It's been more than ten years since college. We pull into the long driveway on a cold, snowy Philly night. It's an old farmhouse from the 1800s, wood-working tools piled with fresh snow, next to a cold entryway with a wood burning stove and the detritus of a family obsessed with thrifting.
Half-clothed babies run wild upstairs. Bobby's got kids.
His hair is long and streaked with grey: Last of the Mohicans meets manbun. He's gained weight, but his forearms have retained their sexy tan, with the definition of someone who builds things when he's not drawing monsters and old men on his kids' scraps of paper. For a living, he designs high-end furniture and ceramics at a boutique studio: beautiful one-off handmade items that are way out of my paygrade, and his.
We spend the weekend drinking coffee, cooking, watching bad movies, kissing babies. We ask each other safe questions about our chosen partners and lives, not wanting to pry, saving judgement for the ride home.
***
Every Thanksgiving during college, Bobby would arrive with a pumpkin roll. He would unroll it from a damp, still warm tea towel. A log of pumpkin bread, rolled around some unholy trinity of cream cheese, butter, and sugar. He would diagram the creation process, the ritualistic rolling and spreading, channelling his grandmothers' delicate pastry ways. He loved cold-weather holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas especially because he was nostalgic about butter and crisp New England weather.
***
For the first annual Bobbysgiving, held in February, before his fake leap year birthday, we make two chickens and almost no green vegetables. Our arteries are not invited. We stay up late watching So I Married an Axe Murderer and It Could Happen To You, analyzing the 90s and the accidental genius of Nicholas Cage. I receive at least 3.5 hours of tickles across my legs and am up until 3:45 am, unable to sleep. Miraculously, Bobby has passed out, one arm slid between my legs, platonically scissoring me with his shoulder. It's not sexual (there's three of us on the couch), but I'm literally overheating next to the baseboard heater. I don't want to wake him up, since I know he'll get a second wind and put on another movie.
I ask him, "What the most romantic gesture you've ever made?" Hoping for something like, "I once gave a waitress my lottery ticket in lieu of a tip and actually split the winnings with her." He answers with an alarming degree of honesty: "I don't know, me holding down a job for three years."
A week later we talk on the phone. There's discord in his household, they're trying to split responsibilities and build a more egalitarian partnership. It's the same issue we're all having: trying to carve out enough time for jobs, chores, money, while not losing sight of our own happiness. We all think we're failing. But for them there's yelling, and blame, and resentments that have started to curdle.
It's still a beautiful, snowy weekend inside. We draw Valentine's for the imperfect partners who didn't come visit with us. We play an iphone game that Ellen DeGeneres invented that is basically charades.
He texts us two weeks later:
- Just thought of a great new sex position: Snorkeling.
- Lay face down
- A dude lays face down on top of you, the opposite direction, crotch over the back of your head
- You have to dangle his dick down the side of your face and pop just the tip in your mouth, then pretend to swim.
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Bobby Likes A Lot of Things
Non-FictionA guide to being young, broke, handsome, and excited about life.
