The following are taken from my forthcoming memoir, Secrets to a Happy Marriage that are so secret, I can’t tell you what they are (because I don’t know), coming out in the fall. Provided I actually write it.
Chapter Six: Never let an opportunity to say something meaningful go to waste
Kim pushed the plate of tofu and fried vegetables away from her and signaled the waiter for another unsweetened ice tea. “I’ll tell you something else,” she said to her veterinarian friends, who were sitting around the table with her, previously discussing veterinarian topics in that tone of voice so common with veterinarians. “This is my first weekend off in a month. I’m really glad I won’t be spending it with my fingers up some mongrel’s butt.”
“Amen to that,” one of the veterinarian friends said wistfully.
Immediately, Kim’s phone started buzzing. She glanced at it in annoyance.
“Aren’t you going to get that?” another friend asked her.
“No, it’s just my husband. He wants to tell me my weekend won’t be butt- and finger-free.”
“Well...that’s...funny?” the first friend said hesitantly.
Kim smiled painfully.
Chapter Ten: Always be honest, if you have to
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Kim asked me for perhaps the sixth time. I gritted my teeth and ignored her, twisting the socket wrench furiously and throwing a contemptuous glare at the directions from the company web site she’d printed out for me, currently lying on the floor and serving only one useful purpose that I could tell: sopping up the water that was leaking from below the water heater.
“‘Do I know what I’m doing,’” I simpered to myself, imitating her. “‘Do I need directions.’ ‘Am I sure that’s what a socket wrench is for.’ She sounds like she does in the bedroom.”
“You know I can hear you, right?”
“I’m sorry, hunny-bun, I couldn’t hear you,” I said, thinking quickly. “You must be imagining things.” Having taken care of that little slip up with maximum cleverness, I now squinted at the metal thing in the other thing in front of me and banged it a few times with the wrench. “Well, this thing is defective.”
“And for the record, if you ever want to fool around with a socket wrench, don’t pretend it wasn’t my idea first.” Kim opened another packet of crisps and looked down at the pool spreading across the basement floor. “How many times did you say you’d fixed a water heater before?”
“On The Simms? Like, a million.”
“But in real life?”
I paused. “Including this time?”
Chapter Fourteen: Seeing things from their point of view
“You wouldn’t believe the day I had today,” I announced as I walked in the front door, loosened my tie, dumped my briefcase on the floor and stomped into the kitchen, where Kim, dressed in an apron, was finishing up the pot roast for dinner tonight. “I mean, it was insane. First thing, I had to take this kid’s phone away from him for, like, the fifth time this year—“
“Just save it,” she told me. “Shake your head really hard.”
I scowled at her. “I hear you talking, but I don’t see you making my martini.”
“That’s because you’re dreaming. Shake your head again.”
I did, and my vision cleared. Kim stood before me in her lab coat and scrubs from surgery. I looked down at myself and realized I wasn’t wearing a tie, my briefcase was actually a backpack of hers I’d commandeered several years before, and the pot roast she’d been cooking was actually a tub of flaxseed and yogurt mixed together.
“I had to convince a fundamentalist family to vaccinate their dog and do seventeen medical records by hand,” she continued, squeezing a stress ball and envisioning putting it through my head. “And you had to take a kid’s phone? Gee, that’s rough.”
“It was a really big kid,” I muttered, slinking away to go find the latest takeout pizza coupons.
