I'm Sorry You Feel That Way
Page 18
Several years into our beautiful friendship, Al and I went to a wedding reception where, even though it was a cash bar, I got drunk, and I am not a graceful drunk, I’m not sly and articulate and able to conceal that I’ve been drinking.
The bartender was a former English composition student of mine—a kid who must’ve been happy with his grade, since he poured me three glasses of red wine for every one I paid for—and, pie-eyed, I started up, reliable as a Buick, asking Al wouldn’t it be nice to have someone living in the house who could fetch you a roll of toilet paper from the linen closet during times of emergency? Yes. Hadn’t the three of us become a family? Yes. What time did he want to come help me pack? He said he’d been thinking about it, he was thinking about it still, he’d think about it some more.
“Baby, you just take your time,” I told him. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The next morning, I woke up in Al’s bed, my contacts still in. I was wearing pantyhose, and my blue silk dress was bunched up around my armpits. My mouth tasted sticky, I was thirsty. There was a red splotch across my pillow. My head pounded, as if two little boys, one behind each eye, were clashing cymbals, and the room was spinning, and what was that red splotch?
At first I thought maybe I’d hurt myself somehow. Maybe it was blood from a head injury. But it smelled. Sour. Fermented. Like red wine.
I’d thrown up in bed.
I thought: I will never be more disgusting.
I thought: Didn’t Jimi Hendrix die from throwing up in his sleep? Didn’t he choke to death on his own vomit? I am lucky to be alive.
I thought about what I was (a sloppy drunk, a puker-in-bed, an obnoxious insecure egomaniac who cheated at Scrabble and believed a man could be nagged into falling in love) versus what I wanted to be (good, nice, normal, reasonable). I vowed if Al would let me move in with him, I would make a bigger effort to become all those things.
I thought: I barfed in bed. If Al sees this, he will never let me move in. Not in a million years.
He was snoring beside me. I flipped my pillow over and waited.
Hours passed before he stirred, stretched, before he slipped out of bed and headed to the bathroom. In the time it took him to wash his face, brush his teeth, and pee, I stripped the sheets, I had them soaking in the washing machine, I smoothed the wrinkles out of my blue silk dress. I got the coffee dripping, I pulled some chicken out to defrost for supper later, I was fluffing a feather duster across his windowsills.
“Whoa,” Al said sleepily when he saw me. “You’re ambitious this morning.”
I asked if he was impressed. I told him if he let me and the boy move in with him, it would always be like this. I said that letting us move in would be the best decision he’d ever make. It would be the best thing that ever happened to him. He would be so happy. I would see to it.
Okay, okay, he sighed. Sure, he said. Okay. Fine. Why not.
I said great. “You won’t regret it,” I told him. Then I excused myself, I went to the bathroom, I threw up some more.
It was, of course, terrible.
We argued. Not a lot, but enough, and when we did, it was bad enough to leave me breathless, wondering why I’d ever given up my apartment.
We never raised our voices. We never raised our hands. We never fought about the things one might consider worth fighting about. Not God. Not money. Not sex. Any one of our arguments was so petty and absurd it was hard to believe we were having it.
We argued about whether or not eating hot soup in the summer makes you feel hotter (he says no; I say yes). We squabbled about whether or not purchasing holiday wrapping paper to wrap Christmas presents in is a waste (I say no; he says why can’t it be whatever wrapping paper you have on hand, even if it’s got canoes and mallard ducks on it, isn’t the fact that it’s wrapped what counts?). We quarreled about whether or not ketchup is an appropriate condiment to slather over a charcoal-grilled porterhouse steak (I say don’t you dare ruin that piece of meat; he says try and stop me).
Once, a friend of ours asked me what we were bringing to the potluck. When I said green bean casserole, she said bleck. I thought her response was rude, Al said it was just honest, and for hours, we bickered about whether it was better to be polite or honest.
