Written about, reviewed in the Journal News

http://www.lohud.com/article/20121125/LIFESTYLE01/311250010/The-fall-season-s-other-steamy-novel?odyssey=tab|topnews|img|Life&Leisure

Beddington Place has a website!

http://beddingtonplace.com/

How to train a husband

By EVE MARX

My husband has a new expression. He says he’s over-trained. “I’m over-trained,” is his response now to everything I say. Examples of his over-trainedness mostly manifest themselves in the kitchen. “I loaded the dishwasher this way because that’s the way you taught me,” he lies, because I never told him to load it that way. Who would train someone to stack fragile glassware on the bottom, where it will surely break?  “You’ve over-trained me,” he protests when I stare curiously at him as he eats his snack of matzo sprayed with fake butter, hunched over the sink. “You told me not to make crumbs,” he says. “You trained me.”

While my husband’s characterization of me as a cross between a circus trainer and a dominatrix is annoying to say the least, at the same time I feel a certain pride that he thinks of me this way.

Over the years I have tried, with varying success, to train him. I’ve worked on getting him to remove muddy shoes before entering the house, to make a bed, to put down the toilet seat. (The last is an utter failure.) I have successfully trained him to let a dog in or out, and at least aim to throw his soiled clothing in the laundry basket. Writing this, I attempted to make an inventory of areas I’ve successfully trained him in, and realized the list is woefully short.

Still, my husband maintains he’s over-trained. Vis a vis the garbage. “You tell me to put a new bag in when you’ve told me to take the garbage out,” he whines. “ So I’m standing there with a leaking bag in one hand, and you want me to put in another bag. Which do you want me to do first?” He claims there are so many household rules it makes his head spin. Maybe that’s the explanation for why the first 5 years of our marriage, he walked around with a wool scarf wrapped around his head, like a bandage.

I asked him to describe how he feels about all of this.

“I feel tormented,” he said. “I’m always torn between two impossible options. I can either do one thing and be pilloried, or another and get whacked. In the end I always end up cowering in the corner, holding the Chihuahua as a shield,” he said, prone, as always, to hyper-exaggeration. That’s another thing I’ve failed to train him out of, his propensity for inflating every situation. Let’s not forget, when we met, he was a screenwriter.

I recently asked him to explain what he means by saying he’s over-trained. “If I hear your car pulling up, I’ll immediately race around fluffing pillows and folding blankets and grabbing the broom to start sweeping,” he says, meaning he’s just trying to clean up the mess he made in my absence. “And then the kicker is I manage to step in some tiny poop Rinaldo (the Chihuahua) made. How do I clean my foot, clean the floor, and get rid of the poop before you even walk in?” he said. “It’s impossible.”

He also wanted to discuss what he called his dress. “Am I supposed to tuck in my shirt or not tuck in my shirt?” he said. “If I don’t tuck it in you say I look a mess. If I tuck it in, you say it’s all bunched up. So I leave it half in and half out and then you say I look ridiculous.”

A couple of years ago when I announced I was sick of grocery shopping, my husband volunteered to take over the job. He’s become much better about buying produce, a weak area since he started out barely knowing the difference between a pear and an avocado. (“Why do they call them ‘avocado pears’?’ he protested.) Onions continue to elude him. “They’re poorly labeled,” he says. “You told me to never buy those small, hard yellow ones. But you also don’t like the tiny white ones, either. To me, they all look the same.”

It’s what he calls, “the multiplicity of rules,” that has left my husband paralyzed in some of his dealings with me. “I can’t buy onions, I don’t know how to tuck in my shirt,” he said. “I’m afraid to walk around the house. All I can do is hide in my man cave, or go to the office.” He says we live in a 2500 square foot house where he spends all his time in a room “smaller than a NYC apartment.”

A friend posted on Facebook that 8 days and nights with no internet or television might be grounds for divorce. I laughed. I know I’ve trained my husband to leave me alone when I watch my Real Housewives. But don’t think he doesn’t have his own arsenal of training tools to keep me on my toes. For example, he’s got me trained to run away whenever he starts playing the saxophone, which is for a minimum of 40 minutes a day, easily hours on the weekends. His man cave is home to multiple sax’s; tenor, alto, and soprano, the last whose sound makes my heart pound with anxiety, especially when he hits certain notes that set the dog to howling and that another friend described as “insane asylum music.”

