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Dating

By Jim Donadio

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I stopped living with Kathleen because she made the apartment smell like fish. I’m not talking about that mother-and-daughter-playing-tennis, not-so-fresh-feeling smell.  Kathleen was always taking care of herself with vinegar and oil or whatever, those feminine hygiene things that sound suspiciously like salad dressings. No, that wasn’t the problem. It was her unhealthy obsession with tuna fish. She ate it all the goddamned time, ever since that fateful day when I’d mentioned drunkenly that she could stand to lose a few pounds around the hips. She burst into tears, and the next day she joined a gym and went on that crazy carnivore diet where you stop eating bread. She started eating tuna straight from the can because it was low-fat, high-protein, and carb-free. And soon that was all she was eating, breakfast straight through dinner. I found myself living with the Star-Kist poster girl. I started calling her Charlie Tuna. I thought it was a cute pet name. She cried again.

At first, the odor was only prevalent on her breath and in the general kitchen area, but than that stench just crawled though the apartment and got into everything. It hung in the curtains and permeated my clothes. I’d go to work, and people would look at me and turn up their noses like I’d farted. One coworker slipped me the number of a gastrointestinal specialist who’d apparently worked wonders on his uncle’s colon.  “Great,” I’d thought, “they think of me as the gassy tuna guy.”

I’d never met anyone past the age of ten who smelled like tuna, except my grandfather.  His house smelled like tuna and mothballs, which I didn’t mind so much because most old people I’d known in childhood smelled like piss and mothballs, and that new combination was a welcome change. My apartment smelled like tuna and gym socks from Kathleen’s experiment in crash dieting. I’m not sure which of these combinations was necessarily the worst. The general aura of that place, of her, began to remind me of my grandfather, which was wrong in a number of ways. Sex became impossible. It felt incestuous and began to arouse what my therapist likes to refer to as “repressed memories.”

So I had to leave Kathleen, basically because she felt too much like home.  And telling her that I was leaving was another tear-soaked disaster. “Is it me?” she asked. “Be honest.”  I told her that, yes, it was absolutely and completely her fault. She began sobbing, and begging me to elaborate. I told her that it was because she smelled bad and had gotten fat. She began to twitch and convulse a bit, and then went to the kitchen to get her antidepressants and a bottle of gin. “Oh Christ,” I thought, “here she goes with this again.” So I grabbed a few suitcases and headed out the door.

After Kathleen, I stumbled from one bad relationship to the next. I began seeing a girl named Florence, who I should have known was trouble from the start because she was from Bangor, Maine. I always associated New England with clam chowder, and Maine with lobsters, so the reminders of Kathleen and the whole fish scene were bound to hang over the relationship. On top of that, I just couldn’t see how anything good could come out of a town called Bangor. It sounded so clunky.  It didn’t roll off the tongue like Burlington or Montpelier, those nice little New England towns in Vermont. Bangor sounded like it should be a name of a character in a Conan the Barbarian movie, not the name of the town my girlfriend was from. The bottom line is, I should have realized we were destined for failure from day one.

I didn’t recognize these omens because I was blinded by lust. I’d always had a thing for girls who wore flannel and overstressed syllables like they were deaf.  But most girls I’d met who wore flannel on a regular basis were lesbians. Most girls who did the whole overstressed-syllable thing were actually deaf. With the lesbians, sex was out of the question.  With the deaf girls, I just couldn’t communicate. I had figured that, due to the fact that I had a penis and didn’t know sign language, I was doomed to a life of unfulfilled fantasies. But then my little New England girl came along, and I thought my dreams had come true.

There was nothing really wrong with Florence.  She was a good girl, slender and attractive, intelligent and funny. In fact, everything was fine until I invited her to Thanksgiving with my family. It all went wrong just as we were about to eat, and my mother was tying a bib around my Uncle Lenny’s neck.  He’d never been the same since an unfortunate accident a year earlier during his time working for a construction company. The details were fuzzy, but it had involved long overtime hours, a steel extension ladder, and a freak lightning storm.  His bones had healed almost completely since the fall, and the doctors said the outlook for Uncle Lenny regaining some of the feeling in his extremities within a few months was pretty good.  However, the outlook for the return of ninety to ninety-five percent of his mental facilities was really slim-to-none, so we as a family had to resolve ourselves to dealing with the “new” Lenny, who was kind of the like “old” Lenny except more quiet, less active, and more messy of an eater.