One argument began innocently: as a discussion about the identity of the Most Beautiful Girl in the World. While we offered up possibilities—Lana Turner or Veronica Lake; Wilma Flintstone or Betty Rubble; Stevie Nicks or Linda Ronstadt—Al stirred the enormous pot of chili he’d made to take on his camping trip. He’s proud of his chili, he believes it’s the best chili you’ll ever have because it’s the best chili he’s ever had. He figured he’d freeze this batch until time came for it to bubble over a campfire. He had an industrial-sized plastic Miracle Whip container to put his chili in, courtesy of an elementary school lunch lady he knew.
Al and some of his friends took this camping trip every year, and though I myself didn’t care to sleep on rocky ground in a tent or pee in a hole where thousands before me have peed, I didn’t begrudge him going. In fact, I always sort of looked forward to it, the space it provided, the chance it gave us to take a break from each other. Al looked forward to it because he liked to sit in a lawn chair drinking beer, fishing for trout, and eating his chili.
We took our debate into the living room where the television was on some talk show. Renée Zellweger happened to be a guest that day, and before changing the channel, Al said Renée Zellweger was the Most Beautiful Girl in the World.
I urged him to put some more thought into his choice for Most Beautiful Girl in the World. I said the only reason he said Renée Zellweger was because he’d just seen her on television. I thought he needed to think about it a little more. It was an important title to bestow. I smiled at him, raised my eyebrows, tossed my hair.
Think carefully, I said.
Take my choice, for example, I said. I gave my choice a lot of thought.
Al asked who was my choice for Most Beautiful Girl in the World; I said it was me.
He said he was sorry I felt that way.
Something clicked. Something turned. Something crashed. A moon rock to the earth. A bird against a window. A car into a building. We were arguing. One of us said why do you have to be so emotional while the other said why don’t you have any emotions. One of us said you’re hotheaded; the other said you’re cold-hearted. We both said we were just kidding, why do you have to get so mad; we each said the other wasn’t funny. One of us said you’re full of shit. One of us said fuck you.
It was me.
Al returned to the kitchen where he ladled hot chili into the plastic Miracle Whip container; I followed him. One of us said you’re really immature. The other said no, you are.
Then we started to argue about the boy. The day before, the boy had been running in the backyard, he tripped and fell, gouging open the meaty part of his palm on a tiki lamp. I thought he needed to go to the emergency room, he needed stitches; Al thought I was overreacting, just squirt Bactine on it, some Neosporin, wrap it up, he’d be fine.
I turned out to be right. I reminded Al of this.
He tightened the lid on his chili. He put it in the freezer. He said, “I don’t have to listen to this. I don’t have to take this baloney from you,” and I said, “Well, I don’t have to take this baloney from you,” then he walked away, and it didn’t take long for a basic scientific principle to do its thing: The lid that trapped the hot air inside the container blew off. The freezer door blew open. Chili blew out. Everywhere. Inside the freezer, down the refrigerator, across the floor. It even splattered on the counter, the cupboards.
I’d never been happier. The single red kidney bean sticking to, then falling from, the ceiling pleased me more than if I had been proclaimed Most Beautiful Girl in the Universe.
There was silence. Silence while I helped him clean it up, and silence while we went to the store and bought more hamburger, red kidney beans, canned tomatoes. When one of us did finally speak, it wa
s to say do we have any more onions at home, while the other said we better get some more green peppers. We did not discuss the fight we’d just had. Neither one of us said what was that? or that was pretty ridiculous or why? why would we talk to each other like that?
I don’t think any of our fights were ever about green bean casserole or Renée Zellweger. How often, looking back, would the timing of our arguments match up with the mailman bringing a letter from a collection agency planning legal action addressed to me or a letter from the parole board announcing another hearing addressed to Al? How often would I, for seemingly no reason at all, get it in my head that Al secretly thought I was a moron? How often would Al, for seemingly no reason at all, become distant and withdrawn?
And when our squabbling becomes bickering that grows up to be arguing about the position of the toilet seat or hair in the sink, about clothes on the floor and don’t-talk-to-me-like-I’m-an-idiot, isn’t one of us saying, Good God, you’re irritating, while the other says, Oh really? What are you? Not-irritating? And when we’re ignoring each other or when we’re talking to each other in a hyperbolically polite way—After you! Oh, I couldn’t, please, after you!—isn’t it true that one of us is really saying, I’m afraid you don’t love me, while the other is saying, I’m afraid I do. How long will it take for us to trust each other with our biggest secrets?
