Let's Pretend This Never Happened (13 page)

A friendly but bleary-eyed couple on the other side of us seemed to be doing a booming business cooking and selling cupcakes. Except replace
“cupcakes” with “meth.” “Cupcakes” sounds nicer, though. Unless you’re really into meth. Then I think you kind of lose a taste for cupcakes. Unless they’re meth cupcakes. Which honestly sounds awful, but would probably sell like
hotcakes
. Which would actually be a great name for meth cupcakes if they existed.
Oh my God, this business plan writes itself.
Someone find me a venture capitalist.

The first time my mother visited us in our new apartment, she seemed worried that she’d made a huge mistake in pushing me to move out, but I reassured her that we were happy, and that (in a way) it was kind of an unorthodox neighborhood-watch program, because technically the meth cookers and shut-ins were always at home to sign for our packages and to keep an eye out for neighborhood burglars (who we all suspected lived in the apartment directly underneath us). It was an uncomfortable, involuntary community, but we were young and didn’t know how much it hurt to be shot yet, so we shrugged off the danger, and we began the process of learning how incredibly difficult it is to live with someone who is totally anal and slightly OCD (
ahem . . . Victor
). And someone who is perpetually accidentally hot-gluing herself to the carpet, and who is sort of mentally unstable, but in an
“At-least-I-still-remember-how-pants-work”
kind of way (
cough . . . that’d be me
). Victor remarked that comparing myself with the sometimes naked hermit next door wasn’t exactly a strong mental-wellness benchmark, especially since I often ended up pantsless myself. I raised my eyebrow at his seemingly seductive remark until I realized he was referring to the time he found me half naked because I’d just hot-glued my jeans to the carpet.

Still, in spite of everything, Victor seemed to love me in a strange and bizarre way that was never more evident than the day that he proposed to me. But that’s the next chapter.

(Aren’t you glad you’re not paying for this book by the chapter? Because then you’d feel totally ripped off that you paid for this chapter and then it leaves you hanging like
Pirates of the Caribbean II.
I would never do that
to you guys. Also, did you know there are some places in Russia where you have to
pay
to use the toilet? It’s not really on the same subject, but honestly,
what the fuck?
I would
never
pay to use the toilet. That’s like paying someone to let you throw away your own litter in the mall trash can. If I ever go to Russia I’m going to pee on the floor all the time.)

No One Ever Taught Me Couch Etiquette

Before Victor could tell his parents that we were moving in together, he insisted that I go meet them personally in Midland, Texas, which was a few hours’ drive away. Midland is a big oil town, and in my mind, everyone who lived there was some sort of millionaire. Victor assured me that his family was not
really
wealthy, but he kept drilling me on how to tell the fish fork from the dessert fork, and then when I walked into his parents’ house I noticed that they had a giant, fancy floral centerpiece on the table
and
a skylight, and that’s when I started to hyperventilate a little. Victor’s stepdad was out of town, but his mother was very polite, in a way that made me feel like I should have worn tiny white gloves to meet her.

Bonnie, his mom, invited me to sit on the couch. And so I did. But when my back grazed one of the little couch pillows, Victor’s eyes widened at me in horror as if I’d just stabbed the family dog through the ear. He cleared his throat at me, and I sat up quickly as he surreptitiously restraightened the pillow and whispered,
“Those pillows are only for decoration.”
And that’s when I learned my first rule about rich people. They never use their cushions. Which is sort of fucked up,
because that’s kind of what cushions are for
.

Bonnie excused herself to mix us some drinks and, I imagined, to telephone
her husband about the low-class drifter that her son had brought into her home. “You’ll love this one,” I could hear her saying in my mind. “She can’t even use a couch properly. I suspect she might be some sort of a hobo.”

I pulled anxiously at Victor’s arm and whispered that we should sneak out now before I did any more damage, and he looked at me as if I’d gone insane. “We’ll leave a note,” I explained. “We’ll leave a nice note saying that we saw a monkey outside, and that we need to catch it.”

“Are you high?”
He looked suspiciously at my pupils. “Seriously, calm the hell down. She’s gonna love you.
Just don’t sit on the couch cushions.
”

I looked at him in confusion, and he patted my hand and gave me a strained smile as he told me to relax. Then I sighed in resignation and slid down onto the floor, sitting cross-legged, which was fine, because I was wearing jeans and honestly I felt more comfortable there anyway, and Victor whispered,
“What the hell are you doing?”
and I’m all, “Dude. I can’t do this. I’m intimidated by your fucking
couch.
Clearly this relationship is not going to work out.
”

He anxiously tried to pull me back up before his mother got in the room, but I wasn’t worried, because it always takes a long time to make Kool-Aid. “You can’t sit on the damn floor.
What’re you, seven?
”

“Dude. You
just
said not to sit on the cushions.”

“The
decorative
cushions,” he attempted to explain, as he yanked me back up on the couch next to him. “
Obviously
you can sit on the
couch
cushions.
That’s how couches work.
”

“WHY DIDN’T YOU TEACH ME COUCH ETIQUETTE?”

I guess I may have said that a bit loudly, because when Victor’s mom walked back in with the drinks she gave me a strange look, and I was so flustered I couldn’t even think straight, so I quickly took a drink of what was the worst Kool-Aid in the world, and (after a small coughing fit) I realized that “mixed drink” actually referred to some kind of wine spritzer, and not a drink that you make from a mix. After it was clear that I wasn’t going to die, she tried to fill the awkward silence by showing me pictures of
Victor in his tux with lots of different girls, who all had good hair and formal dresses, and probably never even
heard
of bread-sack shoes. Victor kind of rolled his eyes when his mom went on about all the debutante balls Victor had gone to with these girls, and I nodded, trying to look politely interested. Then she asked me when
I
came out and I said, “Oh, I’m not gay. I’m dating your son,” which I thought was pretty clear to begin with. Then Victor started coughing loudly and Bonnie looked confused, but then she got distracted, because Victor sounded like he’d swallowed his own tongue, and then right after that Victor said that we should probably leave.

