Let's Pretend This Never Happened (15 page)

“You’re probably right,” I admitted. “It
is
hard for me to appreciate the sheer machismo involved in a man making a purse for another man.” Then he clarified (quite loudly) that it was
a medicine bag
, and I replied, “Oh, I wouldn’t know about such things. I’ve never even owned any coyote-face purses, because I can never figure out which shoes to wear them with.” Then Victor glared at me and told me I wouldn’t understand, and I agreed
and blamed it all on my vagina, since it seemed like that was what we were both doing at the moment. Then Victor sighed defeatedly, kissed me on the forehead, and told me he was sorry in a rather unconvincing manner. I suspect he said it less because he realized he was being sexist, and more because I think he was just afraid to argue with my vagina. Which is a pretty smart move on his part, because my vagina is
wily
.

Turns out, though, that Daddy loved his animal-face purse and hung it in a place of honor from the mantel, where it remains to this day. Victor had won my father’s respect, and all it had taken was a dead-animal backpack. I wondered whether there was some sort of secret combination that I could try that would make Victor’s parents accept me so willingly. It wasn’t really that they
disliked
me. They just seemed uncomfortable around me. They were polite and kind but baffled. It was as if their son had unexpectedly shown up with a neck tattoo that read “MAKE ME SOME BASKETTI.” They seemed dumbfounded, and confused, and possibly even hurt, but they also seemed to realize it was too late to do anything about it, and so they hesitantly complimented the unaccountable neck tattoo that he’d asked to be his wife.

This was never more apparent than the day before our wedding, when Victor brought his mom and stepdad to my parents’ home so that they could meet and visit before the wedding. My mother and I had convinced my father to stay outside in his taxidermy shop until I’d had a chance to soothe them with a little booze and with reassurances that we were all actually quite normal, before bringing in my father. Unfortunately, as soon as Victor drove up with his parents, my father heard them and waved them all back toward the clearing behind the taxidermy shop, where he had started a very large fire. An enormous metal oil drum was in the middle of the fire, and was filled with a boiling liquid, the steam billowing my father’s gray hair as he stirred the barrel with a broom handle. This was the point when Victor should have waved, pretended that they couldn’t hear my father, and then quickly ushered his parents into our house, but instead he smiled nervously and helped his mother, whose elegant heels sank into
the dirt as she weaved in and out of stray chickens. My father towered intimidatingly over Victor and his parents, but he welcomed them heartily with his booming voice, even as he continued to stir the boiling cauldron. My soon-to-be mother-in-law attempted small talk as she raised an eyebrow at the strange, bubbling liquid and asked shakily, “So, what are you cooking?” She leaned forward hesitantly, trying to smile. “Is it . . . stew?”

My father chuckled good-naturedly and smiled kindly and condescendingly, as one would to a small child, as he said, “
Nope.
Just boiling skulls.” Then he speared a still-meaty cow’s head with the broomstick to show it to her. Then the eyeball fell out of the cow’s head. It rolled toward them and stopped at my mother-in-law’s designer shoe as if it were attempting to look up her skirt. Then my future in-laws stumbled back to the car and left quickly. I would not see them again until the wedding.

Still, they did grit their teeth and gamely try to accept me into the family, as they hesitantly welcomed me into their lives with extreme trepidation and slow movements. They treated me with respect, but also with an equal amount of uneasiness, as if I’d brought with me a dangerous instability that threatened their very lives. It was only later, as I walked down the aisle on my wedding day, that I finally placed and recognized the look in Victor’s parents’ eyes and numbly realized that I’d seen that exact same look on Victor’s face once, long ago. It was then that I realized that
I
had become the unexpected bobcat in the room. And I knew exactly how terrified that damn bobcat had felt.

Married on the Fourth of July

Victor and I were married on the Fourth of July. It was a lot like the movie
Born on the Fourth of July
, except with fewer wheelchairs and Tom Cruise wasn’t there. Also, I’ve never actually seen
Born on the Fourth of July
, because it looks kind of depressing. But to be fair, I remember very little of my own wedding, so it’s entirely possible Tom Cruise was there and I’ve just forgotten. This will probably be very awkward the next (or first) time I meet Tom Cruise.

On the day of our wedding, Victor and I
both
had misgivings.

I had misgivings because I was barely twenty-two, and immature, and had no clue how to be someone’s wife, and, more important, because of what I was wearing (
see “twenty-two, and immature”
). In a strange twist of fate, Victor had bought my wedding dress when he saw it in the window of a rental shop that was going out of business. It was inappropriately virginal white, beaded, bowed, and looked like the sort of wedding dress that both Princess Diana and Scarlett O’Hara would have deemed “completely over-the-top.” Each of the billowing puffed sleeves was larger than my head and seemed to be stuffed with newspaper (I suspect it was the
New York Times
Sunday edition), and the hoop skirt, pushing out the yards and yards of white ruffles, dictated that I keep an empty five-foot radius around me at all times, because if anything pressed against the bottom of
the hoop, the opposite side of the dress would suddenly lift up and hit me in the head. It was fancy and high-maintenance and pure as the driven snow,
and I would not have chosen that dress for myself in a million years
, but Victor insisted it was “so me,” which I think was less of an insult and more of a vision he had of the woman I might one day become. He was wrong on so many levels that I started to lose count.

