by Wade Rouse
About a hundred times a day, I look over at Charlie Brown, Marge Simpson, and my little Indian brave, and I smile every time.
“You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July Fourth, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.”
–ERMA BOMBECK
INDEPENDENCE DAY
Gutting Gary
I spent the Fourth of July holidays of my youth at our log cabin on Sugar Creek.
There, enveloped by the sandy bluffs and ice-cold water, my family would swim, shoot off bottle rockets, and throw smoke bombs into the water.
At night we built a giant bonfire on our rocky beach and roasted hot dogs and toasted marshmallows for s’mores. Our Fourth of July beach bonanza culminated with a spectacular fireworks display that would run nearly an hour and feature extravagant bursts of purple and gold comets, green palm trees, and giant red chrysanthemums.
I used to sit back, my mouth stuffed with a s’more, and watch the explosions in the blue-black summer-night sky—the echoes booming off the surrounding cliffs, the colors reflecting off the burbling creek.
They were amazing, yes, but I also knew the best fireworks were yet to come when my family would scamper up the stone steps that dotted the hillside to our cabin and huddle together to kick off our annual Fourth of July Game Night. This competition involved every member of the family, young and old, in a series of card and board games, the last man standing the winner.
Fourth of July Game Night was sacrosanct at our family’s old log cabin. In fact, looking back, those contests seemed to be held on an even higher level than births and major surgeries that involved the removal of important organs.
The Rouses battled in Battleship and contested one another in canasta and Chinese checkers for two main reasons: boredom, and a genetic defect that made us want to crush the competition, like today’s New England Patriots.
Truly, there was little to do at our cabin besides eat, swim, or fish. We didn’t have a TV, only an ancient radio the size of a Buick that received faint, scratchy voices that sounded like mice trying to claw their way to freedom. We were also a gene pool not blessed with speed of foot, great coordination, or even passable singing voices, so, as a result, we were forced to entertain ourselves with games.
While our annual Game Night was titled something different but dramatic every year—the Summer Showdown, the Duel to the Death, the Blood Match, the Rouse Rumble, the Ozarks National Board Championship—one thing was always certain: My father would win, no matter how much my family teamed up to slay the dragon.
In fact, he never lost.
But it wasn’t just the fact that my father always won, it was the way he won that upset the family: He crushed his victims, and did it with such spiteful glee you would almost swear he was spitting venom. My father, an engineer and mathematical whiz, could count cards and memorize players’ bad habits. He was invincible.
One of the earliest Fourth of July memories I have of my dad was playing Operation with him as my teammate. Though I was still too young to be much good, my father single-handedly whooped family members, badly, using those little tweezers like a scalpel, plucking organs willy-nilly from that clownish body like a skilled surgeon.
As a result, I was trained from an early age to be deadly, to strike without feeling, like a child soldier. I learned that humiliating others in board games was a way to prove my dominance, and I loved that passive-aggressive approach to life. I learned it was wonderful to win, but one got even more pleasure if he was able to crack Professor Plum over the head with a candlestick in the conservatory—over and over and over again.
“Life is like a board game,” my dad would always tell the vanquished, holding tweezers or dice or cards over his head in a victory dance. “There are always winners and losers. And I’m always the winner!”
And then I met Gary and fell deeply, madly in love. He was funny, handsome, warm, nurturing, talented, adventurous.
But, as fate would have it, horrific in board games.
I uncovered this important fact quickly—like a woman might discern up front if a prospective husband truly wanted children—by whipping him in every board game we could possibly play: Scattergories, Scrabble, Cranium, Trivial Pursuit. Even Candy Land and pick-up sticks. Playing board games with Gary was like playing board games with a stroke victim. In fact, a stroke victim could take Gary because his attention span would be longer and deductive reasoning better.
Which is why I was consumed with fear the very first Fourth of July I brought Gary back to my family’s cabin.
I knew my dad would eat him alive.
I tried to fill the holiday with nervous chatter and activities: float trips, bottle rockets, fishing, sunning, berry picking.
But I could not outrun the inevitable, and the moment I had long feared, the words that had caused my colon to cramp in the wee hours of the morning were uttered by my father at sundown after we’d eaten barbecued ribs and watched the fireworks: “Gary, are you up for the traditional Rouse Fourth of July Game Night?”
I had warned Gary.
He knew what he was in for.
He had even witnessed my own brutality with his family, who played board games without any rules so that everyone won. After playing Tripoli for hours the New Year’s before with his family, without any clear set of rules or winner, I finally screamed: “This isn’t Neverland, people! Board games are like life. There are always winners and losers. And I’m always the winner!”
We had survived that low point in our relationship, which gave me a glimmer of hope that we could survive our first Rouse Game Night, which my dad sweetly titled the Fourth of July Massacre of the Newbie.
I suggested that we start with something friendly, like Monopoly or Cranium.
But my dad suggested we go straight for the heart with hearts, the card game where the queen of spades is the old biddy, the game where you try to shoot the moon and instantly give opponents twenty-six points, the game my father has never, ever lost.
