Let Me Tell You Something (16 page)

I used to love running my fingers through his hair. I could lay in bed for hours and just run my fingers through his hair and be content. Thirty years later, he's bald, and now my favorite part of his body is this tuft of hair on his chest. I run my fingers through that now, and it makes me just as happy.

It's the stupid things like that that keep a marriage fresh. We say silly, parochial things to each other, it's almost corny. But we communicate. If I'm cold, I'll put on one of his coats and smell his cologne and I'll always call him and tell him that I smelled his cologne and it made me smile.

You don't have to give someone a box of chocolates or a bunch of flowers, you just have to let them know you love them every time you talk. We've probably never ended a phone call to each other without saying “I love you.”

The place where Al and I are now did not happen overnight. This place in our relationship was thirty years in the making. We were romantic and dating at first and then life got in the way. Al's father's murder and then back-to-back kids made for a difficult period in our lives, but they made us stronger. It was tough to make time for each other when we had the kids, but we did whenever we could. We came up with a perfect solution—I'd have a sitter come over at midnight, while the kids were sleeping. Al would come get me at around 2:00
AM
when he was finished with work, and we'd head into New York City. We'd go to Blue Ribbon, I love it there, and it's open until 4:00
AM
. I knew I'd be exhausted the next day, but this was our time to be romantic. This was when he'd hold my hand and we would just be that same couple that fell in love years earlier.

I see a long relationship as a house that you're building. And every event that happens to you as a couple is another brick in the wall of your house. And every event that you get through together is another layer. So when you've just started dating, your house is still being built. You have the foundation and one brick. It's not a house yet. You have to stay together and be patient, and let the bricks start to add up, until you have built a very strong house that can withstand anything.

When you're young and still in the beginning or honeymoon stage of dating, your relationship is just a baby. You're still going to dinners and seeing movies and going on great vacations. You'll need to come through some bad times together before you get stronger.

The absolute essential thing that is a good foundation for a long marriage is your friendship with your partner. You can never become boring to him and have to keep up with him. If your husband loves football, sports of any kind, develop at least a basic knowledge of it so he can talk to you. Just the same for him—he needs to know about whatever your hobbies are outside of him. Also never ever become a nag. No man wants to be married to his mother. Nags are awful people. Nagging gets you nowhere.

I love the way Albert looks today. There are things I love about him now that I didn't see then. He's a man now. He was a boy then. When I look at him, he's still the boy I started dating. He says when he looks at me, he can still see the little square-faced girl that he met thirty-one years ago.

I cannot wait for the next phase in our lives, when we become grandparents. He and I talk about it all the time. We talk about selling our house when the kids move out, but we need something that is still big enough for our grandkids to come stay. We talk about getting a place by Central Park so we can take the kids into the park all the time, or maybe even out on Cape Cod, or Hoboken, so we can have a boat.

Albert will be an incredible grandfather, and I feel like the next thirty years will be even better than the first. He'll be retiring soon, hopefully, and we're really going to travel the world together and do all the stuff he never got to do because he dedicated his life to making our life better. Now I want to pay him back.

I'm thrilled to think of myself at eighty, married to Al for sixty years and surrounded by grandkids. After getting our marriage into great shape for thirty years, I think the next thirty will be a snap. I'll look at Al when he's eighty, and I'll still be saying, there's my handsome man. I'll hold his hands, look into his eyes, and know that he's in every fiber of me.

Marrying someone I never
lived with was tough—and
so were our early years.

It all seems so old-fashioned now, but when we got married, we had never lived together. We'd never been away together. So after the whirlwind of our wedding day, we flew off to San Francisco to begin our honeymoon, and it was such a huge adjustment, we both freaked-out!

The morning after we arrived, we woke up in bed and just stared at each other, not speaking at all. Albert finally broke the silence and said what was on both our minds: “Did we make a mistake?”

I looked into his eyes, and I was just so confused.

“You know, I think we did,” I said. “I think I want to go home.”

