read between the lines

The Guy and I have been together for almost three years. In that time, we've never had a single fight.

No, really. Not one.

This isn't something that I confess to a lot of people. Listeners are far too prone to saying things like, "What's wrong with you?" (or, conversely, "What's wrong with him?" which is the same thing, just more politically correct.) Then they're likely to launch into stories about the passionate relationships that they were in, in which the sex was great but there was nonstop fighting, which was why the sex was great, and how relieved they were to get out of those relationships and how grateful they are they're no longer fighting all the time and how they wished they had a relationship like mine, and . . .

. . . and all the time they're thinking, "Is Yuhri a Tamagotchi? Who the fuck has a three year relationship and doesn't have a single fight? Chick's not human."

Or, if they're a little more creative, they're thinking, "Maybe this guy she's engaged to is a figment of her imagination, like that cat?"

I'm not particularly interested in other people's old passionate, sexual relationships, or their lurid Tamagotchi fantasies about little yellow me and my little yellow buttons. On the whole, therefore, I tend to keep my mouth shut about the general tranquility of my relationship with the Guy.

With whom sex is outstanding even without fights, thank you.

The other night, however, we finally had our very first squabble. (Squabble. What a ridiculous word. It sounds like a board game played with live ducks.) A tiff. A tempest. A teapot. The Guy spent half the night on the couch.

Thing was, I didn't realize we were having a fight. I was joking when I told him he was kicked out of bed. Damn my Japanese genes. Nobody ever believes I have a sense of humor.

The roots of it all began in New Jersey, where I engaged in a two hour conversation with nurses about teeth. White teeth, to be specific. My teeth are, like the rest of me, solid, even, and yellow. The coloring has nothing to do with my eating habits; I might be the only Seattle native left who doesn't regularly consume a Guatemalan's weight in coffee. I also don't smoke. I suspect that the origins of my dental shading might have something to do with the two years in childhood when I decided to assert my maturity and independence from my mother by never brushing my teeth again.

Creative choice in self-empowerment for a 5 year old. In retrospect, I don't think I made a single intelligent decision until I was at least 25.

Fast-forward the clock to last weekend, wherein the Guy and I made a trip to Costco. We were standing in the check-out line when I noticed the bank of dental care products. This just goes to show the superiority of Costco over your average supermarket; not only can you buy toilet paper by the crate, your impulse shopping enticements consist of row upon row of hygiene products, instead of foil-wrapped fat bombs from your friends at Hershey Corp.

At any rate: dental care products. And among the dental care products: teeth whitening products. "Look," I said.

"Want it?"

"We could try it."

The Guy obligingly trotted forth and retrieved, and we went home with a Costco-sized pack of what turned out to be liquid tooth whitener from Crest.

If you have never used liquid tooth whitener from Crest, allow me to run you through the experience. The package comes with fourteen little brushes, tiny plastic things with tiny plastic bristles at the end of a long blue plastic handle. It comes with fourteen tiny little foil packets containing tiny amounts of white goop, like plastic, that almost instantly dries to booger consistency upon contact with air. It comes with a sheet of instructions.

So here's what you're supposed to do.

1. Brush your teeth.
   
2. Dry your teeth. (What?)
   
3. Get a little painty thingy. Get a little packet thingy.
   
4. Open little packet thingy, and squirt white goop onto brush.
   
5. Paint your teeth. Fast. Or it'll dry.
   
6. Too late.
   
7. Apply fresh white goop to "smile" teeth.
   
8. Do not drool.
   
9. Allow to dry.
   

Being the patient purple monkey that I am, I read the instruction sheet four times, followed every instruction to the letter, and eventually found myself with a set of bright yellow teeth that looked like they'd been visiting the Elmer's glue. The white goop, which smelled peculiarly like chloride, hardened into long gummy streaks that tasted pretty much the way they looked. I showed my new smile to the Guy, who looked dubious.

"No kisses for you, tonight."

No, that wasn't the fight. I wouldn't have kissed me either.

I puttered into the bedroom and began putzing about on the computer, occasionally pausing to clean something. I puttered out of the bedroom, and into the office, where the Guy was busily doing something geeky.

