'As long as we both shall live' and other terrors

PART SIX, for heavensakes, of WHY I WAITED 22 YEARS BEFORE GETTING MARRIED, reasons # 22-24

This is the SIXTH installment of a thing I started writing in an attempt to figure out why I was so afraid of tying the knot with someone I’d been happily living with for 22 years. Even I knew that made no sense. Then I realized the word marriage was loaded with fear for me. So I decided to unpack the terror thru writing. You can find the other five parts (reason #1-21) in the archives of this page. If you are fed up with me talking about this….I guarantee I’ll be posting goofier stuff in one damn minute. Meanwhile gotta warn you…I can’t guarantee there won’t be A PART SEVEN! I still have a few weird tales to tell.

REASON #22: IS TOMORROW TODAY?

 I understand that where love is concerned, women are meant to find a vow of ‘forever’ and a phrase like “as long as we both shall live” comforting. This is said to have something to do with the biological imperative and nesting.  Though no one would argue that human history is not littered with pieces of ‘forever’ gone terribly wrong.

Long before I ever became romantically attached to someone, I developed a healthy fear of the vacillating nature of time and the terrifying concept of ‘forever’. Introduce the word ‘forever’ into any love scenario and you quickly stumble into an arena where Romeo and Juliette are so in love with each other that they both decide a good way to show it is to commit suicide at the age of 13.

 Lengths of time are the kind of thing that are easy to worry about.  When my nephew Noah was three years old, he earnestly asked me “Is tomorrow today?”   I laughed because ‘Oh ho ho, the crazy things children say!’. Then I thought about it more and realized “Well, yes. Actually, tomorrow is today. You’re right!” Increments of time only have different names so we can pretend to see them. Maybe we were all better off before we chopped everything up and gave all the pieces names.

 When I was in the first grade, after my friend and I learned how long a minute was, we began to contemplate five minutes.  ‘An hour is a really long time.” I remember telling her.  An hour seemed so terrifyingly long that it almost couldn’t be comprehended. And panic set in when I realized there was no easy visual representation of ‘infinity”. It never even occurred to me to point out that tomorrow was in fact today.

 Over the years I have often changed my mind about the length of an hour as well as the start time of tomorrow.  Some hours seem like they are only seconds. Some hours are interminable. If we could see the elements of time organizing physically, they would probably look like the mimic octopus (Thaumocopus mimicus) who can disguise itself like its surroundings so perfectly that one moment it looks just like a medium-sized expanse of sand and the next it has hidden six of its arms so carefully that you think it’s a snake or a fish. 

But getting back to the wording of marriage vows; To me, the phrasing “…thru sickness and thru health…until death do us part.” always sounded saturated with foreboding, like dialog hinting at what was just around the corner in a horror movie.  With only a small adjustment in the background vocals, it could sound eerily similar to  a curse being chanted around a cauldron by the witches in Macbeth. Forever seemed like a dangerous thing to tack on to any decision. 

 The summer after I graduated high school, I signed up for a student trip to Italy where I spent eight weeks living in a convent. I wasn’t there to find sanctuary in the religious life. I was there to take art classes and the convent offered inexpensive housing. However, my seventeen-year-old self unintentionally clashed with the power structure that organized the trip after I was arbitrarily assigned to spend all my time with a group of Catholic school girls from South Carolina.  We were tied without recourse to a randomly selected chaperone, (yes, a chaperone) a pinch-faced German woman in her sixties who recoiled at my seventeen year old Bohemian aesthetics. Did she also have a problem with my Jewish heritage?  That didn’t occur to me at the time but it does now.

 The other girls in my mandated group were entrenched in a very different socio-political stratosphere than I was. They wore big, carefully teased and sprayed hair styles, cute trendy outfits and meticulous make up. I had long straight hair, big dangly earrings, and dark eye liner. My clothes were olive green or black and I always wore black boots. They were the Kardashians to my Wednesday Addams.

