Him

We all have him. You know who I mean, girls. Him. You know - that guy you could never resist, the one you knew was bad, bad, bad news, but you kept....well, in the interests of keeping this PG-13, let's say you kept 'dating' him. He's the guy who wrecked your car, almost got you fired, evicted, arrested or killed, but you kept going back for more. You know him. Yeah, that guy.

Mine was/is J. He had dark curly hair, green eyes, and a wicked grin. It said, 'yes ma'am, I will get you in serious trouble. Doesn't it sound like fun?' He was tall and lean and way too confident. He had swagger.

We met cute in an elevator in my building a dozen years ago. In just twenty seconds on the way to the third floor, his manner was so intimate that I stepped off the lift blushing. His words were perfectly gentlemanly, but his tone, his gaze were so familiar, I felt as though he knew all my secrets. I smiled for an hour afterward, amazed at seeing someone that good-looking in real life, rather than the movie, or at least TV, screen.


I figured I'd never see him again, but he'd actually moved in down the hall. The second time I saw him, again in the elevator, he asked me to dinner. I was in total shock. I was much thinner back then, but still not thin. I don't remember the details of the date, but I do remember his goodnight kiss, and his disbelief when he realized he would not see my bedroom that first night.


Now, I've always been a good girl (at least at first), and I was a bit put off by his, um, fervor. It had been a year since the obligatory breakup with the college boyfriend, and there had been no one - no one in that time since. I liked being wanted, but there was a pressure there, an insistence that seemed to have little to do with me. I ignored his calls the next day, and his knocks on my door. Yeah, I know now it reads loud and clear - stalker. But this was during The Wilderness Years, when all I had was work to fill my days and nothing but TV for my nights. The attention seemed exciting to me. The rejection was clearly exciting to him. He pursued relentlessly.


So we went out again, and then again. I really, really liked him; we had more fun together than I have had with any man before or since. And then it went bad.

It doesn't matter how or why. I won't bore you (or embarrass myself) by telling you how long it took me to figure out he was an alcoholic. So naive, I thought drunks drank hard liquor. In the morning. He only drank beer, and only at night, and occasionally at lunch, so it didn't occur to me he might have a problem. You don't need to know how many mornings I was late to work after late nights with him, or how often I called in sick to work to drink with him, reasoning I was revisiting my college days. I won't tell you how mad I was when he accompanied me to a doctor's appointment, pretending to be a doting boyfriend, only to ask for my keys and forget to vent the car, so that I was knocked over by the residual pot smoke when we returned to the parking lot.

I will also leave to your imagination my embarrassment when I was called home from work by my landlord's threats of eviction and found him Drunker Than Cooter Brown, as we say in the South, at 11 a.m., blasting the Allman Brothers so loud you could hear it a block away. And the day the deputy sheriff visited me at my office, looking for him on that outstanding felony probation warrant he'd never mentioned? You don't need to hear about that.

Simply know that we broke up, but not before he actually told me his ex was coming into town, and I should 'lay low' for a couple of days. I asked him if she would be at a hotel, and he not very convincingly told me that she would. He lied. That was it. I will allow myself to be taken advantage of, used, lied to, fooled and humiliated in a number of ways, but I will not be cheated on.

I gussied myself up that morning and showed up unannounced at his job, telling him in what is now my courtroom voice that as a country girl, I had been around shit all my life. I'd seen it shoveled onto growing crops, out of chicken coops, and bought in clean plastic bags by ladies for their flower beds, but that I had never seen it in such a well-dressed and charming package such as him. And then I told him to go to hell, turned on my heel, and went to work on time for the first time in weeks.

I moved away not too long after that, but I have settled back in this same town, and he's still here. I've not seen him, but my husband, also an attorney, has encountered him in court as a defendant, which B thinks is hilarious. Obviously, for J, not much has changed.

