Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir Page 10

  Even if I had ever wondered how Victor would respond to a giant bearded man throwing a live bobcat on him, I don’t think I ever could have foreseen his actual reaction. Victor’s jaw clenched and he stiffened, staring with wide-eyed shock at the bobcat and remaining perfectly still. Then (impressively avoiding any sudden movements) he looked up at my father in bewilderment. Perhaps Victor was expecting to see a look of embarrassment from my father, who must’ve accidentally spilled a bobcat on him, or perhaps he thought my father would be just as horrified and shocked to see a bobcat on Victor’s lap, and would tell him to remain still while he got the tranquilizer gun. Instead, my dad smiled broadly and held out his hand to shake Victor’s, as if an unexpected bobcat weren’t sitting on Victor’s chair. (A bobcat, I might add, who was looking just as horrified and pissed off himself at being placed in this awkward social situation.) Victor kept a wary eye on the bobcat (who was now making the frightening sort of noises bobcats make when they want to make it perfectly clear that they are not house cats and don’t want you to snuggle them), and then Victor glanced at me, as if deciding whether or not I was worth this. He took a deep breath, and then turned in slow motion in his seat to shake my dad’s hand. “Henry,” he said tersely, nodding his head in greeting, the fear in his voice showing only slightly. Then he turned back to my mom and kept talking as if nothing could be more natural. It was awesome, and I think it earned the respect of all of us right that moment. Even the bobcat seemed to realize he was probably safer with Victor than with the large man who was always throwing him on people, and snuggled down beside Victor to glare resentfully at the rest of us.

  (Disclaimer: These aren’t great pictures of Victor or of the bobcats.)

  Later Victor told me he’d been totally freaked out by the situation, but that his dad had once owned a cougar named Sonny when Victor was a kid, so he assured me that he understood that some people liked exotic pets. And it was nice that we had this thing in common to bring us together, but the difference was that his father owned helicopters, Porsches, and pet cougars because he was wealthy and ostentatious, and my father kept wild bobcats for their urine. I didn’t point out those differences, though, because we were bonding. And because I still couldn’t completely explain the urine thing myself, although I was later told it’s simply an organic way some people use to frighten pests out of their yards. Unless those pests are bobcats, I guess. Then you’re fucked.

  For some reason, Victor was very concerned about what my parents thought about him, and he focused on winning their approval. He’d won over my mom almost instantly by helping her rebuild an old muscle car, but my father always treated him as if I’d inexplicably invited our CPA over for dinner. If we’d ever had a CPA, that is. Victor attempted to woo my father’s approval as a manly man by asking my dad to teach him about his taxidermy business. It was an endeavor that neither of them seemed entirely excited about, but they both pretended to be happy to do it for my sake, in spite of the fact that I told them both I thought it was a terrible idea. At the end of what would be Victor’s first (and only) day of taxidermy, he looked physically ill, and my father looked bewildered.

  “What happened?” I whispered to Victor as my father went to go lie down. “Did you throw up? Because almost everyone throws up the first time they mount something,” I reassured him. “I’m pretty sure that’s normal.”

  “No,” Victor answered, his arm slung over his eyes as if attempting to block out the images. “No, your dad had already mounted it. It just needed some touchups. It was a black boar, and he told me I could paint the inside of the mouth, because that’s good, quick beginner’s work.” It was, actually, and I gave my dad points for giving him something easy and nongross.

  “And?” I asked.

  “I spent six hours painting it. Six hours. With an airbrush.”

  “Wow. That’s . . . that’s a really long time to paint a boar mouth. How did it turn out?”

  “It looked like . . .” He paused for a moment, staring grimly at the ceiling. “You know when Fred Flintstone dresses up like a girl?”

  “Oh.” I bit my bottom lip to remain stoic, because I knew that laughing would just add insult to injury more insult, and I patted his arm reassuringly. “So, what did Daddy say?” I asked cautiously.

