I’m gonna buy a car this year and it’s gonna be great. I have never before purchased a car from a reputable dealership, the kind of place where the salesmen wear ties and offer you water while they roll their eyes at your credit score before offering up some loan-shark contract that involves putting up your firstborn child or the deed to your house as collateral. All of my rusted-out matchbox cars were purchased from somebody’s dying grandma or from tiny lots where you can pay for your new Chevy with a combination of expired food stamps and lottery tickets. So now that I am an adult who is going to be living in a house with a driveway, I am going to buy a big black truck with a booming system and shock absorbers so I can silently weep as I float over the potholes without disrupting so much as an eyelash. I’m going to glide into the drive-thru, effortlessly lowering my childproof window to whisper my fried chicken order directly into the mic instead of dislocating my shoulder trying to roll the window down before shouting unintelligibly at the helpless person inside who can’t understand why a person whose car is barely three inches off the ground wouldn’t just bring her lazy ass inside.
I will take every road trip and helm every carpool on brand-new fully inflated tires, an iced coffee in every cup holder, while getting free oil changes every three months because that’s the kind of thing written into the fine print of a multipage lease agreement rather than a bill of sale hastily scribbled on the back of an unpaid FedEx invoice (you know this is too specific not to be true). I don’t care what it costs. I am a grown-up lady who doesn’t have any cartilage in her arthritic knees and I deserve to have a car whose seat slides back electronically. No auxiliary cord? No problem! Because the Bluetooth already connected to your iPod and Beyoncé’s dulcet tones are soothing your weary eardrums before you’ve even fastened your seat belt. In my old Escort, I used to have this little device that would play a Walkman through one of the staticky radio stations at either of the far ends of the dial. I would make a mixtape, put batteries in a portable cassette player, connect it to the adapter, set the dial to 88.2 or 107.8 or whatever, then cruise around to the barely audible strains of “Essaywhuman?!!!??!” et al. for approximately forty-seven minutes before the batteries tapped out or the connection died. That is the story I need to tell when people ask me “How could you possibly be sad?!” in earnest.
7. Can you deal with my doing things without you?
In fact, I would prefer it. I like a lot of alone time, you know, for things like scrolling through the Jibri website for four hours, trying on clothes in my mind. Or plucking my chin whiskers while sobbing over that movie where Winona Ryder is dying from a heart tumor and Richard Gere is in love with her but somehow just can’t stop fucking other people, so yeah, maybe I need to be alone as I process all that imaginary grief for the ninety-seventh time.
I don’t understand couples who do everything together. If I’m going to see you at home, I don’t also need to see you while agonizing over which flavor of Hot Pockets to get. I would like to have my own relationship with the dry cleaner, thank you very much, not smile off to the side while you guys have your familiar little “light starch on the gray slacks!” morning banter. I’m going to the coffee shop you hate, so it can be my coffee shop. You’re getting groceries from the white chick with dreadlocks over at the organic co-op? Well, fine, I’ma get my provisions for the week at Target, along with a car battery, six lightbulbs, a desk calendar, and a handful of Revlon lipsticks. I like having my own shit.
The thing is, I have no idea how to exist within a family unit. Despite my efforts, I have never lived with a romantic partner before; the last time I shared a house with someone, we divided the light bill in half and wrote our names on our respective milks. I don’t know how to coexist in a place where people don’t scribble names on their food or hide their pharmaceuticals on the top shelf of the closet. I still live like I’m in a foster home, hiding my trash at the bottom of the can because I don’t want anyone to know how many Little Debbie oatmeal pies I ate under the covers after dark. And I am still like “Will she notice how much of this body wash I used…?” while tucking the bottle behind a bigger one for fear that you’re going to yell at me about how I always use up the expensive shit. Forget being hit or kicked—the real terror of my childhood was tiptoeing around trying to disguise all the precious resources I was using up. Sometimes a person’s damage is obvious: yelling, violence, defensiveness. But in some cases it looks like walking around with a plastic bag full of trash in your backpack when you didn’t spend last night at home because of a baseless worry that someone will look through it and hold its contents against you.
I am still learning that no one is going to mark the level of the shampoo before I take a shower so they’ll know whether I use a squeeze. And that I don’t have to hide my dirty clothes. However, I will put a password on my computers and shit, I know how you feel about unauthorized screen time. And also those naked pictures of you on my desktop.
8. Do we like each other’s parents?
Is this a trick question? My parents, as I can’t stop reminding people, ARE DEAD. Which means you are one of the lucky people on this planet who never has to suffer through any of my mom’s silent scrutiny of your potato salad (she would eat it, but she would not approve) or humor my father as he not-so-secretly drinks every drop of cognac you have in that high cabinet where we keep the plates yet gently berates you about how children in his house weren’t allowed to whistle, let alone speak to him while looking him in the eye. He would fall asleep in the rocking chair while my mom washed all the dinner dishes and excused herself multiple times to anxiously smoke cigarettes in the driveway, and then she’d serve her contribution to the meal: a cake from a box mix baked in her finest cat-shaped mold. At some point in the evening I would have to take you aside to explain that I was going to sell the children’s piano to fund the latest of my father’s harebrained schemes, but that he’d assured me that this one was going to be the one that finally paid back a return on my investment. There’d inevitably be a fight of some kind, resulting in your having to drive my sobbing mother home and my body-slamming an old-ass man in the middle of the TV room while your kids cower in fear in the kitchen. So I guess what I’m saying is that death can sometimes be pretty great.
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