"The Man (er, Wife) Who Came to Dinner"

Every Saturday evening we have something fun for dinner and watch a movie. Tonight it was pizza and "The Man Who Came to Dinner." And I think I have found a fictional character who adequately captures Wife's total self-absorption. Surely there is no better match (along that dimension) than Sheridan Whiteside. I'll grant that the comparison isn't perfect in other respects -- Sheridan Whiteside is rich and famous and witty and endlessly entertaining besides being an egocentric baby. But in this one respect, ... well, you could pick worse.

In fact, she threw a fit over dinner this evening that exemplified this Whiteside-like self-absorption perfectly. Candor requires me to admit that I probably triggered it, and I certainly fueled it by refusing to take her seriously. But it's not often that she gets on such a roll that the boys both tell her to chill out and relax because it's all going to be OK, and they did tonight.

Let me back up and try to describe what happened.

I was out and about, doing the week's grocery shopping. Wife suggested that I pick up a pizza for dinner -- one of the places that we shop sells pre-made, uncooked pizzas that you can take home and bake yourself. Now, for as long as I have known her, Wife has railed against pizza as a food that she loathes. No surprise, the boys love it. So when Saturday rolls around and we are going to have "something fun" for dinner, they always lobby for pizza and Wife generally nixes it. The few times she actually recommends it herself, I notice because it is pretty remarkable.

So I got to the store, picked up a few other things we needed, and wandered over to the counter where they keep the pizzas. How many do we need? Hmm, good question. For myself, I knew that I had been eating rather too much bread lately and needed something like a salad instead, to kind of scrub things out. (Sorry, too much information.) And I figured that Wife might not really be that excited about pizza either. So I called home and asked her, "How many pizzas do you think we need? Will one large be enough? I think I am just going to have salad." Wife answered, "Well if you get sausage and pepperoni then I sure don't want any! I hate sausage and pepperoni! If you get that then I'm just having a salad too!" I looked at the shelf, and -- sure enough -- sausage and pepperoni was the only variety they had there. So I got one. I figured we didn't need two, because one large pizza should feed two boys and it sounded like neither adult was planning to have any.

But I also realized just how bad it has always made me feel to listen, day in and day out, to Wife's steady stream of hatred. She hates this, she hates that; nothing is ever right or good enough, and everything is somebody else's fault. It is always up to somebody else to make things right for her, and then she hates what they did for her and are forcing her to put up with. It is just incredibly demoralizing. And the longer I thought about this, as I shopped, the more I disliked the idea of going out of my way to feed her something special. Fortunately, I had never offered to make her a salad. When she started ranting about how much she hates sausage-and-pepperoni pizzas, I said quickly "OK, I'll just get one," and hung up on her. So I figured I would bake the pizza for the boys; I would make a salad for me; and then I would let her make whatever she liked for herself.

And that is more or less how it went. When I got home from shopping, she had (very belatedly) cleaned up the kitchen so I had room to put away the groceries, and she was back in bed lying down avoiding the world. I put away the food, put the pizza in the oven, made myself a salad, and then came and told her she should probably make hers because we'd be eating in a few minutes.

Wife: What do you mean?

Hosea: You said you wanted a salad for dinner, so you should probably go make it.

Wife: Why do I have to make it?

Hosea: To make sure you get exactly what you want in it.

Wife: How hard can it be for you to make me a salad?

Hosea: Well I have already made mine, but I only made it for one because I didn't know what you wanted in it.

My God, you would have thought I had told her she was going to be boiled alive and served up in a pudding. How could I possibly single her out like this? What did I mean by making dinner for everybody else in the house but not her? How would I like it if she made dinner for everybody else in the house except me? Didn't I realize that she had cooked dinner all last week and all the week before? Didn't I realize that she had done laundry those weeks too? And now, when it was my night to cook [huh? It's Saturday -- we have fun food, nobody cooks.] I made a point of singling her out by not feeding her? What on earth could I be thinking? What could I possibly be punishing her for? How could I possibly be so thoughtless and inconsiderate?

