She loved to talk about how equal we were. "I don't consider you my possession," she said presumptuously the first night we were together. She accepted me and wasn't going to try to control me. I accepted her and wasn't going to try to control her. We would work out any disagreements amicably. We would compromise! We would always put each other first! It all sounds lovely, until you realize that she was talking only to me, and I wasn't looking to be persuaded of her egalitarian intentions - so to whom was it, exactly, that she was speaking with such dogmatic conviction?
It was only natural that she would take the lead when it came to our living arrangements; after all, I'd spent my whole life either as a minor under my family's care, or as a prisoner of the system. She had been married twice, raised four children. She was the one who wanted to go looking at apartments. She was the one who wanted to put in an application. She was the one who rejoiced without reservation when we were approved, and since she was so lovely in her enthusiasm - and none too pleased when I did dare to express my hesitations - I swallowed my own feelings and tried to cooperate as, like a whirlwind, she swept me out of my comfort zone and then some.
We had our first major argument after a visit to the furniture store. I hadn't wanted to go in the first place. I didn't have any strong feelings about couches or dining tables. As long as I had my desk and my bookcases, I'd be just as happy sleeping on the floor. Of course, when we actually got to the furniture store, I quickly developed a few tentative preferences. I wouldn't hear of a couch without arms, for instance. All of my opinions were impractical, or selfish, or just silly, yet she kept on soliticing them. Matters of décor were even more difficult, because I did some have some strong feelings about that. I quite simply fell head-over-heels in love with a certain collection of rose-patterned bathroom accessories. We got the shower curtain, but she wouldn't hear of the trash can or the soap dispenser or the toothbrush holder. She didn't want a matchy-match showpiece bathroom, something that looked as if it belonged in a Better Homes and Gardens photo spread. Overly polished and formal wasn't her style. Now don't get me wrong; I like a house (or apartment) that looks and feels like a home, not a catalog display - but I've always liked bathrooms with neatly coordinated décor. They feel luxurious to me. I didn't care about the kitchen or the dining room or even the living room, but I did want my pretty showpiece bathroom.
When my grandfather gifted me with a rather substantial sum of money to use on furnishings, particularly a refrigerator and microwave, I felt that I finally had something to contribute. There was some talk of my going to pick them out on my own, but I insisted on her coming with me. After all, I had never shopped for kitchen appliances before; I wouldn't know what to look for. And since what was mine was hers and what was hers was mine, this was going to be our refrigerator and microwave, and I wanted her to be as satisfied with them as I was, especially because she planned to do most of the cooking.
The year before, I had spent several months staying with my uncle and his family, who had a refrigerator that dispensed cold filtered water from the door. I'd always been content to drink tap water, but I had found this feature just as convenient and much more satisfying than drinking from the tap. I would have liked to choose a refrigerator with a water filter in the door, but for some reason, she put her foot down. I never understood what, exactly, she had against refrigerators with dispensers in the door, but she refused to even consider any models with this feature. I wasn't about to argue; her desire not to have a water dispenser was clearly much greater than my desire to have one. It was much more important to me that she be happy, so we found a very nice, very basic refrigerator.
What was ironic was that, unlike me, she wasn't content drinking tap water. One day, before the refrigerator was delivered, as we were walking in the heat, carrying our heavy bags home after a shopping excursion, I tried to inject a little positivity into the situation by reflecting how good it would be to get back to the apartment and enjoy a nice cool glass of water. "That would be true," she snarled, "if we actually had cold water to drink!" Wounded, I fell silent. If she wanted to be miserable, let her!
One of the first purchases she made for the apartment - even before we moved, actually - was a pair of water pitchers to keep in the refrigerator. With two pitchers, we could always be sure of having cold water available; when one pitcher was used up and refilled and the water was still getting cold, we could drink out of the other. Or at any rate, she could. Most often I just filled my glass from the tap. I thought it was quite cold enough; even on the hottest of days, when the water came out warm from sitting in the pipes, it was only a few seconds before it began to run cool, the warmth flowing over my hand chilling like the sudden blossoming of an ice-blue flower. What additional satisfaction I might have derived from colder water wasn't usually worth the bother of pouring it.
I knew she looked down on me for being content with tap water, as if it weren't just a matter of personal preference. I think it may have been guilt on her part, because I was the one filling her glass more often than she was. If I was up and she was sitting, or even if we were both sitting, she would ask me, so sweetly, if I would get her some water. Since she liked to have a glass of water at hand, and didn't like to touch water that had been sitting out even as long as a couple of hours, I was faced with this request several times most days. It was such a simple thing, such an easy thing for me to do to make her happy; of course I would do it. Sometimes I poured a glass for myself at the same time; more often, I didn't. Sometimes, if I was feeling lazy or rushed, I wouldn't bother to refill the pitcher when it got to be empty, or I would pour from the full pitcher even though there was still some water left in the other one. If she caught me doing this, or I never got around to refilling the first pitcher and we ran out of cold water, she berated me for being inconsiderate. I didn't bother to point out that if it mattered so much to her, she should be the one making sure the pitchers were full.
