Now There’s Two of It
BY SARAH KASEY
My Facebook algorithm has gone feral. It’s been a slow slide, but I think it’s truly off the rails now. Anything algorithmically fed will go rogue if you ignore it long enough. I once let a Pandora station play unattended on a muted computer with no sustenance of thumbs up or down for days until it pinged from Belle and Sebastian to Britney Spears, possibly lurching in its desperation to alphabetical grasping. My Facebook seems to be having a similar hypoxic seizure. Every third thing is a video of someone pouring resin around colored pencils or wood chips and turning the resulting mess on a lathe until they’ve made a light fixture or a stunningly unfoodsafe bowl. My top post is a man wrapped entirely in white latex rolling himself in paint and flailing up and down a room-length sheet of paper. I’m worried about whether or not this man can breathe.
I could delete the profile, but I’ve become paranoid that the internet is forever and that deactivating my Facebook would leave it there, but cut off my access to it, letting it drift like an internet ghost ship flying my flag, ripe to be hijacked by ill-intentioned pirates or to become self-aware, gathering its piles of dirt and revealing them to the anonymous friends that I would no longer be able to see. Internet search history, or photos of me upside down in a pub in York, mid back flip and nearly kicking the light fixture, in which my ex has helpfully tagged my butt.
My profile picture is a wildly out-of-date one of me carrying my daughter in a backpack that she hasn’t fit in for a year. Under the picture there’s a little heart with a date next to it, telling me I’ve been married for 15 years this week. The date of our wedding is wrong because it’s the date Ben changed his “relationship status” to “married” and not the day we were busy making vows and signing paperwork in our living room.
I didn’t forget our anniversary this year, although there have been years when we both have. When I realize half-way through the day that I’ve forgotten, I hope he has, too. It’s usually a safe bet. This year, Ben left for a string theory conference in New York City the morning of our anniversary, and we were up late the night before packing.
*
I don’t think the algorithm would have put us together. I’ve watched friends make profiles on dating sites and helped choose pleasantly bland descriptions and smiling pictures with backgrounds of interestingly gnarled trees or cities they do not live in to help direct traffic towards digital echoes of people I know and love. I’m useless at helping them sort the music they like from the music they want their dates to think they like. My digital echo owns a lathe. She doesn’t give a shit about food safety. She sees a lot of ads for protein shakes. Maybe she buys them while I do not. I’m not sure who she would love. My husband’s online self is smoothly professional. He’s a locked Youtube channel of lectures only his students can see. His Facebook photo is actually our dog.
The series of tick boxes describing my hypothetical ideal mate would probably not include Ben at all. I’m not sure we’re asking any of the right questions. If given the chance to slash through the profiles of humanity, excluding massive groups of people, I’d likely have set my maximum height at 5 foot 10 and not looked back. My husband is 6 foot 2 – thirteen inches taller than my 5 foot 1. I can’t spontaneously kiss him unless I’m wearing the right shoes. I imagine his profile would say he’s a “cat person.” I’m allergic.
Luckily, we got together “the old fashioned way”: high as fuck at a party after months of the kind of friendship and casual noticing each other that needed one extra push. Marbles circling the rim of a funnel in a Rube Goldberg machine before they tip, fall, and knock the rest of the mechanism into action. Even our friendship was accidental. We knew people who knew the same people, and kept showing up at the same parties, leaning against the same walls outside to get out of the heavy smoke, back when people smoked indoors. I wasn’t sure if I found it comforting or irritating.
“You had a real Beatrice and Benedick vibe,” a friend told us. But there was no masked ball or iambic pentameter, just a crowded full-moon party where we tried to share a chair with me sitting on the arm and him in the seat and I unbalanced into his lap.
*
The algorithm has 100 ways to ask what you want in a partner, but it doesn’t really know how to ask you what you think a partner is.
*
When we first moved to Massachusetts, my friend Aline visited while we were still living out of boxes. The dog we’d had for ten years, since before we were married, had just died of cancer, and our remaining dog was lying under the table staring at the wall. Ben was writing lesson plans even though it was midnight and I sat with Aline in the kitchen drinking and “leaving things to soak” in the sink.
When she said, “You must have your shit together. You’re married!” I snorted bourbon up my nose.
I tried to explain – drunk, and mid-career change, and full of dog grief, and now with my nose burning from the inside – that we fundamentally did not have our shit together.
“Don’t you have to be good at being with yourself before you’re good at being with someone else?” Aline asked. She had always sort of been a lawyer, even before she was a lawyer.
“I don’t know if we’re good at it! Do we have to be good at it?”
In romantic comedies at least one of the leads ends up less of a mess than they started. Love saves people. Or makes them want to be slightly less terrible versions of themselves. I don’t imagine my marriage as a romantic comedy. It’s more of a sci-fi/horror as told from the alien’s perspective. The humans stare down the tunnel into our dark and cluttered lair, they see the lumpy, alien life within looking back anxiously. One of them says “I don’t know what that is.” The mate scuttles into view, even larger and lumpier. “But oh shit! Now there’s two of it.”
*
My mother’s parents were married for 75 years. They were a delightfully mismatched set. She loved mystery novels. He refused to read fiction. The only genre of films they agreed on were musicals. He cooked and she DIYed the house. I once saw them blow kisses at each other through the kitchen window while he washed dishes and she tried to repair a leaky basement window well. She stuck her tongue out at him before disappearing below the window with her trowel full of cement.
We asked them for advice about what makes a happy marriage and they seemed entirely ready for the performance, arthritic and age-spotted fingers entwined. My grandmother said, “Marry someone whose faults you find funny.” My grandfather said, “Low expectations!”
*
The algorithm doesn’t need to ask about our tolerance for imperfection. We’ll just keep swiping left, or giving a thumbs down, or whatever method we’re using these days to feed it infinite iterations of nope.
“I could never go out with someone who lives with their parents,” Aline scowled at her phone through the ice left in her glass of bourbon.
“You live with your parents,” I said.
“That’s different.”
“Everyone’s different.” Maybe we need an app to match us with friends when the people that we’ve known forever start to make us feel like ice in the bottom of an empty glass.
*
Now rounding the corner into forty, people come with suitcases of responsibilities and interconnections, and whole new reasons to live with their parents. Our online selves are singular, solitary, equally weakly connected to every other profile that friends or follows us: our moms, our former housemates, people we sat next to in a class on Sanskrit literature in translation, strangers we accepted friend requests from because we thought they were someone else and are too embarrassed to remove. All those loosely connected nodes look free and unencumbered with the love, friendship, and attendant responsibilities of real people. Sorting through dating profiles with friends, we see lots that say they want “no baggage,” like they’re the human equivalent of a super-economy plane ticket that won’t allow carry-ons. The older we get, the more we know we can’t book that kind of trip. More and more people will have kids from a previous relationship, or aging parents with whom the balance of who is helping or receiving help is currently a seesaw in motion. We fetishize independence and our profiles usually tuck these relationships out of view like teenagers running to meet their friends around the corner from their parents’ cars, pretending they didn’t just get a ride.
My brother-in-law lives in the upstairs apartment of my in-laws’ duplex on a steep dirt road in Vermont. In some ways, it’s a sweet deal—live-in childcare from enthusiastic grandparents, a beautiful location, and a financial arrangement that makes things more affordable for all of them. On the other hand he lives with his parents, and his presence makes a situation that would otherwise be an aging-in-place nightmare of icy roads, steep stairs, and medical appointments 45 minutes away by car into something more tenable.
My mother-in-law would love to gather all her adult children in around her and have all of them, their partners, and their kids settled happily on nearby dirt roads, enjoying the hilly beauty of the woods. Most of us are unable to uproot our lives, or find jobs deep in the forest. The exception is my brother-in-law the carpenter, who seems more than happy to live around so much nice wood. We all felt a guilty relief when his new girlfriend accepted so readily that he can’t move out, that his mostly voluntary tethering is the price to keep his parents in their remote and beloved home.
His first wife had a different reaction to the living situation, and railed silently against all the tangible signs of her enmeshment with other people. When she threw away my mother-in-law’s sewing machine, it went with all the hard-to-find interchangeable parts from my grandmother’s machine that I had loaned to my mother-in-law. She disposed of charcoal drawings by my sister-in-law, my husband’s photography negatives, and boxes of my father-in-law’s books. I’m sure her profile describes her as a free-spirited minimalist. We experienced her as a whirlwind taking weird pleasure in purging other people’s stuff along with her own, like a reverse hoarder.
*
My husband’s other siblings have scattered where jobs and partners have taken them. Two of them live near us. We sat in a frozen yogurt place and watched one of them break up with her girlfriend over a texted picture of a quesadilla.
“It just doesn’t look good,” she tapped the phone in the center of the table, showing us the – admittedly not awesome-looking – quesadilla. “That’s her dinner. We have to break up. Why would she send me that picture?”
“I don’t know. Why would you break up over it? This cannot be about the quesadilla,” Ben said.
“It is about the quesadilla. I deserve better.” She tapped at her phone.
I don’t think deserving has that much to do with love.
*
The algorithm measures us in quality, not quantity. That sounds charming, but I think there is such a thing as too much of me. I know I think there is such a thing as too much of everybody else.
*
In grad school, I shared an office with a bunch of other academic malcontents. Most of us have left the field now—a description that makes us sound like gladiators abandoning bloodied swords and shields when we left to take up jobs as librarians, journalists, editors, and teachers, leaving our research writhing but undefeated.
One day I came in to find Zach, soon to leave linguistics for journalism, staring glumly at his phone. “I miss Beefy,” he said. Zach always referred to his boyfriend by the nickname Beefy, his journalistic commitment to truth rivaled only by his commitment to embarrassing the love of his life, and by said love’s commitment to weight lifting.
“Oh, how long is he gone for?” I asked, thinking Beefy must be away for work. We all traveled for research so much that separations from partners were pretty common. “Oh no. He’s not gone. I just haven’t seen him since breakfast.”
It was 11 AM. Zach proceeded to tell me that he was waiting for his mid-morning “I love you” text. This was back when texts had to be purchased in packages of 100, 500, or 1000. “How many times a day do you talk to Ben while you’re at work? How many times a day do you tell him you love him?”
Ideally never. Maybe once in the morning if neither of us has anything better to say.
Zach and Beefy are happily married now and are presumably texting constantly now that messaging is unlimited. I hope they are, even though the same level of attention would drive me insane. My threshold for partner contact is much, much lower.
Ben once went to Sweden for the entire summer and forgot to give me his new Swedish mobile number for over a week. Last I heard, Stefan, the flatmate he was supposed to meet up with in Ropsten, wasn’t answering emails, then nothing. Once several days had gone by, I found myself cycling between annoyance and a reluctant fear that Ben was dead. Should I be annoyed at him if it might be the last thing I think about him before I find out he’s an unidentified hit-and-run victim in a Swedish hospital? What if Stefan stopped answering his email because of a carbon monoxide leak and now they’ve both succumbed? Once we passed the one week mark of no contact I was annoyed, guilty for feeling annoyed when I should be worried, and annoyed again that he had put me in a position to worry when there was nothing I could do. It turns out I do have a line beyond which I get irritated with lack of communication. It just turns out that line is several days past where a lot of people may have reported their partner missing to Interpol.
*
I sometimes think I should feel guilty about this level of independence between us, about usually preferring to travel and hike alone. Our paces are different owing in large part to the radical difference in the length of our legs.
When he finally called from Sweden his call came in on my UK mobile while I was hiking. We had been on burner phones all summer.
“You’re like spies,” a friend texted back when I sent him another new number.
I was relieved and happy but also content with the stream to my right and the stretch in my legs and the work I got done the previous week. I growled a bit and let him know he’d freaked me out, but I also didn’t really want to ruin the day for everyone and be that woman rowing with her partner on the phone under a tree.
When we travel together Ben takes somewhere between three and ten times as many photos as I do. I’m in the pictures a lot, but they’re not pictures of me. I’m there, looking at a gargoyle, taking my own photo, walking away. He never posts these pictures to Facebook, never tags me. It’s a secret wildlife documentary he doesn’t need to share: The Undomesticated Wife.
*
The algorithm keeps track of where you go. Facebook used to have a widget with maps of both North America and The World, with green and blue dots announcing “Sarah has lived here!” “Sarah has visited here!” The widgets are gone but the data is still there, somewhere. The algorithm knows when you move. It doesn’t necessarily know if you’re following a job, or a love, or running away from everything you know. It knows when you shop for groceries. It doesn’t know how you feel about it. It knows whether you ticked yes on “interested in travel.” It doesn’t ask how you feel about someone traveling without you.
*
We spent nearly six months during college writing each other paper letters when we had been dating for less than a year. He took a semester’s medical leave and the school had shut down his email before he’d even gotten home.
Our music history professor made a show of not docking me too many points in our presentation on Frank Zappa’s place in 20th century classical music when I gave it alone after Ben was too sick. The same guy had told me the previous year that someone should have loaned me a laptop so I could work on a paper for his class while in the hospital on an IV antibiotic drip. He didn’t believe in extensions.
He was married to another professor and they bragged that they had nothing nice to say about each other’s work. That when they edited each other’s papers, at least one of them cried.
“That’s what academic marriages are like,” he said.
I drew cartoons in my letters to Ben and drew this professor on fire.
*
In academia there are lots of names for the difficulty of staying together if you both pursue jobs in research and teaching. Scientists tend to call it the “two body problem.” If someone follows a more successful partner, they’re a “trailing spouse.” My department had a particularly bad track record with intradepartmental relationships – also known as “everyone was fucking.” Five couples from inside the department are still married. Two of those involved a grad student marrying a faculty member; two involved the break-up of one or more previous marriages.
Women in particular tend to get the shit end of this.
*
Ben’s department was less messy: they were a dedicated bunch who were less prone to distraction than my friends. Anyone who wasn’t happily single was dating someone they found elsewhere. They talked about their partners affectionately, but also like exotic mushrooms or furniture they picked up at the side of the road.
“Where did you find her?” one guy asked, as if his friend’s girlfriend was not there, rather than simply busy eating an olive.
“Argentine tango class,” his friend answered.
“Oh I never met anyone who does that!” he said, although he had apparently been sharing a desk space with someone who did all semester, but they’d only ever talked about physics.
“I only meet people in the department,” someone else said.
“Oh you gotta find someone from elsewhere. Like I met my boyfriend in my home town and just kept him,” a girl smiled at her boyfriend who smiled back, unbothered.
The few physicist couples that did exist had arrived together and intended to leave together, looking for jobs in the same university or at least the same city. This was, it seemed, a different kind of mess. Lots of muttering about who would be the “main” career person and who would “follow.” Even people in other departments were suspect, our aspirations liable to lead young physicists astray.
Ben’s advisor cornered me over a cheese board when I had already decided the academic job market in my field was not my intended destination. “So what are your plans, you know, after?” He had the energy of a sitcom dad asking a teenage prom date their intentions towards his child. When I told him I intended to leave the field, apply for some jobs in academic editing, eventually go to library school, he clapped his hands together. “Oh good! You’ll be so portable!”
I imagined myself as one of the pieces of rolling luggage my parents kept folded down in a closet, tucked behind the also folded, and slightly rusted, rowing machine. I didn’t know much about what was in that closet, because it was portable and excellent at staying out of the way.
*
Among the algorithmic ghost ships that float on the internet reflecting former versions of me is a late ‘90s/early 2000s Livejournal telling the void who I was with questionnaires answered entirely in They Might Be Giants lyrics or quizzes that defined me by analogy. Cowboy or pirate? Vampire or werewolf?
I don’t really need the intervening years of Twilight mania and HBO content to tell me that vampires are everywhere and ascendant, a distorted romantic reflection from a creature that is not supposed to have a reflection at all. In middle school we watched Interview with the Vampire on someone’s mother’s VHS. The victims on screen looked at the vampires with wide, empty-eyed fascination, and my friends looked at the CRT monitor the same way, breath quickening at the prospect of being drained of power and swept off their feet—in some order. No one could think of a bigger turn on than meeting the nutritional and emotional needs of the supernatural. The desire to be consumed as a literal food stuff or a romantic battery was one I didn’t share.
When I was twelve I watched American Werewolf in London late at night with my grandmother. I imprinted on it, there on the floor on the cusp of teenagerhood. The horror braided with humor and Jenny Agutter’s unabashed sexual agency was more my speed than the earnest, panting self-sacrifice I’d been invited to enjoy just months before. A few weeks later I spent my thirteenth birthday lost on Shropshire’s Long Mynd with my parents, running out of water as the sun set and turned the dark scrubby heather into the horror movie set plants of the film. We lucked into an encounter with a school group and stumbled into town where the pub had outdoor floodlights and Australian hikers bought me blueberry wine even though I told them I was thirteen.
I’ve never convinced a friend to watch American Werewolf all the way through. They tend to sigh and tell me that the pacing is slow, the comedy makes it hard to get into, and it doesn’t strike the expected notes of romance. They’re not wrong: it’s got 70s pacing, the horniest lines are spoken by regular women, the werewolf in human form kind of looks like my dad. But that’s what I love about it. It’s a movie where women don’t sacrifice themselves to love, where men are ambivalent about power and eating people. And it’s a film that could make me laugh, blush watching sex scenes with my grandmother, and root itself somewhere where it could sprout into visceral terror when my experience started to mirror its imagery.
*
In grad school we used to go to a bar called Pixel and sit in the flash of arcade games and the bleep-blorp nostalgia of millennials aging out of the university town bar scene. The sofas were so soft you could sink into one and have trouble getting out, even before you started drinking. Tara told us that her new professor boyfriend was brilliant, and that she just wanted to “wash his socks.” Most of the other girls nodded.
“Is that a euphemism?” I asked, struggling out of the sofa cushions. “Please be a euphemism,” I whispered only to Kylie, who also wasn’t nodding.
“No. I just want to, like, take care of him and let him be brilliant.”
More nods, and I retreated into the deep cushions, feeling like an alien from an ice planet, watching humans be warm and sticky and full of love I worry I can’t feel. I’ve never felt a wash-your-socks love. I feel attraction more like the desire to sneak up behind someone and quietly smell their neck.
*
On Tuesdays, I talk to Kylie on the phone while she hides in her car during her daughter’s occupational therapy appointments.
“Can I get some reader’s advisory for my niece?” Kylie asked last year.
“Yeah, OK, but I’m not so up on kids’ books.”
“What’s the difference between YA and adult? Is it less sex?”
“Same amount of sex, but at least one of them is a vampire or a werewolf.”
“Is that a librarian joke or, like, true?”
“Both.”
“OK, what if we’re fine with the sex, but less with the vampires?”
“Judy Blume. John Green…”
“I don’t think she’s going to read something about normal humans, either.”
“Yeah, we’re boring. How do we feel about dragons?”
*
The Undomesticated Wife is a different kind of feral, supernatural creature. She failed the vampire or werewolf test. I shelved a book last week in new fiction where women turn into dragons en masse. They neither seduce their mates with their sleek, sexy scales nor try to consume them. The self-sacrificing, wash-your-socks love of a vampire’s willing snack, or the lose-yourself, lose-your-mind passion of a werewolf don’t do it for dragons. In Kelly Barnhill’s novel, the dragons mostly just fly away.
In the depths of Ben’s first research job, I tried to be portable. When his supervisor would email him questions after midnight and follow-ups and recriminations about why he hadn’t replied yet before 7 AM, I tried to be a different kind of wife. I tried to find a deep vein of sock-washing passion within me, and hoped the apparent ecstasy of self-sacrifice I’d seen on the screen and in my friends’ neon-lit, confessional faces, would follow.
We shouted a lot in our fire hazard of a kitchen, with the wooden cabinet with scorch marks on the bottom less than 18 inches over a gas stove that gave me nightmares.
“You’re not happy and you’re going to resent me!”
“No no,” I lied. “How is any of this going to get done?” I pointed to the dishes and the laundry baskets waiting to be carried down two flights of stairs.
“It probably just won’t,” he threw up his hands and I worried about the film of oil landing on the laundry from the vent-fan-less stove.
*
While Ben was packing for New York we tried to find him socks. I’d washed the laundry, but gotten no particular high of self-sacrifice from it. I assume he doesn’t love me any more than usual while he’s taking out the compost either. We dug like mad squirrels through the baskets of clean clothes that never make it into the dressers.
It’s not wash-your-socks love. But the socks are there. Somewhere.
*
At work the algorithm sends me hints about books and films to buy. It’s supposed to be based on our previous purchases and what other libraries our size are buying. Melinda thinks the publishers pay off the programmers to get their titles higher up the list. I’m not sure she’s wrong. It’s not too bad when it comes to books. It’s clocked that the kids at the local college like sci fi and horror, the regulars who come for the seed library want their gardening and permaculture books, and someone somewhere in our patron records is consistently requesting titles that have won literary awards in Ireland. These things it can handle. For films, though, the algorithm is glitchy. Right now, it is obsessed with Showgirls. Whatever I buy it says what my patrons want next is definitely Showgirls. Drama about lesbians in England in the 1980s? Showgirls. Romantic comedy about the immigrant experience and midlife love? Showgirls. There are six copies of Showgirls in the library system. None are checked out.
