Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir Read online

  But at the chapel of the church where we’d said “I do,” none of that seemed to matter. All that mattered was that we loved each other. And while our families made their way to the church doorsteps to prepare to throw birdseed at us, we hid in the empty church sanctuary and I made Victor promise to love me forever. “Have a little faith in me,” he said with a proud smile. In retrospect, I probably should have asked for something more substantial, like “Promise me you’ll always clean up the cat vomit in the hall,” or “Promise me you’ll never ask me if it’s ‘that time of the month’ in the middle of a totally rational argument when what you really need to do is just apologize and stop being such an asshole.”

  But no, I was young, and naive, and wished for love, and I tried to have faith that that would be enough.

  Sometimes you just have to take it on faith.

  Our official wedding portrait. If you didn’t know us you could almost imagine that we’re whirling around a candlelit ballroom instead of standing in front of the Sears Portrait Studio backdrop at the mall. Still, there was a Lionel Richie song playing over the intercom. It was “Dancing on the Ceiling.” It was like even the mall was mocking us.

  There’s No Place Like Home

  After we were married, I started working in HR. Victor worked in computers. We bought a small seventies house in San Angelo, the same town outside Wall where we’d gone to college. The house quickly grew full of memories. It was the house we were in when I became convinced that Y2K was basically the end of the world, and so on New Year’s Eve of 1999 I filled up the bathtub with water, so we’d have something to drink when the water from the tap turned into blood, but my cat didn’t realize it was full and fell in it, contaminating the whole thing. Then Victor laughed at my distress, which really pissed me off, because, Hello? I’m doing this for both of us. And then he abandoned me at a quarter to midnight to go check on the computers at work, and he wouldn’t even load the riot gun for me before he drove off. When he came back a few hours later, I’d barred the doors with couches to keep out the looters. I was too tired to move all the furniture, so I just told him that doors didn’t work anymore because of Y2K, and that he should just go sleep under his car. Eventually he convinced me that there were no looters, and so I opened a window for him to climb through.

  These were the happy memories I was holding on to a month later when Victor took a job offer in Houston, and left me behind to sell our house. He found us a new place to live, and he expected me to come to Houston within a week or two, but as soon as I had an opportunity to leave the small country area I’d always wanted to escape, I suddenly realized how much I didn’t want to leave. I was terrified of even thinking of living in a big city, and did everything possible to keep from selling the house. I parked directly on top of the “For Sale by Owner” sign Victor had left up, and I told multiple people who stopped by (after seeing the ads that Victor had put in the paper) that we were selling the house because “I just can’t bear to live in a house where such a gruesome murder occurred.”

  After six months of waiting, Victor started to suspect I was stalling and came to bring me to Houston, saying that we’d just leave our house vacant until it sold. On the very day he came, he huffily pried the “For Sale” sign out of the grille of my car (I blamed the nonexistent gangs of hoodlums who, I’d convinced prospective buyers, roamed the streets at night looking for stray pets to eat) and stuck it back in front of the house. Two hours later the doorbell rang, and Victor sold the house to a man who’d just been passing by. He planned to give it to his daughter and son-in-law, and started measuring the front lawn for the wooden wishing well he was going to install to “increase the curb appeal.” I felt almost as sorry for our house as I did for myself.

  After a few months in Houston I came to realize that there wasn’t much difference between the two places, except for the change in traffic and the lowered incidences of my parents showing up unannounced with dead animals in the back of the car. But surprisingly, I found myself homesick for both of these things. Victor tried to convince me that it was a whole new adventure filled with sushi and museums and culture and intimidating coffeehouses, and (much as I had done with Wall) I gritted my teeth and bore it, certain that soon we’d leave Houston and go back home to West Texas. And, as before, that was how life went on for the next ten years.