A couple of times I actually wondered if it was fair that she would ask me to fill her glass for her, whereas I always took care of myself - not whether it was fair to me, but whether it was fair to her! I thought of what a warm glow I felt when I handed her the glass and she smiled up at me and said "Thank you," and I wondered if I was being selfish, never giving her a chance to feel the same way. (I really was that fucking naive, okay?) A couple of times, then, when I was sitting and she was up and about, I asked her to please bring me some water. I very quickly learned that the response was the same every time, even if she was actually already in the kitchen (doing something other than pouring water) when I asked: "Get it yourself. I'm not your nigger." Then she would smile and explain that that wasn't a racist thing to say, because she'd first heard it from a black person.
(My mother was none too sympathetic when I told her about the chances I'd given her to do favors for me. "That's not love, doing every favor someone asks you," she said, as if it should have been obvious. Well thanks, Mom, now you tell me.)
Her intent to do most of the cooking, which she had stated before we got the apartment, quickly fell by the wayside. She did a lot of baking, but it seemed I was most often the one preparing our meals. (She later claimed she couldn't stand to cook with the inadequate pots and pans we had, and that was why she had me do it.) One day, several months into our relationship, when I'd given up hope of ever satisfying her and taken to staving off her fury as best I could, she wanted a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch, and she insisted I make one for myself as well, even though I wasn't hungry. When I brought our sandwiches over to the couch where she was sitting, she muttered "Thank you" and began to eat as I sat down beside her and tried to think of a way to clear up the tension between us. Suddenly I heard her sputtering and choking - clearly a bite of food had gone down the wrong way. Her distress cut through my seething resentment, and all I could see was the discomfort and pain of someone I cared for dearly. I leapt to the kitchen in a couple of quick steps, quickly filled a glass, and rushed it back to her, only one thought in my mind: to bring her relief without delay. During those few seconds that I was up, however, she got past the worst of it, and when I pressed the glass into her hand, she looked at me with disgust and rage and sputtered, "Why did you bring me tap water? You know I don't drink tap water!"
If I had been able to admit to myself then that our relationship was truly beyond repair, that whatever may have passed for love between us once was dead a thousand times over - if I had been willing to admit to myself what my life had become, and that it was only fear that kept me bound to her now, I would have done what I've ever since regretted not doing: I would have gone back to the kitchen, grabbed the fullest pitcher of ice water we had, carried it back out to the living room, and dumped it over her head.
It wasn't for another month or two that she threw me out. When she turned on me, she turned on me completely. She blamed me for the high blood pressure that had recently landed her in the hospital, claiming that my mere presence was enough to send it spiking. She didn't want to hear my apologies; she didn't want to hear my concerns. She knew she couldn't legally demand to have me out of the apartment - my name was on the lease - but she knew she had options and if I didn't go on my own, she'd find somewhere else to go and I wouldn't be able to afford to stay there anyway. If my mother hadn't been available to pick me up that evening, I don't believe she would have cared if I'd had to spend the night on the streets. Over the course of the next few days, we did speak on the telephone several times, to make arrangements for me to come back and move my things. I can honestly say that I took the high road during those conversations: I spoke gently, apologized for what I'd done wrong, and bit my tongue when she bombarded me with unjust accusations or hypocritical invective. "A soft answer turneth away wrath," according to a Biblical proverb, but my meekness seemed to inspire her to new heights of fury. She couldn't stand the thought of me coming to the apartment to pack my things, but she didn't like having to deal with my stuff all over the place, so she did a lot of my packing for me. When I told her I appreciated that, she snarled, "I didn't do it for you."
Her main concern with me at that point, other than extricating all traces of me from her life and apartment as quickly and completely as possible, was the refrigerator. The microwave too, to a lesser extent, but primarily the refrigerator. For me, the issue was cut-and-dried: although I knew my family specifically wished it otherwise, I had promised her months ago that I would leave the refrigerator with her if we ever broke up. She was the one who loved to cook, and if I took it she would have to replace it immediately, whereas I would be living indefinitely with my mother, and the refrigerator would only be in storage if I did take it. And really, I didn't want it. It wasn't my refrigerator in the first place. It was the model she'd wanted.