Lenny had gotten a sizable fortune from the settlement, but most of that disappeared along with his wife Susan and his former accident and injury lawyer, a guy named Chuck. Chuck had also acted as Susan’s divorce lawyer about a month after the settlement came through, and he and Susan left Lenny paraplegic and penniless. In an effort to save a few bucks, Mom, who had taken Lenny in when he couldn’t make mortgage payments and had his house repossessed, lifted extra bibs from Red Lobster when they went out to dinner instead of buying more traditional cloth ones.  When Florence saw the picture of the dancing lobster on the bib, she started talking about growing up in Maine and the lobster business there. And then, of course, she had to go and mention Bangor by name.

My senile grandmother overheard “Bangor” as “Bangkok,” and launched into an obscenity-laced tirade about not letting any grandson of hers go around banging some Thai whore. She called Florence a “slant-eyed yellow cocksucker” and began hurling flatware at her with one hand while she slapped my grandfather with the other.  My grandfather, who had decided to celebrate Thanksgiving in his own special way by downing half a bottle of Wild Turkey before dinner, slapped her back and began shaking her violently.  Grandpa started yelling about how she never let him live down the one time he’d visited a bordello in Thailand during the war, and how she’d have never even known about it if not for the chaffing rash he’d developed on his crotch when he returned home.  My little nieces and nephews began to weep in fright and confusion. My father declared that he was enjoying his “goddamned turkey” whether we liked it or not, and began to slice the bird and recite grace amidst the chaos.

So I think it goes without saying why I had to end that little love affair right then and there.  Really, it was all Florence’s fault that Thanksgiving was ruined, and I told her so on the ride home. If she hadn’t gone chit-chatting about Bangor, my sister wouldn’t have had to explain what “cocksucker,” “blowjob,” and “VD” mean to her three pre-adolescent children. Thanks to her, those kids would be scarred for life by bad childhood holiday experiences. And I myself was no stranger to how deep such wounds could be.

I had a bad experience with a shopping-mall Santa when I was young. He’d gotten a massive erection when I sat on his lap, and though he’d assured me it was just a candy cane in his pocket which I felt poking into my rear, I was old enough to know better.  It was absolutely traumatizing, and everything connected to the whole scene was forever tainted. The scent of peppermint makes me nauseous. I involuntarily jerk the wheel towards fat, bearded old men on the sidewalk when I’m driving. Whenever I see a midget, I think of Santa’s elves who stood idly by while some pervert robbed me of my innocence, and it all comes rushing back.

The midget thing is a big problem. I’ve had to avoid circuses altogether. I’ve missed out on the enjoyment of classic films such as Snow White, Willy Wonka, and The Wizard of Oz.  Every time I see the Seven Dwarves, Oompa Loompas, or Munchkins, I get anxiety attacks. And the problem extends to anything even remotely connected to films like that, because I’m reminded of those troublesome characters. For instance, I can’t listen to Elton John’s “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” or eat the donut holes at Dunkin Donuts.  Furthermore, because of leprechauns, I can’t enjoy St. Patrick’s Day, so I am deprived the joy of yet another holiday. In fact, because of leprechauns, I hate the Irish in general.

So it was bitterly ironic that the first girl I went out with after Florence was a midget herself, or as she liked to call it, “a little person.” A friend set me up on a blind date with her, not knowing of my history with and phobia of those with short stature. Her name was Lillith, which reminded me of Lilliput, that place in Gulliver’s Travels with all of those really tiny people. Of course, Lillith was no where near as small as that, but all I kept thinking was, if a hundred or so of those little things could tie up and torture Gulliver, there was no telling what sort of damage she was capable of. Compared to them, she was enormous. And of course, after I made this connection, I had to be careful to avoid calling her Lilliput by accident, just in case she caught the reference and got offended.

The date was a disaster. I could barely pay attention as she rambled on throughout the meal. I was too preoccupied with thinking about all the problems dating a midget would pose. Would we ever be able to go on fun rides at amusement parks? Those “You must be this tall to ride” signs seemed to pose a problem. Where would I take her shopping? The only place I could think of was Kids’ R’ Us. Would I have to buy a booster seat for her to be able to ride in my car? Buying one of those seemed too much like commitment, because it suggested the idea of having children.

