Love Is a Mix Tape

by Rob Sheffield

  Renée and I were surprised at all the drama we had to deal with, just living together in our tiny room. For one thing, we always argued about the telephone. I’m not much of a phone person. I always vowed if I ever met a woman who ignored a ringing phone for me, she was the one. But of course, this never happened, and I fell for a woman who would have dropped a scalpel into my spleen in the middle of performing open-heart surgery on me to grab the phone. You know the Prince song where the girl’s phone rings but she tells him, “Whoever’s calling couldn’t be as cute as you?” I long to live out this moment in real life. But I doubt it ever happened to Prince either. I bet even Apollonia got the phone.

  Neither of us was a skilled fighter. My ancestors were neither warriors nor kings. I am descended from generations of peace-loving shepherds who tended their flocks in the hills of Kealduve and never killed anybody. Their strength was in their patience. Growing up I never got into fights because I never wanted to disgrace my ancestors—God knows they knew how to disgrace themselves, and fair play to them. But they lived in the grassy fields, so when the house was full of ugly emotions they could step outside, smoke a pipe, kick a sheep or something, and let the air clear. Renée and I did not have a farm, or even walls in our apartment, so we had to do our fighting in the same room where we had to sleep and eat, and that’s no good. Her temper was a zero-to-sixty machine. We were pretty good at keeping the two-minute fights from escalating into three-minute fights. The problem was keeping the three-minute fights from turning into eight-hour fights. When the air in the house got toxic, I would go out into the driveway and sit in the car and read, waiting for the smoke to clear.

  One Saturday afternoon, I got tired of the driveway, so I said, Fuck this, and drove to the parking lot at the Barracks Road Shopping Center, got a cup of coffee, and locked myself in with a book. I sat there all day, reading Shelley’s The Witch of Atlas, hoping for the bad blood in my head to simmer down. When the sun went down, I still wasn’t ready to go home, so I cracked the door to turn on the inside light for as long as I could stand the cold. After that, I turned on the engine and sat there with it running and tried to keep reading. I turned on the radio and heard an old 1970s hit I have loathed since my childhood: “Hitchin’ a Ride” by Vanity Fare. I hate this song. The singer chirps about how he’s stuck on the side of the road, hitchin’ a ride, since his girl threw him out. “Ride, ride, ride. Hitchin’ a ride.” There’s a flute solo. I sat there huddling in the cold, breathing out steam, fuming, I hate this song. Then I drove home. A couple of nights later, Renée asked, “Where did you take the car the other day?” I told her. She laughed at me.

  Stupid shit we used to fight about:

  The Telephone: Would she stop to answer the phone in the middle of a fight about the phone? Yes, she would. This definitely proved one of us right, but I’m not sure which one.

  Money: One of us was a scrimp-and-saver, the other was a big spender. Neither of us was what is known as an “earner.”

  Reproduction: We were programmed very differently about this one, in terms of our ancestry and culture. She was into the idea of having babies fast; I wasn’t. Three or four times a year we would have a conversation about this, which would usually begin as a whimsical anecdote about a college friend’s baby or a pregnant relative, and suddenly turn into the last twenty minutes of The Wild Bunch. Why didn’t we discuss this before we got married? I don’t know. We just didn’t. Renée had this excellent country-girl pal at her mall job named Tiffany, who quit to have a baby and go on welfare. When she brought her baby to the mall to show everybody, Tiffany asked Renée how come she didn’t have a baby yet. Renée said something about saving up. Tiffany said, “Aw, hon, the money always comes from somewhere!” The weird part is, not only did we both love this story, we each felt it proved us right. Strange! But true!

  The Word “Repulse”: I hate this word. I believe “repel” is a perfectly good word, and “repulsion” is the noun, as well as the title of an excellent Dinosaur Jr. song. A compulsion compels you; an impulse impels you. Nobody ever says “compulse” or “impulse” as a verb. So why would you ever say “repulse”? This word haunts me in my sleep, like a silver dagger dancing before my eyes. Renée looked it up and I was wrong. But I still kind of think I’m right.

  The Word “Utilize”: Even worse.

