The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones by Sandra Tsing Loh

Author:Sandra Tsing Loh [Loh, Sandra Tsing]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2014-05-05T00:00:00+00:00

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BUT AS the weeks pass, frustrations and irritations keep bubbling up like a geyser.

Now that we’ve been cohabiting for two years, Mr. Y and I have drifted at home into a T-shirt-and-sweatpants thing (which has long been my uniform, but I was surprised to discover that the usually natty Mr. Y had T-shirts and sweatpants as well). And that was fine. But now of course, each morning, after reading the New York Times for an hour, he showers, shaves, and selects a new tie and jacket before sailing out of the house with unrestrained joy. He even dresses to the nines when there aren’t any meetings. I see him standing before his closet comparing ties, one against another. And none of it’s for me.

With my Shanghai abacus, next come the cost-benefit analyses. I can’t stop running the abacus—it is practically an internal physical organ, like my heart or my liver. Mr. Y is spending more and more hours (I keep count) at a venue that’s an hour each way with traffic. The gas and the dry-cleaning alone are a couple of hundred bucks a month. And of course, as events would have it, not much of the money he makes (he won’t tell me how much) flows into our household. Up in the Bay Area, his twenty-six-year-old son is hard at work finishing his first novel, which he really believes in, and so just for a few months Mr. Y is helping him out. A fair bit. I can’t help recalling that when I myself was the exact same age—twenty-six—and I was in a similar situation with Mr. X, myself trying to write, he refused to pay my rent for me (as he had for his ex; besides, he pointed out, no one ever had for him) and I had to get a temp job. It was an excellent experience, I learned to be more disciplined, and all was well. But no, young people today are fragile, San Francisco is expensive, and times are different.

Everywhere you look in our relationship, there are tributaries upon tributaries of conflict, lighting up everywhere like a troubled PET scan.

Meanwhile, our household is sliding into total disarray, which, due to having to write almost a thesis-load of magazine pieces to pay all our bills, I’m powerless to stop. It is true that it’s not his fault that Charter cable has temporarily cut off our Internet. This is apparently due to the fact that, thanks to the three cheapo old Toshiba laptops that I have, which my daughters peck away at like rabies-infected raccoons when I’m on deadline and scold them, our house is radiating—just seeping, suppurating—so much spam it is actually fritzing out other Wi-Fi connections on our block. We are sending out so much Moshi Monster spam, it’s like we have Internet lice.

That said—as he darts in and out of our home, backing out of the driveway with a fresh travel mug, babbling into his headphones—like sand dunes, laundry is piling up,

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