On our first road trip together, Crankenstein and I visited her parents. It was a trepidatious occasion for us both. She was worried I’d flee within five minutes of seeing their house or meeting her father, and I was worried about the effect being back home would have on her mental health. For the first leg of our travels I provided the music, assembling a playlist that began with Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris’s “This Is Us,” which catalogs memorable moments from a lengthy marriage.
Crankenstein’s favorite of my selections was “A Chicken With Its Head Cut Off,” by the Magnetic Fields. It is the brief, sardonic story of a loser Lothario in search of a hookup who promotes himself thusly:
Eligible, not too stupid
Intelligible, and cute as Cupid
Knowledgeable, but not always right
Salvageable, and free for the night
“Salvageable” had been us at the start of our relationship, though Crankenstein was rarely free for the night. Each of us came with plenty of baggage, including the inconvenient facts that I wasn’t fully over my ex and Crankenstein wasn’t fully over her latest stint in ED recovery. But, as Billy Wilder wrote, “Nobody’s perfect.” We tempered our expectations and gave each other a chance, which was humorously echoed in Stephin Merritt’s lyrics:
We don’t have to be stars exploding in the night
Or electric eels under the covers
We don’t have to be anything quite so unreal
Let’s just be lovers
At the hotel I unpacked the weekend bag I’d excitedly purchased years prior and never used; my ex was adamant about keeping me away from her family (or keeping them away from me). I hung its matching toiletry bag from the bathroom door, arranging its contents on the counter. To Crankenstein, an agent of chaos, it was pleasing to see everything we might need, from moisturizer to her preferred hand soap, in one place.
A few months earlier she’d eagerly introduced me to her mother, who was disappointed to learn I couldn’t play mahjong, a skill she thought all Jews possessed. During that visit her mom wanted to see my house, possibly to glean from its condition whether I was a suitable partner for her messy daughter. What she found may have alarmed her. Though my home was mostly empty — I’d been preparing to sell it and move away, until Crankenstein upended my plans — what remained was quite tidily arranged.
“Now, have you seen [Crankenstein’s] apartment?” she drawled in genuine concern. My fastidiousness made enough of an impression that I was almost barred from entering Crankenstein’s parents’ home; my future mother-in-law was self-conscious about her husband’s hoarding problem. When I was invited in, I knew better than to look at the mess, but I was also warned not to look at my mother-in-law or the elderly dog on her lap would become aggressive. That left me with very few options, a dilemma that still makes me laugh.
After a few days of carefully dodging conversational landmines, it was time to go home. Crankenstein’s weepy parents clutched us to their chests and told us they loved us. Crankenstein had recently turned 30 and I was the first adult girlfriend she bothered introducing to them, partly because of their homophobia and partly because of their general cantankerousness. As we fired up our road trip soundtrack again, she expressed shock that I’d garnered “I love yous” despite my mahjong uselessness.
In February of this year, when I realized in earnest that a Parkinson’s diagnosis was almost inevitable, my first thought was that the only honorable thing to do was tell Crankenstein that if she wanted to leave and start over while she still could, I would understand. But my second thought was about that trip and that song — Knopfler’s riffs and Emmylou’s voice — and the feeling that we were embarking on a grand adventure, poised to make memories that would fill the earliest pages of our own family album.
A photo she took then is still her phone’s wallpaper all these years later. I’m in her parents’ favorite thrift store, holding a small figurine of a merman — not the Ethel that all good homosexuals prefer, but a male mermaid. My face was still expressive and my hands didn’t shake. If we’d known then what was coming, would that trip have ever happened? I don’t know. Maybe “salvageable, and free for the night” would still have piqued her interest.