The Journal of Best Practices

by David Finch

  Kristen agreed that Delemont would make a good choice and then revealed her selection. “I’m going to ask Meredith,” she said.

  Kristen had been close friends with Meredith since college, when they became sorority sisters. Meredith also had dark, wildish hair, though it was prettier than Delemont’s, and she had a big, booming laugh that I figured I’d be hearing a lot of. At least, I hoped I’d hear a lot of it. I’d gotten along great with Meredith the few times we’d hung out, when I only had to be some exceptional version of myself to get through the evening. But living with her would present an entirely new set of demands. Full-time demands. For starters, she spoke as fast as lightning. Were she to tell me something important as I snapped a green bean, I’d miss it completely. I also worried that she would get to know me and realize that she didn’t like me. Kristen dismissed the idea, but I had more concerns, none of which I voiced. Will I be expected to hang out with both of them all the time? What if Meredith needs time with Kristen when I need time with Kristen? What if they start an inside joke and they don’t let me in on it? What if Meredith takes huge dumps? Will I be forced to plunge her way out of it? Good God, I don’t want to know that about a sorority girl.

  A week later, we asked Delemont and Meredith if they’d be interested in living with us. Kristen’s conversation with Meredith went precisely like this:

  Kristen: “Dave and I are buying a house and you’re totally moving in with us!”

  Meredith: “Oh my God! Fun!”

  That was it. That was their entire discussion.

  Delemont and I took a different approach, belaboring the strategy and logistics as only engineers and lunatics would. Discussing geography over lunch one day, we used a french fry to trace a series of ketchup arcs that represented ideal, acceptable, and unacceptable distances from our respective hamburger and hot dog offices, which we then analyzed against real estate prices.

  It took some time to convince him, as there were plenty of cheap apartments within walking distance of his office. What ultimately sold him was the idea of living one last time with a group of friends.

  “I think it will be fun living together,” he said. “After living with my parents, some freedom will be nice. Just try to find something in this second ketchup arc.”

  A month later, Kristen and I found a three-story town house with two bedrooms and two full bathrooms upstairs, a beautiful kitchen, family room, and dining room on the main floor, and a full basement finished as an apartment. The location suited our commutes, so we arranged a visit with a real estate agent. Kristen fell in love immediately. She floated from room to room, lifted in reverie, suggesting who might sleep where and how we might arrange our new furniture, while I hunted for substandard craftsmanship and structural problems. We spent all of ten minutes in the house before Kristen announced, “This is the one. This is our home.”

  And so it was. We were thrilled. Everything about the house was perfect—even the walls were pristine. The rooms had been tastefully painted, and the upper floors had these great picture windows that looked out onto the large pond in the backyard, and into the woods beyond that.

  Kristen and I moved in a week before anyone else and felt at home right away. In the mornings, we’d open the windows in the breakfast nook and listen to the faint whispers of blowing leaves and wind chimes. Late in the afternoon, sunlight would pour in through the windows in the family room and spread across the rich oak floors, causing them to glow, illuminating the bottom of our dark leather furniture. Fifteen minutes would pass in an instant as I’d stand in one place, mesmerized, staring at the floor. Kristen had been right—this was our home.

  Then our friends moved in.

  I wanted to be easy to live with. Really, I did. If I ever end up on trial for being a pain in the ass, prosecution’s Exhibit A will be the two-page memorandum I circulated to our roommates before they arrived. It was Asperger syndrome in its purest form, delivered in four excruciatingly long and schizophrenic bullet points and an anxious half-page conclusion. The first two points essentially read Let’s have fun this year and Let’s remember that we’re friends—it’s best to keep the lines of communication open. The latter half of the memorandum read like this: On second thought, let’s not overdo it on the communication—it’s probably best to give each other plenty of space and Actually, let’s not overdo it on the fun, either. And don’t damage anything. I had intended to convey to my new roommates just how easy and comfortable our living arrangement could be, as long as we all adhered to a few simple guidelines—my guidelines.

