It was one of those mornings: Alison was sick with the flu; Melissa couldn’t find her green skirt, and Emily had spilled milk inside her backpack. All we needed was a dog to take a crap on the floor right now, and the circus would be complete—thank God, Alison was allergic to all indoor fur balls.
I burnt my thumb when it happened. The word came out with such swift efficiency that there wasn’t any time to turn it into a G-rated swear word even if I could have thought of one. My head swearing made a full fledged verbal debut because of one little burn and the chaos of the morning. It was the worst possible one said at the worst possible time. Alison had just entered the kitchen; the girls were silent, frozen statues, and all three just looked at me with horror.
“How long have you been swearing?” The question left her pale lips, and I felt the cold dread of an oncoming storm.
“He swears a lot when he’s with Grampa.” Our family informant, Emily, shoved me under the bus.
“Thanks, kid.” I looked at my daughter. “Remember this moment when I scare off all your boyfriends.”
I said nothing to Alison. Fear had me frozen as I watched her walk into the laundry room and come back with a very dusty, very large pickle crock with the words “Potty Mouth Jar” written in marker across the front. I should have thrown it out when I had the chance.
“Heavenly Father does not sleep with his mother.” Alison said as she firmly put the jar on the counter beside me and pointed to it, “and a fine for any words said out loud in the past three months.” She looked at me for a moment and added, “and in your head.”
I hated this jar—not the jar itself—I liked the jar. It worked really well to stop my swearing, and I didn’t want my little girls to swear like truckers. It was the fact Alison sent all the money to the Democrats. That just pissed me off. I needed to find some change or something to pay my fine. Seeing one of the packages of dry beans for tonight’s supper, I ripped it open and threw in a handful. I got a glare and gave one of my own back then just emptied the whole bag into the jar.
“No taking the Lord’s name in vain or any other deity.”
“What, even from Greek mythology?”
She glared, “Any of the B words.” She continued to list them off with her fingers almost bent backwards with her anger.
“The B words!” I waved my arms, “those aren’t profanities. They’re just another name of female dogs and illegitimate children.” Her scowl was lethal. “Aw, come on Babe.” I followed her into our bedroom as my determination crumbled.
“That goes for the F and S words also,” she snapped at me and crawled back into bed.
“The S word? Why?” I knew she didn’t feel well, but I was fighting for my stress relief. “The vacuum does it. A person does it when they drink through a straw. It’s an everyday word!”
“It is a gateway word,” she stated as she pulled up the blankets.
“What?”
“Gateway, you know, like pot is a gateway drug.”
“Seriously? Pot’s legal in Massachusetts.” I was digging in my heels, but the look that I got was not good.
“When New Hampshire makes it legal we’ll talk.”
“Aw, come on, Honey!”
The covers were pulled up to her chin, and she looked pale and tired, but she wasn’t giving in on this. “We signed an agreement.” Getting up on her elbow to make her point, “no infidelity, no lying, and no swearing.” Her eyes narrowed. “Want me to pull out the paper?”
I said nothing, turned, and went back to the kitchen, muttering all the way about unread clauses in contracts and needing to be less trusting of the woman I loved. When I entered the kitchen, both girls looked up at me as if I had shot puppies for fun. I raised my eyes to the ceiling and wished there was a little more testosterone in this house. Just once I would like to feel I wasn’t so alone in my sea of estrogen. Unfortunately, Alison was right again. I had agreed and therefore had to concede. Thoughts of my lost battle had me throwing in another two-fistfuls of beans from the second bag.
Melissa’s small voice broke through my muttering, “Daddy, what’s a boyfriend?” The sound of the rest of the bag being emptied into the pickle jar was my only reply.
That afternoon, I had one child playing quietly in her room and was waiting for the other to get off the bus when Carl stopped by for his fix, his Kool-Aid fix, raspberry to be precise. Alison and Carl grew up together. Carl and I became friends at their high school reunion over a beer while hiding from our wives. We have been hiding together ever since as well as enabling each other’s weaknesses.
I was stuffing things that I hoped would resemble supper at five into a Crockpot while plotting on how to get my father to the doctor’s when Carl in his usual attire of wrinkled business casual entered the kitchen and made a beeline for the fridge.
“Where is it?” All I could see was his ass poking out from behind the door until he found the pitcher. Carl drank his Kool-Aid as if it were an icy beer on a muggy summer’s day, not a New England January afternoon in the middle of a cold snap. Then it happened. He spotted “The Jar” and asked the question I just didn’t want to deal with, “what the Hell?”
“It is what it says,” I mumbled as I adjusted the temperature of the crock to high. “When is Betty due?”
“Fuck, three months, six days and,” he looked at his watch, “six hours.” I just pointed to the swear jar. I will share my pain as much as I can. He groaned as he fished in his pocket for some change. “How much?”
“It doesn’t matter.” I leaned on the counter and rubbed my face. “It is the exercise of making yourself aware.”
“That explains the beans then.” I hadn’t bothered to replace them. She could send those to the Democrats too, damn it. Damn was the only word she allowed me. Carl sighed with the clink of his quarter against the glass. “What do you do with the money?’
“She sends it to the blue party.”
“Oh, that is a worthy cause.”
I glared at his gangly frame and unkept blond hair. I was surrounded by enemies. “What is Betty up to now that she has purged the house of sugar and chemicals?”
Carl didn’t even miss a step as I changed the subject. “Thinking about eliminating meat.” He rubbed his eyes and took another drink. “I can’t wait for this baby to be weaned.”
“It’s not even born yet.”
“She is going to starve me to death with these vegan meals.” He groaned and filled up his oversized green water bottle with the rest of his sugary drink.
“There will be left-over chili in the fridge tomorrow.” I was trying to help him out.
“I can’t. It gives me gas, and she will know I had meat by the smell.”
“Seriously?”
“Unfortunately,” he sighed and pushed away from the counter. “Still on for dinner Saturday?”
“Yup.”
“See you then.” And he was off; that was when I noticed he hadn’t even turned off his car. His wife’s pregnancy was going to kill him. The man had eaten his weight in food, half of it in meat, and still had been underweight. Carl had been losing weight since his wife’s ban on anything not organic or that had any whiff of the unhealthy. He was fighting a battle he had no way of winning. He was just trying to survive by eating at McDonald’s and raiding our refrigerator every other day. I wondered if any husband could win a battle with his wife over what she deemed morally correct.
Then I heard the little voice from the kitchen door, “Daddy, I don’t feel good,” as she promptly threw up at my feet. That is when I heard John Wayne in my head: “all battles are fought by scared men who’d rather be someplace else.”
