6. What’s the most you would be willing to spend on a car, a couch, shoes?
I wear one pair of shoes. One pair only, every day, unless it’s snowing. And even then I change out of my boots and back into my one pair of shoes as soon as I’m safely out of the elements. I have one pair of Finn Comfort Augustas, they cost $375 a pop, and I replace that pair annually. Who knows if I’ll remain faithful to you, but I will never cheat on these perfect shoes ever. They come from a place in the suburbs called Waxberg’s, where a gentleman named Irving measures my feet and watches me walk and forbids me from ever having another pair of flip-flops cross the threshold of my home. I’m not trying to put too fine a point on it, but these jams changed my life. If they went up to $500, I’d still buy them. I might have to cancel my Spotify to work them into the budget, but it can be done.
I’ve already bought a couch for you and that couch was $900. So…$900.
I’m gonna buy a car this year and it’s gonna be great. I have never before purchased a car from a reputable dealership, the kind of place where the salesmen wear ties and offer you water while they roll their eyes at your credit score before offering up some loan-shark contract that involves putting up your firstborn child or the deed to your house as collateral. All of my rusted-out matchbox cars were purchased from somebody’s dying grandma or from tiny lots where you can pay for your new Chevy with a combination of expired food stamps and lottery tickets. So now that I am an adult who is going to be living in a house with a driveway, I am going to buy a big black truck with a booming system and shock absorbers so I can silently weep as I float over the potholes without disrupting so much as an eyelash. I’m going to glide into the drive-thru, effortlessly lowering my childproof window to whisper my fried chicken order directly into the mic instead of dislocating my shoulder trying to roll the window down before shouting unintelligibly at the helpless person inside who can’t understand why a person whose car is barely three inches off the ground wouldn’t just bring her lazy ass inside.
I will take every road trip and helm every carpool on brand-new fully inflated tires, an iced coffee in every cup holder, while getting free oil changes every three months because that’s the kind of thing written into the fine print of a multipage lease agreement rather than a bill of sale hastily scribbled on the back of an unpaid FedEx invoice (you know this is too specific not to be true). I don’t care what it costs. I am a grown-up lady who doesn’t have any cartilage in her arthritic knees and I deserve to have a car whose seat slides back electronically. No auxiliary cord? No problem! Because the Bluetooth already connected to your iPod and Beyoncé’s dulcet tones are soothing your weary eardrums before you’ve even fastened your seat belt. In my old Escort, I used to have this little device that would play a Walkman through one of the staticky radio stations at either of the far ends of the dial. I would make a mixtape, put batteries in a portable cassette player, connect it to the adapter, set the dial to 88.2 or 107.8 or whatever, then cruise around to the barely audible strains of “Essaywhuman?!!!??!” et al. for approximately forty-seven minutes before the batteries tapped out or the connection died. That is the story I need to tell when people ask me “How could you possibly be sad?!” in earnest.
7. Can you deal with my doing things without you?
In fact, I would prefer it. I like a lot of alone time, you know, for things like scrolling through the Jibri website for four hours, trying on clothes in my mind. Or plucking my chin whiskers while sobbing over that movie where Winona Ryder is dying from a heart tumor and Richard Gere is in love with her but somehow just can’t stop fucking other people, so yeah, maybe I need to be alone as I process all that imaginary grief for the ninety-seventh time.
I don’t understand couples who do everything together. If I’m going to see you at home, I don’t also need to see you while agonizing over which flavor of Hot Pockets to get. I would like to have my own relationship with the dry cleaner, thank you very much, not smile off to the side while you guys have your familiar little “light starch on the gray slacks!” morning banter. I’m going to the coffee shop you hate, so it can be my coffee shop. You’re getting groceries from the white chick with dreadlocks over at the organic co-op? Well, fine, I’ma get my provisions for the week at Target, along with a car battery, six lightbulbs, a desk calendar, and a handful of Revlon lipsticks. I like having my own shit.
The thing is, I have no idea how to exist within a family unit. Despite my efforts, I have never lived with a romantic partner before; the last time I shared a house with someone, we divided the light bill in half and wrote our names on our respective milks. I don’t know how to coexist in a place where people don’t scribble names on their food or hide their pharmaceuticals on the top shelf of the closet. I still live like I’m in a foster home, hiding my trash at the bottom of the can because I don’t want anyone to know how many Little Debbie oatmeal pies I ate under the covers after dark. And I am still like “Will she notice how much of this body wash I used…?” while tucking the bottle behind a bigger one for fear that you’re going to yell at me about how I always use up the expensive shit. Forget being hit or kicked—the real terror of my childhood was tiptoeing around trying to disguise all the precious resources I was using up. Sometimes a person’s damage is obvious: yelling, violence, defensiveness. But in some cases it looks like walking around with a plastic bag full of trash in your backpack when you didn’t spend last night at home because of a baseless worry that someone will look through it and hold its contents against you.
