What Wendell Wants Or, How to Tell If You're Obsessed With Your Dog

1 Do You Talk About Your Dog Nonstop? Thirty-one Ways to Get a Dog It all started one evening with one of my melodramatic pronouncements: "Something's missing from our lives," I said. My husband, Cosmas, reading a science journal appropriately enough named Science, was sitting on the couch just across the room, but did nothing to indicate he'd heard my pronouncement. Of course, Cosmas knows me almost too well by now, and has come to expect melodrama and has been trying out ways to avoid it. A few seconds later, just as I was about to repeat myself in a louder voice, perhaps to be followed by a pillow chaser adroitly aimed for the magazine in his hands, he let out a quiet "Mmmmmm?" which meant he was now at least pretending to listen, so there would be no need for pillow violence. I released the pillow I was clutching, gave a deep sigh, and continued: "It's just that I feel there is a void in our life." I paused for effect here. "A chasm really." Cosmas's eyes began scanning the page faster, desperately trying to get to the end of the paragraph about nucleotides he'd been immersed in. Because everyone knows--well, at least he did, after a healthy dose of trial and error--that one pronouncement followed by another increasingly serious pronouncement requires immediate attention. (It's like one of those SAT verbal questions--MISSING is to VOID as CHASM is to PAY ATTENTION OR RISK UNTIMELY DEATH BY SOFA PILLOW!) Of course, the tricky thing for Cosmas to figure out has always been when I'm just a little bored at the moment, and simply "sharing" my thoughts with him, versus those times when he actually needs to take me seriously (for instance, when I'm talking about gaping black holes in our so-called life). When I had finally won his undivided attention (by walking over to him and snatching away his magazine), I looked him straight in the eye and asked, "Do you feel that there is something missing in our lives?" This is where, had he been wearing a collared shirt, he would have unbuttoned the top button to make room for the slam dunk of his Adam's apple as he gulped it down to the back of his throat. Instead he did a quick preemptive rub of his temples, trying to ward away the nervous sweat beads just breaking through his skin (actually this was a rather nice combination move, in which the whole gesture moved smoothly into the ol' playin'-it-casual, runnin'-my-fingers-through-my-hair thing). Of course, he assumed I was thinking B-A-B-Y (I assume he would have tried to spell the word out in his head, sort of the way he'd previously spelled out M-A-R-R-I-A-G-E, in that typically guy leap of logic that saying a word out loud will somehow make it more of a reality). After all, we'd been married for over two years now. He probably also realized it was the third week of the month, signifying two important things that never seemed to work in his favor: First, my emotions were running high due to PMS. And second, this "delicate emotional state" (which was how Cosmas referred to a woman's sudden ability to slam a pint of ice cream in five minutes) happened to coincide with what I referred to as "the Dead Zone." I'm a certifiable magazine junkie, and the Dead Zone is that time of the month (usually the third week) when I've already read all the current month's fashion mags and am waiting for the new ones to hit the stands. This can last anywhere between two and five days, and it generally isn't pretty (Cosmas and I have discussed the merits of reworking my Pill cycle to separate these two events for the sake of my own sanity and the well-being of those around me [i.e., Cosmas], but as it was decided that the risk of fooling around with the Pill [i.e., risk of B-A-B-Y] was the greater of two evils, we've left things as they are). Another reason he would have thought I was thinking B-A-B-Y was because I had beeLee, Jenny is the author of 'What Wendell Wants Or, How to Tell If You're Obsessed With Your Dog', published 2004 under ISBN 9780385337854 and ISBN 038533785X.