More than a year or even two. Maybe ten million. Maybe more.
People are always surprised to learn Al and I have a cat. The day after our fight about me versus Renée for the title of Most Beautiful Girl in the World, two days after the boy gouged open his hand on the tiki lamp, we adopted a kitten, dainty, small-boned, green-eyed. She’s a striped tabby but her coat is overlaid with the markings of a calico, like she wanted to be both or like she couldn’t make up her mind about who or what she wanted to be.
When we’re with colleagues at a cat-talker’s dinner party, we don’t say anything about our cat, how strange she is, how fretful, fearful, skittish. How she lives in the basement. How she won’t come upstairs, preferring instead to lurk in dark corners, to tremble in dark places. But if you go to her, if you approach her, gently, patiently, on her territory and on her terms, she can be very sweet, purring and weaving between your legs while you sort or fold laundry. Pets reflect their owners’ neuroses, and what this cat reveals about me and Al is obvious.
In the spring of 2006, after serving twenty-six years of his sentence, the man who murdered Al’s son was released from prison. Seven months later, a sixteen-year-old girl would go missing. This man would be the last person seen with her. This man would draw a detailed map that showed police exactly where they could find her body.
When the phone rang—it would be a reporter calling to ask Al for a comment on this tragedy—he was in the basement. He’d been sorting laundry. He sorts by color, not by fabric. For years, I tried to convince him that just because a towel is blue and a pair of jeans is blue and a silk dress is blue, it doesn’t mean they should be washed together in hot water. It was a losing battle, one I accepted after I realized I could do the laundry myself or I could shut up and thank him for getting it done. I went to the basement not to ask did he need help folding but to ask who was that on the phone.
That’s when he told me about the girl, about how after she’d gone missing, her dad went looking for her. It was her dad who found her empty car—even before the police did—parked alongside a stretch of dark country road, her purse and cell phone on the ground beside it. Al said he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl’s father. Al said he had a pretty good idea what her father was going through, Al said he knew something about how her father feels, and that he was sorry. Al said he was terribly sorry.
I put my hand in his. He squeezed my fingers. I thought I knew something about sadness, about depression, about feeling bad, but it turns out I know nothing. Al and I were sitting on the floor in the basement, piles of dirty laundry all around us, while a boy we loved was alive, safe, playing video games in his room, and a cat was purring, flicking her tail and weaving herself between our bodies. Al and I had been together ten years. I wanted us to be together at least ten million more.
Acknowledgments
I owe these people a big thanks: My agent, Randi Murray. My editor, Amy Einhorn. Sarah Vowell. Rebecca Howell and the Kentucky Women Writers Conference.
I’m much obliged to Minnesota State University, Mankato, for giving me release time and financial support; this is a wonderful place to work. My colleagues in the MFA program are terrific. Here’s a special shout-out to Rick Robbins, who graciously and without complaint read draft after draft after draft; to Roger Sheffer, who is, hands down, the most careful and enthusiastic reader in the universe; to Candace Black and Dick Terrill, who offered encouragement; and to Terry Davis, Mick Jagger to my Keith Richards, who insisted I keep going, reminding me there’s really no other choice.
Thanks to the following editors of journals where versions of some essays first appeared: Nate Liederbach of Marginalia; Brad Roghaar of Weber Studies; Joe Mackall of River Teeth; and Sam Ligon of Willow Springs.
I’m lucky there are people who’ve got my back: Al Learst. My brothers. My dad. Jessica Smith. Nate and Dawna Vanderpool. Jeremy Johnson. Nate Liederbach. Elijah and Korie Johnson. Tyler Corbett. Danielle Starkey. Brandon Cooke. Nathan Wardinski. Luke Rolfes. David Clisbee. Jason Benesh. Seth Johnson. Ryan Havely. Greg Nicolai. Melanie Rae Thon.
I’m lucky to have a son. That boy is the best part of my world.
About the Author
Diana Joseph teaches creative writing in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato.