I'm Sorry You Feel That Way

by Diana Joseph

  I wanted to tell them about the discussion I’d had with my son right before coming to this party. He sat me down and told me flat-out that when we were out in public, he would not be going in the women’s rest room anymore, he’d be using the men’s room, and I couldn’t go in there with him. Nor could I stand outside the door and pound on it, asking, Are you okay in there? Are there any perverts in there? Do you want me to come in there? like I did that one time, because it was embarrassing. When I asked him what about me, what if I had to pee? I couldn’t very well leave him alone in a public place. What did he suggest?

  He said I could cross my legs if I was sitting down and walk like a penguin if I was standing up.

  His solutions were always terrible, but I didn’t have anything better.

  At the cat-talker party, people were admiring the sunset from the deck, going on about isn’t it spectacular! Amazing! Awe-inspiring! Fantastic! I was as sick of hearing people gush about landscapes and scenery and sunsets as I was of hearing stories about their cats—Lulu likes to sleep on the washing machine during the rinse cycle!—so in a loud voice I advertised my hatred for nature. “I hate nature!” I said. “Just hate it!”

  “You don’t really hate nature, do you?” the cat-talker asked.

  I insisted I do, I do, I really do hate nature. I hate nature and grooving on nature and I hate landscapes and sunsets and everything that goes along with it. Including rocks. I hate piles of rocks. And the mountains? Nothing but a big fucking pile of rocks.

  The cat-talker proclaimed her love of nature. I knew she would. I loved being in my kitchen where I could drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. I loved being in the waiting room at the doctor’s office where I could read People magazine for free. I loved being in a dressing room at Herberger’s, where I could try on pink poufy prom dresses and twirl in front of a three-way mirror.

  The cat-talker didn’t wear pink. She wore Patagonia. She didn’t wear makeup, not even mascara, not even cherry-flavored Chap-Stick, and the lines around her mouth and eyes revealed she participated in outdoor activities. She was sun-kissed. Her earrings were miniature dream-catchers. She had a lot of silver and turquoise on her fingers and around her wrists so everyone would know she was a Patagonia-Wearing Nature-Loving Outdoorsy Woman of the West who battled raging river rapids and climbed fourteeners. Her sleeping bag probably kept her toasty even when the temperature dropped to minus forty. My sleeping bag was pink. Hot pink. She said to me, “Well, if not nature, then what pretty thing do you like to look at?”

  I told her the mirror.

  She didn’t laugh but her husband did. That was part of the problem: The wives never found me amusing, but the husbands thought I was a stitch, a spunky little number, full of sass and piss and vinegar.

  In reality, I was lonely and scared, all tapped out, and not nearly as clever or confident as I pretended to be. I accepted full responsibility for the mess I’d made of my life. Wasn’t I the one who let my husband drag us to western Colorado, its bizarre high-desert landscape, the red sandstone canyons and cliffs, the sky too blue, the sun shining all the damn time, no clouds, nothing green will grow without a timed sprinkler system, and neither of us with decent and full-time work. Couldn’t I have protested more loudly when he rented a house we could not afford? Didn’t I cosign the loan so he could buy himself a pickup truck we could not afford? Didn’t I use my Discover card to pay for groceries, gasoline, Internet access to AOL chat rooms while he lived in a tent in Utah? Wasn’t I doing his laundry?

  None of it made any sense. I was so sick of doing his laundry.

  “This marriage is not working,” I told my husband one weekend when he’d come home so I could do his laundry and he could stock up on supplies. He was lying on the couch, watching something about dinosaurs on the Discovery Channel. When I said I needed to tell him something, he turned the sound on the television down.

  I told him I wasn’t happy. In fact, I said, I was miserable, I was lonely, I wanted out.

  He said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  Then he turned the sound back up.

