by Gayla Twist
There is a knock at the door so loud that it startles the book out of my hands, and it falls onto the floor. It’s an angry knock, not some neighbor-stopping-by-to-borrow-a-cup-of-sugar-at-ten-o’clock-at-night kind of knock. I realize as I get up that I’m a little sloshed. Not super drunk or anything, but my makeshift martini has definitely softened the sharp edges of the world.
Using the peephole, I check to see who’s out there. Just as I suspected, it’s Elliot. And he’s brought that stupid Elizabeth’s Conspiracy gift basket with him. I let out a sigh so deep that I feel like it’s emanating from my soul. If I just do nothing, how long will it take him to give up and go away?
I guess he somehow senses I’m behind the door because he looks directly at the peephole and says, “Sue, open up. It’s me.”
I really need to get one of those chains for my door. Instead, I open it a crack with my foot braced behind the door so he can’t just barge in. “What do you want?”
Elliot looks thoroughly annoyed. “Sue! What the hell?” he bellows. “Why did you take off like that? I looked like a total wad! The waitress made me pay for the champagne!”
I restrain myself from saying that he does not need my help to look like a total wad. I can’t quite tell if he knows the jig is up and he’s trying to bluff his way out of it or if he seriously thinks I took off, leaving him there for no reason.
Lifting the gift basket, he shoves it toward the door. “Look, I brought your birthday present. You forgot it.”
I don’t know what compels me, but I open the door another few inches and take the basket. I know that gifts create obligations, and that’s what he’s trying to do, but it’s too ingrained in my DNA that I have to be gracious about a gift, even a wildly inconsiderate gift.
But no. I’m not going to be that person anymore. I can’t be that person anymore. There is a point where you reach the absolutely, very last straw. So I straighten my spine and say, “For the hundredth time, Elliot, I'm allergic to this crap. What does that say about you as a boyfriend that you keep giving me gifts that make me break out in a rash?”
Elliot is truly confused. I mean, he’s not faking it. He seriously has no idea. “You're allergic to Elizabeth's Conspiracy? Since when?”
Feeling beyond exasperated and in no mood to explain something that I’ve explained dozens of times before, the last time being less than an hour earlier, I cut to the chase and say, “Elliot, we've got to break up.”
This completely throws him. His mouth practically falls open. “What? Why?”
“Because you're an asshole. And you're cheating on me.”
Elliot reacts like he’s just discovered a cobra in a basket, which is some pretty bad acting. “What? I'm not cheating on you! That's crazy. Where would you come up with something like that? Sue, I love you.”
Nope, I’m not buying it. I give him a steady glare and say, “Fine, if you didn't cheat on me, prove it.”
I see a subtle smirk flit across Elliot’s face. He is supremely confident that he can squirm out of this situation, and it’s really annoying. “No problem. What do I have to do?”
I give him the death glare. “Drop your pants.”
Elliot is completely caught off guard by this request. He stares at me for several seconds while his brain maps out all the different scenarios. For the longest time, all that comes out of his mouth is, “Uh...” Finally, his brain clicks on a plan of action, and he decides to go on the defensive. “I'm not dropping my pants!” he thunders, full of indignant self-righteousness. “Don't think I'm going to jump through a bunch of stupid hoops just to prove to you I didn't cheat!” A vein on his forehead is throbbing, and he’s really selling it. “I love you. My word should be good enough.”
I completely melt. “Oh, Elliot. I’m sorry,” I gush. “I should have known you'd never cheat. Here.” I extend a hand toward him. “Give me your phone. I'll call work and tell them to take the champagne off your credit card.”
Elliot can barely suppress a smug look of triumph as he pulls his cell phone out of his jeans and hands it to me. As I press a few buttons and put the phone to my ear, I see doubt creep across his face. The desire to have the cost of the champagne erased from his credit card was stronger than his common sense. He’s really starting to look nervous, so I hold a finger in the air to delay him from reacting. “It's ringing.”
