The Marriage Plate

fishinghearts — By Beth Hannon Fuller www.studiofuller.com

By Jessica Handler

The auctioneer’s receipt for my mother’s tableware reads, 78 pieces Rogers ‘First Love.’ $150.00. I put the receipt in a green plastic file marked “estate.” The hundred and fifty dollars I put in a household checking account.

Copious, easily tarnished silverware with extravagant names was a standard wedding gift in the fifties, when marriages were copious.

Salad forks, dinner forks, olive and pickle forks. Knives for checking for food between your teeth by eyeing the slim mirror of the blades. Soup spoons, dessert spoons, serrated grapefruit spoons, nestled large protecting small and smaller.

Marriages are easily tarnished.

I doubt that my father was my mother’s first love, despite the brightly named wedding silver. When she was fourteen, she held an unfulfilled crush on her cousin. His name was Paul, and he was sixteen. He could play the hell out of the piano: he rolled through some boogie-woogie. She never mastered boogie-woogie, but she played the hell out of Chopin.

At twenty-three, my father appeared to be a good catch.

I have a blurry memory of going fishing with my father, of gray predawn light, of mist, of trying to bait a hook.

My father was no outdoorsman: how could it be possible that we went fishing? Squinting at the narrow mirror of my mind’s blade, I can’t find an answer.

I have a memory of failing to catch anything.

A few years ago, a student told me he knew the guy who’d whistled the Andy Griffith theme for the TV show soundtrack. You know it: someone whistles a hearty tune while Opie and Andy amble to the fishing hole.

They appear to love each other.

I borrowed the idea in another classroom. I explained to my students how, when writing a screenplay based on a novel, a writer needs to show what’s inside a character. How to show closeness? Opie and Andy, walkin’ to the fishin’ hole.

It’s kind of a dumb example of depicting physical representation of the unspoken.

Try showing this in a screenplay: my husband laughing at a video on his computer of a mud-soaked hippo letting loose a blast of farts. My husband is in tears from laughter.

He’s a very funny guy.

I shine from the inside when I can make him laugh. I see him bent large in the blade, and I see myself small, barely a fleck. Turn the blade and I loom, large eyed and small mouthed, and he tightens to a speck.

That’s easy to show, but not this. Sometimes we don’t have anything to say to one another.

A colleague once told my husband to warn her if he planned to employ humor in conversation.

We think that’s very, very funny.

We didn’t register for silver when we married. We got beautiful dessert plates from Tiffany’s and a hideous, sharp-cornered crystal bowl that I wish now I’d had the sense to return. I lost it, buried it in the basement or a closet.

You could put your eye out with that thing—it’s worse than with a knife.

We came to the marriage with our own flatware from brand-name discount stores. The forks and knives, the soup spoons and those other spoons for what—yogurt? cereal?—cohabitated nicely.

Someone bought that fancy silver as a wedding gift for my mother and father. My father’s parents, most likely. They had money. My mother’s parents might have scrimped and saved for it. They loved her more than silver.

I polished that silver after Thanksgiving dinners, after the Seders over which my father intoned, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” I appreciated the diligence required to wash, dry, polish, wrap, settle. Salad forks, dinner forks, olive and pickle forks. Knives and soup spoons and dessert spoons and serrated grapefruit spoons. A silver claw with four retractable prongs for sugar cubes. An archly modern Georg Jensen cheese knife, adopted by this silverware family.

You had to wash the silver in warm water, dry it, then dull each piece with a menacing-smelling cream from a plastic jar, polish it with a soft gray cloth, then put it to bed like dressed-up kittens in perfectly shaped red velvet forms inside a walnut case.

And I sold it all, earning less than the cost of a week’s groceries. One hundred and fifty dollars is padding, polish, a sliver of safety money.

I baited the hook: the silver had become small fish in the estate world.

The auctioneer took the heavy walnut box (heavier than I remembered) along with a quality but faux Mission desk, a cedar-lined blanket chest (I kept the linens), boxes of various “smalls.”

My own first love wasn’t a cousin, but a good looking boy in my high school whose parents had emigrated to Georgia from South America. He taught me to say “love” in Spanish. Yo te quiero.

This means I want you.

We had sex for the first time in my bedroom. My parents were at work. My sister was somewhere in the house, watching television, or practicing the piano.

Andy Griffith, maybe, or a Satie Gymnopedie. No boogie-woogie yet.

I was twelve, and my boyfriend was thirteen. I had made a bet with my best friend—which of us will lose her virginity before the other? I caught the first boy. I won.

