Really Good, Actually(38)
“Jesus,” said Emotional Lauren. “What an asshole! I’ve seen your boobs and they’ve got a solid eight to ten in them—I mean, as long as you don’t have kids. What happened to Dart Guy? He sounded like . . . not that.”
I told her I wasn’t sure I wanted to see him again. Through dating apps and Instagram and parties and bars, I had access to so many potential romantic or at least sexual partners, it was hard to know if I cared about any of them. Even if it seemed like I had connected with someone, I was not particularly interested in that information. My carousel of weeklong adventures was working fine for now.
“There’s also the option of, you know, being alone,” said Lauren. “Nothing wrong with taking some time to yourself.”
Emotional Lauren nodded, adding that the sex shop near her house was promoting a cool new vibrator that was “essentially a production-grade suction cup.” We agreed that it did sound pretty cool, then got to work disassembling my wretched couch.
Leaving my apartment was less emotionally wrenching than I’d expected. “Continuing to live in the mausoleum of your old relationship was maybe not the healthiest option, all things considered,” Lauren said, lugging a decrepit coffee table to the curb for someone younger and more desperate than us to take.
Stripped to its bones, the place was revealed for the shithole it was, all cheap flooring and badly spackled holes, with a bathroom that was almost certainly an illegally converted screened-in porch—in the winter, the toilet water would freeze.
Once, right after we were married, my grandmother had come over for dinner. As we showed her around, she was delighted to see a few pieces of hand-me-down furniture she’d thought were gone forever, sold or lost to time. “Very charming,” she’d said, eyeing our old couch and scratched end tables, the kitchen chairs we’d picked up on the sidewalk. “It’s just like the place your grandfather and I lived in when we were first married.”
I reminded her that when she and my grandfather had been newlyweds, they were nineteen and living in postwar Hamilton, in tenement housing where the heating was operated with nickels. She hadn’t even had a job. We were both pushing thirty, worked more than full-time, and could barely afford to live here, in this place where the kitchen “tiles” were easy-peel stickers, and the landlord locked the thermostat in a small plastic box to avoid us turning the heat on before November.
“Still,” she’d said. “Nice to see my old dresser again.”
I thought about where my parents had lived at my age: in a little house they owned, with a baby on the way. Jon and I had once talked to a mortgage broker to see what we’d need to buy a home. He’d suggested saving $80,000 and leaving the city.
The Laurens broke my bed frame trying to take it apart, so we put the headboard on the lawn with the rest of the sale items. To avoid spending money on a moving van and hopefully make some money on the side, I’d decided to hold an impromptu garage sale, spreading my possessions in front of the house and offering them to anyone who stopped to check them out. So far, a hair dryer and a clothing rack had earned us twelve dollars and eighty-five cents, which we immediately put toward pastries.
We spent the day alternating between manning the items for sale on the lawn and driving boxes and bags and poorly protected plants over to Merris’s in Lauren’s car, depositing them roughly in my new digs before heading back to pick up the rest of my garbage. After our last trip, Lauren and I returned to find Emotional Lauren victorious and overwhelmed. Some students had come by and cleared out the lawn. “Their house full-on burned down a few weeks ago, and they didn’t have insurance, and they were starting over with nothing,” she said.
She’d offered them the lot for fifty dollars. “They were so happy, you wouldn’t believe it,” she said, beaming. “We did a good thing today.”
Back at Merris’s, we unpacked and ate falafel wraps, and Lauren noted that I might have preferred to make more than fifty bucks for a similar percentage of my possessions.
“Do you have any records?” Emotional Lauren asked. “When Nour put his out at our yard sale, all these men materialized from nowhere. They were drawn. We made, like, hundreds of dollars.”
I consulted a box labeled very misc. The only records in it were Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, an Ella Fitzgerald live album, and something called NONSTOP DANCING 1600, which was a compilation of seventeenth-century reels and jigs, curated by two different men named Siegfried. We decided to sell some of my old clothes instead.
Lauren had recently received eighty dollars for a beat-up Gucci belt of her mother’s at a secondhand store on College. I did not own any Gucci but thought maybe they would have some interest in the approximately three hundred pairs of too-small denim I’d ordered online and could not bring myself to return, because to do this was to abandon the fantasy that one day they might fit, and perfectly. I resolved to drop by the secondhand store tomorrow, after first trying on all the jeans one final time, to see.
“I want to stress that these problems make it sound like I am not very beautiful, but I think we can all agree that I look pretty good, possibly even great, and it is the contemporary method of manufacturing, sizing, and marketing clothes that is the problem,” I said.
The group obliged.
We sorted through my clothing and accessories, throwing anything I was tired of that neither Lauren wanted in a big plastic bag. At some point I came upon my wedding and engagement rings. I chucked them in too.