“Honey?”
“Hmm?” Mark was engrossed in a football game. Not any of his teams, so I could interrupt at will.
“We need to talk about something important.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Security questions,” I said, as I put a casserole in the oven.
“Oh, for like picking the kids up from school?”
“No, though that’s not a bad idea, either. I was thinking more for if one of us were ever body-snatched or somehow being impersonated. If we were suspicious of the other person, we’d obviously need some sort of security questions that only we know.” I put the oven mitts on the counter and pulled my hair back into a fresh ponytail.
“Um, hello? Earth to Mark?”
“This is me ignoring my wife, who is clearly high.”
“No, I simply happen to read and watch enough sci-fi to want to be prepared for all eventualities,” I said. “You know, body-snatchers, zombie apocalypse, certain things that happen in the later seasons of Alias you haven’t watched yet that I don’t want to spoil but concern me greatly … So, I need you to think, because I’m coming up blank. What could we ask each other that’s a question that only the other one of us would know?”
“Seriously?”
“Yes. It’s harder than you’d think. You try and come up with something.”
“Ok, how about what we had for dinner the night we got engaged.”
“You’re the one who remembers what we had for dinner everywhere we’ve ever eaten. I’m lucky if I remember the restaurant. It has to be something I can remember, because if I hesitate, you might shoot me.”
“Shoot you?”
“Or knife me, or whatever.”
“This is ridiculous.”
“Consider it an act of a husband acknowledging his wife’s anxiety on a subject and attempting to alleviate it.”
“Fine.” He sighed so massively that the windows shook.
“So? What’s your question?”
“I’m thinking.”
“You see!” I said, triumphantly. “It’s harder than you’d think!”
“Ok, how about where we got engaged?”
“No go. Everybody knows that.”
“No they don’t!”
“Um, yes, they do. Girls talk about things like how the proposal went in kind of excruciating detail.”
“Ok, what about what I gave you for the first birthday we had when we were dating?”
“Nope.”
He stared.
“Why the hell not?”
“You can’t give a girl a book of Yeats and inscribe it with a note that says a certain poem reminds you of her and not expect her to spend hours poring over it with her closest friends and fellow English majors trying to parse its meaning and your intentions.”
“Seriously?”
“Um, yeah.”
“This would be easier if I had a wife who didn’t write all of our lives on the Internet.”
“I don’t! I do normal girl chat. Now stop stalling and think of a question.”
“It could be our code word.”
“Ahh. Our code word.”
“Yep. I ask you what it is, and you say it.”
“See, now you’re trying to get me to say it, and I’m not convinced you’re not body-snatched right now and trying to milk me for confidential information! Besides, other people know our code word.”
“Who?”
“My sister, for one. And I think my aunt. Oh, and definitely my therapist. You have to admit, it’s funny. We’ve said we’ll use it for so many things now that if you ever said it in public I wouldn’t know whether to check my teeth for spinach, my shoe for toilet paper, my bag for extra Xanax, or to look in the mirror to see if my Spanx were showing or if there was a stain on my white pants. So I’m pretty sure I told them about it because I had this great mental image of you saying it during a party and me groping myself to identify the problem, failing, and then diving under the table.”
Mark actually paused the football game.
“I do not think I need to worry about being able to tell whether you have been body snatched.”
“And I do not want to worry about being unprepared.”
“Ok, I’ll keep thinking about it. In the meantime, will you please have a drink?”
So I did. And then forgot all about it due to calculated distractions on Mark’s part (making me watch Duck Dynasty on A&E was particularly effective). But now I’ve remembered. And this topic will be revisited.
