Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Dungeons & Dragons (23 page)

“I can't believe you're living with that dog,” my brother said over e-mail a few days later. “Mom said she ate your expensive shoes and when she was younger she ate a cat. You are either crazy or really desperate to have a boyfriend.”

“Allegedly,” I wrote back. “On the whole eating-a-cat thing. Sadie says it was self-defense. The shoe incident is true. And I will not comment on your ‘desperate to have a boyfriend' accusation.”

Needless to say it was a rough few days adjusting to our new living state. The Great Shoe Massacre was just the beginning.

The day after, two giant men from Boston boxed, wrapped, and taped all of Bart's worldly possessions in just under two hours and thirty-three
minutes and carted them off to a storage facility in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood for an indeterminate amount of time.

“Wow, Georgetown,” I said, regarding the neighborhood filled with big old brick warehouses and a growing community of artists. “Your stuff is so hip and trendy now.”

“You know what they say,” he said. “D&D minis and comic books move in, the hipsters and restaurants will follow.”

It wasn't just Bart's comic books and minis in those boxes. It was his board games and photo albums from the Peace Corps, the tiki bar decorations we got at Big Lots, the Walter Payton-signed Wheaties box, and the backyard horseshoes game. Almost everything near and dear to him. We spent weeks packing up his stuff and I was feeling terrible he'd have to give up so much, even temporarily, even for a good cause, even if it meant we'd save his rent plus utilities every month and put that toward a house. That is, until we got to the cobalt dishes.

Bart's had the cobalt dishes since he was in college. They've been boxed and moved to sixteen different apartments.
Sixteen!
And no, they're not family heirlooms. Unless Bart's related to JCPenney.

“You're taking great care in wrapping stuff that's just going to Goodwill,” I said when I found him using the entire Arts & Leisure section to coddle a soup bowl.

“Oh,” he said, staring at his papered bowl like it was a gift of myrrh and frankincense. “I thought I'd take this with me.”

“With you to Goodwill?”

“No, with me to your house.”

“Oh.”

All right
, I thought to myself, sensing a red-flag situation.
Tread lightly. This is a touchy situation all around. He's the one being displaced here. I've lived in my condo for more than a decade! That's longer than he's lived in Seattle! If the guy wants to bring a soup bowl, he should bring a soup bowl! It's his house, too!

“If that's the bowl you like to eat soup out of, it should come,” I announced, feeling proud like a fourth grader who just spelled
poultry
correct.

Judy was wrong. I can live in peace and harmony with another living being. A human being, even.

He cocked his head to the side and looked at me like I suddenly was a fourth grader. “Not just the bowl. The whole set. It's good stuff. I've had it for years!”

That's the difference between the two of us, I guess. To me,
had it for years
implies it's
time to go.
To him that just means
sturdy and irreplaceable.

“But I have perfectly good plates and bowls,” I said. “And matching coffee mugs!”

Chill … it's just some soup bowls! Besides, you'll probably get all new stuff in a year or two. Who cares what you eat off
?

“It's just,” I continued, “we don't have a lot of room. So maybe we stick with just one set of dishes for now.”

Bart looked at the soup bowl he cradled in his arms and then to its cobalt blue brothers and sisters. “But why can't this be the one set we stick with?”

Choose your battles! Is this really worth it?

I thought of dinner parties and the placemats I bought that complement the colors of my dishes and how I have ten of everything because if there are more than ten people at once I invoke my right to use paper plates. (Not like plain old white paper plates—but nice, decorative ones you get at party supply stores.) I couldn't figure out what the heck was so appealing about his set of plates. He didn't even have a full set.

“You don't have enough,” I said. And it was true. He only had four dinner plates and three salad plates. And we may never find that one soup bowl under all that newspaper.

Thankfully he saw my reasoning but wasn't totally convinced he wanted to give them up completely.

“I'll put them in storage,” he decided.

“But why?” I whined.

Oh, I know. Just let the stupid dishes go to storage. But I couldn't help it. Ideally the next time we saw any of this stuff was when we move into a brand-new (to us) home. Even I'll want to replace my beloved dishes when we get there.

“Maybe our kids will need them when they go to college,” he said.

I smiled, waiting for him to laugh, but he just stared at me. Oh, wow. He's serious. And how am I supposed to argue with that? At once it's poignant and charming and reeks of the sentiment that we'll be together at least long enough to populate the earth with a child that's able to get into college. And at the same time we're talking
at minimum
eighteen years from that very moment assuming I am currently
with child
(and I'm not, thank you; I'm a stress eater and moving is very stressful).

“What makes you think our child would want dishes that are twenty-eight years old? I mean, it's a sweet gesture and all but maybe we could celebrate them getting into college by buying new stuff.”

“Or maybe they'll like the idea that these are the same dishes Mommy and Daddy used to eat off of. Besides, it's economical.”

I sighed. “Fine. The dishes go to storage,” I said, wondering how much it would cost to get those giant men from Boston to lose the box marked “dishes.”

After that, Bart and the remaining 5% of his stuff sat in my living room. The living room I had lived in for thirteen years.

