Here is a tender marital scene for you.
This is how it begins.
I’m in the bathroom, trying to make sense of my face. I bought a magnifying mirror recently, because otherwise when I put makeup on I’m just guessing. Thanks to my deteriorating vision I’m going by muscle memory more than anything else. I apply eyeliner to what I think is the right place and when I put my glasses on I see I’ve extended it out to my temples. I should probably give up at this point with eyeliner; what am I, Cleopatra? But I digress. Anyway I’m gazing intently at the 12x magnification of my pores—really, it’s mesmerizing—when Scott edges his way in.
Our bathroom is so small it can barely fit me, so Scott usually doesn’t—and can’t, really—join me. I assume something terrible has happened, or he has caught a glimpse of my magnified face and it’s inflamed his senses and he must have me, yes right here, lack of space be damned.
He’s holding something in his hand. It’s sitting in his palm, a white blob.
“Look at this,” he says. From the tone of his voice I’m assuming it’s a dead animal. I’d back away in horror but there’s nowhere to go.
Then I squint and see it’s my AirPods case. And there’s something on it. A streak of yellow-brown.
“Uh, what is that?” I ask, afraid of the answer, and he tells me.
“That,” he says, “is chicken seasoning.”
Now, I was cooking the night before (chicken, if you must know, but you probably guessed) and listening to a podcast and did I touch the AirPods case with a seasoning-coated hand? I wouldn’t swear to it, but I wouldn’t swear I didn’t. This is one of the least disgusting traces of food I’ve left on items around the house. Why did he find this notable enough to carry the case across the length of our apartment, cram himself into the bathroom, interrupting my morning reverie and probably endangering both of our lives?
“And you came in here to shame me about it?”
He laughs. “I mean, who DOES this?”
I do! Me, your wife of 20 years! Do you not know me at all?
I am FURIOUS. mean, a little smudge of spices and he’s got to get up in my face about it! And what of all the days and weeks and months, reader, that my AirPods case has remained (visibly) pristine? Has he congratulated me for all those times? Do I hear about the days I DON’T almost leave the house with a blueberry stuck in my hair or half an Oreo plastered to my butt? I think we all know the answer to that.
I scramble to remember all the times he’s left a mess somewhere, but honestly, all he does is clean. It’s the worst. Every time I walk into a room he’s wiping down a surface. Apparently because someone else left a mess? And then he looks significantly at me? Or he doesn’t look at me, he’s just happily spritzing cleaner all over like he was born to do it? And meanwhile the counter looks plenty clean to me, of course I don’t have my glasses on so there could literally be an entire chicken carcass smeared across it, I could be endangering all of our lives.
“You should just wear your glasses,” is a thing you’re probably thinking, which is why I’m mad at you now. That is not the point, dear reader! Please focus. The point is that my husband is tidy and patient and I am, as he calls me, a “chaos machine,” and it is unbearable.
And so, faced this disgusting evidence of my chaos, I go straight into fight or flight mode. Although I am a flightless bird, sometimes I must flap my wings and pretend I can soar.
“You’re in my way!” I insist, even though I have mascara in one hand and an eyelash curler in another and I’m not fooling anyone. “I was just about to leave, would you move?”
“Well, I’m leaving the room, so—“
“No, I’M leaving.” Does he understand nothing?
“Honey, I’m getting out—“
“ME!” I declare, like an adult, and squeeze past him.
And then I am outside the room I wanted to be in, and he is in the room he doesn’t need to be in, which is really a perfect representation of our dumb fights throughout the years.
“I’ll clean this for you,” he says, chuckling, as he leaves, while I plan the devastating takedown I’m going to write about him.