I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (22 page)

C
ats were not the problem. The problem was cat owners, and the names they gave their cats—Fluffums, Foo Foo, Fifi, Colonel Fancypaws—and it was the stories they told about their cats at their Friday-night dinner parties:

The problem with cats is, they are not handy to have around in an emergency. Not like a dog, who can smell the heart attack you’re about to have, drag you from a burning building, then sort your recyclables, all in a day’s work, and not like a four-year-old boy. When my son was four, he could be counted on: If I was stuck in the bathroom with no toilet paper, for example, he would fetch me a roll from the linen closet. Or if my back hurt. There’s no better back-walker than a four-year-old boy. But then the phone would ring, and he’d run toward it, crying,
It’s Dad! It’s Dad!
only he was superexcited so it came out sounding like
It’s sad! It’s sad!

“That
is
sad!” a cat-talker said. She was the trim, fit, athletic wife of someone in the math department. Or maybe geology. Hers was a happy life. Her cats were named Cutie, Kiki, and Beaner. I had interrupted her cat story with my boy story, and now she was empathizing with me, and I didn’t like it one bit. What was her deal?

“Oh, it’s sad, all right,” I said. “Nine times out of ten, it’s a collection agency calling. I don’t have any money, so it’s actually tragic. For them.”

Mine was a less-than-happy life. I was ornery and disagreeable, feeling worn out and washed up, full of self-pity and spite. I’d picked up part-time work teaching college freshmen the difference between a colon and a semicolon. This profession provided me with “colleagues” rather than “coworkers,” and by inviting me to their dinner parties, my colleagues were just trying to be nice. It wasn’t their fault: they assumed I was like them. They didn’t know I didn’t belong at any gathering where people took tidy sips of wine, then remarked upon its bouquet or nibbled on stuffed mushrooms or spread a thin layer of hummus across pita bread. When people weren’t talking about their cats, they were repeating what they heard on NPR, or recounting what they saw on PBS, or reporting what they read in
The New Yorker.
I wanted to write my name in Cheez Whiz and dot the
i
with a heart. I wanted to shout that a bouquet is a fistful of dandelions brought to you by a four-year-old boy. I wanted to tug down my neckline and hitch up my skirt and talk about something I’d learned on
The 700 Club
or
The Oprah Winfrey Show.

I wanted to tell them about the discussion I’d had with my son right before coming to this party. He sat me down and told me flat-out that when we were out in public, he would not be going in the women’s rest room anymore, he’d be using the men’s room, and I couldn’t go in there with him. Nor could I stand outside the door and pound on it, asking,
Are you okay in there? Are there any perverts in there? Do you want me to come in there?
like I did that one time, because it was embarrassing. When I asked him what about me, what if I had to pee? I couldn’t very well leave him alone in a public place. What did he suggest?

He said I could cross my legs if I was sitting down and walk like a penguin if I was standing up.

His solutions were always terrible, but I didn’t have anything better.

At the cat-talker party, people were admiring the sunset from the deck, going on about isn’t it spectacular! Amazing! Awe-inspiring! Fantastic! I was as sick of hearing people gush about landscapes and scenery and sunsets as I was of hearing stories about their cats—
Lulu likes to sleep on the washing machine during the rinse cycle!
—so in a loud voice I advertised my hatred for nature. “I hate nature!” I said. “Just hate it!”

“You don’t really hate nature, do you?” the cat-talker asked.

I insisted I do, I do, I really do hate nature. I hate nature and grooving on nature and I hate landscapes and sunsets and everything that goes along with it. Including rocks. I hate piles of rocks. And the mountains? Nothing but a big fucking pile of rocks.

The cat-talker proclaimed her love of nature. I knew she would. I loved being in my kitchen where I could drink coffee and smoke cigarettes. I loved being in the waiting room at the doctor’s office where I could read
People
magazine for free. I loved being in a dressing room at Herberger’s, where I could try on pink poufy prom dresses and twirl in front of a three-way mirror.