Alone.

I told you. When I plant roots, they stick.

“You know what's going to happen,” Bart said flipping through the saved shows on my DVR. “We're going to argue so much about those dishes that they'll become this huge iconic figurehead in our relationship. We'll dredge them up every year and argue about what we should do with them and because we'll never agree we have to keep them.”

“And really the dishes are just a symbol for something that is dreadfully off in our relationship,” I added. “Like when I say ‘why did you keep those stupid dishes' I'll really be saying ‘why didn't you roll over our 401(k) so we could retire, damn it?' ”

“We'll force our kids to eat off of them and therefore resign them to a life of repeating our mistakes.”

“They'll live in the same fear of those blue dishes that I had of my mom's wooden spoons. Ouch. My butt still stings when I walk past the housewares department at T.J. Maxx.”

“They will taste our resentment with every bite.”

“We'll definitely need a reality show,” I said.

“Especially around the time they go through puberty,” Bart agreed. “I would have loved to have had those awkward years projected into America's living rooms.”

“It's not too late.”

With that we raised our cans of Fresca and toasted to all the ways we could screw up the next generation.

Later that night the wind picked up and the snow fell in cold, icy sheets. If you're not familiar with how the people of Seattle deal with snow, allow me to fill you in.
They don't.
That is unless you count ditching your cars in the middle of I-5 and running for your life down the highway shoulders as “dealing.” Schools announce closures at the mere threat of snow. The TV news was already showing scenes from the apocalypse and the snow wasn't even sticking yet.

“We're not going to work tomorrow,” Bart predicted. “It actually might be cold enough to stick.”

“In that case, let's open a bottle of wine.”

When I went to get the wine opener, I tripped over a rollerblade.

“You rollerblade?” I asked Bart.

“Sure!” he answered.

Weird
, I thought. Not in the last year and a half at least. And certainly not in November.

I looked around my once organized and artfully decorated living room to find it covered with boxes, gym clothes, and a ninety-pound pit bull who may or may not have designs on my cat.

“Well, this is our life now,” I whispered to Zelda who was glaring at me from the hallway. I should probably have put a little wine in her water bowl.

Bart was right. We didn't go to work the next day or the day after. Seattle shut down while we waited for the three snowplows to do their jobs and free us from our neighborhood. There's a fine line between “living” together and “stuck” together and we dashed across it.

“Be careful what you wish for,” Judy reminded me on our daily phone call. “Or rather, agreed to.”

“What I agreed to was an upgrade to my cable service and having someone to help take out the recycling, all while maintaining the freedom to do simple things like go outside, walk on a sidewalk. Stop at Safeway and get more wine!”

Judy sighed. “That's how it is in a big-girl relationship.”

“Well, what if we need to get away from each other?” I asked. “There's nowhere to go. The living room, dining room, and kitchen are all one room!”

“You could go stand in the hallway, I guess.”

“Oh, sure. That wouldn't look weird at all.”

“Well, not as weird as you wearing one brown suede boot and sobbing in the bathtub.”

I scoffed at the notion. “I was not in the bathtub.”

Judy laughed. As bad as she felt about the incident, she still took Sadie and Bart's side. She didn't want
them
to feel bad.

“It's hard enough having to live with you,” she said. “How could you make that little dog feel bad?”

“It's not easy for me, either,” I whispered so Bart couldn't hear me. Although he was technically in another room, it was still only like seven feet away. “It's not like we subscribe to the same ideals when it comes to cleaning and organizing. There were dinner crumbs on the counter when I woke up today! They were there all night!”

“Awww,” Judy mock pouted. “Don't you have a little wizard spell you could pull out of your book to make the crumbs disappear?”

Now that would be nice. Maybe some cantrips? But we were talking about mere mortals here.

We were out of work for two full days. Now, I know what you're thinking, a freak, paralyzing snowstorm when you're moving into a new place? What a brilliant stroke of good luck Mother Nature has gifted you. All those perfectly good bonus days you can use to get settled and unpacked in your new digs. If that were me, I'd have my clothes ironed, hung up, organized by color, season, and maybe even alphabetical by designer if the sun didn't come out soon. Alas, Bart took a more leisurely approach to settling in.

“These boxes aren't going to untape themselves,” I said in attempt to be jovial.

My voice said
oh, ha ha!
My blood was seething
get rid of these godforsaken boxes before you end up living in one!
Perhaps I was feeling a bit … pardon the pun … boxed in.

“Do you need help?” I asked. “I'm very good at putting things away.”

He took his earbuds out and smiled. “Oh. Yeah. The boxes. No, I'm good!”

“They don't bother you?”

“I guess I don't really notice them.”

There are things I'm glad Bart doesn't notice. Maybe I've gained a few
pounds. Maybe there's a massive zit on my chin. Maybe I've gone too long between eyebrow waxes and I'm starting to look like Bert from
Sesame Street.
But the thirteen cardboard boxes stashed in roughly 700 square feet? These are the things I kind of wish he paid a little mind to.