How to Love an American Man (13 page)

“No thanks,” he says. “I have to be in the mood for seafood. Hey, your bra's sticking out.”

“Oh.” I pull the scoop neck of my sweater up over the lacy cup of my bra, wondering if it's normal for a guy to be so fixated on football that he doesn't even care to admire the cleavage that's heaving right under his nose. Geez, even
I
think my boobs look good in this bra . . .

I pretend that my boyfriend is keeping his energy in reserve and that when we get back to the cabin Tucker will slam the door behind us, take my face and kiss me hard, rip my sweater over my head, and press me up against the wall for a fervent episode of nobody-knows-us-here vacation sex. But instead he announces that he's freezing, and he draws water for a bath. I watch him climb into the tub and sprawl out lazy-boy style, never actually considering that another human might intend to join him in the space as well. “Oh,” he says. “You want in?” When he finally makes room for me, our legs tangle up so that I have to throw myself onto my hands and knees to break free. When at last we're almost comfortable and I nestle in against his chest, he informs me that with the steam in the bathroom and the weight of my body against his, he's finding it difficult to breathe.

That officially makes two of us.

The next morning after he smacks the alarm, scratches himself, and mumbles to me to get packing or else we'll be late to catch the Steelers, I decide it's time to draw the line on Tucker's attitude. He asks me whether ten minutes are enough for me to cross the property to the owners' home to grab breakfast for the road and say thank-you for their hospitality. Meanwhile he says he'll pack us up in a hurry. I meet him at the loaded truck with a blueberry muffin, a banana, and a cup of coffee.

“You took fifteen minutes,” he says. “Now I'm gonna have to floor it to get home in time for the game. Oh, why'd you get me coffee?” he whines. “I don't want to have to hold it while I drive.”

I stare at him, dumbfounded that he's treating my concern to make sure he eats as an unbearable chore. “I'll hold it, then,” I tell him, trying to scoot the truck door open with my hip. “I was trying to feed your cold.” Tucker's listening to a game on the radio, and when one of his players scores a touchdown he pauses from shifting the car into drive to grab my shoulder and shake me. The entire cup of coffee projects across us both and the heap of luggage that he's wedged idiotically between us. I find tissues to wipe coffee off my face and Tucker's shirt, but instantly the truck smells like a Starbucks garbage bin trapped inside six square feet.

Ten minutes later we're in the back parking lot of a gas station, desperately scrubbing down the seats of the truck like two old maids over their lord's broken washboard. We work in silence until Tucker suddenly stops scrubbing to point his finger in my face. “I didn't even want to do this weekend,” he yells. “This was a waste of money and time.”

Slowly I place my hands on my hips, then throw down my rag and slam the truck door from the inside. “Close your door,” I tell him. He looks at me, then goes back to scrubbing.
“I said close your goddamn door!”

Like a maniac I react, diving across him to reach his inside door handle and slamming it with such force that it smashes against Tucker's thigh. I scream with the windows rolled up, only barely concerned that the shrieks in my voice must be carrying out to the busy front parking lot. I tell Tucker how dare he speak to me that way, that we'd both planned this weekend and that I've done everything I can to make it a time for us to try to reconnect. I tell him what the fuck does he care about the money because I've paid for everything for the last three months, and that unless he starts making school as big of a priority as following the NFL is, he better make sure his next girlfriend is as generous a sugar mama as I am.

He slams his fists on the steering wheel. “I do my best for you!” he hollers. Two guys in fluorescent orange pull in and hop out of their truck to examine a tire, but when they see the theater happening inside our windows, they reverse straight out of the lot. “And you know what? We're done!”

“Oh, we're done all right! In fact,” I go to open the door, “I'm not riding home with you.” Tucker hurries and hits the child-proof lock. “Tucker, you let me out!”

“It's two hours back home, Krissy, just where will you go?” He's challenging me.