  “He didn’t say anything. He just looked at the boar in silence and then led me away from it. I’ve never heard him so quiet. Then he asked me to string his hunting bow for him, and I almost got a hernia doing it. He took me out back to try to shoot it, and I almost shot myself in the leg. For real. I almost shot myself. In the leg. I think your dad was expecting me to kill myself accidentally so that he could tell you there had been a tragic accident, and then you could just move on with your life and find someone else who doesn’t make wild boars look like cheap male prostitutes.”

  I tried to convince Victor that my dad actually adored him, but then I remembered that two weeks earlier my dad had tried to teach Victor flint napping (the art of making arrowheads out of rocks the Native American way), and Victor had been doing surprisingly well, until he cut himself and had bled so much we started to suspect he’d hit an artery. “You sure you want to marry a hemophiliac?” my dad had whispered to me while looking for something to use as a tourniquet. “That’s a hereditary trait, you know.” It was possible my father was trying to kill him.

  In a final desperate attempt, Victor decided to make a present for my father of an authentic Native American medicine bag he’d made himself with a found coyote face, a dead turtle, and some braided leather for the strap. When he’d finished his macabre handicraft project he held it up to me triumphantly, and I stared at the eyeless coyote face for a moment, and then went back to reading my book. “Isn’t this awesome?” he insisted (somewhat manically), and I shrugged halfheartedly, allowing that it did seem like the sort of the thing that my father would enjoy. This wasn’t saying much, though, since my father also inexplicably enjoyed picking up interesting roadkill, and creating mythical taxidermied creatures out of spare parts. Victor was pissed that I didn’t share his enthusiasm, and he gruffly and dismissively waved me off, pointing out that I was “a girl,” and thus couldn’t understand such masculine endeavors as winning over your future bride’s father with such a manly gift.

  “You’re probably right,” I admitted. “It is hard for me to appreciate the sheer machismo involved in a man making a purse for another man.” Then he clarified (quite loudly) that it was a medicine bag, and I replied, “Oh, I wouldn’t know about such things. I’ve never even owned any coyote-face purses, because I can never figure out which shoes to wear them with.” Then Victor glared at me and told me I wouldn’t understand, and I agreed and blamed it all on my vagina, since it seemed like that was what we were both doing at the moment. Then Victor sighed defeatedly, kissed me on the forehead, and told me he was sorry in a rather unconvincing manner. I suspect he said it less because he realized he was being sexist, and more because I think he was just afraid to argue with my vagina. Which is a pretty smart move on his part, because my vagina is wily.

  Turns out, though, that Daddy loved his animal-face purse and hung it in a place of honor from the mantel, where it remains to this day. Victor had won my father’s respect, and all it had taken was a dead-animal backpack. I wondered whether there was some sort of secret combination that I could try that would make Victor’s parents accept me so willingly. It wasn’t really that they disliked me. They just seemed uncomfortable around me. They were polite and kind but baffled. It was as if their son had unexpectedly shown up with a neck tattoo that read “MAKE ME SOME BASKETTI.” They seemed dumbfounded, and confused, and possibly even hurt, but they also seemed to realize it was too late to do anything about it, and so they hesitantly complimented the unaccountable neck tattoo that he’d asked to be his wife.

  This was never more apparent than the day before our wedding, when Victor brought his mom and stepdad to my parents’ home so that they could meet and visit before the wedding. M
y mother and I had convinced my father to stay outside in his taxidermy shop until I’d had a chance to soothe them with a little booze and with reassurances that we were all actually quite normal, before bringing in my father. Unfortunately, as soon as Victor drove up with his parents, my father heard them and waved them all back toward the clearing behind the taxidermy shop, where he had started a very large fire. An enormous metal oil drum was in the middle of the fire, and was filled with a boiling liquid, the steam billowing my father’s gray hair as he stirred the barrel with a broom handle. This was the point when Victor should have waved, pretended that they couldn’t hear my father, and then quickly ushered his parents into our house, but instead he smiled nervously and helped his mother, whose elegant heels sank into the dirt as she weaved in and out of stray chickens. My father towered intimidatingly over Victor and his parents, but he welcomed them heartily with his booming voice, even as he continued to stir the boiling cauldron. My soon-to-be mother-in-law attempted small talk as she raised an eyebrow at the strange, bubbling liquid and asked shakily, “So, what are you cooking?” She leaned forward hesitantly, trying to smile. “Is it . . . stew?”

