Sixth date 4, Brief narrative

Let's see if I can give a bare bones account of what actually happened last week. Let's see ... chronologically? Thematically? A mix ...?

Revisiting the week as I wrote this, I think it is pretty likely I won't have any friends left in the blogosphere by the time they finish reading it. (sigh) I hope it helps that I am aware of the problem. I am trying to figure out the next steps from here.

Cleaning

[Saturday] D started by helping the boys tidy their room and put away their laundry. Only they couldn't close their dresser drawers because of the huge numbers of shirts falling out of them. Wife says "If they'd only hang up their shirts it would be no problem." D asks the boys, "What are these shirts? Can you show me? Do they still fit? Do you like them or wear them?" Then she weeded out a couple of bags worth of shirts that no longer fit and/or that neither boy was willing to let touch his body. And suddenly the dresser drawers closed nicely.

[Sunday, Monday] D and I totally rearranged the storage units. Wife and I have rented a storage unit ever since we moved into our house. You may recall that back in January we had to rent a second unit because of all the junk we moved out of the house. Well, two units cost twice as much as one unit (fancy that!) and the expense was getting to be a nuisance. D and I rearranged things so that we could consolidate into one unit, and surrender the second one. And mostly we succeeded at this by simple geometry ... we really threw out very little. (Well, ... considering.)

Also, D cleaned the bathrooms again. Yes, she had done that back in January. It is possible somebody else might have done it since then, but I'm not taking bets.

[Tuesday, Wednesday] Then she started in on the living room, which had been left out the last time around. The boys had left a bunch of junk lying around, and there were books strewn. Also the room was hard to use (and therefore drifted into being a junk depository) because of the way the bookshelves and furniture were arranged. OK, well D got the boys to pick up their own stuff. She consulted a bit and we agreed that the brick-and-board shelf had to come down ... that would improve the space enormously. (I would swear that Wife was in on this agreement, but maybe she thought we were talking about something else.) So D went to work on the shelves, pulling down books to dust them and asking what could get donated to charity or the library or something. As the project went on, she got significantly more aggressive on this point; and in the end we must have culled somewhere over a thousand books. Not that this really stripped our living room, you understand ... there must be twice that many still on the shelves. Or more.

[Thursday] Last thing was to organize a whole box of filing into which I had been pitching papers pell-mell for a long, long time. She did ask me (several times) if I had any intention of ever dealing with the papers, and was tolerant when I said yes.

Other chores

D did a lot of laundry -- every day -- and did the dishes after every meal. (She doesn't believe in dishwashers.) She also offered to help Son 2 pack for a big two-week expedition he was leaving for -- call it a campout, which is close enough. She helped me plan, shop for, and cook the meals. She made a huge raft of sandwiches for Son 1's sports team, which had a number of games during the week. There's probably more that I'm forgetting.

Sex

Since D was staying in our house, there wasn't really a good venue for sex. But we improvised the best we could, using what little standing room we could find in the storage units and the garage. I can't say either of those venues worked for me terribly well, but they did seem to work for D -- rapturously and repeatedly. At any rate she certainly sounded like she was enjoying herself ... and the loss of muscular control is something I'd only ever read about before. I take all that as a good sign. (Seriously, it could sound like I'm griping and I'm not; given the very tight constraints, I think the sex was one of the things that worked out best during the whole week.)

Fights

There were a lot of them.

Wife blamed D for throwing away all those shirts; although honestly I had wanted to do the same thing for years. Wife buys stuff without any visible regard for whether we need it or already have it; I have enough shirts to go to work for three weeks without repeating a single one, but she still tells me I need a few more. The thing is that I'm too dilatory or slothful to get around to purging the boys's shirts, to say nothing of wanting to avoid the inevitable fight that it would (and did) generate. But when there were so many shirts that they would never wear, it was the right thing to do.

D for her part got progressively more irritated at Wife's refusal to say Please or Thank you or even Hello, at Wife's seeming inability even to notice when D was scrubbing her fingers to the bone cleaning caked shit out of the inside rims of our toilets, and at Wife's consistent failure to make even the smallest gesture of politeness: Can I get you something? Would you like a glass of water? One way of explaining this neglect would be to say that Wife didn't want D to do the things she was doing, but it is pretty hard to think that about scrubbing the toilets. Nor does it explain similar rudenesses over breakfast or dinner, when no work was being done at all (except for cooking or washing up). In any event, when Wife shouted about some of the other topics, D shot back with this one.

Wife resented the hell out of our pruning the books, and truth to tell we probably went overboard. But the way she reacted wasn't very productive, because it mostly meant repeating the refrain, "You can't throw those away because their mine, mine, mine, all mine! Do you hear me? Mine, mine, MINE!" This just cemented D's diagnosis that owning all this stuff has totally distorted Wife's view of the world, making it all about her. Since Wife acquires the stuff with no concern for whether we will need it or ever use it, the overall pattern looks unhealthy. And no, D was not terribly gentle about explaining this back to Wife; rather, when Wife had screeched for long enough at D, D would shout back at her to open her eyes up to other people besides herself. The point about basic civility (see the preceding paragraph) fit in here too.

