Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Dungeons & Dragons

by Shelly Mazzanoble

  me: Well, things will be just fine with Bart. I don’t think we need any help from your paperback preachers, thanks anyway.

  judy: Knock on wood. I just thought you’d like this book because it’s about fitness and you two seem to like that stuff.

  me: It references fitness in the title, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t about how to flatten your abs in six easy steps. Now, those books I would read.

  judy: Maybe it is about flattening your abs. You’ll have to read it and find out.

  me: I won’t. I’m much too busy henpecking, belittling, and emasculating Bart to read a book.

  judy: Do you think Bart will still like you after living with you in your natural habitat?

  me: What do you mean still like me? Ever think he’s the one who should be worried?

  judy: No.

  me: Well, maybe he should be. Once at his house he left out a whole carton of milk for two days! I went there to walk Sadie while he was playing D&D and I thought she had died. Like died on the heater or something. It smelled that bad. Poor dog couldn’t get out of the house fast enough. So I tossed the milk, right? And then he got all pissy the next day because he was out of milk and couldn’t make a smoothie. Who does that?

  judy: I don’t know. I would think yogurt would be much better in a smoothie.

  me: No. Who leaves dairy products out for two whole days?

  judy: Men do that. There’s something in their genetic code that prevents them from reopening cupboard and refrigerator doors once they close.

  me: What a waste. It’s almost as bad as the trail of baby powder he leaves from the bathroom to the bedroom. Once Sadie must have stepped in it and walked all over the house. I came over to what looked like the set of Paranormal Activity 3! It was terrifying!

  judy: You need to soften your start-up.

  me: Excuse me?

  judy: Solve the solvable problems by softening the start-up. Didn’t you read that book by John Gottmann?

  me: John who?

  judy: Oh my God. He’s a brilliant marital psychologist. And he’s local! He teaches at the University of Washington.

  me: Oh, well then, I’ll just go visit him during office hours and ask how I can teach my thirty-something-year old boyfriend that moving piles of discarded newspapers and junk mail from the kitchen table to the coffee table doesn’t constitute cleaning.

  judy: Wow. You’re really uptight. I have no idea where you get that from.

  me: Oh, please. Weren’t you the one who had us living in fear of little pieces of paper? God forbid I tore something out of my notebook and left a little bit of fringe on the carpet.

  judy: That’s because you and your brother used to tear up months worth of newspaper to use for New Year’s Eve confetti. I was still finding those scraps when you left for college.

  me: You mean the cleaning lady was finding them. Speaking of which, I need to find one.

  judy: Or you could create a shared meaning experience.

  me: Here we go.

  judy: In Gottmann’s The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work—

  me: Again, not married.

  judy: Fine. For making cohabitation work. You need to create rituals and traditions around housekeeping. Maybe after he sweeps the living room floor he gets a cupcake.

  me: Ew, Mom! That sounds like I’m moving in with a six-year-old! I will not bribe Bart with baked goods! He should see the mud he tracks in from walks with Sadie and sweep it up. With or without the promise of a cupcake.

  judy: By establishing traditions around basic household tasks you’ll in turn be celebrating each other’s roles.

  me: I fail to see how getting cupcake crumbs on a newly swept floor will celebrate my role.

  judy: If your role is a controlling naghead then it might.

  me: Naghead?

  judy: You might want to at least learn how to make repair attempts. You know, acknowledge the things he does correctly before you jump all over him to wipe down the bathroom mirror.

  me: It’s true. There are times when I’m afraid living together will make us parodies of ourselves. Like all of a sudden we’ll become a stereotypical sitcom couple. When did I care about fixing the bed and not using the guest towels? When did I get guest towels? I don’t want to become that woman!

  judy: Yeah, I don’t blame you. She sounds like a real pain in the ass. But rest assured. You don’t have to resolve your major issues in order for your marriage to thrive.

  me: We are not married! And I hardly think leaving chin hair in the sink after you shave is a major issue. It’s more of a courtesy issue.

  judy: Would it kill you to have some Clorox cloths under the sink? Just make wiping the sink basin part of your routine.

  me: It’s not my chin hair, Mom! And why do you know so much about this book. Did you read it?

  judy: Honey, I’ve been married for more than forty years. You think it’s all love notes on the coffee machine and romantic nights watching Law and Order SVU?

  me: I can’t even fathom how romance fits into that, but then again, I don’t want to know. It’s you and dad we’re talking about.

  judy: You could learn a lot from us. But probably even more from John Gottmann. I’m downloading something to your Kindle right … now. Isn’t technology great?