“I'll call my dad to come and get me.” Then, just for dramatic measure, I rip off my Steelers jersey, revealing a turtleneck underneath.
“Hines Ward?”
I scream, holding the jersey in his face. Then I clench my teeth and roll it up in a ball. “You take it, I hate football. I only bought this because you kept saying how hot girls look in jerseys.” I hold it back to launch it in his face. “Who
says
that to his girlfriend?”

He catches my arm mid-toss, clenching his fingers hard around my wrist. His face gets in mine and he's talking through his teeth: “You throw like a girl.”

“I am a girl!”
I wrangle my wrist from out of his fist and cradle it gently against me with my other arm.

Tucker slams the truck in reverse and whips out of the parking lot too fast for anyone to get down his license plate. Down the road I'm bawling with my head in my hands, ashamed at the monster this relationship has just brought out in me. I've been here before, years ago in an interminable high school first love where I lost all control, along with the rest of myself, to what he wanted. This is the point of no return—we have crossed every boundary of respect for one another. “Look at us, Tucker,” I say between hyperventilations. “We're not happy!”

“Yes we are.” He takes deep breaths through his nose and lets them out calmly. “Just don't talk.”

For the next two hours I concentrate hard out the window, with my hand holding my chin firmly to keep it from quivering. I stare into the gray Sunday fog and the dismal, skeletal trees with their branches reaching up, begging the sky for sun. By the time we arrive back in Treasure Lake two hours later, my face is too red and puffy to go straight home. Tucker tries to lighten the mood by suggesting we order a pizza, but I tell him I'm not hungry. “Why,” I mutter. “Are you?”

“Nah.”

We drive in silence to the Landing, and when I sit on the couch adjacent to where he's sitting, he asks me to move next to him. Part of me wants to . . . but I hesitate. I feel like we shouldn't be here together at all. I feel like the whole world heard our fight today, our animalistic display of
Springer
-style drama. And the shame is only one of the symptoms that this relationship is dying. My head's booming, my heart aches, and my wrist throbs from Tucker's grip. This is not the kind of love my family raised me to accept. Before he leaves the Landing, he hugs me and sobs into my neck, saying he's sorry. “What can I do to make you forgive me?” he asks.

I shake my head and pull away from him. “I don't know.” I find myself holding my wrist, even though it's not hurting now. “Tucker,” I say, “I don't want to get melodramatic here so I'll just say it. I planned this weekend for us to enjoy together, and I know you agree that it was awful.”

He looks at the ground.

“I feel like we don't have fun anymore. I think I saw you smile three times all weekend. And everything you wanted to do, I wanted the opposite.”

“Well, why didn't you say so?”

“Because I wanted to try it, for your sake. I thought maybe I could be interested in the same things you're interested in, and maybe I could, except we're not . . .” I search for the right word. “. . . connected to each other. I just feel like . . . this is really hard to say. But I feel like we're too different.”

“You want things that I can't give you,” he says.

“No. I want things that you
won't
give me. There's a difference. We don't want the same things in life.”

“What do you mean?”

I tell him that I don't want my weekends to revolve around whatever football game is on TV. On Friday nights, just sometimes, I want a break from pizza and wings to relax with a glass of wine and cheese, or sushi.

“Hey, I liked sushi when you made me try it!”

“Tucker, you said it was little and raw.” The two characteristics that make sushi an appealing dish to many people are the two characteristics that Tucker spotted as its tragic flaws. I point out how every time we drive past a house sitting high on a country hill, he sighs in longing while the thought of being so far removed from other people makes me start to panic. He likes trucks; I prefer cars. I like passionate, dynamic sex that could go all night; he's turned into a wham-bam four-minute man. I used to live abroad; he thinks a passport is pointless. He's a little bit country; I'm a little more rock and roll. I say tomato, and he says . . . McDonald's. Our lifestyles are completely different, I explain.

“Maybe,” he says. “I think I caught a glimpse of your old life in that Italian restaurant last night.”

“Really?” I ask him. “When?”

“The waitress told you she always wanted to live in New York, and you said how amazing it was, how you were never bored and how every girl who ever wanted to live there should try it. And then the owner came over and started speaking Italian with you.” I'd forgotten about that. “Your eyes went all excited like you were hosting a TV show, and you were talking with your hands. And even though I'd never seen that side of you, you just seemed more . . . yourself.”

