Two. The Lobby, 2002

This thing happened around this time, when we moved into that godawful house in Crown Hill. If that house was a ship, I would name it “Marriage-Ender,” and don’t you just want to bust a bottle of champagne onnit and say “bon voyage” to all that? I know I did.

If you are new, as in, if you started reading *after* 2001, ha ha, or if you need some refreshening, I will give it to you. SeaFed’s father decided to set him up in the business of house-flipping. This decision didn’t really have anything to do with me, in spite of the fact that I would be living in renovational squalor with a toddler while trying to start grad school. That was fine, whatever. He bought this terrible little house on Crown Hill with moldy windows and boogers and foundation makeup smeared on the bathroom walls and YOU BET I cried the day we moved in. I guess if I was selling a house as is I wouldn’t make my renters clean it, either, but come on, have some pride, people, at least with where you put your boogers. The booger-wiper was also a culinary student so the kitchen was covered in grease and tomato sauce.

I am a pretty optimistic person, and I don’t shy away from hard work with a purpose, but I knew my Waterloo when I saw it. This house would not be finished, and certainly not in the year’s time that SeaFed promised to do it in. I got very Cassandra about things in the latter years of our marriage, because you would have to be a giant dummy to think things would turn out well.

SeaFed’s parents went out of town, leaving their condo empty, which was deemed the perfect time to cut a giant hole in the living room floor and hire a carpenter to build stairs to connect the upstairs and downstairs, which were being used as separate apartments. The house started its life at least 50 years ago as a Ballard-style fisherman’s cottage, with a tiny living area above and a basement dedicated to storage and a wood-burning (I think?) furnace, unconnected by interior stairs. So we went downtown to stay in a condo that was blessedly free of sawdust or exposed wires.

Staying downtown meant that Franny was less in danger of getting tetanus, and more in danger of losing her mother to an aneurysm as she crashed one of her grandmother’s very expensive pieces of art. Before my mother-in-law died, their condo always looked like a pastel version of Lydia Dietz’s parents’ house, which I loved, but I always worried about breaking things that looked like giant kinetic spork sculptures. Needless to say, to avert disaster I kept her plugged into their giant TV and the Cartoon Network every hour she was awake, which was a vacation for her as well. The breeze off Elliot Bay was lovely, and Pike Place Market was practically outside the door. SeaFed was either off “working” or supervising the stairs-building, which I was assured was “almost up to code.”

I think we stayed for three or four nights, watching TV in a real living room that did not have a bed in it, and went to bed fairly early most nights. I was pretty tired out from running around after Franny all day.

One morning I woke up and the answering machine was blinking. This was very slightly before the complete proliferation of cell phones, so part of our job was to record and relay any important messages to my in-laws when they would call and check in. SeaFed had the day off and he was noodling around in the kitchen, probably making coffee. I pressed the machine button, pen poised to record what I heard.

The machine announced that the call was from around midnight the night before. Then, a desperate man’s voice, older, came out of the answering machine. It was a call from the condo’s lobby. “Help me…please…I’ve been beaten very badly…please call the police…help me, I need help.”

“Oh my god, did you hear that?” I said.

“Hmm?” SeaFed said. As usual, he wasn’t paying attention.

“Someone got beat up in the lobby last night! They were pressing the buttons for help and left a message on your parents’ machine!”

I played the message again for him to hear. It was just as heart-rending as the first time and my eyes filled with tears. SeaFed cocked his head to one side and then shrugged.

“Don’t you think that’s sad?” I asked.

“I guess…” he said. He stopped and looked at me. “Yes, it is very sad,” he said, slowly, in a strange voice. I felt strongly like I was being humored, or like he was trying to find the right response that would satisfy me. “It was probably a B&E scam, though,” he finished.

We had a very moments like this, where I felt he was grasping for a proper human response and trying to appear like he gave a shit. I was stunned and felt very alone. I wondered what I could do for the man who pressed our bell, but there was no trace of him in the lobby, and I didn’t know the other residents. I hoped he was okay.

That wretched living room with a bed in it, because there was no other room. A tiny Franny. I still hate this color orange. 2002.

I guess I am thinking about this guy a lot lately. I feel we are bulldogs holding onto each other’s throats, except kind of acting like we’re not. Like I feel your teeth on my jugular, but at the same time you are checking your cell phone and maybe doing some light macrame. I want to write about First Dates this week or next, so I’m going to write a couple of stories and then write about my first date with SeaFed.

One. I’m a Old Cowhand, 1996-2000
We moved to Arizona to get away from his grow operation and the collect calls we would get from prisons at random times. I told people that I was moving to go to college, but really I was trying for a fresh start. I really should have made “a new line of business” a condition of marriage and me moving in with him, but you think you can handle anything when you’re 18, I suppose.

I felt like a scientist trying to create a totally sterile environment in which to grow the perfect control bacteria that would compose our marriage. “If only I do X, etc,” I told myself. I was such a classic relationship “fixer” then. He said he was done with his criminal phase–he had turned over a new leaf. Or his luck had run out, he said. Maybe some of both.

I got a job and started taking classes. A small load at first, because I was scared of the fact I had been such a failure at school in the past, and then more as I got more confident. I was acing everything. He toyed with the idea of going back to school himself, having quit twice before, and I tried to be a supportive wife and offered to look over his papers and made sure not to bother him while he was studying.

Something obvious emerged then for me. I was a classic slacker–angry, shiftless, did not see the benefit of applying myself until I was out on my own–but the potential was always there. I could write a decent paper if I felt like it, I could make semi-cogent freshman-level arguments in my tiny little essays. The essays thrilled me. We had been taught the five-paragraph essay in high school but I never saw the point of actually writing one. Now I was enjoying myself. Writing well isn’t the acme of what it is to be a human being, but I was having fun exploring it, and I think at that time I began to realize even short pieces were a glimpse into people’s minds.

