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I’d been feeling a little out of sorts lately, restless even, like there was something missing in my life. Unloading the dishes and finding no spots on the glasses didn’t produce the usual exhilaration. I seemed apathetic to my success at producing lumpless gravy. I felt no joy in occurrences that would commonly be cause for celebration, such as the puppy going a full 45 minutes without gnawing on the coffee table, or my 15 year old son unexpectedly showing an interest in how the sliding glass door closes. After about three days of listlessness, when finding my favorite Danishes on the reduced rack at the grocery store completely failed to elate me, I had to admit…I was depressed.
Maybe not depressed. I refused to admit depression, after all with all of the anti-depressants on the market today to confess outright depression would be like crossing into the pharmaceutical dead zone – the consensus of most physicians being take two Zoloft and call me in three months. No, maybe depression was an exaggeration, but I was definitely having feelings of discontent, sullenness, and lethargy, which, a little voice in my head insisted, are the exact symptoms that Prozac claims to cure…
No forget it! I didn’t need drugs. All I needed was a little sympathy. A little understanding. A little commiseration and reassurance. What I needed was a shoulder to cry on, but unfortunately all the shoulders within proximity (those in my immediate family) were otherwise occupied, holding up heads that that were so certain of their center-of-the-universe status and filled with such an abundance of narcissistic thoughts that any conversation not pertaining directly to their individual circumstance would surely cause a total cranium shut down if not a complete implosion.
I’m not one to lay my trouble at my friends’ doorsteps, but there are times when the aid of a faithful comrade is mandatory. This was one of those times.
I often wonder at certain mysteries of cosmic law. One that often stupefies me is the unwritten decree that stipulates the undeniable impossibility of a mother completing a ten-minute phone conversation without interruptions. I’ve often contemplated the possible source of this phenomenon that appears to effect children, pets, and telemarketers unanimously and without bias. Perhaps, every phone manufactured somehow reacts only with a mother’s energy to produce unidentified transmissions which are then received by certain individuals and transcribed into subconscious compulsory urges to locate the phone user and disrupt the dialogue with useless prattle, annoying behavior, or an extended uninterruptible sales pitches.
Although this phenomenon can never be avoided, I took preparations nonetheless. I checked on the kids who seemed occupied and oblivious to my existence, one engrossed in a video game and the other locked in the bathroom apparently fully engaged in an extensive, cosmetological ritual. I fed the dogs and the cats, made sure their water bowls were filled and then walked the puppy and gave him a rawhide bone. Then I tiptoed into my office and quietly shut the door behind me. It was all I could do, and yet I was somehow convinced that it wouldn’t be enough. I dialed the phone anyway.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Cath”
“Fonda, it’s good to hear from you…wow, it’s been a while.”
“Yeah…sorry, I guess I’ve been busy.”
“How have you been?”
“Ok, I guess.”
“You don’t sound ok.”
“I don’t know…I mean everything is fine really and yet...”
Beep
“And yet what?”
Beep
“Oh, hang on a sec, Cath, I’ve got another call coming in.”
I hit the flash button and said, “Hello?”
“Don’t hang up, the following is an important message…”
Press flash button...
“Sorry Cath. It was one of those recorded messages…I hate that. You’d think if it was important enough for these companies to sell you something it’d be important enough for them to hire a real person to sell it to you.”
“Aren’t you on the Do Not Call list?”
“Yeah…doesn’t seem to make a difference though.”
“Ok, so where were we? Oh, yeah, you were telling me what’s wrong.”
“I can’t put my finger on it, but it’s just that nothing seems to make me happy anymore.”
“So what’s happening in your life right now?”
“Nothing really, that I can see.”
“How are the kids?”
“Fine. Josh has stopped with the 900 numbers and Ashley’s boyfriend was denied parole…the kids are good.”
“And what about…”
“Mom?”
“How did you get in here…I didn’t even see the door open.” I said to my daughter who had magically appeared in the chair behind me.
“Do you think I’m pretty?”
“Ashley, I’m on the phone right now.” And then into the telephone: “Hang on, Cathy, Ashley just came in.”
“I think I want to get my hair cut.”
“You just had your hair cut last week…can’t this wait until I’m off the phone?”
“God, Mom! You never have time for me!”
Stomp, stomp slam.
“Sorry, about that, Cathy. You were saying?”
“Ok, so the kids are good. What about Pat?”
“Pat who?”
“Pat your husband.”
“Oh, right, Pat. He’s good, I guess.”
“Forgetting even momentarily that you have a husband named Pat can not even remotely be qualified as good.”
“It’s just that I don’t see him much…he’s busy…work, poker, sleep, television, sleep.”
“When was the last time you and Pat went somewhere together…alone?”
“We take the garbage to the dump every Saturday…it smells up the car so the kids won’t go.”
“I meant somewhere mysterious and stimulating.”
“The most mysterious and stimulating experience we’ve had in the last six month was taking the minivan through the automatic car wash.”
“You need to…”
Splusssssssssshhhhh…”What the hell? Odis! I just let you out! How can your bladder be that full after five minutes!”
“Fonda, are you there?”
“Hang on again…the dog just decided to recreate Niagara Falls on the carpet…let me grab a towel.”
Put phone down, go to kitchen, grab towel, throw over squishy dark spot on office rug...
"Ok, sorry, I'm back. What were you saying?"
“I was saying that you need to spice up your love life…make Pat pay attention to you…become irresistible to him.”