I am still learning that no one is going to mark the level of the shampoo before I take a shower so they’ll know whether I use a squeeze. And that I don’t have to hide my dirty clothes. However, I will put a password on my computers and shit, I know how you feel about unauthorized screen time. And also those naked pictures of you on my desktop.
8. Do we like each other’s parents?
Is this a trick question? My parents, as I can’t stop reminding people, ARE DEAD. Which means you are one of the lucky people on this planet who never has to suffer through any of my mom’s silent scrutiny of your potato salad (she would eat it, but she would not approve) or humor my father as he not-so-secretly drinks every drop of cognac you have in that high cabinet where we keep the plates yet gently berates you about how children in his house weren’t allowed to whistle, let alone speak to him while looking him in the eye. He would fall asleep in the rocking chair while my mom washed all the dinner dishes and excused herself multiple times to anxiously smoke cigarettes in the driveway, and then she’d serve her contribution to the meal: a cake from a box mix baked in her finest cat-shaped mold. At some point in the evening I would have to take you aside to explain that I was going to sell the children’s piano to fund the latest of my father’s harebrained schemes, but that he’d assured me that this one was going to be the one that finally paid back a return on my investment. There’d inevitably be a fight of some kind, resulting in your having to drive my sobbing mother home and my body-slamming an old-ass man in the middle of the TV room while your kids cower in fear in the kitchen. So I guess what I’m saying is that death can sometimes be pretty great.
—
I will have to keep your parents at arm’s length because yours is the kind of family that goes on extended vacations in the wilderness together, and I’m afraid that if they like me too much, they will expect me to go with, and I am doing no such thing. You get only one chance to drag me to the woods, and I already let you take me to that isolated cabin in the middle of nowhere for three days with no phone and no Wi-Fi, so see you when you get back. I can’t remember the last time one of my sisters and I went to the grocery store together, and I can’t think of anything less relaxing than revisiting a fight that began in 1993 while slowly developing a bacterial infection from a wet bathing suit. I imagine there are two types of orphans: people who can’t wait to jump into a ready-made family or build their own from scratch, and the kind I am: get your heartwarming holiday cards away f
rom me ASAP. You know what I can do, since I don’t have a mom anymore? Write “I love big dicks in my pussyhole” on the Internet without worrying about getting a disappointed phone call immediately after.
I haven’t had to justify anything I have or haven’t done to anyone in my whole adult life (PS: it feels amazing). I also haven’t had to suffer through a forced Thanksgiving dinner or Aunt Barbara’s retirement party or cousin Julie’s baby shower, and, sure, I have an iPad, but unless you let me stay in the car, your padre is totally going to be all “FOR REAL, SAMANTHA” and hit me with the “I didn’t raise you like this” eyes. And the thing is? No, he did not. And I respect that moms gotta mom no matter whose kid they’re talking to, so I’m definitely not inviting your girl over for a bottle of—I don’t know, what do moms drink? Sauvignon blanc? Costco wine?—so she can knit her eyebrows together in concern while waiting for me to offer up an explanation for why I wrote “LinkedIn is emailing people that today is my 14th anniversary at my job, but damn, I wanted to write my suicide note myself” on Twitter this morning.
9. How important is sex to you?
Is there such a thing as the opposite of important? Because that’s what I would choose. Maybe this is the depression talking, or maybe years of masturbating with the most powerful vibrators on the market have broken my vagina, but at the end of a long day, the last thing I want to do is stand up more. Or put on clothes that someone else might find visually arousing. Hopefully lesbian bed death is real and not another unattainable fantasy the Internet has lied to me about, like poreless skin.
10. How far should we take flirting with other people? Is watching pornography okay?
I used to bang this dude who was really into female bodybuilder porn. And while that’s not necessarily my bag, because I like to watch soft naked bodies jiggling like chocolate pudding on a spoon, I was totally down with it. I didn’t do a single triceps curl for the entirety of that relationship, either. I walked in on him jerking off to an ass like a library book bouncing up and down on some shriveled steroid dick, then walked right out and down the block to Dragon Gate. Because, listen—if he is getting what he needs from watching two leviathans bang into each other like bumper cars while oozing streaky orange self-tanner, then I am just going to get these eggrolls and post up in the other room with a pile of magazines.
—
I am partial to mature lesbian porn, because I’m old, and while I would never call it “lovemaking,” that is exactly what I wanna watch. I like watching two ladies (or men) with a few miles on ’em kissing passionately on the mouth and having real orgasms. I am forever here for gratuitous cumshots and clenched ass cheeks thrusting away for twenty real minutes (how do they do that?), but I have never been excited to watch two straight girls kiss like it’s icky while plucking at each other’s clitoris like a banjo string. I don’t need soft music or a backstory, but I would very much like to believe that these people are both at least marginally attracted to each other and experiencing legitimate pleasure. Porn is a quick and easy way for me to release some tension through a vaginal sneeze without having to undo my bra or take my shoes off, and I will never stop watching it, especially now that it is free, and I ain’t gotta hide my sex DVDs at the bottom of my sock drawer when company comes. Sex is messy and exhausting, and if you’d like to masturbate alone while I am sleeping or watching sports, have at it.
