Things We Should Do Better

Last month I went to the doctor’s office for a diaphragm “fitting”.

“Why do you want a diaphragm if you’re on the pill?” they asked. “Not many people use those anymore.”

“My boyfriend is crazy,” I said. “He doesn’t believe in the pill, and I don’t like condoms.”

It was not their place to judge. They brought out an old, dusty set of diaphragms from the back of the closet. The smaller ones looked like a reasonable size to me, but the larger ones were the size of a newborn baby’s head. “Dear Lord,” I said to myself. “Is that how wide my childbearing orifice will be after performing its natural function?” The doctor gave me a small one and left me alone to practice putting it on my cervix and taking it off again, a pastime which did not leave me feeling normal.

Then I went to the pharmacy with my diaphragm prescription and was lucky to be served by a young woman. On my next visit, however, the pharmacist informed me in hushed tones that there had been a problem ordering the “ortho-flat”. Every time I went to the pharmacy after that, the same important message flashed on my account, and the staff drew me aside and began to speak in hushed tones about the “problem” until I quickly informed them that I was fully aware.

Crazy Adam will henceforth have to trust in the witchdoctor female medicine known as “the pill” because the diaphragm has been discontinued by its major manufacturer due to poor demand. There is one other manufacturer who would send it to the doctor’s office, but I have come back to England now, and I don’t want my mom getting a call saying “Your daughter’s diaphragm has arrived, can you come pick it up?” Said daughter could possibly obtain one of these devices in Britain if she wanted to LIE to STRANGE PEOPLE about her eligibility for the national health service and go to a CLINIC OF POVERTY-STRICKEN SOCIALISTS and let them STICK THEIR FINGERS UP HER VAGINE but unfortunately she does not want that because she too is crazy.

Disbelieving in the pill is not his only bizarre stubbornness. My favorite Crazy Adam episode (not at the time) is the visit to the Swedish supermarket. We were about to spend eleven nights at a house in the woods without a car, so we needed to stock up on supplies. I made a grocery list based on seven recipes I had brought with me, which included healthy options and fresh fruits and vegetables.  I told him he could have four nights of his kind of food (frozen pizza, meatballs, and fish pie). He agreed to this. However, when he saw my grocery list, which filled three sides of small notebook paper, he became intensely disturbed. It was as if he had never seen a grocery list before.

“You’re going to get all that?” he shrieked.

“Yes. I showed you the recipes, and you said that was OK.”

“How much is all that going to cost?”

“Probably about seventy pounds for what I have written down, plus extra for breakfast and toilet paper and that kind of stuff.”

He was silent all the way to the grocery store. When we got there, he took a basket and filled it with his fish pie and meatballs and stood sulking while I tried to find my ingredients. When I asked him to help me read the Swedish labels on the food, he refused or claimed not to know the translations despite speaking Swedish as his native language. Every now and then he would go through my basket with dark, suspicious looks. He seemed to think that a full shopping basket meant I was engaging in an outrageous, irresponsible shopping spree.

I wandered around the supermarket in a tearful, illiterate daze. I was cold and wet after being drenched by a downpour on the walk there. I had to decipher everything from the pictures on the packages because I couldn’t read any of the words. Swedish began to appear as a strange, distorted language that had been designed to thwart my attempts to eat. I had to convert the prices from crowns into U.S. dollars and also into British pounds since my money is partly in dollars and partly in pounds. My mental math skills have atrophied over the years and it was not an easy process. Barring earthquakes and volcanoes, I couldn’t imagine how a trip to buy groceries could be any more miserable. Our holiday was ruined before it had even begun. It did not even matter to him that I was paying for half of the groceries.

We came to the checkout and divided the groceries in half. Our bills were almost exactly even: 555 crowns for me and 546 crowns for him. We carried the groceries outside, and I waited for him to apologize. We began the walk home, and I was still waiting. Math did not appear to be his strong point, either.

I gave him a gentle hint. “You owe me a big apology.” This did not quite do the trick. I provided the currency conversion: “Our grocery bill was just under a hundred pounds for two people for eleven days.” (Under two hundred dollars.)

Finally a light went on. “Yes,” he admitted. “I owe you a big apology.”

These little obstinacies crop up every day, usually about money and plans for the future. He doesn’t want to marry me because he insists that I could get a work permit in England, as if the only reason to get married is so that you could work and live in a certain country, not because you love somebody and wish to build a future with them. How inspiring! The next time somebody asks me to marry him, my reply will be, “No, because I’m thinking of changing careers, so we don’t really need to go that far.” This stubbornness has eroded my feelings to the point where I don’t want to get married anymore. Although I have explained this, I’m not sure crazy Adam has fully comprehended it because he still seems to be defending himself against the prospect of untimely marriage. You might think this sounds like a depressing situation, but on the other hand, who wants to enter into a potentially lifelong contract with someone who won’t let her buy groceries? Either we would swiftly die of starvation or we would be arrested for failing to feed our children.

He is also astonishingly stubborn about his mother. Most men with a mother like his would understand that they are operating under a massive liability and that, if they hoped to have a future with any other woman, they must invite their mother into a padded basement suite until after the wedding ceremony.

Crazy Adam, however, does just the opposite. He insists that I must like if not love his mother as a precondition for our shared future. He suggests solutions like putting me on a desert island with her until we learn to appreciate each other. When I reminded him that I can swim and his mother can’t, so she would be on the desert island a lot longer than I would, he looked hurt and said that I should not say bad things about his mother. He often tells me that I should not say bad things about his mother, as if there is anything else to say. He is still very young. After he has three or four more girlfriends who replace him on similar grounds, he’ll see what I was talking about. Maybe that’s what it will take. Maybe I’m destined to be his learning process. The only kind of bride who might not have a problem with his mother would be a docile Chinese girl with bound feet (have you ever seen an X-ray of bound feet and the way the bones are painfully stunted and misshapen for beauty’s sake?) who doesn’t speak English or Swedish and is accustomed to being pathetically grateful to her oppressive elders for not aborting her because she was a girl, but crazy Adam is not going to find any such brides because their elders have aborted them, and the remaining ones will be selling at too high a price for his stingy ways.

Come to think of it, he’s more like his mother than I realized. He has acquired her habit of adopting a crazy point of view and sulking in it for months on end. Unlike her, he comes to his senses eventually, but by then the damage is done. Am I really proposing to mingle my chromosomes with this family’s genetic material? Wouldn’t it be better to find a sane family who could dilute my family’s craziness and give my children a chance at normal life? God forbid our children should turn out worse than either of us!

The problem is that I have never found a normal person who liked me. Furthermore, I have never liked a normal person. Have I ever met a normal person? How would I know when I met him? Should I give up hope? Are we doomed?

Probably not. As an American, I participate in an optimistic nation, unlike the gloomy British.

If only I could raise a clone of myself, I might make her happy. I would set her free as a small child and let her run wild in nature and never subject her to the misery-making constraints of family and civilization because she is too sensitive to deal with these. She is sadly unequipped to cope with social life at all, so I would let her live with the animals. I would plant an orchard for her and teach her how to garden, and let her get on with it, and I would not instill in her a hope for romantic love because that is the path of false expectation, and we only do it because they tell us we should. I would not teach her how to read because then she would brainwash herself. I know it would be a deprivation – oh bother, I suppose I would have to teach her to read, but then she would be ruined. But I would teach her how to write too, and then at least she could save herself, even if she ruined herself with books.