Love Me Like This

He’s sat across from me.

Of course this is the expected thing to do. In times like these.

Proper I think it’s called. Proper, or pleasant, and not overly forward, sure. But, how can it be? Now there’s only one thing to save me from undisturbed eye contact with this new and uncertain human: refuge in the glass of wine I will order to set between us.

I’ll never drink it of course. That’s not what it’s there for though.

It’s there to protect me. From nowhere to hide. And from being known too soon for what I am.

I order merlot. A tasteful, upstanding choice I assume. Something a self-respecting, but unpretentious girl would select. I suppose this is who I want to be tonight.

It’s going fairly well so far. If politely were to be one’s definition of well.

He’s a well-groomed, educated boy though, raised with manners and a commitment to general decency. This I can tell. So the politeness isn’t really a surprise. Bearing this, shock and dismay over the life I’ve lead wouldn’t be either.

This is why I test.

By the time the waiter returns with our drinks we’ve exchanged the usual beginner’s pleasantries: where from, what do, parent’s names, siblings, hobbies, friends in college, bothers at work.

After appetizers, a slight unmasking occurs.

He asks me, “What’s the most intense thing that’s ever happened to you?”

I don’t really like this word: intense. So vague. I want to tell him that when you’re terrified all the time, then: everything. But I don’t say this.

Instead I ask him to go first.

He tells me about the time he took a bullet out of his friend’s leg with safety scissors in his childhood bedroom so nobody would get arrested at the hospital. They’d been playing with his older brother’s gun.

“Wow.” My surprise is genuine. “I’d say that hits the mark. Intense for sure. Is your friend alright?”

He is and I’m glad, because I didn’t see this coming, but I don’t say so. Instead I say to myself that this one might be on to something. But I’ll have to administer the test to be certain.

I take a deep breath and find my voice.

“So there’s a few things you’ll need to know before I can tell you mine. Mostly, I need you to understand that I never meant for any of it to happen. It was just one of those things where a bunch of predetermined life variables came together, on courses of their own, to create what should basically be considered an unavoidable tragedy.”

“Sounds heavy, but sure. I’m listening.” He sounds mildly concerned, like I’m going to tell him that I murdered someone. But I would never tell anyone that. Not on a first date.

“Ok. You’re sure you’re ready?” I try to sound confident-coy, but really I’m dying inside.

After all, I only give tests to those with promise. But I also know the score before we begin. So I don’t truly have anything to worry about.

“I guess we’ll see.” He smirk-intimates, trying to make us both comfortable for whatever lies ahead.

And so he should. After all, it was his idea to talk about ‘intense’ things.

“Alright. Well I think the first thing to know is that we – my brother and I - weren’t allowed to watch TV growing up. Our family owned a TV, but watching it was frowned upon in a soul-ejecting, you-might-just-ruin-your-whole-life kind of way.”

“That does sound intense!” Oh dear, this was barely the preamble.

“Hmm, yes, well, they say the average child watches between two and six hours of TV a day – so comparatively speaking my childhood was an uncontained abyss.”

“Yeah, I can see that freeing up a lot of your time.” Good, he gets that that’s the main takeaway. Part one of the test passed.

“It really did. And we needed something to do. And my dad had grown up on a farm. So we got hamsters.”

“Ok. Farm Dad. No TV. Hamsters. Got it.”

“Yes. Well this particular combo as you’ve just named it, turned out to be a dangerous one.”

He laughs, bemusedly ushering on my weirdo grandstanding.

“We didn’t know this at first of course. It started innocently enough with one hamster, and I named her after my favorite cousin, and I loved her, and it was great. Then we got another and soon we had three, then four. Then they started having babies. By the time I was ten, we’d had about 50 or 60 hamsters in total.”

He’s just listening. I’m thrown by this, but soldier on.

“So this is what we did with almost all our free time. When they didn’t need to be fed, or cleaned or exercised in the yard we just sat beside their cages and watched them. My parents called it the hamster-tube - like some kind of homegrown, morally incorruptible discovery channel.

“And they were everything. They were pure and interesting. Their sweet innocence the perfect beacon for our curious hearts. Hamsters genuinely seemed like the answer. But truly we didn’t know anything else.”

He’s chuckling again, but still not saying anything.

“Eventually our parents out-grew their no TV rule and started stealing cable from the neighbors. Then I got addicted to MTV for a whole summer and eventually the last of the hamsters lived out their days and found their place in the backyard cemetery.”

“I mean I don’t know if I’d call any of that intense, but it’s pretty funny. Seems like you turned out ok though.” If he really believes this, then part two of the test may be passed.