  Every time we’d go back to visit West Texas it would change a bit. The cotton fields slowly gave way to subdivisions. The tractors were upgraded and new. I’d drive around our old town to find that the snow-cone shack I’d worked at was replaced by a parking lot. The skating rink was shuttered and abandoned, the sign filled with empty birds’ nests. The bookstore where I’d met Victor was gone now, and my grandparents’ home was sold soon after they died. Each year, my father’s small taxidermy shop grew until it became a true business, with an always-busy parking lot beside my parents’ home. One day I came home to visit and was shocked to see that the elementary school I’d walked to each day had become an alternative school for pregnant teens, and the school playground I’d lived in each summer had been ripped out and demolished. My sister and I walked through the aftermath of the playground together and I took a small piece of the rubble to remember it by. Now when I pass by the school I look away and remember it the way it was, with the dangerous metal seesaws and merry-go-rounds that eventually disappeared all over America. All that remains of it today is the memory, still echoing in my head, of the sound of my favorite swing, squeaking rustily and comfortingly, over and over, back and forth.

  One day, several years after Victor and I had left for Houston, we came back home to stay with my parents for the weekend and my mother proudly announced that San Angelo now had “some new coffee place” everyone was talking about. We drove up to see what I expected to be some rural cowboy coffee shop, but instead a Starbucks stood largely on the corner, looking wrong and out of place next to the shops that hadn’t changed since I was a kid.

  “Oh, thank Christ,” Victor said. “Civilization comes to West Texas at last!” he proclaimed.

  It bothered me. Not that Victor equated caramel macchiatos with civilization, but that there had been a turning point, a final tip over the edge when I realized that the small town I’d always expected to come back to no longer remained, at least not in the same way as before.

  Later that night I sat out on the porch, looking at the same stars I’d stared at when I was ten and had longed to travel to places that existed only in my mind. They were places like Egypt or France, but they were the Egypt and France of a child’s mind, filled with blurry visions of perfect pyramids, and warm sands, and Eiffel Towers, and something that people called “wine.” They were visions of places that weren’t quite real, but that was long before I discovered that the romanticized places on the map were more than just pretty pictures, and that included things I couldn’t have even imagined when I was young. Things like political unrest, and dysentery, and hangovers.

  That night I looked up at those same stars, but I didn’t want any of those things. I didn’t want Egypt, or France, or far-flung destinations. I just wanted to go back to my life from my childhood, just to visit it, and to touch it, and to convince myself that yes, it had been real. Victor could tell I was upset, but I couldn’t find a way to describe it without sounding ridiculous. “It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s just that . . . Have you ever been homesick for someplace that doesn’t actually exist anymore? Someplace that exists only in your mind?”

  He rocked with me on the front porch in silence, not knowing how to answer, and eventually he put his arm around me and told me everything would be all right, and then he went inside to get some sleep. He found me the next morning, still outside in the same rocking chair, and stared at me worriedly. He asked me gently, “Are you gonna be ready to go home this morning?”

  I rocked in silence, and realized for the first time that “home” wasn’t this place anymore. It was wherever Victor was. It was both a terrifying and an enlightenin
g realization, and I took a deep breath and thought carefully before I answered.

  “Yes. I’m ready to go home.”

  It was like saying hello and good-bye at the same time, and Victor stared out at the baseball field that had once been a cotton field. He quietly said (as if to himself) that the memories of the places we’d been before were always more golden-tinted in retrospect than they had ever been at the time, and I nodded, surprised that he’d known more than he’d let on. He was right, but I didn’t know if that made it better or worse. Was it worse to be homesick for a time that was once home, but now lived only in your own mind . . . or to be homesick for a place that never really existed at all? I couldn’t answer, so instead I went back inside the house to pack. For home.

  A Series of Helpful Post-it Notes I Left Around the House for My Husband This Week

  Dear Victor: This bath towel was wet and you left it on the floor and it was the last clean one in the house. I’m pretty sure this is how tuberculosis is spread. I’m writing all this in my blog in case I end up dead because of your carelessness.

  Dear Victor: There is a pile of business suits for the dry cleaner’s that have been in the closet for five months. You work from home. The fuck, Victor?

