This is okay to wear to work, right? #RealityBites screening tomorrow night! See you crazy kids there! #DateNight
You really do need to get some boundaries, Mary Kay. This is your personal page and public library events have no place here. We need boundaries, both of us. My alarm on my phone goes off—it’s almost 1:45—and it’s time to get to work. The work I’m doing now is not unlike my work at the library—nobody is paying me to do this—but the feeling I get from helping you is payment enough. I open my notepad.
DIMARCO HOME RENOVATIONS: DAY EIGHT
-Pour Phil’s almond milk down drain, return empty carton to refrigerator.
-Delete Monterey Pop from DVR.
-Loosen screws in the leaf of dining room table.
-Jack up heat on thermostat.
-Disable Phil’s bullshit fix on the stove.
-Move charcoal to deck so it gets rained on.
-Hide the coasters.
-Turn on all the TVs. High volume. VH1.
Yes, I’m your handyman—you’re welcome—and you don’t know that I’m the prop master, staging things to advance the plot so that you blame each other when things go awry, when you come home to a hot house and he swears he turned down the heat before he left. I like the way he flies into an indignant rage, accuses you of being crazy. I hate the way you recover—I know I’m moody, I’m still in shock over Melanda—but soon you will jump off the building, away from your forty-five-year-old man baby. And he is a baby. Of all my tricks, it’s the milk that drives him to slam cabinets and rail on about his vocal cords, your selfishness—It’s not like I ask for a lot from you, Emmy. Jesus Christ. I need my almond milk!
I finish my projects and I get home and I fix dinner—old pizza from Bene—and I head down to the Whisper Room and turn on my TV to settle in for my favorite sitcom: You. Things are especially ugly in your house tonight. I signed you up for Pottery Barn catalogues, Restoration Hardware, and of course, Crate & Barrel. The rat is on a tear—What is this shit?—and you can’t find your favorite sweater in your trash bags—I moved all your things around—and you want him to assemble that dresser now but he can’t because he threw his back out at the Guitar Store—ha! Thanks for playing, Phil—and he can’t take a pain pill, he won’t take a pain pill—right on, brother!—and Nomi is fed up—I can’t wait to get out of here—and congratulations, Mary Kay. You’re in the twenty-years-later sequel to Reality Bites and there’s a reason why that movie doesn’t fucking exist. In real life, Troy and Lelaina split up three months later and Lelaina realizes that Ben Stiller actually loved her but Troy only wanted to control her.
Right now, your poor man’s Troy Dyer picks up his Gibson and you grab it out of his hands and is this it? Are you gonna ask him for a divorce? You sigh. “I don’t want to fight with you.”
He reclaims his guitar and strums. “Then don’t.”
You stare at his Michelob Light. It’s not on a coaster because I hid your coasters. You walk into the kitchen and tear a paper towel off the roll, you pick up his beer to move it onto your makeshift coaster, and he kisses the back of your hand—Sorry—and you rub the top of his head—Me too—and I scream at my TV—NO!
For a little while you coexist, living your separate lives, but then you try to start dinner. You turn on the stove but nothing happens.
“Phil!”
“Writing!”
“The stove’s out again.”
“Nope, fixed it, Emmy.”
He did, but I unfixed it today and this is the final act where it all comes together because the pot isn’t boiling, you can’t cook, and now he’s playing the almond milk card—Good boy, Phil—and he shoves a Pottery Barn catalogue in the trash and you grab your phone. Do it, Mary Kay. Lawyer up!
“What are you doing, Em?”
“I’m gonna find someone on Craigslist to assemble the dresser.”
“Oh, come on. I dig the trash bags, it’s like the good old days.”
You groan—kick him out—and you collapse onto your old blue sofa. Did you finally give up? Do you finally see what needs to happen?
“Okay,” you say. “Should we just order Sawadty? I’m exhausted anyway.”
You can order all the beef and broccoli in the world but it won’t satisfy your desire to eat beef and broccoli with me and Phil is fine with Thai, fine with anything, and you lecture him like he’s your indolent teenage son—We do have to finish the house before Nomi graduates—and he huffs—It’s only March, I’ll stick the boxes in the garage—and you are calm—We have a hundred people coming to this house—and he is a child—To hang out in the backyard, Em, in two months. Relax. No one likes being told to relax and you harangue him about the minefield in the bedroom. He snickers—The party’s not in the bedroom, Em—and grabs his guitar—That’s a good line. That’s gold. He buries his head in his music—I’ll take care of the dresser tomorrow—and you pour more wine—I’ll hold you to it. But you won’t hold him to it, Mary Kay. You never fucking do. You go upstairs and masturbate and I shut off this bad TV show: frumpy husband and foxy wife, how original! I don’t have it in me to jerk off. Not tonight.
I have to work harder.
Oliver bugs me for an update—he’s easier to deal with when he’s out of town—and I tell him I’m at home—the truth—and I don’t bitch at him for stealing my M30s because Ajax sold me some heroin and sadly, we’re gonna have to use it now.
I am back in your house less than twelve hours later and I am retracing your footsteps. You’re always sniffing around his nightstand because you are Married, Worried. I plant a baggie of horse in the copy of Catcher in the Rye that he keeps in his nightstand. There’s a sticker on the cover—PROPERTY OF BAINBRIDGE PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL—and oh Phil, grow up. I cross the room and slip another bag under an amp—who keeps an amp in the bedroom?—and then I walk over to your nightstand. This is where you keep a little book that I can only presume must be your diary. I know I shouldn’t read it. But we’re in a rut so I open your drawer and I pick up your diary. The first few pages are to-do lists—almond milk, sell dresser, find one that comes assembled—and you are a fox. Sneaky. The good stuff is in the back.
The dresser, the damn dresser. It’s like a box of Joe and it’s like he’s on my porch in those goddamn boxes and what am I doing? I am punishing Phil because I want to be with Joe and I can’t be mad about Phil about Melanda because come on. I knew. And in some sick way I felt good letting it go on because we all know that I really did steal him and maybe I hoped he would leave me for her? But he didn’t and now he’s never leaving and I can’t leave but what about ME? When do I get to be happy? God I miss Joe. But is that only because I want what I can’t have? Joe in the bunkers at Fort Ward. Joe in the meadow. Joe Joe NO AHAHAHAHAHAH
The danger of a good book is that it swallows you whole and animals in the wild don’t read because if you get lost in a book, you lose sight of your surroundings. You don’t hear the predator. For all of Phil’s laziness, the fucker did do one thing you asked him to do last night. He sprayed WD-40 on your sliding glass door. And I couldn’t reverse that fix. That’s why I didn’t hear the door open.