Peggy Sue’s Advice

A few weeks ago, Jessica and I visited The Swanson, a restaurant in downtown Perry, for dinner. It was my first time being there although Jessica had been for lunch once or twice.

The dinner started out interestingly enough. The restaurant is in an old house, and people eat in small, separated rooms on the first floor. Jessica and I were sat in a room roughly the size of our living room at home. The only problem with this set up is that there was another party in the room with about 15 people sitting at a long table. As loud as they were, I don’t know why they just didn’t invite us to sit with them. This was definitely not the dinner we had in mind we when headed out for our first “date” in a few weeks. Needless to say, we were happy when the large party finally finished their meals and left, we thought we would have a semi-normal meal now, however, things kept getting interestinger and interestinger.

The lady who was waiting on us this evening was named Peggy Sue, an odd enough name given the Buddy Holly song and all that… but I managed to overlook that. After the large party left the restaurant, Peggy Sue began to make (what started out as) small talk. When she noticed Jessica and I wearing wedding rings, she asked how long we had been married. Jessica answered that we were newlyweds, married only four months. Now, in a small town like Perry, this kind of small talk was expected. What followed was anything but expected, no matter if it was a stranger or my own mother.

Peggy Sue apparently saw the opportunity to impart a piece of what must have been her vast knowledge to the newlyweds she saw before her.

She started with fairly simple and obvious. She stated that I should never try and understand Jessica. Never… under any circumstance… should I try and understand what Jessica is thinking, or why she’s acting that way. Or why she does… anything. Our brains are just too different, explained Peggy Sue. There’s no way we could ever understand each other.

She then went on to explain that the reason I could never understand Jessica was hormones. And these hormones would be more out of control after Jessica has had our first child. “That’s why so many marriages end in the year after the first child is born,” Peggy Sue told us. Her solution to this problem was quite simple. Jessica and I should sign a contract stating that we would not get a divorce until our first child was two years old. Apparently, that’s plenty of time for those crazy hormones to calm down. I won’t necessarily be able to understand Jessica at this point (see above advice), but I’ll at least be able to live with her. Oh, and a written and signed contract obviously means more than marriage vows… you didn’t know?

At this point I think our food was on the table, and as Peggy Sue gave us lesser, smaller pieces of advice, we tried not to laugh so hard that beef would come out of our noses. I think she thought our silence meant we were deeply contemplating her pearls of wisdom, trying not to forget them before we were able to make it to the tattoo parlor and have them permanently emblazoned on some part of our body we look at regularly.

Peggy Sue returned yet again… I think it was a slow night, to offer the wisdom that we should never fight about money or sex. That we should just “work it out.” That was so profound. A few days later when I was wondering why Jessica required shampoo that cost more per ounce than clean urine on the black market we got a little frustrated with each other, and I reminded Jessica that Peggy Sue said we should “work it out.” Yes, that makes everything better.

Back to dinner, before she brought the check Peggy Sue offered one more piece of advice. And this is the reason you have read this extremely long post. This is why deep down, you knew that I something was telling you to forge ahead and eventually it would get better. Peggy Sue said that we should “never visit each other in that department more than three times a week. Otherwise, one of you might get bored and things might start to get weird and then the other one would wonder why they married such a freak.” I am telling the God’s Honest Truth here. And while neither Jessica nor I had ever heard it referred to as “that department” in our lives, we both immediately knew that she meant sex. And when she said that one of us would get bored, we both knew she thought it would be me.

After Peggy Sue left the table this time, the silence remained. A stunned silence, like the silence that takes when you you realized that the reason your parent’s door was locked when normally they like for you to check in when you get home is because they’re having sex… at like 45 years of age… on a weekend. Jessica and I just looked at each other, amazed that a stranger would feel it necessary to dictate how often we “visit” each other in “that department.”

At this point, I know I’m not letting the check hit the table. I get up to pay the bill at the counter, despite having the option to hand Peggy Sue my credit card and let her take care of it. As Jessica gets up as well, Peggy Sue calls her back to give her one final piece of advice. I could only imagine the kind of things that Peggy Sue might need to tell her privately that she couldn’t tell me. I imagined that it was some lost chapter of the Kama Sutra, passed on from generation to generation of worthy women and Jessica had been chosen.

Turns out she knew a great place to buy the kind of shirt of I was wearing.