  Delemont and Meredith were remarkably generous, saying only, “Does Kristen know you sent us this?” and “I think most of the guidelines in your memo go without saying.” The latter was probably a reference to my prohibition of major renovations and rowdy all-night parties. Everyone seemed to be on the same page. Almost.

  I’d asked our new roomies to refrain from hanging picture frames on “my pristine new walls,” which left a giant loophole for Delemont, who skirted my request by nailing a dozen frameless pictures of bridges around his room shortly after he moved in. “You said no picture frames,” he said, proudly extending a gigantic middle finger to me and my policies, and my rage ignited. Rather than confronting him directly, I spent several days bemoaning Delemont’s actions to anyone who would listen and being short and dismissive with everyone else. I was standing outside on the deck with Kristen when she decided she’d had enough of my moping.

  “Dave, I understand that you’re upset with Delemont and his nails, but can you please tell me why it’s a big deal to you?” she asked.

  “What can I say, Kristen? He’s completely fucking insane. Who nails pictures to walls? Pictures that he tore from a fucking calendar about bridges!”

  “Delemont does, I guess. But I still don’t get what you’re so angry about.” Meredith spotted Kristen and me from the kitchen and wandered out to join us.

  “Kristen, nails leave holes. The house that you and I bought last month didn’t have nail holes; it was spotless. Now, in partial custody of a crazy person, it does. I didn’t put them there, you didn’t put them there. He put them there.” Great, now I look crazy. Can’t you just agree that this is a huge deal and that my anger is 100 percent his fault? He is to blame. He is to be questioned, not me! I’m the victim!

  “Right.” I knew she couldn’t see my point, and I wasn’t sure how to proceed with Meredith standing right next to me. Around her, I had always played the role of Kristen’s Charming Boyfriend—my favorite character—but that guy was nowhere to be found.

  “Are you guys talking about Delemont’s bridge pictures? What’s up with those?” Meredith asked.

  I couldn’t keep myself from ranting. “Look, what if we had a baby and he came over and pierced her ears? Wouldn’t you be pissed off?”

  “I’m not sure if I’d call that the same thing,” Kristen said.

  How is that not the same thing?!

  “I think you’ll be able to paint over the holes easily enough,” Meredith offered.

  That’s when I snapped.

  “Oh, that’s fucking great, Meredith! We’ll just paint over it. No problem, right? Grab a fucking hammer and let’s smash some walls! No big deal, right?” I snatched Delemont’s cigarette lighter from the patio table and chucked it into the grass below. “Fuck all this!” I reared back to kick the table, but then I saw Kristen’s face. I’d never seen her look more stunned or horrified. I didn’t even bother looking at Meredith. Suddenly, my head was spinning and I couldn’t take myself or them. I barged past Meredith, stormed inside, and went upstairs to our room.

  Fuck.

  I’d gotten that stunned What just happened?! look millions of times before—from teachers, from my parents, from friends—but never from Kristen. She had just caught her first glimpse of her fiancé going from zero to boiling in an instant, with no legitimate provocation. For more than a year—scratch that, for more than a decade—I had managed to conceal from Kristen my hardwi
red incapacity to deal with things like nail holes and anger. I had always kept myself in check around her, and then suddenly this happened.

  To Kristen, nail holes were no more significant than fingerprints on the doorknobs or dust on the carpet. To her, such intense anger about something so superficial was far more damaging than the holes themselves. But I didn’t get that. All I saw was her face during my outburst, her expression and speechlessness mirroring my desperation. For the first time, I didn’t feel like the life of her party, and I hated myself for it. Great. Nice job, shithead. Mer just got it, too—that’s perfect. Game over. You’re the freak now, and they’re all going to hate you. Happy? Happy, fucker? I just wanted to crawl into my old closet at my parents’ farmhouse, or push myself facedown through the halls to my old hiding spot behind the dining room door, and wait for the episode to leave my head. Fucking Delemont.

