They told me that getting married was not something any man would choose to do; it just sort of happened to you, like going bald or developing a paunch. These men questioned what function their wives actually served. Sure, they’d say, she cooked your meals, and cleaned your house, and raised your children, and occasionally had sex with you, but otherwise what was she good for? Housewives certainly didn’t contribute much to civilization, to say nothing of the household income. These Andy Capp types often complained about arriving home from the most soul-destroying workday and having to endure a barrage of nagging the minute they walked in the door — and from someone whose most stressful part of the day appeared to involve catching little Sally as she came down the kiddie slide at Rainbow Valley. These men knew that there must have been some advantage to having a crabby, indolent, entitled, irrational, unemployed person in their house, day after day, but they had long since forgotten what that was.
Even as a boy, I was appalled by this barroom misogyny, but I also feared it. It’s not that I was afraid I would ever see eye to eye with these men — many of whom, despite being born in the 1920s or even ’30s, opposed female suffrage on principle — but that I would come to resent someone as much as they seemed to resent their wives. It didn’t help matters that Little Frankie often egged them on from behind the bar, declaring what a blessing it was that my nymphomaniac mother had decided to scram. I even had an image in my mind, a frightfully detailed paracosm, of the shrew I’d marry if I wasn’t careful: a squat, pear-shaped woman with a mass of curly hair like a cobra’s hood around her head, a permanent sneer contorting her pug face. I had a vision of this person standing at a kitchen sink somewhere in a perpetual state of fury, an utter Andes of backfat greeting me as I came in the door from a job I hated. In this vision, we would row every night, and I would say the most scalding things to her — the kind of things Frankie often said to me.
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