He proposed a couple of years later, after we’d graduated, when he was twenty-three and I was twenty-one. If you’re twenty-three or twenty-one and you tell me you’ve just gotten engaged, I will tell you that you’re insane and too young, because when I look at twenty-one- and twenty-three-year-olds now, they look like babies. But at the time, when I was twenty-one, I could not foresee any reason not to marry him. I pictured the timeline of my life ahead of me—inasmuch as a twenty-one-year-old can look at her future life, which is to say in hazy, imaginary terms—and saw no circumstance in which I’d want not to be married to him. Would I want not to be married in fifty years because we’d grow sick of each other? Would I want not to be married after we’d had kids and parenthood changed us? Would I want not to be married if we didn’t have kids? No, no, no. I would never want not to be married to him. I was sure.
Plus, come on, could there be someone better out there for me to find? No, again. And as preposterous as my confidence was on every other question, on this one I was right. I found the best person early. I got lucky.
Marrying John was not an attempt to get an A+ in relationships. It was both the rightest thing I’ve ever done and the thing that had the least to do with the question of “What is right?” This sounds like I’m giving cheesy advice, saying the right way to find love is to stop thinking and follow your heart. That’s not it. I mean, row your love-canoe down the river of dreams or whatever, but what I’m trying to say is that the evolution of a relationship is not something you can entirely control. Falling in love is not a matter of weighing pros and cons. Unlike other big life events—jobs, moves, homes—it’s not a thing you work toward like you’re seeking a personal-life promotion. You don’t pick a human being and go, okay, now we’re going to follow these steps and fall in love and reach the certain knowledge that we want to be together forever. I don’t care what the secret-to-love books and articles say, that’s not how it works. It wasn’t for us, anyway. We met. It happened.
The spontaneous existence of love where before there was none is the most insanely wondrous thing. It’s crazy magic. You might as well witness your hairbrush transforming into a talking owl right before your eyes.
* * *
We do disagree sometimes. But often when we fight, it’s not really fighting at all. It usually goes like this:
I, deeply unsettled by some existential horror but not willing to face and discuss the existential horror, pick a fight about something else. Often, I take this opportunity after John has benignly pointed out something I’m doing wrong. For example: I decide to reheat some leftovers in a Styrofoam container. As I put it in the oven, John says, “Hey, Styrofoam melts. Shouldn’t you put that food in a pan?”
I say something sarcastic to indicate I couldn’t possibly be wrong. (“Why would a restaurant put leftovers in a container that can’t be reheated? I know how an oven works.”)
John presents evidence to support his point, thinking he’s helping. (“Uh-oh, look—the Styrofoam is dissolving.”)
I lash out at John and accuse him of calling me stupid. (“WELL, THIS IS OBVIOUSLY SOME FAULTY STYROFOAM. AND MAYBE YOU COULD COOL IT WITH THE GLOATING.”)
John says he is not calling me stupid, and offers to help correct whatever is happening because of the thing I have done wrong. (“Okay, I’m just going to put out the fire in the oven.”)
I stomp off in a snit.
Fifteen minutes later, I come back and tell him whatever’s really bothering me. (“I’m sad that summer is almost over and seasons keep changing and the kids are getting big and soon they’ll leave us and I’ll miss them so much I’ll die.”)
John listens. I talk more. I flap my hands around in wild gestures; he watches. I exhale in a big huff, and he exhales, too, to match me.
Fifteen minutes after that, I’m in good spirits again.
* * *
When I am packing a suitcase and I’ve crammed every last rectangle of folded clothing into the bag and added shoes, makeup, a just-in-case-it’s-cold cardigan and a panicked last-minute backup outfit or two, and I’m mashing everything down as hard as I can, and I go from zero to psycho in a second because I can’t get the bag zipped, and I’m stomping on the bag and hammering at it with my fists, he calmly opens it, rearranges a few things, and zips it.
Sometimes he says exactly what pops into his head. On a visit to Augusta: Over dinner, my mother picked up some fancy little utensil—a silver fish knife or something—and held it up. “That’s pretty,” John said, dutifully offering a compliment. “Well, it’ll be yours one day,” my mom said. “When you’re dead?” John responded. He heard his words as they came out and immediately reddened, throwing his hands over his mouth. “Yes, when I’m dead,” she answered, as the rest of us laughed.
We went to celebrate our daughter’s birthday in her kindergarten classroom, where there was a tradition of letting the children climb up on the tables and have a dance party. The teachers put something innocuous on the speakers—“The Wheels on the Bus,” maybe. But before the music started, we looked over to see our girl, hands thrown over her head, doing a body roll and singing, “THIS GIRL IS ON FIIIIRE.” The teacher looked aghast. I looked aghast. John looked from the teacher to me, and, sensing my embarrassment, blurted, “I taught her that.” (He didn’t teach her that. I taught her that. We often danced in the kitchen at home.)
He is the dad who, when I feel myself losing my mind at the repetitive nature of homework—it’s spelling words on the green sofa all over again!—will take the stack of flash cards and the third grader and go out to the porch and tackle the addition tables until they are finished. He can supervise the cleaning of rooms without losing his patience. He can teach them how to ride a bike without trying to micromanage their every turn.
