Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman(49)

It was right two months before we moved, at the end of a day with his kids, when we swam in Lake Washington and played his favorite game, “see who can throw everyone else on the ground first,” which he always wins, which is the point, because he is a giant toddler, and we stopped by a garage sale because the sign read “RARE JAZZ VINYL” and the woman there thought I was the girls’ mom—me!—and complimented us on our beautiful children. “Your mom,” she called me, to them. They looked up at me and I panicked, and said, too loud, “Oh no, I’m not their mom, I’m just SOME LADY!” because I wanted so badly not to fuck this up, not to let him think I was getting any ideas. Don’t worry, I’m just some lady. We’ve only been dating for four months. You just got divorced. I’m not trying to be your family. That would be weird. I know. I’m normal. But.

Then we picked blackberries and made a pie and we swung by my parents’ house—it was still my parents’ house then, not my mom’s house, not truncated and half-empty—and after the kids went inside with the pie he held me back.

“I loved hanging out with you and the girls today,” he said, staring at me with that face.

“I know!” I said.

“I like your parents’ house,” he said, looking up at their white Cape Cod blushing in the sunset.

“Me too!” I said.

“What do you think our house is going to be like?” he said.

Meaningful pause.

“In L.A.”

“Really? Are you sure?” I jumped up and down, squeezing him.

We weren’t moving to L.A. together, we both insisted. We were each independently, coincidentally, moving to L.A. at the same time. He was going to live with some female friend I didn’t know; I was going to live with our mutual friend Solomon Georgio. It had to be that way. People didn’t move in together after four months. But on that perfect day, heat-drunk and berry-stained and bruised from roughhousing, from playing family, the ruse didn’t make sense anymore.

We should live together, obviously. We were best friends, and we were in love, even if we didn’t say it, and that had to be enough, even though he’d been telling me he was broken since the first night we spent together—broken from abandonment, poverty, kids at nineteen, two divorces by twenty-seven (“that’s as bad as being thirteen and a half and divorced once… times two,” his bit goes), single fatherhood, depression, a hundred lifetimes of real-ass shit while I was rounding the corner toward thirty still on my mommy and daddy’s phone plan. We were friends for eight years before we even kissed. “Didn’t you ever have a crush on me? I’m so handsome,” he asked me later, teasing. “No. It literally never occurred to me,” I replied, honestly. He was a man. I was still a stupid little girl. Kids? Divorce? That was above my pay grade.

In the summer of 2011, Aham and Solomon were both in the semifinals of NBC’s Stand Up for Diversity contest, an annual comedy competition that awards development deals to underrepresented minorities, particularly people of color. (Every year, some straight white shithead would insist on entering, nobly, in protest, because “Irish is a minority.”) I’m not sure if the deals ever went anywhere, particularly, but it was a good way to “get seen” by L.A. industry folks, and it made NBC look progressive.

All three of us were feeling like big fish in those days; we were ready to flop into the L.A. River and see if it’d take us all the way to the sea. (If you know anything about the L.A. River, you know we were screwed from the start.*)

Not to mention the fact that Aham couldn’t really move to L.A. anyway. You can’t just move when you’re an adult man with two kids—he was only going for a few months, six tops, to see if this NBC thing panned out, because you never know, and maybe he’d “get seen” and become the next David Schwimmer and be able to move out of his three-hundred-square-foot place and he and the girls could have a big new life and no one would have to sleep in the laundry room anymore. If not, no foul. Nothing to lose. Meanwhile, I was signing a year-long lease in Los Angeles. My love story had a six-month shelf life, at most, in all but the most unlikely circumstances. But I forged ahead. Fuck reality. This was going to be my person. I knew it.

Then, in the driveway, Aham said it out loud—we’d live together, be a real couple—and all of those warnings, overt and covert, that he’d been sending me for the past four months, that he wasn’t ready for this, he couldn’t do this, his divorce was too recent, their fights were too loud and too mean, his life had too many moving parts, were going to fall away. I had been right to ignore him all along. I knew it. I would make him okay through sheer force of will. He said it. Binding oral contract. Breaking it now wouldn’t be fair. That’s how a little girl thinks. Love was perseverance.

Later, I’d ask him, heaving, “Why the FUCK would you say that? Why did you trick me? Why did you come here?”

“I just loved you,” he’d say. “I just wanted to be around you. I told you I couldn’t do it. Why didn’t you believe me?”

I rented the three of us a little yellow house in Eagle Rock with a big eucalyptus tree in the backyard. The house was owned by a church, which was two doors down, and every so often some church people would come by and try to guilt trip us into coming to one of their “activities.” The church owned another, identical house next door to ours, where a middle-aged couple lived with their teenage son. The wife, Kathy, had severe early-onset Alzheimer’s—she couldn’t have been over fifty—and every couple of days she’d wander through our front door, lost and crying. “Where am I? Where’s Jeff? I can’t find Jeff!” We’d try to soothe her, walk her home, back into the house that was a dim, dirty funhouse mirror of ours—towels tacked up over the windows, counters piled with fast-food takeout containers, empty of furniture except for a few mattresses on the floor. One particularly sweltering afternoon, trying to get her settled in the back bedroom to wait until her husband got home from work, I realized with a start that he was there, passed out drunk under a pile of blankets. “Jeff,” I said, shaking him. “JEFF. JEFF.” He just kept sleeping.