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2001-05-30 | 9:04 p.m.

Sometimes I feel like a poltergeist in my own house, because I walk from room to room, switching off lights.

It is so hot I believe I am actually melting. Very, very slowly. The last time it was this hot, Duff and I got into a bitter argument about how easy it would be to fix the fan. I think that may have been the day he threw the laundry basket at me. I was quite put out by it, as it has always been my job to throw things in anger. His job is to remain calm at all times. In my defense, my throwing is calculatedly ineffectual; I tend to throw non-precious items at other inanimate objects. But he threw the laundry basket right at me, and it scared me, and he was very wrong to do it.

Duff has little desire to fix anything, ever. He is content to let things stay the same indefinitely, as am I. He wishes I would clean the house, so it isn't dirty, but beyond that he does not concern himself much with maintenance. Sometimes he cleans, though often he does so with a chip on his shoulder, pointed directly at me. But my ex was good at fixing things, and my father would always give it a shot, and my sister is quite good at it, and my nephew is usually game, and even my niece will occasionally raise the hood and have a look. But I am afraid of ruining things, and have to psych myself up to try, while Duff ... frankly, I don't know what Duff thinks, or why he doesn't like to fix things. But he doesn't like me to hire people to do things, either, because he hates to part with his money.

Stephen told me yesterday that he thinks Duff and I should marry. I had a similar conversation with my Mom a few months ago. They are trying to look out for my best interests. Mom kept trying to dance around the "what-if-something-happened-to-you" subject, without actually saying that, because she's incredibly superstitious, and Stephen seemed to be thinking more along the lines of the lissome lassie in the law library. Not because he thinks Duff is a crud, he hastened to add, but because it happens all the time. My feelings on the subject are mixed. To put it in simple terms, my heart wants to get married, but my brain doesn't. So on days when my emotions are holding sway, I'm a mess. I see all of Duff's finest qualities and I feel so lucky to be with him and I would LOVE to get married. And if I think about it too much I cry in the shower and feel really really REALLY sorry for myself. But the rest of the time, I feel fine; I think it's pathetic for a person of my age and circumstances to mope about such a thing; and most of all I'm wary of all the literal and figurative laundry baskets in our relationship that could come hurtling toward my head at any given moment. It's like I told Stephen: Do I really want to marry a guy just before he goes off to law school? Stephen's thinking was that instead of Duff just dumping me like a bag full of kittens, we would have to get a D-I-V-O-R-C-E and then I would get something out of it. But do I really want to get divorced from a lawyer? If you think I'm joking, believe me, I'm not. It's not hard for me to imagine Duff being incredibly cruel in that situation and really grooving on the whole thing, while I agonized and struggled to keep up. Do I really want to give him that much ammunition? I don't know. I actually think our relationship is fairly stable, but you never do know about such things. But if it is stable, then there's not much incentive to get married (except for the thing about if I get incapacitated). And getting married so as to be in a more powerful position if we should break up is a bit cynical, even for me.

The thing I always come back to is this. If Duff had wanted us to be married at any point in the last seven years, we probably would have gotten married. But he didn't, and we didn't. So why would I want to be married to someone who doesn't want to be married to me?

Now some people would say, Hey, why didn't you make your feelings clear to him? Why didn't you ask him to get married? Well, when I first got pregnant with the girls, our relationship was still very new, and I told him at that time that he could stay or go---I wouldn't hold it against him if he left, and I wouldn't make it hard for him to be around the baby (we didn't know it was twins at first), and that I wasn't asking him to marry me and I never would. (I can remember quite clearly saying all those things to him in a laundrymat parking lot in San Leandro. It wasn't the usual laundrymat we went to; we were trying out a different one but we didn't stick with it because the manager had been in the military, apparently for a long time, and had some pretty rigid ideas about how a laundrymat should operate.) And he said he wanted to stay, and he's never really wavered from that position. (I'm the one who has threatened to leave.) So I've tried to keep my word about not nagging him. Especially because that same thing---longing to get married and expressing that longing from time to time in increasingly frantic tones---really soured my first long-term relationship.

Time to read story to insolent overheated child. We've gotta get that fan fixed.

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