He is the person you call when you find a living or dead animal where it shouldn’t be, and he calmly wields the net or the shovel. I make the grocery list with the items listed in the order in which they occur as one walks from left to right through the store aisles; he goes and does the shopping. I point out the spiderwebs in the windows; he takes a broom and whisks them away. I see one dead plant and freak out about global warming; he turns on the hose and waters it. He doesn’t get flustered, grossed out, or panicked. Where I see things in disarray and feel overwhelmed at how much in the world there is to fix, he picks up a hammer or pen or trash bag and starts chipping away at it. When I’m a planet come loose from its orbit, trying to find its place while bouncing around space like a pinball, this guy is the sun itself. This is how we operate.
* * *
He is the most important person in my life. Well, now one of the three most important people, although it started with just him. But he is not my “other half.” Our lives move forward as a unit and also as the lives of two individuals. We are not a couple who share one email address. (That’s weird. Sorry, “[email protected].”) We were each a person before, and we are each a person still.
A marriage does not make anybody more of a real person or a right person. It makes you a married person. You can be a wonderful married person or a terrible married person, just like you can be a wonderful not-married person or a terrible not-married person. You can also be a wonderful person who has a dog or a terrible person who has a dog, a wonderful or terrible person who has no dog, a wonderful or terrible person who has a baby or does not.
So, marrying John did not make me a good person, or a successful person. But it did make me very happy.
And when I look back on my twenties, a decade during which I was bullheadedly focused on checking all the boxes in order to be a good adult, I can see what a blessing it was to have some things in my life that weren’t tied to success or failure, especially the love of a person whom I often joked was exactly what I would have created for myself had I been wise enough to know what I really needed—but who was 100 percent not of my own making. I could take no credit for working this love into existence, and that made it a respite, both at the
time and many years later.
Welcome to the Club
When I blew out the candle on my twenty-fifth birthday cupcake at the kitchen counter of our tiny new house, I wished for a leaf blower. So I went to Ace Hardware the following weekend and bought one—a reasonably priced and sized model with a tiny gas tank (so I wouldn’t have to drag an electrical cord around) and a small motor (because the superpowered ones came with backpacks that, when I tried them on, tipped me over backward). I flaunted my leaf blower in the yard of that house, a brick shoebox surrounded by a square plot of grass and four tremendous oak trees, which for nine months out of the year rained skinny brown leaves upon the ground, creating a thick, slippery layer that slid out from under your feet as you walked and made car tires spin on the short, precipitously steep driveway. I hoped the neighbors would see me blasting leaves around: Behold, I do yard things, just like you.
I wanted to prove my membership in their club, a neighborhood populated by couples a decade or more older than John and me, most with school-age children. They had to have looked at us—this silly little couple in our mid-twenties—and thought, Babies. I looked at us and thought, Grown-ups. We were married, after all. Married people have homes. And leaf blowers! This is what you do. This is stability.
I knew my yard-care efforts had been successful at establishing our adult credentials when we received a card in the mailbox, our first invitation to the neighborhood supper club:
DINNER CLUB
SATURDAY, 7 P.M.
DISCO INFERNO
Disco motherfucking inferno. YES. Not even five years out of college, we still knew how to do it up for a theme party. In fact, we still had theme party costumes in our closets. I dug up the groovetaculous polyester dress I’d worn to a ’70s party senior year. Floor length, aqua with orange and green stripes, spaghetti straps. Glorious. John wore a fly thrift-shop ensemble, including an enormous pair of sunglasses and a paisley shirt made of some flammable man-made material—unbuttoned to his navel, natch.
We set out for the party on foot, making our way around the corner to the hosts’ house.
“Do we know anyone’s names?” John asked as I rang the doorbell.
“They’re going to love us,” I said. This would be the night the neighbors went from including us to embracing us, I was sure. It might even be the night they held a spontaneous election and named me president of the supper/leaf blower/adult club.
A man answered the door. He stared. “You must be the new neighbors.”
We looked at him, in his khakis and loafers, then looked past him to the living room, where everyone was in sweater sets and button-down shirts.
Turns out nobody ever dressed up for supper club. The “theme” applied to the food and decor, not the attire.
I might have been aware of this had I taken the time to get to know our neighbors a little bit before waltzing into their lives in a rainbow prom gown.
Whenever you join a group of some sort, there’s an orientation period where you need to learn the lingo, observe the customs of the tribe, and gauge where everyone stands in the social pecking order. You’re provisional members, so to speak. You’ve got to hang around long enough for people to get used to you. You can’t just assume that because you’ve reached a particular level in the game of life, you immediately fit in with those who have been there much longer. Unless you’re me, in which case you point at the house and go, “I AM ONE OF YOU NOW. I BLOW LEAVES.”
* * *
Having a home, I figured, means you belong. I belonged in a house made of bricks (because I read “The Three Little Pigs” and learned from it), a 1940s bungalow in the center of Atlanta. Our neighborhood was bordered by a creek on one side and a highway on the other. A historical marker sign indicated the site of a Civil War battle. We’d bought into something established. I was going to excel at homeownership.
