The Hard Way (fiction)

I like to do things the hard way. Well, I must like to do things the hard way since, as far back as I can remember, I have consistently made things more difficult for myself than I needed too.
When I was six I stole some nail polish out of my mother’s bathroom and then, from the top of the stairs, dropped it onto the hardwood of our foyer below. My mother, who had been in the kitchen at the time, heard the crash, came out to see the mess on the floor (which left a permanent discoloration that my parents opted not to fix perhaps as a reminder to me) and glanced up at me, crouched between two slats of the railing upstairs. Trying to avoid anger and corporal punishment and seeing my stricken face she told me, “That’s okay, accidents happen.” Most kids would’ve taken that and run with it. I cheerfully admitted that I had nicked the nail polish from her bathroom and had purposefully and with full intent dropped it on the floor below. It hurt to sit for about an hour afterwards, I had dinner alone in my bedroom and I didn’t get dessert. My brother was kind enough to tell me as he passed by my bedroom door that they’d indulged in strawberry shortcake, which was quite possibly my favorite.
When I was eight I attempted to take on our class bully. He didn’t appear to have a problem with me, but he seemed to quite enjoy picking on Kathy Murtz, who had the unfortunate distinction of having a dorky name, stringy hair, glasses and braces. I mean really, this girl already had enough on her plate. For posterity I will admit that I thought she was a nerd as well and though I couldn’t quite commit to the chant, “Kathy Murtz: so ugly it hurts”, I didn’t exactly recommend that my classmates cut it out, either.
One lunchtime I was playing some game that involved four squares and some pebbles and a lot of hopping and Kathy was sitting in solitude (no doubt watching us forlornly and desperately hoping to be asked to join in) on some nearby steps, when the resident bully, Rodney Klassen, made an appearance. He ignored me and my handful of friends: we were neither too cool nor too uncool to appear on his radar. He stumped over to Kathy and demanded that she turn over whatever sweet treat her mother had packed in her lunch. On that particular day Kathy decided to stand up for herself. It hadn’t been the first time that Rodney had commandeered her treat from her and perhaps she felt that because she was within our general proximity that we might step in and help her out. My friends stood mutely by, their mouths slightly agape as they heard Kathy utter a meek, “No,” to Rodney’s forceful demand.
I, in all honesty, thought she would cave after he asked her a second time, but she did not. Nor did she relent when he smacked her lunch bag out of her hands. When Kathy made an effort to stand up to confront her tormentor and he roughly pushed her back down onto the concrete stairs my friends gave a collective gasp. And when Kathy leaned over to retrieve the lunch bag, so carefully and lovingly packed by her mother that morning or perhaps the night before, and Rodney landed and open handed smack across her face that resonated throughout the underground play area one of my friends muttered, “I’m going to get Mrs. Johnson” and darted quickly for the door.
It is at this point that things become blurred. I have no recollection of leaving the safety of my friends, I just remember arriving next to Rodney and saying in a very demanding voice that sounded quite unlike me, “Why don’t you leave her alone?”
This was a great source of amusement to Rodney, who heretofore had never considered me in any regard. I was rewarded with a scornful glance and a stern push on the shoulder with the admonishment that I “beat it”. With two hands I shoved him back so hard that he took two surprised steps backwards, stumbling towards the nearby bike racks. Kathy, at this point, had ceased to exist for him.
Long story short I got punched in the face and he knocked out one of my teeth (it had been loose to begin with). My friends avoided me for the next few days because of my fat lip and overall toothless appearance and Kathy would start her trend of doggedly following me around until some time in Grade 9.
When I was eleven, and not very popular and perhaps carrying more than my fair share of baby fat, I decided that the concept of Valentine’s Day was more of a popularity contest than one should have to bear at that age. After having to sit through the humiliating ordeal whereby classmates would drop Valentine’s Day cards into the handmade receptacles affixed to our individual desks (I will give kudos, though, to Amy Bernstein who was kind enough to give a card to everyone in the class, short, fat, smelly, slow or otherwise) I decided that I would come back during lunch and re-distribute the cards in more equal fashion. Unfortunately my teacher at the time had opted to take his lunch at his desk that day, so I was forced to improvise and tell him that the secretaries at the school had asked me to pass along the message that his wife had called, in the hopes that he would leave his post to make a phone call. It turns out that Mr. Addison didn’t have a wife, so my cover was blown (to this day I don’t get why we call unmarried men “Mr.” and yet unmarried women are “Miss” or the more ambiguous “Ms.”). I decided to come clean and thought that surely someone as intelligent and kind as my teacher would understand how horrible and unnecessary Valentine’s Day might appear to some of the kids who surely had only one or two cards in their little receptacles. He seemed unwilling to understand my logic and I strove to drive the point home by summarily ripping off the heart-shaped construction paper “mailboxes” from the desks all around me and dumping their contents on the floor.
