I'm Sorry You Feel That Way Page 5
“It wouldn’t look like this if you were here,” he’d say.
The last year we were a couple was our first year in Grand Junction. Karl Bennett and I fought, often and a lot. We fought loudly enough that the cops came. We fought silently, sleeping in separate rooms and ignoring each other when we passed in the kitchen. We fought about money—our lack of it. Karl reminded me I was the one who said money can’t buy happiness.
We fought about things that happened years before: how those naked pictures of his ex-girlfriend came to be mailed back to her, for example. Apparently, she’d been upset and called her attorney, who called Karl’s attorney, who called Karl. When my involvement came into question, I denied everything, but Karl knew better.
“You’re simple,” he said. “That was a simple thing to do.”
We fought about Jingles, shot and killed by the neighbor; Karl’s fault, I thought, for allowing the dog to run loose. We fought about why we gave away Jack Dog Number One: I didn’t trust him around the baby. We fought about why we gave away Jack Dog Number Two: off the leash, he bit a guy. We fought about the mean, horrible things Karl Bennett had said that I still remembered even if he didn’t, and we fought about the mean, horrible things he was sure I must’ve said even if he couldn’t remember what they were. When I pointed out that everything wrong was his fault because he was the one who said, “I’m moving to Colorado with or without you,” Karl said I was the fool who believed him.
We fought about how much I hated western Colorado, the unbearable desert heat, the bizarre canyon landscape, the rednecks in pickups with gun racks who hooted at me as I walked down North Avenue. We fought about the fact that the closest woods where he could find work were in Utah’s La Sal Mountains, too far away to commute, so Karl lived there, in a tent on the job site, a little too contentedly, coming home only on weekends. We fought about if I was happy to see him when he came home on weekends. We fought about his growing suspicions concerning the man who would become, according to Colorado state law, my common-law husband, and we also spent a great deal of time fighting about which one of us was simple.
Karl would tell you that from the first moment he laid eyes on every one of his wives, he never once took notice of, or even for a moment fantasized about, another woman, not even a supermodel or movie star. He’s told me that, and though I pooh-poohed it, saying that it seems a little unbelievable, not to mention unhealthy, I really do believe him. When Karl Bennett tells his wife she’s the most beautiful girl in the world, when he holds her hand and says to her for-better-or-for-worse, he means it. Things just don’t always work out the way we mean.
I harbor grudges against Karl Bennett. There is my bad credit, for example, and that getting involved with him meant my father wouldn’t speak to me for almost a year, the old man literally turning his back when I stepped into my parents’ house. There’s also the rice steamer my uncle gave us for Christmas in ’95 that I know Karl took when he moved out.
But I owe Karl Bennett. He replaced the brakes on my truck; when I broke down in traffic last week, he was the one I called. When I wanted mulch for my garden, he brought me bags and bags of it from the sawmill. When we go out of town, I don’t have to kennel my dog: Bobby goes and stays with his uncle Karl. When our son is behaving in ways that I find especially obnoxious, Karl Bennett is the only one I don’t get pissed at for agreeing.
I will always admire the things Karl Bennett knows: how to skin a buck, break a horse, sew a button. He knows that duct tape, WD-40, and Neosporin are the only emergency supplies you’ll ever need. He knew that when his father died, he wouldn’t have much to say, and that when his mother died, he’d weep. Karl Bennett knows he doesn’t do well in a crowd, but one-on-one, he can be quite charming.
Once I got it in my head that I wanted a dog, there was no changing my mind. My son and Al, my common-law husband, and I had been living together for not quite a year, and since I’m set firm on no more babies, it seemed to me that what the three of us needed to bond as a familial unit was a dog.
I got us Bobby.
But my son and Bobby didn’t connect as I’d hoped. Bobby was high-strung and high-maintenance and he had alpha issues. Bobby was a very destructive, very humpy puppy. Bobby was a hairball with sharp teeth. It was during a weekend with his father, a Friday night, that the boy admitted to hating all dogs in principle and Bobby in particular, and for Karl Bennett, a boy who hates dogs is an example of tragedy, pure and true.