  Here’s the story of a lovely pair of brown suede wedge heels; a girl who was obsessed with them; a pit bull who was also obsessed with them; and a boy who was about to feel very, very bad.

  One night, I met Bart and his friend Sean out for drinks and Mexican food. It was a beautiful night, clear and warm, and the forecast showed zero chance for precipitation. This is what I like to call a “fancy shoe night.” The weather cooperates, I don’t have far to walk, and my pedicure is still looking good. Yes, the stars had aligned.

  Fancy shoes are special shoes. Special because I paid an arm and a leg for them. (Actually, that’s an idiom that doesn’t work here. Why would I give a leg for a pair of expensive shoes? Kind of a rip-off, don’t you think? Maybe an arm and an ear?) Anyway, I got them at Bloomingdale’s in New York and they are truly fabulous. Buttery brown suede ankle boots with a wedge heel. They’re definitely “top shelf” shoes, meaning I keep them in their shoebox on the top shelf of my closet. Can you see where this is going?

  So I wore my special boots and felt special all night because of it. Bart marveled at how tall I was and Sean said my “ginormous heels” make me look like a centaur and I, for some reason, took that as a compliment. I felt that special. We filled up on guacamole and Mexican beers and then took it across the street to a bar known for their delicious, creative cocktails and truffle popcorn.

  After we parted ways with Sean, Bart and I headed home, tired and happy. And really buzzing. I don’t do cocktails very often, and when I do, I usually lean toward the kinds that taste like bubble gum or bananas or butterscotch Life Savers. You know—the kinds you drink a lot of without realizing how many you drank? Perhaps that’s why that night I left the boots on the bedroom floor and not wrapped in their shoe bags and stowed neatly in their box on the top shelf. The next morning through my sleepy haze, I woke up to the smell of pancakes and vegetarian bacon. (Don’t judge: It’s delicious.) Even with the dull ache in my head and my lower extremities knotted up with the charley horses I got from my chubby cat taking up three quarters of the bed and forcing me to sleep on the diagonal, I was feeling pretty happy. Ahh, life was good!

  As I was enjoying my breakfast, I heard Bart mumbling from the bedroom. I figured correctly that he was talking to Sadie.

  “Umm, Buddy?” he called. “You might want to come in here.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “But stay calm.”

  My first thought was that Sadie had finally snapped and killed Zelda while we were sleeping. But Zelda jumped out from behind the love seat and landed an ambush attack that resulted in a four-inch scratch down the back of my calf.

  My second thought was that Zelda had killed Sadie. What an awful mes
s that would be. That thought was almost confirmed when I saw Bart standing over a limp and cowering Sadie.

  “Oh my god, is she okay?” I sobbed. “Did Zelda take her eyes? I’m so sorry, little puppy head! Auntie is so sorry!”

  Bart held what very well could have been an electrocuted animal in his hand. “Um, she’s okay, but, err, these aren’t.”

  He held the deformed object out to me.

  “Ew!” I shouted. “A dead thing! No! Wait, is that … oh my god, oh no!”

  “I’m really sorry, Buddy.”

  Yes. Yes, it was. To be fair, it wasn’t a “these” it was a “this” and I found that to be much worse. It was my left boot and it was torn to shreds. Part of the heel was chewed through. The suede was sopping wet with dog spit. The sole had been gnawed from heel to toe. And it happened in front of the right boot. How would it ever recover from seeing that?

  “Please tell me Sadie pulled that thing from the jaws of a displacer beast,” I said fighting to remain calm. “And I will herald her a hero. Otherwise, look for her profile on Petfinder in about eight minutes.”

