The Marriage Files

Polls suggest that the trait men associate most closely with masculinity is playing the role of provider, but I don’t buy it. If men were programmed to supply sustenance, they’d be just chomping at the bit to run to the grocery store. I mean, if coming home with a dead animal slung over his shoulders got ancestral man the adulation of all the females in the village, you’d think modern man would take a clue and show up with a quart of milk now and then. How different could hunting be from selecting a package of ground beef that’s not past the expiration date? How different could gathering be from plucking produce off shelves as if the oranges were growing there instead of stacked in neat pyramids? With a little imagination, it’s all the same experience: get food, bring it home. But no—grocery shopping isn’t a “guy thing.” Eating everything in the house is a “guy thing,” but not restocking the supply.

As a result, in my household food is a topic that causes a lot of tension. It’s a multi-faceted problem, but undoubtedly the biggest area of contention is that nasty division-of-labor issue with respect to who gets it, who prepares it, and who cleans it up. My husband K— and I have worked out a reasonably acceptable arrangement for the latter two chores: I cook, and he washes the dishes. But there’s still a heated conflict over the “who gets it” part.

Our weekly skirmishes over who went to the grocery store last and what they came home with have come to resemble a World War I battlefield, with entrenched positions and occasional random grenade launches. God help the poor soul who makes an innocent comment such as “Is there any popcorn left?” It’s likely to unleash a wafting cloud of noxious gas.

One day, unprompted, K— came home with a couple bags of groceries. I was mightily pleased. Thinking of my ancestral females and how it was their blandishments that supposedly inspired ancestral Provider Man (capital “P,” capital “M”), I rewarded him with kisses and accolades. But taking a peek inside the bags, I saw that the grocery list from which he’d worked must have read something like this: proceed to the junk-food aisle and put one of everything in your basket; add one or two perplexing items at your discretion. He’d bought diet Coke, potato chips, Hershey’s chocolate bars with almonds, Pop-Tarts, packaged coconut cookies, Tic-Tacs, honey-roasted nuts, a bag of M&M-laced trail mix, and inexplicably, liverwurst and hair gel.

We proceeded to exchange a little sniper fire over his foray into food provision. He complained about how much Time (it had a capital “T” coming out of his mouth) it had taken to procure all these essential foodstuffs. He made it sound as if he’d had to sit in a blind for two days, then flush the Coke bottles out of the reeds and wring their little necks with his bare hands. I gritted my teeth and retreated.

A short time later, while surveying the refrigerator for ingredients for that night’s dinner, I made a mental note that it was time for a clean-sweep operation. You know, one of those maneuvers where you inventory every item in the icebox and make a decision as to whether the mold culture growing on the cheese brick needs a bit more time to become the basis for a biological weapons program or has already passed that danger threshold and requires HAZMAT disposal.

Just as I was reflecting on the fact that here was yet another food-related chore I would have to perform alone, K— passed by, still muttering about the unfair burden of his 20 minutes at the grocery store. A light suddenly ignited in my brain, and I realized that my twin goals of preparing dinner and cleaning out the refrigerator might be combined with a resulting time savings of an hour or more.

I’m not talking about feeding him anything truly poisonous, of course. Were he to die as a result of consuming a purposely awful culinary concoction, I’m well aware that the existence of these articles would pretty much preclude an insanity defense. I was just thinking about some creative cooking, and perhaps making a Point (it had a capital “P” in my mind) about the utility of his grocery store gleanings.

At dinner that night, I proudly presented K— with a first course of effervescent soup. He sipped a spoonful, winced, and inquired in a quiet voice, “Um, what kind of soup is this?” “Coke soup!” I answered in an intentionally bubbly voice. “Like it? It’s amazing, but you can find recipes online with any kind of main ingredient.”

The second course was a warm salad of week-old tortellini basted with the contents of a bottle I’d found in the back of the fridge and vaguely remembered placing there sometime when the Y2K issue was still in the news. The bottle was covered in an Asian script I think might be Thai, and at first I thought it was something called “urd sauce” until I realized that the label had actually begun to disintegrate from age and what it actually said was “soy bean curd sauce.”

The entrée was a sort of pan-cultural casserole representing the triumphant peak of my effort at combining refrigerator relics and the items K— brought home and attempted to pass off as “food.” It contained refried beans of uncertain vintage, half a jar of garlic salsa from which I’d skimmed a suspicious-looking layer of colorful moss-like growths, buckwheat pancakes suffering from freezer burn, mashed liverwurst, some shrunken apricots I’d extracted from the trail mix, and a topping of crumbled, frosted blueberry Pop-Tarts for which I apologized profusely, explaining that they were the closest thing to bread crumbs I’d been able to find in the pantry.

We don’t usually eat dessert, but I offered K— some of what I called a fried potato and chocolate torte, anyway. He passed, being a man slow to change but quick to recognize a homicidal gleam in his wife’s eye.

I have yet to receive an offer of a truce, and we’re pretty dug in over our food issues, but I think I’ll prevail in the end. After all, K— doesn’t cook, and with takeout coming to $10 a night or more, he’s gonna feel the pinch soon.

So where did this myth of man as Provider come from, anyway? Since modern man can’t be too far off the mark of ancestral man, I think a little relabeling is in order. “Consumer Man” would seem to be a lot closer to the truth!

N.B. For the record, the name Coke should probably be followed by the little trademark thingie or the registration symbol that corporations are so touchy about. Please don’t sue me.

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