I lay there and thought of groceries, of what was in the refrigerator and the pantry. I’d need to start dinner before my mother came home from work. I would make coq a vin. Or meat loaf. There were also fish sticks. I didn’t realize, at twelve, that these could be seen as sex jokes.

Sometimes when I set that table, I used the good silver.

Now, my husband and I polish each other until we shine. We nestle together, large protecting small protecting large. We look in the distorted images we make in silver blades, and we laugh.

•••

JESSICA HANDLER is the author of Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief (St. Martins Press, December 2013.) Her first book, Invisible Sisters: A Memoir (Public Affairs, 2009) is one of the “Twenty Five Books All Georgians Should Read.” Her nonfiction has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, Brevity, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and More Magazine. Honors include residencies at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, a 2010 Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writers Center, the 2009 Peter Taylor Nonfiction Fellowship, and special mention for a 2008 Pushcart Prize.

The Women Before Me

By Sue Sanders

“Tell me about your girlfriends,” I ask the man I’ve been seeing for the last few months, my bare leg sprawled over his, my fingers grazing the graying hair of his chest. He holds me closer and begins to talk.

My relationship with Jeff was young, but we weren’t. At the time, I was in my late thirties, a single mom a year removed from the end of an eighteen-year relationship.

He’s ten years older, tall and fit, with silver curly hair and Delft blue eyes.

I want to hear about Jeff’s girlfriends not for the intimate details about those relationships (he’s not the type who would ever kiss and tell, anyway) but because learning about his past makes me feel closer to him. Plus, I’m nosy—although I like to think of it as “being curious.”

Dating in midlife is quite different from the last time I dated, in college. Then, there was still a shiny newness to it; everyone I met had only recently shed the protective wrappers of childhood. We each had fewer years of relationship experience than fingers on one hand. My college boyfriend and I had had other lovers before we got together during our sophomore year. But those early forays into sexual relationships were far more sexual than relationship; with inept fumbling in assorted cars and dorm rooms, it was mutual lust rather than lasting love. Youth may be exuberant, but it often doesn’t know what the hell it’s doing.

Jeff had dated for far longer than I had. With decades of dating backstory, he was a bit like a book I’d been dying to read but one that started at chapter ten. I wanted to find out what happened in the previous chapters. It was, after all, the prologue to our relationship.

When my ex and I had met, we were essentially children. At nineteen, I was still a teenager. And like kids on a really great play date, we didn’t want the fun to end. We quickly became close, spending all our time outside of our classes together. We slouched on the grass of the quad, grabbed (too many) post-study drinks at an off-campus bar and, a few hours after that, huddled in a diner’s red vinyl booth, feeding each other greasy scrambled eggs and bacon. We skipped classes far too often, instead spending the day naked on his futon under the navy polyester-and-cotton blend comforter he’d brought from home, the one that made me itch and sweat in New Orleans’s humidity. When we graduated, we didn’t really discuss our future—we both just assumed that we’d stay together. And we did, for almost two decades. Then it was over, a twisted Theory of Relativity, parts of our universe expanding and each of us moving away from the other seemingly faster than the speed of light. For a year, I focused all my energy on our young daughter and surrounded myself with friends. It was more than enough until one day it suddenly wasn’t.

I was determined to meet someone—or someones—but, because of the large gap in my dating resume, I wasn’t quite sure how. In college, everyone wanted to connect with someone, for a night or for far longer. Now the only men I met were married to my mom friends. I saw other men, lurking in my favorite cafe and at the local food co-op, so I knew they existed, but they seemed strange and exotic and as approachable as the Yeti. So how did a middle-aged single mom of a young child meet men?

I asked my ex-sister-in-law (with whom I’d remained close) when we got together at a cafe for drinks. She suggested I give online dating a try—she’d met her husband that way. Sipping a glass of sauvignon blanc, she leaned closer on the edge of her chair and reminded me to practice safe sex. (I was actually going to have sex! … if I met someone). She plonked her glass on the table and warned me that some men actually lie and say they’re not married when they really are. I suddenly felt gullible and incredibly naive. The last time I dated, no one was married and cordless phones were the size of cereal boxes. Forewarned and forearmed (she’d given me a couple condoms), I joined a dating website, threw together a profile, and uploaded a digital photo.

Jeff quickly responded, sending me a thoughtful letter, and I immediately wrote him back. It was like a game of tag by email. As soon as one of us received a note, the other would reciprocate. Neither of us wanted to be the first one to stop writing. Email led to phone calls that led to a real-life meeting that led—eventually—to me snuggled into him, asking about his ex-girlfriends.

Jeff had an entire life before we met which, to me, sounded terribly fascinating and glamorous. He was a writer in New York City, and he’d met and dated a slew of interesting, talented women: dancers and writers, actresses, social workers and businesswomen. I moved closer and asked about the other women, the earlier ones. What were they like? Why had the relationship ended?

