Even though she managed the daily affairs of their household, Anita had no desire to wear the pants in the family. She completely enjoyed the role of being a woman and had no desire to usurp her husband’s position. She felt that a woman was better off achieving her aims through a quiet expression of helpfulness and understanding instead of bossing her family about. The management techniques she employed at work produced a harmonious consensus rather than force her to issue dictates to be blindly followed. The end result, she felt, was much the same except that the rancor and hurt feelings that ensued from direct orders did not occur. It was profoundly unfortunate that the same techniques didn’t work with Howard. The only solution was abject surrender to his demands. Howard had learned from the men on the farm of his childhood that men were the absolute masters of the Earth and their homes. He had been taught that neither plagues of insects nor the willful whims of women should deter a man from the course he had set for himself. He felt that it was only proper for Anita to subordinate her desires to his needs. Compromise was unacceptable. He was the supreme master of his demesne.
Their life together went on in this vein for almost two years without change. Howard wasn’t a bad man nor did he ignore her, they regularly went on long walks in the park and often went to the movies on the weekends. Granted, during Football season he was glued to the set, but that wasn’t unusual among her married neighbors and acquaintances. Howard took out the trash without her asking him most of the time and was good about working on the plumbing and the cars. If they rarely went out to restaurants, it was because he didn’t like the cooking and he was always unhappy with the price of a quality meal. When Anita was too tired to cook, he was happy to drive up to a burger joint to get a dinner of hamburgers for their dinner. He rarely forgot their anniversary and never forgot her birthday. After the first five years of marriage, he even learned to leave the seat down on the toilet. Anita couldn’t even complain about the way he squeezed toothpaste. Having an engineer’s love of ingenious gadgets, he had bought toothpaste tube rollers early in their marriage. He recycled like a religious eco-freak too; he had put both a can crusher and garbage compactor in their house. He would gather up the coke and beer cans twice a week in an old plastic milk case he had bought at a flee market and crush them to an inch thickness in the can crusher mounted on the wall of the garage above a plastic kitchen garbage can. Once it was full, he would empty the can into a forty gallon lawn and leaf bag and store it until it became full. Then he would unload the bag into the garbage compactor and compress it at maximum pressure until he had an almost solid block of aluminum. Once a year, he would take sixty to eighty pounds of aluminum blocks to a recycling company and sell them.
Anita satisfied herself with her achievements at work and waited patiently for Howard to make the adjustment to his changed metabolism. Life at her corporation had become increasingly more exciting during this period. Anita’s company, a small pharmaceutical firm, was on the verge of completing work on a revolutionary product for foreign sale. The new drug was in the final stage of testing and promised to make a fortune for the company. As the middle manager in charge of the project, Anita had shepherded the drug from its initial testing through its final stages. Her insight and inspired management in guiding the new pharmaceutical had cut years and millions of dollars from the drug’s development. The President of the company had been so pleased with her performance that she had quietly promised Anita that when the last tests were completed on the drug, Anita would be promoted to the ranks of upper management. Within six months, Anita would be the Vice-President in charge of research.
