Contentment

Sadee and John head to the grocery store. Back home, while the kids are busy with their grandparents and Sadee is making dinner, John starts to make a list.

Transcript

Hi, my name is Wayne Jones. Welcome to Lies I Tell My Kids, a fictional memoir by a truthful man with no children. This is episode 3, “Contentment.”

This word, contentment, is another funny one, good or bad depending on who’s saying it and when. Sadee and I are in the car on our way to pick up groceries which, I’ve been told at several key turns during this short itinerary, I should have picked up yesterday while she was at work and the kids were in school.

“Friday is our shopping day, John. I know you know the arrangement and I thought you were content with it.”

I do and I am. It was just that this week there was something deep inside me that just held me back from going out the door and driving to the store. It was an upset to the order and efficiency of our lives, but I felt like I was just unable to wrest myself off the couch. And I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to be in a store using that stupid shared grocery list app that she’s made me use. Making sure I got everything. Making sure I got X if Y was out of stock. Making sure that I didn’t buy too much of that Y because everyone knows that it goes bad much more quickly than X.

I didn’t want to compare prices and I certainly didn’t want to receive live updates on the app as Sadee thought about something while she was in the bathroom at work and added it to the list. Ping. That’s normal, right? I mean, sometimes when you get up you don’t want to make the bed first or at all, you want a few bracing splashes of cold water to substitute for the shower you should be taking. You don’t want to have coffee and grains and fruit. No. You want to just grab a protein bar and sit in the leather armchair and do one of the New York Times puzzles before you do anything else. Sit and get engrossed, absorbed. Be happy and not just content.

We went for couples therapy two years ago. Eight weeks, twice a week, of just excruciating analysis, assessment, tentative conclusions. During one session the therapist, a tiny and immaculately dressed man, asked us to say the first word that came into our heads to describe our marriage. “Don’t think for more than three seconds.”

“Content,” Sadee said, a little too quickly for my liking. And of course that’s a case where you don’t want the word used to be content. It lacks a little passion; it lacks a little everything. Sure, I truly am (almost always) content with Friday grocery shopping, but my marriage …

“John?” the therapist asks.

I felt like my ratiocination—that had been a pangram in one of the puzzles that morning—had gone on for an hour and not the evidently mere seconds that his question proved.

“I need a little time to—”

“First word that comes to mind. Right now.”

“I’ll go with content, too,” I said to him, defeated.

The shopping goes more quickly than it does when I’m solo because Sadee knows exactly what we need and she loves the app. We sail systematically up and down the aisles and at the checkout I pack things into the bags we brought while she pays.

“Well, that wasn’t so bad after all,” she says as I put the car in gear and make my way out of the parking lot.

I nod without looking at her. There’s silence on the way home and we’re greeted at the door by not only the kids but also Sadee’s parents, who are staying for dinner. There’s a flurry of activity and people bumping into each other as too many of us manage to get too few bags out of the car and onto the kitchen counter. Giggling at messy cooperative success.

The kids rush into the living room to see what Grampa and Nana have in store for them. Sadee is making dinner this evening, a dish unnamed as yet but that will satisfy all three generations. I’m standing at the side watching others be attentive to something other than myself. I slip out the kitchen entrance and upstairs without causing a stir or even notice. We’ve done well enough, especially in the last few years, that Sadee and I each have an office and so I head to mine. I’m serious now, pensive, contemplative, and with a teaspoon of something approaching … What is it? Despair? Boredom? Anger? Something else that I can’t quite name? I sit on the edge of the loveseat and just look down. A tear lands like a drone on the thigh of my jeans and I rush my hands to my face to contain the potential onslaught.

I’d feel some relief if I knew just exactly what’s going on? Sadee, for God sake, have an affair. Drain our savings account on something we have no use for but it seemed cute and so you just told yourself, Fuck it. And the kids: we’ve been raising them too well. I should have advised differently. Grady, that dork Simon isn’t a bully now, but when he’s on the way home tomorrow, just knock the little prick down and tear some pages from his books. Preventive measures.

The computer stares at me and I feel I should devise a plan to blast me out of all this. I call the document plan.docx and I save it in my misc folder. It’s a blank on the screen now just beseeching me to add words and lines. A numbered list begins, comes from God or Satan, or from me happening to click on that icon because I used to use it to compile our groceries before I headed off to pick things up.

1. Don’t tell the kids and make sure they don’t know. Lie.
2. Don’t tell Sadee but occasionally be asshole enough to make her wonder.
3. Change something small. Make yourself whatever the next adjective up is on the list that includes content.