JOSEPH N. BELL -- The Bell Curve

For some years, my wife has worked full time at gainful employment

away from home while I have worked -- well -- semi-full time less

gainfully at home. As a result, we have adopted a lifestyle that would

probably be anathema in macho societies where it would be unlikely to

find the alleged head of the household in the kitchen drying dishes for

the little woman.

In the present division of duties in my family, I not only dry the

dishes, I wash them too, among other domestic chores. But all that is

going to change soon. My wife is moving her working base of operations

home at the end of the year, so we are presently negotiating a new

lifestyle. Since she is trying to protect ground established under the

old arrangement, I have to guard against being blindsided.

She has asked me to identify househusband jobs I would especially like

to shuck off on her, which would appear to represent progress.

Accordingly, I have broken such duties down into three categories: those

I enjoy, those I tolerate and those I detest. And at the top of the third

category -- and the job I will most insistently hand back to her -- is

managing our social life.

In suburban middle-class America, such arrangements are normally

worked out between the women of the house, using a kind of conversational

shorthand which men find both confusing and -- for various reasons --

irritating. I got deeply involved in this process simply because I was at

home. Callers reached me instead of Higher Authority for so many years

that I was finally accepted by the more frequent calling parties as a

kind of necessary and not-too-bright roadblock in the creation of social

arrangements.

I suppose I could have avoided a lot of this by not answering the

phone, but I have a few things going on in my own life that make ignoring

the phone difficult. Also, while dealing with writer’s block -- which

happens frequently, especially during the baseball season -- I tend to

clutch at any interruption.

One of the many downsides in my being forced into this role has been

the temporary alienation of several of our more fragile friends because

my poor hearing makes it difficult for me to recognize familiar voices,

and I thought they were trying to sell me something on the phone. The

word quickly got out to all the telemarketers in North America that I was

home and available, so I pretty much divide my less-gainful time between

telemarketers who want to loan me money at usurious rates or contribute

to a fund to buy USC a quarterback and people who want to invite us to

dinner. I tend to yell a lot at telemarketers, and this has occasionally

carried over to social callers.

But even when I play social calls absolutely straight, I have the

narrowest of parameters within which to work. If the date I have been

given isn’t acceptable and another date is suggested, I lack the

authority, the confidence and the information to make such a decision

without going through proper channels.

There is seldom a problem with my calendar, which is mostly blank.

Looking at November, for example, I see appointments with a dentist, the

Harbor High student I’m mentoring, one lunch and a reminder to pay our

mortgage and watch the UCLA-Washington State football game. The only

evening engagements are my monthly poker game and the new Stephen

Sondheim show at the Laguna Playhouse, which I look forward to eagerly.

My wife’s calendar, however, is a quite different instrument. She

keeps it in a book I can never find when I need it, and -- instead of

noting engagements cleanly as I do on a calendar over my desk -- she

scribbles them into this book in a kind of cryptic code that is

frequently scratched out, leaving such surviving notes around the margin

as: “See H&F; friend?” “Make soup, salad,” “Call LA? See play tonight?”

“Look chair,” “Joan & Arthur back. Dinner?” On several November days, she

has the single pristine message, “Work.”

From this confusing melange, I am supposed to determine whether we are

available to some woman caller chafing on the other end of a phone line

and wondering what the hell I’m about.

To assist in this process, I have a crib sheet of most frequently

asked questions and how to answer them. For example: “Can we bring

something?” (No) “What time do you want us?” (6:30) “Can we come casual?”

(Wear tennis shoes) When the dinner is at our house, I’m instructed to

find out if our guests have any dietary limitations, a question that took

on renewed significance after I forgot to ask and we served a beef roast

to vegetarians.

I got a warning the other night of what it may be like under our new

arrangement from my neighbor Ron Darling, who comes home early a couple

of times a week from his law practice to pick up his children from school

and free his wife. His voice on the phone -- unlike mine -- is wholly

unexpected and leaves women callers for his wife in a quandary. When they

find she isn’t home and say they’ll call back, he always offers, rather

insistently, to take a message. They box with this a few moments and then

invariably say, “Oh, that’s all right, I’ll just call back.”

“They are quite certain,” he says, “that a man capable of arguing a

case in court or running a business or teaching a college class or wiring

a house is so socially retarded that he is incapable of passing along a

message to his wife as complicated as telling her what time the kids will

be picked up in the morning.”

Well, I can certainly deal with that a lot better than serving as a

social secretary. I’ll still do the dishes, but I might want to throw the

telemarketers into the new mix on my wife’s plate.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.