 More difficult than our aesthetic differences were our political ones. These girls were pro-Nixon and pro-war-in-Vietnam. The obvious parallel to now would be that they were MAGA and I was NOT. This problem became harder to ignore when our group went out on bus excursions, especially the time I had to listen to them cheering after being told that the United States was going to bomb Hanoi. For readers with no historical reference points, this would mean that a terrifying and unpopular war I was very much against was escalating in a scary way.

I found their political beliefs so stupid and scary that I began hanging around by myself when we were not in class. This enraged the German chaperone who wanted the members of our group to be in an observable cluster at all times. At one point when I realized that there were some sympatico girls with a sense of humor also at the convent, but who had been assigned a different chaperone, the evil German chaperone let me know that I could not hang out with them. They were off limits.

 It all came to a head one night when Cruella DeVil,  pretending to offer a sympathetic ear, succeeded in getting me to confess why I wasn’t assimilating properly with the girls in our group. “We just don’t have anything in common,” I recall saying, “I’d rather be by myself.” This sopissed her off that it inspired her to write a letter to my parents explaining that if I did not change my attitude, I would be sent home early at their expense. My parents had already paid for one plane flight home from Italy. They had no intention of paying for a second one.

I begged them to let me come home early. I promised to pay them back for the added expense. But they were probably so glad to have my sulky, rebellious, ass out of their house for the summer that they didn’t want their new found serenity to end prematurely.

  Looking for a way to cope, I made a big calendar on my drawing pad and taped it to the wall by my bed. Then I drew a double line around the amount of days until the freedom departure would bring. Every night I crossed off the day with as much fanfare as I could figure out how to create by myself in a room at a convent. No matter how I looked at it, there were still 42 days left. So many days.  And they were going by so slowly. Every second seemed like a week. That tomorrow was today didn’t help anything.

 Of course, it’s important here to remember what role perspective plays in all this. I was in a small town in Italy. My nightmare was someone else’s dream vacation.

 Meanwhile, there I was, trapped in a convent, in forced lock-step with a small group of girls who didn’t like me and monitored by a chaperone who really didn’t like me. And I couldn’t even go out for walks by myself because a mob of intimidating Italian teenage boys from the town would follow any girls they saw out walking alone. So I sat on my bed and stared at my home-made calendar. It was like living in a freeze frame. Somehow the 42 days remaining seem to have stopped the progress of time itself.

 On the other hand, I knew that if I could just get through this unmoving blip on the calendar, I would be headed for UC Berkeley in a few weeks where I would definitely meet some people I liked.

In the final week of the trip, the group went on a few frustrating sight-seeing excursions around Italy which, as it turned out, were booked specifically to provide kick-backs to the German lady and the company that organized the tour. For example, we stopped at the ruins of Pompeii, which I found breath-takingly interesting. But we were only allowed to spend an hour there because we had to rush back to the busses and head over to a nearby cameo factory where we were left alone in the gift shop for an interminable two hours so all of the South Carolinian girls would have time to purchase as many cameo necklaces and pins as they could carry . I assume at the close of this enforced shopping spree, the awful German chaperone got an envelope full of cash.

  Ditto a trip to Venice where we were allowed only an hour to walk around and look at art because we had to sit in gondolas for an hour while serenading men in costumes sang and tried to coerce us into buying jewelry.  Then boom…time to hurry over to a glass factory for two hours so the German lady could get more kick-backs.

  On the bright side, our plane was departing from an airport in Venice so I was on the count-down to freedom; a moment to which I was looking forward with an exceptional amount of zest.

On the day we were finally set to leave, our flight was delayed. And by “our flight” I mean the propeller plane that this trip had chartered from Saturn Airlines. (Yes, I said SATURN airlines: clearly a kick back for someone here too.)  I half-expected the pilot to refuse to take off until everyone bought a piece of jewelry but what happened next was weirder than that. While we waited at the airport, one of the South Carolinians decided to pay for a psychic reading. It didn’t take long for the results to make their way through our group. The psychic told her that we should not get on the plane. 