  Dear Victor: Why is cleaning up cat vomit always my job? Was I not here when we picked from the job jar? Is there a job jar at all? Because I’d like to redraw. Also, I’m aware that you always have to clean out the litter box, but that’s because at any moment my IUD could fail and I could accidentally get pregnant and then get that cat-poop pregnancy disease, and our baby would be born with no arms or legs. Is that what you want, Victor? For our baby not to have arms? You are so selfish.

  Dear Victor: You make me sick. Why in God’s name wouldn’t you just throw away the empty pizza box when you were done with it? Are your arms broken? Do you have some sort of disease I don’t know about that makes you blind to empty pizza boxes?

  Dear Victor: Okay, I just remembered I was the last one to make pizza, so I guess I left this box out. Still, I’m leaving out the note anyway so you can learn from it. Bad, bad Victor.

  Dear Victor: I do not appreciate your leaving passive-aggressive addendums to my helpful Post-it notes. In fact, they are the opposite of helpful. They are just bitter.

  Dear Victor: If you leave wet towels on the ground again I will stab you.

  Dear Victor: You can’t take clothes out of the dryer without telling me and just dump them on the bed in a heap. When I find them they’ve usually cooled off, and then I have to put them all back in the dryer with a cup of water, and then rerun the dryer so all the wrinkles come out, and then sneak each article of clothing out one at a time and hang it up. It’s called “a method,” Victor. Stop judging me.

  Dear Victor: No, actually, I don’t know how to use an iron. Because we don’t own one. How have you never noticed this before?! The dryer is our iron, Victor. Also, I would appreciate it if you would talk to me directly instead of yelling at me on a Post-it. These Post-its are for educational purposes. Not to draw lewd caricatures of hands pointing menacingly at me. Also, you’re supposed to point with your index finger. This is basic pointing etiquette.

  Dear Victor: I’ve poisoned something in the fridge. Good luck with that.

  Dear Victor: I’m sorry. I think I might have PMS. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

  Dear Victor: That was an apology, you asshole! Now there are two things poisoned in the fridge. Because you don’t know how to accept an apology.

  Dear Victor: I am so sorry you are sick. I swear I was just kidding about poisoning shit in the fridge. I mean, I did leave the yogurt out for, like, a half a day, but that was really more by accident because I was so distracted by the wet towel on the floor. If anything, you brought this on yourself. Once again, I apologize.

  Dear Victor: I love you but I’m getting kind of weak from hunger, and I know you said you didn’t poison anything, but every time I take a bite of something you leer and laugh suspiciously and I have to spit it out. I can only assume this is probably how Gandhi felt when he wasn’t allowed to eat. (Here’s a hint: He felt stabby.)

  Dear Victor: Okay, first of all, you don’t know that Gandhi went on a hunger strike on purpose. For all we know he was avoiding poisoning too. The people who survive are the ones who write the history, Victor. Not the people who die of hunger because their husbands may or may not have poisoned all the food in the house. Except guess what? This is all going on my blog, so I can document this in case people find my emaciated body later and demand justice. There will be a reckoning and it will be brutal and swift.

  Dear Victor: Great. Now we’re out of Post-its. I’m writing this on the towel you left on the ground this morning, since we obviously have no respect for towels anymore. I’m going to the grocery store for more Post-its, and I’m going to eat unpoisoned Triscuits straight out of the box while I’m there, so I will return fresh and renewed. Also, the cat vomited in the hall and I am not cleaning it up. I have had enough, Victor. And so has the cat. Whom I’m assuming you poisoned.

  Dear Victor: The cat and I are leaving you. You can have the dog. Also, I’ve decided not to go get Post-it notes after all, because I’m no longer speaking with you, so I’m just writing this on your hand towel. You will never hear from me again.

  Dear Victor: The dog started whining when I told him he had to stay with you, so I’m taking him too.

  Dear Victor: Yes, actually I was holding a bag of dog treats when I told him he had to stay with you, but I don’t think that had anything to do with his reaction. Also, we’re running out of dish towels, so this will be my last message to you.

