Housebroken Read online

  I never got my nachos that day. We just left. We honestly had no choice. It was either that or wait for the Kiss Kam to return at any time, and we already both had developed cramps.

  “That was worse than when I tried to run the mile in seventh grade, thought I was having a heart attack, and demanded that the even slower girls behind me go back for help, and they did,” I said as we trudged to the car.

  “I have never been so horrified in my life,” my husband said.

  “No, no, no,” I pooh-poohed him. “What about the time a drop of my face lotion got on the seat of the toilet and you wanted to go to the emergency room because you thought it was going to burn a hole through your ass?”

  “Yeah? Well your face lotion had salicylic acid, which sears off warts,” he countered. “My whole left side was on fire. To this day, I know you’re lying about there not being a scar on that side. Someday, someone will tell me the truth.”

  The wound of the Kiss Kam Katastrophe sat on our marriage for the rest of the day, my husband analyzing every second of the play to see how we could have averted such disaster.

  “I just can’t believe we failed the Kiss Kam,” he said repeatedly, until I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “The fact that we collapsed in the face of a public challenge is not our fault!” I asserted. “It’s the manufacturers of the baseball hats that are to blame. They need to be retractable, so that when an intern with the baseball team homes in on you like the Death Star, you have some recourse. We had no warning, we never had a chance. Plus, you weren’t the one who had her head in between her legs while wearing a dress on a hundred-foot screen.”

  “No, but I was the man who couldn’t figure out how to kiss his wife!” he replied, and suddenly turned toward me. “Kiss me!”

  “Fine,” I sighed, and obliged.

  We each leaned in, and it took less than a second for us to halt four inches apart, exactly as we had before.

  “Take the damn hat off!” I cried.

  “No,” my husband said emphatically. “We need to practice. We need to prove that we can do it.”

  So for the next ten minutes, we had to practice kissing with our hats on, from one side to the other, taking turns from every angle and every direction. Then he made us try a stop, turn, and kiss maneuver to use if we ever got caught on the Kiss Kam again to stun everyone who had watched our disaster.

  While the wound eventually healed, the scar of doubt remained as puckered and red as our searching lips on that awful day.

  So when this new opportunity presented itself in the box of HelloFresh dinners, my husband wanted—no, demanded—that we use it to prove our in-tandem couple skills.

  “We do plenty of things in tandem,” I complained. “We watch TV together, we go to the movies together, we eat dinner together every night.”

  “But we can’t eat popcorn out of the same bowl,” he mentioned. “And that is a tandem activity.”

  “That’s because you hover,” I said. “And your hand is the size of a baseball glove. In fact, I’ve never seen you put popcorn into your mouth. Your hand is always just there, right above the bowl like it was a Magic Eight Ball. If I wanted to go as you for Halloween, all I would need is a bowl of some salty snack and my hand just hanging over it.”

  “Then that’s proof that we need to work on our couple coordination,” he said. “Let’s just try it and see how it goes. Let’s make a deal that we will cook these three meals together, and if it’s another failure in our relationship spectrum, then we’ll stop. I won’t bug you again. I promise.”

  “What do I get for my trouble if all I get is aggravation?” I said. “What’s in it for me if it doesn’t work?”

  He thought for a minute.

  “I give you my permission as your partner, in the future, to have an individual popcorn bowl,” he said, luring me in. “All to yourself.”

  “Fine,” I said, giving in.

  “Let’s make one tonight!” he said, and I agreed, if only to hurry up and get this thing over with.

  At six o’clock, he pulled out the box that held the seared steak dinner and put it on the kitchen counter.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “Yep,” I answered.

  “Okay,” he said, holding the recipe card. “There are four elements to this dish. How about we split it half and half? There’s couscous, roasted cauliflower, romesco sauce, and the steak. Which portions of the dish do you want?”

  I thought I would be kind. A baby could make couscous if it didn’t require boiling water, and chopping some cauliflower seemed easy enough. “I’ll take the steak and the romesco sauce,” I said.

