I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(21)
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.