  Figure Skating: She won this one. I’m glad she did. Figure skating saved us. No matter how bad a mood Renée was in, those twirls and axels melted her butter. Figure skaters were always on TV somewhere. Ice dancers were the best: brooding Slav castrati dudes with tree-trunk thighs, packed into a glittery fistful of L’Eggs, twirling feminine whisks named Natasha or Alexandra, enacting the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice to the orchestral strains of “Loving on Borrowed Time: Love Theme from Cobra.” How did married people stay together before this shit was invented? I honestly have no idea. Renée drooled over Paul Wiley (the clean-cut American), Victor Petrenko (the ruthless Russian), Kurt Browning (the burly Canadian), and good old Scott Hamilton. That guy’s enduring success as a sex symbol is the sort of thing that makes me wipe tears of joy from my eyes and proclaim, “Thumbs up, America!” For me, the ladies all dissolved into a blur of vowels and poofy skirts, except Katarina Witt. That girl had an ass on her. The Cutting Edge—I don’t see why this isn’t the most famous movie ever made. Moira Kelly as the skate princess! Brrrrrr—she’s cold as ice! She’s willing to sacrifice her love! D.B. Sweeney as the hockey stud! “I do two things well, babe—and skating’s the other one.” Can they win the medal and triple-lutz their way to love? (Of course they can! Pay attention!) For Renée, this flick was liquid Vicodin. We watched it several thousand times. I can still recite the whole thing from memory. “In case you can’ttell . . . I’m throwing myself at you!”

  TV in General: We both loved The Banana Splits and MTV. We disagreed about everything else. As far as I was concerned, TV had been crap ever since Freddie Prinze died. But we did our best to appreciate each other’s tastes—she got me into The Andy Griffith Show, I got her into Sanford and Son. My preferred method of avoiding her shows was just to go into the kitchen and do dishes, turning the water up loud whenever Renée got hooked on a show that involved doctors, lawyers, a small town full of lovable eccentrics, or Kirstie Alley.

  Getting a Dog: She won this one easily, as I’ve already mentioned; I thought my graceful surrender would win me a concession or two down the line. I was wrong. Renée saw the dog not as a personal victory for her, but as a huge favor she was doing me by teaching me the joys of being pissed on by an animal. This is just one of the adorable quirks of the dog, the best friend God ever gave humanity in this crazy little world. Thanks, God!

  The Air-conditioning Commercial: You know this one. It comes back every spring, like the gypsy moth caterpillar. The husband and wife sit sweating at the kitchen table. She says, “Honeeeeeey, why don’t we have aaaaaair-conditioning?” He says, “I’ll call tomorrow.” She says, “You’ll call today?” He smiles and says, “I’ll call today.” Then he’s on the phone, giving her a hearty thumbs-up, while Renée sits frozen, knuckles white on the remote, and asks, “I’m not like her, am I?” This question is like the cowboy in Mulholland Drive, who you see again one time if you do good and two times if you do bad. Answer the question wisely, and you won’t have to hear it again for another year. Try to give a clever answer, and you have bigger immediate problems than the humidity index.

  The Cure’s “Let’s Go to Bed”: Similar to the above, but when she gets depressed and asks, “Honey, is this song about us?” the strategic answer is, “Yes, but so is ‘Just Like Heaven.’”

  Fighting: As with most couples, probably, most of our fights were not about anything, but rather about fighting itself. We negotiated the rules, slowly, stupidly, over time. The word “sulk” got banned early on, in the summer of 1990. “Pout” was soon to follow. “Don’t start” was banned in the fall of 1992. “What is that supposed to mean?” got banned, reinstated, and banned
again. “Not that again” took a few years to go on the index. “What are you thinking?” never did get banned, despite my intense lobbying efforts.

