Dennis: Part 9
I was very excited to get an apartment with Dennis. At this point, I’d recently stopped working at the daycare and now I was working at Wendy’s. The daycare didn’t work out because my boss noticed I had a constant tremor in my hands and a lot of the time, the rest of my body too, and she asked me if I was on any medication. I made the mistake of telling the truth. I was on anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. I can’t fault her for talking me into quitting. It was hard at the time, but I understand why I shouldn’t have been working there at that time.
Wendy’s gave me a lot more hours and they paid me more. I’m telling you the truth. I was paid more for taking drive-thru orders than I was to watch a room with five infants every weekday from 3-7pm. I changed them. Gave them snacks. And for hours was the only adult in the room with all of them. Wendy’s paid me more to put on a headset and say “Will that complete your order?”
Don’t take this as a feminist thing. I’m not a feminist. I’m just saying it how it is: when you’re the only girl working in a fast-food restaurant, you have to work drive-thru. That’s just how it is. I would have preferred to work the grill and not deal with customers. But that only happened a couple of times after another girl was hired and she got put on drive-thru. But then she started dating the grill guy and they had a big falling out and she quit and I was back to being the only girl, so drive-thru was mine again.
My classes were in the mornings. Then I would work 2-8 drive-thru. I worked 3-11 on the weekends.
I’d worked there a couple of weeks, when I looked over my paycheck and I realized something. I made enough now to pay half on a modest studio apartment. I could be with Dennis all the time. Come home to him every night. Be a real adult.
I told him that.
“I make enough to pay half on a place like this here in [your town] or we could get a third roommate and a get a place like this in [slightly bigger town]. Whatever you want, Dennis. I have a car and I don’t mind driving.”
He tried to change the subject and I realized what the problem was.
I tried to broach it gently.
“Have you thought about getting a different job? The nursing home doesn’t pay you very much. They also barely schedule you.”
He was very resistant to changing jobs. I couldn’t figure out why. I didn’t want to push him too much. But also, I loved him, I wanted to start a life with him. And to be perfectly honest, the fact that he was older than me freaked me out. At 20, I was used to guys I dated living at home and working shitty jobs. That’s the state of most 20-year-olds. But Dennis was 27. When the situation with the maybe-miscarriage happened, it hit me for the first time: he should be further along in life than I am.
But I didn’t judge him. Not too harshly anyway. It’s not like I was very successful or together either. I’d help him get to the next stage in life along with me.
Except…he wouldn’t go.
I tried nudging him along.
He always had excuses for why he didn’t want to apply to a good job. It usually came back to his code of honor, which I was getting very sick of by that point.
There are few good jobs you can get in rural New Hampshire, not without a skill anyway. Dennis had no college. Dennis knew no trade. I wanted him anyway. I just needed him to help me even a little.
“The ball bearings factory,” I told him. “Starting pay is $12 an hour. That’s really good.” And it was. This was 2009. This was rural New Hampshire. $12 an hour was very good pay.
I don’t remember why he didn’t want to work there. It wasn’t an honorable place to work for some reason or another.
Another piece of this honor code was that he wouldn’t “lie” on a job application. Which really meant he would say the most absurd things on these formal documents in the name of “honesty.”
The few times he got interviews, he was also absurdly honest. If he was asked, “Why do you want to work here?” he would respond with something like “I really don’t. I think I’ll be bored and hate dealing with customers. But the pay is good, so I’ll put up with it for a while.”
And because he was so proud of having so much honor, he’d tell me said those things.
I was starting to become very frustrated with him.
“Don’t you want to live with me? Don’t you want to marry me? Can’t you try even a little?”
He always changed the subject and never really told me why he was acting that way.
I nagged him into applying to Wal-Mart. Aside from working at the ball bearings factory, Wal-Mart was one of the sweetest gigs there was for a person with no degree or skill-set.
I sat with him while he completed the online application. He got to the part that’s like a Myers-Briggs personality test. You know, where they ask you about how you’d handle specific situations?
“No, no!” I told him. “You want the third answer.”
“But that’s not what I’d do.”
I sighed. “Dennis, you won’t get called for an interview if you don’t fill it out right.”
He ignored all of my attempts to give him the right answers. He kept clicking on the “honest” “honorable” answers.
I went over to the couch and put my head in my hands. I didn’t know what to do. I loved him. I loved him so much. But I was seeing him in this brand new way. What we had now was what we would always have. He’d never moved forward in life because he didn’t want to.
I kept trying. I kept prodding. I kept trying to convince him. I love you. We could be together all the time.
I wanted it so much. I wanted it so badly that I found myself applying to second jobs. With a second job, we could do it.
It was when a manager at a convenience store asked me about my availability that it hit me. “I have school in the mornings and I work Wendy’s in the afternoon. On Tues and Thursday I don’t have classes or work, so I’m available all day. And I’m open on the weekends in the mornings.”
I realized that I was going to be working round the clock. Not even one day off. No breaks. All so that Dennis could hold on to this…honor of his….
I know he wasn’t being this way to be cruel. But I also knew I couldn’t do this to be with him.
After that conversation with that manager (who never did offer me the job btw), I viewed my relationship with Dennis differently. This wasn’t my future husband. This was something nice right now.
I started feeling sad whenever I was with him, and when I noticed this, it made me even sadder, because I loved him so deeply and wanted us to have a future so much. But I couldn’t make it happen on my own. I couldn’t drag him into it.
I spent less and less time with him.
He called me one day and asked me what was wrong. Why wasn’t I spending the night anymore? Why hadn’t I called in almost a week?
And I chickened out. I didn’t know how to tell him that I had to end it because I couldn’t rely on him. As much as he always wanted to take care of me emotionally, when it came to the practicalities of life, I couldn’t trust him to help me. I was afraid of a life with a man I couldn’t trust to help me.
“I think I need to focus more on school,” I lied. “I want to break up.”
He cried. He cried so much. And I started crying too. Because I wished it could have been different.
“If you end this, you can never come back to me,” he sobbed. And he’d never talked to me like that before.
“Okay.”
We didn’t talk again until 7 years later. I told him his wedding pictures were beautiful and his baby looked just like him and he thanked me for accepting his friend request and asked if I was still writing.
This is what was supposed to happen. It was hard, but it was what was supposed to happen.
My head popped off again briefly after Dennis. I went back to some of my worst behaviors. But the first time a man talked to me like the way they’d always talked to me, I snapped out of it.
Because Dennis had shown me there was a different way to do this love thing. I stopped taking poor treatment from men and I started working a lot harder on getting my shit together, and as silly and immature as he was back then, I don’t think I would have done it without him.
He wasn’t perfect, but he did love me. And meeting and loving him was a major turning point in my life.
