Wendy Markham - Slightly Suburban

So, yeah, I’ve always wanted to start a family for legitimate reasons.

Mostly, though, I just hated my job as account executive and I was desperate for a way out.

At that point, anything—and I mean anything—round-the-clock morning sickness, childbirth without pain meds, endless sleepless nights, death by firing squad—would have been better than taking the subway to midtown every morning and dealing with my anal-retentive boss, account group director Adrian Smedly and an array of bitchy Clients.

Luckily for me, Jack didn’t think an eight-week maternity leave was sufficient incentive for motherhood. At the time, I was a little miffed. But since it takes two to make a baby the original old-fashioned way, and I couldn’t find a willing sperm donor ( just kidding ), I reluctantly set aside the baby dream—half hearted and short-lived as it was.

Not so long after, I found my salvation—or so I thought, pre-Crosby Courts—when I was at last moved into the Creative Department.

Meanwhile, Jack and I pretty much dropped the baby-making subject. I figured it would come up again, though, when one of us found a burning desire to procreate—or play hooky from work for a few months.

Or forever.

Which is how I feel right about now.

Seriously. I need to get out at some point. I’ve been at Blaire Barnett, aside from a brief foray as a catering waitress at Eat, Drink and Be Married, for my entire adult life. I’m so over agency life. And city life.

Things have to change.

So last night when I was eating overpriced turkey on overpriced bread with overpriced lettuce and drinking an overpriced Snapple, while keeping one eye out for cockroaches, trying to ignore the deafening crashes from 10J and watching the ten o’clock news with its usual urban murder and mayhem, I came up with a plan. A good one.

Nope, pregnancy isn’t my proposed ticket out this time. This new plan doesn’t involve nearly as much physical pain. Or sex.

Unless, of course, I need to use my wiles to bribe Jack.

Just kidding. I don’t really do that.

Much.

“So, look, I think we should start thinking about moving,” I tell my husband, officially launching Operation Fresh Start. “We said we were going to do it someday, and we’ve got the down payment.”

Thanks to his dad, who surprised us with a pretty big chunk of change for our wedding gift. I say surprised because even though he was filthy rich, he also was never the most generous guy in the world, and like I said before, he and Jack weren’t on the best terms.

But he had mellowed a little over the years, and he did give us money to use toward a house. Jack—who, as a media planner, is proficient with handling large sums, though it’s usually the Client’s tens of millions and not our own tens of thousands—decided to invest it in a CD until we need it. That sounded like a good idea to me, and Jack and I have always been on the same page about our household finances.

Unlike my parents, who have always argued over money—not that they’ve ever had any.

Also unlike Kate and Billy, who have also always argued over money—not that they’ve ever had any shortage of it, as bona fide blue bloods.

Anyway, Jack might be getting an inheritance, too, once his father’s will is sorted out. Jack Candell Senior had remarried a few months before he died, and his new wife is contesting his will, which left everything to his kids. She says he made a new one leaving—surprise!—everything to her. Only there seems to be some discrepancy about that.

Even without a cut of his father’s fortune, though, Jack and I can probably afford a decent house in the suburbs.

“So,” I say to Jack, “we’ve got the down payment, and I think we should start thinking about a move. Out of the city.”

Jack looks at me, shifts his weight in his chair. “I don’t know.”

Okay, the thing is…I didn’t ask him a question, so why is he answering one?

“You don’t know…what?” I ask. “What don’t you know?”

“Just…why do you want to leave the city?”

“I’m sick of it. It’s crowded and noisy and expensive and stressful and dangerous and it smells and we’re surrounded by strangers, some of whom are circus freaks and pickpockets and perverts. I can’t take it anymore. I want to live in a small town.”

“You grew up in a small town.”

“I know, but—”

“You left your small town the second you were out of college and moved five hundred miles to New York because you didn’t want to live in a small town. Remember?”

Of course I do, but he doesn’t. I didn’t even meet him until I’d been in New York a few years. I hate when he uses my past against me like this.

Okay, he’s never really done it before. But he’s doing it now, and I think I hate it.

“So are you saying you want to go back?” he asks.

“To Brookside? God, no!”

“Good. Because I don’t think I can live there. Nothing against your family.”

“I know I can’t live there. Everything against my family.”

Don’t get me wrong—I love my family. Do the Spadolinis have their little quirks and oddities? Absolutely. Like, as much as they resent stereotypes about Sicilians and organized crime, they do have a hush-hush sausage connection (my family pronounces it zau-zage, and I’ve never been sure why).

What the heck is a sausage connection, you may ask? Or you may know already, though unless you’re Spadolini compare, I doubt it.

See, my brother Danny knows this guy, Lou, who furtively sells homemade zau-zage out of the trunk of his car and let me tell you, it’s the best damn zau-zage you’ll ever taste, see?

It’s even better than Uncle Cosmo’s homemade zau-zage, which has too much fennel in it, see. When one of my nephews once told him that, he inadvertently started what is now referred to in Spadolini lore as the Great Zau-Zage Wars of Aught-Six.

So, yeah. We have our quirks and oddities, just like any other family.

Well, Jack’s family doesn’t exactly have quirks and oddities, per se. The Candells may have an organic-produce connection, but their (probably organic) family tree is barren of colorful relatives like Snooky and Fat Naso and Uncle Cosmo of the Homemade Zau-zage and Spastic Colon—who will tell you, usually over a nice zau-zage sandwich, that one has nothing to do with the other, but I’m not so sure.

Oh, and the Candells don’t discuss bowel function—or malfunction—around the Sunday-dinner table, either. In fact, they rarely even gather around the dinner table on Sundays or any other non holidays in the first place. When they do, it’s usually for takeout. Usually chicken. Not KFC, though. The Candells don’t go for battered, deep-fried food.

My family would batter and fry lettuce—iceburg, of course. They privately refer to the Candells as a bunch of health nuts, and they don’t mean that as a compliment. When my brother Frankie Junior found out at our wedding that Jack’s sister Rachel is a vegan, he practically shook her by the shoulders and screamed, “What the hell’s the matter with you? For the love of God, eat a cheeseburger, woman!”

So, while I do love my family, I do not want to live anywhere near them or, for that matter, in the bleak and notorious blizzard belt of southwestern New York State.

You’ve probably heard about the prairie blizzards of yore, and the historic Buffalo blizzards fifty miles north of my hometown. Let me tell you, that doesn’t compare to what we get in Brookside every year once the Lake-effect snow machine kicks into gear—and it lasts for months on end. Our Columbus Day and Memorial Day family picnics have both been snowed out more than once.

A few Christmases ago, my brother Joey parked his van on my parents’ side yard and when Lake-effect snow started falling, it quickly became mired. He had to leave it there overnight. Well, the snow kept falling, foot after foot after foot, and by the next afternoon, the van was completely buried. I’m talking buried—no one knew the exact spot where he had parked it, so it couldn’t even be dug out. Joey had to rent a car until well after Martin Luther King Day, when the roof emerged after a fleeting thaw.