It's All Relative by Wade Rouse Read Free Book Online Page A

delivering cards to each classmate’s new P.O. box.
    This was serious business to me—one of the few creative outlets I had in the Ozarks—so my creations tended to go to the extreme, blending a childish Charles Eames with a big dollop of Edith Head, not an envied mix in my rural classroom, where boot boxes outnumbered shoe boxes on Valentine’s.
    Yet I would spend weeks creating bedazzled, glittery mailboxes in roaring reds and pretty pinks, some that were even strung with lights.
    My great undoing, however, didn’t come until late grade school, when I created a Barbie-themed mailbox, using shocking pink gauze and Barbie’s body parts as my foundational decor. I had always wanted a Barbie for Christmas and had never gotten one, so I “borrowed” one from a girl in school—along with her root-beer Lip Smackers—and ended up murdering Barbie. I dressed Barbie’s torso à la Cupid with little pink wings and a little pink quiver filledwith little pink bows. I plucked one of her arms off her body to use as a bracket for a homemade banner that stated, MY HEART OVERFLOWS … LIKE MY MAILBOX .
    But the pièce de résistance was the mailbox flag I created out of Barbie’s missing legs, positioning them sideways, like a gymnastic whore, so that one long, glamorous gam could be lifted into a vertical position to show when I had received a card, or lowered to show when my box had just been emptied.
    You could even see Barbie’s barren plastic goody box all the way from the chalkboard.
    My masterpiece was greeted with great fanfare by the friend from whom I had borrowed Barbie. When she saw her beloved doll tortured, dismembered, and hanging from my mailbox, she screamed a scream that still reverberates in my head.
    That prompted our class bully, a kid who simply and scarily used an empty Camel cigarette carton to gather his Valentine’s loot, to free Barbie and then open my mailbox and announce, “What have we here?”
    What he discovered was three valentines that had been given to me by a male classmate with a high-pitched giggle and penchant for dribbling in his Garanimals whenever he got nervous. The “topper” was an exquisite card—a real, adult valentine, not one of those mini, childish cards—that pictured two cupids kissing. In fact, my stalker had even gone to the effort to stencil our names above each cupid’s head.
    My Valentine’s massacre led to a long winter of humiliation, highlighted by the daily ritual of the class bully interlocking the arms of my winter jacket with those of my stalker’s on the coatrack in the back of the classroom, a silhouette that, from a distance, made it look as though we were about to embark on a long, romantic walk together through a snowy forest.
    The next year I decorated my mailbox in a Speed Racer theme,but that didn’t stanch the bloodletting of future Valentine’s massacres.
    In college I remained closeted and tragically drunk, stringing along endless girls, dragging them to Valentine’s dances—them in red formals that longed to be hiked up, and me flirting with death by imbibing a punch bowl full of red Kool-Aid and Everclear.
    As a result, I hid from Valentine’s—from love—throughout my twenties like a turncoat Cupid in holiday Witness Protection.
    And then, at thirty-one, I met Gary.
    And I fell in love.
    Cupid actually should have been fashioned after Gary: a winged man with a big swoop of hair and a tragic weakness for buying anything from Target that was red, dipped in chocolate, or came in the shape of a heart.
    The first Valentine’s after Gary had moved in with me, I walked into my house after work and found it glowing, awash in red, like it was on fire.
    â€œI did a seasonal switch,” he explained.
    A “seasonal switch,” I came to learn, applied not only to every season but also to every holiday. Thus a seasonal switch