Nine and
Counting
by
Jeff Stimpson © 2007
This is my ninth wedding anniversary. "I have
nothing for you," says Jill. "No card. No present. Nothing. And you
know why."
"Why" is Alex and Ned, both floored for a week
with a relentless fever and stomach bug. This week, the cool, very
married palms of Jill and Jeff have felt their children's foreheads
and scooped up load after load of soiled bedclothes. Our shirts and
arms have been drenched in spurts of every-parent-knows-what. This
morning, exhausted, I broke Jill's coffee cup. Still, I think there
still worse ways of having your anniversary obliterated than caring
for your two sick sons. We'll go out to dinner next week, Jill says,
and exchange gifts then.
As I've escaped to work every day this week, I've
been able to shop. At least today. Opera tickets are on the way. I
also got Jill a transit card holder and a red metal-covered notebook
from the Metropolitan Museum of Art shop, along with one postcard of
a lady in an evening dress and another of girls in tutus. Before I
give her the tickets, I'm going to write on the back of the lady's
postcard, "Better dress up!" On the back of the tutu postcard I'm
going to write, "Ballet. Opera. What's the difference?" Don't you
think that's adorable?
Nine years. Not counting two years of living in
sin beforehand, that's almost a fifth of my life. Nine years ago
there was no Alex and no Ned. Jill had just hitched her wagon to the
star of my "career" - most of which did then, and I hope still does,
reside in the future - and we were sharing a ground-floor apartment
on a quiet street in Ithaca, New York.
People ask how we met, of course. I've told them
Jill asked me if I was married on the day we met. I never
mention that she was an editor at the time and planning a wedding
supplement, and she was gauging my experience as a freelance writer.
At least that's the story she's stuck to.
"What did I care who this guy was?" she told a
how'd-you-meet neighbor recently. "He had on a red T shirt and a
purple dress shirt. He had a lousy haircut." I used to go to her
newspaper office every Friday and just hang around and hang around
and talk for hours, Jill says, adding, "I wondered, 'How come this
guy doesn't have anything else to do?'"
Bless the neighbor: She rapped on our coffee table
and said, "Hello? Jill? Anybody home?!"
We were married in New York City on a frigid day,
in her aunt and uncle's place on Riverside Drive. We had a small
ceremony, just a handful of relatives and friends, a guitarist, and
shrimp. When we returned from our honeymoon, we found our car buried
in snow at the Ithaca Airport. A year and a half later we moved to
Baltimore. Jill never liked Baltimore much - I didn't either, really
- but one night in that apartment she looked at me and said, "You
know, even if we don't have kids, I can think of things worse than
to grow old with you."
The following year we had Alex prematurely, and
began to grow old a little faster than we'd planned.
There have been many Jills in the past nine years:
the editor, the girlfriend, the cook, the editor, the wife, the
editor, the sweet partner and slippery arguer. One version of Jill
that remains vivid to me, though, is the woman in the hospital. She
sat with me through the pointless doctors' conferences, held Alex
and changed his first tiny diapers around the IV tubes, and pounded
the keyboard and found the online support groups as the conferences
grew more pointless. She answered the phone when I called Alex's
bedside. She helped me hack our way through the jungle of his
hospitalization. I can't imagine what other woman I would have done
all that with. Sometimes Jill mentions her first husband - usually
after I've broken something like a coffee cup - but I like to think
Jill has had only one husband.
This morning the boys were up, Alex munching
Cheerios and heading, we pray, toward his first and only day of
school this week, tomorrow. Ned was flat. Jill's husband must call
to see how they're doing. When he does, Jill will answer.
Copyright 2005 Jeff Stimpson, all rights reserved
