Would You Still Love Me If I Had Crab Pincers?

My girlfriend and I have been together for about fifteen years. It's been long enough so that calling her girlfriend doesn't quite seem accurate, but we have never tied the knot, so wife isn't particularly true either. I try to stay away from the jargony terms that have come up lately, like life-partner or significant other, although sometimes I like to make up some of my own--terms that would be more accurate--like "remote-control-adversary" or "political-diatribe-recipient." These terms don't quite denote endearment I know, but, by this time, those things go pretty much understood, and humor of this sort goes further than anything else in keeping us bonded.

Margaret owns a Restaurant. It’s a pretty difficult business, calling for long, long hours and a great deal of physical labor combined with diplomacy and organization. She usually works from eleven-thirty am until eleven-thirty pm Tuesday through Saturday and from nine to five on Sundays. With my school and work schedule, our paths don’t cross at the usual times for most couples. We usually get the pleasure of each other’s company in the morning. I get up relatively early, and she gets up an hour or two later. This means the coffee levels are way off balance, I having five cups already and she having none. So it’s the good mood/bad mood phenomena for about an hour, as I hunt and pound on my keyboard doing school work, and she holds a cup of coffee up to her mouth like a sacred chalice. Then, suddenly, she is all action, jogging upstairs, stomping around, jogging back down (dog following her the whole way), microwaving that last cup for the trip in, shouting that she has acupuncture today, stopping by my computer room and asking how its going, hearing me grunt or say fine, giving me a kiss, and then she’s gone.

She returns at night—often we arrive home at the same time—and we spend a couple of hours watching the news, or Charlie Rose, or Letterman, or something. These evenings can have different tones, which usually depend on my mood. I am a person who is very susceptible to suggestion (imagined or otherwise), and, having attended a liberal arts college for three years, I often bring the lofty ideals regarding man’s inhumanity to man home with me and apply them to the eleven o’clock news, Keith Olbermann, or, in some cases, re-runs of The King of Queens. I also believe this is somewhat hereditary (or at least learned), because, as a child, I listened to the same sort of abuse being hurled at a wavy black and white image of Richard Nixon every night by my father for about three years. All of this gets channeled through Margaret’s eardrums—unfortunately. But she is not a passive recipient. Her protests (against me, not the proponents of man’s inhumanity to man) usually start with, “Would you be quiet, I’m trying to listen to this.” Then it moves on to, “Hush now, please!” then “would you SHUT UP!!!” This has been going on for years, and deters me very little. As annoying as it is, I like to believe that I am inviting discourse, however banal, with these provocations.

So this was going on the other night in the same pattern as always, except it was Sunday, which is always worse. On Sundays, after watching my football teams lose, we watch 60 Minutes. Something happens to me when I hear that familiar stopwatch ticking. I may have been in the most lethargic of moods after witnessing my team’s place kicker miss a twenty-yard field goal to lose the game, but as soon as I see Mike Wallace’s embalmed features, I am instantly primed to be outraged and disgusted at the unjust and often illegal activity reported on the show. I, by now, have realized that an automatic digging in on the topics might end with Margaret stomping upstairs to watch QVC, so I try to control the heat with a well placed “bullshit,” or “that’s a load a…” or “liar.” I can feel the alert level rise in her when I say these things, so I’ll wait another ten minutes to insert my next, “fascist,” or “sleazebag.”

We were watching a report about a particularly controversial issue in the news these days, and I was maintaining a very self-controlled, “open-minded” view of the subject. This time, it was actually Margaret who began a discussion about the issue, and she started firing off questions about the topic—what did I think, was this person lying, how much were they telling us, what did they mean by that—so that before I could even form the first answer she was asking another question. “Well, I think it has to do with…” I would venture, and she would fire back “and who was that other guy, what was his motive?” After about three or four minutes I got so muddled that I just shouted “I don’t know… you know, everything isn’t a conspiracy!” This was met with dead silence.

I knew I had crossed a line, and I also knew it would be okay, but I felt bad. I wanted to say I’m sorry, but those words have lost their relevance in this long relationship. It had been a long time since I had pushed her to this kind of silence, and I was trying to remember how to deal with it. 60 Minutes became irrelevant, and I sat, staring at my hands, wondering if I should try to say something, or let it pass and let it stay with her, benign perhaps, but there none-the-less.

I started making shapes with my hands. I remembered seeing a show about a cruel alcoholic sideshow performer nicknamed “Lobster Boy.” He had deformed hands, like claws, and I positioned my hands in this way to see how it would feel. I raised them up and started opening and closing them. Then I looked at Margaret and said. “Honey, would you still love me if I had crab pincers.”
“Hmmm…”she thought a second, still giving me a stern gaze. “No I don’t think I could still love you if you had crab pincers.”
“You couldn’t?”
“No, that’s asking a bit much.”
I returned my hands to their natural state.

We continued watching TV, and the next morning, as she was rushing from the kitchen into the living room, probably looking for her keys, she asked me what I was doing. I told her I was writing for the blog. She stopped, thought a minute, and then said, “you should do a piece called Would You Still Love Me if I had Crab Pincers.” She laughed a little at her idea, and I, always looking for a reason to believe this, felt like a genius.