On the way home, Victor explained that “coming out” is what debutantes do when they reach womanhood. I told him that he sounded like a tampon commercial, and he rolled his eyes. Then I yelled at him for spending so much time teaching me the proper fork to use when we didn’t even stay for dinner, and he was all,
“You couldn’t even use the fucking couch correctly!”
He had a point, so I sighed and sat in silence, because it’s hard to argue with confidence when you’ve just found out that you’ve been using couches wrong your whole life.

We stopped at Dairy Queen on the way back, which was comforting, because they give you only
one
set of silverware, unless you order the Peanut Buster Parfait, in which case they give you that extra-long red plastic spoon so you can reach the fudge at the bottom of the cup. And even then there’s a picture of an ice cream cone on the end of that spoon, just in case you get confused about what it’s for. This is when I started venting about why Dairy Queen is better than fancy restaurants, and Victor stared at me, fascinated, as if he were totally surprised that no one had ever thought of that before, or like he wondered what the hell was wrong with me. It was a look he’d perfected in our last year together.

I took a deep breath and I leaned forward to look at him, grimly. “Look. This is us.
I’m
the Dairy Queen ice cream spoon.
You
are the escargot spoon. That’s why this is never going to work.”

Victor paused, then leaned into me across the table and whispered, “Fork,” and I was all, “I don’t get it. . . . Is that how fancy rich people pronounce
the F-word?” And he smiled crookedly, like he was trying not to laugh, and said, “No. You eat escargot with a
fork
. Not a spoon.” And I yelled, “
Exactly!
This is
exactly
what I’m talking about,” and Victor laughed and said, “I don’t
care
that you don’t know what an escargot fork is. I think it’s adorable that you don’t. And you will learn all of this. Or you won’t. But it doesn’t really matter, because
I
happen to like Dairy Queen spoons.” And I smiled hesitantly, because he said it so confidently that it was hard not to believe him, although I did suspect that he was just being nice because he didn’t want to get dumped by a girl in a Dairy Queen who couldn’t even use a couch properly. That’s pretty much the worst way to get dumped, ever.

Actual picture of Victor and me on his parents’ couch. Please note how uncomfortable Victor is to even be near the couch cushions. It’s like he’s poised to run from them. And at this point I still think I’m the crazy one.

Just Your Average Engagement Story

When I was in junior high I read a lot of Danielle Steele. So I always assumed that the day I got engaged I’d be naked, covered in rose petals, and sleeping with the brother of the man who’d kidnapped me.

And also he’d be a duke.

And possibly my stepbrother.

Then one of us would get stabbed with a broken whiskey bottle and/or raped.

Turns out the only part I was right about was that one of us was going to get stabbed.

IT WAS 1996,
and Victor and I were still in college. At night he worked as a deejay, and I worked
as a phone prostitute
in telemarketing. We’d been living together for about a year when Victor decided it was time to get married, and (just to make it all rock-star romantic) he decided to propose on air. The only problem was that if he was on air he wouldn’t be there to physically make me say yes, and so instead he took the night off and set up a recording that would make it sound like he was calling in to the radio show to talk to the guy filling in for him. He planned on my hearing the
proposal on air, and then getting down on one knee and handing me the ring, but he had no idea how to get me in front of the radio, so he suggested we go for a drive so he could listen to his substitute on the radio. And so we did.
For six. Fucking. Hours.

6:00 P.M.
—We’ve already been in the car for a half-hour. I’m getting hungry.

6:30 P.M.
—I’m hungry, but Victor refuses to pull over to eat.

7:00 P.M.
—Victor is acting very strange and jumpy. I start to suspect he’s going to kill me. I know this seems like an illogical jump to make, since this was the same man who cried when he punched me in the nose over a potato chip, but I’d always suspected that Victor was a little too good to be true, and it seemed easier to believe that he wanted to murder me than it was to believe he’d want to marry me.

7:30 P.M.
—I pretend I’m going to pass out if he doesn’t take me to get something to eat. Victor is convinced that the moment I leave the car, his sub will play the recording, so he insists we just go through the drive-thru of Taco Bell.

8:00 P.M.
—Victor refuses to turn down the radio while we’re ordering our burritos. I assume he wants to drown out my voice in case I ask the cashier to call 911.

8:30–10:30 P.M.
—Victor drives in circles. I have to pee. Victor will not let me out of the car. He’s sweating a lot. I dimly wonder where he’ll dump my body.

10:30–11:30 P.M.
—The urge to go to the bathroom has now grown more pressing than the urge to escape. I begin to suspect that Victor is trying to
kill me by making my bladder explode. He smiles nervously and I wonder whether I could make myself pee on myself.

11:40 P.M.
—No, but not for lack of trying.

11:45 P.M.
—Fifteen minutes to the end of the sub’s shift. Victor is a wreck. I’m at that point of having to pee where you think you’re going to throw up, but then you realize as soon as you throw up you’re going to pee on yourself anyway, and I start considering leaping out of the moving car, because even if I peed on myself, the coroner wouldn’t judge me, because who
wouldn’t
pee on themselves when they were tossing themselves out of a moving car?
Nobody
, that’s who.