I pause. I realize how long I’ve been carrying on for. I second-guess, but then I remember that this is the only way I know.

I sigh. “I wish this was the end of the story, but it’s not. “

“Alright. Go on.”

So polite.

“Flash forward to around two years ago. It happened all over again, but worse. I’d moved back home after college to save money, and my brother, he’d never left. Neither of us could find a job, and I think that same loose-end boredom came back to haunt us. So we fixed it the only way we knew how: we got more hamsters. I think it was almost automatic. Like a reflex."

“Jesus.” I think he’s starting to catch on. He might be able to see me for what I really am now. But I can’t stop. I have to finish the test.

“It was fine at first, honestly. I got a boy and my brother got a girl and that was it for a while. But then we still couldn’t find jobs so we thought why not let them have babies.

“We kept two boys from the first litter. Now we were back up to four: the mom - Lavender - and the dad and two son hamsters.”

He’s being polite at this point. I’m sure of it.

I take another deep breath and roll my eyes at my whole life.

“Ok, so long story short, the mom somehow manages to get out of her cage and when we find her, she’s in with one of her sons. And I mean this could have been fine, but it soon became clear she was pregnant.

“Not ideal from a genetic standpoint, sure, but we figured, no big deal - they’re hamsters.

“So Lavender had those son babies and they looked pretty alright: no visible deformities, no motor retardation. Seemingly all good on the surface. We figured we were in the clear. We’d let them wean for the needed 6 weeks, give the babies to the pet store and that would be that.

“But then Lavender never stopped looking really fat. We assumed it was just baby weight from back to back pregnancies, but no. She was pregnant again – with her son’s son’s babies.

“Believe me, I blamed myself. I went through shock and then grief and then outrage. We tried to figure out if we’d miscounted the weaning period, or if someone had let in her in with one of the other grown hamsters, but it wasn’t that. She’d been knocked up by one of her son’s sons.

“So again Lavender gave birth and again the babies seemed fine. But this was not the case. Some terrible genetic anomaly had been unleashed.

“At about two weeks, we noticed the boy hamsters from Lavender’s son’s son’s litter were developing at an alarming rate - in one particular area: their balls."

My date’s stopped eating. I can tell he’s rightfully off-put at this point. If I wasn’t a formidable hourglass in this dress I’m sure he would have left by now. But I can’t let that be the reason he stays.

“I know how this must sound, but we assessed the situation and tried to do the right thing. We knew they were too young to be weaned, despite their mutant sexual prematurity. But we figured, it’s not like they’d be able to get Lavender pregnant. They were one inch long! So we let them stay with her a bit longer.

“What an oversight this turned out to be. We hadn’t thought about the son’s son’s daughters! At three weeks it became clear that they too had been touched by the rampant fertility curse, and almost every one of them, about six in all, had round swollen baby baby tummies of their own.

"What came next was one of the strangest, seemingly natural, yet very much not so, things we’d ever seen. We separated the teen moms from Lavender and their baby daddy brothers and they gave birth in this massive pile, that they all seemed to know to give birth in, of like 40 squirming son son daughter hamsters."

I place my fingers on the base of my wine glass to steady myself as I look into his eyes.

He’s looking back at me - steady, expectant, smirking ever so slightly.

It’s time for my closing remarks. “Most of them didn’t survive. The ones that did, we kept until they'd lived out their curse. To protect the world from what we’d done.”

“After that I understood why hamsters are banned in the state of California as well as the dangers of getting a B.A. and returning to your childhood home.”

Somehow this boy, this young man really, hasn’t left. And of all the things he could say after what I have just revealed, he chooses, “I think you did the right thing.”

The test is complete.

He’s given the correct answer. The best answer really, but also a terrifying one; one that means the game is over and I must relinquish the role of test maker.

Fair is fair.

It’s not supposed to happen like this though. I’ve designed the test to not be passed. There’s not supposed to be a prize or a bonus round. It’s supposed to be lights off, walk out of the arcade, go home.

But he’s still here, illuminated by the warm hues of my merlot.

This isn’t right. It’s supposed to be that the hamster pile is the only and strangest thing I’ll ever have to reveal about myself. It’s supposed to be that knowing he can’t handle this, I can safely move on, confidant that he won’t be able to handle anything else about me either. And I’ll get to keep me and he’ll get to keep his normal life. Everyone wins.

Yet in this moment, his earnest care glinting through eyes I am no longer afraid of, I realize my test only works if my strange is really thus. And it just might not be. At least not to him.

This is the sort of score I haven’t prepared for. That I didn’t know I’d need to prepare for.

Then we’d both have to love me like this.