THE BAD ONES
I’m not telling you about The Bad Ones. Or even about how sometimes the good ones can be bad. In this story, I’m only telling you about the sweet and memorable ones. The good-in-bed ones. The ones that didn’t hurt me. Or scare me.
I wrote almost all of this story as it was happening. In the time before the Me Too Movement. This is important. In that less-woke time of only a few years ago, I was like a lot of women. I didn’t report the bad things that happened to me on dates. Or at work. Or in life in general, starting way back when I was a little girl. It was just a normal part of life. A thing to get around or get past. A thing about being a woman in the world. Just status quo.
So in the time after The Bomb, the time I’m telling you about, where I meet handsome young men and have wonderful and wild experiences … some of those experiences were not wonderful. They were not all easy. I didn’t write about The Bad Ones in my notebooks, where I always write everything. It’s like I erased each one the minute it was over and I was back on safe ground. Sometimes, I didn’t walk away from The Bad Ones. There are a million articles you can read now about why so many of us do that. And still, even now, some of you wonder: Why don’t women say anything? Why don’t women just walk away when things are clearly getting bad? Why do women sit through a bad experience, and then text the guy “Thanks for the date” even after they were treated terribly?
I’ll tell you why. I just figured there was no point. Or that it was my fault for going on a date in the first place. Or for being drunk in the first place. Or for being single. For being a woman who likes having sex. For being a woman with low self-esteem. For being a woman whose husband had an affair and now here I was in some messed up situation with some messed up guy I just met, and Phew, good thing I fought him and got out of it.
But report it? Why would I report it? Talk about it? What would I say? That I drank a lot and went to the home of a man I barely knew and then halfway through he got crazy and not in a good way? That he was one of the smartest, most interesting men I’d met after my marriage ended, but he was also the one who held me down with his arm across my neck. He wouldn’t stop, no matter how many times I yelled at him to get off me. It was like he was in a trance. He was a big man and I knew I’d be no match but eventually I said, so quietly in his ear, “I will fight you.” That worked, I don’t know why. But did I report it? No. Did I write it down? No. But I remember.
I remember that for some reason I sat there on his bed and talked with him for another half hour, about religion, soccer, true love, and the concept of forever. And then he walked me home and kissed me goodnight and this all seemed perfectly normal to me somehow. This all seemed to be just part of dating. This is what it is to be a woman who goes on dates. This is what it is to be a woman who enjoys sex, and wants sex, but doesn’t have the safety of one committed partner.
When this story took place, I was resigned to a sad truth that to be a single, sexually active woman meant sometimes things are great, and then here and there things get really bad. And those times, I’d just suck it up and keep living and keep on dating and keep waiting for a unicorn to come along and be my boyfriend so I wouldn’t have to roll the dice anymore. So I wouldn’t have to take the chance that a handsome, smart, awesome guy I’ve been getting to know might hold his arm across my neck and say, “Not yet,” every time I yell at him to get off me.
There are so many stories like that I could tell you, but so could we all. Each one of us has a lifetime of stories. A lifetime of being chipped away at, and then if we speak up, being told not to be so serious or that we “can’t take a joke.” If we speak up, then we have to sit and listen as our own experiences are explained back to us, handed over like corrected proofs. So we stay quiet. And then we’re told we’re complicit, it’s our fault really.
The best thing we can do now is listen. Listen to the actual lived experience of women when they do try to say something about it.
Listen. Just fucking shut up and listen.
ORPHAN CHRISTMAS
The girl with the blue dreadlocks is intent on telling me she totally gets me. I don’t know what she gets because I haven’t even said a word. She’s sitting beside me on a long bench, our backs up against a wall in a little dive bar in Kensington Market where everyone’s wearing black and covered in tattoos and drinking a lot and the music is punk and loud and I don’t really know anyone at all.
It’s Christmas Day 2012.