Putting my hand over the mouthpiece, I say in an offhand way, “You know what's kind of funny? In the restaurant, you said your phone's battery was dead. But it seems fine now.”
Elliot opens his mouth to launch some kind of protest, but I put my finger back in the air to delay him again. Someone has picked up on the other end of the line. “Elliot?” chirps a peppy female voice.
Elliot is starting to panic as he realizes his giant gaffe, but I don’t care. I’ve got him right where I want him—over the coals and soon to be roasting. “Hi,” I say in an extra sparkly, friendly voice. “I found this phone and I don’t know who it belongs to.”
“Oh, I think you found my boyfriend’s phone,” the woman replies with a complete lack of suspicion.
I feel a glancing blow down the side of my face, and I realize, too late, that it’s Elliot smacking the phone out of my hand. It bounces across the ground.
It’s my turn to be caught by surprise. “Hey! What the hell?” I demand. “Why’d you do that?”
Elliot regains his composure, lifts his chin, and says, “Because I wanted your complete attention.” Dropping to one knee, he reaches for my hand and says, “Sue, will you marry me?”
I am absolutely gob smacked. Over the course of my life, I have, from time to time, daydreamed about how the man that will one day be my husband will propose. To be honest, I’d always visualized a more tropical setting. And maybe a little champagne. But I never in a million years fantasized that the proposal would be a desperate ploy by some schlub to escape being caught cheating.
I gape at him for several seconds. He’s really reversed the tables, and it’s now my brain’s turn to play catch-up. I can’t think of what to say. My head is crowded with words, but I can’t remember how to get any of them out of my mouth. So instead, I yank my hand out of his, dart back into my apartment, and slam the door.
As I’m frantically throwing the locks, I can hear Elliot getting to his feet. Through the door he calls, “Was that a yes?”
Chapter 6
I am so insanely angry that I actually kick the tacky gift basket that is my supposed birthday present. The bottles and jars of foul-smelling crap burst from the brightly colored cellophane and distribute themselves around the room. It turns out that kicking something in anger will also do some damage to your foot, so I let out a yelp and limp around in a circle while silently cursing. “Why am I such an idiot?”
There was an architectural trend during the eighties in Chicago, and possibly throughout the Midwest for all I know, where apartment buildings and condos were built with no interior hallways. When I head out my door, I’m actually on a covered walkway outside. In a way, it’s nice because I have a big bay window in my living room, and in a way, it sucks because it’s frequently raining and/or snowing in Chicago, and the wind can really whip down the open passageways.
The bay window also makes it possible for creepy ex-boyfriends to think they still have access to my condo after I’ve locked them out. I can hear Elliot out there tentatively tapping on the glass. Fortunately, I have the curtains drawn. “Sue?” Elliot calls. “Come on. We have to talk about this,” he says in his most placating voice as if I am just being unreasonable.
“Go away!” I hear myself shouting. “I don't want to talk to you. Ever!”
“Come on,” he wheedles. “Don't be like that. Just tell me what you want.”
This request enrages me so much it’s almost laughable. How to explain to a clueless idiot like Elliot what I want? Gee, let’s think. To be treated nicely? That would be a start. To be with a guy who shows me a little consideration? That would also be helpful.
To be with a guy who is actually a grownup and not a baby-man attempting to be ironic in an ill fitting T-shirt? I know that sounds like a stretch, but there’s got to be one or two of them left in the wild.
But there’s no way to explain what I want to Elliot. The idea of being considerate of someone else doesn’t even show up on his radar. He actually thinks that he treats me well and that I should be grateful he’s dating me. I’m so angry, I’m trembling as I rip back the curtain and glare at him through the glass. “What I want?” I sputter, spit literally flying from my mouth. “What I want? There's no way in hell you could even come close to giving me what I want!”
I can tell by the look on Elliot’s idiot face that he’s about to say something stupid, so I cut him off by saying, “But I'll tell you what I don't want.”
This makes the jerk widen his eyes a little as he asks, “What?”
