by Jenny Lawson
The first time my mother visited us in our new apartment, she seemed worried that she’d made a huge mistake in pushing me to move out, but I reassured her that we were happy, and that (in a way) it was kind of an unorthodox neighborhood-watch program, because technically the meth cookers and shut-ins were always at home to sign for our packages and to keep an eye out for neighborhood burglars (who we all suspected lived in the apartment directly underneath us). It was an uncomfortable, involuntary community, but we were young and didn’t know how much it hurt to be shot yet, so we shrugged off the danger, and we began the process of learning how incredibly difficult it is to live with someone who is totally anal and slightly OCD (ahem . . . Victor). And someone who is perpetually accidentally hot-gluing herself to the carpet, and who is sort of mentally unstable, but in an “At-least-I-still-remember-how-pants-work” kind of way (cough . . . that’d be me). Victor remarked that comparing myself with the sometimes naked hermit next door wasn’t exactly a strong mental-wellness benchmark, especially since I often ended up pantsless myself. I raised my eyebrow at his seemingly seductive remark until I realized he was referring to the time he found me half naked because I’d just hot-glued my jeans to the carpet.
Still, in spite of everything, Victor seemed to love me in a strange and bizarre way that was never more evident than the day that he proposed to me. But that’s the next chapter.
(Aren’t you glad you’re not paying for this book by the chapter? Because then you’d feel totally ripped off that you paid for this chapter and then it leaves you hanging like Pirates of the Caribbean II. I would never do that to you guys. Also, did you know there are some places in Russia where you have to pay to use the toilet? It’s not really on the same subject, but honestly, what the fuck? I would never pay to use the toilet. That’s like paying someone to let you throw away your own litter in the mall trash can. If I ever go to Russia I’m going to pee on the floor all the time.)
No One Ever Taught Me Couch Etiquette
Before Victor could tell his parents that we were moving in together, he insisted that I go meet them personally in Midland, Texas, which was a few hours’ drive away. Midland is a big oil town, and in my mind, everyone who lived there was some sort of millionaire. Victor assured me that his family was not really wealthy, but he kept drilling me on how to tell the fish fork from the dessert fork, and then when I walked into his parents’ house I noticed that they had a giant, fancy floral centerpiece on the table and a skylight, and that’s when I started to hyperventilate a little. Victor’s stepdad was out of town, but his mother was very polite, in a way that made me feel like I should have worn tiny white gloves to meet her.
Bonnie, his mom, invited me to sit on the couch. And so I did. But when my back grazed one of the little couch pillows, Victor’s eyes widened at me in horror as if I’d just stabbed the family dog through the ear. He cleared his throat at me, and I sat up quickly as he surreptitiously restraightened the pillow and whispered, “Those pillows are only for decoration.” And that’s when I learned my first rule about rich people. They never use their cushions. Which is sort of fucked up, because that’s kind of what cushions are for.
Bonnie excused herself to mix us some drinks and, I imagined, to telephone her husband about the low-class drifter that her son had brought into her home. “You’ll love this one,” I could hear her saying in my mind. “She can’t even use a couch properly. I suspect she might be some sort of a hobo.”
I pulled anxiously at Victor’s arm and whispered that we should sneak out now before I did any more damage, and he looked at me as if I’d gone insane. “We’ll leave a note,” I explained. “We’ll leave a nice note saying that we saw a monkey outside, and that we need to catch it.”
“Are you high?” He looked suspiciously at my pupils. “Seriously, calm the hell down. She’s gonna love you. Just don’t sit on the couch cushions.”
I looked at him in confusion, and he patted my hand and gave me a strained smile as he told me to relax. Then I sighed in resignation and slid down onto the floor, sitting cross-legged, which was fine, because I was wearing jeans and honestly I felt more comfortable there anyway, and Victor whispered, “What the hell are you doing?” and I’m all, “Dude. I can’t do this. I’m intimidated by your fucking couch. Clearly this relationship is not going to work out.”
He anxiously tried to pull me back up before his mother got in the room, but I wasn’t worried, because it always takes a long time to make Kool-Aid. “You can’t sit on the damn floor. What’re you, seven?”