Don’t get me wrong; I saw the positive sides to it as well. If I put her in pigtails, I might have been able to pass her off as my daughter and get her half-priced meals at restaurants.  If we did go all the way with it and tie the knot, then we’d be able to save money by not buying her new clothes once the kids were about five years old or so. Their hand-me-downs would keep her well-dressed for years.  Her clothes would always be in fashion, too, because kids these days won’t stand for wearing anything but the best name-brand and trendy clothes. And if the occasional cartoon character or something specifically “kiddy” was emblazoned on the front of one of her second-hand shirts, so be it. An adult wearing “kiddy” clothes was considered cool and kitsch, so I’d been told, which meant that she’d be the hippest little midget around. We’d just need to pump those kids out fast, lots of them, so the supply of hand-me-downs wouldn’t run out.

I realized quickly that it could never work, though, and began to plot my quick exit from the restaurant. I made up a grotesque lie about having to rush home and put my dog out of its misery. I said that my visible distraction throughout the night had been due to my wrestling internally over what to with good old Skipper, my floppy-eared beagle who’d been hit by a large pick-up truck out in front of my apartment, right before my very eyes, just before I was supposed to head out for the date. I told her that I’d left him there to die because I didn’t want to show up late and upset her, but that I now realized the only humane thing to do was to rush back and beat him to death with a shovel if he wasn’t dead already. She nodded sympathetically and said that she knew exactly where I was coming from. I had no idea what she meant by that, but I was scared and didn’t want to find out.

I bolted from the restaurant, laughing to myself that my ad-libbed excuse had worked so well. I was also laughing to myself about the fact that, in the confusion my quick exit had created, I’d been able to stick her with the bill. I didn’t feel too bad about it because I knew I’d never see her again, and I was sure that if she couldn’t pay it, she’d have an easy time sneaking out of there, seeing as she was a midget and could probably stay under the restaurant staff’s line of sight as she ran for the door. But really I was laughing more about my brilliant lie.

What was so absurd to me about the story was that I actually hated dogs, passionately so.  I would never have owned one. If I did see one get hit by a pick-up truck, I’d have called off any date or appointment I had and just sat there watching it die. I hated dogs because dogs hated me, and they always had. They always chased me as I rode bikes and jogged through the park. They always left steaming piles of shit where I was most likely to step in them. It was disproportionate, honestly. I’d walk out the front door of my apartment have to tiptoe down the sidewalk like I was walking in a minefield unless I wanted my shoes to reek of dog shit all day. It only seemed to be on my block, and I began to become convinced that all the neighborhood dogs must have been congregating nightly at some underground canine all-you-can-eat buffet and then coming to my doorstep to collectively relieve themselves. I felt conspired against.

And they were always humping my leg. Yes, friends with dogs would laugh and say it was cute as Spot or Lucky took to my leg like a Viagra-bingeing priest on a pre-pubescent boy. I found nothing cute about it. I considered it rape.  I mean, if I got all hot and bothered and started going to town on a Chocolate Labrador down at the pet store, I’d be labeled a sicko and locked up for sure. I didn’t see how a non-consensual sex act between man and beast could ever be considered acceptable, no matter which species was acting as the aggressor.

Given my hatred for dogs, it was fitting that my next blind date, Betty, was a dog-lover.  She had to be, I guess, because she was also literally blind, and she had to have the mangy thing lead her all around town. Of course, I didn’t know that she was blind or that she had a dog before we met. When I walked into the trendy little café she’d picked out, I saw her with her shades and figured she was just one of those beatnik writer-types that were always mulling over bad poetry in those places while they sipped their soy milk lattes. I identified her disability pretty quickly, however, after seeing the dog and making a few funny faces at her which she didn’t react to.

To my surprise, I found myself liking Betty a lot. She told me that, since she couldn’t see, she took advantage of all her other senses. She loved music, whether it was sitting around listening to records or going to the opera. She loved the taste of good food and fine wine.  She was apparently also a demon in bed with a fairly insatiable sexual thirst.  The fact that she shared this on a first date excited me greatly. I decided to ignore the dog problem and tried to make things work with her.