I snatch a heavy jar of cream off the floor by my feet and fling it at the window. It’s my own damn condo, so it’s an incredibly stupid thing to do, but that doesn’t stop me. I guess I throw it with some force because the window smashes and giant sheets of glass come crashing down. Elliot leaps back, almost flipping himself backward over the walkway railing in the process.
“I don't want peppermint foot cream!” I bellow. “Why the hell would I want my feet to smell like peppermints?”
Elliot is so surprised he’s cringing, not even bright enough to get out of the way of a tornado. His stupidity enrages me even more, so I grab a tube of something off the rug. “And I don't want peach apricot scrub!” I whip it at him. “It stinks!”
As the tube speeds toward him, he tries to deflect the scrub with his hand. It explodes in mid-air, splattering him with goop. “Jesus, Sue! Chill!”
Seeing my cheating ex with apricot scrub dripping from his lopsided Afro only incites me to pelt him with more toiletries. “And just so you know,” I say, scooping a large jar off the ground, “lilac bath salts smell like someone barfed up a birthday cake!”
I let the jar fly, and it bounces off his giant melon of a head. “Stop it, Sue! That hurts!” Elliot shrieks. He’s not angry. He’s not trying to defend himself. He’s just bewildered and confused. He has no idea why I might possibly be so upset with him that I’ve destroyed my own window and am pelting him with body lotions and bath salts.
I have another tube of cream loaded in my hand and ready to let fly, but I realize that no amount of rage is going to get through to him. He’s just not that self-aware. That doesn’t mean I’m not still angry, but it’s like shouting at a bad dog. He only has the vaguest memory of having taken a crap in my favorite pair of shoes. “You know what?” I let the tube fall from my hands. “I DO know what I want, Elliot.”
“What?” he asks, a little shakily.
“I want you out of my life. Forever.”
Elliot is somewhat bruised and covered in sickly sweet–smelling goop. He figures he’s the injured party and has the right to be upset, but he’s also probably worried that the next thing I chuck out the window might be a lamp directed at this head. “Fine!” he says, straightening himself up and trying to remember where he left his dignity. “Your loss!”
Elliot has stormed off, and it’s a good thing because the way I’m feeling, I really could have clocked him with a lighting fixture. Still, my anger hasn’t abated, and I stomp across the living room, especially furious with myself. “Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!” I scream. “Why am I such an idiot?”
“Wwwhoa!” My feet fly out from under me. I land hard on my back, the wind knocked out of me. “...Ow...” I groan, looking around to see what felled me. It’s the stupid self-help book I dropped when Elliot started pounding on my door.
I’m in pain, but seeing the book only reignites my fury. I have been reading dating advice books for years, and all they’ve ever gotten me is trapped in relationship after relationship with pathetic idiots like Elliot. And the damn books only reinforce staying with an asshole once you’re landed with one. They don’t ever tell you to ditch the schmuck. They don’t explain how to find a great guy. After years of extensive research, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that all dating advice books are a load of total crap.
Struggling to my feet, I snag the book and chuck it out the window. “There!” I shout, and a wave of triumph rolls over me. That felt great. I will never be the victim of some crackpot wannabe advice columnist ever again. Elated, I rush over to the section of my bookshelves designated for advice and snatch up another book. There will be no more of these obnoxious books in my life. “No more ‘I'm Okay, You're a Complete Dill Hole’!” I shout, throwing the book out the window. I grab another volume and look at the title. “No more ‘The Fools’!” This book also gets pitched.
I clamber for another book, and let me tell you, there are plenty. “No more, ‘He's Just Not That Into You, But He'll Sleep With You Anyway’!” I bellow, flinging it toward the gaping hole where a sheet of glass used to be.
As I’m reaching for another worthless piece of printed trash, my eyes alight on an ancient saber with a lanyard grip that I just paid off after having it in layaway for six months. I love this sword. Just holding it makes me feel very connected to my Chinese heritage. But I love destroying self-help books even more. With the weapon in hand, I yank my next victim off the shelf and toss the book into the air. “No more, ‘Women Like to Whine and Men Have a Penis’!” Using both hands, I bring the sword down, slicing through the book with a mighty “zwak!" A flurry of clipped papers flutters around the room.