For any number of reasons, though, "you keep it" wasn't a good enough answer for her. She was afraid I would change my mind. (Of course she was. She'd told me in the beginning that my bed was mine to keep no matter what, but she changed her mind about that when she threw me out. It was important to her that she and her new roommate have matching beds. Why wouldn't I follow suit, just for spite?) She wanted me to sign it over to her legally. She had it all worked out: if she and her new roommate weren't able to make the rent, which was a very real possibility, she would have to find new lodgings and pay a $1200 break-lease fee. If I signed the refrigerator over to her, she would consider that to be my part in paying the fee.
I was flabbergasted. She didn't have any immediate plans to give up the apartment; she'd done the calculations before she threw me out and had every reason to believe she and her new roommate could get by. She was asking me to sign over a real asset against a prospective debt - and it was her debt! She was the one who'd thrown me out, against my will, and she was more eager to have my name removed from the lease than I was. Any further financial obligation attached to that apartment would be squarely on her shoulders; I had no obligation to pay a single penny of that break-lease fee! When I pointed this out, she lost her pretense of reasonableness and threatened to take me to court over it. It was my fault, she insisted, if she had to pay that fee, because I'd forced her to throw me out in the first place! I'd misrepresented what living with me would be like - I'd broken a verbal contract. I'd told her that I wouldn't sit around the house all day, that when I felt truly comfortable and settled-in to our new life together, I would enjoy expanding my sphere of acquaintances and experiences - but after six months living with her, I was turning to my books and computer games more eagerly than ever. I'd promised to try to bring my night-owl tendencies under control, but I'd found it difficult to do so, and at one point had tentatively proposed a two-week experiment to see if a more "unconventional" schedule of sleeping and waking might better suit my body's needs. In the early days of our relationship, we'd talked about what we imagined our future together would be like, and now she was threatening to use vague promises I had made about "someday" - promises I had made to please her, and not from any great desire of my own - against me in a court of law.
In that moment I decided: there wasn't a power in heaven or on earth that could make me sign that refrigerator over to her. No, I didn't change my mind about letting her have it. But for the first time in nearly ten months, she would have to take or leave what I was offering on my terms.
She wasn't there the morning I went back to the apartment to pick up my things. While I waited for the movers to arrive, I drifted around this space that was so intimately familiar, yet was clearly my home no longer, puttering uselessly in a haze of pain and tears. On the coffee table, where I couldn't miss it, was a statement she had drawn up on notebook paper, something to the effect that I, Truth Unleashed, acknowledged that I had broken a verbal contract, etc., etc., and that in signing over the refrigerator I would understand that my debt would be, in the eyes of all parties, considered to be paid in full. I set it back down without signing. Also on the coffee table was a paper that looked to have been torn from a magazine, one of those nauseating "inspirational" quotes she loved so much: "You can never truly please another person; you can only please yourself." It was an odd message for her to have left me amidst all these accusations of selfishness. Maybe it was her way of saying she was through trying to make me happy, but I'd never considered her to be responsible for my happiness. Whatever it was that she meant, it struck me like a dagger in the heart, and all I could do was collapse on her ugly green couch, the one I'd spent six months pretending wasn't a perfect eyesore, and give myself over to a plaintive, primal wail.
Maybe she would be furious when she came home and found I hadn't signed her little contract, but I didn't care. I was so desperate and broken I might have abandoned my resolve and signed a simple statement that I relinquished any claim I might have had on the refrigerator, but she'd gone too far. I wasn't going to let her recast a gift freely given as an admission of blame on my part. If she wanted that refrigerator, she would have to accept what came with it: the knowledge that I had been the bigger person, that I had chosen to put her first and act from a place of love while she was spewing curses and threats. She could have the refrigerator, but it would forever put the lie to whatever she was telling herself about me.
She would complain to me over the telephone later about my not having signed the paper, but there was nothing she could do at that point. Even she would have to admit that, if I hadn't taken it when I already had the professional movers there with their van, I wasn't likely to change my mind and come back for it now, no matter how spiteful I happened to feel. She couldn't afford to replace it and wash her hands of it (and me) altogether. If she tried to take me to court, she'd be laughed out on her ass and probably required to pay my legal fees if the suit wasn't dismissed outright. She had the refrigerator. The only thing she wanted from me that she didn't have was an undisturbed image of herself as a moral person. And I wasn't going to give her that.
"I walk out of this darkness / With no sense of regret," Kelly Clarkson sings on her first album, "And I go with a clear conscience / We both know that you can't say that." I'm not sorry I stayed true to myself at a time when I was hurt, forsaken, and angry. I'll never be sorry I chose to stay right (ironically, "stay right" was one of her catchphrases), to take the high road.
I do wish I'd taken that pretty rose-patterned shower curtain, though.
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