“Dude. You just said not to sit on the cushions.”
“The decorative cushions,” he attempted to explain, as he yanked me back up on the couch next to him. “Obviously you can sit on the couch cushions. That’s how couches work.”
“WHY DIDN’T YOU TEACH ME COUCH ETIQUETTE?”
I guess I may have said that a bit loudly, because when Victor’s mom walked back in with the drinks she gave me a strange look, and I was so flustered I couldn’t even think straight, so I quickly took a drink of what was the worst Kool-Aid in the world, and (after a small coughing fit) I realized that “mixed drink” actually referred to some kind of wine spritzer, and not a drink that you make from a mix. After it was clear that I wasn’t going to die, she tried to fill the awkward silence by showing me pictures of Victor in his tux with lots of different girls, who all had good hair and formal dresses, and probably never even heard of bread-sack shoes. Victor kind of rolled his eyes when his mom went on about all the debutante balls Victor had gone to with these girls, and I nodded, trying to look politely interested. Then she asked me when I came out and I said, “Oh, I’m not gay. I’m dating your son,” which I thought was pretty clear to begin with. Then Victor started coughing loudly and Bonnie looked confused, but then she got distracted, because Victor sounded like he’d swallowed his own tongue, and then right after that Victor said that we should probably leave.
On the way home, Victor explained that “coming out” is what debutantes do when they reach womanhood. I told him that he sounded like a tampon commercial, and he rolled his eyes. Then I yelled at him for spending so much time teaching me the proper fork to use when we didn’t even stay for dinner, and he was all, “You couldn’t even use the fucking couch correctly!” He had a point, so I sighed and sat in silence, because it’s hard to argue with confidence when you’ve just found out that you’ve been using couches wrong your whole life.
We stopped at Dairy Queen on the way back, which was comforting, because they give you only one set of silverware, unless you order the Peanut Buster Parfait, in which case they give you that extra-long red plastic spoon so you can reach the fudge at the bottom of the cup. And even then there’s a picture of an ice cream cone on the end of that spoon, just in case you get confused about what it’s for. This is when I started venting about why Dairy Queen is better than fancy restaurants, and Victor stared at me, fascinated, as if he were totally surprised that no one had ever thought of that before, or like he wondered what the hell was wrong with me. It was a look he’d perfected in our last year together.
I took a deep breath and I leaned forward to look at him, grimly. “Look. This is us. I’m the Dairy Queen ice cream spoon. You are the escargot spoon. That’s why this is never going to work.”
Victor paused, then leaned into me across the table and whispered, “Fork,” and I was all, “I don’t get it. . . . Is that how fancy rich people pronounce the F-word?” And he smiled crookedly, like he was trying not to laugh, and said, “No. You eat escargot with a fork. Not a spoon.” And I yelled, “Exactly! This is exactly what I’m talking about,” and Victor laughed and said, “I don’t care that you don’t know what an escargot fork is. I think it’s adorable that you don’t. And you will learn all of this. Or you won’t. But it doesn’t really matter, because I happen to like Dairy Queen spoons.” And I smiled hesitantly, because he said it so confidently that it was hard not to believe him, although I did suspect that he was just bei
ng nice because he didn’t want to get dumped by a girl in a Dairy Queen who couldn’t even use a couch properly. That’s pretty much the worst way to get dumped, ever.
Actual picture of Victor and me on his parents’ couch. Please note how uncomfortable Victor is to even be near the couch cushions. It’s like he’s poised to run from them. And at this point I still think I’m the crazy one.
Just Your Average Engagement Story
When I was in junior high I read a lot of Danielle Steele. So I always assumed that the day I got engaged I’d be naked, covered in rose petals, and sleeping with the brother of the man who’d kidnapped me.
And also he’d be a duke.
And possibly my stepbrother.
Then one of us would get stabbed with a broken whiskey bottle and/or raped.
Turns out the only part I was right about was that one of us was going to get stabbed.
