He and I

He is always warm and I am always cold. When he opens windows I open drawers, looking for my winter fleece. He is old and I am young, but he denies that the eleven years make any difference to our lives together. Secretly I agree, but it's one thing I can lord over him when we taunt each other about things of which we have no control. He teases me about my forgetfulness, which I don't think is funny at all. He thinks of himself as impossibly young and I think how impossibly long the road trails behind me. As a child he was smart and I was contemplative. He knew facts and I knew where the best sunlight would fall through the afternoon windows. His stories of childhood are often signifiers of his precociousness, the gifted child who wanted to debate the logic of parental rules and his right to break them. My stories aren't as much fun. As a child I mostly watched and was astonished by the complexities of adult behavior, their words had meanings that would not settle in my head, words that would just spin and spin and never line themselves up in any sort of order that made sense to me. My stories are sensations unwilling to be confined by words. His perfect childhood has become an affront to me, and my tortured one takes on a new dimension in the face of the fundamental normalcy of his. He has grown up and left his childhood behind and I have grown up and dragged mine along with me, thinking it, in some way, valuable. I envy him his past. He is organized and I am not. He looks at my desk and sighs with exasperation, but only when he thinks I am not watching him. He knows where everything is and I must first sit and think for ten minutes before I begin the search that can last another ten minutes, or a whole day, and sometimes I look for a week and sometimes I never find what I'm looking for at all. He pays bills punctually on the 16th and the 30th of every month and I am still searching for the few bills delegated to me weeks after they are due. He reads fantasy and science fiction and the occasional book I hand him from my collection of eclectic studies while I heroically resist all temptation to diverge from true literary consumption. He eats everything and never gains an ounce and I concede to the inevitability of an additional three pounds a year. He knows all the capitals and past presidents and continents and how to do algebra. I know nothing of those things and feel no remorse for the loss. I know how to remember my dreams and how to make the earth spin beneath me by lying on the ground and squinting at the sky. (He secretly wonders why I think that's important.) He watches biographies of once-important people and events on the Learning Channel or PBS and I surf for animal shows like Crocodile Hunter or Good Pets Gone Bad, but what I like to watch most is MTV where all the too-hip people shake their money makers and look good doing it. I shake my money maker and the kids laugh and roll their eyes, I am so un-cool they tell me. I claim my interest in another generation's packaged sales campaign to be purely intellectual, but the truth is I am fascinated by the new and easily carried away by change. He is a child of the fifties and sixties and I am a trained consumer raised on television commercials for A&D Ointment and A-1 Steak Sauce. There are times he gets disgusted with my gullibility, when I oooh and ahhh over a new Herculean-size SUV or sing along with a jingle for toothpaste, and he hrrrumps his way out of the television room to relieve himself and get a Pepsi, scowling back at me over his shoulder with a look of not-so-mock mock-horror. Knowing the jingles from commercials is akin to reciting the alphabet backwards, which he does just to annoy me and show off his spectacularly efficient brain. I think it's harder to remember the jingles, since they are always changing while the alphabet stays exactly the same. He is a Democrat and I am a Democrat though for different reasons altogether. He is a Democrat because his father was and because he believes a government must first take care of its citizens and not big business, and I am a Democrat because I believe the Republicans have a hidden agenda to subjugate women and minorities. He votes for the best man, regardless of party and I vote for anyone not Republican, not a man, and lastly someone who is not likely to mess with Roe v. Wade. He doesn't mind getting a chick-flick from Blockbuster once in a while but I really hate it when he brings home an action-thriller movie. We hear of enough violence, I think, in the newspapers and on the television and watching guys waving big guns seems oh so Freudian to me. Plus, his taste in movies is inconsistent. Once he wondered who would bother to see a remake of a historical event when everyone knew how it would end--that was the movie Titantic, and boy was he wrong. He likes music and I like music but he can rarely sing along because he never knows the words to the song. I can listen to a song a few times and sing the major refrains. He was once impressed with this talent of mine, but now he thinks all the songs I've memorized take up valuable space in my brain that could be used for things like remembering what I spent two hundred dollars on at Target. He will wander to the end of the driveway to meet people he does not know walking down the street and I will hide in the garage if I see someone I recognize coming. He takes bike rides with the kids and I sit in front of my computer and write words that almost never sell. He makes the money and I spend it--at least that's what he likes to think, although all the power tools he claimed he needed are in the garage, still in their boxes, and I know they weren't cheap. He lets the kids go to the neighbor's house uninvited and I insist they be asked before sending them off for someone else to supervise. He refuses any kind of body adornment and I have a pierced navel and a tattoo. He was against the pierce and the tattoo but I told him it was my body and I had a right to disfigure it any way I thought appropriate. I pierced my navel to announce the liberation of my body...I would no longer be merely a depository for sperm and the resulting children, no longer only a milk machine or a comfort giver. I did not begrudge the former role of my body, but it was time to reclaim it, symbolically, from the provisos others had placed on it. The tattoo signified my spiritual liberation, which is a very private thing that I think I will keep private even here where I am sharing all my secrets. Adornment is unnecessary, he believes, and scoffs when I suggest the manliness of a small diamond stud for his ear. He won't even wear a wristwatch; instead he takes the straps off cheap digital watches and carries them in his pocket. Before he