 I had been waiting for seven long weeks and I was getting on that plane no matter what. Yes, it was going to be a thirteen-hour flight to Kennedy airport and my seat was right next to the propeller. But even if I was the only one on board, I was willing to take the risk. So to prepare for whatever ordeal was ahead, I took some ridiculously effective over- the-counter sleeping pills that I bought at a Venice Pharmacia. By the time the plane left the ground, I was barely able to sit up.

  Only a few minutes in, as I was drooling, and unintentionally carooming face down into my tray table, the plane made an unnerving lurch. My seat mate and I looked out the window and saw an engine on fire but I was so full of sleeping pills that I just stared at it like I was watching an episode of The Twilight Zone.  It turned out that actually two engines were on fire.  Not to be outdone, a third one exploded.

  We knew the situation was real and a problem when the pilot of the plane got on the intercom mic and tried to say something comforting. But what he said was “I don’t know what to say. I’m at a loss for words.” Yes, that is really what he said. Talk about having a knack for saying the right thing at the right time! I might have been the only one who heard him. The South Carolinians were all very busy doing their rosaries. 

 The upshot was a crash landing into an airport in Shannon, Ireland.  Maybe there was a kickback happening here too. Amazingly, no one was hurt.

  Eventually, we spent the night on the floor of that airport, despite the best efforts of the pinch-faced German chaperone to get us all right back on the same plane as quickly as possible. We were not going to be held back by three dysfunctional engines. “Get up, girls! Let’s go! We’re ready to board!” she was barking, trying to herd us all back to the tarmac. That was the moment when the South Carolinian girls finally won my heart by making emergency calls to their parents. Somehow the U.S. government actually interfered, and the powers that be who organized our trip had no choice but to arrange for another plane.

 At this point I realized that my German captor no longer had any say over my activities since the trip had officially ended. That meant I could start hanging out with the kids I’d met, in a differently chaperoned group, who were kindred spirits. They had always been so near yet so far away.

 So after being relocated to a hotel for the night, a few of us went out to an Irish disco and bought ourselves glasses of wine. That marked the first time I had a legitimate reason to make a noise like my hero Curly Howard. “Nyaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaah” was the only appropriate thing I could think of to say when I looked down at my chest, while dancing at the disco, and discovered that wearing a white bra under an Italian knit sweater when standing beneath a black disco light caused my bra to shine right thru the knit fabric like the headlights of a car.

  The next day, when we finally made it back to Kennedy, it turned out that the airport staff there was on strike. There were picket lines and no planes were taking off at all. That’s a different story. But it also brings me back to my point about time.

Sometimes seven weeks can seem to short that it is over in the blink of an eye. But my time in that convent was able to take seven weeks and weld them so tightly into an infinitely repeating loop that Day 41 felt just like Day 40 and Day 39 didn’t feel that much better. This was an experience with time that wound up re-defining the word ‘forever’ for me, transforming it into an inescapable trap, like a house of mirrors.

Eventually I filed that experience in the same part of my brain that housed the memory of being trapped in that dysfunctional stalled elevator. It was slowly but surely becoming a list of metaphors I had connected to my growing fear of getting married.

Reason # 23: HOSTAGES

Come with me now on another little trip to the 19^th century, a simpler happier time, especially if you didn’t have to live thru it.

And look at you! Still thinking about getting married!  You’re in your early twenties. No one has invented injectibles yet so you don’t appear to be getting any younger. Hopefully someone has explained to you that if you are the blushing bride, the distinction between Being Single and Being Married means a MASSIVE legal re-definition with regard to your rights.

According to Webster’s Dictionary, in the mid 1800’s, getting married changed the fundamental essence of both members of the happy couple because our old friend, The Law of Coverture, meant that uniting a man and woman as husband and wife merged them into ONE single identity. And surprise!: That ONE identity was the man!  He was now in possession of the woman and she was his dependent. Fancy ideas like “inherent rights” and “inalienable rights” or even ‘being a person’ no longer applied to her. All of the money you brought with you into the marriage, including the salary you were earning if you were employed, now belonged to your husband. But come on, since you’re not actually a person any more, what are you going to do with money? Money is for ‘persons’.

