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Might As Well: November, 1988

Tracy Paladino Kessler

    “What do you mean you aren’t coming home with me for Thanksgiving? I already told my parents you’d be there.” Oliver sat on the edge of Kate’s dorm room bed while she continued to read over her mythology class notes. The room was small, but able to fit two twin beds. The brown shag carpet desperately needed a steam cleaning, but the white walls seemed more cheerful, adorned with band posters, two sorority pennants, photos, and other colorful mementos of its inhabitants.
    “Hello? You gonna answer me, or is the life of Hadeus more interesting than your supposed boyfriend?”
    “It’s Hades,” Kate calmly replied.
    “You know what I meant. Why do you take that stupid class anyway if you’re going into education? Everyone knows that class is worthless. It’s a campus joke, y’know. Mythology 302, otherwise known as ‘Who Screwed Who’.”
    “Yes, I’ve heard the joke before, Ol, but really, why must you keep trying to change the subject?” Kate didn’t remove her eyes from her notes but gave a slight, almost-undetectable, sideways tight-lipped grin. She knew this snide comment would incite Oliver, but she found some strange joy in irritating him. It was just too easy to do.
    “What?!” he scoffed. “So, you do want to talk about Thanksgiving plans then?”
    “God, no. I hoped we could keep talking about wholly nonsensical elective classes.” Kate glanced at him, then back to her notes. She knew her sarcasm was on unforgiving overdrive at the moment. “Look, we talked about this last week. I told you that I’m going home to my parents’ house for the holiday. I asked you to join me. You said no.”
    “I had to say no!” Oliver snapped.
    Kate pretended to continue reading her notes. She raised her eyebrows in c’est la vie fashion. “Hey, believe me, I’m fine with it. No worries.” She totally didn’t care if Oliver joined her or not. She wasn’t just acting the part for attention like some girls did. It was the truth. After dating for the past year, his constant wish to control her every move had worn on her. Plus, he rarely listened to her unless it served his purposes. In this case, his Thanksgiving plans.
    “I had to say no because of my sister. The baby is due that week.”
    “Exactly, and you should be there with her and your family in New Hampshire. Please, go.”
    “Damn, why don’t you sound more like you could give a rat’s ass about being with me that week? You know very well I had to say no to going to your parents’ place, but I guess I still assumed you were going with me to mine,” Oliver shot back.
    “Maybe you shouldn’t have assumed that.”
    At that comment, Oliver took a hold of Kate’s favorite pair of red and black checkerboard stirrup leggings that were sitting next to him on the bed, squeezed them into a tight ball while standing up, then chucked them across her room into her roommate’s INXS poster, knocking it partially off of the wall. “Dammit, Kate!”
    Kate put down her notes and got up. She coolly walked over and knelt on her roommate Natalia’s bed to retrieve the poster. God, Michael Hutchence is hot, she thought as she grabbed hold of the top corner of the poster paper and stared at the musician. It’s no wonder why Natalia, Tally to her friends, was so obsessed with him. Why can’t Oliver be Michael Hutchence right now? Kate thought. If only he were, we’d likely be screwing and not talking so much, or at all.
    She re-pinned the poster to the wall, grabbed her leggings off of her friend’s bed, then walked back to her side of the room to her desk where a mirror sat above it. She sat down in the desk chair, tossed the leggings into a nearby laundry basket, and pulled out a hot pink Goody brush from one of the drawers to brush her hair. She had started resenting Oliver for all of his abundant disappointments in her. True, sex with him was still great, but she recently couldn’t stand having him around in any other context. Come to think of it, nowadays, it seemed she had to be drinking or drunk in order to have sex with him just to put up with the words that came out of his mouth. If he’d just shut up and never talk it would be the perfect relationship. She wondered if there had ever been a married couple who had completely stopped talking but still lived together and had awesome sex every now and then. Probably not. What a pathetic thought anyway.
    She looked at the reflection in the mirror of the INXS poster behind her. I bet my boyfriend Michael over there wouldn’t care if I didn’t join him for Thanksgiving in New Hampshire with his family. He’d probably just kiss me goodbye and say, “Hey, luv, ‘ave a great time with your family. Be a good girl and pass along my apologies to your mum, yeah? I’ll make sure to dedicate a song to you when we play the Big Apple next. Tally ho. Tup, tup.” Or, whatever it is that worldly Australian rock stars say to their American girlfriends. Then he’d smack my ass in a most loving way before boarding his private plane.
    “I’m beginning to think you just don’t want to be with me even though you are able to go with me to New Hampshire.” Oliver sounded like a whining five-year-old who was fishing for some serious mollycoddling.
    Kate wasn’t about to bite that hook. Instead, she stared at herself in the mirror. Anything not to look at Oliver at the moment because he was absolutely right. For once, that is. If she looked into his eyes, he would instantly read the sentiment in her face, so she kept staring in the mirror. She really didn’t want to go home with him to visit his family. She really didn’t want to go home with him at all. Ever. Even so, she wasn’t ready to admit that to him or herself, at least fully. Finally, she summoned enough guts to muster up a confident lie and turned to him quickly in military fashion.
