Last night I offered to take Dan out to Chick-Fil-A for dinner.
"Wow, it looks kind of busy," I said. "I think it might be Kids' Night."
Dan groaned. "We could go to Meijer and kill time," he suggested.
It's not that we don't like children. (We practically are children when we hang out together.) It's that we don't like dozens of spoiled and ill-behaved screaming banshees with helium balloons ruining our dinner. (Sometime you'll have to ask us about the fork-wielding toddler that couldn't stay on her side of the booth at the Pizza Hut in Brownsburg.)
So we went to Meijer. I smelled every last bottle of shower gel. Dan stared at the memory disks, clearance electronics, Hot Wheels, Matchbox cars and Transformers. We observed a moment of silence for the Caddyshack Gopher golf club headcover. (You would too if you saw where they put the hole.) I begged him to buy me Hungry Hungry Hippos. He refused and deflected. "Oh man, have you ever seen anyone play that game stoned?"
After 45 minutes, we went through the self-checkout lane, purchasing two bottles of soap, a can coozy, and white candy dipping chocolate. (Because random is fun, that's why.) On our way out, Dan was distracted by the quarter machines filled with stale candy and gum, stickers, and cheap Chinese-made toys. He reached his hand into his pockets and fished in his palm for two quarters. He put his money in the jewelry machine.
"Is that for me? Are you buying me a present?" I asked him.
"Yeah, but you can't have it yet. It's a surprise." He opened the plastic bubble and examined the gift. It was a cheap-ass bracelet, made with stretchy, shoestring-like bands, a plastic "LOVE" medallion, and four plastic beads. He gave it to me.
"I am totally going to wear that. I will cherish it always."
We got in the car and drove across the parking lot to Chick-Fil-A. Dan looked at the bracelet on my wrist thoughtfully and deadpanned, "Look, there's a bead for every soul I had to destroy to get to you."
I am going to do something I typically try to avoid. I’m going to write a blog post about my ex-husband. Mostly, I don’t write about him because I’m afraid you, dear readers, will think to yourselves, Damn. Girlfriend hasn’t moved on yet? What is wrong with her? That is so unhealthy.
Then I suddenly realized I don’t really care if that’s what you’re thinking.
On Saturday Liar, Liar Pants on Fire™ wrote to a mutual acquaintance of ours:
“I don’t know if you got the news, but my wife left me for a new Internet boyfriend.”
That one sentence got me thinking about narcissism and compulsive lying and the alternate reality that exists in my ex-husband’s mind – a place where apparently I abandoned him for an Internet booty call.
Flashback to one fall day in 2005. I was driving home from my job at The Saturday Evening Post. Stopped at a red light at Riverside and 16th Street, I remembered that LLPoF had called me earlier in the day while I was stuck archiving. I flipped open my phone and retrieved the message waiting for me. My turn signal clicked rhythmically. My wipers skipped over the windshield in that annoying way they do when the sky is a little shy about raining.
“Hey,” I heard him say, and I stopped tapping my left thumb on the steering wheel. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m planning on tutoring one of my classmates tonight after class. Be home late. Probably around 11:00. Hope you don’t mind.”
That’s what he said. Translate his reality into actual reality and you get something that sounds more like: “Hey, I just wanted to let you know there’s this girl in class that seems to kind of like me. She’s Asian, reveres anything with a penis, and her English isn’t so great. I’m going to use our complicated PR textbook as a ruse to see if she’ll kiss me and hold my hand.” I just knew that he was planning on breaking a vow or two after his night class.
I hit ex-husband’s speed dial number, but I got his voicemail. Rather than leave a nasty message, I went straight home to gather evidence. That night, he came home to find that an email exchange between the two of them had been nailed to the garage door.
“…can’t wait to see your beautiful face after class.”
“…my heart skips beatings when in your big red truck.”
“…we can get coffee and I’ll tell you more about my days as an investigative reporter.”
“…you are my love for America and PR in one same person.”
There, I thought. Deny that reality, you asshole.
And deny it, he did – right after he accused me of invading his privacy.
I spent the next couple of months translating his reality to a marriage counselor, my immediate family, my close friends, and concerned professors who wondered why a model student would suddenly bolt out of lectures with mascara dripping down her face. After his fifth chance, I divorced him, confident that if there had been some reason to keep trying I’d have come across it already.
So Sara, the acquaintance, wrote to me. “Doesn’t he know that I know what happened? Can you believe him?”
And all I could offer to her was this analogy: “It’s like my ex-husband is a Republican and his imagination is Fox News. There’s nothing anyone can do.”
I spent this weekend in Evansville visiting a good friend, and Saturday morning we went to the Southlane Flea Market. The following is a conversation I had with Dan via multi-media messaging on our cell phones:
Me: [Image to the left was sent to Dan.] Should I buy you this? We are at a flea market. It's kind of scary here.
Him: [Image to the right was sent to me.] Already got one.
Me: OMG. I'ma hafta dump you now.
Him: Damn, thought you loved me?
Me: Is that thing really yours?
Him: Yes, it was a very strange gift.
Me: We need to talk.
Tuesday was my first day back to running in three weeks.