Another friend got on my advice purchased a tiny riding whip. She lives in south jersey but not by the shore and nowhere near The Horse Connection which has an excellent selection of crops. So I sent her to a site called JustForPonies.com and she bought a girlish crop to enhance her demeanor around her own spouse. “You were right,” she said, when I told her every woman needs a crop, especially during football season when the domestic training of males usually could use reinforcement. “He jumps right to attention when I whack it against the coffee table and tell him to get his shoes off the couch.”

Ladies, are you paying attention?

The Examiner reviews BEDDINGTON PLACE

http://www.theexaminernews.com/local-writer-publishes-saucy-debut-novel-about-the-horsey-set/

Dispatches from the storm

Superstorm Sandy – and have they downgraded it from a hurricane to a

‘superstorm’ for insurance purposes, the cynic in me wants to ask? – has blown in and out of my little hamlet with disastrous effects. Although we were all very lucky there were no fatalities, thousands are left without power, perhaps indefinitely.

I’m typing this from the Scarsdale Inquirer newspaper office, an ad hoc arrangement cobbled together at the last minute, but that will allow the Bedford Record Review newspaper to get out. We are working to get the paper out, come hell or high water. And it has been hell. Driving around is frightening, especially in the dark. Roads are blocked. Trees are down. Unsecured live power lines lie twisted on the ground. Like many of my neighbors, I have no heat, light, or running water. Last night it was 30 degrees. Light rain is in the forecast. The lack of communication from the power company, NYSEG is grim. No one is willing to go on the record as to when relief can be expected. Town officials are saying restoration could take weeks. Flaks from the power company are saying nada.

As I go about the house dressed in my coat, my hat, and my boots, I think about my mother, Geraldine, who years ago was a proud member of the Women’s Army Corps. “You’re in the army now, you’re not behind a plow; you’ll never get rich, you son of a bitch, you’re in the army now,” she gleefully sang, following me around the house when I was a teen, supervising me through chores. Thanks to my mother’s immersion in the United States Army, I have some resourceful skills, including the ability to carry on for days lacking heat or hot water. I know how to hammer my daily sustenance down to the barest minimum. Although what I crave most is a cup of hot soup and hot tea, I can survive on apples, nuts, bottled water and almond butter. Chocolate and wine help. Thanks to Geraldine’s training, I also know how to make a bed so tightly you can bounce quarters off it, pluck a chicken, clean a weapon.

I’ve often quipped that there is almost no situation where a Barbour coat won’t serve, and during this Sandy Situation I’ve been proven correct at every turn. My favorite stepfather, the one I think of as ‘Dad,” Charles Camp Cotton, a Democrat and a free thinker and a former judge in Nuremberg, favored his Burberry raincoat, even wearing it as a bathrobe. Between my Barbour Utility jacket and quilted vest and field coat, I’ve been well prepped for every Sandy scenario. The waxed canvas coat kept me dry the many times I had to venture outdoors during the storm, monitoring the gutters and keeping the flood drains cleared. The vest has been a terrific bed jacket. The quilted coat I’ve been wearing four days on end. It’s warm, it’s reflective, and just the thing to throw on when crouching in the leaves, urinating in the moonlight.

As news trickles in of gas shortages, civilians arguing with police officers who are blocking them from checking on their storm affected homes, friends and family members in much worse off areas, like the Jersey shore, I wonder what might be next to come if things go from bad to worse. No one I know can even conceive of what it might be like if the norm is not soon the norm. You hear a lot these days about “The New Normal,” i.e. single parent families, gay marriage, anyone and everyone rating and ranking themselves and their friends’ peculiar quirks as being somewhere on the Asperger Spectrum. But the New Normal might really turn out to be decades of hoarding batteries, stockpiling fuel, conserving commodities, learning to live in the dark. We all might have to decide whether it’s better to own a generator or become a master survivalist. Recipes for cooking squirrel may abound. A girl who helped me clean our log cabin in upstate New York long ago told me the secret ingredient to making rodent palatable is lots of ketchup.

