Meanwhile back at the Tudor: Puritanism, pickup lines and early-2000's 'Pure Romance' parties.

This ain't your mama's closet renovation.

When I met the man I would marry, I was a long-haired, wild-minded philosophy undergrad, working 30+ hours a week in the kitchen and bath department of The Home Depot (a job I was fired from, twice, the details of which are not important).  I put myself through college selling sinks, straightening shelves of plumbing fixtures and fittings, and walking countless miles up and down dusty aisles of orange, industrial shelving wearing a matching orange apron, helping weekend warriors DIY their lives.  Not a bad training ground for a future therapist.   

“You can do it.  We can help.” 

He was a cute, young professional, a homeowner with a 401(k) who made his Ikea platform bed every morning, including the days when he left for work and I was still in it.  

We met on a summer night in June at Edna’s, a dive bar named after the beloved owner who was basically the fairy godmother of Oklahoma City nightlife.  Well into her seventies, she hardly missed a night and every time her song came on the jukebox - Great Balls of Fire by Jerry Lee Lewis - she immediately stopped what she was doing, pushed a folding step ladder up to the end of the sticky, epoxied bar and climbed on top to dance through its duration.  

Edna was a kindred spirit whose eyes shone and set the generous, welcoming tone throughout the place that, for so many misfits like myself, felt like home.  We shared a birthday and back then I wouldn’t have been caught dead anywhere else but her hole-in-the-wall each time she and I made another loop around the sun.  I turned twenty-one at Edna’s place, twice… another set of circumstances in which the details are of no importance, even if they could be recalled.  What I do remember, however, is that on my lawful 21st birthday, also my golden birthday, I was given an unforgettable gift by my friend Gia, a certified kitchen designer who moonlighted as a Pure Romance party host.  I went home that night the eager owner of a blue, battery-operated bunny, better known as The Rabbit, made an overnight sensation when Charlotte became a shut-in after buying one at Miranda’s suggestion in Sex and the City’s “The Turtle and the Hare” episode.  Golden birthday, indeed.  Stowed next to a stockpile of Energizer MAX double-A’s, it was the gift that kept on giving and giving and giving and… My friends didn’t have to perform any interventions or anything, but my twenties were off to a good start.  

I was twenty-three when I met my husband-to-be against the smoky backdrop of countless inscribed dollar bills taped to yellow, cinder-block walls and tacked to the black drop ceiling, enhanced by a symphony of shot glasses hitting the bottoms of frosty mugs when another round of Lunchboxes, Edna’s signature drink, went down. The same signature concoction served at our wedding almost two years later with Edna’s blessing:  cold Coors in a chilled mug with a shot glass of amaretto dropped in, finished off with a splash of orange juice.  

I was wearing low-waisted, distressed jeans bought on a road trip to Vegas and a thrifted youth Yankees t-shirt (I went all in on the early-2000’s baby-tee trend).  Want to know his pickup line?  “Do you really like the Yankees or do you just wear that shirt?”   Watch out for this sweet talker, ladies and gentleman.  

There are photos documenting the moment we met because his friends were all agog exclaiming, and I quote:  “He’s talking to a girl!”  You have to remember, this was the Nokia era, when cell phones had only slightly more functionality than a brick, and at least as much weight.  There were no camera phones, so it was a really big deal when someone made the effort to lug a camera to the bar to document the general mirth and merriment of twenty-something bar culture.  I’d never expect anyone younger than an elder millennial like myself to understand, but the fact that these images of our first encounter exist is a really big deal.

He didn’t remember my name after getting my number and he was too embarrassed to ask, so he started calling me ‘Yankee’ and it stuck.  No one knows how or when he came to find out my real name, but he got there eventually.  Both our kids know the story and, to this day, it’s a rare and weird experience for everyone to hear the father of my children call me by my real name, something he started doing regularly after the divorce.  Hmm… maybe Yankee’s dead now, too.  I still have the shirt, though, and now our ten-year-old wears it to sleep.  

As for his ensemble that night, he was dressed in orange - it’s like we were family already - with his t-shirt turned inside-out that read “This is my costume.”  For a talkative guy, he was painfully shy, so his friends were astonished when I convinced him to take off his shirt right in front of me and everyone, to turn it right-side-out.  Maybe it was my charm, maybe it was the lunchboxes… who cares?  I wanted to see his costume.