SeaFed started cranking out essays himself. I do recall he finished one summer semester, but I think all the other attempts were aborted, a sore point with us, since he would always quit on the week when it was too late for his father to get any sort of refund. I started looking over his work for typos, at his request, and I was shocked at what I found. When we were first dating and married we would talk for hours, something that had already dried up, and I thought he and I were kindred spirits. I thought he was like me–the potential was there for him to crank out a decent essay that was well-argued and grammatically-correct. In reality, in spite of his sincere efforts, he was not. His sentences juddered along, veering off into unexpected stops. His ideas wandered and he did not seem capable of concluding anything, really.

Maybe he will improve with practice, I thought to myself. He quit school (again) and got a job at a small sheet music store that was attached to an instrument sales and rental place. The sheet music store was a small operation of three people, including the boss. He worked 30 hours a week and spent another 30 in his practice room, after deciding to throw himself into music full time. I rarely saw him. “I’m woodshedding, like Parker,” he told me. I whined about never seeing him, a habit that broke after being ignored for long enough. “You knew I was a musician when we got together,” he reminded me.

I thought the work experience was good for him. His boss was pretty laid back and trained SeaFed on some aspects of ordering music and running the business. He formed relationships with some of the workers at the shop who were also musicians, and they played together sometimes. He got to know the other clerk well, an older man who was a musician and retirement age and working part time for the discount and to stay busy. He was diagnosed with cancer and we watched him as he become more frail and gained a fanny pack that contained his chemo drip equipment. I cried when he died and SeaFed went to the funeral, which was well-attended by his friends, natural children, and the children he had fostered over the years.

So it seemed we had our perfect little crime-free productive life in Phoenix. The city was significant to me–it seemed we had risen from the ashes and would become responsible adults. I was doing well in school, and he was working, working, and playing. I learned over time that work and music was an escape for him. I would demand balance later and come up disappointed, but at the time I appreciated the regular paycheck.

I got pregnant with Franny on New Year’s Eve in 2000, and we decided to move back to Seattle, to be closer to family and grandparents, and out of the unbearable heat. I could finish school up there, I reasoned. I finished spring semester and packed up most of the house and did the cleaning myself, just starting to show, but not yet big enough to make moving a bigger hassle than it already is. Franny fluttered while I packed boxes and sorted things for Goodwill. We were still young and poor so we were looking at renting a big U-Haul and moving ourselves as we had on the way down. He packed up his music room, of course, and we got all the boxes onto the truck. The day we left it was 113F. I was so happy to be escaping before my body got completely ungainly.

Once we got to the house we had rented in Seattle, it was up to me to unpack everything. We were splitting rent on a split level with my mother, so we put our furniture in the basement living room, and her stuff was upstairs. I went spelunking through all the boxes, unsure of what to do with everything. I found some of the music room boxes, which I knew contained odds and ends like cords and music stands.

There were two boxes that I did not know the contents of. They were very large and almost impossible for me to shift, let alone pick up. What was in them? I thought if I opened them I could ask SeaFed about them or move the contents a little at a time.

I zipped the tape open on the first box. It was filled with sheet music–small books with single songs, and larger songbooks. So much music. The second box was similarly stuffed full of hundreds of books and sheets. Had he been buying this all along? My brain raced, trying to understand. Were there receipts tucked into them, or bags, or some sign they had been paid for? There was thousands of dollars worth of music in front of me. On our budget, there was no way we could have afforded all this, and I was sure he would not keep it a secret anyway–it was just sheet music.

Then I got it. My experiment had failed–my crime-free environment that I had tried so hard to create so that we could both be healthy and sleep well at night. I thought about his boss, a kind man who was just trying to make ends meet. I thought about his coworker, lost to cancer, and the high school clerks on the rental side that he would jam with occasionally. That place throbbed with humanity, with a chance to make a human connection and do right by people. That is when I learned that SeaFed could sleep well at night, no matter what.

Boy howdy bear moon sauce am I sick. I have this cold that makes my head feel like it is a balloon on a string. (Advice from my babydaddy today: “Avoid needles.” What kind of fucking fortune cookie is he, I ask you?)

You will be thrilled to know I have a [OPRAH VOICE] “MEEEDIATION APPOINTMENT!!!” next month to discuss going back to 50/50 time with Franny. He wants to “wrap it up” before school starts. When SeaFed was sending me DEMAND LETTERS back in May demanding that we switch back, I suggested mediation, since that’s our conflict resolution process. He refused to mediate, so I let the matter drop, telling him I didn’t feel comfortable entering into further unofficial agreements with him at this time without a real deal witness present. Enter this month, and mediation is now this like, groovy idea he had, you know?

I’m not sure what the most fun part is–the appointment is at my old lawyer’s office (best quote from my lawyer, turning white as we walked into court: “Jesus Christ, we got the father’s rights judge.”), or could be it that this is all initiated by SeaFed because he wants a change now (we are still not saying the words CHILD SUPPORT in any communications), or perhaps it’s that the mediator is more expensive than my lawyer at $225/hour, christ. I keep innocently asking him why he wants this change now and the best he’s been able to come up with is “becuz.”

I think mediators deserve $225 an hour to deal with this level of impending asshattery. I sort of wish we could just go fuck off and spin our tires in the mud, because that would be the same, and yet more entertaining. Considering live tweeting the appointment, or at least bringing a tiny whiteboard to make a hashmark every time I say some flavor of “NO!” I’ll bring my laptop and be all “lol hold up dog I need to get that quote down.”