*
A college friend shared a list on Facebook of authors who should never be listed on a dating profile or social media page among your favorites. Apparently if someone likes Kurt Vonnegut it should render them undatable. In Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut—who I, out of sight of the algorithm, like—creates a fictional modern religion that seeks to connect people to others with whom they have a pre-ordained spiritual connection based in nothing visible. The religion believes that most visible connections are what it calls “granfalloons”—people from the same state, or who went to the same school. The algorithm is excellent at generating granfalloons. I think the algorithm snuck Vonnegut onto that list and it doesn’t want us to notice.
I’m not sure I’d want to date someone who has a long list of authors I’m not allowed to like. I approached media with a librarian’s promiscuity before I even trained for the job.
*
In high school my friends passed books and comics back and forth like they were sexually transmitted, loaning copies to new boyfriends and girlfriends like it was an intimate act, solidifying our love by showing some piece of ourselves as reflected in someone else’s words and images. We passed the books between friends, too, but only the type who were so close that we’d also passed a case of plantar warts from sharing each other’s sandals and in a pinch we’d borrowed each other’s underwear. We weren’t friends because we all liked the same sexually transmitted comics, we were friends for reasons that I still don’t understand and the burned CDs and battered paperbacks we passed around were just the circulating blood that kept the monster alive. We didn’t want a new person to already know all the music and movies and books we were about to recommend, we wanted a chance to newly infect. Werewolves expanding our pack.
*
Late ‘90s teens were obsessed with making out and more in movie theatres (I blame Alanis Morrisette) but it’s a rite of passage I always managed to avoid. I hate the idea that when I’m with someone I’m not allowed to have a separate experience. No matter how much I love your face I don’t want it to block my view of the movie screen if we’re there to watch a movie.
When I would read on the couch, our Labrador would put her giant head into my lap, eclipsing the words with jowls and ears. I loved her with a force that can still make me sad that she existed for just over ten years, that one quarter of my life included her, and as I get older, that percentage will be less and less. Still, I would always pull the book free, stroke her ears, and replace them on my leg, then lean the book on her big square skull and keep reading.
Sometimes I worry that something is broken in me, that I don’t feel things enough, that I’m too much of a head person with no heart, that I’m not willing to stop thinking, to just love someone, that I don’t want to wash anyone’s socks.
*
I dragged Ben to watch The Babadook at the Brattle Theatre, conveniently forgetting that he’s too tall to sit comfortably in the folding seats and that he absolutely hates horror films.
“I think it’s more of a social commentary,” I reassured him on the way in.
“Okay,” he said, because he trusts me.
Thirty minutes later, my husband was folded into full airplane crash position, with his head between his knees, and his arms on the back of the seat in front of him, in the pose I’d only ever seen on airline safety demo cards. He was breathing very deliberately, and I reached over to touch his shoulder to reassure him. This was obviously, in retrospect, not reassuring to be touched from behind by someone you cannot see while hiding from a horror movie in a chair too small for your body. He hit his head on the entirely-too-close seatback in front of him. He caught his breath and looked back at the screen just in time to see a small dog have its neck broken.
*
“We would have been nuns,” my undergraduate thesis advisor said to me in an 8 AM meeting. “In the Middle Ages we would have been nuns. It was the only way to avoid marriage and get to work with words as a woman.”
I think I’ve let her down. I think about emailing her, but I don’t. I didn’t become a nun, or an academic, in the end.
*
A quiz the algorithm has never sent me: Do you live in your heart, your mind, or your body? Choose two.
*
“I think I want to write again, but I don’t know if I’ll have time with this.” I looked around the kitchen. Our daughter had spread jam on the table. I knew Ben wasn’t going to tell me not to. I wanted him to save me from myself. Instead he shrugged.
“We’ll make it work,” he said. “You have to defend your time.”
“What about the house?” I tapped my finger in the jam.
“I don’t really notice it,” he said. “You could try to not notice it.”
“That’s disgusting.”
In our popular fantasy of romantic love, relationships make people better. I’m sometimes afraid we’re making each other worse. Happier, stickier, but definitely worse.
*
Ben fell asleep in our daughter’s room, in the chair next to the door, while trying to get her to sleep.
“Why didn’t you wake me up?” he asked. “I had to pack.”
I looked up from writing and said, “Because I’m a whole separate person.”
