Three Christmases (2013)

This is my husband Roger.

It was our 19th wedding anniversary this fall and I’ve long since gotten used to that word, “husband,” but I remember that it took a while. Actually, “husband” was never what bothered me; it was the first-person possessive that threw me in the beginning — “my” husband.

Because I never thought I’d have one. And not like, Oh, a Ferrari, I never thought I’d have one or A brain tumor! I never thought I’d have one. But like I woke up one morning with a fluffy pink cottontail on the end of my butt. I never thought I’d have one. And as with a cottontail, probably, it wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, but one did feel vaguely followed.

I used to watch him when he wasn’t looking and think, What does he want? It worried me no end because I didn’t want him expecting anything, you know? Like if he wore me down long enough I’d turn out to be Donna Reed underneath it all. In fact, I made it clear to him many times and in no uncertain terms that I was not going to turn out to be anything if I could help it. I had turned already as far as I had any interest in turning — I was finished — and if he was looking for something in a warm and sentimental yin sort of model he had better hie himself back to the Barbie side of the board and pronto.

My husband thought I was cute when I said such things. He harbored a not-very-secret conviction that I was more benign than I appeared to be. Ironically, I believe it was this blind and staggeringly stupid faith that saved us, because in a clear-eyed marital meritocracy there is no way in hell I could have earned him.

Roger is a fixer — of situations, of algebra homework, of black and hopeless moments, but usually of things. I didn’t grow up with fixers. My father wrote for a newspaper, and he could be funny, acerbic, witty as hell — but never handy. Every Christmas Eve he would sally forth to get a tree, possessed of the odd economic theory that the best time to make a deal on something was when you were desperate for it. We’d cart it home to the garage and he’d root around on the bowed plywood shelves until he came up with the family’s lone tool — the Christmas Tree Saw. All other tool needs were covered by a butter knife and my mother’s wooden hairbrush.

He would kneel on the freezing concrete, breath misting from his mouth, and start to trim the end off the trunk (because it cost extra to have the lot guy do it, subtracting from the great deal he could boast to my uncles he’d gotten on the tree). This usually took about two hours — the first to grind the rust off the saw and the second to actually cut the tree. Afterward, the saw went back onto the shelf to regather its protective orange coating until next Christmas, and my father went back to the bar.

The year my husband met my mother, she and my dad were in the middle of a long and savaging divorce, and Mom had hold of the rough end. That particularly bad day in December, she had sat smoking and worrying in her decaying kitchen late into the night, and as my little brother and sister slept upstairs, her profound distress found focus in one thing she fancied she could control — the tattered and hated kitchen wallpaper. At 1 a.m. she slid open a drawer and got out a butter knife.

By the time a neighbor got hold of me in California the next week the walls were peeled and gouged halfway up the stairwell, where Mom’s frenetic hand had been stayed for want of a ladder. I flew home to Philadelphia, took it in and did the only think I could think of to do — grabbed another butter knife.

It was in this condition that my shiny new boyfriend Roger, finished on location in Pittsburgh, drove south and found us. He handed my mother some flowers, looked at the house and the two of us, covered in dust and several layers of yellowed paper shavings, and said, “Huh. Why didn’t you use a wallpaper steamer?”

There’s a wallpaper steamer?!

Rog spent that Christmas with us, steaming, scraping, sanding, painting and repapering two floors of my mother’s house while I watched joy come back to her face like the sun in winter. I still cannot see my husband draw a utility knife from his back pocket without wanting to have his children, which I did as quickly thereafter as was practical.

He is my hero, my knight in shining armor and my personal Superman, and he always will be.

A few years ago we scraped together the money to have our powder room remodeled and a shower added, a project dear to my why-do-males-take-so-long-in-the-damn-bathroom? heart. In December, in the middle of construction, our contractor fell off the wagon and disappeared into the ether, never to be heard from again, leaving us with one unfinished bathroom and $6,400 in the building fund.

It happened that Roger’s 12-year-old Jeep had been struggling along and he’d been shopping for a used replacement, but like a 6-foot kid to a Hot Wheels display kept returning to our local Mazda dealership to gaze at the new RX-8. He would stand there and do the mental math and price it out without options — 4 speeds instead of 5, cloth instead of leather, lease instead of buy … It never came out to a payment he thought we could afford, and he was okay with that. He just couldn’t stop being its secret admirer.

So the week before Christmas I withdrew our 6,400 bathroom dollars, went to the dealership and put it all down on a Dallas Cowboys-blue sport model with Bose stereo, 5 speeds, black leather interior, the giant showroom bow of my choice, and a monthly payment in my husband’s comfort zone. On Christmas morning before dawn I parked it in the driveway and stuffed the key into his stocking.

It was the best Christmas present I ever got to give. Roger tweeted a photo and the world tweeted back what a wonderful wife he had.

What does the world know?

A couple weeks ago we finally finished the “new” bathroom, six years after we began and just in time for a new Christmas. It’s a bright squash yellow with creamy tiles and poison green accents. We shopped for new towels, a pretty silver mirror, a bold, tomato-colored triptych for the walls. To me it is spectacular, that bathroom.

And Roger’s prized RX-8 sits at the curb, still lovingly waxed and perfectly Cowboys blue.

We have many beautiful things, and I look forward to another wonderful holiday among them. But no Christmas will ever hold a candle to the one when the man I would shock myself by needing to marry fixed my mother’s smile with a wallpaper steamer.

This is my Roger. Merry Christmas to me.