  He winced. “I would really like to give the romesco sauce a shot. It looks like it has an interesting taste profile, and there’s a lot of chopping. I’d like to work on my knife skills,” he said.

  I shrugged and tried not to laugh. This is the man who, when I’m out of town, eats Fritos and beans mixed together as if it’s a French delicacy. “Okay, then…I’ll take the cauliflower?”

  “Sure,” he said, tossing me the head as he went over to the knife block. Here we go, I thought to myself. We’re going to argue over the best knife. This should be awesome.

  Knife fight ten seconds in.

  But he passed over my favorite knife, dawdled over my second favorite, then went to the top of the knife block, pulled out a cleaver, and went back to the cutting board with it.

  “Really?” I said when he pulled out the red pepper. “You’re going to start with the Friday the 13th knife? Let’s calm down, cowboy, and take a run with a paring knife first.”

  He shook his head. “I like this one. Feels solid.”

  “You know,” I said slowly, “if you took the pepper out to the driveway and ran over it with the car, it’s the same amount of overkill as your ax there.”

  “Worry about yourself,” he cautioned. “I’m not concerning myself with your choice of knife.”

  “No problem,” I said. “But when you realize you only have four fingers on one hand, use one of them to call 911. Because I’m worrying about myself, you know.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “The oven needs to be preheated to four hundred degrees.”

  “I already did that,” I replied.

  He put his sickle down and walked over to the oven, next to where I was cutting the cauliflower with the right-sized knife. “You only got it to three seventy-five,” he said, as he turned the knob an increment. “Wait. STOP. STOP cutting the cauliflower. STOP. Please.”

  I stared at him and waited for him to say, “Watch out for that wilted piece,” or “Oh my god, there’s a worm!” but, instead, he picked up the instruction card and read aloud, “Cut the cauliflower into bite-sized florets.”

  Then he looked up at me.

  “Yeah?” I replied.

  “I think maybe you’re taking the easy way out,” he said earnestly. “You’re a half inch over bite-sized there. Shouldn’t bite-sized mean I should be able to pop it in my mouth? I couldn’t do that with most of those.”

  I just stared at him.

  “That one, right there, like, who has a mouth that big? Like Steven Tyler could eat that bite, Mick Jagger, sure. But to anyone else with an average-sized mouth, you’re just going to run into trouble there,” he continued. “You’re promising something you can’t deliver.”

  I paused.

  “Considering that I’m sharing this meal with the person who has the biggest mouth on the planet, I’m not too worried,” I said, and started chopping the cauliflower into egg-sized chunks.

  “I’m just following directions,” my husband said, and went back to his red pepper slaughter.

  “Yeah, well, the recipe didn’t call for a sword, but that did not deter you at all,” I replied.

  “I am comfortable with my food preparation decisions,” he said, turning away from me.

  “As am I,” I retorted, leaving half of the cauliflower head intact as I shoved it into the oven.

 
; I had the cauliflower roasting and was seasoning the steak when my husband posed a question.

  “What exactly is a pinch?” he asked. “Does it matter which fingers I use? Because if I pinch with my pinky and thumb, that is considerably less than pinching with my thumb and forefinger. The water for the couscous requires a pinch of salt, but is that just a rhetorical reference?”

  I stopped seasoning the steak.

  “Would you do me a favor?” I asked. “Would you run upstairs and get that piece of paper that says you have a Ph.D. on it? The one with the gold sticker? I want to make sure you didn’t get it from the University of Phoenix or the place where you draw the turtle and pirate.”

  “That’s so funny, because I don’t see a pinch of sarcasm anywhere in the ingredient list,” he said. “Careful it doesn’t leave a bitter taste in your mouth and ruin the dish.”

  “How about I show you what a pinch feels like?” I asked.

  He put down his scythe and turned toward me.

  “I thought we were supposed to be a team doing this together,” he said. “But when it comes down to the flavors and the execution, I am not taking the blame for your mistakes.”

