Fiction author Robin Brande talks about writing, reading, and other vital matters

These are the kinds of conversations we have in my household. It’s why I was on the phone at six o’clock this morning verifying how long hepatitis vaccinations last.

I finished my copy edits yesterday (yay!). Now there’s just this small matter of a screenplay due next week. So since I’m busy, and he’s not, my husband has decided to hop on a plane tomorrow and go to some primitive island in Belize where they don’t have electricity or running water, and sleep under a mosquito net in a hut on sheets that the message boards say don’t match but are clean (hmmm), all so he can “get out of your hair,” which really means take advantage of my momentary distraction and go do something he’s always wanted to do and that I wouldn’t sign up for even if it were the last primitive island on earth.

Hurricane season? Bah. Sanitation? For sissies. My husband is not of my tribe. My people build a nest of toilet paper before sitting down on a public toilet. My people never let guests put their purses on our kitchen counters because those same purses might have been sitting on the floor of a bathroom stall sometime in the last century. My people always wear long pants to the movie theater because they heard there might be traces of feces on the seats. Yes, my people are very wise.

My husband will always eat the local food. Doesn’t matter if it comes from a street cart or a lean-to on the beach. I tried that for one day when I went with him to Mexico a few years ago. I can’t even talk about it or I’ll turn green. Suffice to say that for the rest of the trip I stuck to only processed foods. Let me tell you, ten days of nothing but boxes of raisins, bags of potato chips, and cans of evaporated milk will do something to a person’s psyche. Not to mention intestines.

So we’ve worked out this compromise: I go to civilized places like England by myself and do girly things like go on the Jane Austen Tour, and he handles all the sweaty Central and South American locales by himself. So far so good. Last year while he was diving with sharks in Honduras (no joke–he paid to specifically dive with sharks. Why? Because obviously he doesn’t love his wife), I was with his sister in New York City enjoying some Broadway shows. Sure, my sister-in-law almost got us arrested for dealing in stolen goods, but other than that it was a pretty low-key trip. Whereas even looking at the photos from the shark dive make me want to scream and run out of the room.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal this week about couples taking separate vacations. And the line that resonated with me was a wife telling her husband, “When we are old, I don’t want to hear you say I didn’t let you go.” That’s exactly it. I don’t want to be the boss of him (well, yeah, secretly I do, but so far it hasn’t worked), and I don’t want him to be the boss of me. So even though I’d love it if next week he decided to be my personal assistant, apparently that isn’t in the stars. I’ll have to get my own damn coffee and walk my own damn dogs.

At least I’ll have electricity and running water. And sheets that not only match but are verifiably clean.

To which my husband would say, “Boring!”

I’m going to go take a shower now, just because I can.

Technorati Tags: Writing, Publishing, Vacation, Belize, Travel, Marriage, Relationships

Posted on Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 7:49 am under Life, Writing . Subscribe to responses: RSS 2.0 Comment Feed. . Both comments and pings are currently closed.