It is New Year’s weekend, and when my adorable Husband woke up this morning, he shuffled over to me with his pale face and glassy eyes and said he was sorry but he wasn’t feeling well, so we’d have to cancel our plans. There is nothing quite like a needy cute guy to awaken the nurture gene within me, so I put my arms around his neck and asked in a soothing voice, “What can I do for you, sweetheart?” To which he replied, “Anything I tell you to.”
When Husband and I married six years ago, he graciously consented to move into the home I shared with my teenage children. He had done this same thing for his first wife, who sadly left him a widower after ten happy years. They had raised five boys together, sons from her first marriage, with the youngest being a teenager when she died. Years later, voluntarily repeating that living situation might seem like more deja vu than one person would be comfortable with, but Husband embarked on his new family arrangement with generosity and a sense of adventure.
Shortly after moving in, he walked around the house with his toolbox repairing the many things I had neglected during the time I was a single parent with no innate fixit talents. At this time Son was in high school and Daughter was away at her first year in college. “How long has this front door creaked like this?” he asked me. “Creaked like what?” was my oblivious response. In the same way that people whose homes face the railroad tracks become immune to the thunderous sound of the trains, I had become deaf to household noises I could do nothing about.
But other residents of the house knew different. The next time Daughter was home from school, she closed the newly silent front door behind her and stood transfixed, staring at it. When she turned around to face me her cheeks were red and her eyes ablaze. “It’s not fair!” she wailed. She looked past my stunned face to Son who was standing behind me, hands in pockets, smirking wildly. “Of course it’s fair,” he assured her. “No, no, no, no!” Daughter insisted, fiercely shaking her head. After much questioning on my part, it became clear that the kids always thought I was the one who made the door creak. That I literally installed the creak as an alarm to notify me when the door opened or closed after curfew. Apparently, Daughter had spent an inordinate amount of time devising ways to close the front door soundlessly to no avail. And now, after she left the house, the problem solved itself for her smirking brother.
In a way it made us even. A big treat for my daughter when she was five years old was to go to lunch with her father’s receptionist. We lived in Brooklyn above my ex-husband’s medical practice when the kids were very small, and Daughter adored Doc’s twenty-something assistant, Robin. One day a week I would allow her to accompany Robin for pizza and Doc would allow Robin to be gone an extra half hour. Years later, when Daughter was about 12, she qualified a statement she made in conversation by saying “according to Tony.” “Tony who?” I asked. “Tony from the tanning salon in Coney Island,” she responded. Then we just looked at each other as her entire body said “Oops.” Turns out the deal between Daughter and Robin was that they’d gobble the pizza fast and have all that extra time for Robin to work on her tan as my five-year-old sat outside talking to the regulars.
All of which makes me certain you will not question my veracity when I swear on the life of Tony the tanning salon flunky that I never in my wildest imaginings could have known that front door creaked.
Happy New Year to all.