Our second date was a sensible, low-risk group gathering at his house, a charming 1937, red-brick Tudor with red wax begonias lining the curved walkway to the porch.  In the fall, he would replace them with pansies in every color transforming his sidewalk into a rainbow road of sorts.  After we were married the neighbors told me, wistfully, they all thought he was gay because he spent so much time meticulously weeding, watering and fussing over flowers.  The gaybors mourned when I moved in and they had no qualms telling me about it.  This endeared me to them immensely.  You know I’ve got a thing about radical truth.    

Given our instantly legendary connection over thrifted tees, the night’s events landed us on a tour of his tiny walk-into closet where we partook in an enthusiastic perusal of the vintage t-shirt collection he’d amassed from multiple purchases of mystery lots on eBay.  It was then and there that we shared our first kiss.  Our courtship teed up in a tiny closet in the corner of a quaint, little house nestled in a neighborhood full of hopefuls for the day he’d come out.  

Sixteen months later, in the same closet, he asked me to marry him.  Well, same but different.  Somewhere between the kiss and the proposal, the closet underwent a remodel down to the studs after the hot water tank in the attic ditched its post and fell over one night while we were sleeping.  I had never awoken so abruptly in my life.  There was a sudden deafening boom that reverberated in my slumbering core followed by the sound of rushing water spilling onto the oak floors of the bedroom.  After going horizontal, the tank had positioned itself so perfectly as to send the attic door crashing to the floor of the closet, spilling out its scalding contents all over his prized t-shirt collection.  So much for ‘cold wash recommended.’  And if that weren’t enough, the supply pipe that this forty-gallon drum rudely removed itself from was spewing a non-stop, streaming arc of cold water straight through the same chute.  

Listen, I’m a night owl by nature, not by choice.  In all my life I’ve never truly, fully come online in the realm of conscious awareness before 10:00 AM and that’s only after sufficient carb intake.  Do you know what I thought had happened after that middle-of-the-night summoning from what I am now certain was a pipe demon?  (The dark underworld of modern plumbing is nothing to shake a stick at.  Believe me, I worked at Home Depot.)  The only reasonable explanation my drowsy imagination could muster at the time as to why it sounded like Little Niagara had reanimated in our bedroom was that a lightning bolt had struck the roof and the heavens parted directly above sending down torrential rains of damnation all over our blissful, sinful cohabitation.  

When I graduated high school I ran away screaming from my strict Southern Baptist upbringing straight into the cool comfort of secular academia, complete with a long, fashionable stretch of agnosticism that briefly devolved into a short stint in militant atheism.  A textbook defense mechanism, mind you, called reaction formation in psychoanalytic-speak.  But I was still wet behind the ears and I hadn’t yet shaken the punitive, patriarchal God I’d internalized from my upbringing.  The one that author and publisher, Louise Hay, perfectly described in the following quote:

“I refuse to believe that God is an old man sitting on a cloud watching my genitals.”

In one line, Louise totally nailed the aspirational religious sentiment of my early twenties.  But damn, for a split second, I was really regretting all those wicked, intimate moments with The Rabbit.  I wasn’t ready to go out like that, in a thunderclap providential condemnation.  

We were allowed to live, suffering only a minor punishment of soggy plaster that necessitated a total closet remodel.  Nothing a seasoned do-it-yourselfer such as myself couldn’t tackle in a fortnight.  Unfortunately, no premonitory skeletons were identified during this stage of renovation.  That would come later, but if you read my first essay - no spoilers here - then you already know about that. 

He asked me to marry him in our newly reconstructed closet painted in a throwback harvest gold that rivaled his venerable t-shirt collection, all trimmed in crisp white.  Displayed on the walls and shelves were fifteen framed photos of us he’d printed and hung, surrounded by lit candles.  I laughed and squealed so long, he nervously asked again:  “Well, will you?”  I laughed some more, realizing only then that I hadn’t answered, and quickly delivered an emphatic yes.  

Neither in that moment nor in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that less than a year later, in the adjacent bathroom, I would be soaking in the tepid aftermath of his betrayal, to the numbing sound of an episodic drip from a stubborn, leaky tub spout and a maelstrom of truth and lies echoing in my mind.