Real Live Boyfriends

Bonsoir, Hutch,

Comment va Paris? I have a mental image of you wearing your fanny pack and a beret, holding a baguette and playing bread air-guitar on the top deck of the Eiffel Tower.

But I know that can’t be how you spend an average day.

Just on Saturdays, right?

Ruby,

The pastry of France kicks the ass of the pastry of America. It kicks it so hard the pastry of America hobbles to the curb whimpering, then scuttles down the street never to be seen again. That is how good the pastry is here.

Maybe you should come out at Thanksgiving break.

Or not. Whatever.

You probably have plans.

Hutch

Hutch,

No money, no Paris. That is the scenario here.

But I am glad you asked.

I would really like to see your bread air-guitar.

1 “We Will Rock You.” By Queen.2 The Yellow Wallpaper: An 1899 novella by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about this lady whose doctor husband confines her to an attic room as a rest cure for her mental illness. She’s not supposed to do anything: not read, not write, not play games, not have visitors, nothing. Wallace says this was the nineteenth- century idea of how to treat mental illness, or even just how to deal with difficult women. Lock them up and keep them quiet until they’re ready to act the way society wants them to. Like a giant time-out. Naturally, the heroine of the story goes more and more insane because of this treatment that’s supposedly going to make her better. By the end she thinks the wallpaper in her room is full of trapped women, and she has to strip it from the walls. She never leaves that room again. She just becomes a madman. So, yeah. It is supremely excellent that I don’t live in 1899. First of all, I’d be married already (ag), and second of all, my husband would completely be locking me in the attic.3 Joint notebook: Entitled The Boy Book: A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them.

Secrets of the Panda Bear!

nora sits on the steps outside the Tate Prep gymnasium. She’s dressed in shorts for basketball practice and looks all legs and uniboob under a tank top. Hair in a ponytail. She digs her camera out of her backpack and snaps a picture of Ruby behind the video camera.Nora: There. You look like a real filmmaker.Roo: (behind the camera) Thank you.Nora: Meghan said you were going to ask me the definition of love. So I prepared an answer.Roo: That’s what I asked her.Nora: Did you change?Roo: Now talk of love makes me feel desperate. I’m going to ask you about popularity.Nora: I’m not in love with Happy.Roo: You’re not?Nora: No. I mean, maybe I could be. But not yet. And sometimes there are things he does that make me think: I couldn’t ever.Roo: What?Nora: Twice we’ve gone to parties and he’s gotten really wasted. I had to get the keys and drive us home. I don’t think I’m going to fall in love with someone who gets drunk like that.Roo: Couldn’t you get him to stop? Nora: Maybe I’ll say something. But then would I fall in love with him if he stopped? I don’t know.Roo: If he changed for you?Nora: If he changed for me that would be nice. I guess. But he’d still be the same person under the change. The person who wants to get wasted. Who didn’t think anything about it until his girlfriend said something.Roo: Is that the answer you prepared?Nora: (blushing) No. I was going to say, Love is when you have a really amazing piece of cake, and it’s the very last piece, but you let him have it.Roo: Nora.Nora: What?Roo: That’s completely warped.Nora: It’s a metaphor. You like metaphors. Did I tell you my brother’s coming to town tonight for the weekend? He gets in around five.Roo: I have to turn this camera off.Nora: He’s always asking about you. Go out with him.Roo: I can’t find the right button.Nora: I bet you’d have fun. (darkness)

Gideon Van Deusen called me up that night. It was Halloween.

Every year, my parents go to this huge costume party Mom’s friend Juana throws in some dance studio she’s connected with. Lots of people in the Seattle arts community go, and my mother always wants to stand out.

This year, she had made go-together costumes: a light socket (her) and a plug (him). Dad stood in the middle of our living room wearing black leggings and a black thermal, his pelvis encased in a white cardboard box with two giant prongs sticking out like insane metal penises.

I was dressed as a bobby-soxer, wearing a vintage fifties dress I already owned but never wore, and saddle shoes I found for four dollars at the Salvation Army. I had curled my hair with Meghan’s curling iron earlier that day and had my bangs pulled off my face with a totally retro hair band. I was planning to go to a soccer muffin party with Meghan, Finn and Nora, but I wasn’t really looking forward to it. I’m not that interested in muffins, and seeing them dressed as Wolverine and Jack Sparrow doesn’t make them any more attractive.

Anyway, Polka-dot trotted in from the bedroom. He eyed Dad’s crotch prongs for only a moment before deciding they were chew toys and clamping his jaws around one of them. “No, Polka! Bad doggie!” Dad cried, swatting at the dog’s nose and trying to move away from the drooling mouth.

The dog held fast.

“Ruby, get him off me!”

It was really not my idea of a pleasant evening to go sticking my hands in my father’s pelvic region. I looked severely at the dog. “Polka. Drop it!”

Polka-dot shook his enormous head side to side, the way he did when he had a good stick in his mouth and wasn’t no how going to drop it. Dad was practically hyperventilating, yelling, “Elaine, Polka’s got my prongs!” but Mom was in the bedroom ignoring him, so I grabbed one of Polka’s ears to stabilize his head and then pressed on the sides of his jaw to get him to loosen his grip on the prong.