I come downstairs for breakfast to find drops of fresh peanut butter dotting the kitchen counter. I know the culprit: a blindfolded chef who worked in the night. He’s my husband, still abed in the sleep mask he will not remove, not even to make a sandwich to satisfy the hunger that pangs him awake. He’s an insomniac. I’m not. He likes peanut butter. I never eat it. He’s frequently hungry. I’m hardly ever. He’s noticeably slim. I’m certainly not. He’s Jack Sprat. I’m Jack Sprat’s wife.
If you know this character from the nursery rhyme, you probably have an image of her, preserved in the antique hues of a handed-down storybook: She’s the corpulent matron in a white kerchief, lustily stabbing the joint of some beast with her knife, while the emaciated Jack on the other side of the table serenely picks his teeth. He can eat no fat, while she can eat no lean. Between them, they lick the platter clean.
No one alive wants to be Jack Sprat’s wife. And I am not fat by any measure, except in relation to him. But the Sprats tell a common but unspoken truth about marriage, revealed in the rhyme’s hoary humor—the bane of comparison. Having been married to Jack for nearly 40 years, I may be a leading expert on the subject, though I rarely speak of it, my mouth, as it were, full of fat.
How do I compare us? Let me start with metabolism. He’s blessed, or cursed, depending on your take, with a body that cannot retain fat and won’t “bulk up,” even when he tries. Mercifully, no one ever let him play football. He comes by this honestly—his grandfather barely cast a shadow, and his sister, at 60, can still wear her Girl Scout uniform. This means that he can eat as much as he wants and never gain an ounce. It also means that nothing he eats, not even peanut butter, will stick with him—a serious problem when he’s ill, or when the table we’ve reserved is not yet available.
I, on the other hand, am descended from folks who look like Mrs. Sprat: stout when healthy, skinny when sick. We spent a good portion of our lives trying to lose the weight that naturally attached to us. In the 1970s, three generations of the women in my family—including 11-year-old me—attended the same weekly Weight Watchers meeting in a church basement. We stepped on the scale and celebrated our losses or mourned our gains. I learned to like foods it’s healthy to like, like pineapple rings and cottage cheese. I learned how to slice one piece of bread into two. But I also picked up the idea that my body was evidence of my sins, both original and committed, and my appetite evidence of temptation (the church basement didn’t help matters).
This is not my husband’s fault. Nor is it mine when he has to wait five minutes to eat and no one else feels it is an emergency. None of this is anybody’s fault, though it feels unfair within marriage, a relationship that is by definition bound up in the body, and in sharing—as the Sprats perpetually do at their tilted, groaning table.
I struggled with this for the first two decades of our union. When my in-laws asked, with real empathy, whether I wanted dessert, understanding I had to “watch my figure,” I flushed with confused rage, like a child whose sibling has been openly favored. It likewise infuriated me that Jack could refresh his wardrobe by merely reciting a few numbers, as if replacing a battery, while I had to spend long hours in fetid dressing rooms to assemble the jigsaw puzzle of fit and style that gets scrambled for me every year.
Obviously, I’d scarfed up a lot of cultural baloney dished out to me since I was a little girl, and like most women, I was sensitive to the scents of approval and disapproval constantly wafting around my flesh. But the bigger and paradoxically more intimate problem was jealousy. How do you love someone, not to mention make love to someone, whom you persistently envy? How do you set aside the bitterness you never asked to carry without placing it on his slender shoulders? I suspect I’m not the only lover who’s toggled between desire and resentment in the dark, and if there’s a diet to control this habit of mind, no one ever told me about it.
In the kitchen of marriage, the work of sustaining life, as well as love, is daily, messy, and improvisational—you have to dance around each other and work with the ingredients at hand. Aware of how prickly I am about my appearance, Jack tries not to mention it, which I then try to read as his way of caring for my feelings and not as his indifference. I should compliment him more—his lithe beauty is no secret—but I worry about provoking my own insecurity that reciprocal praise is due me. To partake of the more carnal pleasures, we have to shed these petty calculations as well as our clothes. I suspect he’s better at this than I am.