But oh, how I've changed. I have my law degree now, a job I love, and the respect of those I work with. I am confident enough to stand up for myself, and wise enough to see through the con I so eagerly fell for back then. I have a wonderful husband who is crazy about me. He also happens to be successful, politically influential, and very well respected, in this small town and around our state. We have a modest but nice house, good friends, and wonderful families.

If I did run into him, what would he see - the accomplished woman and hard-ass prosecutor, popular in my community and in love with my life? Or that lonely twenty-three year old, 100 pounds heavier and twelve years older, beginning to age, with blonder hair and better jewelry?

Which change do I use to define me? Do my accomplishments matter, or just my body? In the past dozen years of your life, dear reader, what consumes your time and thoughts - is it your inner life, or your outer one?

Cooking for One, and Other Strange Gifts

Razors pain you,

Rivers are damp.

Acids stain you

and drugs cause cramp;

Guns aren't lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.

- Dorothy Parker

One of the weirdest gifts I have ever received was Cooking for One.

I was in what I call The Wilderness Years, those years just after undergrad, before law school, when I lived alone, worked too much, ate too much, and grew so much. I was living in a rambling old Victorian cut up into four apartments, the other three of which were occupied by people I am now sure were on felony probation. I had no TV, but spent my time cooking, eating, reading, and writing. I was lonely, but part of me enjoyed the solitude. It was the time in which I learned to be alone, to be my own company, a skill that serves me well today. It was tough, but I could feel it making me tougher. I could have gone home every weekend to visit my parents, but I wanted to have this experience.

I didn't think much about how others saw my situation, until one Christmas when my weird aunt gave me a cookbook - Cooking for One. What the hell kind of gift is Cooking for One? Why not give me Eighty Ways to End It All? COOKING FOR ONE?? Why not call it You're Pathetic, but You Gotta Eat. Or maybe the point was 'cook for one, fat-ass, because it appears you are eating for three.'

Probably she just thought hey, she's one, she needs to cook, and it can be hard to cut down recipes to just one portion. I am, after all, famously bad at math. But I kind of don't think so, because the gift didn't end at Cooking for One. There were also the cheesecake pans. Pans. Plural. So I've not only got Cooking for One, subtitled forever in my mind as Just Kill Yourself. Now I have two spring form cheesecake pans along with it. It's so confusing and surreal. Who puts those two things together? I still don't get it.

Though Cooking for One and the cheesecake pans top the list, there have been other strange gifts over the years. Once, my whole family received a thumbnail sized portrait of my uncle's family - not one for each of us, but one tiny picture for the four of us to share. Another year, my brother and I received manicure sets. I was nine; he was four; neither of us cared that much about our nails. I've received earrings before my ears were pierced; bedroom shoes made to look like Santa and Mrs. Claus; a silver cup with a 'B' etched in it (not my initial); a tiny spoon with a map of Malta in the bowl, and a mug with a wheat field scene that proclaimed me to be A Wonderful Uncle.

When I think about these gifts today, though, they say much more about giver than they do about me. The manicure sets say "I have no idea what kids like," while the Santa slippers say "I don't really care what Onederwoman likes." The 'B' cup was a wedding gift from an elderly woman I've known since childhood, and it says she wanted to give me something nice, but didn't have the money to buy something new - the yellowed tape on the box gave it away. I love that cup, even if everything drunk from it does taste like pennies. The Uncle mug tells me my high school secret pal, an exchange student from China, likes a wheat field scene. And the spoon from Malta has a special place in my heart, because my brother brought it for me as a gift when he returned home from his first deployment with the U.S. Marine Corps.

When I was younger, less secure in myself, what people gave to me in both a figurative and literal sense gave me a feeling about their thoughts on me - like Cooking for One. As years pass, however, what people put out into the world seems to have less to do with me and more to do with how they perceive life, whether they are concerned enough about others to carefully select what they offer up, or if any old pair of Santa slippers will do.

But I still can't explain those damn cheesecake pans.