  “Um …”

  “No, no, no!”

  “I’m so sorry,” Bart said, backing away from me. “I don’t know what happened. Sadie never chews shoes.”

  “Well, clearly she does!” I yelled.

  Sadie sighed deeply and put her head down, covering her eyes with her paw.

  “Don’t pull that remorseful crap with me, dog! You’re a bad, bad dog! How dare you? Those were my favorite!”

  If you think you’ve seen this scenario play out in a very similar way, you’re right. It happened to Carrie on Sex and the City with Aidan’s dog, Pete. They broke up, I reminded Bart later.

  “Because the dog ate her shoe or because Aidan was a wuss?”

  Well … maybe a combination of both.

  But back to the shoe at hand. Seriously, I was mad. Like way more peeved than I ever thought I could get at an animal. In fact, I couldn’t get that mad at an animal, so I directed it all toward Bart. Sure, it was Sadie who ate the shoe, but she’s his dog! He adopted her. Never mind that it was me who found her at the shelter, guilted him into fostering her, and later tricked him into adopting her by making him think the paper he was signing was just a rabies vaccination. (He was going to do it anyway, no biggie.)

  The brutal assault happened while he was awake! Probably while he was watching Superman 2 or Googling where to find shaved noodles in King County or preparing me breakfast in bed or any number of idle things instead of watching what his dog deemed appropriate for chewing.

  “I gave her a bone,” Bart said. “I thought she was chewing that.”

  “Does Manolo Blahnik make bones?”

  “I have no idea what that means, but I’m guessing no?”

  And that is how we celebrated the eve of our cohabitation.

  “I can’t believe you’re living with that dog,” my brother said over e-mail a few days later. “Mom said she ate your expensive shoes and when she was younger she ate a cat. You are either crazy or really desperate to have a boyfriend.”

  “Allegedly,” I wrote back. “On the whole eating-a-cat thing. Sadie says it was self-defense. The shoe incident is true. And I will not comment on your ‘desperate to have a boyfriend’ accusation.”

  Needless to say it was a rough few days adjusting to our new living state. The Great Shoe Massacre was just the beginning.

  The day after, two giant men from Boston boxed, wrapped, and taped all of Bart’s worldly possessions in just under two hours and thirty-three minutes and carted them off to a storage facility in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood for an indeterminate amount of time.

  “Wow, Georgetown,” I said, regarding the neighborhood filled with big old brick warehouses and a growing community of artists. “Your stuff is so hip and trendy now.”

  “You know what they say,” he said. “D&D minis and comic books move in, the hipsters and restaurants will follow.”

  It wasn’t just Bart’s comic books and minis in those boxes. It was his board games and photo albums from the Peace Corps, the tiki bar decorations we got at Big Lots, the Walter Payton-signed Wheaties box, and the backyard horseshoes game. Almost everything near and dear to him. We spent weeks packing up his stuff and I was feeling terrible he’d have to give up so much, even temporarily, even for a good cause, even if it meant we’d save his rent plus utilities every month and put that toward a house. That is, until we got to the cobalt dishes.

  Bart’s had the cobalt dishes since he was in college. They’ve been boxed and moved to sixteen different apartments. Sixteen! And no, they’re not family heirlooms. Unless Bart’s related to JCPenney.

  “You’re taking great care in wrapping stuff that’s just going to Goodwill,” I said when I found him using the entire Arts & Leisure section to coddle a soup bowl.

  “Oh,” he said, staring at his papered bowl like it was a gift of myrrh and frankincense. “I thought I’d take this with me.”

  “With you to Goodwill?”

  “No, with me to your house.”

  “Oh.”

  All right, I thought to myself, sensing a red-flag situation. Tread lightly. This is a touchy situation all around. He’s the one being displaced here. I’ve lived in my condo for more than a decade! That’s longer than he’s lived in Seattle! If the guy wants to bring a soup bowl, he should bring a soup bowl! It’s his house, too!

  “If that’s the bowl you like to eat soup out of, it should come,” I announced, feeling proud like a fourth grader who just spelled poultry correct.