Betty and I started to get pretty serious after a while. Sure, we had our problems. There were things we couldn’t really do because they wouldn’t be fun for her, like going to the movies or to art exhibitions. It was hard for us to discuss current fiction, because considering the amount of time it takes a book to move from hardcover to paperback, you can imagine how long it takes until the Braille versions are released. I’d tried playing catch with her once on a beautiful afternoon when we were picnicking in the park, but the results were disastrous. After a quick trip to the hospital and three stitches above her left eye, I realized that most sports were likely not an option for us.

There were a lot of nice things about Betty’s lack of sight as well. I didn’t need to be as self-conscious about my looks as I’d been with past girlfriends. If my clothes didn’t match, she didn’t notice or complain. I could buy her fake jewelry and she didn’t know the difference. I occasionally got away with taking her to Denny’s and telling her it was an upscale bistro or something of the like, amazing her with the speed with which we received seating and the promptness of our service, making her think I must be someone really special to get that type of treatment. It was easy to do, as long as I was careful about how I phrased my order. Bacon-covered cheese fries became “a skillet of sliced and fried potatoes, topped with a cheddar fondue or what have you, and chips of pork.”  A buck or two slipped to the waitress ensured she would play along. So what I’m saying is, I guess that with Betty, I was able to both appreciate and live by the old adage, “it’s the thought that counts.”

But eventually, as was always the case with me, my heart began to wander. When thinking about Betty in the long-term sense, I began to doubt her domestic abilities. She left dishes spotty, missed large areas while vacuuming and dusting, left large wrinkles in her ironing, and so on.  Sure, Betty couldn’t see these errors, and wasn’t completely at fault, but I became frustrated with her regardless. The little things began to grate at my nerves. And on top of it all, there was that fucking dog. I didn’t know if I could go on living with a dog forever.

Eventually, I found myself attracted to Marge, our regular waitress at Denny’s. She was frumpy, not particularly attractive, a little past middle-aged, and questionably literate and educated. But boy, could she clean. I’d watch her in awe as she blew through a table as soon as a party left, making it spic-and-span in less than two minutes, every time. The Formica tabletops shined brilliantly and mirror-like after her graceful hands and her damp rag worked their magic on them. If there was a particularly tough coffee stain left behind, she wasn’t afraid to use a little gob of her own spit and some elbow grease to get the job done. It really turned me on to see a woman so competent with her work.

And Marge loved to serve. She did it for a living and she did it well. My coffee cup never sat empty, as she was always there to refill it just as I was about to take my last sip.  And damn, was her coffee good. She made a fine cup of coffee, and I like that in a woman. Betty could point out the best cafes around, but Marge, she didn’t need to go buy some fancy coffee. She was a coffee artist.

Marge responded well to tips, even when they were insultingly small. Even a handful of change and some pocket lint would get a genuine “thank you” out of her. She was easy to impress, and humble, which I also found attractive.

Last but certainly not least, I was fairly sure Marge was a fellow dog-hater. I was sure I saw utter contempt in her eyes whenever she looked at Betty’s mutt sitting in the booth next to her and likely shedding all over the place. If she hadn’t been a dog-hater before Betty’s dog had become a regular feature of the restaurant, I was sure she’d become one because of it.

So I decided that I needed to leave Betty, and pursue my love for Marge. But I was intimidated by Marge’s domestic perfection, and scared by how strongly I’d begun to feel for her.  Unable to come right out and ask Marge for a date, I instead began to stalk her.  I’d eat all my meals at Denny’s, always asking to be seated in her section. Sometimes I’d call in sick to work and just sit there all day, writing little love poems on the napkins and leaving them in mountainous piles for her to read when I left. Other days I would do the same thing, except instead of writing poems I would write my phone number over and over again. But my phone never rang. Marge rejected my advances.

Eventually, Marge began giving my table to other waitresses, and outright refusing to wait on me. At first I was hurt, crushed even. But eventually hurt gave way to anger, and I came just as often as before, if not even more, to spite her. Then, one early weekday morning at about 4am, I was lucky enough to find her as the only waitress working. I knew I had her to myself, through some stroke of luck or perhaps by the Hand of God Himself. But I was too intimidated still to make use of the situation.

Marge took my order coldly and almost unwillingly. Our conversation consisted of the bare essentials.

“Grand Slam, please.”