“Believe me, that is not possible.”
“Of course it is! There’s a sexy, desirable woman inside of you screaming to get out.”
“Angelina Jolie could be inside me screaming to get out and Pat wouldn’t notice right now.”
“You underestimate your inner woman.”
“No, I’m simply estimating my chances of getting Pat away from the television during football season, and unless my inner woman is a star linebacker for the Bills she doesn’t stand a chance.”
“Seriously, football isn’t broadcast seven days a week. That’s just an excuse. You two have become too comfortable with each other. You’ve become complacent in your marriage. You need to convince him of the importance of recovering the romance and excitement in your relationship. Learn to explore and rediscover the sexuality of your youth.”
Pause of silent deliberation...
“So, what’s your take on Zoloft?”
Somehow, I’d never thought of being comfortable in my marriage as a bad thing. And even if we were complacent in our relationship, was it actually feasible for me to expect to persuade my husband to rediscover sexuality when I could rarely compel him to rediscover the nose hair trimmer? I also had to admit that if I ever hoped to succeed at releasing the passion of my inner woman…the outer woman was going to need a little work. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d worn anything that didn’t have an elastic waistband. My liquid makeup had, quite some time ago, become solid, a forest of hair almost long enough to braid had taken over my shins and calves, and my curling iron had been lost to the depth of the bathroom vanity usually reserved for Epsom salts and boric acid. No wonder sweaty men in tight pants held more attraction for my husband than I did.
Other than a little help from Cover Girl, what I really lacked was know-how. It’s all fine and well to say that you have to do something, but how to do something is where most people get bogged down. Where, I asked myself, does one go for advice on their love lives? My first thought was the drug store magazine rack, but after spending an hour browsing through numerous publications with headlines that promised to “Drive your Man Wild in Bed” and yet delivered a mere three paragraphs of superficial musings on a page otherwise crowded with ads for hair depilatories and contraceptive devices, I decided that talk is cheap (if you consider $4.95 cheap that is). I didn’t need phony advice. What I needed was an instruction manual.
The thought of asking a perky, twenty-something store clerk at Barnes and Noble where to find do-it-yourself sex manuals was less than appealing. Therefore, I got on the Internet and after a few disheartening searches (and a rather embarrassing incident in which my daughter came into my office while I was frantically trying to eliminate over a hundred pornographic pop-ups) I came across a book that sounded promising. I placed my order, splurged on the cost of overnight shipping (hey, I’m not getting any younger) and then spent the next day on the front porch waiting for the UPS guy. The discrete brown package arrived early in the afternoon, giving me what I hoped would be an ample period of time to browse through its words of wisdom before my husband got home from work and I could astonish him with a newly acquired sense of sensuous womanhood, which the book guaranteed to unleash from even the most sedate and lackluster female.
By the end of the hour, I’ll have to admit that my eagerness had faded into skepticism. The section on experimenting with new sex positions was more than discouraging, especially because I am a visual person. The image that manifested uninvited in my mind of how parts of my body would react with gravitational pull when engaged in most of these positions had me wondering if there was enough duct tape in the house to wrap my entire torso. I decided that the chapter on role-playing was completely out of the question after imagining an attempt to seduce my husband wearing the only costume available in the house – an irrefutably less-than-sexy clown suit and frizzy red wig left over from when my kids were still young enough to trick-or-treat. I was momentarily intrigued by a paragraph that described an avant-garde use for whipped cream until I remembered that Pat was lactose intolerant. Finally, exasperated I threw the useless and rather expensive book on the bed and went to start dinner.
Later that night, I was hanging clothes in the closet, when Pat ambled into the bedroom, switched on the T.V. and lay down on the bed.
“What’s this?”
I peeked out of the closet to see what my husband was referring to and was mortified to see him holding the little red book in his hands. In a flurry of freshly ironed shirts I flung myself at the bed, grabbing for the text, which my husband deftly whisked from my reach.
“How to Become the Other Woman?”
“Give it to me…please…” I begged. “It’s just something I found in a box of books I bought at a yard sale.”
Ignoring my pleas, Pat opened the book and began leafing through its pages. “Oh, this is good…listen to this…biting can be erotic to a man, you should often use your teeth to entice and stimulate a man’s…”
“Pat please, just give it to me before the kids come in.”
“The kids are in bed….oh, here’s one…play the role of a prostitute…set a price on different sexual acts, the more exotic the act, the higher the price…”
“Come on, Pat…this is ridiculous.”
“Ya think? I thought it sounded familiar. Don’t you already do this? Or doesn’t it count if you just wait until I fall asleep and then raid my wallet?”
“Funny.”
“Here…read this part…is this even physically possible?”
Resigned, I sat next to my husband on the bed took the book and scanned the paragraph he pointed to. “Not with your bad back…” I replied, “you’d be in traction for a week at least.”
For the remainder of the evening, we lay together on the bed, the television ignored as we took turns reading to each other out of the book, smiling and laughing mischievously like two kids who have stumbled upon their parent’s copy of The Joy of Sex.
The book may not have kept its promise, to create a sensual sexpot out of an ordinary housewife, but what it did accomplish was worth ten times what I paid for it. For that night, and a few subsequent nights, it brought my husband and I together, even if it wasn’t in the throws of passion. Sometimes, I realized, simple camaraderie is the most fulfilling form of intimacy a couple can experience. | 