Watching my father shuffle the deck and deal the cards while smiling and staring down Gary like Paul Newman in The Sting, I honestly believed my father had sold his soul to Satan for one simple thing: board-game invincibility.
I mean, the man counted cards like Rain Man. He once made an aunt cry by shooting the moon four consecutive times, thus ending the game in under fifteen minutes. Another family member, who refused to play with my father after being publicly humiliated one too many times, had called my dad “the most vicious man alive.”
Tonight wasn’t really a fair fight from the start. My father sat Gary to his immediate left, kind of the way a lion might seat a water buffalo next to him at a safari dinner party. And then my dad shot the moon on the first hand, handing us all twenty-six points. And then my mom shot the moon. And then my dad shot the moon again.
I looked over at Gary, who was over the moon. He sat lifeless, shell-shocked, his double row of eyelashes soaked, close to tears.
I glanced over at my father. He winked at me.
Jesus Christ, he’s going in for the kill, I thought. The only successful relationship I’ll ever be able to pull off with my family is if I get involved with a professional poker player, or someone creepy smart like Bill Gates.
But then something miraculous happened.
Gary shot the moon.
Despite the fact his hand was rife with losing cards: an eight of diamonds, a six of hearts.
He won hands he shouldn’t have won.
My dad threw away cards he should have kept.
And my mom followed his lead.
At that moment—on a stifling July night, despite bottle rockets still popping in the distance—I knew my family’s fireworks had officially ended: Gary was loved. He had been accepted into our family
.
Gary smiled triumphantly, but I knew my family’s one good deed was done. After that, my father proceeded to gut Gary like a fresh bass.
About fifteen minutes later, my dad pushed his chair back after winning and stood to taunt my partner. “You know, Gary, life is like a board game,” my dad said, twisting around in his victory dance. “There are always winners and losers. I’m always the winner, and you’ll always be the loser!”
Gary would cry later that night, softly, out of humiliation, as every Rouse had done at one point in our lives. But before he fell asleep, I pulled him into my arms and whispered, finally remembering the reason my family loved Game Night: “You shouldn’t be sad, sweetie, you should be honored. It’s the only way we know how to show our love to one another.”
ANNIVERSARY
So, a Gift Card to
Trader Joe’s Isn’t Romantic?
Gary and I once took a loaf of Amish friendship bread to a new neighbor, a kindly, older, sassy woman who looked a lot like Shirley MacLaine and always waved to us from her front porch.
She thanked us profusely for the bread by asking us in for a cup of coffee and depositing us in her dining room, the walls and cabinets of which were lined and stuffed with commemorative anniversary plates and dishes. There was seemingly a teacup, goblet, dessert fork, and sherry glass for every anniversary up to number sixty.
“You’ve been married sixty years?” I asked, nodding my head at the walls as she walked back in with a pot of coffee. “Congratulations! What’s your husband’s name? I don’t think I’ve seen him yet.”
“All that shit belonged to my parents,” she said coarsely, pouring us cups of coffee. “I’ve been divorced three times. Not a big fan of marriage … or anniversaries. Just makes me feel good to know someone made it work. And all this crap will be worth a fortune, too, someday.”
Gary promptly poured the coffee into his lap.
“I should’ve taken my Amish bread back!” Gary said, charging back across our street when we were done. It looked like he had wet himself.
Incidents like this shake Gary to his core. He believes they serve as signs: signs of impending doom. “She was so negative about relationships and romance. She might as well have spit in our faces.”
“Can it still be considered Amish friendship bread since you didn’t bake it in a bonnet over a copper urn, and you no longer like her?” I asked.
I knew I needed to change the subject before this ended up turning bad more quickly than a cup of clam chowder in the Sahara.
But it was too late.
“I’m serious,” Gary said. “It’s sad. But then again, you don’t believe in anniversaries either, do you?”
Ahh, the question that had no answer, like “Do I look fat in this?” and “What do you think of my mother?”
But he was right. I didn’t. I believed in marriage. I believed that my parents and grandparents stayed married for fifty years because of the simple yet undeniable fact that they worked like hell at it every single day, not because they bought each other a commemorative teacup every year.
I mean, I had worked in retail. I saw what men did: They used gift buying as a ruse. Buying a gift bought them time. They were perceived as romantic. And so they could slide.
I believed that if you loved someone, you showed them every day. I believed that it was the small gestures—opening a door, taking Gary’s hand in mine every night before we fell asleep—that meant the most. You didn’t buy the one you loved a happy-anniversary spoon rest and then receive a free pass for the next 365 days.
Gary was my antithesis. He had also worked for a number of years in retail, selling Tommy Hilfiger and Polo in a large department store. He believed that a $145 cotton summer sweater with an American flag on the front not only conveyed love but also had the power to change a man’s life.
Gary believed that gifts, the bigger the better, spoke volumes.
What made our schism even more cavernous was the fact that Gary knew every single anniversary, kind of like he knew the names of every member of DeBarge. It was an odd ability, but one that came in handy every so often. Especially when he wanted to drive home a point.
“Do you even remember what anniversary gifts I’ve gotten for you over the years, while you’ve gotten off scot-free?”