Thankfully my parents agreed with my heavy handed tactics and, after a lengthy conversation with the principal, it was agreed that I would submit 500 lines of “I apologize for my disruptive behavior” to the teacher, and on a go forwards the Valentine’s Day popularity contest would cease.
I did relatively well in high school except for the following minor incidents: slamming a fellow student’s fingers in his locker door when he refused to take down a poster that indicated “AIDS cures gays”; calling my alcoholic history teacher an alcoholic; and falling in love (or as much in love as one can conceive at fourteen years of age) with someone that didn’t realize I existed. The whole falling in love thing was a bit of a debacle and might have caused a minor eating disorder, but the silver lining was that I lost the baby fat.
After graduation I worked at a succession of industry jobs that I hated. It become rapidly apparent that I had no customer service skills (culminating when I told a particularly well-heeled patron of a certain popular coffee chain to go fuck herself "and with vigor” when she condescendingly asked me if I even knew what a cappuccino was).
Cleary I was made to work in the backroom, away from the prying eyes of the public, and so I fell into accounting. Numbers didn’t hassle you, didn’t give you grief (though one of my first employers that seemed to enjoy placing his hand on my knee whenever I wore a skirt did), and I seemed to have an aptitude for it.
At twenty five, after settling into a decent accounting job I decided to do what all my friends had done seven years earlier: get some post secondary education.
At this time I was living on my own and working full time. Adding three courses a semester to my already full plate resulted in me doing funny things like: forgetting to eat; not sleeping; losing my social life; and continually forgetting where my car and apartment keys were. Most often my car keys ended up being in my car, and my apartment keys were found dangling from the lock on my apartment door.
After getting my accounting degree I was wooed away from my job by a large, global transportation company and enjoyed much success there until I discovered that they had a contract with the US government to ship arms to Iraq. I expressed some measure of displeasure at this to the CFO of the company and was basically told to shut up. I didn’t. I wrote to the president of our parent company and indicated that shipping arms to fight a war that was morally and ethically suspect was just a big bowl of wrong. I was rather rapidly laid off due to “downsizing”.
At about this time I had met a man that I felt was my match intellectually and didn’t seem to view my rants as totally out of order, as most of my friends were becoming increasingly wont to do. We entered into a relationship that would rapidly become the best and most positive that I had ever experienced in my life,right up until, in our third year together, I came home from work early (at this point I had found work with a non-profit organization that paid like shit, but at least enabled me to sleep most nights) to find him in bed with his ex-girlfriend. She left – though not with as apologetic an exit as I would have liked – and my boyfriend and I sat down and had a serious chat. It seemed that between my job, my guitar lessons, and my kickboxing lessons (I still had some anger that I was trying to work out) that I wasn’t around as often as he would have liked. His ex girlfriend had appeared on the scene some months ago, one thing led to another and, evidently, to them fucking in our shared bed.
Because I loved him and because he seemed earnest when he said he would end the relationship I allowed it to continue. And certainly there was resurgence. I scrapped the guitar lessons (all I ever really got out of them was horribly calloused fingers and a mounting sense of frustration which I then alleviated at my kickboxing class) and I made more of an effort to be part of a couple, instead of being an individual within a relationship.
Though I had verbally forgiven him for his transgressions, I knew I couldn’t forget. I also knew that by allowing the relationship to continue I had to allow bygones to be bygones and to not bring up his infidelity and throw it in his face. It was my choice to continue, because I liked making the hard choices apparently.
In April 2008 he told me that he was attending a conference through work in San Francisco for a few days. He had done this before. On a Saturday when he was supposedly at the conference I called the number of the hotel that he was staying and, because a man answered, I asked if there was a woman on duty at the front desk. Perplexed, they agreed to my odd request and transferred me to a resident member of the same sex. She confirmed that indeed he was registered there and at that point I laid all my cards on the table. It was a rather expensive cell phone bill that month, as I didn't have a long distance plan. After a couple of moments of silence, and me giving a very detailed and accurate description of exactly what it was I was on the lookout for, and promising that I would not do anything to compromise her employment at this hotel, she confirmed that it did not appear that my boyfriend was spending his nights alone.
And so, lying in a tub of cooling water having finished an exorbitantly expensive bottle of Shiraz I am watching the coloration of the water change from clear to a murky red, and in addition to becoming increasingly introspective, am also becoming quite larthargic.
Perhaps I stand corrected: I don't like doing things the hard way afterall.