  Whenever we had a fight, I could never get to sleep, so after it was over I got up, moved to the couch, fixed a sandwich, and watched TV with the sound down. One night I watched this intense Bette Davis movie, A Stolen Life. Even without sound, I could still follow the basic gist. There are twin Bette Davises, a good twin and an evil twin. Both are in love with Glenn Ford. They’re in a boat; it’s stormy; the boat capsizes. The good twin sinks under the waves and desperately reaches out her hand. The evil twin reaches down, but instead of grasping the hand, she just slides the wedding ring right off her sister’s finger. Damn. That’s cold-blooded, Bette Davis. Back in town, she pretends to be the good twin and gets to have post-shipwreck sex with Glenn Ford. I fell asleep, so I never found out if she got caught. After Renée died, I kept meaning to go back and watch it with the sound on, but I never did.

  One night, after some fight I’d thought we’d both forgotten, Renée woke up trembling and cold. She gave me very detailed instructions about what she needed. I was to get up, go into the kitchen, open up her stash of pizza dough, and make her a pizza. This would take half an hour or so. I asked if she’d be okay by herself for that long and she promised she would call me if she couldn’t make it. She was shaking. I got up and went to the kitchen.

  When the pizza was done, I carried it back to bed and we ate it. Renée told me the whole time she was alone in bed, she sang a song over and over to comfort herself. She sang: “The only one who could ever reach me, was the Makin’-the-Pizza Man.”

  dancing with myself

  AUGUST 1993

  One day we were at the Barracks Road Shopping Center when Renée called me over to the cosmetics aisle. We stared at a brightly colored plastic tube dangling from a hook. It was our first encounter with Grunge Gunk or, as it proclaimed itself on the label, “The Alternative Hair Styling Mud!” Of course we took it home ($1.75) and Renée nailed it up on the bathroom door.

  It was a Grunge Gunk kind of summer.

  As Lionel Richie once warned us, there comes a time when we heed a certain call. For us, that time was the summer of 1993. Our first redhead summer smelled like hair dye and nail polish. Renée had only been a redhead for a few months, but she was already burying her brunette past, and the apartment filled up with cosmetic fumes. Renée had a new job at the Fashion Square Mall, working as the Clarins girl at the Leggett makeup counter. At work, she became instant best friends with the Clinique girl, Susan, a Waynesboro muscle-car aficionado. She was fond of dispensing wisdom along the lines of: “The bullshit stops when the green light pops!” I’d go to the mall to pick up Renée, take them both a couple of coffees, and hang out while they chattered in their hot white coats. Susan would take Renée to hot-rod shows and run-what-ya-brung drag races. She brought out sides of Renée I’d never gotten to see before, and it was a sight to behold. After a night out with Susan, Renée would always come back saying things like, “If it’s got tits or tires, it’s gonna cost you money.”

  That year, the music we loved had blown up nationwide. It was a little ridiculous how formerly underground guitar rock was crashing through the boundaries. More guitar bands than ever were making noise, and more of them than ever were worth hearing. The first sign of the apocalypse had come during the Winter Olympics when Kristi Yamaguchi, America’s gold-medal ice queen, was doing her free-form routine to Edith Piaf’s “Milord,” and TV announcer Dick Buttons said that Kristi psyched herself up backstage by listening to her favorite band, Nirvana, on her Walkman. Renée and I just stared at each other. For her, it was an epiphanic moment—punk rock was now music that even figure-skater girls could listen to. The door was open. Our turn had arrived. Here we are now. Entertain us.

  Now we lived in a world of Grunge Gunk, where the bands we loved had a chance to get popular, or half-popular, or at least popular enough to get to keep making music, which is all most of them asked for. One night, before a special Seattle episode of Cops, the announcer said, “Tonight . . . in the city that gave us Pearl Jam . . . the cops are taking out the grunge!” Pathetic? Depressing? No. Awesome, we decided. Why not? We were easily amused. Maybe it was all the nail-polish fumes, but we were buzzing with energy. Our apartment flooded, so we just moved to the couch. For dinner, we cut across the train tracks to Wayside’s Fried Chicken. On weekends, Renée and I drove out to the Fork Union drive-in to see cinematic masterpieces like The Crush and Sliver. MTV spent the whole summer blasting the video where Snoop Doggy Dogg wore his “LBC” baseball hat. Renée asked, “Snoop went to Liberty Baptist College?”