  Kristen eventually joined me on our bed to talk about what had happened. Had we known that I had Asperger’s, there wouldn’t have been so much confusion. We might have known that I tend to feel a greater emotional connection to inanimate objects, like walls, than I do to most people. We might have known that a sense of order and control was critically important to me. We might have known that my brain wasn’t built to tolerate reality when reality doesn’t match my expectations. Circumstances being what they were, however, an explanation was in order.

  “Everything okay?” she asked.

  I was too ashamed to look at her, so I stared at the wall and nodded.

  “Is this really about a few nail holes? Or is there something else?”

  “Today it’s about nail holes. But what about tomorrow? It might be wild parties, complete strangers driving motorcycles through our house. There’s no control. I can’t deal with this.”

  Kristen laughed. “So, today’s nails open the door for tomorrow’s home-obliterating motorcycle parties?”

  I couldn’t laugh with her because it made perfect sense to me. Of course! Duh. She tried explaining the difference between reacting and overreacting, saying, “It’s natural to get upset about things. I was just surprised by the intensity of your anger. You can get mad, but it’s not okay to get so mad that you lose control.” I understood her point, but I couldn’t imagine myself reacting any differently.

  “I don’t know what my problem is,” I said. “I just can’t handle this.”

  “Dave, I think you just need to relax. This whole year is about having fun. We just have to let some things slide. Okay?”

  I said okay, as I would hundreds of times that year when being told exactly the same thing. You have to relax. You have to pick your battles. Let’s just enjoy this. “Okay.” But how?

  The year progressed without any more nail holes, without the dreaded wild parties, and without any crazed motorcyclists cutting donuts on our immaculate oak floors. (It’s worth mentioning, however, that Kristen cut a deep four-foot scratch into the kitchen floor by accident, and unlike Delemont’s nail holes, there was no way to repair it without full replacement. Yet I managed to laugh that one off. Forgiveness is easy when you’re in love.)

  But that’s not to say that things got any easier. Meredith contracted conjunctivitis—pinkeye—and I quarantined her for days. It wasn’t a formal quarantine; she had simply gotten the hint that I was fearful of contamination when she saw my hand, protected by a latex glove, slipping a list of nearby hotels with phone numbers under her door after I found out that her eye was crusted shut with pus. “The antibiotics I’ve been given make it impossible to spread,” she insisted from behind her closed door. But come on. That’s just ridiculous.

  Worse than exposing my aversion to bacterial infections, however, was the fact that I never quite figured out how to cope with the social dynamics of the household. My failures in dealing with group situations began taking a toll on both Kristen and me. Spending time with Delemont or Meredith individually was never a problem. I knew that the key to hanging out with Delemont was always to talk sincerely and literally, to include tremendous detail, and to tell highly exaggerated jokes. I eventually learned how to manage Meredith as well. Details seemed to confuse her, as did having to repeat herself (“Wait, repeat which part? What was I saying again?”), so I learned to get to the point quickly and then activate hyper-listening in preparation for her astoundingly fast-spoken response.

  But these techniques for one-on-one engagement flew out the window whenever we convened as a group. Game nights, especially, were ripe for disaster. For weeks, we followed a particular sequence of games: Catch Phrase! followed by Scattergories, followed by Kristen and Meredith gossiping to each other while Delemont and I played Mastermind. I’m not sure if anyone else noticed this pattern, but I sure did; the routine had become as essential to game night as the games themselves. When someone suggested a new game, or when the group decided to change the sequence, I couldn’t handle it. Scrabble?! I would participate in the games, but my lifelong pattern of scowling and brooding in response to a change in routine would take hold of my behavior. I would grow silent and passively belligerent: We always start with Catch Phrase!, and they know that, so why are we mixing it up? Delemont might laugh about something, then look to me to keep the joke going, and I’d snub him by asking if we were still playing. “Well, are we? Because I thought this was game night. So, whose turn?” If someone asked me what was wrong, I’d say that nothing was wrong and then grow even quieter.

