It has been said that everything happens for a reason. It’s true, and the reason I married my second husband is because I was an idiot. There, I’ve said it. I was looking for something opposite from Husband Number One, and quite successfully found it in Husband Number Two.
Husband Number One was highly intelligent, goal-oriented and always better than me at everything (according to him). Number Two was… not. Initially, Number Two seemed to be very nice, supportive, friendly and kind. He never came across as being too terribly intelligent, and after feeling like a second class citizen with Number One, I suppose that was an attraction, albeit of the wrong type.
The dating process lasted a little over a year, in which time I refused to live with him as I still stupidly deemed that as “inappropriate.” Looking back with 20/20 hind-sight, I wish now that I had stepped into the 1990’s and gone for a good test drive before making the decision to purchase. Much can be hidden from a woman blinded by love, with enough time spent apart – like the minor fact that he couldn’t read.
Well, I take that back. He could read enough to sound out the important things when necessary, but wasn’t I amazed the first time we went to a fancy restaurant together as newlyweds! He became upset that the menus did not show pictures of the offered fare, meaning that he would have to read about the food. I don’t know what I found more frightening; the fact that until that point in his life he ordered his meals based upon photographs of plastic burgers and Styrofoam slices of cake, or that I was now Mrs. Styrofoam cake. I was just going to have to bite the bullet and make the best of it.
I hold nothing against less-literate or less educated people at all. The simple fact of the matter is that I should have thought better than to marry one. It was not a good life decision to say the least, and not one of my brighter moves. This man was generally a very nice person, but the mix could not… mix. Whatever the case, as with almost any element of life, there are still things to laugh about.
I remember one romantic evening when we were walking together in the moonlight. He gazed up at the nearly-full moon and said, “It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
I grew very excited at the prospect of finally having an intellectual conversation concerning the cosmos, and started wondering how to segue into Steven Hawking’s theories concerning universal expansion, as he continued, “It’s amazing that those stars are so far away…”
My excitement grew.
“And how the moon looks so small. It’s hard to believe it’s bigger than the earth!”
“What?”
“You know. How the moon is bigger than the earth but it looks so small form here.”
At that point my bubble of excitement burst, and there was something far more insidious welling up inside of me. I fought it. I fought it hard, but there it was, overcoming me. Overpowering me. Choking me. I tried even harder to subdue that heinous act of…
“What’s wrong?” He asked innocently.
Giggling. Laughing. Hysterical, eye-watering guffawing! I know this was not fair to him, nor was it kind, but like a sneeze, it was something I could not possibly control. I’m sure this was probably the beginning of the end for us and I take full responsibility.
To save face, he did go so far as to claim that that is what he learned at his school, and he’s not sure why my fancy schools were teaching me the wrong things. I refrained from pointing out that his school had failed to teach him how to read, and I offered sweetly to pull up some information on-line if he’d like. Unfortunately he had little interest in facts, and the internet might mean he’d have to read something. We dropped it.
Not long after this episode we started to see news stories on the future 2000 Summer Olympics in
“Is this the first time the Olympics will be held on an island?”
I held it this time. I did not laugh or even crack a grin. I did so well until…
“
On yet another occasion Number Two came up with the statement that said it all!
“Honey, you should know, I’m not the sharpest tack in the book!”
Though I refrained from saying “Well, you can say that again!” he did say it again and again. Many times in fact. I never had the heart to ask him about book tacks. I even wondered if that was perhaps one of the reasons he avoided reading. Perhaps he feared the book tacks lurking within the pages of seemingly innocent looking books. And if that was the case, I further wondered if one would find nails in the pages of the construction manuals he actually did look at every now and then, or if perhaps they were taped and bedded together.
These unfortunate scenes wore on our marriage. It did not help that he was also quite jealous. He constantly wondered aloud if I was cheating on him and if I wasn’t when I would start. Things became worse at a Christmas party hosted by my boss. Number Two had a little too much to drink and was certain he saw my boss and me “looking at each other.” He quietly followed me upstairs when I excused myself to use the bathroom and pushed me up against the wall for questioning. When I tried to escape, he threw me against the wall and put his hand precariously close to my neck to hold me there. Luckily someone downstairs heard the bang and came up to investigate. Of course I explained it away by saying I had tripped.
When I wanted to leave my job and work with a small start-up computer services company in the position of Vice President, he could not for the life of him figure out why I would want to leave a perfectly good management job as well as the man I was most likely cheating on him with. Though I tried to explain my aspirations and how my new boss and I planned to grow the company into something spectacular, it was something he could not relate to. He was a construction worker. His father was a construction worker. His brother was a construction worker. His goal in life was to (you guessed it) be a construction worker.
“Why do you want to work so much? Other women don’t do that. Look at my sister. She’s a hairdresser. She makes good money and she doesn’t have to take a computer home with her and do work on vacation. Women are supposed to want to stay home anyway. You don’t even want to vacuum the house but once a week! You cook dinner but you still make me do the dishes. My sister doesn’t make her husband do the dishes! I see how you are. You’re just like that other woman I heard of once. She got a good job and left her husband. I see how you are.”
I took the new job anyway and as I worked from home a few days a week, I set up a computer in the master bedroom of our very small house. It was the only place where there was enough room for the desk. One day shortly after the alteration in bedroom furnishings had been made Number Two asked me, “So if your boss comes over to work with you on something, are you going to entertain him in our bidet? I don’t want you hanging out with some other man in there!”
I knew he meant “boudoir” as we did not own a bidet or “fanny fountain” as one of my college friends enjoyed referring to them. I reassured number two that I most certainly would not be hanging out in a bidet with any man at all! I was being perfectly honest and my promise seemed to make him feel better.
Unfortunately the start-up company didn’t go the distance, and neither did Number Two. Contrary to his belief, he did not “see how I was.” I put up no fight and left with my son and the bare minimums. Honestly I was just happy to go where I could think my own existentialist thoughts, and allow my mind to expand like dear Mr. Hawkings’ universe. And thus, I flushed Number Two.
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