    “Listen, Oliver, that’s not it. I don’t know if you remember me telling you, but John is taking a break from the tour to come home to spend Thanksgiving with my family. I haven’t seen him in months. I’d like to see my brother after such a long time away.”
    Oliver scoffed. “Taking a break from the tour. You make it sound like he’s in a band, Kate. The guy follows The Grateful Dead around the country. He’s a groupie.”
    “And, what if he is? What does that have to do with my wanting to see him?”
    “I’m just saying that he could come home and see his family whenever he damn well wants. He chooses to roam the country aimlessly on his own time without any regard for his family.”
    “Careful, Ol.”
    “I’m not trying to be mean. Really. You know I love your brother.”
    “You’ve only hung out with him twice.”
    “Yeah, and both times I loved it. Jesus, are you trying to make this discussion more difficult or what? Listen, I’m trying to compare his situation to the situation with my sister. She can’t choose when her baby is going to come. It’s most likely coming that week whether she and Gary want it happen then or not. Your brother isn’t tied to a schedule where he can only see his family on holidays. He can choose to come home any freakin’ day of the year to visit you guys.”
    “Oh, so you’re saying Clara didn’t choose to get pregnant?”
    Oliver huffed again and turned his head away from her.
    She realized that this debate was getting more and more ridiculous, and her retort just made it that much more absurd. Pointless. She blamed Oliver for always making her engage in ludicrous arguments that made her feel juvenile and petty even though she knew deep down that she was equally responsible for the nonsense.
    She pushed all of her hair out of her face, closed her eyes, rested both elbows on the desk, and took a deep breath. When she regained composure—actually, her sanity—her composure had been fine all along...almost too fine, she calmly stated, “Look, maybe this is a good chance for both of us to have some ‘me time’ to ourselves. You have to agree that we’ve been fighting a lot lately. Maybe time apart at Thanksgiving will be a good thing.” She grabbed a teasing comb from the top of the desk and started working her blonde locks into an erect frenzy to match her emotions. Her true feelings were beginning to bubble to the surface and presented themselves in the smallest physical way via bangs standing at attention straight up to the nines.
    “So, like, you’re basically saying you want to break up?” he asked.
    “Did I say that? I don’t think I heard myself say that.” She put down the comb, leaned forward, and gave a pointed, direct look at herself in the mirror. “Hey, lady in the mirror, what exactly did you say?” Again, her sarcasm did little to help her feel her age at the moment and only hid her true feelings.
    She immediately regrouped. “Oliver,” she sighed, not looking at him but still herself in the mirror, “I don’t want to break up.” As she stared at her reflection, she saw the black of her eyes get larger the minute she said it. Her pupils now appeared far too large for her aquamarine blue irises. That was such a lie. The more she heard this argument carry on out loud, the more she found resolve in want she really wanted inside.
    “Well, we might as well. All of this sucks shit.” Oliver kicked over her empty wicker trashcan. He wasn’t a violent guy, but when he was pissed he occasionally vented in physical ways. “Fuckin A’!”
    Clearly, we both lose our more sophisticated articulation when we are pissed, Kate thought. She looked back over his way. “So, are you breaking up with me then?” The coward in her was winning, and she hoped to God his anger would take the reins and save her from doing this thing herself. She wished he’d just scream to her that she was a total bitch or a fucking loser or slovenly fussock but knew that last term was merely a pipe dream since they weren’t actually living in 1700’s London. At least if he called her something terribly derogatory she’d have an actual excuse to leave him rather than merely being irritated as hell by everything that came out of his mouth. She pushed even harder for the response she was looking for. “Well, really Oliver, there’s no need to have such a cow.”
    “Fuckin A’!” he repeated. He banged his head into the wall, but thankfully not hard enough to do any real damage—to the wall, that is. His head, however, started bleeding. He touched his hand to his forehead, saw the blood on it while storming over to the door that exited into the dorm hallway. “That’s it. I just gotta bounce,” he said.
    Was this it? The moment he called her a selfish, no good tart, or something to that effect?
    No.
    After fiddling with the doorknob for what Kate considered to be an exorbitantly long time for any person with an adult brain, Oliver whipped open the door, shouted, “We’re seriously done!” He hurried out, slamming the door as hard as he could behind him to make his final, inarticulate point. Tally’s poster fell partially off of the wall again just as it had before.
    Ah, success at last. I guess that takes care of that.
    Carefully, she put the comb in a drawer of the desk, followed by the brush, then looked back at the poster on Tally’s side of the room. As she sat, she stared at Michael Hutchence’s fixated eyes that were now gazing sideways from the askew position of the poster on the wall. A familiar lyric from the Australian band started repeating over and over in her head.
    Devil inside. Devil inside. Every single one of us the devil inside.

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