That’s why, after we got a leaf blower and figured out the rules of supper club, we got a dog, followed shortly by another dog. Because two dogs is not just an accidental dog; it’s intentional dog ownership, and everyone knows you have to have dogs before you have babies, because being great at owning a dog is how you show the world you’re ready for children. Obviously.
Our dogs, two beagles named Frances and Phoebe, owned the following:
• One hairbrush, shared
• One sweater each
• Collar tags engraved with name, address, phone number, and rabies vaccination license number
• A large beanbag bed
• Developmentally appropriate toys, such as rubber domes with little holes in them that shook out treats at random intervals, thus stimulating the dogs’ natural foraging instincts and keeping their minds sharp, because who wants a dull-minded hound?
I interviewed several dog walkers before hiring Angela, a career walker who came with strong references and a well-articulated philosophy regarding canine individuality. She came to our house twice a day while John and I were at work and spent twenty minutes with the dogs each time. As per our agreement, she left page-long narratives about the day’s activities on a notepad near the front door. “We watched the trash truck today. Frances is getting faster at chasing squirrels. Two Milk-Bones at 3 o’clock. Phoebe likes the green ones best.”
The beauty of having a real house, not an apartment, is that you can just open the back door and let the dogs out, which I did every morning at 5:45 a.m., when John’s alarm went off and he got in the shower and I made my coffee. Such a well-oiled machine, this household.
We’d been in the house maybe two months when our neighbors called.
“Your dogs are waking up our kids,” the woman said.
“My dogs don’t know your kids,” I replied.
“Our bedrooms are right across the fence from your backyard,” she said. “Every time your dogs bark to come in, they wake us up.”
How rude, I thought. We didn’t know much about these neighbors yet other than that both the man and woman worked long hours, and their daughter and son looked to be . . . two-ish? Three? I had no sense of children’s ages. They weren’t babies, but they couldn’t drive. So whatever age that is. And apparently their parents didn’t like us.
“Those people hate dogs,” I told John.
“Maybe they don’t hate dogs. Maybe they just like their sleep,” he said.
“They’re so mean.”
Having thrown down what I saw as a completely irrational gauntlet, the neighbors made their disdain clearer by never complimenting me on my neat rows of leaf bags or my seasonal plantings in the pots by our front door. I couldn’t believe how unfriendly they were. And I couldn’t believe the woman kept calling me.
“It’s just that when I finally get them down to sleep, I really need them to stay asleep,” she said. “Could you maybe try letting the dogs in and out a different door?”
This was rich, I thought. She was trying to tell me which doors to use in my own house, when we both knew that their giant white cat had been prancing along the fence between our yards and taunting Frances and Phoebe, which was probably why they were barking.
“Maybe if you kept your cat in your yard, my dogs wouldn’t bark so much,” I suggested.
It was a classic border war. Cats versus dogs. Neighbor versus neighbor. As months passed, we developed a chilly stalemate in which they kept asking us to please quiet our dogs and we (okay, I) kept telling them to keep their cat to themselves, but nothing really changed.
The way I figured it, we were both homeowners with pets, and one household—the one that was not ours—was being awfully bossy toward the other one. I did not think about how I’d feel if somebody’s dogs were waking up my babies every time I put them to sleep. I had no babies; I didn’t get it. I didn’t comprehend how different my neighbor’s life was from mine, how much more she had to balance, how much more precious and rare her full nights of rest were.
When I’m being hard on myself, I call myself a bitch for how insensitive I was. When I’m being mo
re understanding, I remind myself that no one can fully appreciate a life phase or experience they haven’t lived through. Someone might explain to you what it feels like, and even though you understand the words—they are all nouns and verbs you know; you know what a baby is, you know what sleep is—you don’t understand. You have empathy and intelligence, but empathy and intelligence have limits. So many arguments come down to saying, “Of course I understand what you mean,” while not understanding what the other person really means at all, because you can’t. Today-me tries to cut back-then-me a little slack.
* * *
What I did know was that neither the cat nor the dogs were any good at keeping rats away. North Georgia wood rats are terrier-size, and they specialize in climbing trees and then jumping onto your house and eating a hole in your roof and going into your attic and then busting through your closet ceiling and having babies in the pockets of your winter coats.
We also had a mold problem, which we didn’t notice until the mold had crept silently up from the crawl space, through the wood floors, across the living room rug and up the side of a sofa. I can only guess that rats love mold, because both things lived very happily in our home alongside us without our knowledge for quite some time. Coincidentally, both required expensive extermination services.
I was looking over the bill from the mold remediation company and questioning whether homeownership was worth it one rainy Sunday afternoon when the neighbor called.
“Have you seen our cat?” he asked. “He’s been missing since yesterday.”
“Oh no,” I said. I didn’t like the dog-taunting little feline creep, but I didn’t want anything bad to happen to him. I’d always been an animal lover, and the thought of the cat having encountered some danger softened me a bit toward our neighbors for a moment.
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