The Marriage Files

It’s true: you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Or, more accurately, you can’t unteach an old dog old tricks. In other words, the habits a husband brings into a marriage will stick around long enough to wave goodbye to his wife as she’s lowered into the grave, the victim of terminal exasperation.

Men learn their old tricks from their parents. But while some of the tricks they learn from their fathers are actually useful, the tricks they learn from their mothers are not even benign, but downright harmful, because their mothers mother them. They pick up after their little boys. They feed them and tell them to run off and play instead of sticking around to do the dishes. When their boys turn into young men, mothers balance their sons’ checkbooks (sometimes making little deposits to cover their sons’ fiscal indiscretions) and turn a blind eye to the fact that after umpteen lessons in separating laundry into whites and darks, they still have a closet full of gray clothes. On the floor, of course, never on hangers.

These are just a few of the old tricks husbands refuse to unlearn, and every wife has her mind-bender—the old trick that doesn’t just drive her batty, but can make her downright homicidal, a Chief Inspector Charles Dreyfus to her husband's infuriating Inspector Clouseau. In my household, this humdinger of an old trick is what I refer to as the Disappearing Act. I’ve observed that many of the duties my husband learned to assume a wife would perform concern making things appear and disappear. (Little did I know that a stint at magician’s college would be the best preparation for marriage.)

Sometime in the course of his boyhood, he learned that if he just puts certain things in certain places, they’ll vanish. This trick does require some skill, because the object must be carefully matched to the place, and sometimes considerable experimentation is required to find the proper fit. My husband’s repertoire includes (but is not limited to): dirty laundry on the couch; grocery bags behind (but get this—not IN!) the trash can; and food-encrusted dishes on the coffee table.

Most husbands develop a specialty, too, in just the same way that one magician makes his mark working with elephants while another one conjures exclusively with rhinos. K—‘s special versatility is with empty food containers. It doesn’t matter what they are—Pop-Tart boxes, chocolate bar wrappers, soda bottles—whatever. In his skilled hands, empty food containers of any sort left on the kitchen counter, in the cupboard, or on top of the refrigerator will disappear. Quite impressive a range, don’t you think?

To be sure, not every item left to disappear requires such exacting placement. Some will disappear wherever they are left. As a consequence, they are left everywhere, and with some frequency, perhaps because this trick demands constant practice. Every man has learned to master this variant of the Disappearing Act with at least one object. In K—‘s case, it’s wadded-up paper towels.

The converse to the Disappearing Act is the Appearing Act. This is when a man uses up the last of something and miraculously—through no apparent effort of his own—a new supply appears to take the place of the old. This trick has been recorded since antiquity. You know the Hanukkah story of the lamp oil that was supposed to last for one day but amazingly lasted for eight? In reality, I suspect it was just the wives refilling the lamps with the oil stored in the next room. If there hadn’t been any women present, the men probably would have spent one day debating whose responsibility it was to replenish the oil and seven days in the dark. But who’s to say?

Back to the present. In a more recent example, four sanding belts, all worn down to the fabric, were lined up in a row in our basement woodshop. There was not a new one in sight. (I might add that there was a garbage can within spitting distance. Can someone explain this to me?) But by the time my husband returned home that night, a brand spanking new package had appeared as if by, well, magic—at least from his point of view.

And that brings me to the principal shortcoming of the Appearing and Disappearing Acts: like so many things in this society, they only work for men. Leave a grocery list on the counter though I might, it’s still there the next day, and none of the things on the list have materialized. Ditto the clean socks that I keep hoping will mysteriously increase in number while I’m busy elsewhere. I can incant ‘til I’m blue in the face, but nothing happens.

The other problem with the Appearing and Disappearing Acts is that for some oddball reason—maybe something magnetic, I’m guessing—there are certain items that defy male mastery. For instance, no matter how hard or often they try, men cannot succeeed in making car keys reappear after having made them disappear. This also applies to telephone books or anything that was last seen in a kitchen drawer.

As for my husband, he’s working on a new trick. Something involving dryer lint and used fabric softener sheets. But I’m on to him. No matter how much of that stuff piles up in the laundry room, it’s not going anywhere!

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