IT WAS 1996, and Victor and I were still in college. At night he worked as a deejay, and I worked as a phone prostitute in telemarketing. We’d been living together for about a year when Victor decided it was time to get married, and (just to make it all rock-star romantic) he decided to propose on air. The only problem was that if he was on air he wouldn’t be there to physically make me say yes, and so instead he took the night off and set up a recording that would make it sound like he was calling in to the radio show to talk to the guy filling in for him. He planned on my hearing the proposal on air, and then getting down on one knee and handing me the ring, but he had no idea how to get me in front of the radio, so he suggested we go for a drive so he could listen to his substitute on the radio. And so we did. For six. Fucking. Hours.
6:00 P.M.—We’ve already been in the car for a half-hour. I’m getting hungry.
6:30 P.M.—I’m hungry, but Victor refuses to pull over to eat.
7:00 P.M.—Victor is acting very strange and jumpy. I start to suspect he’s going to kill me. I know this seems like an illogical jump to make, since this was the same man who cried when he punched me in the nose over a potato chip, but I’d always suspected that Victor was a little too good to be true, and it seemed easier to believe that he wanted to murder me than it was to believe he’d want to marry me.
7:30 P.M.—I pretend I’m going to pass out if he doesn’t take me to get something to eat. Victor is convinced that the moment I leave the car, his sub will play the recording, so he insists we just go through the drive-thru of Taco Bell.
8:00 P.M.—Victor refuses to turn down the radio while we’re ordering our burritos. I assume he wants to drown out my voice in case I ask the cashier to call 911.
8:30–10:30 P.M.—Victor drives in circles. I have to pee. Victor will not let me out of the car. He’s sweating a lot. I dimly wonder where he’ll dump my body.
10:30–11:30 P.M.—The urge to go to the bathroom has now grown more pressing than the urge to escape. I begin to suspect that Victor is trying to kill me by making my bladder explode. He smiles nervously and I wonder whether I could make myself pee on myself.
11:40 P.M.—No, but not for lack of trying.
11:45 P.M.—Fifteen minutes to the end of the sub’s shift. Victor is a wreck. I’m at that point of having to pee where you think you’re going to throw up, but then you realize as soon as you throw up you’re going to pee on yourself anyway, and I start considering leaping out of the moving car, because even if I peed on myself, the coroner wouldn’t judge me, because who wouldn’t pee on themselves when they were tossing themselves out of a moving car? Nobody, that’s who.
MIDNIGHT—Victor sighed and turned into the parking lot of our apartment building, and he just stared numbly at the dumpster in front of us, looking defeated and despondent, and that’s when I felt really, really bad for him. I put my hand on his arm and he sighed miserably, like he was a total failure. I wanted to cheer him up, but it felt weird wanting to cheer up someone who was possibly depressed because they didn’t murder you correctly, and that’s when I thought, “This must be what love is. When you want to make it less difficult for someone to murder you.” And that’s when I realized that I was far too in love with him for my own good, and also that I probably needed therapy.
It was also when I noticed that he’d suddenly tensed up, and that his own voice was on the radio. And then I thought that I was definitely going to get murdered, because this was the perfect alibi, since it would sound like he was in the radio studio when they found my body. But then I noticed he was looking at me and grinning crookedly, and I listened to the Victor on the radio talk to the other deejay about a girl he’d met and fallen in love with, and how at the end of every shift he’d played Sting’s “When We Dance” as his signoff, and as a silent “I love you” to that girl. And then he said that he’d grown so in love with her that he was going to propose to her right then. On the fucking radio.
And then I turned around and Victor had silently opened my car door and was kneeling and holding a diamond ring so small that I knew he had actually bought it himself. And so I said yes, partly because I loved him, partly out of relief that I was not going to be murdered, and partly because I knew he’d never let me out of the car to pee until I agreed to marry him. And then I kissed him and still he stayed knelt down, blocking my exit. And then I asked him if I could go to the bathroom, and he gave me this pained expression, and I wondered whether I’d fucked up his romantic moment, but then he straightened up and I noticed that he’d accidentally knelt right in a pile of broken glass, which was awesome, because there’s nothing more romantic than a proposal that ends with you needing a tetanus shot.