“Wow.” He's more observant than I give him credit for.

“And I know you need somebody with a lot of goals who finds a lot of happiness in what he does . . . but for me, I just don't know what that is yet.”

I know that everything he's saying is true, but I want to protest—somehow this has turned into
him
breaking up with
me
. I watch him staring at the ground, that long, far-off face that's recently turned so familiar. Tucker doesn't know what he wants to do with his life yet, and he's blaming himself for it. I can't keep piling my own needs and plans and expectations on him. He and I have to worry about ourselves now.

T
ONIGHT
I
MOVE
my vitamins and hand lotion and holy water onto the nightstand in the guest room to prepare for my bedtime routine. Ever since high school, I don't like sleeping in my own bed after a breakup. In the morning I need to wake up to new scenery, to light jutting in from a new angle, to the sense that a new day has the chance to start in a fresh space. I feel like my own mattress might swallow me whole in its defeated embrace. Plus the firm pillow I brought in from my bed smells like Tucker from our sleepover the night before we went camping. Stupidly I had insisted we should spend every waking minute of the weekend together.

I know this breakup is the right thing; I understand perfectly well that Tucker and I weren't cut out for the long term—but it doesn't change the fact that I've just lost another man I care about. It will feel lonely at lunchtime not to get his usual call; not to have a happy hour buddy on Friday nights; not to reply to the half-dozen weddings I have coming up with a plus-one. I didn't move back home to be alone, but here I am, hoisting myself high onto the guest bed—a queen-size, which I haven't slept in since I stayed in London with Adam Hunt. On the nightstand there's a photo of Grandma and Grandpa at my cousin's coming-out ball in St. Louis a few years ago. Grandpa's decked out in a sharp tuxedo with a sleek satin vest and bow tie, and Grandma's in a long indigo gown with crystalline drops dangling from her ears and around her neck. Grandpa's arm folds protectively around Grandma's shoulders, and while their torsos are touching securely, they're both very comfortable and relaxed. Into Grandpa's intense eyes I say, “I want someone like you.” Warm, dashing, self-assured. He smiles back to promise me that amazing men exist.

I can't believe I feel
so sad
about this, as though I didn't see it coming. There's no confusion, nothing to analyze, nothing to talk about; yet I'm burning to just blurt out to someone: “Tucker and I are done.” I don't want to tell Mom because she'd warned me this would happen . . . and e-mailing Chris would just smudge the boundaries of his role in my life even more. Can I call Grandma? No. It's nearing three. I'm sure she's been in bed since right after
60 Minutes
.

At some point sleep must have heard my pleas, because I wake up with the sun blasting through the guest room window. My eyes feel hot and still heavy, my whole body sore from such little rest. I could keep sleeping, I think, but the sun doesn't look like she'll allow it. Downstairs I hear the jarring open and close of cupboards, the stem of a wooden spoon pounding against a pot.

I need coffee.

In the kitchen, Mom is orbiting between her counters, still in her pajamas with the dogs at her feet. “Good morning, sunny day,” she says as I waddle in for a hug. “Uh-oh, somebody didn't sleep well.”

“No.” I duck under her arm for a spoon. “But I better test your sauce.”

“We used up all of Grandma's when we were there for Grandpa's birthday. I want to send her a few containers just to have in the freezer.”

I tell Mom I'll run it in this afternoon, then call Grandma to tell her I'll be heading into town shortly. Does she need anything?

Her request is this: “Just you.”

I
DECIDE AGAINST
the mile-a-minute Hollywood entrance that I feel I could bring through Grandma's front door.
Our weekend was terrible and we got in a fight and he hurt me and just look at the bruises . . .
Then I'd wipe my nose with my sleeve, too distraught over my romance gone wrong to hold any regard for manners.
And I didn't even catch a fish!
At this point I'd crumble into a lifeless pile on the ground, wailing at Grandma's feet like an infamous sinner in the Bible.
Please, heal me!