So for the woman in this scenario, it was now your job to replace what you used to think of as “your identity” with a fictional self who only exists in relation to your husband; a little detail that prompted the early feminists in the mid 1800’s to comment that marriage caused a woman to morph into “a new creature… A fictitious being breathing a legal, not a moral, atmosphere.”

As a wife, you now entered a whole new world of definitions. Before marriage, sex was ‘fornication’. After marriage, it’s ‘a duty and a right’. (Okay, yes, the right part was only for the man. But the duty part applied to the woman.)  

 So let’s say that a wife asks her lawyer (Ha! I’m just kidding. Why would someone who is not even a person need a lawyer?) what she is entitled to as her husband’s partner in the event of a split, he would start to laugh so uncontrollably he might not be able to catch his breath. So see, they had good times in those days too! But once they both calmed down, he would simply remind her that “the rights of the married woman are suspended during coverture so there is no such thing as a partnership in a marital union. How can you have a partnership when there is ONLY ONE PERSON! Which is also why it just made sense that the member of the partnership who was ‘the invisible, rights-free non-man’ could definitely not initiate a divorce. Did she not understand the part where being separated from her husband was ‘to be exiled from the purposes of her being.’

Because history has shown us repeatedly that large groups of human beings tend to be inherently annoying, naturally there was a religious pro-coverture contingent who believed that the Law of Coverture was mandated by God. They insisted that giving up your identity and rights was “a part of a woman’s natural destiny.” Edward Mansfield, the writer of an 1845 legal handbook published for “intelligent women”, regarded ‘wifedom’ as “firmly based on an unchanging scriptural truth”. “A woman was created to be a good fit for a man, her husband, in order to become his perpetual companion.”

   In 1835, the French philosopher and historian wizard, Alexis de Tocqueville, took it upon himself to examine the afore-mentioned mind-boggling restrictions, as he did all activities and behaviors American.  He struggled to figure out why any American women or girls were even remotely interested in playing along with getting married knowing it was so full of Draconian rules. He couldn’t fathom why “any free young American girl would voluntarily decide to accept the bondage of these legal consequences willingly?” His jaw dropped trying to comprehend why they “… seemed to take pride in the free relinquishment of their will.”

  Of course, it is important to point out that the only young American girls that de Tocqueville was meeting and analyzing during his research were the Caucasian daughters of his fancy-shmantzy lawyer friends. But why, he wondered, were these privileged girls, of all people, willing to sign up for this marriage thing?  (Remember: this was hundreds of years before Joni Mitchell pointed out to me in song the irrelevance of the pieces of paper from the city hall.)

  The early women’s right’s activists agreed with him. They called marriage “an insidious crime.” because by becoming a wife, women were voluntarily shedding their “divine rights of life, liberty and independent moral judgment.”Another delegate from Indiana at that same convention, who I have no reason to assume was being sarcastic or trying out a new joke for her stand-up, described a husband and wife as “mutual hostages of each other.”

 The line forms to the right, ladies. Just say yes to the dress. You have nothing to lose except being a person.

REASON # 24: I AM SO NOT BRANDY.

 The first marriage proposal I ever got came from the boyfriend who took me to see ‘Diary of a Mad Housewife’. I was nineteen and a college sophomore. He was a handsome, fit, twenty-four-year-old outdoors-man who my now husband refers as Brawny Paper Towels because he resembled the bearded guy on their package. Though at the time, it occurred to me that he could have been the model for The Marlboro Man.

Brawny Paper Towels was the first of a hand-full of boyfriends with whom I co-habitated and eventually discussed marriage. (‘A hand-full’ is the technical terminology for a grouping of more than one but less than eight boyfriends you are never going to marry.) These intense and drama filled love-adjacent scenarios all were prompted by the faulty premise that agreeing to get married would be a good way to prove that the fraying emotional bonds being experienced as ‘love’ were not actually galloping toward a break-up.

  In every case, I knew I wasn’t ready to have children. So the only thing I could imagine that I stood to gain from any of these proposed unions was the unsettling opportunity to acquire a set of disturbing new family members.  Usually figuring prominently in this proposed cast of dubious future relatives were certain individuals I’d already heard described in unflattering detail during frequent rage filled tirades. The idea of having to integrate them socially with members of my judgmental family at our already fraught annual holiday functions sounded to me like suicide-by-family.