We lay in bed a long time, and we started talking. We realized that we were both just so damned nervous. It felt like there was so much weight on our shoulders, and at that moment we felt like complete strangers. We both wanted to run home to our old lives!

We agreed to stay on the honeymoon, to have as much fun as we could, and if things didn't work out, we'd go home and break up. We'd give back all the presents and go our separate ways.

The next day we woke up laughing, realizing what stupid idiots we were. We just had the worst case of jitters, of stepping into a new life and realizing that everything we'd known our whole lives was now completely changed. We went on to have such a beautiful, memorable honeymoon, and then we returned to New Jersey to start our new life, and once again, I had a lot of learning to do.

I had a lot to adjust to. I had lived in a house that was always full of people; I have never liked being home alone. Suddenly, I was home, alone, a lot. It was my worst nightmare, and I had to figure out how to deal with it. We lived above The Brownstone, so if Al had a free moment, he'd sneak upstairs to see me. Sometimes, I'd go down and work with him, just so we had some time together.

Al had to make the business work. He was taking care of his family and me. Sometimes it just got to be too much for the both of us. To me, it felt like there was never time for us as a couple. He was working seven days a week, from noon until three in the morning. I would bombard him with demands, that I needed more of his time. I needed to know when we'd have time to make us work as a couple.

I'd break down and then I'd regroup. I'd realize that I was being unreasonable. People asked how I dealt with Al's long hours, and my answer was always that it wasn't like he was at the golf course, he was at work. He was missing out on doing things he wanted to do too.

I won't lie. Sometimes I'd just fall apart. I'd cry. I would think I couldn't do it anymore. We had no money; we lived in an apartment above The Brownstone after we got married. We showed it last season on the TV show, when we went back there for our anniversary. When I go there these days, I smile from ear to ear. I remember our time in that apartment, and I look at how far we've come. But at the time he was making $200 a week, and working 105 hours a week for the paycheck.

We lived in that apartment for two years, until Albie was born. Then we were lucky enough to be able to afford a house when Albie was four months old.

I had three kids in three years. When I found out I was pregnant with Christopher, Lauren was only four months old, and I just had a complete breakdown. It just didn't seem fair. When I found out that I was going to be dealing with three kids under three, it just all hit me at once.

When I brought Christopher home on Albie's third birthday, I was alone. My mother-in-law was a tremendous help—I'd go by her house all day with the kids and hang out, but at seven o'clock I'd go back to my house, and I'd be alone with the kids until Albert got home seven or eight hours later.

There was a short period after Christopher's birth when I stopped caring about what I looked like. It was too hard. I was full of self-pity, and Al was never home, so I just said to myself, “Why did I even have to bother to try?”

My mother stepped in. She told me I was young and beautiful and my husband deserved to see his young beautiful wife every day—even if he only saw me for five minutes!

When I was younger and less secure, I worried about other women. People meet Albert at The Brownstone and assume he's rich. It's always a party atmosphere in that place, and I'd seen a lot of women flirting with my husband. Some days, I'd lie in bed and worry that he wasn't really at work, that he was with another woman somewhere.

Ultimately it was the kids, and not me, that got Albert to work a little less. They were very small, but they were all having those breakthrough moments, almost every day. Those little firsts that are so wonderful—first steps, first words—and Albert was missing them all. I told him that he needed to take time and be present for these milestones. It wasn't just him and me anymore, he needed to make the time to be with these kids. So we created Daddy Day. It's Wednesday. We go to dinner with our kids, even now at least one of them, every Wednesday. And on that day, he dedicates himself to me and the family.

I'm still not a perfect wife. I'm somewhere between a good wife and an excellent one. Albert made a smart choice when he married me, and I work my ass off to make sure it's still a smart choice. We grew up together, and we went through hell and back together. I had two miscarriages, we lost his father, his business was a struggle, but we literally worked so closely together that we made it through it all and became great for each other. And I learned that it's better to be an understanding wife than a perfect wife.