  We both had raging crushes, which we loved to dish about together. Our big summer crushes were a couple of rookie grad students in the English department, named River and Sherilyn after the movie stars they reminded us of. Thank God neither of us was the jealous type, or the insecure type, or for that matter the cheatin’ type, since sharing our crushes was one of the major perks of being married. Renée would catalogue my crushes. There was Bassist Cleavage Girl (from the Luscious Jackson videos), Tremble-Mouth Girl (Winona Ryder), Mick Jagger Elastica Girl (Angelina Jolie in Hackers), Painted on a World War II Bomber Girl (Jennifer Connelly), My Eyes Are So Big You Could Fuck Them Girl (Susanna Hoffs), and Madonna (Madonna). She introduced me to her own seraglio, from the Braves’ Javy Lopez (“He sure is put together nice”) to Evan Dando (“He must get more cookie than the Keebler elves”).

  At first, being married made me feel older, but that summer it made me feel younger, just because I had a wife I could count on to make friends for me. Her girlfriends became my girlfriends. I didn’t have to do the work of scrounging my own social life because Renée pimped me out. She took me to parties and sent me to circulate among her crushes and pump them for information. At every party we went to, we’d split up at the door and work separate sides of the room. We had the system down: I was to check on her every forty minutes or so, touch her arm, ask if she needed a drink, and then she’d go back to work. On the way home, we’d ask each other, “What did he/she say about me?” River and Sherilyn came to our Fourth of July party, and it turned out Sherilyn was kind of a pyro, so she brought fireworks to set off in the citronella torches. We made mint juleps and had a blast. Renée got a wax burn while blowing out the torches and kept the scar the rest of the summer.

  Every party that summer ended the same way: One of the girls would put on Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville and all the girls would gather on the back porch and sing along with the whole album, word for word, while the boys stood around in the kitchen and listened. It was scary, like the summer after sixth grade, when the girls back home would gather on the stoop and do the same thing, except they were singing along to the Grease soundtrack. Same girls, same summer nights, just different songs. Liz Phair was asking, “Whatever happened to a boyfriend?” and I would think, Well, some of us turn into husbands, and then nobody writes songs about us except Carly Simon.

  Renée played this particular mix tape one night when she was sewing. Sewing was her most private activity, or at least the most private one I was allowed to sit in on. For a long time, she needed me to vacate the house whenever it was time to sew. After a while, it was okay if I stayed around, as long as I read a book and kept quiet. I was glad she was sewing because it was good for her. I was more glad when I got to hang out and watch. Her brow would furrow and her eyes would concentrate. Her mind would wander places I’d never seen her go before.

  By the night she popped in this tape to sew, she was so comfortable she let me hang out and listen while she worked. I’d never heard this one before. She made private tapes so she could sew or work out to them. (Working out never got to be the kind of thing she could do while I was around.) Of course, the private tapes probably had all the same songs she put on all her other tapes. One side of this mix is uptempo, so I assume she used it for dancing and jumping around; the other side is quiet, so I as
sume it was for meditating or bead-stringing or sewing or other solitary pursuits.

  Renée got seriously into sewing that year. She basically stopped wearing any clothes she didn’t make herself, except for her Clarins work uniform. None of her store-bought clothes looked good on her. She was getting bigger and wider—broader hips, fleshier thighs—and she couldn’t find any clothes in stores that would come close to fitting her. She used to cry when she had to buy ugly clothes from stores like Fashion Beetle or Aunt Pretty Poodle’s, which were her only choices in Charlottesville. So she just started making her own. Her sewing-machine corner of the living room filled up with piles and piles of fabric and patterns. She made a dress form of her body so she could design patterns that would fit her. She would go to the fabric store, sort through the boxes of patterns, and buy them so she could copy them into something that would fit her. She basically had one mod minidress that she made over and over. She couldn’t do zippers yet, but that summer she finally learned to do buttons and buttonholes, so she started making all her own foxy shirts. She sewed bike shorts to wear under her dresses so her thighs wouldn’t chafe when they rubbed together. And she would come home with the strangest, sorriest fabric: pea pods, seashells, eggs, Queen Elizabeth smiling, anything. The more pathetic and helpless the fabric looked on the rack, the more it would sucker her into trying to make it into a mod minidress.