5. The Motion Carries
THE MOTION CARRIES
The house meeting was Scott's idea and Scott ran it, because of course he did.
It was a Sunday in February. There was a pot of chili on and Mr. Duszak had called about a showing, and Scott said we should sit down about a few things, and we sat down at the kitchen table like a small failing business.
Item one was the showing, the fifteenth, and could everyone please move their crap off the stairs.
Item two was the gas bill, which had doubled, which was my fault and which I contested vigorously on the grounds that fifty-eight degrees is not a temperature, it's a diagnosis.
Item three was me.
Scott had the ledger open in front of him. He turned to a fresh page and uncapped his pen and said, "Third thing. We should probably have one rule."
Todd said, "Oh, here we go."
Scott said, "Nobody comes inside her."
I said, "Excuse me?"
And what followed was the strangest twenty minutes of my life, because three men who had between them been inside me eleven times in five weeks proceeded to have a calm procedural discussion about my uterus while I sat there in a chair with my feet up on the rung.
Scott's position was practical and he laid it out like a spec.
One, none of us can afford a problem. Two, if there's a problem in this house in April, the house ends and everybody's deposit goes with it and nobody graduates on schedule.
Three, the arrangement only survives if it stays low-consequence, and the second it stops being low-consequence somebody gets hurt and it'll be her.
Todd's position was that he agreed with Scott and also that he'd started pulling out anyway because, and I'm quoting, "it seemed rude not to."
I argued. I want it on the record that I argued well, from a seated position, in a t-shirt.
I said it was my body and my call and I was the one who'd handed out the blanket permission in the first place, and that a rule about what could be done with me was a rule I got a vote on, and that I was on the pill, which was a lie, and which Scott did not believe and did not bother to say he didn't believe.
He just said, "You said you'd say no if you ever wanted to. That's a no going the other direction. It's the same thing."
Which was, and I hate this, unanswerable.
Because it was. That was the deal I'd built. If they didn't have to ask me for anything, then I didn't get to ask them for anything either, and I had spent five months making sure of it.
I said, "Fine. Vote."
Todd raised his hand. Scott raised his hand. And I looked at Aaron, who had not spoken once, who was sitting with his arms folded and his back very straight and his eyes on the placemat.
I said, "Aaron. Come on. You've never even touched me. You don't get a say in this."
And Aaron said the only sentence he contributed to the entire meeting.
He said, "It's a good rule."
His voice was strange. Flat, and hard, and none of the hedging he did, none of the technically. He didn't raise his hand. He just said it, and Scott wrote it down.
Three to one. The motion carried.
Scott ruled a line under it in the ledger, on the page after the phone bill, in his block capitals, and hung it back on the fridge on the pierogi magnet where the four of us saw it eleven times a day for the next six weeks.
HOUSE RULE. NOBODY FINISHES INSIDE ANGIE.
Todd drew a little chili pepper next to it. Scott let it stand.
I want to tell you I took this with grace. I took it like a woman who has been told she may have everything on the menu except the one thing she came in for, and I went upstairs and lay on the futon in a fifty-eight degree bedroom and thought about a wastebasket in a basement.
And it worked, by the way. That's what nobody expects. The rule made the house better. February was the best month of my life to that point and I hardly want to talk about it, because it was also the month I turned into a person I didn't entirely like.
Todd used me on the couch on a Wednesday during a rerun and finished on my back.
Scott used me twice more, once bent over my own bed at seven in the morning before a lab, once in the front room standing up with my hands braced on the window frame and the curtain open two inches, and both times he was excellent and both times it ended in a wastebasket.
Todd got quicker about it. He stopped needing a bed. By the end of the month he'd take me over the arm of the couch in eight minutes with the sound on and never once turn the television off, and I want to be honest, that was very close to everything I'd ever wanted.
Very close is a hell of a place to live.
Because every single time, at the end, there was the moment where a man made a decision about me, and the decision was no. Every time. Eleven times, twelve, fifteen. The instant where the whole thing was about to become real and instead somebody was careful.
I started to hate the sound of foil.
And through all of it, Aaron Petry did not touch me.
Did not look at me. Left rooms. Spent February in the library until eleven every night and came home and ate cereal standing at the counter with his back to whatever was going on in the front room, and once, on a Thursday, when Todd had me face-down over the arm of the couch, Aaron came in the front door, said "hey," went straight up the stairs, and shut his door, and Todd never broke stride.
I thought he was disgusted with us. I thought he was the last decent man at one-fourteen Tallow Street.
In March I got the aspirin out of his desk and I found out what he actually was.