The Stats
I scrunched two miles into 30 minutes, and almost didn't have enough daylight to finish. I ran at a park close to work and passed a woman and her dog three times. She smiled at me every time. I listened to "Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne, "I Gotta Feeling" by The Black Eyed Peas, "Big Yellow Taxi" by Joni Mitchell, "Kodachrome" by Paul Simon, and "Know Your Enemy" by Green Day. Total jogging time: 15 minutes. Total walking time: 15 minutes.
The Head Game
Here's the thing about running: if I waited until I felt like doing it, I'd never run again. Three weeks in non-exercise time is a long time. It's painfully long like lunch period was for that nerdy girl in high school who read fan fiction while she ate at a table alone. (Shut up. No that wasn't me. I don't read fan fiction.)
My goal was to run 20 minutes, but I knew as soon as I started that my pace was too hard. Still, I couldn't slow down, so all I could do was shave some time off. Every time my foot hit the pavement, I felt my already aching brain slam into the backside of my forehead. It was something like this:
I gotta feeling . . . Woohoo
That tonight's gonna be a good THUD!
That tonight's gonna be a good THUD!
That tonight's gonna be a good, good THUD!
The Public Service Announcement
Don't run with a headache, because when it's over you'll be wondering, Is this what a concussion feels like?
“Hey, Em?”
“Yeah?”
“I think your neighbor is nuts.”
“Really? She seems all right to me. Not very chatty, but not really in my way either. Isn’t that the definition of perfect as far as neighbors go?”
Dan ran down a list of her bizarre behaviors – stuff I miss because I am at work all day. “Then there was the time I got your mail. When I came back up the shared part of the drive, she was unloading her Suburban, and I walked past. She screamed at me, chewed me out for scaring her to death. Oh and that time she yelled into her phone, complaining about how she can’t hear because of the AIDS.”
It wasn’t long before I started to notice little things too. Like how she slams her windows shut when we let the dog out and sit on the front stoop. How she yells at her kids constantly. How that bloody smoke detector in her garage has been chirping for over a year and she hasn’t bothered with a new battery.
One day last week while on my lunch break, I called Dan to see how things were going. “Em, she’s at it again. She’s outside with a shovel, screaming and swearing at the leaves.” I came home that evening to find she had shoveled the leaves on the right side of her driveway only, right behind where she parks her Suburban. It was as if she didn’t think she’d be able to back over them.
Loony. Flipping. Tunes.
I live in a condo in which I share one wall with this crazy neighbor – one Indiana Code residential firewall. In all my five and a half years at this place, I’ve hardly ever heard a peep from my friends to the north. I mean sometimes her three girls get a little rowdy, and I can tell when they’re jumping off the bed and onto the floor by the slight vibrations in the floorboards. But that’s it.
Until this morning at 7:00 a.m. happened. That’s when I heard her screaming, “MY CLOTHES ARE STILL WET! THEY ARE IN THE DRYER AND THEY ARE STILL WET. WHY ARE MY CLOTHES STILL WET? WHY DIDN’T YOU DRY THESE?” She must have been screaming at her oldest daughter, who is by my estimation no older than 11.
Seriously. I could hear Psycho Mom™ as well as if there’d only been a door between us. Her voice was shrill. And I was not ready to get out of bed yet. I did what any cranky, sleepy person would do. I stared at the offending wall and yelled back.
“Oh. My. God. Woman! SHUT UP. I AM TRYING TO SLEEP OVER HERE.”
Apparently I can’t yell as loudly as she can, because it went on for another 15 minutes. I tossed and turned, wrapped the pillow over my ears, and squeezed my eyes shut. No good.
“STOP IT,” I yelled again in exasperation. “STOP YELLING, PUT ON YOUR STUPID WET CLOTHES AND TAKE YOUR CHILDREN TO SCHOOL SO I CAN SLEEP FOR 45 MORE MINUTES!”
Almost immediately, her garage door went up and her Suburban growled to life.
A bonus post. He's just been full of it this week.
[We're watching "Two and a Half Men", and Charlie is trying to explain to his fiancee why there are inappropriate pictures of another woman on his cell phone. I turn to face the BF.]
Me: Do...
Him: NO. Absolutely not.
Me: Hi. Are you here yet?
Him: I drive like big boy! I am on the right side of the road and everything!
***
Him: I got you a treat.
Me: What? Tell me! I need to know.
Him: You do not currently need to know. And, you will only receive it should you complete my list of demands.
Me: [...]
Him: Okay... It's more extortion that treat. You have to get me some Coke Zero if you want to see your treat alive.
Me: [Sticking tongue out.]
Him: Don't mock me, $uess. I'm a desperate man.
Me: [...]
Him: Get the Coke Zero, or THE TREAT GETS IT!
Him: Emily!
Me: What?
Him: Just checking.
Him: Are you... are... you.... saying that Megatron is a lie?!?
Him: I think I'm making a pretty strong case for wearing slippers to Walmart: http://www.peopleofwalmart.
Me: I don't think so.
Him: You're keeping me down with your dress code, $uess. I need to express myself.
Him: If they make this ricotta carton any harder to open, I'm declaring war on Italy.
Me: I think you're doing it wrong.
Him: Back off, woman! I'm not the kind to hit, but I will.
Him: You're wearing perfume.
Me: Yeah, you totally want me, don't you?
Him: [heading towards the kitchen] Nah, I really just want hot wings.