On the plus side, Brawny Paper Towels came to me with very good letters of recommendation. We were introduced by one of my college friends who knew him from rock-climbing circles. She was the girl I looked to for advice about relationships and dating since she was more wizened about the ways of men and sex than I. She even had a handsome full-time boyfriend who she kinda sorta lived with, and seemed to be able to handle, despite the fact that he was a schizophrenic.

My first impression of my new beau, Mr. Paper Towels, was that he was a very nice guy. He was also a high school drop-out. Needless to say, my parents were thrilled to learn about this since it was their dream to send their daughter off to a good college where she’d fall in love with someone who had no interest in education, period. It almost goes without saying that my parents tried to discourage this union without being too obvious. That meant that my mother would refuse to look at him when he spoke.

But my parents also had zero awareness of how relieved I was to finally be part of a couple, any couple. As a girl who’d been raised in a post WWII United States of America, at nineteen I was already embarrassed and ashamed that I’d never had a real boyfriend. I felt like a reject. And there was no option in them days to just declare yourself non-binary and invent some interesting new ways to run this race entirely on your own terms.

Meanwhile, BrawnyP.T. was no free-loader. He had a real trade. He was a typesetter, a thing you can’t even be anymore. He had ink-stained fingers and wore a long white apron covered with black inky smudges. Under his apron, his daily uniform was a blue work-shirt, faded jeans and scuffed up cowboy boots. If this were a movie, he could have been played by Paul Newman.

He also had a personal style that was radically different from the cerebral/Bohemian affectations of my fellow art students. Instead of mismatched clothes and weird hair, he was a collage of different traditional masculine stereotypes from TV and film. Week days he was a ranch hand who rolled his own cigarettes. Weekends he was a sea-faring Irish sea captain from the 1800’s, piloting his 26-foot sail boat around the San Francisco Bay. These nautical outings usually began after he heard ‘small craft warnings’ being announced on the radio as a way of cautioning people not to take their boats out. That got him excited because wind, rain and rough water provided the proper theatrical stage on which he could enact an imaginary life on the high seas.

My job, in so far as I could be said to have one, was to be his appreciative audience.

So there he’d stand, busy and alive at the wheel, the rudder and the boom of his boat, the sun and the wind and the spray of salt water in his face and on his beard. Dressed in a knit wool cap and cable knit sweater, he would belt out Irish Sea Shanties at the top of his voice as we crashed through the waves. “Oh, it be all right if the wind is in our sails! Oh! it be all right if we make it ‘round the horn” As he sang, he’d pause now and then to take a big swig from a bottle of rye whiskey. That was also his cue to turn the page in the libretto. “Oh, it’s beefsteak when I’m hungry, rye whiskey when I’m dry. If don’t get rye whiskey, then I will surely die.” And with that, he’d continue to hold death at bay by tacking the boat hard and taking another big gulp of rye.

Meanwhile, I’d be sitting quietly on an inflatable seat cushion, restrained by a tight life preserver, getting ever more sun-burned and repeatedly soaked by a shower of freezing waves as they crashed over the deck and onto me. There was nothing at all for me to do for the duration of our adventure but stare at the coastline, spotting the same landmarks as they appeared over and over, like the three repeating trees in the back drop of a Hannah Barbera cartoon. Big physical discomforts were the main thing that separated this experience for me from driving my car around and around the block. 

But, I’d remind myself, this was a small price to pay for being in a stable relationship that offered protection from midnight apartment invaders. Because the unstated but omnipresent subtext of our relationship was also this: The summer before I’d met Brawny Paper Towels, a dark fog had descended onto my happy-go-lucky art student agenda after a man had broken into my apartment in the middle of the night and assaulted me. I had been awoken by the sounds of a certain kind of whooshing, swishing noise. I’d said to myself “It’s probably the wind.’ so I’d gotten up to close the window. And then someone had put his hand over my mouth. From that day forward, no sound in the middle of the night was ever the wind again.