What I haven’t said at all to The Girl with the Blue Dreadlocks is that this is possibly the most surreal experience of my life. That to be here, on Christmas, is about as far from who I thought I was or where I thought I would ever be. For the past eleven years I’ve spent Christmas Day with my husband and his family, the last five of those with our daughter. That she’s not with me now is something Blue Dreads cannot possibly understand.
That I’m not with my own little girl on Christmas Day makes about as much sense as me being here in this bar on Christmas Day.
But as if she does understand all these things I’m not saying to her, Blue Dreads puts her hand on my arm and just holds it there. She smiles at me with a quiet kindness. I look at her face and for a second I think she looks just like Birdie, if Birdie were a twenty-year-old girl with blue hair and a nose ring.
I turn my back to the overwhelming room and look outside. The snow is falling so hard that footsteps disappear in minutes. It’s like a deep blanket and I briefly wonder what it would feel like to just go out and lie in it.
I contemplate how the fuck my life could change so much in one year. Blue Dreads still has her hand on my arm and she’s saying something but who knows what. The music is so loud and I’m lying in a snow drift anyway.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
VESPERS
FOOD
Birdie is telling me a story, chatty-chatty-chatty excitable. Something they made at school, artwork? I’m only half-listening as I scramble to make dinner out of whatever’s in the fridge. She’s five, and in Senior Kindergarten at a new school in this new neighbourhood in our new life.
And then she’s holding it in front of me, a drawing of two buildings. Under it, in her signature mix of upper- and lowercase handwriting, it says:
I HAve two Homes. Thay ARe across the stret from EACHotheR. I like that we leve ACRoss the street FROM EACHotheR.
The homework was “Draw and write about your home.” My homework is to not cry, to not burn this crap dinner I’m trying to cook, to not fall apart, to not fall down the well. My homework is to smile and say to her, “That’s so great, Birdie!” To kiss her and give her a squeeze. To take a photo of her drawing and post it on Instagram with #modernfamily and #coparenting and #totallyworthit because in making it public it becomes more true. But in the darkness at the very core of me, where I’m holding everything together to make her this pasta and not cry, I really want to write #shewassupposedtohaveonehome and #weshouldhavebeenworthit.
We should have been worth it. #thanksalotyoufuckingasshole.
Instead, I make the pasta. I hold in the tears and the anger and the blinding, corrosive feeling of failure and I just make the pasta. I make it. I just make it.
This hang-up about food, this struggle to make dinner … in my new life, anything to do with food, I just can’t get right. I can never figure out the amount of groceries to buy or how much food to make. Vegetables are always going bad in the fridge. I either run out of milk for Birdie or end up throwing out half the carton. And then there’s eating alone. Food doesn’t taste good when it’s just me. I can’t enjoy it. But after hearing enough friends go on and on about how they love to go to cafés and restaurants on their own, I make a plan to have brunch. By myself. In a restaurant.
On a Sunday morning I go to the diner at the bottom of the big hotel that’s right between The Ex-husband’s condo and mine. I say “Table for one” and feel like barfing. I sit at the tiny table and pull out a book but I can’t read and I can barely eat. I can’t taste anything b
ut sharp shards of envy, as I watch groups of people laugh together over their meals. It is the longest hour of my life, maybe.
I never bothered to try again. There’s just no point. Eating is social to me, food is for sharing. That was how I grew up, with life centred around what we were going to eat and how we were going to cook it and making it and eating it and talking about it while eating it. So eating alone is hard, okay? And it’s a real problem I still struggle with.
Eating a meal with people you love is the most important part of Italian life. It’s basically a sacrament! Everything important happens at the table. It’s where you talk about your crappy day at school or work. Where you laugh at each other’s stories — or just at each other — all while eating the lasagna you made together. It’s where you talk politics and end up getting into an argument. Where one person cries and someone else defends them while putting the espresso on, and another person says sorry.
