You Deserve Each Other

by Sarah Hogle

I looked it up once to make sure it was a typo but never pointed it out to Mr. and Mrs. Rose because I don’t want them getting a new one with the correct quote. I derive vicious pleasure from knowing their plaque is wrong.

There’s one single television in the “salon”—a relic of the seventies that is never turned on and whose sole purpose is to reflect your shock that such a mammoth television set is still in someone’s house.

It’s her ode to a gilded age gone by, when children suppressed all their thoughts and emotions to make life easier for their boozy parents.

Her mother sometimes talks about her like she’s dead. Nicholas has told me that she’s an EDM deejay, and just for that she’s my favorite member of this family.

She learned from her own mother-in-law (a truly terrifying individual I got to meet only once before Satan called her home) how to be frigid and passive-aggressive.

She clasps my face between her soft, cool palms. I’m not sure she has blood. Sometimes she gets a little red in the face but that’s only because she was left plugged in for too long and the outlet overheated.

I smell food cooking, and the promise of a free meal is the only reason I don’t immediately impale myself on the coat rack.

The only reason he keeps a straight face is that he’s standing directly in front of a window. It’d be too easy for me to push him through it.

“So lucky that your adult son buys you diamonds and golf clubs to celebrate an anniversary that isn’t even his! I can’t imagine to what lengths he’d go for his own anniversary.”

“Why don’t you ever have my back? You always abandon me.” “You always abandon me first,” I hiss.

I’ll eat a bloody half-formed cow fetus with my bare hands if it’ll get Nicholas to dump me in front of his mom like a total chump. What has my life come to, if that’s my goal now?

“Even after all this time together, there’s still so much I don’t know. Our Nicky is surprisingly mysterious.” At that, his gaze snaps to mine, and there’s a glimmer of amusement lurking there. “Don’t sell yourself short, Naomi,” he replies. “I think you’re starting to figure me out.” “Yes, I believe I am. It’s taken some time.” “We can’t all be quick learners.”

“I wish Nicholas were handsier—I mean handier,” I say, stealing the spotlight right back. “I’ve been performing maintenance duties by myself. But I’ve been getting better results, interestingly enough.”

Once, I walked in on him while he was leafing through a Playboy and he said, “Have you ever been with an older man, Nina?”

It’s a pulled punch I’m saving for after I’ve already knocked him down but need to make sure he can’t get back up again. I’m getting my goddamn lemon cake and your mom is uninvited to the wedding. Roundhouse kick. I’m wearing a tuxedo and we’re eloping. Jab to the throat. We’re never naming our daughter after Deborah. High kick. I haven’t flossed in a year. Uppercut. Your dad goes to brothels.

“We’re not having children,” I declare. “I’m barren. I lost my uterus in a Ponzi scheme.”

“There’s nothing wrong with your gas gauge,” I tell him. It’s one of the meanest things I could ever say. “You can’t admit you didn’t notice your fuel was low.”

His eyes are crazed. At game night, I realized they change colors, and right now his eyes are the color of four horsemen heralding Armageddon, riding forth on beasts whipped from storm clouds.

His eyes dip to the Steelers logo on my hoodie and he clenches his jaw so tight I know there’s a hairline fracture there with my name on it. An X-ray technician will be astounded to see the word Naomi etched into his bones one day.

Dentists are monsters.

I hear the slow, somber bells of my funeral toll and hope someone competent does my makeup if it’s going to be open casket. It occurs to me that I’m a little bit morbid.

He’s high on bubble-gum-flavored laughing gas and in the fog of his zombiefied brain all he can remember is that I insulted his tie.

His damned Maserati has heated seats that make you feel like you’re sitting in the devil’s lap.

He watches Jeopardy! to show off (and because he’s an eighty-year-old man trapped in the body of a Disney prince), getting a high every time he delivers the correct answer before a contestant does.

“Oh my god,” I say in a hoarse whisper. “You’re going to drag me into the woods and shoot me, aren’t you?”

We’re all invited to Deborah’s wedding in January.

This is how I’ll die: slightly unwilling but ultimately lazy.

“Are you having a midlife crisis?” He’s a bit young for one, but then again he reads all the boring parts of the newspaper and there are usually Werther’s candies in his pockets. He mentions his 401(k) a lot.

She’d assume I’m having an affair, which, I’ve got to admit, is what this is starting to feel like. There’s no way this is Nicholas. A thousand-year-old witch has hijacked his body.

His regular jacket is an ivory lump in the middle of the back seat, the same color as his flesh. It makes me think of the witch who shucked him from his skin and is wearing him like a bodysuit.

“You really need to stop telling your coworkers I’m out to murder you.” Irritation flits across his features. “Doesn’t give me a good rep.”

“I’ve always wanted a front door that’s painted purple. The color of magic.”

“I don’t really care what you want, to be honest. I don’t like you again yet. But I’m going to. And you’re going to like me again, too. This house is going to save us.”

“Naomi, if the point were a meteor hurtling straight toward the earth with the power to destroy us all, you’d still miss it somehow.”

A kitchen witch lives here. She keeps a cauldron in the hearth and lays bundles of dried herbs across the overhead beams.

“I’m talking to myself right now. Give us a minute.”

“A house like this is full of stories. It should have a name.”

We’re Heathcliff’s and Catherine’s ghosts, marooned in the wilds of Morris.

Being acquainted with Deborah has killed so much of what I loved about her son.

It’s a kill shot, but he raises a laugh like a shield and my blow glances right off.

It’s inane, but I’m mad he knew about this and didn’t tell me. It’s such a juicy tidbit to hog all to himself. I’m supposed to be his fiancée! He should share these humiliating stories about his parents with me.

When we get back out to the car, we plot how to ruin each other’s lives.

No matter what he wears to disguise it, Nicholas was bred to host balls at Pemberley.

It’s a pouty, prissy sort of beauty that screams drape me over a leather chaise to contemplate ennui.

Forget Tinder; after Nicholas throws in the towel I’m going to hire a batch of movers and find my next boyfriend that way.

I’m in a bad way. Boulder-size men with ZZ Top beards and face tattoos. Balding mad scientists. Count Chocula. The silhouette from Mad Men’s credits. If this drought goes on any longer I’ll be lusting after the featureless figure on men’s restroom signs.

I’m watering the Charlie Brown tree because I have love to give and nowhere meaningful to dump it.

I try to bring you back to me every time you go to leave, off into your own head where I’m not allowed.”

All I know is that it’s a bad idea to fulfill your physical needs if you won’t fulfill my emotional ones.”

I look like a pilgrim with cholera.