A few months later, after I allowed myself to try and assimilate what had taken place, I realized I’d developed some rather big scars that needed to heal. But obviously the easiest lesson to be learned from this nightmare was that it was not a very smart idea for me to continue living alone. Maybe I needed a man in residence to protect me against intruders? 

 Enter Brawny Paper Towels, the kind of physically agile guy who could jump into a fist fight and probably win.  And even more shocking, based on the behaviors of the art school guys I’d been seeing before him, he was ready to commit after only knowing me a few weeks. “This is really special” he said the first time we ever slept together, long before our love had even developed enough connective tissue to merit a yelp review.

An additional argument against the afore-mentioned special nature of our union came when I learned the names of the two most recent long-term girlfriends who’d preceded me. They were…and I am not kidding here… named Cheryl and Beryl. It was almost as though the whole thing had all been foretold by a troll under a bridge that his next girlfriend would have arrived as soon as he met a girl with a name that rhymed. “I’ll know our relationship is over when he meets a girl named Daryl” I used to joke to friends. And yes, I was just being silly. But the girl he wound up with after we broke up was named Carol.

  Anyway, watching him live out his romantic masculine fantasies upon the high seas seemed like a small price to pay, right up until the moment where he’d look into my eyes and begin to talk/sing the chorus of “Brandy”.   “And she hears him say Brandy, you’re a fine girl. What a good wife you would be. But my life, my lover, my lady is the sea.”

I’d attempt a bright, fake-smile to mask the difficulty I was having figuring out what facial expression most convincingly hid my goosebumps. With chills running down my spine, I would focus on the lyrical content logically: I was fine with the part where his life, his lover, his lady was the sea. That meant he’d be gone for lengthy periods of time, leaving me ample room to pursue my weird little art projects without having to explain them. Like, for instance, the one where I meticulously re-created a distressed dollar-store display case containing three grim coin purses cast in latex, each one  decorated with a different over-used Pop-art cliché that could currently be seen decorating otherwise boring items being sold in drugstores near campus in a sad attempt to appear trendy. I hoped this sculpture was making a statement about the way a once-original artistic idea had been subsumed into cultural detritus. But it was hard enough explaining my intentions for the piece to my art teachers. The thought of the patronizing smile I’d get from Mr. Paper Towels when he looked at what I had been working on for weeks was painful. It was the same facial expression probably he’d wear when a well-meaning toddler presented him with a macaroni necklace.

 And don’t get me started on the aggravating detail that he would not stop calling me POOH. I repeatedly told him to stop but he did it anyway. I never figured out why he picked that name. I only knew that I hated it. If it was an homage to the beloved children’s book, the more accurate character choice would have been Eeyore.

So in my new relationship, on weekends I became a sea-faring people whose afternoons centered around sailboat outings that sometimes ended in a trip to Spenger’s Fresh Fish Grotto, a restaurant at the Berkeley marina where sailor-wannabes could anchor their boats. After dropping anchor, we’d climb the rope ladder to the dock, soaking wet and coated in salt. Cloaked in an air of righteous naval authenticity, we’d take our place at a table in the dining room where he’d order us all a hearty bowl of clam chowder. Then, while we waited, we’d scoff indignantly at the other tables full of poseurs around us, lacking as they were the sufficient maritime credibility to claim the right to partake in the fruits of the sea.

   During the week, our daily routines returned to the suburban streets of Oakland where Brawny P.T. turned back into a testosterone-infused ranch hand who, when we entertained his friends, sometimes shouted things to me like “Woman!, Why don’t you git your butt on into the kitchen and rustle us up something to eat.” I would raise my eyebrows and sigh, looking for dignity in the idea that this might be practice for being a good hostess. But then, I would get up and rustle these guys up some things and coffee, as requested.

So…okay…. being part of this couple required the ability to make peace with being with someone who behaved like Popeye on weekends. But I was also well aware that I was reaping some real benefits since I was still having frequent flashbacks about the creep who broke into my house. I was genuinely grateful for the additional security that Brawny provided me.