The table is where you make up. Where you pledge to do better while you eat rum cake for dessert. It’s where you hear news of a new baby in the family, and where you hear about someone’s death. It’s where you bring your first love to meet your family, and scare the shit out of them because the meal lasts hours and hours, we never leave the table. We eat and talk and laugh and shout for hours. It’s the best. How can you expect me to eat alone after forty years of eating like that?
DANCING
We loved dancing together. I fell in love with him on the dance floor, you know. Back in 1999, when The Ex-husband was just The Scientist. Each week we’d all go to The Dance Cave, which is exactly what it sounds like. My boyfriend at the time, The Musician, was the one that introduced me to the place, and I ended up spending most of my twenties there. When I watched The Scientist dance, I felt electrified. He danced, I danced. I would watch him and he would watch me.
Later, when we were a couple, we danced together all the time, and when we did it was pure joy I’d see on his face. He did crazy, hilarious dance moves and I’d be soooo embarrassed but also I could not stop laughing. I loved his crazy dancing. We had these moves we’d do together, these routines we’d bust out whenever we happened to be at an Italian wedding. Which, with a family as big as mine, was always.
My cousins adored him, they loved that this big tall WASPy guy had no shame and would tear up the dance floor. Sometimes, when we’d lock eyes and get into one of our silly routines, the dance floor would part and everyone would make a little circle around us. I would be so uncomfortable with everyone looking at us, but he was so into it, it was infectious.
My favourite part of these wedding receptions was when the old Italian waltzes would come on, all warbly accordions, and the old people would come out on the floor and partner-dance so beautifully. The Husband would always grab my mom, or one of my aunts, and pull them onto the dance floor with him. He didn’t have a clue how to tarantella, but damned if he didn’t try. He’d whip the older women around the floor and they would have huge smiles on their faces, even though he was terrible at it.
I’d watch him and my heart would swell a thousand sizes, especially listening to my cousins shout, “He’s the best, you married the best!” I thought so, too. I really did. So is it any wonder their hearts broke when they heard what he did? Like all of our friends and family, they felt betrayed, too. It was like the day you realized the mall Santa was just a drunk old guy wearing a fake beard. No one in my family could believe he wasn’t that guy on the dance floor, that guy who made my face light up.
But hang on, I was talking about dancing.
Everywhere we lived together, we danced. In the tiny basement apartment we shared the year before we got married, he’d grab my arm and slow dance me to whatever song we were listening to as we cooked dinner, his head grazing the low ceiling. In the first condo we bought together after we married, we got a new stereo and there we danced to OutKast and Justin Timberlake CDs in the big open-concept loft, like we were the only two people at a club.
Each Christmas when we decorated the tree, we’d listen to the Boney M Christmas Album and Elvis’ Christmas and even to those cheesy old recordings we would have at least one dance. Several times a year in the condo, we’d have these huge parties with forty or fifty people from his world and mine all mingling — work colleagues, people from my soccer team, old school friends, cousins, and siblings — all dancing to mix CDs I’d make. At 4:00 a.m., once everyone was gone, we’d clean up the bottles and the glasses, just the two of us, and then, dancing slowly in the kitchen, we’d talk about the night, our bodies pressed close, tired.
In the house we bought when I was pregnant, there were suddenly so many different rooms to dance in. If I think hard enough, we probably did have at least one dance in every room of that house. But the place we danced most was the kitchen. When Birdie was born she became part of our “dance parties,” her face beaming as we twirled her across the floor, or as she watched us slow dance. Once we danced to “Rock Lobster,” falling on the ground each time they sang “down, down, down …” just like when we were teenagers. God, I loved that night — her laughter, his smile at me as we lay on the kitchen floor. I can still see his face. I can see his expression exactly as it was. That was love. Even if it’s hard to imagine now.
Somewhere about a year into our separation, he complained to me that none of the women he was meeting liked dancing. He wished someone would dance with him, the way we once did, and he wondered if I had any suggestions for where he should go.