  Judy was wrong. I can live in peace and harmony with another living being. A human being, even.

  He cocked his head to the side and looked at me like I suddenly was a fourth grader. “Not just the bowl. The whole set. It’s good stuff. I’ve had it for years!”

  That’s the difference between the two of us, I guess. To me, had it for years implies it’s time to go. To him that just means sturdy and irreplaceable.

  “But I have perfectly good plates and bowls,” I said. “And matching coffee mugs!”

  Chill … it’s just some soup bowls! Besides, you’ll probably get all new stuff in a year or two. Who cares what you eat off?

  “It’s just,” I continued, “we don’t have a lot of room. So maybe we stick with just one set of dishes for now.”

  Bart looked at the soup bowl he cradled in his arms and then to its cobalt blue brothers and sisters. “But why can’t this be the one set we stick with?”

  Choose your battles! Is this really worth it?

  I thought of dinner parties and the placemats I bought that complement the colors of my dishes and how I have ten of everything because if there are more than ten people at once I invoke my right to use paper plates. (Not like plain old white paper plates—but nice, decorative ones you get at party supply stores.) I couldn’t figure out what the heck was so appealing about his set of plates. He didn’t even have a full set.

  You know why people like creating D&D characters so much? Because you can filter out the bad parts of your own personality. And yes, you have bad parts. Maybe they’re not all documented in a book, but still. They’re there. When we create a new character we design their backstories, pick their personalities, quirks, family histories, and mannerisms. If you don’t like something you can erase it. My characters are flawed to an extent—they’d be horribly boring otherwise—but they don’t have real imperfections. They probably never sweat the small stuff. They hardly ever have meltdowns. They’re not OCD and anal about things like how to properly stack the colanders in the cupboards or how to fold dishtowels. They probably don’t even get morning breath or digestive issues. Basically, they’re Victoria’s Secret models, which means they’re also incredibly depressed and envious of those like me who consider a one-pound bag of M&Ms a perfectly reasonable dinner. Suckers!

  “You don’t have enough,” I said. And it was true. He only had four dinner plates and three salad plates.
And we may never find that one soup bowl under all that newspaper.

  Thankfully he saw my reasoning but wasn’t totally convinced he wanted to give them up completely.

  “I’ll put them in storage,” he decided.

  “But why?” I whined.

  Oh, I know. Just let the stupid dishes go to storage. But I couldn’t help it. Ideally the next time we saw any of this stuff was when we move into a brand-new (to us) home. Even I’ll want to replace my beloved dishes when we get there.

  “Maybe our kids will need them when they go to college,” he said.

  I smiled, waiting for him to laugh, but he just stared at me. Oh, wow. He’s serious. And how am I supposed to argue with that? At once it’s poignant and charming and reeks of the sentiment that we’ll be together at least long enough to populate the earth with a child that’s able to get into college. And at the same time we’re talking at minimum eighteen years from that very moment assuming I am currently with child (and I’m not, thank you; I’m a stress eater and moving is very stressful).

  “What makes you think our child would want dishes that are twenty-eight years old? I mean, it’s a sweet gesture and all but maybe we could celebrate them getting into college by buying new stuff.”

  “Or maybe they’ll like the idea that these are the same dishes Mommy and Daddy used to eat off of. Besides, it’s economical.”

  I sighed. “Fine. The dishes go to storage,” I said, wondering how much it would cost to get those giant men from Boston to lose the box marked “dishes.”

  After that, Bart and the remaining 5% of his stuff sat in my living room. The living room I had lived in for thirteen years.

  Alone.

  I told you. When I plant roots, they stick.

  “You know what’s going to happen,” Bart said flipping through the saved shows on my DVR. “We’re going to argue so much about those dishes that they’ll become this huge iconic figurehead in our relationship. We’ll dredge them up every year and argue about what we should do with them and because we’ll never agree we have to keep them.”

  “And really the dishes are just a symbol for something that is dreadfully off in our relationship,” I added. “Like when I say ‘why did you keep those stupid dishes’ I’ll really be saying ‘why didn’t you roll over our 401(k) so we could retire, damn it?’ ”