How to Housetrain Your Husband

Living Through a Man Cold

Candace: Miriam I need your chicken soup recipe. Paul has a cold.

Miriam: Ok I will find it and email you.

Candace: Right now. I can't go home without it.

Lucy: I am surprised he let you come out with us.

Candace: There was no "let". He thinks this is a book tour meeting that I couldn't get out of.

Me: You had to lie to your husband in order to get out of the house because he has a cold. How bad is this cold?

Lucy: It is a man cold.

Candace: The man thinks he is dying and he needs me there to watch him do it.

Miriam: Sent.

Me: Do we get days off when we are sick?

Lucy: Not from my family.

Miriam: I am very productive when I am sick. I get the laundry done and usually make soup from scratch because it relaxes me.

Candace: I once had the shits so bad that every time I moved, I had to go. And I still had to play dolls with Karin between shitting. She followed me into the bathroom.

Me: Then why do they get special treatment?

Lucy: Because of the whining. I hate the whining.

Miriam: Bob tries to do things when he is sick but he ends up doing them so poorly that it is cheaper if he just stays in bed. Last time he had the flu, he broke the light fixture in my living room.

Lucy: Jonas gets the bed to himself so that I am not infected. I give him a bell to summon me with. Although about day two I want to shove the bell down his throat.

Me: This could be another opportunity for us.

Candace: Because the last one went so so well.

Me: We could treat them like they treat us when we are sick.

Miriam: Why can't we treat them how we want them to treat us when we are sick?

Candace: Or we can get ourselves sick and treat them like they treat us when they are sick.

Lucy: Oh, the whining.

Really this was going to go as Candace wanted it to because, so far, her husband was the only one suffering from the man cold. At work, Candace printed out the recipe. On her way home, she stopped at the store for ingredients. She carried them into the house in two giant paper bags. Paul hadn't moved since she left him that morning. She set the bags on the counter before fussing over Paul on the couch. She pressed a hand to his forehead like she would for one of her children. This was a mistake because she had to lean down to touch him and in doing so she got a whiff of sick man smell. You know the smell: part salty armpit sweat, part cat burp, part old shaggy goat. "Phew, Paul. Maybe you should take a bath."

He rolled his head over the back of the sofa to look at her weakly. "I don't think I can get up the stairs for a bath," he said in a soft phlegmy voice.

Poor Paul. He didn't know it but, this was the voice guaranteed to raise Candace's hackles, like fingernails on a chalkboard. She closed her eyes to count in her head backward from ten in Spanish. When she finished with Uno she opened her eyes, plastered a cheery smile on her lips and said, "C'mon Paul, you will feel better." She took a deep breath of unpolluted oxygen before leaning in again to leverage his arms around her shoulders. Grunting, she leaned backward using the leverage from her lower body to peel him upward from the couch.