“So what happened with Anna?” I asked. (Anna isn’t her real name.)

“We were just at different places in our lives,” Jeff said, slowly. “She’d married young and divorced right before we met. She wanted to see what was out there.”

I was recently separated and Jeff was the first man I’d dated in almost twenty years. I told him that.

“Uh oh,” he said, raising an eyebrow. He brushed a strand of hair out of my face and smiled. “I guess I should ask where you are in your life, right?”

“I’m right here, right now,” I said, laughing, as I rubbed his arm. “And I sort of like this place. A lot.”

There were other questions that I didn’t ask: Would I have liked them? Would they like me? And why did this matter to me? As Jeff and I lay together and talked, my mind wandered. Thinking about his exes, I imagined how my life could have gone differently. I wondered what it would be like to try on an alternative life (and the men that might possibly have gone with it), like a pair of Levis. What if I hadn’t married my college boyfriend? What if I’d done something other than teach? What would my entire life had been like if I’d chosen a different path? I shut my eyes and pictured alternatives:

Me as a successful businesswoman, focused on my career in banking—no, corporate law!—meeting a series of businessmen for a quick wine spritzer after work. The men I date—power brokers in their fields!—have to have a greater net worth than me, and I’m very successful. (I’d tried dating a Ph.D. student once—a nice guy and extremely attentive in bed—but I’d had to pay for almost everything.) After yet another drink and scintillating talk of mergers, I catch a cab to my prewar classic six on the Upper East Side, stash my imaginary briefcase under the mahogany desk in the home office, and … I feel a very real nausea wash over me. Even in my imagination, I dislike Business Sue.

Instead, I pull on a black beret, tuck a cigarette behind my ear and move into a small walk-up studio in the East Village. (In my dream life, it’s 1986, and the East Village is still affordable.) I paint tiny canvasses with an eyelash brush or make jewelry from gold macaroni. (I relax a bit; this fits better.) I only date men like me, men who understand the creative process. We talk a lot about the creative process as we drink cheap red wine from chipped stoop sale teacups on my fire escape, dangling our legs over the edge. My love life is complicated. I immediately shoo away the man with the heroin habit. I get into heated arguments with another. We scream, break dishes, and make love amid the shards. Rubbing my backside, the fantasy dissolves as quickly as the imaginary relationships do with East Village Sue. She’s simply too unstable.

As Jeff reminisces about his earlier life and girlfriends, I wonder if I should’ve kept my mouth shut instead of asking about them—I’m jabbed by what I think are pinpricks of jealousy. How could I, a single mom pushing forty, a preschool teacher for goodness sakes, compete with the accomplished, interesting women of his past?

I weave the threads of my self-doubt into an insecurity blanket, pull it tightly over my shoulders, and say, “I’ve got to tell you, I’m a bit anxious. You’ve dated all these amazing women. I guess I’m feeling a little afraid.”

Jeff held me, looked into my eyes, and said, quietly, “Why? Dating was fun, but lonely. I spent an awful lot of time wishing I’d found someone who made me happy, who made me laugh, and kept me interested.” He laughed. “I wish I’d met you all those years ago.”

Real Sue smiled.

A year or so later, we got married. And now, closing in on fifty, I find there’s a comfort in knowing so much about the years before we met. But there’s also the small thrill of learning something new about Jeff (like, as a child, he never had a stuffed animal or that Frank Rich once sent him a fan letter) that keeps the relationship fresh. It’s newness and comfort rolled into one. And I still love hearing about his girlfriends.

•••

SUE SANDERS alternatively fights and embraces her neuroses and very much enjoys being Real Sue. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times, Real Simple, Brain, Child, Salon, and others. Her first book, Mom, I’m Not a Kid Anymore, was published in the spring.

In Praise of Synthetic Vaginas

uterusembroidery — Photo by Hey Paul Studios/ Flickr

by Catherine Newman

Because a blow-up doll will surely take up too much room in the bed, what I really want is a syngina. You’ll want one too, trust me. Go ahead and Google it. You’re going to be like, “Wait! I’m not a tampon manufacturer needing to test absorbency!” That’s okay. I’m not either. My interest in a synthetic vagina is purely personal. I plan to deploy it as an occasional stand-in for my real vagina, the same way a college may hire an adjunct to replace a professor on sabbatical—with the sabbatical being taken, in this case, by my own weary crotch.