  The fun would plow forward without me, and my anger would turn inward: You’re only ruining this for yourself, dumbass. They think you’re a jerk, and they’re right. Kristen and our roommates would assume that I was angry with them, although I thought that I could trick them into thinking I was crabby about something else. They knew me better than that. “Dave, what’s the problem? Why are you pissed at everybody?” Kristen would whisper. I don’t even know.

  We’d end the evening early, Delemont and Meredith would return to their rooms, and Kristen would be disappointed with me—her sulking fiancé, who should have been enjoying the company of friends. “Is it impossible for you to have fun now?” she’d ask, and I’d tell her to forget it. The awkward evening, with all my mistakes, would play in a constant loop in my head for days until something would happen, for instance dropping my phone, and then I’d melt down. Sometimes I would sit in my car, furious at myself for making everything so hard, sobbing uncontrollably, slapping myself in the face over and over and screaming, “Fucking asshole! Fucking asshole!” But who hasn’t done that from time to time?

  The fact that I used to sit around in my car and punch myself in the face after a rough night of Scattergories should have been a clear indication that something was amiss. It wasn’t until years later, however, that I’d understand the underlying problem: I didn’t know how to go with the flow. As life skills go, adaptability is perhaps one of the most essential. Things happen unexpectedly or they don’t always break in your favor, and maintaining composure under those circumstances is often the only way to get through them with your sanity intact. Unfortunately, those of us with Asperger syndrome tend to be short on flexibility, just as we are on empathy and conversational give-and-take. (If you’re keeping score at home, that’s Asperger’s three, marriage zero.)

  This natural disinclination to go with the flow made living with me almost unbearable for Kristen and our roommates. Back then I was jeopardizing friendships with my emotional outbursts, but as time went on, the stakes became much higher. My inability to cope with real life and the resultant anger it fostered made me, if not an unreliable marital partner, then certainly an unpleasant one. And it didn’t take long for my status as a husband to erode from “unpleasant” to “unworthy,” all because of my inability to deal. Going with the flow was especially important after we had kids and life became truly unpredictable. As infants, Emily and Parker didn’t seem too concerned about my daily routine. My days amounted to a series of interruptions. As the kids grew, they took cues from our behaviors as to how they should react to th
ings, and as someone who lost his mind over hamburger buns, I was not a very suitable role model. With our children’s development at stake, it was more important than ever to learn how to minimize the damaging outbursts and behaviors.

  Fortunately, the kids and I had Kristen to show us how to roll with life’s punches and how to do it with a smile. “What can you do?” she’d say with a shrug, heating up a steamy shower at three A.M. if one of the kids was suffering a croupy cough. Almost as a matter of protocol, I’d insist that we head straight to the emergency room (just as I did whenever one of them bumped their knee or had a runny nose), and with wet hair clinging to the sides of her face and a toddler nearly asleep on her hip, she’d stop her gentle lullaby to comfort me, saying, “If it gets worse, we’ll go. But I think the cough sounds better, don’t you?”

  Kristen had expected our year living with Delemont and Meredith to be one of the happiest years of our life together—a dream that exploded in her face because of my failure to adapt. While someone else might have packed her things and left, Kristen didn’t give up on me. Instead, she handled it with her usual grace. Not gracefulness, not finesse, but authentic grace that she bestowed on me even though I hadn’t earned it.

  After our roommates moved out, it occurred to me that I had run out of opportunities to enjoy living with them. I apologized to Kristen for ruining the entire year and she shrugged it off. “This year was a disappointment, but then again, I didn’t know how challenging it would be for you.” Then her eyes brightened, and she added, “We’re getting married in a month, and then we’ll have lots of opportunities to enjoy things together. So let’s just relax and have fun.”