  “Are you saying you’d throw me under the bus?” I asked.

  My husband just shrugged. “I’m just saying I’m not going down because of your attitude.”

  I gasped.

  “You have four minutes until my steak is done,” I said harshly. “And then it’s hands up. Partner.”

  I tossed my steaks into the sizzling pan, crushed the garlic, removed the cauliflower from the oven, and drizzled it with olive oil and some Parmesan cheese that was not in the recipe. I was taking matters into my own hands, creating the profile I knew would work, and with thirty seconds left and counting, I flung the last tablespoon of butter into the pan and let the steaks rest in the foam as it sizzled.

  “Who turned my burner off?” my husband screamed as he tended to his couscous. “My burner’s off!”

  “…three, two, one,” I said, slapping my steak tongs down on the kitchen counter. “Hands up!”

  My husband sighed and put his hands up.

  “I didn’t get to plate,” he said bitterly, shaking his head. “Sabotage.”

  “I didn’t touch your burner,” I said.

  “Let’s just eat,” he suggested.

  And, as we sat down at the coffee table where we eat because we are savages, my first bite of steak was awesome, and because I took all of the bite-sized pieces of cauliflower, our meal rocked. My husband’s couscous, despite the irresponsible approach to salt, was delightful, with raisins and pistachios in it. The romesco sauce was the perfect pairing for the steak, and three bites in, we complimented ourselves on a job well done.

  “I like the Parmesan,” he said. “Worth the risk.”

  He turned his head from me, stopped, then he whipped it around, yelling “Kiss Kam!” and came at me, all puckered up.

  I unabashedly started to cry.

  Maybe it was because our longtime mailman, Dave, had recently retired, maybe it was because my colorist had up and moved, or maybe it was that I had just found out that Trader Joe’s had discontinued their grilled eggplant, but this was too much.

  My adaption threshold had just been breached.

  “But you can’t move!” I insisted to my next-door neighbor Freddie, who looked at me with pleading eyes. “You’re one of the only neighbors who hasn’t called the cops on me!”

  “We’re getting older,” she said to me patiently. “We just can’t keep up with the maintenance of a big house anymore.”

  “I promise I’ll start wearing pants when I walk around the side of my house that faces yours,” I said. “I really will this time!”

  “It’s too late,” my neighbor replied as she sighed. “We already found another home.”

  We had been neighbors for ten years, a solid ten years, a neighborly ten years, full of sharing holidays, eating dinner at one another’s houses, and giving out sugar and curry powder when Freddie was in the middle of a recipe and realized she was short on ingredients. If I ran out of milk while making a cake, I’d just run next door, where she’d offer me soy milk and I’d make an exaggerated vomiting sound and say, “No thanks!”

  Our houses were on a slight hill, and hers rose just above mine and we’d talk over our deck railings to each other on a daily basis, as if we were in a Lower East Side tenement. Being that my bedroom window was only a few feet away from her living room, on summer nights when we all had our windows open, I’d fall asleep listening to Freddie’s television, reminding me of when we used to live with my grandparents in New York. It was a warm, comforting memory and made me feel like I was five years old again.

  I loved having my friends live next door.

  We shared hoboes. We shared squirrels. We even shared a raccoon couple until two years ago when they were both hit by a car while crossing the street.

  I called 911 when Freddie’s husband, Ed, fell off a twenty-foot ladder onto his back, and I was so scared I ran over to her yard when I heard him yell. I can prove it. There were witnesses. Ed recovered, but I still get a burn in my ankles that happens every time I walk faster than shopping speed.

  I delivered the news to my husband that night, and he was equally bereft. “I am so sad to see them go, they were such good neighbors,” he said. “I wonder what kind of neighbors we’re going to get now.”

  I suddenly felt as if Freddie had shown me a carton of soy milk.

  “Oh my god,” I said, fumbling for a seat on the couch. “Oh my god.”

  My fears hadn’t even gotten that far. I was so upset about losing Freddie and Ed that it never occurred to me that someone else would move in.