“How do you want your eggs?”

“Break them. Just break them like you’ve broken me.”

“Wheat or rye?”

“Does it matter? Burn it black. Burn it black as your heart, you unfeeling jezebel.”

“Want those hash browns doubled?”

“Doubled, covered, and smothered, Marge! Smothered! Can’t you see?”

It went something like that. In the end I felt drained and she left to get my breakfast.  She returned with it quickly, dismissively, and placed it on the very edge of the table, then walked away. I couldn’t eat it. I couldn’t even begin to eat. I just sat and stared at the sizzling strips of bacon, the phallic links of sausage, the pile of hash browns covered in melted cheese and a mysterious white sauce which made me think only of the throes of passion. I sipped my black coffee and stared as the large scoop of butter began to melt atop the stack of pancakes, which were stacked and placed so that they were angled towards the floor. The ball of butter began to slide down the stack, gaining momentum, and I was reminded of when my own balls had descended at the late age of seventeen.  Yes, things don’t always go as planned, but you have to remember that eventually the day will come when the boys in the locker room will stop laughing.

And then the butter fell off the plate completely, landing with a wet plop on the floor. At this same time, I saw Marge round the corner with a steaming pot of fresh coffee to refill my cup.  I looked at Marge. I looked at the butter. I looked back at Marge. I envisioned tragedy.

I thought of the many mornings when I’d stepped unthinkingly into a fresh pile of dog shit outside my apartment.  I thought how nice it would have been if, on even one of those days, a fellow pedestrian had yelled to me, “Hey buddy! Don’t step in that shit!  Literally!” I could have been saved a day of stench and embarrassment, which I might tell you is priceless. I saw before me then the chance to be that fellow pedestrian. I saw the chance to prevent calamity.

“Marge! The butter! Ye Gods, watch your step, woman!” That’s all it would have taken.  And maybe, at that moment, Marge would have realized the depths of my emotion and caring.  She might have fallen right into my arms, smothering me with kisses instead of country gravy.

Instead, I said to myself, “Fuck her. The bitch gets what she’s got coming.” A smile cracked across my face as she stepped directly onto the butter, and stood on it while she refilled my coffee. I couldn’t bear to look her in the face. I was afraid I might burst out in cruel laughter. I instead focused my gaze on her shoe. Then I heard the pouring stop and my cup hit the table, and saw her foot move as she walked away.

I turned to watch her then, walking away with a near-full glass pot of piping hot coffee which trailed steam behind her. As she neared the area by the counter where the carpet ended and the linoleum began, I braced myself for the inevitable. And then it happened.  As soon as her buttered shoe touched the slick linoleum surface, she bolted forward with the speed of an Olympic speed skater, but without a trace of Olympic grace. Her free arm flailed wildly and gripped for the counter in a desperate attempt to steady herself.  Then she fell forward, crashing to the ground on top of the coffee pot she still held.

My ears still ring from the sound she made at that moment. I have never heard anything like it projected from the mouth of man, woman, child, or beast. Not even on the Discovery channel. Shattered glass tore through her flesh as hot coffee seared her skin, and she bellowed in utter agony. I felt thrilled and elated, as if I had just seen some universal justice handed down. I fought the urge to jump out of my seat and scream, “Does it burn, Marge? The sting of karma is harsh, is it not?”

Instead, I took advantage of the commotion and walked quickly out of Denny’s, never to return.  I didn’t pay the check or leave a tip. It was sweet icing on my sticky cake of revenge.

In the two months since the Marge incident, I’ve stayed single by choice. I don’t think I’ll be ready to give of myself emotionally for a long time after the way I was hurt. I’ve even considered joining the clergy, just so I can forget about the whole dating scene forever. The way I figure it, if the whole celibacy thing doesn’t work out once I’m in, there’s bound to be a nun who went into the service for the same reasons I’m considering, and she’ll get lonely too, and we’ll get together.

Those nuns, their habits are always smooth and wrinkle-free. And I don’t know about you, but every church I’ve been in has been relatively spotless.

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When Jim Donadio was very young, he fell into a vat of saltwater taffy and was stuck inside for the better part of three days. The side effects of such an accident include writing funny stories and horrible nightmares involving carnival folk and sticky-fingered taffy monsters. Hang in there, Jim. You’ll be okay.