Fight Club

“One thing I’ll tell you about Kath. She’s like a teapot. She simmers for a long time but when she blows watch out.”
-my dad to Mark on the occasion of our wedding

During Mark’s last few months of grad school, he was finishing up experiments and writing his dissertation while I was newly pregnant. He’d write fiendishly, edit, write some more, edit some more, and overall freak out that he wasn’t going to pass. Mark always took his work and his future seriously, and the pressure of getting his dissertation perfect was all that was on his mind.

Since I was early into my pregnancy I had other things on my mind. I was the main wage earner and working at a bank processing mortgage loans. The loan officer I worked for was young, gung-ho and cranking out customers and loans in record time so he could could go to the head of the class. Every mortgage he approved caused a massive amount of paperwork for me to complete via the old-fashioned way of typing, but like clockwork every morning I’d get the dry heaves between 10-10:30. I’d go into the bathroom stall, close the door, sit on the floor with my head over the toilet and spend twenty minutes dry heaving with occasional full on barfing. Mr. Loan Officer lacked empathy for my situation and one time knocked on the door of the ladies room to ask me if I was almost done. When I got back to my desk he said that I should count my daily dry heaving time in the bathroom as my morning break. So I was spending my days with an average white guy in the 80s who answered to nobody for bad behavior, and my nights with my husband who suffered no debilitating side affects of a baby on the way.

As the time came closer for Mark to present his dissertation, he started staying at home to practice his talk. I’d like to think I was supportive, and maybe I was, but I was more jealous that I had to go into work every day and prop up the Ron Popeil of mortgage loans while Mark merely had to panic and freak out about our future with a baby on the way. During one of those days, I drove home for lunch, made a sandwich, and bitched incessantly about my job while Mark nodded and made notes in the margins of his talk with red pen. It was non-eventful as only one of us was having a conversation. When it was time for me to head back to work, I stood at the kitchen counter where a frozen pot roast was thawing and asked Mark, “About 3:00 can you put this in the oven at 350?” And Mark, pen in mouth and without looking up said, “No.” And that was the moment I flipped my shit about the men in my whole miserable, dry heaving life. I screamed, “NOOOO??? Are you kidding me? I’m pregnant and going back to work for that idiot again and you can’t even turn the oven on and stick this stupid roast in the oven?!!! Really? You really can’t even do that?” Mark was suddenly and violently startled out of the world of cytochrome p450 with no time to react as I flung that frozen pot roast in his direction and stormed out of the house.

I fumed all the way back to work, imagining myself as the victim of a love gone horribly wrong, not by another woman, but a pot roast. I fantasized that it would make a best-selling novel, the cover a portrait of me and my pregnant belly with a single tear sliding down my cheek. But by the time I reached the employee parking lot at the bank, I began to reimagine what my actions might have done. What if I hit him in the head and killed him? What if I hit him in the head and he ended up semi-comatose the rest of his life? I’d probably get arrested for attempted murder. Worse yet, what if I didn’t get arrested and had to keep working at the bank? I started to get a little worried, then I got real worried so I decided to call the house. When I reached my desk I picked up the phone and dialed our home number. When Mark answered, I thought *whewwwww did I ever dodge a bullet there.* Since he could walk because he got up and answered the phone, and he could talk because he said “hello”, he clearly suffered no brain trauma so I launched into another epic bitch session about the pot roast and slammed the phone down. That afternoon at break I told my bank friends the grievous crime Mark had committed, and since they shared in my work and male bitterness they tsk tsked him. “Oh, he had that coming,” they all said and I basked in the glow of my righteousness.

That night when I got home from work there was the smell of pot roast cooking, mashed potatoes being made, the table set with candles, and my husband apologizing for saying “no” when he realized he should have enthusiastically sayed “YES”. He was forgiven because I knew he didn’t mean it, and he seemed slightly terrified which made me sorry for flinging that frozen hunk of meat at his head.

A few weeks later, we were arguing about something else while standing in the kitchen, and Mark picked up a thawing pound of ground beef and slammed it to the floor saying, “I’m just trying to pass grad school so I can get a job and you’re bitching at me about everything.” Simultaneously we both looked at the package of ground beef on the floor and came to the same conclusion. We were so broke we couldn’t even afford to throw a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, let alone meat every time we were mad at each other.

Mark would finish writing his dissertation and defend his work before his committee and pass with flying colors. It was a huge accomplishment and I was so proud of him. My broke college student husband was now a doctor. He was proud of himself, too, and in the months that ticked by he would keep working in the lab until Maggie was born and we started a new life in Maryland.

I was still processing mortgages, my bank friends had a shower for me, we put a crib together in our rented townhouse, and I anxiously waited for this new baby to make me a mother. Meanwhile, Mark started pontificating about everything. He told me in detail how the coffeemaker and microwave worked, how everything I made on the stove would cook faster if I’d just put a lid on the pot, that a drop of beer might turn our developing baby into the Hunchback of Notre Dame, that the tar he inhaled when he roofed would probably give him cancer one day, that professor jobs were hard to come by. I listened to most of it until one day the combination of heat and the growing baby in me that had run out of room made me reach my breaking point.

“Will you just stop,” I said. “You keep preaching to me about stuff I don’t even care about. You follow me everywhere like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz who finally got a brain. I can’t take it anymore. Ever since you got this degree you’ve become a know-it-all asshole.”

Without missing a beat, Mark nodded and said, “I see your point but just so you know it’s Dr. Asshole,” and in the summer of 1983 let it be known that hands down he won Fight Club.