I wasn’t known as a garbage girl until my personality and myriad questionable personal habits were juxtaposed with that of the world’s cleanest boy. I will call this boy Y. As in “Y can’t you chill out and let me revel in the limitless freedom of summertime fun?” Sometimes you try your best and despite your most valiant efforts to contain the mess that you are, you cannot appease the impossibly high standards of a fastidious summer term housemate. Even now I can feel myself putting on a cultivated mask, sitting up a little straighter and using words I vaguely remember from SAT prep in order to impress the boy who looked at me the way a missionary might look at a native. I’m not saying that living with Y for a month was comparable to the subjugation of indigenous peoples under cultural imperialism, nor am I saying that Y was a cruel and tyrant. On the other hand, that is exactly what I am saying.
If we were a married couple, we would be a sitcom couple, and I would be the lovable slob portrayed by an aging comedian. Which would make Y the hot wife who says my name in an exasperated yet adoring tone, stretching out the vowels to indicate I am ridiculous but still endearing. Y said my name the way a real life hot wife who hadn’t been sexually satisfied in months might, high and pinched, accompanied by an accusatory finger directed at a half empty mug.
Yes, I used a lot of mugs, but are there not worse things to have on display? For example, a small parade of kissing partners? Here I must excuse myself for implying through word choice that Y is morally lacking or that I judge morality by quantity of kissing partners. The word parade implies a slatternly mass trumpeting through the streets and through the paths I thoughtfully carved out within the laundry pile, when in actuality it was more akin to three or four boys who I couldn’t tell apart for the life of me. There could have been three, there could have been thirty, only God and maybe Y knows. Imagine living in a purgatory with infinite reiterations of the same white boy in a wide striped scoop neck tank top. Is there an underground organization that provides every gay male with this shirt on the summer of his eighteenth year? It was akin to being trapped in a poorly funded animation, where the underpaid cartoonists must reuse the same template of a basic youth who still pays heady homage to Lady Gaga, on a semi constant loop.
Soon I began to throw myself into the role of the horrifying girl, performing above and beyond as a wild foil to his polished persona.
After a dinner party, we had the following conversation in regards to an uneaten pie:
“Hey, Y, do you dare me to stick my hand in this pie?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Wow, I can’t believe you dared me to do that.”
“I didn’t really.”
“This is so wild of you to do, okay, here I go!”
Subsequently, I proceeded to stick my hand in the pie.
If we were a romantic comedy, I would be the slightly emotionally unstable (but endearing?) girl who tries to bring the fuddy-duddy male lead out of his comfort zone. Movie girls might have forced movie boys to dance in the rain, meanwhile I mostly tried to coerce him into knocking back gin and tonics (the missionary drink), eating his chocolate bar all at once instead of nibbling on it over the course of a week like a repressed housewife, and putting aside his responsibilities.
On many a day, we had the following conversation:
“Let’s go to the gym”
“Or… we could not do that. We still have a mostly intact pie.”
“Come on.”
“Fine. Let me get my shoes.”
Subsequently, I proceeded to take half an hour finding my shoes.
Ultimately, the boy was patient with me. A lesser man might have made me sleep in the dumpster where I belong. He was patient and he was very fit from all the self-imposed gym visits. I have only told you of the spats, the looks replete with raised eyebrows and tetchy eye movements, but for sake of narrative cohesion, I have omitted the day-long discussions about why the focus on mental illness over male entitlement in regards to mass shootings is problematic or about how much we relate to Gerty MacDowell from Ulysses. We were bonded together in garbage matrimony by being pretentious losers. I have carefully withheld the fact that he made me a slightly better person, if by better person you mean someone who managed to keep her laundry within the bounds of her room for the sake of the house and read half of Ulysses. With my Ice Queen by my side, I became a Trash King.
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