On Sunday, when the boy returned to my house, he was carrying a large wicker basket. In that basket, there sat a tiny trembling black puppy, a sweet, cute puppy, some kind of Yorkie-poodle mix, no bigger than a grapefruit, with curly hair, shiny black eyes, and a teeny pink tongue.
Karl Bennett is lucky he wasn’t standing in my living room that Sunday night. He wasn’t there to see his son cradling one puppy while fending off the humpy advances of another. He wasn’t there to hear me, Ex-Wife Number Three, explain—gently at first, then more vigorously—that we would not/could not have a second puppy.
It’s lucky because Karl Bennett is not crazy about sobbing children or heartbroken children or his own child’s sadness. Karl is a softy for children, and he will invent ways to make them feel better.
He can’t much deal with furious women, either; he says one thing he knows for sure is that a furious woman ought be avoided.
Sometimes Karl knows how to act, and sometimes he doesn’t. On my twentieth birthday, he sent me two dozen long-stemmed red roses. On my twenty-first birthday, we conceived our son. On my twenty-second birthday, he gave me a set of four green plastic cereal bowls.
My ex-husband also knows that some things are never simple. That Sunday night he backed that white pickup of his out of my driveway fast, even before our son and that puppy-in-a-basket came through the front door. Karl Bennett hightailed it out of there before anyone could accuse him of any wrongdoing—impulsive, manipulative, or otherwise—and that night, all night, when his phone rang and rang and rang, he didn’t answer it.
My Abel Brother
Growing up in my house, there were the things a boy did: Mow the lawn. Take out the trash. Be home by breakfast, and grunt when asked how was the movie he supposedly saw.
There were the things a nice young lady did: Wash the dishes. Fold the laundry. Be home before midnight, and submit to a timed exam in which she correctly answered specific questions concerning the minute details of the plot, characters, and setting of the movie she supposedly saw, in order to prove she didn’t skip said movie to hang out in the park smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, shooting heroin between her toes, and/or having sex with some grungy, zitty boy, thus ending up pregnant and/or diseased, not to mention disgraced and scandalized.
All questions must be answered promptly, no dawdling. All answers must be in blue or black ink, legible handwriting and properly spelled. No looking at the ceiling. You won’t find any answers on the ceiling. Are you ready? Go!
Question Number One: Name the film’s costume designer. Question Number Two: Name the film’s Toronto caterer. And here’s a hint: Think carefully before you answer. I wouldn’t want you to confuse the Toronto caterer with the New York caterer. Question Number Three... What do you mean you’re still thinking about the first question? All right. Tell me the truth. Out with it. Did you or did you not see this movie? Well? Tell me the truth. Where did you really go, and who were you really with?
While my brothers did the things boys were supposed to do—while they arm wrestled and Indian wrestled and thumb wrestled, while they pushed the coffee table out of the way so they could wrestle like puppies on the living room floor, while they hunted and fished, played high school football then college, while they mowed the lawn and shoveled the snow, while they worked their asses off at my father’s auto body shop after school and all day every day during the summer from fifth grade through graduation—I did the things a girl does. I improved my posture by gliding across the room with a dictionary balanced on top of my
head. I was a Brownie, then a Girl Scout (the first meeting after cookie sales ended, the troop leader measured our waists, and we had to pay a dime for every inch we gained eating all those Thin Mints, all those Samoas). I counted calories, which meant I struggled with math. I babysat younger kids because, as everyone knows, a girl with younger siblings should be really good with kids. I set the supper table and cleared the supper table, loaded and emptied the dishwasher, scrubbed the toilet. I sprayed shirts and pants and my father’s white handkerchiefs with starch, then ironed these things wrinkle-free. My after-school job was shelving books at the public library. For recreation, I called up one of my girlfriends and said catty things about another.
It wasn’t until after I was grown, after I had a son of my own, that it seemed important to change my ideas about maleness, masculinity. I wanted to raise my son differently, outside the perimeters of such rigid and outdated gender roles.
To make this happen, I gave my son a doll, brown-eyed and brown-haired, a boy doll—“This is your baby!” I told him—and I suggested my son name his doll. I said he could, if he wanted, cuddle it and rock it to sleep. I encouraged him to love and nurture it.