  My father chuckled good-naturedly and smiled kindly and condescendingly, as one would to a small child, as he said, “Nope. Just boiling skulls.” Then he speared a still-meaty cow’s head with the broomstick to show it to her. Then the eyeball fell out of the cow’s head. It rolled toward them and stopped at my mother-in-law’s designer shoe as if it were attempting to look up her skirt. Then my future in-laws stumbled back to the car and left quickly. I would not see them again until the wedding.

  Still, they did grit their teeth and gamely try to accept me into the family, as they hesitantly welcomed me into their lives with extreme trepidation and slow movements. They treated me with respect, but also with an equal amount of uneasiness, as if I’d brought with me a dangerous instability that threatened their very lives. It was only later, as I walked down the aisle on my wedding day, that I finally placed and recognized the look in Victor’s parents’ eyes and numbly realized that I’d seen that exact same look on Victor’s face once, long ago. It was then that I realized that I had become the unexpected bobcat in the room. And I knew exactly how terrified that damn bobcat had felt.

  Married on the Fourth of July

  Victor and I were married on the Fourth of July. It was a lot like the movie Born on the Fourth of July, except with fewer wheelchairs and Tom Cruise wasn’t there. Also, I’ve never actually seen Born on the Fourth of July, because it looks kind of depressing. But to be fair, I remember very little of my own wedding, so it’s entirely possible Tom Cruise was there and I’ve just forgotten. This will probably be very awkward the next (or first) time I meet Tom Cruise.

  On the day of our wedding, Victor and I both had misgivings.

  I had misgivings because I was barely twenty-two, and immature, and had no clue how to be someone’s wife, and, more important, because of what I was wearing (see “twenty-two, and immature”). In a strange twist of fate, Victor had bought my wedding dress when he saw it in the window of a rental shop that was going out of business. It was inappropriately virginal white, beaded, bowed, and looked like the sort of wedding dress that both Princess Diana and Scarlett O’Hara would have deemed “completely over-the-top.” Each of the billowing puffed sleeves was larger than my head and seemed to be stuffed with newspaper (I suspect it was the New York Times Sunday edition), and the hoop skirt, pushing out the yards and yards of white ruffles, dictated that I keep an empty five-foot radius around me at all times, because if anything pressed against the bottom of the hoop, the opposite side of the dress would suddenly lift up and hit me in the head. It was fancy and high-maintenance and pure as the driven snow, and I would not have chosen that dress for myself in a million years, but Victor insisted it was “so me,” which I think was less of an insult and more of a vision he had of the woman I might one day become. He was wrong on so many levels that I started to lose count.

  I wasn’t alone in my doubts, though. Victor had misgivings because two weeks earlier we’d had what I referred to as “a very bad date.” Victor was still referring to it as “that time you almost killed me.” (Side note: He now refers to it as “the first time you almost killed me.”) But Victor isn’t writing this book, mostly because he’s a terrible overreactor. The truth was that we’d been driving down some deserted country roads after sundown, as Victor was looking for snakes. On purpose. He’d developed a fascination for them in the last year, and was making money on the side by finding snakes basking on the hot, empty roads after dark, capturing them, taming them, and then selling them to fellow snake lovers. He was great at recognizing the harmless and easily tamable snakes, and listened to my warnings to never mess with the poisonous, aggressive ones, until the night when we drove up on a very large rattlesnake, which seemed to have been run over by a car. Victor stopped his truck and I told him not to get out, but he said he could tell the snake was squashed and told me to hold the spotlight up so he could make sure the snake was dead and not still suffering. I suggested just running over it again a few times, but Victor looked at me as if I were being ridiculous, and he slowly got out of the car. I opened my own door hesitantly, but refused to get out, standing instead on the edge of the truck’s floorboard and leaning over the hood of the truck, certain that other rattlesnakes were probably lying in wait and planning a group attack. Victor looked back at me with frustration. “Come over here and bring the spotlight. You’re too far away.”