Here I interjected a comment. "Actually it wasn't thoughtless or inconsiderate at all. I gave it a lot of thought and consideration before deciding that this was the best thing to do. If you ask me at a more convenient time, I'll be happy to explain it to you -- but not now. You can't ruin Saturday night over this. Ask me tomorrow morning when you are all calmed down and the boys aren't waiting for dinner, and I'll explain exactly what I had in mind."

At this point, you or I or anybody else would have shelved it until tomorrow morning ... maybe seething, maybe bitter, maybe resentful, but every one of us would have realized we'd be gettng nowhere tonight and would have dropped it. But not Wife. She went back to the top of her litany of complaints about me and started them all over again, pretty much without variation.

By this time the pizza was done and I was telling the boys to wash up. And of course if Wife had spent all this time throwing together a salad instead of complaining, she'd be done too. But she hadn't, so now there was one more element to the complaining -- viz., that we were all ready to eat and she still had to start making her dinner! In great bad humor, she pulled things out of the refrigerator and began throwing them together. She sat down with a thump, then immediately got up again to get a drink. Then: "Where is the wine bottle?"

Hosea: Which wine bottle did you have in mind?

Wife: The pinot grigio that I opened earlier this evening, that was sitting in the door of the refrigerator right here.

Son 1: Mom, it's on the table right in front of your place. Come on, sit down, it's OK.

(I should add that we have trained the boys that nobody starts eating till everyone is at the table.)

Wife: What about salad dressing?

Huh? Salad dressing? Well personally I had put oil and vinegar on the table; and while she had been tearing up her lettuce, I had poured them both over my salad and added some salt and pepper. Wife came back to the table again, saw that my salad was all dressed, and commented bitterly, "So you made up some dressing too, but only enough for one? You even have to be that snotty over the dressing?"

Son 1: Mom, he just put some oil and vinegar on it. Come on, sit down. Relax, it's OK.

Wife went back into the kitchen yet again to make up some "Italian" dressing from a mix she keeps in the pantry. And finally, only after that -- and after commenting acidly, "I'm not sure I even want to share your table" -- did she sit down to eat with us.

Nor did she stop commenting even then. The comments were all the same as before, just repeated in a different order. Whenever she got to the part about not understanding why on earth I would do anything so despicable, I would add in, "Yes, I know you don't understand. Ask me tomorrow morning, but meanwhile let it go." But this was like asking a starving dog to let go a beef bone, and she kept gnawing at the subject all the way through dinner.

The boys and I built a conversation around her -- something light and airy, with lots of laughter and silliness in it. Son 2, who normally sits next to Wife, surreptitiously scooted his chair over till he was almost at the far end of the table, to put room between himself and her. Finally everybody was done eating -- Wife had made too much salad for herself and had to throw out about half of it -- so we all got down from the table. Wife made a point of stopping me in the kitchen to tell me in detail how despicable she thought I was being; I added a little more than I had before but basically told her to leave it alone. And why should I get to tell her what to do?

Hosea: I shouldn't. Feel free to go find an apartment somewhere, so that you can run your own life exactly the way you see fit.

Wife: Oh right, on the money I get from Social Security. That's rich.

Hosea: Fine, don't. But make a choice. Do you want independence, or do you want me to pay your bills? You have to pick one, but not both.

I added that I never wanted to have to make her decisions for her, and that I would be very relieved when I no longer had any obligation to. But in the meantime ....

She kept grumbling, all the way until we started our movie -- grousing about our marriage far more openly to the boys than she has done before (at least when I have been there). The boys more or less ignored her; and I noticed that Son 2, who usually cuddles with Wife during movies, made a big point of cuddling with me instead before he got tired and toddled off to bed.

At least I don't have to worry about whether the boys know there are problems in our marriage. (Ya think?) And I don't think Wife is winning hearts and minds quite the way she probably wants to. It's sad, in a way.