Ellen Meister, Take My Husband
Confronted by an image of black dots surrounding an elliptical splotch, most human eyes will perceive said splotch as expanding, as if one were rushing headlong toward the mouth of a tunnel. Though disconcerting, the effect is an example of the eye tricking itself — a run-of-the-mill optical illusion.
Expanding hole illusion
Though the quantity of light impinging on the viewer’s eyeballs remains constant, measurements show that his or her pupils nonetheless dilate. Neuroscience tells us that the brain operates with an infinitesimal delay with respect to changes in its physical environment, an effect of the time required for information registered by the eye to reach the brain and for the brain to decide what the hell to do with it. Thus, there’s a lag between the world as we perceive it and the world that actually exists.
To compensate, researchers believe that our minds constantly make guesses about the immediate future — I’m seeing what happened a few microseconds ago, but I’m projecting toward the physical present. And so, the pupils. The brain models the splotch as a dark place we may soon enter. Accordingly, it directs the pupils to widen, to admit the greatest possible amount of light.
Even at this most immediate level, then, we project ourselves into the future.
We are, by constitution, future-directed creatures (a fact that makes me a little impatient with “live in the present” types who’d have it that times coming constitute unworthy grounds for consideration). Were we built to live primarily in the present, we’d likely not have persisted as a species. We are too weak, too vulnerable to master all challenges as they come. Thus, evolution has wired us to project into the future on scales ranging from the microsecond to the decade. We cannot help it, and with respect to our ability to avoid danger or death, that’s a good thing.
And it illuminates a troubling component of human existence. Faced with the death or disablement of one we love or upon whom we depend, most of us jump quickly to the terrible event’s aftermath. C’mon, admit it. Will I be okay, we ask ourselves. Will I have enough resources? Will my circumstances change? Will another appear to take the departed’s place? Will I be able to provide for my children? Will I, myself, continue?
These thoughts are awful, shameful, and wildly out of line with the actuality of the situation. At a moment that is profoundly not about ourselves, we nonetheless become our own focus. This is a terrible, yet irremediable feature of being a future-oriented organism, programmed by natural selection to forecast times coming to best enhance our own prospects for survival. But because we are social creatures, evolutionarily endowed as well with capacities for love and loyalty, we are appalled by such thoughts and we quickly quash them.
Though perhaps not always?
Author Ellen Meister’s Laurel Applebaum works the floor at a Long Island Trader Joe’s, a job that’s at once tiring and a welcome respite from husband Doug’s overwhelming neediness. Her sales clerk’s paycheck, however, is no match for the couple’s expenses and each week witnesses their savings dwindle. Doug, a failed shopkeeper, refuses to find work, wiling away his hours watching TV and adding to his already unhealthy girth. He is, in short, a heart attack waiting to happen, and his reluctance to shoulder responsibility extends to the most trivial household chores. Hard-working Laurel, by contrast, spends her days crushed by financial anxieties, an increasingly passionless marriage, and catering to Doug’s endless whims.
When she gets word that Doug’s been rushed to the hospital following a car crash of unknown severity, she’s assailed by those terrible, all-too-human imaginings — what if Doug lay breathing his indolent last on an emergency room gurney? What if she’s to arrive at the ER to discover Doug dead? In Laurel’s case, these thoughts are tough to push away. Really, Doug’s demise would solve so many things! There is, in truth, a fat insurance policy, not to mention respite from Doug’s numberless demands. Doug, however, has weathered his encounter with the Grim Reaper with scant injury. He awaits her in an ER carrel, little damaged but needier than ever.
By degrees, and with the aid of the grandfatherly Charlie, a Trader Joe’s coworker, Laurel slips from imagining Doug’s death to actively promoting it. After thirty years of penny-pinching and servitude, does she not deserve the ease and freedom a Doug-free life would bring?
And is Take My Husband, then, a dark tale of wickedness and foul intrigue? Certainly not! Meister’s ability to render the grimmest situation hilarious seems coded into her very DNA. I confess to being a literary chatterbox — why else would I engage in this oft thankless pursuit? — and I invariably bend my spouse’s pretty ear with running commentary on each book I review. (I’m lucky to have a patient spouse, although I’m not sure I want her to read Take My Husband...) But even at such a remove, Meister’s latest side-splitter had my darling L-ing, as the kidz all say, OL.
Will Laurel regain her moral compass before she embarks on a new career as a killer? Are Charlie’s efforts as disinterested as Laurel believes? Will new flames ignite to replace the extinguished old? Just how hard will Doug prove to kill? Take My Husband, rendered in Meister’s trademark breezy prose, is a literary paradox — a hilarious exposition of the grim places to which the human heart might travel.
Meister’s latest will land at a bookseller near you on August 30. Preorder (really, do!) at your local bookstore (better) or at bookshop.org, an online retailer that donates part of its proceeds to independent booksellers.
