Living high on the turkey bacon

David and I revised our household budget last week.

Which was really helpful. It’s good to face these things head on. I’ll tell you why.

1) If we hadn’t worked out the new budget, we would have gone on being complete wastrels, burning zero dollars on cheap entertainment. Now we need to make our own entertainment, as we realize we have zero dollars to spend on entertainment.

2) No longer can we spend zero dollars on home improvements. We know now that we need to buckle down and spend zero dollars on home improvements.

3) We have to face facts and save for a rainy future. We have to save more than zero dollars each month. So we’ve decided to save zero times zero dollars each month, because our budget helped us realize that we can afford to. In fact, we can’t afford NOT to. This is our future we’re talking about.

Excuse me while I pry my tongue out of my cheek. My cheek doesn’t want to give it up because my tongue is a meat product that would cost good money at Stop ‘n’ Shop.

Budgets are another luxury item we can’t afford.

The other night, as David and I cleaned up the kitchen post-dinner, we were bemoaning our pitiful economic situation (although we work! respectable jobs! explain this!). This is our ongoing form of subtle tantric foreplay.

“We just have to be more careful,” he said, shaking his head. “We can’t eat turkey bacon like this every night.”

I emitted a sound new to myself, something like a cross between a guffaw and a snort and a pppffffttt, as I unloaded the broken dishwasher flatware holder.

“What?” he said.

“You just said, ‘We can’t eat turkey bacon like this every night.’”

He shrugged. “So?”

“As if feeding our daughters wilted lettuce and a pack of cheap turkey bacon is a splurge. Expired Jennie-O turkey bacon and lettuce from a bag. That’s funny. That’s funny stuff.”

He smiled sadly and painfully, then went back to scrubbing pots and pans. “Vegetables are expensive too. Fresh ones.”

I felt sorry for him then, this kind, good man who lives to teach papier-mache mask-making and direct wonderful plays and paint faraway landscapes in places he has never seen and cannot afford to visit. It was a dumb move on both of our parts, two debt-ridden artists with gloomy financial forecasts marrying each other. We need to keep telling ourselves that we are Special and our love was Meant to Be and no orthopedic surgeon or corporate attorney could satisfy either of our Burning Bohemian Souls. We need to repeat these things to each other frequently or we would go postal in the turkey bacon aisle. It is a dangerous union.

Because—just perhaps—a nice wealthy yet soulful and fulfilled orthopedic surgeon might have hit the spot nicely for each of us (in his case, a nice Canadian one, so he wouldn’t have had to spend additional beaucoup de bucks on green-card lawyers’ fees to marry this crazy neurotic American girl who drew a lot of naked ladies and spent a lot of money on headshots that only got her auditions for Law and Order extra parts, i.e. Juror #5 With a Bad Cold).

But we must never allow ourselves to come to this realization. We must cling like the no-name brand plastic wrap we buy only during the holidays. We must cleave to each other like cheap generic mac-and-cheese—once mixed, forever mixed. We must not indulge in daydreams of whipping up working budgets with no zeros, while reclined beside a crackling fire in a Vail lodge. A third home. Or a fourth. At least.

It is what it is, this humble, money-free union of ours. We will always have Sarah Lawrence (and the student debt incurred at Sarah Lawrence, that is clear). We will always have the shared, sacred shame of being turned away from a bank in New York City because our savings (of which we were so proud) were not enough to meet the minimum savings required to open an account. We will always have the bonding that comes when two people in love sit down time and time again to discuss the best way to word formal requests for economic assistance.

There is much to be said for this sort of closeness, of course. Instead of home improvements and ski trips and European cruises and 401k plans, we will speak of Commedia dell’Arte and Ibsen and burnt umber pigment and PS 122 and our hilariously failed theatrical ventures and our successful ones and of leather masks pulled from wood carvings. This is the language of our marriage. We will go on speaking at bedtime of lazzis and Scaramouche’s similarities to Groucho Marx, and the second zanni’s uncanny resemblance to all the roles played by John C. Reilly. We will speak of Viewpoints and Stanislavski in total animated earnestness, long after we shut off the light. When we are not trying to build a savings account that does not wish to be built, we will write. We will paint. We will sketch our present and hope the art supplies we need to create a future will come in soon enough. We will cringe as our girls start asking why mildewed tiles and bits of wet rotting wood fall on their heads only in our bathtub, and not in the homes of other people we visit. We will speak no more of turkey bacon.

What language do you speak as you unload the broken dishwasher, or wave goodbye through the busted screen door? What language do you speak in front of that crackling fire, in your vacation home? What language do you wish you could add to your repertoire? Which would you like to be less fluent in?

As usual, it is Thursday, and I am full of questions.