My Gratitude List was self-protection. I started composing it the morning after Joe and I first said “I love you,” at Dojo on St. Mark’s Place. Bob Marley’s Legend was playing in the background. (This was New York in the ’90s; when wasn’t Legend playing in the background?)
Joe was due at the hospital at 5:30 a.m. He’d showered and dressed quietly enough. But then he sat at the end of my bed, on my feet (!), and put on his shoes. Just so you don’t take me for a complete scorekeeping bitch (which I am, but there’s better evidence), Joe freely admits he’s “essentially selfish.” It’s the single piece of insight he received the one time he went to a shrink. (Me, on the other hand, I’ve been to nine shrinks in twenty years and I’m still like, “Wait… what?”) This selfishness, according to Joe’s miracle shrink, was a response to being one of seven children. Every time a box of Quisp or Quake was unpacked from the grocery bag, kids descended on it in a feeding frenzy. Joe shared a room with three brothers. Control of the remote, a private place to read Playboy, everything a cage match to the death. The fault, of course, lay with the Catholic Church, which encourages lower-class families to reproduce like rodents and build up the Church’s ranks, blah-blah.
Another item for the Gratitude List: no more Joe railing against religion.
In fact, that dinner at Dojo, it wasn’t Rasta Bob singing “I wanna love you, every day and every night” that inspired Joe to declare the three words that sealed our fate; it was the following discussion of the New Testament:
Joe: It’s doggerel, aggrandizing a moody egomaniac written by men who believed heaven was a hundred feet above their heads. Literally. So when Christ ascended, He didn’t go higher than a seven-story building.
Me: Who cares?
Joe: The hours I wasted listening to that contradictory claptrap! The things I could have done with that time! I could have learned another language. Or leathercraft.
Me: I was brought up Catholic too, you know. When I was seven, they were teaching us about the loaves and the fishes. I raised my hand and said, “That couldn’t really happen.” Sister Bridget, not happy, responded, “Faith requires the mind of a child.” I said, “But I am a child.” She replied, “A younger child.” I thought, What a load of malarkey, and never looked back.
Joe: So you just turned atheist? Wasn’t it a struggle?
Me: “Let’s not and say we did” is my attitude.
Joe: I love you.
Me [I knew it was a blurt that didn’t count. But still, you gotta jump on these things.]: I love you too, Joe.
I’d officially fallen in love the week before, in the Adirondacks, and was just waiting for him to say it first. Violet Parry, the creator of Looper Wash, had rented a lake house and invited the animators and their significant others for a bonding weekend. (I’d only just met Joe, so new work friends + new guy = doubly scary.) It was July 4th. Rumor had it if we hiked to the ridge we could watch the fireworks from the town on the other side. Only after evening fell and we were getting ready to go did we discover that none of the cabin’s dozen flashlights worked. We groused and resigned ourselves to a boozy night on the porch. Joe didn’t come outside. I found him alone at the kitchen counter. He’d disassembled the flashlights and laid them out like surgical instruments. He’d swapped bulbs, scrubbed off crusted battery ooze, and was folding tinfoil into small squares. So peacefully absorbed, so competent, so dear. (That was the moment.) I’m not kidding, within thirty minutes Joe had ten of those flashlights working. As we headed up the forest path, Violet pointed to Joe and mouthed, Keep him.
Had I lost him? Might there be someone else?
Yo-Yo’s eyes were closed and his face was raised to the sun. Come to think of it, he was pretty useless. Thanks a lot, Joe. You left me for another woman and turned me against my dog. If Jerry Garcia were alive, he could sing a song about it.
The fisherman helped the tattooed chef load the squid into an ice chest. I caught them looking at me. Had they been talking about me? I gave them a nod. They carried on with their business.
I revisited my Gratitude List. Oh, another one! Joe reads in bed long after I go to sleep. No amount of passive-aggressive tossing and turning on my part, nor looking at the clock, nor dramatically putting a pillow over my head will make him turn off the light. When he finally does, he’ll sometimes rest his book on me. And these aren’t slim volumes of poetry. They’re Winston Churchill biographies, and Winston Churchill lived a very full life.
The van door slammed shut. The fisherman was gone. The chef came around the side. Our eyes caught. I held his gaze. He held mine. It’s not that I wanted to get anything going with this guy, but it was too weird…
And then he was walking toward me with an intrigued half smile.
I don’t put my hair in a clip for one day and this happens? A hot chef, knowing he’s got a squid in the back of his van, boldly crosses a parking lot to start up a conversation with a middle-aged woman?
This brave new world could not have come at a better time.
“I have to ask,” he said.
“I have to answer.”