  Or that a slumlord would buy Freddie’s house and rent to college students who would throw parties on the deck three feet from my bedroom window every night.

  Someone like my neighbor in Phoenix, who had fifty cats that all pooped in my yard and threw up worms on my front porch.

  “I just hope they don’t have chickens,” my husband said as my head began to spin.

  “Oh, shut up! If you say one more thing like that, I’m going to have to dose myself!” I said as my spine began to sweat and I tried to remember where I saw my bottle of Ativan last, which was prescribed for anxious and alarming situations exactly like this.

  Exactly like chickens moving in next door to you.

  Because this is what I think of having urban chickens in your backyard: YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE, AND YOUR FRIGGIN’ CHICKENS ARE ASSHOLES. Yeah. That’s what I said. I can see Safeway from my house. I can see it. And they have eggs at Safeway. Lots of eggs. White, brown, free-range, vegetarian-fed, organic, and plain-old-food-stamp eggs. Every kind of egg you might possibly want is already at Safeway. Already there, waiting for you to take them home. When you get your eggs from Safeway, you may not experience the joy of hunting them down in your backyard, but there’s one thing you won’t get: mice.

  Mice that love the organic chicken feed you sprinkle around, mice that love the straw you put out for your fussy hens, mice that will then find their way into my house THAT IS THREE FEET FROM YOUR HOUSE and shit in my shoes. Because that’s what mice do.

  Eugene, Oregon, is a big DIY town. Everyone has a garden, most people are growing their own pot, and every other person on the street has made their own yogurt more than once. Some have died from it, but the herd is far from thinned. And see, the thing about making your own yogurt is that while it is also stupid, chances are that your neighbors don’t know it because it does not necessarily require urban livestock unless you are a superasshole. When I lived in Phoenix, the only reason a goat was in someone’s backyard was because there was going to be a barbecue later that night. In Eugene, urban farming is trendy, and these are the rules, according to Building Permit Services:

  If the property is less than 20,000 square feet in area, any two of the following four categories of animals are allowed: 1. Chickens and Domestic Fowl (quails, pheasan
ts, ducks, pigeons, and doves). Up to 6 over six months of age and 6 less than six months of age. No roosters, geese, peacocks, or turkeys allowed. 2. Rabbits. Up to 6 over six months of age and 6 less than six months of age. 3. Miniature Goats (pygmy, dwarf, and miniature goats). Up to 3 provided that males are neutered. 4. Miniature Pig. One up to 150 pounds. 5. Bees. Up to 3 hives as long as they are located at least 5 feet from all property lines. These standards are intended to improve the way animals are cared for, while increasing the likelihood that neighbors will accept your property uses and food choices.

  Which means if you live anywhere, in any area, you can have a mini-farm. Like the lady down the street does, even though she doesn’t have a backyard and her chickens roam freely, wandering in and out of traffic, wherever they please, pooping, peeing, and being dirty birds as far as they can waddle. Which begs the question: Why did the chicken cross the road? Because an asshole lady on Seventeenth and Willamette decided she needed a friggin’ chicken friend. And not only can you raise farm animals; in your backyard, chickens, domestic fowl, and rabbits can be “harvested” right next to your swing set when I am on the chaise in my backyard, THREE FEET FROM YOU, reading a delightful book or throwing a nice little lunch party for my friends while the sounds of bunnies being slaughtered rises over and above the giggles we’re having after a couple of mai tais.

  And that’s in addition to mice shitting in my shoes. If you know people who have raised chickens and they swear there’s no mice around, it’s because the shit balls roll right out of the holes in a Birkenstock, fall on the floor, and get combined with all of the other filth that’s already there. I don’t wear Birkenstocks. Some of my shoes are from Italy, shipped across an ocean without being pirated, deposited on a shelf for a year, and then placed on clearance at YOOX.com just to become a rodent toilet in my closet. If urban chicken farmers had shoes from Italy, they would know there is a problem. I have scientific proof, as documented below.