More problematic was my growing concern that he and I had nothing in common except an interest in protecting my homestead from intruders. Most evenings found us in his living room where he sat at a small table in front of a vice-like contraption full of hooks and feathers, wielding a tweezer and magnifying glass. He spent hours creating his own fishing lures that accurately resembled the gnats and mayflies that were the main diet of the fish he hoped to kill. And while he did that, I’d be sitting on the other side of the room, sunk way too deep into an arm chair with broken springs, studying for an anthropology or a psychology exam.

   That Mr. Paper Towels and I had different taste in evening activities wasn’t the problem. What concerned me more was the vast array of things I could never share with him. If I was willing to pretend interest in his home-made gnats, shouldn’t he be willing to fake a little interest in what I was learning in college?

   Critical mass came the day I agreed to meet him for lunch at The Apple Pan, after my morning Psych. 101 class. When I sat down with him at that table he liked in the back, I was incredibly stimulated by whatever new details of human brain dysfunction had just been explained to me in a class lecture. On this day, I decided to try to seeif I could interest him in the most intriguing part of what I’d just learned. He stared at me as I talked to him, his eyes as expressionless as the faces of his mayfly replicas. Then I saw him break into that patronizing smile.

“Listen, Pooh.” He said, interrupting my attempt at explaining the hemispheres of the brain,” It’s a beautiful day outside.  The sun is shining. Why does any of this matter?”

 His response floored me. I sat quietly, thinking about it for a minute. “Okay.” I replied, trying to look past how easily he dismissed the idea of the value of learning new things or getting an education. And certainly, a case could be made that if he really had been a Colorado rancher at the wheel of a six-masted-schooner that was really ‘headed ‘round the horn’, nothing did matter except the weather. But rather than get into a big argument, I nodded, and said nothing. In the deepest part of my heart, I gave up.

Not too long after that, he asked me to marry him. This was someplace in the second year of our relationship. But for me, that had been more than enough time. I was not confused about my answer. “No! I said, instantly.

“NO?” he repeated back, as though this version of how the discussion might go had never occurred to him. Perhaps because in the 1800’s, where he spent a lot of his time, the women were so desperate to get married that the idea of ‘no’ was unimaginable. “NO?” he repeated, as if he might have heard wrong, “So what do you want to do? Become an old lady spinster sitting on a shelf?”

  I thought about this metaphor at length. The shelf angle had never occurred to me before. What kind of a shelf were we talking about and where was it located? Was it in a big shelf in a warehouse?  Was the floor lined with shelving paper? Would I get a whole shelf to myself or did I have to share it with the other spinsters? Could I pick my own spinsters or would they be assigned to me like roommates in a dorm? Did someone come to deliver our meals or was there a communal spinster kitchen? Did everyone have to label their food in the refrigerator or did we all cook together? Would I be held captive on these shelves as I would be in a prison or could I come and go freely, like in a hotel? Did they have a security system? I had so many shelf dweller questions. Depending on the answers, it didn’t sound too bad.

By the end of summer, when I initiated a break up, it took him completely by surprise. Hoping for a reconciliation, he granted me a distinctly art-school-girl request. With my instructions, he printed up a set of invitations at the linotype shop where he worked. Done in the usual formally scripted-font on expensive thick off-white stationary with a lightly scalloped edge, the only difference between these faux invitations and traditional ones was that these said that he and I would like to announce that we would not be getting married.

 I was giddy as I mailed them off to selected people, many of whom I imagined would probably open the envelope, see them as real and never get the joke because they read the copy too quickly.

Oddly enough, on the day they were supposed to arrive there was a 5.0 earthquake. Though this may have seemed random to the earthquake-paranoid citizens of the Bay Area, I knew in my heart that it was definitely caused by my parents quaking in terror at the sight of the wedding invitation. Then they exhaled so hard in relief after reading the contents that they created seismic activity. It probably goes without saying that my mother did not think anything about my joke no-wedding invitation was remotely funny. If I had been a more traditional girl, this would have been when I filed for my first divorce.