The cat-talker didn’t wear pink. She wore Patagonia. She didn’t wear makeup, not even mascara, not even cherry-flavored Chap-Stick, and the lines around her mouth and eyes revealed she participated in outdoor activities. She was sun-kissed. Her earrings were miniature dream-catchers. She had a lot of silver and turquoise on her fingers and around her wrists so everyone would know she was a Patagonia-Wearing Nature-Loving Outdoorsy Woman of the West who battled raging river rapids and climbed fourteeners. Her sleeping bag probably kept her toasty even when the temperature dropped to minus forty. My sleeping bag was pink. Hot pink. She said to me, “Well, if not nature, then what pretty thing do you like to look at?”

I told her the mirror.

She didn’t laugh but her husband did. That was part of the problem: The wives never found me amusing, but the husbands thought I was a stitch, a spunky little number, full of sass and piss and vinegar.

In reality, I was lonely and scared, all tapped out, and not nearly as clever or confident as I pretended to be. I accepted full responsibility for the mess I’d made of my life. Wasn’t I the one who let my husband drag us to western Colorado, its bizarre high-desert landscape, the red sandstone canyons and cliffs, the sky too blue, the sun shining all the damn time, no clouds, nothing green will grow without a timed sprinkler system, and neither of us with decent and full-time work. Couldn’t I have protested more loudly when he rented a house we could not afford? Didn’t I cosign the loan so he could buy himself a pickup truck we could not afford? Didn’t I use my Discover card to pay for groceries, gasoline, Internet access to AOL chat rooms while he lived in a tent in Utah? Wasn’t I doing his laundry?

None of it made any sense. I was so sick of doing his laundry.

“This marriage is not working,” I told my husband one weekend when he’d come home so I could do his laundry and he could stock up on supplies. He was lying on the couch, watching something about dinosaurs on the Discovery Channel. When I said I needed to tell him something, he turned the sound on the television down.

I told him I wasn’t happy. In fact, I said, I was miserable, I was lonely, I wanted out.

He said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

Then he turned the sound back up.

The next morning he returned to his tent in Utah while I thought about how much I hated those six words.
I’m sorry you feel that way.
The
I’m sorry
part makes it sound like a generous sentiment, empathetic and understanding, but when you think about it, it’s really a load of crap. It really means
What you feel is stupid and wrong but the reason you feel that way is because, regrettably, you’re stupid and wrong.
I think it’s so much more honest to say fuck you. Up yours. Who cares. What’s that got to do with me? Too bad, so sad. So what. Whoop dee do. Foo on you. Big deal. Bite me. You’re full of shit. You don’t know your ass from a hole in the ground. Tough titty. No, really, fuck you.

I went to cat-talker, sunset-admirer dinner parties because my marriage was over, and because I was depressed. Big depressed. Bad depressed. Scared-I-might-never-be-anything-but-depressed depressed. I was thousands and thousands of dollars in debt, and my monthly child-care bill was exactly twenty-three dollars less than my monthly paycheck. To cut corners, I swiped rolls of toilet paper from the ladies’ room at work and packets of sugar and ketchup from McDonald’s. My best friend was a four-year-old boy who called me
Mother dear
and made me pay him in nickels to walk on my back. The thing I wanted most of all was to meet someone I could talk to. Someone who would be my friend. Someone who’d say the six words that mean the opposite of
I’m sorry you feel that way,
the six words I was longing to hear:
I know exactly what you mean.

 

 

 

 

 

It must not have been too much to hope for because I met that someone at a happy hour organized by a different set of colleagues. These colleagues preferred dark divey bars to sunsets. They thought inventing euphemisms for flatulence (anal vapor, anal cloud, butt smoke, ass music) was more interesting than chitchat about cats.

This particular dark divey bar was attached to a low-down motel. I was familiar with that motel: it’s where my husband and I stayed when we first got to town and were looking for a place to live; it’s where I worried my son and I would end up when I finally went broke and bonkers. The motel room had fist-sized holes in the walls, dark stains on the carpet, and blotches on the ceiling the color of old, dried blood, but the bar was sort of cozy and smoky and smelled like things I knew, like cigarette smoke and wood smoke and men who worked outside.

