Kindness University
Photo by Miguel Bruna on Unsplash
Being with David was like attending Kindness University. It’s not a place I’d ever been before or thought I’d want to be. It’s a place where no one thinks it’s kind of sexy-cool to smash an entire box of Riedel crystal glasses one by one against the wall or open a third bottle of wine during an argument or demand the title to the car be signed over.
At Kindness University, you talked things out, using “I” words and compassion. You listened to your partner with all the empathy you could muster and apologized if you fell short. I had to learn it nearly from scratch.
The syllabus, if you will, of Kindness University was a list of partner to-dos that David kept prominently displayed on his fridge. It had been compiled by a minister who congratulated “unattractive” people for their luck: “Be glad! You have less temptation to stray!”
The minister reminded couples to find happiness in each other’s good fortune. He praised intimacy and regular sex. He was all about favorite foods and date night and emotional support and a whole host of ideas that sounded just fine but which I had never actually experienced in my real life.
David kept the list first on the fridge, then moved it to his bulletin board, and made a practice of reading it each day. I don’t remember when it finally was put away into a drawer but I did one day notice it was gone and considered that to him, it meant this relationship was going to be our final one, the one that lasts.
We spent our first Thanksgiving together at the home of a woman whom I had befriended because of the extreme cuteness of her yellow leather purse. We had been on an art tour together and at its end, while waiting for the wine to be served, formed a tight union over the purse that immediately included shared stories of abortion and death, divorce and infidelity.
Our bond had held and she had invited David and me and my youngest son, then 20, to her extended family’s table for the holiday. I was giddy at being with my new friend with my new love and my son, meeting her family of painters and theater folk, and eating delicious food I didn’t have to cook myself. And goodness, was there a lot to drink.
As the bottles emptied, the hilarity rose. David sat across the table from me and I could flirt directly at him, which I did with a sense of daring sass, like a flapper freed by newly bobbed hair. I felt old-fashioned and irresistible. He said something silly, I jested back. He nudged my foot under the table, I nudged back. He made a funny comment, I laughed and threw a spoon at his face.
My aim is bad, I’ve never played sports, and I hit him as directly as if I had intended it, cutting him just under the eye. Every mother is correct: I could have blinded him. He leapt up in surprise and pain from the table. My new friend hustled him to the bathroom and helped him with ice and bandages.
I went out for a smoke.
As I was rolling my cigarette, my son brought our wine outside. “You know, Mom,” he whispered loyally, handing me my glass. “It really was kind of funny.”
The holiday was over for us and we drove home in silence. David dropped my son and me off at my house and drove away. We had a date the next day to drive up the Sonoma Coast to go mushrooming, maybe we still would. He didn’t call but he didn’t cancel, so we went to his house the next morning as planned.
He opened the door with an air of sadness and sobriety. He was a dry-eyed manager who specialized in difficult personalities at work and who suspected the worst in mine.
We had a quiet two-hour drive up the coast, my son and I doing most of the talking, discussing chantrelles and mycelium and tree communication patterns and Paul Stamets.
“Are you violent?” he asked me very seriously later that day, while we were sprawled in the forest must, my son off scouting more mushrooms.
“No!” I laughed, surprised. “Oh.” I understood. “Because I threw the spoon.”
“Yes because you threw the spoon! Do you throw other things? Is this normal for you? Because if it is, we should stop right now. I don’t want anything to do with a violent person.”
I was startled. I never spanked or slapped my kids, though I had sometimes very much wished to pinch them. I certainly didn’t consider myself to be a violent person, but, to be honest, I had tossed my share of Riedels. Come to think of it, I had used a shoe to pelt my former husband’s back as he turned away from me. But it was a soft shoe. It wasn’t a cowboy boot or a heel.
I had also thrown a sharp metal object right at David’s head the night before.
Perhaps I was violent.
I had already understood that my language was aggressive to his ears, loaded with fucks and hard-edged frictives that expressed the crude fury I’d become accustomed to keeping at a smolder. In just the few months I had known him, I had begun to hear it with his ears. It was the language of toughness and brittle anger that my former husband and I had spoken, the common tongue in our little country of marriage.
I guess I was violent.
But I didn’t live in that country any more. I didn’t have to be so tough, so consumingly mad. And really, I no longer was. I just still abided by those rules after so many years of devising them.
What if I enlisted in David’s University of Kindness instead? He wouldn’t even know. I’d never confessed that I thought of my time with him in those terms.
Perhaps, like the minister’s list, I could make an effort big enough to be on the front of the fridge. Maybe we’d get more used to it, and I could go on the bulletin board.
And finally, on a day like today, my University list could just be tucked in a drawer, depended upon and true, something I know to my bones. A new life in a new country.