Further, for every book I read him that featured a male protagonist, I read him one that featured a girl. I also forbade him from playing with toy guns, I created a safe space where he could feel free to talk about his feelings, and I dressed him like Little Lord Fauntleroy. On his first Christmas, I clothed him in black velvet knickers, a white blouse, black-and-white-checked suspenders, a black velvet bow tie, white knee socks, black leather shoes, and a little black velvet beret. He looked adorable, and I was proud to be doing my part in bringing up a sweeter, gentler, dandier generation of boy.
Only it didn’t work. It wouldn’t take. My son didn’t want to hug and kiss his baby. He wanted to crush its head by running over it with a dump truck. His final analysis of Little Women was that Jo March and her sisters were silly, boring, and stupid. He bit his toast into the shape of a pistol and pointed it at me. “Pow!” he said. “Bang! Bang! You’re dead.”
When I asked him how it made him feel to do that, to bite his toast into a weapon, to point that weapon at the woman who gave him life, and to, paradoxically, metaphorically, destroy that same woman’s life, he said it made him feel like he wanted more toast.
My son was in first grade when he and I went to a backyard birthday party where six-year-old boys were taking off their shirts, then thumping their chests like they were the feral sons of Tarzan. One boy whirled his shirt in a circle over his head as though he was about to lasso a wild mustang, while the others hooted and hollered and hissed. One boy pushed his belly out as far as he could, then scratched it; another boy burped. My son was the one grunting and flexing his biceps, baring and clenching his teeth. A bouquet of helium balloons tied to a tree floated above the shirtless boys, and some of them jumped up and down, like primitives, yipping and screeching and poking at it with sticks.
A few minutes later, they were shaking cans of pop, which they then quickly buried in the sandbox before scurrying away. One of the other mothers there said what on earth are those little dickens up to?
Because I grew up with brothers, it was obvious to me what they were up to. They were building bombs out of vigorously shaken carbonated cola. They were anticipating a really awesome sandbox explosion that would morph into the sandstorm of the century at any minute. They were running for their lives.
“Run!” they implored us. “Seek shelter! It’s gonna blow!”
As the oldest child, the only daughter, I’ve watched boys blow things up and shoot things and skin things and set things on fire. I’ve seen them scratch at their bellies, their butts, their balls. I’ve heard each boast that he’s the fastest, the strongest, the smartest, the very best. I’ve heard them say Butthead. Dickhead. Fuckwad. Douche Breath. That Christmas I dressed my son in the black velvet knickers, the black velvet bow tie, the white blouse, the black-and-white-checked suspenders, my brothers removed the outfit and wouldn’t give it back, not even the white knee socks or the black leather shoes or the black velvet beret, forcing the boy to spend his first major holiday naked but for his diaper. On more than one occasion, one of my brothers has squeezed me in a headlock, forcing me to smell his armpit, his fart, his foul breath, then asking, “How do you like my new perfume?”
More than once, I’ve wondered who I would have been if I’d had a sister. What would my life have been like? How would it have been different? Because I think there would be differences. I think I would be less entertained by belching, but I would also have made better choices about my hair. A sister would have taken me aside and said it’s not 1988, you’re over thirty, it’s time to invest in a flatiron and grow out those puffy bangs.
I was three years old when my brother Mitchell was born, and I don’t have an early memory that doesn’t include him. In fact, he is my first memory. I’m standing on my tiptoes, peering into his bassinet, and our father is asking me who’s that? Because I am not thrilled with the sudden existence of this baby brother I’m told I need to love and be nice to, I refuse to dignify my father’s question with a response. Who’s that? What do you mean who’s that? Who is what?
But as Mitchell got older, I learned how handy it was to have him around. I stopped thinking of my little brother as a curse and started seeing him as the greatest gift my parents ever could have given me, that special little something every girl needs: a scapegoat of her very own, someone upon whom a girl can pin her crimes. Mitchell and I were adults before I finally revealed that I, not he, was the one who flushed that apple down the toilet. My brother, who’d received a couple pretty good stripes across the butt because of this incident, said no kidding, really, and all this time I thought it was me. Bitch.