Al was sitting in a corner booth, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and telling cheesy jokes. The first words I ever heard come out of his mouth were these:
Three-legged dog walks into a saloon in the Old West. Dog sidles up to the bar and says: “I’m looking for the man who shot my paw.”
The next words I heard him say were
Boilermaker, please
and
Thank you
to our cocktail waitress, an eighty-year-old redhead named Clarice.

Al was one of my colleagues, a professor of creative writing and twentieth-century American literature, but before that, he’d been a seasonal employee, a factory rat, a janitor’s son. When he said he knew exactly what I meant about cat-talking nature-loving dinner parties, I wanted to kiss him. When he debated which laundromat was better—Suds-n-Duds (they had a cleaner bathroom) or King Koin (their dryers burned hotter longer)—I decided I would sleep with him. After he lit my cigarette, then asked what’s your story, I set out to make him mine.

He was an unlikely choice. He was forty-six years old. He’d been married once, briefly, back in the early seventies, but now he mostly had ex-girlfriends. Some of them invited him over for dinner. Some of them were still writing poems about him eight, twelve, nineteen years later. One of them chopped her panties into tiny pieces and sent them to him in the mail.

What about this man inspired such depth of passion? His legs were skinny. His arms were skinny. He had narrow shoulders, knobby knees, he was a scrawny guy with a little belly. He had wiggly eyebrows, a wide forehead, a blunt chin, a poor boy’s bad teeth, and big ears hanging flat against his head. His moustache crept too far past the corners of his mouth, it was a moustache like a pervert would have, and his glasses were too big for his face. His hair got tall when it grew too long, then he got it cut too short. In his closet, ties purchased in 1982 draped over a coat hanger like so many skinny snakes. His bathing suit was a pair of baggy blue trunks covered with ukuleles and hula girls.

The rest of his wardrobe was just as amazing. Baggy Wranglers and flannel shirts, a T-shirt that said
I’m all in
, a T-shirt that said
Sitka, Alaska: A drinking village with a fishing problem
, a dozen flowery Hawaiian shirts, and a silk shirt with dogs playing poker printed on it. He had a leather belt studded with buffalo nickels, a bolero tie shaped like a cow skull, a Detroit Tigers baseball cap, a denim Levi’s jacket, brown cowboy boots, acrylic sweaters covered with fuzz balls, sweatshirts that he wore tucked in. Strangers in bars told him he sort of looked like Bob Dylan; no, he looked more like Gene Wilder; no, there’s a slight resemblance to Barry Manilow; no, he’s a dead ringer for Eric Clapton.

“I am a dead ringer for Eric Clapton,” Al says, but to me he looks like somebody’s goofy uncle, affable and friendly, the guy who comments on the weather by saying,
Chili today, hot tamale,
who comments on gun control by saying,
Sometimes I aim to please, but mostly I just shoot to kill
, who remarks,
This cheese is pretty Gouda, but that cheese tastes much Feta
, during Thanksgiving dinner—who, when you accuse him of exaggerating, says,
I wouldn’t shit you, you’re my favorite turd.
When I picked him up from the hospital after his colonoscopy, he was still dopey, asking his nurse how much money did they find up there.

Decades of bachelordom meant Al could run a vacuum. This impressed me, and that he knew that vacuums had bags, and that those bags occasionally needed changing, and which aisle in Kmart they keep vacuum cleaner bags, made me want to take my shirt off. He could iron; he starched and pressed sharp pleats into his jeans. He could brown a pound of hamburger, then mix in a packet of taco seasoning. I liked his blue eyes, and that he could tie a Windsor knot with as much skill as catching a trout. When I said why don’t we start something up, you and me, he told me the same thing he’d been telling women for the past twenty-some years: He wasn’t looking for any high drama in his life. He didn’t want any hassles. Falling in love was a hassle. He wasn’t interested in falling in love; in fact, he had no intention of falling in love. He didn’t want to hurt anyone.

But.

If I could understand that he didn’t fall in love, he wouldn’t fall in love, there would be no falling in love, if I could accept he just wasn’t interested in a romantic relationship, then maybe, just maybe, there could be something between us. We could have what he referred to as “a beautiful friendship.”

That meant he was agreeable to having sex with me.

“Okay,” I said. “Sure. Why not.”