ring around the rosey

My sister called me on Saturday to ask me about professional etiquette in regards to a job she's interested in, and after we'd settled that subject, we moved onto the issue of my wedding registry, which is in week two of its disembowlment with nary a recovery in sight.

I had to explain to her what I'd done, as she hadn't had a chance to go online and read the damage. When the narrative was finished there was a small silence on the phone, as though she were picking her words with care -- although that couldn't possibly have been the actual case because, come on, my family. What she finally ended up saying was, "You realize how 7-year old that sounds?"

Yes. Yes, I do. Thanks.

"Don't mention it."

"--But please. It was Mom. Tell me she's never turned you into a raving idiot. And did you hear what she said to me?"

My sister admitted that she had heard, in that sympathetic and resigned way that sisters use when they, like you, still live under the manipulative thumb of an evil troll woman a pair of chopsticks could snap in half. "I put my head in my hands and was, like, 'I can't believe you said that.' But, you know--"

"--Mom," we said together in unison. We understood each other.

I mused, "I wonder which is worse? Jewish guilt or Japanese guilt?"

"Asian guilt," Sako said instantly. She's been living at home for the last month while she completes another class in her ongoing, 20-year Bachelor of Science program at University of Washington. "Turns out my advisor's husband is half-Chinese half-Jewish. I went into her office and sat down on her chair and said 'You have to help me, my mother is driving me insane,' and she said, 'Oh my God, I know exactly what you mean.' She says she knew exactly how I felt because her husband was half and half. And I asked her which was worse, and she said it was definitely the Asian guilt, hands down."

I felt so proud. Go, my peeps. Again.

To those who have been offering advice and encouragement on how to handle a mad maternal unit, I appreciate it. She called me last night to tell me that my grandmother had finished the calligraphy on the backs of the wedding favors she's bringing from Japan: "Ken, Wa, Fu," which literally translates to "Health, Harmony, Prosperity," the three ingredients of happiness.

"She was up until three a.m. to writing them," Mom said. "It taking her long time, but they are all finish. She says, maybe not so good writing, but you know, she getting old."

Mom comes by it honestly, I suppose. I can't wait until I have children I can wrack with pangs of agonizing remorse. It's important for children to learn their cultural traditions. Guilt.

With a side of parricide.

The Guy's wedding ring came in the mail a several days ago. I ordered it one night, having been reminded by some chance comment that a wedding ring is, in most cases, a useful accessory to a wedding.

For those of you who haven't seen it, feel free to take a look. It's titanium and platinum, and is inscribed inside with, '"I have spread my dreams under your feet." - W.B. Yeats.'

I'll give you a moment to recover.

Yes, it is a lovely sentiment. Yeats, I learned, is one of the Guy's favorites. It's a beautiful line, and a spectacularly deceptive one. Neither of us is romantic, or at least not successfully so, and it might have been more appropriate to inscribe the thing with a line of ingredients off a Cheetos bag, or an "If found, return to--." However, I was planning ahead. It was with images of our children eventually reading that inscription and deceiving themselves that before they came along, their parents once had a life full of romance and sweet loving and, you know, joy, that I selected it. Bring on the guilt. My people plan ahead.

As I was saying, the wedding ring arrived several days ago at my workplace, and after I and all my coworkers had inspected it, I brought it home to show the Guy. He was very excited. He took the little plastic bag out of the little silver mesh bag, and he took the ring out of the little plastic bag, and he put the ring on his finger . . . and we found out that we'd ordered it a little big.

Well, okay. Fuck.

While I methodically bashed my head on the dining room table, the Guy experimented. He put it on and tugged it off, put it on and tugged it off, put it on and tugged it off--

"Stop that!"

--he put it on and tugged it off, then curled his fingers up and practiced typing. "It feels weird," he announced.

"So take it off," I said in a muffled voice. My face was still buried in the table.

The Guy, however, wanted to keep it on. "Just to see," he said. He wore it for an hour. And then another hour. And at the end of the second hour, he scampered to where I was sitting on the couch and showed me, with great pride, how his finger had puffed up like a massive, engorged sausage so his ring would stay on.

He was very proud. "Do you want to wear it all night?" I asked, burying my face in the couch.

He did. He wore it while working online, pausing every few moments to starfish his hand under the lamp. "See?" He wore it while brushing his teeth, pausing every few moments to wave his finger in front of my face. "Shee? Shee?" He wore it to bed, and prodded me in the ribs to show me his hand. "See? See? Look! Look!"

I looked. I complimented. And then, because I really am not a romantic -- though I really, really wish I was -- I fell asleep.

The next morning, the Guy woke me up with his shrieking. The ring had stayed on through the night; it was now fitting perfectly. However, when he removed it, he found that the skin beneath the ring had gone white and moist. He was convinced his finger was going to turn gangrenous and fall off. "Look!" he wailed, trailing me around the apartment with the ring in one hand and the offending finger waving about with the other. "Look! You're trying to kill me! This is what marriage is to you? It cut off all the circulation to my finger! It's puffed up like a giant pickle! I'm going to be scarred for life. For life!"

It was useless to explain to him that the ring was just wide and had trapped moisture under it. He was still chirping tragically when I left for work.

...and that, I thought, was that. I went online at work to investigate ring resizing options and learned that titanium is an inconveniently difficult metal to negotiate. When I came home, I found the ring in its little plastic baggie in its little silver mesh bag, neatly tied with silver ribbon, on the keyboard of my laptop.

"Cute," I thought, tossed it in its Fedex bag, and thought no more about it.

Except that night when the Guy came home, he demanded to know where his ring was and went rooting through my pile o'wedding crap to find it. He bore it off with him like a paranoid chipmunk convinced people are after his mouthful of peanuts. A few minutes later, he reappeared with it on his finger, unbearably smug. He wore it all evening. He wore it to bed. He woke up the next morning and wailed over his finger.

Lather. Rinse.

Repeat.

This is the way it has been for the last few days; there is no talk of resizing the ring now, as he is convinced that it fits perfectly -- and, in fact, it sort of does, after his finger has had enough time to grow accustomed to the ring's presence and (I'm convinced) expand to fit it. Some sort of psychosomatic response, I suppose: wish fulfillment. At any rate, that's one more thing completed. Now all he needs is a tuxedo.

One night while I was watching TV, he trotted up to me and demanded that I put it on his finger. "Just to practice," he said. Only dimly aware of the interruption, I slid it haphazardly onto the digit he offered, my gaze still glued to the television set.

"Goddamnit," I swore at the TV. "Why'd they do that?"

The Guy looked down at his beringed finger and drooped pathetically. "That wasn't romantic," he said in a small, sad voice, and drifted away.

I love this man. He makes me laugh. I really have spread my dreams beneath his feet.

And what the hell are in Cheetos, anyway?