I wasn’t alone in my doubts, though. Victor had misgivings because two weeks earlier we’d had what I referred to as
“a very bad date.”
Victor was still referring to it as
“that time you almost killed me.”
(Side note: He now refers to it as “the
first
time you almost killed me.”) But Victor isn’t writing this book, mostly because he’s a terrible overreactor. The truth was that we’d been driving down some deserted country roads after sundown, as Victor was looking for snakes. On purpose. He’d developed a fascination for them in the last year, and was making money on the side by finding snakes basking on the hot, empty roads after dark, capturing them, taming them, and then selling them to fellow snake lovers. He was great at recognizing the harmless and easily tamable snakes, and listened to my warnings to never mess with the poisonous, aggressive ones, until the night when we drove up on a very large rattlesnake, which seemed to have been run over by a car. Victor stopped his truck and I told him not to get out, but he said he could tell the snake was squashed and told me to hold the spotlight up so he could make sure the snake was dead and not still suffering. I suggested just running over it again a few times, but Victor looked at me as if I were being ridiculous, and he slowly got out of the car. I opened my own door hesitantly, but refused to get out, standing instead on the edge of the truck’s floorboard and leaning over the hood of the truck, certain that other rattlesnakes were probably lying in wait and planning a group attack. Victor looked back at me with frustration. “Come over here and bring the spotlight.
You’re too far away.
”

“Oh, I’m just fine, thanks.
Please get the hell back in the truck
.”

He glared at me and shook his head. “Have a little faith, will ya?” He knelt down beside the rattler. “It’s dead. Looks like its head was crushed.”

“
Awesome.
Now get the hell back in the truck.”

Victor ignored me as he put on a glove and stooped to pick up the tail of the five-foot rattler. “We should bring this home to your dad. He could probably—
OHJESUSCHRIST!
”

It was at this exact moment that the “dead” rattlesnake suddenly started angrily striking at Victor’s leg. Uncoincidentally, it was also the exact same moment that I ducked back into the truck, taking the spotlight with me and leaving Victor in the pitch-dark blackness on an abandoned road, as the angry rattlesnake he was holding tried to murder him.

“BRING BACK THE LIGHT,” he screamed.

“I TOLD YOU NOT TO GO OUT THERE!” I yelled angrily, as I quickly locked the doors (for some reason) and rolled up all the windows. I
was
worried about him and wanted to help him, but I couldn’t help but think that he
had
brought this on himself.

“BRING BACK THE LIGHT OR I WILL THROW THIS DAMN SNAKE IN THE CAR WITH YOU,” he screamed, which was surprising, both because he sounded very vital for someone dying of snakebite, and also because he’d wrongly assumed that I
hadn’t
automatically locked all the doors.
He knows so little about me,
I thought to myself.

I took a deep breath and reminded myself that although he was a macho idiot, he was
my
macho idiot, and I rolled down the window just far enough to put my hand and spotlight through it, and saw Victor still looking very much alive and more than slightly pissed off. Turns out that the snake was still alive and striking, but its mangled jaw was crushed and so it never broke Victor’s skin. Victor glared at me with terrified eyes, and put the snake out of its misery with a shovel before walking back to the truck.

After a minute to slow his breathing, Victor’s voice was only vaguely controlled. “You left me alone. In the dark.
With a live rattlesnake
.”

“No.
You
left
me
alone. In the car.
For
a live rattlesnake,” I countered. “So I guess that makes us even.” There was a long pause as he stared at me. “But I forgive you?” I said.

“YOU ALMOST KILLED ME,” he shouted.

“No,” I pointed out. “
A rattlesnake
almost killed you.
I
was just an involuntary witness.
I
wanted to turn the car back on and try to run over the snake to save you, but
you
took the keys with you. Plus, I can’t drive a stick. So basically I would have died eventually too, except
way
more painfully and slowly from starvation and exposure. If anything,
I
should be mad at
you
.” I hadn’t actually been mad until I started defending myself, but then I realized that I had a point. If anything, I had almost killed
both of us
, but Victor was too shortsighted to see that far ahead.

“You left me alone. In the dark.
With a live rattlesnake
,” Victor repeated in a whisper.

“Well, I had faith in you,” I said sweetly. This is one of my favorite phrases to use in an argument, because it’s hard for someone to contradict you without blatantly admitting that your faith in them is utterly unjustified. I use that one a lot. In fact, it sounded so good I said it again. “I
knew
you could handle that snake. Sometimes you just have to have faith.”

And
faith
was exactly what I was trying to have in the week before our wedding. Personally, I was terrified of being the center of attention in front of other people, and I’d wanted to just elope and get married in tennis shoes in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator, but Victor was an only child and his family desperately wanted a real wedding, so I’d given up and gone through the motions. I was never much of a big-wedding girl, so I gave no thought to unity candles and rehearsal dinners. My mom and I made a veil out of hot glue, mesh, and a flowered headband, and we picked out a cake at the local grocery store.

Neither Victor nor I was religious, so my grandparents bribed their church to let us use their small side chapel. The wedding lasted an entire twelve minutes, as we’d asked the preacher to cut almost all of the Jesus references out. (“Jesus is
totally
invited,” we explained to the preacher. “We just don’t want him giving any long speeches.”) Then we had a twenty-minute reception in the basement, which looked just like a basement except somehow drearier.

But at the chapel of the church where we’d said “I do,” none of that
seemed to matter. All that mattered was that we loved each other. And while our families made their way to the church doorsteps to prepare to throw birdseed at us, we hid in the empty church sanctuary and I made Victor promise to love me forever. “Have a little faith in me,” he said with a proud smile. In retrospect, I probably should have asked for something more substantial, like “Promise me you’ll always clean up the cat vomit in the hall,” or “Promise me you’ll never ask me if it’s ‘that time of the month’ in the middle of a totally rational argument when what you
really
need to do is just apologize and stop being such an asshole.”

But no, I was young, and naive, and wished for love, and I tried to have faith that that would be enough.

Sometimes you just have to take it on faith.