Now, here's where I have to do a little explaining. The goop on the teeth was fairly adhesive; that is to say, every idle movement of my mouth wasn't causing it to flake off like voters at a Democratic convention. Speaking should therefore not have been a problem. On the other hand, having this goop on my teeth felt weird; it made me reluctant to make certain sounds. Anything that required pressure against my teeth, for instance, or the passage of air between them.

You'd be surprised how many vowels and consonants require your lips to move.

"You!" I declared in a spray of saliva. The Guy flinched as it hit the back of his neck. "You! You hadda kode de dwessah dwawah."

The Guy flashed a shiny eye at me. "What did you say?"

"De dwessah dwawah. You hadda kode id. Wad'z zo hawd abou' koding da dwessah dwawah?"

"The dwessah dwawah?"

"Da dwessah dwawah."

"The dresser drawer?"

"Yed."

"What's so hard about closing the dresser drawer?"

"Yed."

The Guy was beginning to quiver. "Why should I close the dwessah dwawah?"

"Bekud id dan-jawuz," I said earnestly.

The Guy choked. "Why is it dan-jawuz?"

"I kud hid 'i head."

This required more explanation. It required a demonstration. The Guy crowbarred himself out of his chair and padded into the bedroom. I puttered after him, muttering agitatedly.

During my trip to New Jersey, the Guy had gone out and purchased an Ikea dresser for me, to sit side-by-side with his older, more stolid one. Until my return, I'd always kept my clothes in a small portable set of wire drawers, which just about managed to contain my entire wardrobe. Ever since I've known him, the Guy has had more clothes. More of everything, in fact: more clothes, more shoes, more hair.

Working with the purple monkeys has expanded my wardrobe a tiny bit. I outgrew the wire drawers. Now I had real ones. My drawers, when we walked into the bedroom, were all nice and orderly and shut. The Guy's drawers, on the other hand, displayed a remarkably cavalier attitude towards physics. Three of them gaped wide open, loaded with enough cumulative weight to launch the dresser's base of support into another zip code.

"Dewe," I said with triumph. "I tode you."

The Guy nudged an open drawer. It creaked. He inspected it. "How could you possibly hit your head on that, you hamster?"

"I kud bed dow. Wed I stad up, I kud hid 'i head. Id dan-jawuz."

"It's what?"

"Dan-jawuz."

He started to giggle. "I keep forgetting you're four feet tall and blind."

"Fug you."

...which sent him off the deep end entirely. He pounced on me like a bear, and squashed me in some sort of hug that involved a great deal of drool transfer from my chlorine-maligned mouth to his shirt. It's hard not to salivate when one's being fed dark cotton and chest. "You're so silly," he chortled.

"You aw seebig od da couje," I told his chest.

At two o'clock in the morning, I woke up to discover that the bed was empty. I wandered out to the living room to investigate, and found the Guy curled up like some sort of small, fuzzy animal on the loveseat in the living room. The monitor of the laptop on the coffee table bathed him in its warm, Microsoft benevolence.

He looked very cute. He looked very peaceful. I poked him mercilessly.

"Wake up. Wake up. What are you doing out here? Are you an idiot? You stupid monkey. Why are you sleeping on the couch?"

It's the curse of the Guy that he is a light sleeper; snores and thrashing and physical abuse tend to waken him almost immediately. Poking -- really determined poking aimed at the temple -- perked him up right away. He opened his eyes and looked bewildered, like a small pet rodent whose god has played another evil trick on him and replaced his pine shavings with shredded bits of the San Francisco Examiner: bad litter and bad content.

"You kicked me out of bed," he said pathetically. "You said I should sleep on the couch. Why did you wake me up? I was sleeping."

The poor, stupid little man. I regarded him tenderly and poked him some more. He whimpered. "I was joking." Poke. "You're a dumb monkey. Get up. Get up. It was a joke. Ha ha. Joke. Let's go to bed."

I herded my confused man to bed, tucked him in, crawled into bed myself, rolled over, and squashed him.

Our very first fight. Glorious.

And who's a Tamagotchi now?