  The next morning he returned to his tent in Utah while I thought about how much I hated those six words. I’m sorry you feel that way. The I’m sorry part makes it sound like a generous sentiment, empathetic and understanding, but when you think about it, it’s really a load of crap. It really means What you feel is stupid and wrong but the reason you feel that way is because, regrettably, you’re stupid and wrong. I think it’s so much more honest to say fuck you. Up yours. Who cares. What’s that got to do with me? Too bad, so sad. So what. Whoop dee do. Foo on you. Big deal. Bite me. You’re full of shit. You don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground. Tough titty. No, really, fuck you.

  I went to cat-talker, sunset-admirer dinner parties because my marriage was over, and because I was depressed. Big depressed. Bad depressed. Scared-I-might-never-be-anything-but-depressed depressed. I was thousands and thousands of dollars in debt, and my monthly child-care bill was exactly twenty-three dollars less than my monthly paycheck. To cut corners, I swiped rolls of toilet paper from the ladies’ room at work and packets of sugar and ketchup from McDonald’s. My best friend was a four-year-old boy who called me Mother dear and made me pay him in nickels to walk on my back. The thing I wanted most of all was to meet someone I could talk to. Someone who would be my friend. Someone who’d say the six words that mean the opposite of I’m sorry you feel that way, the six words I was longing to hear: I know exactly what you mean.

  It must not have been too much to hope for because I met that someone at a happy hour organized by a different set of colleagues. These colleagues preferred dark divey bars to sunsets. They thought inventing euphemisms for flatulence (anal vapor, anal cloud, butt smoke, ass music) was more interesting than chitchat about cats.

  This particular dark divey bar was attached to a low-down motel. I was familiar with that motel: it’s where my husband and I stayed when we first got to town and were looking for a place to live; it’s where I worried my son and I would end up when I finally went broke and bonkers. The motel room had fist-sized holes in the walls, dark stains on the carpet, and blotches on the ceiling the color of old, dried blood, but the bar was sort of cozy and smoky and smelled like things I knew, like cigarette smoke and wood smoke and men who worked outside.

  Al was sitting in a corner booth, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and telling cheesy jokes. The first words I ever heard come out of his mouth were these: Three-legged dog walks into a saloon in the Old West. Dog sidles up to the bar and says: “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw.” The next words I heard him say were Boilermaker, please and Thank you to our cocktail waitress, an eighty-year-old redhead named Clarice.

  Al was one of my colleagues, a professor of creative writing and twentieth-century American literature, but before that, he’d been a seasonal employee, a factory rat, a janitor’s son. When he said he knew exactly what I meant about cat-talking nature-loving dinner parties, I wanted to kiss him. When he debated which laundromat was better—Suds-n-Duds (they had a cleaner bathroom) or King Koin (their dryers burned hotter longer)—I decided I would sleep with him. After he lit my cigarette, then asked what’s your story, I set out to make him mine.

  He was an unlikely choice. He was forty-six years old. He’d been married once, briefly, back in the early seventies, but now he mostly had ex-girlfriends. Some of them invited him over for dinner. Some of them were still writing poems about him eight, twelve, nineteen years later. One of them chopped her panties into tiny pieces and sent them to him in the mail.

  What about this man inspired such depth of passion? His legs were skinny. His arms were skinny. He had narrow shoulders, knobby knees, he was a scrawny guy with a little belly. He had wiggly eyebrows, a wide forehead, a blunt chin, a poor boy’s bad teeth, and big ears hanging flat against his head. His moustache crept too far past the corners of his mouth, it was a moustache like a pervert would have, and his glasses were too big
for his face. His hair got tall when it grew too long, then he got it cut too short. In his closet, ties purchased in 1982 draped over a coat hanger like so many skinny snakes. His bathing suit was a pair of baggy blue trunks covered with ukuleles and hula girls.