Of the three of us, my brother Mitchell was the perfect one. Mitchell was who adults had in mind when they uttered words like “good boy,” “nice kid,” “gifted and talented student,” and “Have you ever considered getting him into child modeling?” Ladies young and old approached him in parking lots, in grocery stores, at the bank, on the street. They might have tightened their lips into a pinched-up smile at me, a loud and show-offy little girl with scabby knees, bitten-down nails, and gnawed-on cuticles, but even the most ardent believers in zero population growth went goo-goo-ga-ga at the sight of my brother. They held Mitchell’s little face between their hands and gazed into his very big, very blue eyes fringed by very thick, very long lashes. They got all aflutter over his rosebud lips and sweet, sweet smile. They wanted to tousle his silky hair and squeeze his pink cheeks.
“Oh, what eyelashes!” they’d exclaim.
“Oh, it’s always the boys, isn’t it, blessed with such eyelashes!”
“Oh,” they’d cry. “He’s so cute-handsome-good-sweet-wonderful-brilliant-adorable-fantastic-fabulous. . . .”
At some point their voices would blur and their words would blur, and I’d chew on my cuticles until what I heard spewing out of their black-holes-for-mouths sounded more like fucking-bratty-monster-stupid-pig-guts-baboon-testicles-bastard-son-of-a-bitch because by this point even our mother was getting in on the act. “Oh, I know,” she’d sigh, because being the mother of the New Messiah was such a burden. “I really should think about getting him into child modeling.”
In retrospect, it wasn’t Mitchell’s fault. Though he was asthmatic and living in a house with a smoker unaware that smoking aggravates asthma, though he was allergic to smoke and dust and mold and everything else in the world—though he got sick on roller coasters like The Spider, the kind of ride that whirls you round and round and up and down, causing my brother to puke up hot dogs and blue cotton candy on the people waiting in line below—Mitchell was an extraordinarily good-looking kid.
He was also dreamy and smart in a way that adults like, learning the names of stars, of insects, of dinosaurs. He was creative and good at drawing, sketching, taxidermy, and papier-mâché. He could make a five-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus re
x out of strips of newspaper, glue and flour, chicken wire, and poster paint, then position the beast on a platform complete with papier-mâché flora and fauna and rocks historically accurate for the late Cretaceous period. He could create museum-quality mountings of fish, birds, and small mammals using only an epoxy compound, glass eyeballs, and his own innate understanding of sculpture, anatomy, tanning, and the natural world. Mitchell was quiet, even-tempered, and obedient. If our mother asked him to take out the garbage, for example, or feed the dogs, Mitchell didn’t say just a minute. He didn’t say I will soon as there’s a commercial, or I did it last time, or why do I have to do everything around here. No, Mitchell got up off the couch, and he took out the trash, he fed the dogs, he did what he was told when he was told, and he did it without lip.
Every year at Halloween, Mitchell still had Easter candy. At Christmas, he had Halloween candy—even the good stuff, the miniature Hershey’s and Snickers and little bags of M&M’s—and when Valentine’s Day rolled around, Mitchell still had a stocking full of chocolate Santas, chocolate sleighs, a Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer made of chocolate.
He didn’t even flaunt his stash like I would have. He didn’t gloat about having it. Not unless he’d been provoked. Calling him a sissy usually worked or a pansy or a pussy or an asthmatic or some combination of these. Say something like you pussified pansy-faced sissy asthma boy! and Mitchell would open his mouth to show how slowly an agonizingly teensy sliver of a chocolate bunny’s ear melts on a pink tongue. “Where’s yours?” he’d say. “I’m still enjoying mine.”
We each received an allowance of five bucks a week, and Mitchell, the smart child, the family genius, washed his money in the bathroom sink. He ironed it smooth. He clipped it to the clothesline that stretched across the room he shared with our brother Travis. Mitchell saved his money, Mitchell saved every last cent while I ate my Halloween candy, my Christmas candy, my Easter candy, and I spent my allowance the same day I got it, and I never, ever did anything my mother asked me to do when she asked me to do it and certainly not without questioning why I had to do it, why didn’t she ask Mitchell, perfect Mitchell, her favorite, God’s favorite, everyone’s favorite.