As the image of Jack suggests, my husband is very disciplined. His only addiction is to regimens. He does not drink. He is very good at streaks: 956 consecutive Duolingo sessions, as many daily pages on a writing project, 25 miles on the bike at least three times a week. He never misses, and he needs no encouragement from anyone to keep at it, least of all me. He high-fives himself at the end of each day, stoked by his own willpower.
I am, relatively, a libertine and slacker, addicted to resolutions, to the forgiveness offered by each new morning, like the ones after the last pour at the dinner party I should have politely refused. I worry about this, as I worry about my weight, as I worry about my productivity, but I tend to freestyle the solutions to such problems. I go easy on the wine, cut out bread (or use the half-slice trick), pound out some pages. Then there’s inevitably a lapse, a heady release from my self-imposed restrictions that I have come to understand as how I experience pleasure. Guilty, maybe, but deep—an afternoon sipping vermentino and dishing with a friend, a hunk of warm ciabatta dipped in oil.
He is, by most reckonings, more successful than me. His books take up shelves while mine can fit in my purse. I am less rigid than he is. I can sustain a conversation that has no discernible goal. I can sprawl on a beach without building a sandcastle. I can watch a movie past my bedtime to find out who dunnit. He can do none of those things.
His temperament courts certainty. Mine, serendipity. Years ago, while on a biking trip in England, he thought we should bypass the church festival just getting started in a village we rolled into—we hadn’t reached his 75-kilometer “distance goal” that day. But I insisted, and we happened upon the vicar, who stowed our bikes in the sanctuary and showed us around town. The festival was in celebration of nothing, the vicar explained merrily—they just felt like having one. There were bake sale treacle tarts. There was a parade of children enacting nursery rhymes, including a wee Mr. Sprat in his oversized waistcoat, along with the Mrs., waving shyly from under her pillowed bosom. We played the greatest carnival game ever invented: throwing croquet balls at a larder and breaking all the crockery. The prize you won was the sheer thrill of it. It was one of the best days of our lives.
I am in charge of “stop,” I like to joke, and Jack is in charge of “go.” This division of labor guarantees that we both profit from our travels and get to all our trains on time. Less funny, I admit, is that he moves faster than I do in every endeavor, even a Sunday stroll, his speedy gait unslowable except by extreme concentration, which he often loses (a rare lapse of discipline). Sometimes I’ll take his hand to bring him to heel, especially at intersections where he’s inclined to charge out, a militant pedestrian daring the oblivious traffic. In the light version of this story, I’d tell you I’ve already picked out his tombstone: “Jack Sprat: He Had the Right of Way.” In my gloomier moments, it shames me that something so simple is so hard for us to do.
But usually, I walk alone while he zips off on his bicycle. Forty years on in the fairy-tale project of coupling for life, my impulse to compare us has steadily waned, my anxieties about who’s better or worse replaced by a kind of interest in the roles our God-given flaws and quirks play in the long-running performance of our marriage. Maybe this is as trite a process as settling, or aging into grace.
I think it’s something more dynamic, though. I love Jack, and Jack (he says) loves me. But love at this advanced marital age feels less like romance than like learning. For 40 years, it’s been every day’s problem to figure out how to inch ourselves toward balance. More days than not, now, we solve it. I drive to the restaurant, then hand him the car keys. I savor an after-dinner espresso, confident I’ll sleep, while he polishes off a bread pudding, sure he’ll wake up famished. We make love with the lights out, guiding each other toward blind but equal joy. The new day dawns with its peanut-butter dew.
The illustrated Sprats I read about as a child look old enough to be married as long as we have. What I see, now, though, are not their bodies but their faces—two very different expressions of fulfillment. And when I sing myself their verse, I notice it never claims they lived “happily ever after” or even that they’re happy at all. They are in harmony, I think, which may be an antiquated emotion, a geezer’s version of passion. Ours may not be a modern love story at all, if it ever was, it occurs to me, too late. But I’ll take it. I made it, after all, and Jack did too. I wipe the counter clean and set our plates.