  Dear Victor: Okay. Fine. You can have the dog. I tried to put him in the car and he peed on me. You two deserve each other. I am writing this on the dog because it seemed fitting. Also I couldn’t find packing peanuts for the booze, so I just drank it all. YOU WILL MISS ME SO MUCH ONCE I’M SOBER ENOUGH TO WAKE UP AND DRIVE AWAY.

  Dear Victor: Wow. That . . . really got out of hand. I’m sending this cat in as a peace offering. I forgive you for all the stuff you wrote on the walls about my sister, and I’m going to just ignore all the stuff you wrote about my “giant ass” (turn cat over for rest) because I love you and you need me. Who else loves you enough to send you notes written on cats? Nobody, that’s who. Also, I stapled a picture of us from our wedding day to the cat’s left leg. Don’t we look happy? We can be that way again. Just stop leaving wet towels on the floor. That’s all I ask. I’m low-maintenance that way. Also, this cat needs to go on a diet. I shouldn’t be able to write this much on a cat and still have room left over.

  Epilogue: Victor forgave me and we all lived happily ever after, except for the cat, who had to have his leg amputated, but that was less from the infection and more from his poor circulation because he was so fat. He kind of brought it on himself too. But now he’s less fat. By, like, a whole leg.

  (Disclaimer: Most of this chapter was exaggerated, except for the part where Victor left a wet towel on the floor. That shit totally happened. I’m still working through it.)

  The Dark and Disturbing Secrets HR Doesn’t Want You to Know

  I worked in human resources for almost fifteen years at a number of different companies, including a religious-based organization where one of my duties was to teach people how to be appropriate and professional. Yes, I do see the irony in this.

  Human resources is the place where people come to complain and/or shoot people when they just can’t take it anymore. Choosing to work in HR is like choosing to work in the complaint department of hell, except way more frustrating, because at least in hell you’d be able to agree that that Satan is a real dick-wagon without having to toe the company line. The HR department is the place where people stop by to say, “THIS IS TOTALLY FUCKED UP,” and the HR employees will nod thoughtfully and professionally as they think to themselves, “Wow. That is totally fucked up. I wish that this person would leave so I could tell everyone else in the office
about it.”

  When I was in HR, if someone came to me about a really fucked-up problem, I’d excuse myself and bring in a coworker to take notes, and the employee would relax a bit, thinking, “Finally, people are taking me seriously around here,” but usually we do that only so that when you leave we can have a second opinion about how insane that whole conversation was. “Was that shit as crazy as I thought it was?” I would ask afterward. It always was. Sadly, HR has very little power in an organization, unless the real executives are on vacation, and then watch out, because a lot of assholes are going to get fired.

  There are three types of people who choose a career in HR: sadistic assholes who were probably all tattletales in school, empathetic (and soon-to-be-disillusioned) idealists who think they can make a difference in the lives of others, and those who of us who stick around because it gives you the best view of all the most entertaining train wrecks happening in the rest of the company.

  People who aren’t in HR always assume that people who are in HR are the biggest prudes and assholes, since HR is ostensibly1 there to make sure everyone follows the rules, but people fail to realize that HR is the only department actively paid to look at porn. Sure, it’s under the guise of “reviewing all Internet history to make sure other people aren’t looking at porn,” but people are always looking at porn, and so we have to look at it too so that we can print it out for the investigation. This is also the reason why HR always has color printers, and why no one else is allowed to use them. Because we can’t remember to pick up all the porn we just copied. This is just one of many secrets the HR department doesn’t want you to know, and after sharing these secrets I will probably be blackballed from the Human Resources Alliance, which is much like the Magicians’ Alliance (in that I don’t belong to either, since I never get invited to join clubs, and that I’m not actually sure that either of them exist). Regardless, almost immediately after starting work in HR, I started keeping a journal about all the fantastically fucked-up stuff that people who aren’t in HR would never believe. These are a few of those stories: