Chapter 9
Rose
After finishing another long day of baking and carrying trays back and forth to Kalli’s coffee shop, I stop by my still blistering hot apartment to grab a few things.
I’m grumpy, and I have valid reasons beyond the fact that it’s Monday.
I don’t believe in karma or in voodoo, but I believe in the inherent power of Monday to be awful.
I blame Garfield.
Anyway, besides the inherent Monday of it all, I’m tired of living out of a suitcase and lugging things back and forth like I am now. I’m over having to use a regular kitchen and normal-sized appliances after being spoiled with commercial everything. I miss my kitchen. I miss my space, my bed.
And even though I feel silly admitting it even to myself, I am having serious Tank withdrawals.
It’s illogical. Before Friday, we’d only spoken a handful of sentences to each other, none particularly personal or important.
But give me one day that included a little bit of flirting—at least, based on my long-distant memory, I think that was flirting, a deeper conversation about our spouses, and what felt like an extravagant grand gesture by way of the kitchen, and I got some ideas.
Big ones. It was only a few hours, but I got spoiled.
When I saw him yesterday with Chevy, I fell off the wagon all over again. Or did I get on the wagon? I’ve always been confused by the wagon analogy and what constitutes off and on. I should probably switch to a merry-go-round analogy, because I’m really going in circles and also up and down.
Now, I’m back to feeling a little sad because he seemed excited to see me yesterday. He intimated that he’d stop back by, at the very least, to get some cake.
Did I use hummingbird cake as a ploy? No! Of course not. It was part of our agreement. Did it occur to me that it might give him reason to come back to his loft? I’m not stupid.
Fine. Perhaps there were mixed motivations on my part.
In conclusion: I feel foolish and slightly miserable today.
Which is why I picked up my gaming console in addition to a duffle bag of fresh clothes from my hot loft. And as soon as I drop the bag in my room, I start setting up my own personal de-stresser.
Some people might have a glass of wine to decompress after a long day of work. Or reward themselves with a sweet treat. Others might do yoga or watch their favorite show or take a nice, hot bath.
But I am not any of those people.
Yoga stresses me out more than it relaxes me.
This probably starts with yoga pants, which I never got on board with, and it ends with my inability to follow simple directions when it comes to how to move my body.
Yoga gets lumped in with every other form of group exercise, whether it—or its pants—deserve it or not.
And my old favorite way of unwinding died along with my husband.
It took us a few years into marriage for us to discover something that really worked for us both.
Because what I really loved after a long day of teaching was to come home and talk about the good things my students did as well as the ones that made me want to walk right out of the classroom screaming, never to return.
Whereas my sweet husband really liked not talking after work.
He wanted to sit at the kitchen table with a pencil and a crossword puzzle or his worn book of Sudoku.
You can imagine the way this created tension during the earliest years of our marriage.
Until one day I decided that I didn’t care if he wanted to hear about my day. I was going to tell him anyway.
So, I did. I threw myself down in the chair across from him and his crossword, slammed my palms on the table—it had been a particularly hard day for me—and absolutely unloaded on him.
When he first glanced up, alarmed, and opened his mouth to protest, I speared him with a look and hissed, David, just let me complain for a few minutes.
Whether it was my expression or the words, which came out sounding like a Macbethian curse, he did what I asked.
And for the next probably ten to twelve minutes, he sat across from me, continuing to pencil in answers while occasionally looking up, making eye contact and nodding as I told him about Johnny and the wolf spider he brought in from recess and the subsequent panic in our classroom, which resulted in Leah vomiting inside her desk.
Yes, inside, not on top of.
I finally finished and collapsed back in my chair, exhausted and also satisfied that I was able to completely vent without David, who loved to offer unsolicited solutions, offering a single one.
I also wasn’t sure if he heard anything I said, but not trying to solve my wolf spider problems was a start.
Until he set down his pencil, blinked his brown eyes at me, and said, “Throwing up seems like an extreme reaction to a spider. I’m sorry it was such a stressful day, but it sounds like you handled everything really well. Can we do this again tomorrow?”
As it turned out, we discovered something in my tiny kitchen revolt: while he was focused on his puzzle, he didn’t try to fix the things I was complaining about.
Which allowed me the venting I need. The surprise was that David somehow worked better with my voice as sort of background noise.
Which I decided not to take personally. He was listening, after all. Just listening while multitasking.
Would this work for everyone?
No. When I excitedly told the Emilys the next day, they did not get it. In fact, they accused David of being self-absorbed and me of having low standards. Which I didn’t feel like was the case. I mean, it could be for someone else. But it wasn’t for us.
This practice, which became our almost every late afternoon ritual, somehow fed something in each of us without costing either of us very much in return. Win, win.
After David died, I walked into the kitchen after my first day back at work, stared at the kitchen table for five seconds, and burst into tears. I sold it the next day and bought a new one. Different shape, style, and color. Then, I started baking.
After baking became my profession, it was no longer the same kind of therapeutic, and I discovered a new and surprising way to unwind.
I game.
Though my son says I cannot call what I do gaming. In fact, John looked horrified when I used that term after he popped in unexpectedly one day last year to find me sitting on the floor in the Austin house, controller in hand, playing the original Super Mario Brothers game.
“Is that a Nintendo?” I remember him asking, sounding as though he’d walked in to find me running an illegal gambling ring.
“It is.” I almost explained how I had to blow into the game and then jiggle it just to get it working. “And you just made me die!”
“Where did you get it? And why are you sitting on the floor?”
“I’ve had it since middle school, and it was in the attic,” I told him.
I did not tell him that I found it while trying to declutter.
Already, at that point, I’d started thinking about selling the house, which I couldn’t tell him because of his complete disapproval about the idea of me opening a storefront.
“And the cords won’t stretch all the way to the couch. ”
“But what are you doing?”
It should have been totally obvious what I was doing, so I looked at my son and spoke slowly to help him understand. “I thought it was obvious. I’m gaming.”
While I continued on my quest to rescue the princess, John explained what real gaming is.
I half-listened to his very elitist opinion involving games I don’t know and a streaming platform called Twitch.
I forgave him when he stopped by a few days later with a new gaming console.
It comes standard with hundreds of Nintendo games from multiple systems built-in.
Cordless controllers. And no need to blow air into different game cartridges.
Thankfully, Tank’s television is a lot like mine, and before long, I’ve got everything set up. Sinking into his comfortable couch, I queue up my old favorite and lose myself in a quest involving mushrooms and a frustratingly absent princess.
I’m battling Bowser in level 4-1 of Super Mario Bros when there’s a knock, and then Tank walks right in.
“Well, what do we have here?” Tank asks.
I freeze for a moment, having the wherewithal to pause the game, and Tank tilts his head, studying me with what looks like curious amusement. Embarrassment tries to rise to the surface but I tell it to get lost. Grown women can game—even if not everyone agrees on the definition of gaming.
“Welcome to my daily ritual,” I say, deciding just to own it. There’s no point in being embarrassed about things I like. “And before you ask, no, I didn’t take the thermostat batteries for my controller.”
It takes Tank a moment to remember our previous conversation the day he stopped in to find the air conditioner broken. I love watching the way his expression changes as understanding passes over it. Then, he laughs, long and hard.
“Want to watch me defeat Bowser?” I ask.
Tank blinks, then grins and crosses the room to sit down on the couch. One cushion away, which feels like progress. The last time we shared the sectional, we were at opposite ends. Annnnd there I go again, making much of something little.
“Absolutely,” he says. “Please continue.”
I die right away, my fingers fumbling and sending me right into one of Bowser’s flames. But I redeem myself by quickly hitting the ax to retract the bridge, sending the boss down into the 8-bit lava below.
“Did you just beat the game?” he asks.
“Only world four out of eight. The princess is in another castle.”
“That seems like a trick,” he says.
“It does, doesn’t it? How have you been?” I ask, like this is an everyday occurrence—just chatting with Tank Graham about his day while I’m playing Nintendo.