“I like that you’re a whole separate person, but I need to pack.”
I’m still trying to find the line between defending my time and just being an asshole. I get it wrong a lot.
*
Last month a patron asked me if I could transfer her husband’s library card and Libby account into her name. Technically? No.
“He’s dead,” she said. “He died last year.”
“I’m so sorry.” She shrugged. It’s the same gesture I use to try to shake off other people’s compassion. “I could set up a new account for you.”
“This one has to go?” she asked. “We both used it. We have the saved reading history. There’s stuff he read that I was still meaning to. Stuff he read…”
Technically, I was supposed to make her a new account. Technically, they were supposed to have separate accounts all along. Actually, plenty of people do this. I found a way to help her keep her algorithmic ghost.
*
If I die first, there are notebooks I want Ben to burn after reading. There are notebooks I want him to burn before reading. He says he wants to keep the cartoon letters from college, but he left them at his parents’ house and his brother’s ex-wife threw them away with his paperbacks, and his music composition notebook, and a bunch of my clothes. I haven’t enabled the saved check-out history on my library account. My Facebook account remains unfed.
If I haunt Ben, I’ll do it like Alan Rickman in Truly, Madly, Deeply: obnoxiously, and pointlessly and filling the house with chamber music played by my dead friends. If Ben dies first, I trust him not to haunt me. His lack of belief in any afterlife is strong enough to destroy his own ghost out of pure stubbornness.
*
When Ben and I were moving into our first apartment, his 93-year-old grandmother was moving in with her 89-year-old boyfriend. He was a former high school chemistry teacher who had lost an eye in an experiment gone wrong. He took to Ben, who was teaching his first lab class.
Two of my sisters-in-law got angry. “Couldn’t she just wait?” Their grandfather had been dead almost five years.
“Wait for what?” Ben asked. “Wait to die?”
When they weeded the duplicates from more than half a century of two kitchens, we were given a set of cast iron skillets and what is still our best spatula.
Rosa had seven happy years with her boyfriend before she died at 100 after falling off a ladder. It’s more good time than a lot of relationships get.
*
Ben’s students like him. We can tell because they congregate in his office to do their homework together and because they carved stunningly good portraits of him into pumpkins on Halloween.
The emails Ben writes to his students after midnight are different than the ones he got. He tells them to take care of themselves. He doesn’t brag about times we’ve made each other feel bad.
A few years ago some of them asked him how we got together and he told them—although he may have left out the drugs. They were shocked we’d met in meat space, that we had approached each other without the confirmation of a digital swipe.
“You just asked her out?” they asked.
“Well, we’d been friends awhile.”
“But you just…asked if she wanted to be…not friends?”
“I don’t think that’s how I put it.” He didn’t tell them we had most of our clothes off. I guess it would have been pretty awkward if I’d said no.
“How did you know she would say yes?”
“I was pretty sure.”
“How sure?” In my memory of this I don’t think either of us could have had any doubts. Some of our friends wolf-whistled at us when they saw us together. On Facebook, we appear in the background of party photos, the type everyone untagged when we all started looking for jobs. We are always looking at each other in these pictures, not like either of us is about to pounce, but like we might be plotting something in a language no one else there speaks.
“Pretty sure.”
*
Our wedding rings each consist of two strands of heavy silver wire twisted together. The symbolism of rings was something I googled a lot before the wedding, and then rejected most of the components of. I’d never had an engagement ring.
“Do you want one?” Ben asked, stopping suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk. We’d decided in the kitchen to get married. Then left to walk the dog.
“Fuck no,” I said.
The dog doubled back to sniff something and wrapped her leash around us both, pulling us together.
*
The algorithm assumes you are a fully formed person, that you have defined edges that you can explain in a way that lets it find the corresponding puzzle piece to fit against you. But you’re probably an amoeba. I am.
We don’t fit together tightly. We update and alter the space between us without fully transforming ourselves. Sometimes I think we are supposed to want that space filled, that other people fit so entirely against each other that there is no air. I’m afraid for those people’s ability to breathe. That if you overfeed your algorithm or your relationship, you’ll starve yourself.
Ben will come back on the train and the house will not be clean. There will be a pile of words trying to define the fifteen years of shifting space between us, like I’ve been trying to look at us as two blobs under a microscope.
“I don’t know what that is. But now there’s two of it.”