I’m always interested in how the human spirit deals with adversity. While the national news casts dire warnings against future looting and price gouging, this morning in downtown Katonah, things were almost sunny. At Kelloggs & Lawrence hardware store, despite the lack of electricity, business was lively. People were coming in from as far away as Lincolndale seeking butane-fueled outdoor cook stoves,  sleeping bags, kerosene lamps, batteries. Storm stories were exchanged. Little Joe’s Coffee up the street was open, even though Jen, the owner, said she had no hot drinks. Passersby on Valley Road stopped to pet a shivering Chihuahua wearing two coats. Everyone said “Good morning. ” Last night a kind neighbor invited me in to take a hot shower. At the end of the day it was good to know most people in my town realize in a catastrophe it’s all about neighbor helping neighbor, which is just as it should be. Let’s all stick together and hang tough.

Chick Lit Central: The Blog!: Book Review: Beddington Place

Chick Lit Central: The Blog!: Book Review: Beddington Place

Gigi, R.I.P.

Our family dog, Gigi, died the other day. Our wonderful vet put her down. She was 15 years old at the time, and we had her since puppyhood.

Gigi was supposed to be my son’s dog, but of course feeding her and training her fell to me. That’s the way it is with family dogs. The parents say they’re getting the dog for the kids, but unless mom wants the dog and raises it like a 4-legged child, family dog ownership can be a calamity.

It’s embarrassing to say, but I embraced Gigi’s presence reluctantly. I didn’t want another dog. I already had Maisie, a nervous, sickly rescue, and a couple of middle aged cats. Yet there we were that Saturday in late October, driving around Mahopac. We had kids in the car, my son and his friend. They begged us to stop in a pet shop (my least favorite place), and before I knew it, we were coming home with a new pet.

Store bought dogs are notoriously unhealthy and not a purchase I recommend, but we got lucky with Gigi even though I’m pretty sure she was born in a puppy mill. Right from the start, she was full of vim and vigor, with intelligence to spare. She housebroke quickly and learned her name and developed a vocabulary. She loved us all, but she was crazy about my son. For years, everything was grand.

Of course Gigi was like every young dog, and she had her moments. One day in the back seat of my car, she ate a Coach handbag. She enjoyed dragging our soiled clothing all over the house, and she was a nuisance at the table, barking and begging for chicken. She ate cat poop. She had a passion for licking shower water off our legs. She could open any unlocked door. She was nosy, and loved going to other peoples’ houses. Once she found a pair of turtles living in someone’s bathroom.

Her biggest joy in life besides food was car rides into town. She was a natural café dog. She loved cars, especially my old Miata, where she rode shotgun with the top down. When she was my only dog, a situation that lasted 6 years, she accompanied me on work interviews and she was always well behaved. At home she had a collection of chewed tennis balls. When he was cooking outdoors, Gigi was my husband’s best friend. Referencing her love of barbecue, my son called her “the grill fiend.” 

Gigi was about well into middle age when we acquired Basil, the crippled pup. Then last winter, we adopted an older Chihuahua from the Westchester SPCA. While not exactly pleased about these interlopers, Gigi gave herself a job, obedience training and helping to housebreak both of them.

My son’s feelings were hurt in the late spring when he came home for a few days and Gigi failed to greet him. That was the day I came to terms with her situation and began to prepare myself for her end.

Caring for an elderly dog is not much different than caring for an elderly person. There were times when I could have been more patient. Gigi suffered memory lapses and was often disoriented. She was pretty blind and deaf. And yet she still enjoyed her walks, her food, and her car rides. Ugly warty lumps and bumps sprang up all over her small body and she developed an itchy skin condition that necessitated near-daily baths. She was depressed but bore it in good grace when I had to lift her into the car or help her up on the bed. In her salad days, she was quite the athlete.

My whole life, I’ve had cats and dogs, and understand lifetime commitments. Fortunately, I’ve had enough experience to know animals tell you when they’re ready to go, and it’s our job to pay attention. The hardest thing is not to human needs get in the way. Many, if not most people try to hang on too long, and a dog will keep trying for you because they hate to to disappoint. Everyone has their own rules about quality of life; for Gigi, I knew it would be when she stopped eating and drinking.

My husband came with us to the vet to say goodbye. It’s a personal decision, but I always stay with my animals through their last breath. Gigi actually seemed to be smiling as Dr. Scott administered the pre-euthanizing sedative. After that it went very quickly, probably less than 2 minutes. Afterwards I helped wrap her in the towel and kissed her head. Then I immediately left.

It’s been a few days and I’ve not stopped thinking of Gigi and what a good girl she was for so many years. I think about is our good times together and all the fun we had. Roger Caras famously said, “Dogs are not our whole life, but they make our lives whole.” Gigi, wherever you are, we will always love you.