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What the fuck is wrong with you?

Gary Zenker

    “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
    It’s the first time those particular words left my mouth aimed directly at her...though not the first time I thought them or used them about her while talking to someone else. And it wasn’t so much of a question as it was a statement of bewilderment over the last twenty years of marriage and the most recent thirty minutes of conversation.
    “That’s incredibly rude,” she replied and she wasn’t wrong. It IS rude to say that to anyone, especially to the person who was supposed to be your partner in all things, your safety net and safe space, your love above all other loves. I should be ashamed at my lack of self control. I should have apologized immediately. But I wasn’t and I didn’t. Instead, I shook my head condescendingly, thinking that I had spent twenty of that last thirty minutes defending my use of picture hangers from the top right drawer of her desk...the same ones I purchased and have laid there unused for the past six months.
    “They are picture hangers. I used them to hang pictures. That’s their purpose.”
    “My picture hangers.” She enunciates each word as if it is its own sentence.
    “I’ll buy more, from the hardware store two minutes away,” I nearly scream back. There’s a chance, but not a great one, that I would remember to do that without her reminding me. Regardless, the offer is rebuked immediately.
    “They’re mine.”
    If I was a better person, if I were more understanding and more empathetic, I’d understand that this argument isn’t really about the picture hangers. It’s about boundaries violated, a feeling of a lack of control, and maybe – probably - past promises unkept. Hell, it may not even be about me...well, truth be told, it probably was about me. But instead of being that better person, I say the first thing that comes to mind and repeat myself. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
    Besides being the wrong words, it’s the wrong place. She’s on the front porch while I’m in the mulch, now picking weeds with a ferocity previously unknown in gardening. If anyone is outside of their homes, they can overhear me. Which, subconsciously, is probably my desire since I am seeking validation from any source.
    We stare at each other. If this were the Marvel Universe, opposing eye lasers would evaporate us both into thick clouds of black smoke. As it is, our agony is prolonged. She returns to the house, slamming the heavy door behind her. I mumble some expletives under my breath and return to the work that gives me a reason not to follow her in and apologize.
    We’ve been unhappy with each other for more than half out marriage. That includes sleeping time when you sometimes don’t even remember you have a spouse. It’s hard to remember the times I was happy. Last week we argued over my using double A batteries for my computer mouse, batteries that she was saving for her Christmas votive lights...six months in the future. The week prior, it was over my scouring through the trash she had just thrown away for anything I might be able to use.
    “That’s my personal trash,” she informed me. Well I guess it was but isn’t the goal of throwing something away an action meant to depersonalize it? Exactly when does it stop becoming personal trash and become simply trash? In the can at the curb? At the dump once it’s mixed with and indistinguishable from other people’s trash? Her logic and concern over trash eludes me. So I use that in the cruelest way possible to ridicule her. Her response remains the same. “That’s my personal trash.” I unilaterally declared myself the winner of the exchange. She just glares at me. I shake my head.
    And now, picture hangers are the latest ammunition in our battle. Simple. Stupid. Neither of us gives in and we eventually retreat to our personal safety zones: me to my home office and her to wherever she goes. We spend more time there than any place jointly.
    Even the bed we sleep in together is an obvious division. We face away from each other and scarcely mumble goodnight. If there had been a decent mattress in the guest room, I would have moved there a year ago. But my back as it is, this mattress is better.
    Perhaps it’s really the hope that laying in physical proximity would bring us together in a way that words don’t. Or maybe neither one of us wants be the first to leave. Either way, that small distance between the backs of two bodies on a queen size mattress is a gulf neither one of us has been able to climb over.
    My friends all agree with me when I tell them the stories: her actions ARE irrational and she is a control freak of the highest degree. I’m just as certain her friends agree with the version of the story that she tells and declare me a ridiculous human being. You know what they say: the antagonist is the protagonist of his or her own story.
    And yet...I can’t seem to get to the point where I just accept those elements in the woman I loved enough to marry. The more she does what she does, the more I fight back.
    What is it about me that cannot accept who she is? I should just smile and overlook it. Batteries and picture hangers and trash aren’t really that important in a life challenged by raising children, aging parents, and family mortality. The stability of having someone to both stand by and stand by me through career changes, health scares, and money matters is so clearly more valuable than winning an argument over the use of small pieces of metal or ownership of things neither of us really needs.
    What the fuck is wrong with her?

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