I remember thinking at the time that if I didn’t have to pee so badly I probably would have told him that we should wait, because truthfully, I knew I was a little too broken to be married to anyone. But by the time I’d gotten out of the bathroom he’d called everyone we knew and told them I said yes.
I tried to convince Victor several times that he’d made a terrible mistake in proposing, but whenever I insisted that he would be better off with one of his old debutantes, he dismissed it as low self-esteem. Even when I assured him I was kind of insane, he brushed it off as an exaggeration on my part, because he’d witnessed my minor panic attacks and occasional breakdowns and he wrongly assumed that was as bad as it got.
Then one morning, shortly after we got engaged, I woke up as Victor reached over for me, and he stopped suddenly and slowly sat up. In a carefully measured voice he said, “Honey . . . ? Did you . . . did you pee in the bed?”
And I was all, “WHAT?! Of course I didn’t pee in the bed!” And then I thought, “Ew, DID I pee in the bed?” and I felt around and I didn’t feel anything, but then I saw this large puddle seeping slowly though the top of the comforter into the valley between Victor and me. Then I screamed, “OHMYGOD, CAT PEE!” and I threw the comforter off me and the cat pee splashed everywhere.
Victor jumped out of bed, gagging and shouting profanities at both me and the cat, and then I realized that—in spite of his total disgust in thinking that I had peed on him—he had still struggled to maintain a calm and understanding demeanor. Because apparently he thought I was just crazy enough to randomly urinate on him. And that’s when I thought that just maybe we had a chance together.
Still, I felt sorry for Victor, because he did know that I was kind of mentally ill, but he also thought I was naturally thin, so he was kind of expecting “crazy,” but I think he was expecting hot, sexy crazy. Then Victor insisted I start seeing the college shrink, who coaxed me away from the anorexia, and I immediately gained thirty pounds, which was very healthy, but which seemed not hot at all. Also, I suddenly started eating solid food, so I cost a lot more than Victor had originally expected. Basically he got a really shitty deal.
And I was even crazier than I’d let on.
It Wasn’t Stew
It’s always seemed unfair to me that I’d had so little time to ingratiate myself with my soon-to-be in-laws, whereas Victor had a year to worm his way into my parents’ hearts be
fore we got married.
Granted, it hadn’t been easy for any of us. One of the first times he’d come to my house for dinner, we were sitting in the living room visiting with my mom. My mom and I were on the couch, and from our vantage point, we could see my father tiptoeing into the room. He gestured with a finger to his lips not to let Victor know that he was behind him and a live bobcat was tucked under his right arm. This probably would have been my exact worst nightmare of bringing a boy home to meet my parents, if I’d ever had enough creativity to imagine my father throwing a live bobcat on the boy I was trying to impress. I assumed that Daddy had accidentally left a bobcat in the house, fallen asleep, realized his terrible mistake when he woke up and heard Victor’s voice, and was now surreptitiously sneaking it out the back door so that Victor would never suspect that we were the type of family to keep live bobcats in the house. Unfortunately, that was not my father’s intent at all, and my eyes widened in horror as my father leaned over and yelled in his booming, cheerful voice, “HELLOOOO, VICTOR,” while tossing a live bobcat on him.
Most people reading this will assume that this was my father’s way of making would-be suitors terrified of him so they would always treat his daughters right, but this wasn’t even vaguely a concern of his. He would just as happily have tossed the live bobcat on my mother or me, if it weren’t for the fact that we’d all become superhumanly aware of the terrifying sounds of my father trying to be quiet. In my father’s defense, it was a smallish sort of bobcat that my dad was nursing back to health so he could release it back into the wild, rather than one of the full-grown ones from the backyard. At the time, my dad had several large bobcats he was keeping, but they were seldom indoors, and if my mom found one in the house she’d shoo it into the bobcat cages outside with a broom. I once asked my mom exactly why Daddy kept bobcats, and she said it was because “he collects their urine.” Because, yeah. Whose father doesn’t have some sort of a collection? (Also, for those of you not from bobcat territory, bobcats are like small, easily underestimated tigers. They’ll avoid confrontation if they can, but push them too far and they’ll cheerfully eat your face off. They’re like tiny, undermedicated badgers and should be avoided.)