Flirting is one of my main forms of social currency. I don’t mean actual gross hitting on people, but if your mom comes up to me at a reading, then I’m going to look deep into her eyes and say, “You look amazing in magenta, Margaret,” without breaking my gaze, and she is going to swoon and buy six copies of my book and, duh, love me forever. I’m not kidding, Margaret is going to shout down the other members of her book club when they try to dismiss this trash as vulgar and disgusting (they might have a point) and storm out of Betsy’s house in a cloud of Chanel perfume because I wrote “I would love to toss your salad, girl” inside the front cover of her copy. Listen, I would never lead someone to think that I would actually want to have sex, because yuck, see above. But everyone loves eye contact and eating butts!
It’s so weird to me that adults in committed relationships have a problem with something so seemingly innocuous as flirting. I would never expect you to walk around with a paper bag over your head to avoid catching the eye of a stranger, nor would I discourage your making friendly conversation with whomever you might encounter during the day. And look, if you needed to fuck somebody else, we could talk about it. People change, our desires evolve, and it feels foolish to me to expect that what you’ll want two, five, or ten years from now will be exactly the same thing that fills you up today. I mean, the way I feel about fidelity has evolved over the last ten years of my life. It’s a hard-and-fast rule that we don’t apply to any other thing in our lives: YOU MUST LOVE THIS [SHOW/BOOK/FOOD/SHIRT] WITH UNWAVERING FERVOR FOR THE REST OF YOUR NATURAL LIFE. Could you imagine being forced to listen to your favorite record from before your music tastes were refined for the rest of your life? Right now I’m pretty sure I could listen to Midnight Snack by HOMESHAKE for the rest of my life, but me ten years ago was really into acoustic Dave Matthews, and I’m not sure how I feel about that today. And yes, I am oversimplifying it, but really, if in seven years you want to have sex with the proverbial milkman, just let me know about it beforehand so I can hide my LaCroix and half-eaten wedge of port salut. (“Milkmen” always eat all the good snacks.)
11. Do you know all the ways I say “I love you”?
I guess so, but the most important one is that time I came home after an Amtrak ride from the pit of hell and my pajamas were already laid out and my night banana and half-full glass of room-temperature water were waiting on the bedside table for me.
12. What do you admire about me, and what are your pet peeves?
Likes:
• You look real good in a pair of tight-ass jeans.
• You can eat more food than anyone I have ever met and I’m pretty old.
• Your laugh.
• That time you dropped your credit card at a tollbooth was pretty hilarious.
• You don’t stink even though you wear homemade deodorant.
• You scoop all the cat poops, which is sick.
• I asked you to learn all the dance moves in the P Diddy and Ma$e “Been Around the World” remix video and dance them with me and you did.
Dislikes:
• I do not enjoy being kissed in the middle of the grocery store.
13. How do you see us ten years from now?
Living is a mistake. If good things ever happened to me, I would say that some grief-stricken mutual friend of ours will be sobbing gently while digging up the yard of one of my many enemies to plant trees fed by our biodegradable burial pods so that he forever has to live his life in my shade. But everything is garbage, and the universe never gives me what I want. So, sadly, we’ll still be alive, and I will definitely be luxuriating in the recliner you haven’t let me buy but I’m scheming to get anyway. That’s a good foundation for a healthy marriage, right? Having a plush, comfy rocking recliner that clashes with the house’s current midcentury modern design just show up on your doorstep and being like *shrug* when your wife objects? I mean, it’s already here, we might as well watch an SVU marathon in it…?
Yo, I Need a Job.
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing to you regarding your company’s customer service representative opening. I have been working as the client services director, which is a mostly fictional title, at an animal hospital for the last fourteen years and have developed substandard phone manners while also somehow managing to maintain a tenuous grasp on my sanity. I am used to an incredibly busy and fast-paced environment, serving as a personal assistant to seven doctors, each with drastically different personalities and demands, as well as being an unpaid servant and chambermaid to literally thousands of wealthy suburbanites and their unruly pets.
—
• answering phones without an attitude
• swallowing my pride while people talked down their noses to me about cat vaccines
• feeling chagrined as clients made jokes like, “Brought you a present!” while tossing steaming bags of dog feces for parasite screening on the desk next to my iced tea
• getting bitten on the leg more than once without murdering anyone involved
• staying awake for eleven hours at a stretch despite the 50 mg of Benadryl in my system, because believe it or not, I am allergic to stupid cats
• sniff-testing the effectiveness of industrial-strength institutional-grade air fresheners against the smells released from animal mouths, butts, and inner ears
• fielding questions like “Why is there a worm coming out of my dog’s penis?” (A: That is his penis.)
• giving meticulously detailed driving directions to the practice over the telephone in 2016
• ordering enough office supplies to both cover the anticipated needs of the clinic and also offset the collateral damage inflicted on the supply closet by the staff. (Who needs thirty-six blue ballpoint pens in their house, I mean, who?)
We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. Page 21