I know I’m acting like a crazy woman destroying books with an antique sword, but it feels so good that I don’t care. I turn to the shelf to make my next selection. As I raise my sword in preparation of cleaving something new in twain, I catch sight of the blade. Was that small knick always there, or is it something I just added with my psychotic meltdown?
I definitely want all the self-help books out of my life, but I’m not willing to destroy a beautiful piece of history to do it. I carefully replace the sword on the wall. All the adrenaline drains out of me while I do it. Suddenly, I’m very tired and more than slightly embarrassed by my behavior. I fling myself onto the couch with a "whumph!” I’m a little less coordinated than I should be, and I smack into the bookshelf behind the couch, causing all the volumes above me to quiver and dance out of line. I’m normally quite the perfectionist about my books. I like to keep them aligned on the shelves with straight edge precision. But the hell with it, I can always fix the shelves tomorrow, after I’ve eradicated every single relationship advice book from my condo. “I'm done with all of you!” I yell at the books as they sneer down at me.
I slump backwards on the couch with a little too much determination to relax and end up whacking my head on the bookshelf. “Ouch!” I wail, clutching my noggin as the shelf shakes for a second time. I close my eyes and add pressure to the point of pain, waiting for it to fade.
Something feels wrong, and I open my eyes only to realize that one of the books on the very top shelf has loosened from its friends and is teetering on the edge. “Crap,” is all I have time to think before gravity takes over and the book plunges toward my head. I catch part of the tile as the hardcover missile targets me. The Art… registers in my brain before I’m seeing stars.
Chapter 7
“Hello? Sue?” a female voice calls from outside my broken window. “It's Dahlia. What's going on in there? Should I be calling 911?”
I’m sitting on the couch reading while clutching an ice pack to my head where I got clocked with the book. I look up as my neighbor Dahlia swipes back the curtain, her eyes darting apprehensively around my living room. She’s scared, but she’s trying to hide it. I don’t know Dahlia super well, but I can tell from the meticulous way she dresses that she doesn’t like feeling out of control, and finding my mutilated corpse in a puddle of blood would probably put a damper on her day. “Please tell me you're not dead in here. I really hate a mess,” she says.
Dahlia is wearing dark r
ed lipstick that would never dream of smudging beyond the confines of her full lips, a midnight blue silk blouse (without a wrinkle) that’s unbuttoned down to the bra line, and a gray pencil skirt that perfectly hugs her slightly curvy hips. I’m sure if I could see her feet, I’d find they are clad in a pair of sling-back stilettos. She’s very professional but with a strong undercurrent of feline sexy. A style and attitude I could never pull off in a million years.
I look up from my reading. “Hey, Dahlia. No, I'm alive.”
Through the window, Dahlia peers about the room again, sighs a little with relief, and then looks annoyed. “Why are there toiletries and self-help books everywhere out here?”
“I broke up with my boyfriend,” I tell her.
She nods. “That explains it.”
I unlock the door, and Dahlia enters my living room like a finicky cat trying not to step in a puddle. “And you're okay?” she asks.
I think about it for a moment and then say, “I am, actually.”
Still concerned, Dahlia gestures toward the ice pack. “Did he assault you or something?”
“No.” I let out a small laugh to show I really mean it. “A book fell off the shelf.”
Using only two fingers, and with obvious distaste, Dahlia picks up a sticky tube of something off the floor. “So you've decided you're going to stop bathing and reading self-help books?” She raises both eyebrows.
“No.” I’m firm on this. “I'm going to keep bathing. I just don't enjoy smelling like a baby's ass.”
She shrugs, as if that much is obvious. “Who does?”
Using the toe of one of her pointy sling-back shoes, Dahlia nudges a portion of the cleaved book. “And the self-help books?”