Like, are you fucking kidding me?
REVIVAL
February 2013. One year exactly from when The Bomb first dropped. I’m out with three of my favourite girlfriends and trying really hard not to feel The Lonely, that monster that sits in the pit of my gut whether I’m alone or not. The Lonely is such a bastard. It never lets its claws out of me.
We’re out dancing in a bar called Revival, drinking tequila like water. I see a super-hot guy standing with a group of people and something about him makes me want to get closer to him. I’m walking toward Super Hot Guy, trying to catch his eye, when a different man steps in front of me. He says “Hey” with a nod of his head, so casually, so effortlessly, like he’s been waiting there for me the whole night.
This guy is cool and cute and dressed really, really great. There’s an immediate click between us, and I forget all about the original guy I was walking toward. We just start dancing and talking. At first we try to guess each other’s ages, and though he’s convinced I’m younger than him I know he will be wrong, I know I will be older, I’m always older. It turns out I’m right, but he is on this side of thirty, so that’s something.
Then I make a game of trying to guess his astrological sign. I guess right on the first try (Taurus), and he laughs, saying, “All right smarty, guess the exact day then,” and just because I think the universe is always up to something, I say The Ex-husband’s birthday. And again, I’m right. They have the exact same birthday. Yeah.
We dance some more and then he says, “So when’s our first date?” Like he likes me for real, not just for a hook-up. So I do what I’ve never done up until now — all these firsts — I tell him I have a kid. “How about Monday night?” I say, “Because my daughter will be with her dad that night.” I hold my breath, sure this will scare him off, or he’ll lie and say it’s cool but then totally ghost me. Instead he says, “Great, Monday!” and then, “How old is your daughter? I have a son!” And he takes out his phone and shows me photos of a beautiful baby boy. His son is an infant still, and this puts me on guard, obviously. So I ask if he’s married, and what’s the deal with asking me on a date when he has a nine-month-old?
He tells me his son’s mother is one of his best friends, a woman he sleeps with casually but they’ve never dated or ever even been a couple, and they are not, and have never been, in love. He says when she got pregnant she wanted to keep the baby because she was nearing forty and nowhere near finding a boyfriend to make that happen. He says he always wanted to be a dad
, and maybe not this way or before he was thirty-five, but since this was the way, this was the way. He stopped working at a small music studio and got a job at a major bank to support them.
“That’s what I’m doing now,” he says. “I’m not married, I’m not in a relationship. I’m a dad and she is my son’s mother.”
I believe him. And I really like him. He seems so effortless and genuine and just … a guy, a down-to-earth regular sweet guy. We continue to dance and laugh until 2:00 a.m. when my girlfriends and I all leave. He texts me ten minutes later to say he can’t wait till Monday, when we will be less drunk and can really get to know each other. And that’s what we do.
Three weeks later. Revival is standing in my kitchen, cooking. I just stand there dumbly, staring at his shoulders, his neck, the way the muscles in his arms tense as he grabs a knife, or reaches for a pan. I can’t believe there’s a man in my kitchen, and he’s cooking me dinner.
This man is a sweet, real man. He’s also the first man I’ve actually dated in the true sense of the word. For our second date we went to see a movie, and he had his arm around me the whole time. As the opening credits rolled, he leaned in close and whispered, “If this movie sucks then you better be ready for my hands to be all over you.” I giggled like a teenager. It felt so good to be in a movie theatre with the arm of a cool, good-looking man around me and the laughing and the popcorn and the regular-people things. It felt so good after such a long stretch of getting drunk, meeting men, getting drunker, then having drunk sex. This felt different. It felt normal.
And now here he is, in my kitchen, cooking up jerk salmon with spinach. I hate salmon. But not tonight. The only other man who’s cooked anything in this kitchen is my father, so tonight I am on a Cloud 9 of epic proportions. I will eat salmon on this cloud, obviously!
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