  The rest of his wardrobe was just as amazing. Baggy Wranglers and flannel shirts, a T-shirt that said I’m all in, a T-shirt that said Sitka, Alaska: A drinking village with a fishing problem, a dozen flowery Hawaiian shirts, and a silk shirt with dogs playing poker printed on it. He had a leather belt studded with buffalo nickels, a bolero tie shaped like a cow skull, a Detroit Tigers baseball cap, a denim Levi’s jacket, brown cowboy boots, acrylic sweaters covered with fuzz balls, sweatshirts that he wore tucked in. Strangers in bars told him he sort of looked like Bob Dylan; no, he looked more like Gene Wilder; no, there’s a slight resemblance to Barry Manilow; no, he’s a dead ringer for Eric Clapton.

  “I am a dead ringer for Eric Clapton,” Al says, but to me he looks like somebody’s goofy uncle, affable and friendly, the guy who comments on the weather by saying, Chili today, hot tamale, who comments on gun control by saying, Sometimes I aim to please, but mostly I just shoot to kill, who remarks, This cheese is pretty Gouda, but that cheese tastes much Feta, during Thanksgiving dinner—who, when you accuse him of exaggerating, says, I wouldn’t shit you, you’re my favorite turd. When I picked him up from the hospital after his colonoscopy, he was still dopey, asking his nurse how much money did they find up there.

  Decades of bachelordom meant Al could run a vacuum. This impressed me, and that he knew that vacuums had bags, and that those bags occasionally needed changing, and which aisle in Kmart they keep vacuum cleaner bags, made me want to take my shirt off. He could iron; he starched and pressed sharp pleats into his jeans. He could brown a pound of hamburger, then mix in a packet of taco seasoning. I liked his blue eyes, and that he could tie a Windsor knot with as much skill as catching a trout. When I said why don’t we start something up, you and me, he told me the same thing he’d been telling women for the past twenty-some years: He wasn’t looking for any high drama in his life. He didn’t want any hassles. Falling in love was a hassle. He wasn’t interested in falling in love; in fact, he had no intention of falling in love. He didn’t want to hurt anyone.

  But.

  If I could understand that he didn’t fall in love, he wouldn’t fall in love, there would be no falling in love, if I could accept he just wasn’t interested in a romantic relationship, then maybe, just maybe, there could be something between us. We could have what he referred to as “a beautiful friendship.”

  That meant he was agreeable to having sex with me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure. Why not.”

  The next day, while the boy was at a birthday sleepover, I went to a sleepover, too, at Al’s house. We ordered a large pizza with everything and ate the whole thing while I beat him at Scrabble, twice. I took both games by a wide margin, more than two hundred points. Then we had sex.

  Afterward, I told him one of my secrets.

  Not the secret about what I had done the night before, how I soaked in a hot bubble bath while studying The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary because I had every intention of kicking his ass. I learned big-point-scoring words like qat and qaid and qoph, xu and xi, jo and jee and jeu, and also challenge-winning words like aa, ab, ae, ag, ai, al, ar. I was out to win because I was out to impress him.

  The secret I told him is this: I believe it can be done. I believe you can trick someone into loving you, you can bully and cajole someone into loving you, you can show off until the one you love is impressed enough to love you back.

  “No doubt about it,” I said. “It can be done. That’s a fact.”

  Al said he didn’t agree, and I said I was sorry he felt that way, and we left it at that.

  In the ten years since that day, Al has beat me at Scrabble only once, and that was when I was sick with West Nile virus and too fevered to cheat.

  Al and I had been having a beautiful friendship for about a month when I said he should let me and the boy move in with him. Didn’t he have a house with three bedrooms and a yard? Yes. Didn’t we make a nice couple? Yes. Weren’t we having sex in the daytime when I came over? Yes.

  “If you let me move in with you,” I reasoned, “we could have sex at night. Nocturnal intercourse! That is probably the only major thing in your life that will change.”

  “Except for you and the boy living with me,” Al agreed. “That’s probably the other major thing that would be different.”

  Then, no doubt just to shut me up and get me off his back, he said he’d think about it. This was an enormous tactical error, one that buoyed me not with hope but with certainty. At some point in the future, my son and I would be living with Al.

  In the days and weeks, months and years, to come, Al would say what he always said when I started in on him about moving in: he said he’d think about it.