For some reason I pictured Gary as an Amish woman, in a bonnet, getting banged over a hot copper urn by a man with one of those freaky Amish beards that for some reason is always missing the mustache part.
Free association and fantasy: That’s how I—and prisoners of war—survive.
“Let me remind you,” Gary said, “since you seem at a loss for words.”
We stopped on the sidewalk in front of our house and Gary began recounting his anniversary gifts to me:
“First anniversary … paper … I got you a journal for your writing. Second, cotton, romantic sheets for the bed. Third, leather. You got Kenneth Cole slides and a Dolce belt. Fourth, flowers. I planted an entire anniversary garden of your favorites, from peonies to hydrangeas. Fifth, wood.”
Here I interjected. “I’m sure I gave you some wood on our anniversary.”
Gary didn’t laugh.
“You’re disgusting. I planted a birch in the front yard in your honor.”
“Okay, okay, I get it.”
“Do you? Do you know what anniversary this is for us?”
“Yes. Eleven.”
“Very good. Do you know what the theme for eleven is?”
“Rubies?”
“No, steel.”
“Steel? What are we buying each other this year, rebar?”
“Use your imagination,” Gary said. “Surprise me … for once.”
He walked inside, looking back at me for dramatic effect. Still, I hated when he told me to surprise him. It meant his expectations would be elevated, on par with Mars—when shooting for midcalf, whenever surprise and I were involved, seemed much more appropriate.
That week, during my lunch breaks at work, I began shopping to find inspiration.
I looked at watches and stainless-steel appliances. But those seemed either boring (“A watch?”) or exploitive (“You just want me around to bake for you?”).
So I shopped for myself, a bad habit of mine. Whenever I did something nice for somebody else, I usually did something even nicer for me.
Which is why I was browsing through too-tight T’s at Abercrombie & Fitch when a clerk approached and asked if I needed help picking something out for my son.
Now, if I hadn’t been so absolutely mesmerized by the clerk’s youthful splendor, stupefied by his tousled blond hair, and intoxicated by the Abercrombie scent that made him smell like beach, sweat, and denim, I would have bitch-slapped him into next Tuesday.
The clerk was, of course, beautiful—just like every Abercrombie clerk, just like every Abercrombie model who smiles flirtatiously and flashes one perfectly pert, tan nipple from the side of a shopping bag.
So I assumed this pretty-boy clerk was stupid, simply because I needed something—besides the fact that I had health-care coverage—to make me feel superior.
“What size is your son?” the clerk asked me again.
“I’m shopping for myself,” I said indignantly, but in a whisper.
“There’s, like, a Macy’s at the end of the mall, and, like, a Brooks Brothers just across from us,” he said to me.
“Brooks Brothers?” I hissed.
“Umm, yeah, you know, for, like, guys … your age.”
I stormed out of the store, out of the mall, and into the parking garage, lost in my own world of misery, when a sleek, black, brand-new Honda Pilot honked before screeching to a stop inches from my aged face and brittle bones.
It was a sign.
Steel.
Anniversary.
Car!
For once, I thought, I would go big or go home.
So I decided to play hooky from work one day the next week, telling everyone, including Gary, that I was sick. An
d, as fate would have it, I indeed got sick, a hideous summer flu that invaded my lungs and turned my once tan face into some sort of swollen mass. I was a hacking human tick.
In the midst of my Ebola outbreak, I sneaked to a local Honda dealership after Gary had left for work, looking as if I had left my oxygen tank at home.
Now, I am not a car man. I do not believe they connote status of any kind. I view cars as purely utilitarian. I want one that works. I don’t need a leather interior, a sunroof, a jazzy stereo, spinning chrome hubcabs.
We have a friend who owns two Vipers—one red and one yellow. I thought, until he told me, that they were Camaros. He wanted to punch me in the sternum.
I have driven, since I was twenty-two, just three cars: a white Toyota Corolla with cloth interior and no power anything—windows, car seats, locks. It had only AM/FM. I traded that in for a forest-green Honda CR-V with cloth interior. I would still be driving it today if it hadn’t been totaled by hail. I now drive an orange Honda Element, which you can literally hose out. It’s my dog car. It’s my beach car. It’s covered in sand and filled with workout clothes and bottled water and dog toys and hundreds of Post-It notes filled with spur-of-the-moment writing ideas.
Now, in the eleven years Gary and I have been together, he has had six cars. He has been robbed and screwed by more bad cars than a Vegas hooker. But his obsession continues. He now desires an SUV that connotes luxury but isn’t ostentatious. He wants it in black to connote mystery and sexiness. He wants leather because he deserves it. He wants XM and a nine-hundred-disc CD player and surround-sound stereo and conversation mirrors.
So I decided to get it all for my man.
I stepped out of my Element at the local Honda dealership and was immediately greeted by a young man with all the teeth and annoying earnestness of Matt Damon.
“Hello! I’m Dave! Looking to buy a car today?”
“Yes, I am.”
“That! Is! Terrific! You’ve! Come! To! The! Right! Place! Great! Weather! We’re! Having! What! Can! I! Do! You! For!”
Everything! Dave! Said! Ended! With! An! Exclamation! Point!