Green Card

I once saw a movie called Green Card, about a couple who enter into a marriage of convenience. She covets an apartment reserved only for married couples; he wants to become a citizen. The immigration authorities become suspicious about their motives and try to trap them with a quiz about their married life together.

I don't know what possessed me, but I was once foolhardy enough to ask my husband a few of the same questions posed by those immigration examiners. It soon became painfully obvious that if his admission to this country depended on an intimate knowledge of my habits and preferences, he would be exiled to Siberia. As a matter of fact, after witnessing his lackluster performance, I am convinced that he would be hard put to pick me out of a police lineup.

When he tried to list my favorite foods he failed miserably. This doesn't really surprise me. This is a man who once brought me chocolate caramel cremes for my birthday although I'm allergic to chocolate and loathe caramel. He adores both and, as he pointed out with the sort of infallible male logic that drives women to murder, I'm always on a diet and after all, he did remember my birthday.

To be perfectly accurate, he didn't. He was two days early. My birthday is the fourteenth. He got it mixed up with our anniversary, which is a month earlier, on the twelfth. The only bright note is that he can never remember my age either, and seems to be completely oblivious to the fact that I have gradually become two, three and even four years younger than he as time goes by.

However, he did know what side of the bed I sleep on because when he wakes up on the living room couch at three a.m. and comes to bed, there's only one empty side, so even he can figure it out.

But he has absolutely no idea what colour my toothbrush is, no matter how often I explain that mine is blue and his is green. He says he can't understand why this makes me so angry. After all, we've exchanged a lot more intimate body fluids in the past few years than saliva.

The question that had me rolling in the aisles was the one asking what kind of face and/or shaving cream we use. I, of course, know what kind of shaving cream he uses, since I buy it for him along with his razors, underwear, shirts, shoes and winter tires. The only comment he's ever made to indicate that he is even remotely aware that I use face cream at all is to ask, "Are you really coming to bed with all that goo on, or do you intend to swim the entire English channel before morning?"

I can forgive all that. What I can't accept is his not knowing what I look like. I admit he can have no way of knowing how much I weigh. That information is classified material to which no one but the holder of at least two medical degrees will ever have access. But I once insisted that he buy me lingerie for Valentine's Day and he came home with a piece of transparent fluff that wouldn't cover a Barbie doll indecently.

Actually, now that I think of it, I have to admit that it was really rather sweet of him.