Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [22]
In fact, a grandmother who behaved like this would be so on my last nerve that after I got up and moved into the other room with my laptop, if she followed me and came over and sat right on top of my keyboard, knocking off all my papers and books, and tried to kiss me, I would scream and tell her to get the fuck out of here right now. And then if a little later I found her sprawled out in the middle of the hallway in front of the door to my bedroom, oblivious to the fact that because she was using up all the available floor space I was having to jump over her just to get into my own room, my reaction would not be “Awwww, see how much she trusts me?” I would be so insanely aggrieved that I would stop speaking to that grandmother entirely. Then when I got the time, I would change my email address and my phone number.
Because the truth is, I cannot imagine continuing to love anyone who had the gall to think that it was acceptable, after many hours spent digging in the mud, to crawl into my bed, lean up against me like a fifty-pound sack of rice, and make snoring noises like a broken exhaust pipe. In fact, I have never thought the sleeping position of any man I loved deeply, even if we were spooning after a passionate encounter, was so adorable that I wouldn’t wake him up and ask him to move when I felt my arms going numb.
It’s also not likely that I would be motivated to maintain a cordial long-term relationship with any human being, no matter how attractive or influential, who emitted sulfurous odors every time they sat down beside me. I would be correct to find this behavior unspeakably boorish, and sensible to resent having to interrupt my activities while the room was airing out.
It’s too unpleasant to even fantasize about what would happen if the man I lived with behaved that way among people I cared about during a dinner party, to say nothing of putting his head down on the table right next to the full plate of one of my guests, in the hopes that she would hand over some of her food. Oh sure, I guess at first I would try to ban him from the room. But if he refused to go, then ran under the table and started to weep, and I later discovered that he had stolen all the extra food off the counter in the kitchen and taken it out into the yard, where he had eaten it behind a row of shrubs, leaving behind big wads of partially eaten Saran Wrap and aluminum foil, what recourse would I have but to accuse him of having an untreated mental illness and, after the guests went home, insist that he seek professional treatment? I would get a restraining order to keep him off the premises. And if that didn’t work, I would sell my house and move.
And if all of these things continued to happen, plus I found that he kept taking dirty napkins out of the trash and shredding them in order to extract all the last remaining food particles before scattering them all over the rugs … or standing directly in front of the TV screen, right in the middle of the inauguration of the first black president of the United States of America, happily squeaking on a noisemaker for no reason … what choice would I have but to suspect that this person had sadistic motives and a dangerous emotional disorder?
So it must be something else my dogs are doing that makes me love them so much.
Because there’s no way in the world that I would consciously want any part of living with anyone who exhibited these types of behaviors.
But Enough About Me: Narcissism for Echoes*
EVERY YEAR, AT CHRISTMAS, MY MOTHER WOULD BUY ME AN expensive piece of clothing that I would never wear. Or, if luck was smiling on me, several pieces of expensive clothing meant to be worn together that I would never wear. I describe the clothing as “expensive” because when my mother gave me these gifts, she would make a point of telling