met me he wore ties with stripes or polka dots or ties all of one color with his business suits and I wore blue jeans when I wasn't naked. After we got married I started buying him fashionable ties to which he objected until he his clients started complimenting him on them. Before we married he never sorted his laundry and had gray underpants but questioned me suspiciously when I claimed to have some special laundry knowledge regarding washing jeans separate from whites. He is logical and I am creative. He likes to know all the columns add up and I like to think the universe can only be appeased by allowing chaos to reign...except when it comes to laundry. He thinks it's good that we think differently but only when it doesn't make him mad. He does not like to exercise and I only feel right when I'm working my body hard four times a week. He goes to the health club mostly because we pay almost a hundred dollars a month for the privilege and I go because my body demands it. He doesn't care too much if his stomach is soft and his arms skinny because he never really exercised his whole life except for playing basketball, and once upon a time I managed a health club and had a body to die for. I keep looking in the mirror hoping to see my body transforming back into the body I remember and loved fifteen years ago but so far it has not materialized. He hasn't really failed at anything his whole life and I fail every day. I fail to do the laundry before it piles up as high as my shoulder on the utility room floor, I fail to get a job that pays actual money, I fail to keep the house clean and mostly run around the last twenty minutes before he gets home, throwing things in closets and behind the couches so it looks like I did some work during the day. He goes to work five days a week and I stay at home and try to make a career out of writing. Mostly I start writing something and can never finish it. My specialty is the short story. He is refined and I am lowbrow. His humor runs to the ironic while I take the greatest pleasure in watching episodes of personal misfortune. America's Funniest Videos was a show that pleased me to no end. Thinking it funny when some stranger falls off a ladder is understandable--their pain is not your pain. But for me it doesn't stop there. When a child of mine takes an unfortunate spill I am hardpressed to withhold the giggles, and that is wretched mommy-etiquette of the major variety. Despite the mother-side of my brain screaming in empathy the twisted-humor-side of my brain kicks into overdrive and I must leave the worst scenes to my husband who has no such affliction. I feel a bit better knowing I do not suffer this sickness alone, since my sister and my brothers all exhibit the same symptoms. He does not like cats or dogs and I love all animals, except maybe snakes. We have a rabbit for a pet but it really isn't a pet because it doesn't make any happy noises at you or look you in the eye and ask you to play. He thinks a rabbit is a fine pet, since the cat I brought along with me when we first married would jump on him when he was sleeping and scare the hell out of him. The experiment of having a dog failed too because it ended up digging little mine holes all over the back yard and barking at the trees and peeing all over the house. We don't have dogs or cats anymore. He likes getting up early in the morning and I like to sleep in. He thinks sleeping late is a sign of laziness but he would never say it to me, since he loves me and doesn't want to point out my shortcomings. He doesn't know much about nature but refuses to believe me when I make a claim about some aspect of animal science that sounds suspiciously made up and I hate being told I'm wrong. He scoffed at the idea that a perfectly reasonable bird like a Killdeer would build its nest on the ground when it could fly and make a safer nest in a tree and I told him it was fact. He was wrong and I was right and I cannot let him forget it or he will try to make me out to be some scatterbrained artist who doesn't know anything except where to put a semicolon. He gets teary-eyed when he watches old videos of us and the kids and I can't help but moaning in despair when I see how fat/frumpy/pathetic I was even last year. Next year I will look back on this year's video and think the same thing. He likes himself and I am always trying to change. He wears his hair the same way he has for decades and I cut my hair impossibly short and then let it grow and then cut it all off again. He is losing some of his hair and going gray but it doesn't bother him at all, or if it does then he has hidden his disquiet behind a veneer of taciturn acceptance. He knows how much money he spends daily, monthly and yearly and I do not. My bank account is frequently overdrawn and he wonders how I can spend so much on things I cannot name or list. His records are impeccable and I have none to speak of, unless you count the notebooks I fill with snippets of momentary inspiration that I leave lying throughout the house. One day some six years after we married, as I cleared drawer space for my overflowing pile of "work-in-progress" I came across some old files of his, things that came from his bachelor pad in boxes I did not pack. One box was a file of maps, some handrawn and some computer generated, for destinations long since traveled. There was a map to a house up north that he had shared with a friend for a weekend--beneath the crude drawing there were notes, neatly taken in his fine accountant's script, of landmarks and gas stations between the start of the journey and the end. These he kept, he said, in case he ever needed to get back there again. My eyes must have mirrored the astonishment I felt, because he became defensive and practically shouted, "What?!" In another file I found a five-page list of his household effects, all detailing the date of purchase, amount spent and description of each item, neatly placed into columns under the appropriate heading: Clothing. Furniture. Appliances. I looked at these symptoms of acute orderliness and sensed his otherness from me. How, I wondered, could I have married this complete stranger, this person who saves maps and creates lists? Did I love him enough to say I'd bear his children and stay with him forever, all those years ago?   Our life is not perfect. And yet if I wrote down all the ways I am vexed by him, and weighed it against the myriad ways that he brings me joy, it is certain I'd find the former list nothing at all compared to the latter. I hope he thinks the same of me. He is always warm and I am always cold. He once said to me, as I shivered in the cool of a spring evening, "If I could do just one thing for you, it would be to make you warm." This man loves me, and I, him.