  “Oh, I’m just fine, thanks. Please get the hell back in the truck.”

  He glared at me and shook his head. “Have a little faith, will ya?” He knelt down beside the rattler. “It’s dead. Looks like its head was crushed.”

  “Awesome. Now get the hell back in the truck.”

  Victor ignored me as he put on a glove and stooped to pick up the tail of the five-foot rattler. “We should bring this home to your dad. He could probably— OHJESUSCHRIST!”

  It was at this exact moment that the “dead” rattlesnake suddenly started angrily striking at Victor’s leg. Uncoincidentally, it was also the exact same moment that I ducked back into the truck, taking the spotlight with me and leaving Victor in the pitch-dark blackness on an abandoned road, as the angry rattlesnake he was holding tried to murder him.

  “BRING BACK THE LIGHT,” he screamed.

  “I TOLD YOU NOT TO GO OUT THERE!” I yelled angrily, as I quickly locked the doors (for some reason) and rolled up all the windows. I was worried about him and wanted to help him, but I couldn’t help but think that he had brought this on himself.

  “BRING BACK THE LIGHT OR I WILL THROW THIS DAMN SNAKE IN THE CAR WITH YOU,” he screamed, which was surprising, both because he sounded very vital for someone dying of snakebite, and also because he’d wrongly assumed that I hadn’t automatically locked all the doors. He knows so little about me, I thought to myself.

  I took a deep breath and reminded myself that although he was a macho idiot, he was my macho idiot, and I rolled down the window just far enough to put my hand and spotlight through it, and saw Victor still looking very much alive and more than slightly pissed off. Turns out that the snake was still alive and striking, but its mangled jaw was crushed and so it never broke Victor’s skin. Victor glared at me with terrified eyes, and put the snake out of its misery with a shovel before walking back to the truck.

  After a minute to slow his breathing, Victor’s voice was only vaguely controlled. “You left me alone. In the dark. With a live rattlesnake.”

  “No. You left me alone. In the car. For a live rattlesnake,” I countered. “So I guess that makes us even.” There was a long pause as he stared at me. “But I forgive you?” I said.

  “YOU ALMOST KILLED ME,” he shouted.

  “No,” I pointed out. “A rattlesnake almost killed you. I was just an involuntary witness. I wanted to turn the car back on and try to run over the snake to save you, but you took the keys with you. Plus, I can�
��t drive a stick. So basically I would have died eventually too, except way more painfully and slowly from starvation and exposure. If anything, I should be mad at you.” I hadn’t actually been mad until I started defending myself, but then I realized that I had a point. If anything, I had almost killed both of us, but Victor was too shortsighted to see that far ahead.

  “You left me alone. In the dark. With a live rattlesnake,” Victor repeated in a whisper.

  “Well, I had faith in you,” I said sweetly. This is one of my favorite phrases to use in an argument, because it’s hard for someone to contradict you without blatantly admitting that your faith in them is utterly unjustified. I use that one a lot. In fact, it sounded so good I said it again. “I knew you could handle that snake. Sometimes you just have to have faith.”

  And faith was exactly what I was trying to have in the week before our wedding. Personally, I was terrified of being the center of attention in front of other people, and I’d wanted to just elope and get married in tennis shoes in Las Vegas by an Elvis impersonator, but Victor was an only child and his family desperately wanted a real wedding, so I’d given up and gone through the motions. I was never much of a big-wedding girl, so I gave no thought to unity candles and rehearsal dinners. My mom and I made a veil out of hot glue, mesh, and a flowered headband, and we picked out a cake at the local grocery store.

  Neither Victor nor I was religious, so my grandparents bribed their church to let us use their small side chapel. The wedding lasted an entire twelve minutes, as we’d asked the preacher to cut almost all of the Jesus references out. (“Jesus is totally invited,” we explained to the preacher. “We just don’t want him giving any long speeches.”) Then we had a twenty-minute reception in the basement, which looked just like a basement except somehow drearier.