  Then he’d try to explain.

  He said the problem was he’d been living alone for such a long time. He’d known quiet and order and obligation only to the self for so long he’d become selfish. He was a selfish man, he said. It was hard for him to imagine any other life, especially a life that asked him to be responsible, reliable, and depended upon. Especially since I had a child. It made him anxious to think about being depended upon by a child. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” he said.

  “So have you given any more thought to me and the boy moving in with you?”

  Why was I so obnoxious? Why was I such a nag? My wants so often got the best of me, and what I wanted was to be loved by this man. It’s easy to make me love you: pretty much all you have to do is be nice. Al was nice to me, so I was nice to him. Because we were nice to each other, I figured it must be love even if he didn’t know it yet.

  What else could it be? He cooked up a big pot of mashed potatoes, made extra good with a stick of butter, lots of salt and heavy cream, which we then ate directly from the pot with a gigantic serving spoon. He grilled my steak the way I like it, medium rare, and he brought me coffee, two sugars and heavy cream. On my birthday, he came back from the grocery store with a carrot cake, a gallon of vanilla ice cream, an issue of Cosmo, batteries for my remote control. He gave bums on the street the change in his pocket. He picked up the empty beer bottles someone else left by the river. He drove my son to school and taught him how to ride a bike. Al wanted me to lock my doors, lock my windows, close the curtains. He programmed the numbers for the local FBI and Crime Stoppers into my cell phone because he knew how bad things happen, random things, tragic and heartbreaking, and he wanted me to be prepared. Twenty-two years before, Al’s only child, a boy of age five, died in an act too violent to imagine, too unpredictable to prevent. The man who murdered Al’s son was in prison, serving a sentence of twenty-six years to life. Every so often, he came up for parole, and Al, along with everyone else who loved that boy, wrote letters to the parole board, letters that included the shocking, the ugly, the graphic, the very simple facts; they wrote these letters with the hope that this guy would never be released.

  The facts surrounding this crime are shocking and ugly, tragic and painful, and the first time Al told them to me—on the couch, in his living room, in the dark—he recited them as if reading from a newspaper. The facts—the how and the where, the when and the who—came out of the part of him that thinks, that knows, that can repeat what it’s been told.

  But when Al tried to put the loss of this boy into words, what it meant, how he felt, he spoke in starts and stops. It was too big, too terrible, the pain never far from reach. He said he’s never known how to respond when someone asked him if he has any children. It’s an innocent enough question, one that should be easy to answer. But saying yes would inevitably lead to him revealing the circumstances of his son’s death, while saying no would be a kind of betrayal. Either way he answered felt uncomfortable and wrong,
but I don’t think that’s his fault. I don’t think there is a way that anyone could say I know exactly what you mean about something like this. Because you can’t.

  But then I don’t think saying I can’t imagine is right, either. Because though that sentiment may be more accurate, it’s also too cold. It leaves the other person alone with the unimaginable. The first time I listened to Al talk about his son, all I could think to do was squeeze his hand, all I could think to say was My God again and again until he said you have to let go, you’re going to break my fingers.

  When I asked my five-year-old son what do you think of Al? do you like Al? do you think he’s nice? the boy said he liked him.

  “But why?” I asked. “What do you like about him? Take your time. Think about it.”

  The boy said he didn’t need to think about it. “I like Al because when he goes places with us, and I have to go to the bathroom, I don’t have to go to the girls’ bathroom.”

  Al would be protective of my son. He wanted to know about the boy’s friends and their parents, who they were, what sort of people. He didn’t like to let my son loiter by himself in the toy aisle at Kmart or ride his bike alone, not even around the block, not even when I thought he was plenty old enough. The day I told the boy he could ride his bike solo to the park, he wasn’t gone thirty seconds before Al said he didn’t like it, he didn’t feel right, he was going to make sure that kid got there all okay. We climbed in Al’s Jeep, tracked the boy down, then stayed on his trail, following him to his destination like a pair of undercover cops.

  We would do this more than once.