Occasionally Wife would argue that she needed these or those scholarly tomes because she still reads them on a regular basis and is going to go back to scholarship any day now. Mind you, she failed her master's exams nearly fifteen years ago and hasn't seen the inside of a university since then. The "scholarly tomes" in question were all covered in spider webs and insect droppings, so they probably hadn't been used all that recently. But Wife claimed that they had been and would be, all the same. This argument just contributed to the impression both D and I have, that Wife spends most of her time in a world of make-believe.

Wife was also angry that D offered to help Son 2 pack for his expedition. What was she trying to say, that Wife wasn't good enough to pack her own son? (Somehow the topic had shifted from getting the work done to whether Wife was good enough ... but don't conclude that this is self-absorption.) Now, Son 2 is a gentler and more sensitive kid than Son 1, and I really didn't want him being caught between two such dominant women. So I pushed both of them away (figuratively) and insisted that Son 2 should pack himself. After all, if he's going to be gone for two weeks, he'll have to be able to take care of that. This seemed to work out OK.

Shortly after we finished with the books, Wife went out to get "one last thing" that Son 2 would need for his trip. She came back not having found it, but having bought a big box of candles (we have candles already, not that we use them), some personal electronics (for which we have no need), and a pair of $60 earrings (she must have hundreds of earrings). I lost my temper at this and took the bags away from her. I went immediately back to the store to return them. In the process, I also took Wife's wallet and hid it somewhere I am reasonably sure she can't retrieve it. (I can, easily enough.)

That's how I confiscated Wife's wallet.

While I am still speaking of the wallet, I should explain a couple of things. I let her keep her driver's license and all her keys. She recently set up an ATM card with our bank that lets her access two separate accounts holding inheritance money from a relative that recently died. These accounts are in her name alone, so I have no ownership rights on them. And I let her keep that ATM card. (Between them they add to something over $23,000.00 ... so as long as she is willing to drive to the bank, she has access to plenty of money.) I also let her keep her insurance ID cards and her library card. So she is not without resources. But I hope to impede her ability mindlessly to piss away our common resources as long as she is making such irrational buying decisions.

While I was gone, she spent the time murmuring softly to Son 2 about what a beast I am and how she won't put up with it any longer, until he was curled up on his bed crying in fetal position. (Nice send-off for his big trip, huh?) When I came back and found out, I told her "No more. You are going to be happy and cheerful until Son 2 leaves tomorrow evening. I don't care what anybody does to you or says to you, but you are not going to say a single, solitary unpleasant thing until that time. Then after he leaves, you can say anything you want." She couldn't make herself be pleasant, but she did succeed in shutting up, which I guess is the next best thing.

She also got on the phone to Boyfriend 5 ... or no, I guess it was Friend. That's when I picked up her cell phone, insisting that she deal with the here-and-now instead of fleeing into fantasy land. I handed the phone to D, saying I was really too upset to know what to do with it. D put it somewhere around the house. I'm sure it will turn up.

That's what happened to the cell phone.

Travel and heat

The next day we took Son 2 to the spot where he was embarking on his big trip. Everyone said nice things to him, and we all hurrahed him off. (Wife sulked when she wasn't actually talking to him, but never mind.) Then we went from there to visit my parents and spent the night. The next morning we hung out at my parents' house for a while, preparing a big barbecue for lunch. D spent a lot of time chatting with them and getting to know them.

After I took a shower that morning, I couldn't find my comb so I checked in Wife's bag for one. I didn't find a comb, but I did find her Smith & Wesson 38. Now, I don't know about you but I honestly can't think of any legitimate reason for her to have brought a handgun along on this trip. So I lifted it out of the bag and hid it at my parents' house. I also told my parents -- and D -- what I had found.

Not ten minutes later, Wife asked me in a long-suffering voice to give her back her handgun. I asked her why she had brought it. Her answer was, "I always carry it whenever I go anywhere, so that it can't get stolen by someone breaking into the house."

This is a pure lie -- a total fabrication -- and I told her so. I know perfectly well that on plenty of other occasions when we spent the night at my parents' house, she did not pack a weapon. So what was she planning? Was she going to kill us all? Or make a dramatic last stand and then kill herself? Both? Or what? My private theory is that she didn't have a plan, and in fact that she didn't even know why she packed it. But that doesn't make me feel any better.

Anyway, that's how I confiscated the handgun.

Coda

Later in the week we went to one of Son 1's sports events, went out to see a silly summer movie, got pizza and ice cream ... fun stuff. I read aloud a funny essay I had found. And Monday morning I took D to the rental car office, from which she was going to drive herself a few hours away to visit some relatives. First stop, of course, was her adult daughter, whose comments on the week you have already read here.

This will have to do for now ... it's more than I really had time to write, but no matter. I want to add another post or two that spend more time thinking about what happened, not just narrating it. But that's for another day.