Heterosexuality is a bizarre and perverted phenomenon. Whose idea was it to combine reproduction with sex? Because it was a bad one. At forty-four, after more extreme reproductive experiences than you could count on my nipple hairs, sex feels about as festive to me as a Ferris wheel erected in a cemetery. It’s thrilling, sure, and the views are great, but it’s also just plain weird, and sometimes kind of sad and scary.

In the twenty-five years that Michael and I have been together, I have peed on one gazillion pregnancy tests, give or take. I have thrilled to positive and negative results both, to plus signs and minus signs, double lines and single lines and subtle ombre shiftings of color, as well as the subtle absence of this shifting of color, from white to blue, or white to pink, or white to some other shade of white, and “Honey, are these two colors the same color or not?” (“Um. You mean the white and, uh, the white?”) I have also wept over positive and negative results both. I have thrilled to a positive test, my heart briefly soaring, mere moments before sighing and picking up the phone to call Planned Parenthood. I have wept over a negative pregnancy test, cried for the baby I didn’t want but now wouldn’t get to have, mere moments after clasping my hands in prayer that it would be negative.

Wanted pregnancies have devolved into bloody phlegm, me on my hands and knees on the bathroom tiles, keening, or me propped up in bed, munching on a donut with sticky equanimity. Unexpected pregnancies have progressed into toast-induced vomiting and colossally pendulous hemorrhoids, and then into babies who braced themselves stubbornly against my pelvis and had to be forcibly excavated with scalpels and sections, my belly traversed by a transcontinental railroad of staples and stitches. An unwanted pregnancy was terminated with suction and ad hoc Slavic-inflected counseling (“You khev heared of diaphragm?”), with a stupor of grief and relief and Valium, watching The Bird Cage with Michael and snorting laughter out of my nose at all the funny parts. “You would normally have hated this movie,” he said, and I said, “I know,” and shrugged pleasantly from beneath the drugs. Grief morphed briefly into regret, morphed back, later, to relief. (That anybody would use the fact of grief or regret as an argument against reproductive rights always strikes me as short-sighted. Should every potentially regrettable choice be illegal? Marriage, paint colors, teetery t-strap sandals? Having sex or a baby? Ordering a second basket of fries or a third mojito?)

I have squinted at an ultrasound with my mystified gynecologist until she clapped and said “There!” and pointed to the IUD listing over at the edge of my withered whoopee cushion of a uterus. “Probably not a great fit for you,” she said, adding, superfluously, “birth-control-wise.”

I have had allergic reactions in the vagina, to latex, lambskin, and spermicide. I have had literally dozens of yeast infections and figuratively millions of UTIs. When I explained to my ten-year-old daughter that women get more bladder infections than men, she said, wisely, “Well sure. With women, it’s like you’re walking right into the house. Men have a kind of a mudroom.”

My body is a wonderland. If, by “wonderland,” you mean mismatched breasts like a hedgehog family’s deflating air mattresses. If you mean brown, rubbery nipples that appear to have been pilfered from a 1970s-era baby bottle before getting glued on. It’s not just regular aging—like the fact that my neck looks like somebody’s ill-cared-for scrotum. It’s not the constellations of moles and acne and wrinkles, like a crazed galaxy spanning multiple eons. It’s that my body is like a beautiful and terrible reproductive neighborhood. Sexuality is in the mix, sure, but it’s a flowering window box on a condemned building, with the wrecking ball swinging noisily in the background.

I weep and rage. I’m sad sometimes, or overcome with joy. I fill up, spill over with nostalgia: These silver c-section scars! These golden children! The blinding lights of my life, who bring me to my knees with love, a thousand times a second. I shudder and burst into tears and cry until I laugh.

And Michael? Michael just comes and comes. He has experienced this same twenty-five years as a more or less happy collection of orgasms, as if he’s the simple hydraulic version of a senselessly complicated machine. He has also seduced and delighted, to be sure. Baffled and alarmed, he has held me while I wept. He has fathered two beautiful children in a beautiful way. But for him, sex is still about, of all things, pleasure. It is not a holy act of grief-stricken joy. It is not exhibit A in a report about PTSD, or a tearful, garter-belted clown in a postmodern circus. He does not cling to my neck, weeping, “This is how we made our babies.” His cheerful seed sprays hither and yon. And I hate to begrudge him.

Thus the syngina. I’ll put my novel down, even, and turn towards him willingly, my fake vagina at the ready. I won’t worry, for the thirtieth year in a row, about getting pregnant. I won’t experience full-body flashbacks. I’ll just smile and encourage and my vagina will wink at me, like a retiring police horse, before its blameless and well-earned rest.

•••

CATHERINE NEWMAN is the author of the book Waiting for Birdy and the blog benandbirdy.blogspot.com, where she writes about parenting her kids and feeding her family.