They Agreed
They agreed. They agreed not to say “I love you” anymore. He slapped the flaccid slice of pizza on the top of the overstuffed garbage. He pushed down on it with the paper plate and the cheese sludged out, breaking apart like degrading polar ice.
“Fine,” he said, in that mean way you could say fine. He affirmed to himself he meant it in the proper use of the word. It was fine. It was completely fine. Everything else would be the same, she assured him. They just wouldn’t say that phrase anymore.
She was still on the couch, swiping at beautiful pictures of food on her phone’s screen. He squinted at the back of her head, trying to see inside it. She pulled off her scrunchy and shook her hair out. Then she addressed the air around her: “It’s like if you say milk over and over. Milk, milk, milk, milk, milk milk milk. It turns into gibberish.”
“Milk,” he whispered to himself. “Milk, milk, milk.” It did sound weird.
“People should only say it if they really mean it.”
He straightened. “But I do—”
“People, I’m saying.”
“We’re talking about us.”
“Are we not people?” she shrugged and let out a small puff of exasperation. “I know I’m people. Are you people?”
They were talking about people and milk now. He wanted to start over and ask why—the word crouched like a restless toad in the back of his throat—but that why would be the trigger point of an avalanche of all the small contempts that had been piled up high on one another over the last eight years. That wasn’t worth making any loud noises over. This was just sluff. It was a simple enough request and they’d already agreed. He returned to cleaning up.
The movie credits were still running on the TV. Maybe she was riled up by something she heard in the movie. It was a romantic comedy, but they had fast-forwarded through the romance bits, not wanting to watch all that kissing and fondling together. Adam’s Rib was suggested in the corner and would soon start playing automatically. He tore up the pizza box so it would fit in the can. Maybe it was the pizza. Wasn’t the stomach connected to the brain or something? He couldn’t remember. He tore the box into quarters. “I won’t even think it,” he muttered.
“What?” she asked, and in that one syllable expressed how deeply tired she was of talking. He was too.
“Nothing,” he said, flattening the bulge of garbage down with the pizza box pieces. The trash can lid still stuck up a little, like it had something to interject, but it would just have to wait.
* * *
Twenty-six minutes later, they arranged themselves under the covers. They shuffled and turned in the tiny, wrinkled mountains of the bed, staying in their designated but unmarked sleeping areas. She opened her bedside read: a dysfunctional celebrity’s memoir. He put in a single earbud for a true crime podcast that would lull him to sleep. It happened because he wasn’t thinking. It was automatic, like putting on a seat belt when you got in a car. The phrase began the usual way: “I lo—”
“We said we weren’t doing that anymore,” she said, cocking her head back like the hammer of a revolver. “We agreed.”
He flattened his lips and nodded. After a brief pause of consideration, he offered “I’ll see you later.” It was the truth. His eyes were closing. He would open them later and see her. A simple, indisputable statement of fact. See. You. Later.
“Goodnight,” she said. Which he thought was much less certain and more of a wishful thought. But he did not argue. He closed his eyes. He tried to sleep.
* * *
The next morning, the odor of coffee and moist garbage mingled in the air. He dumped the coffee grounds in the trash on top of the deconstructed pizza. It had been married into the other contents of the bin: junk mail, brown lettuce, a pair of cheap shorts torn at the seam, and the obfuscated dregs beneath. All just trash now. Bulging up and out again, it tested the boundary of the lid.
The only solution was to take the garbage out, but it was so full it would probably be hard to tie. Probably spill. He pushed the lid down and resolved to ignore it.
She sat down at the kitchen table with her oatmeal. She blew on it then began looking at her phone. He sat across from her and opened his laptop. A new borehole log and his nascent geological risk analysis report greeted him. He stared unfocused at the screen for a moment, then closed the lid.
“Well, what if we’re in front of our friends?” he asked. “What then?”
“What?” She didn’t look up.
“Saying—” he started. He pursed his lips and took a sip of his coffee to give himself a moment to rephrase it in his head without actually saying it. “Not saying that phrase may seem strange. A red flag.”
She finally broke from her phone, where a cat was dancing on its hind legs to a Beyoncé song. “A red flag for what? It’s an—” her small hands tore the air to pieces. “An omission. A lack of. No one is going to pay any attention to something that isn’t there. I mean, if you don’t wear your hat—”
“Which hat?”
“Any hat. If you don’t wear your baseball cap, is Maurice going to suddenly be like,” she lowered her voice in imitation, “he’s not wearing his baseball cap. I wonder if something is wrong?”
“But if I was suddenly missing my hand? My arm?” He indicated one arm with the other.
“Your arm? Really?”
“Fine. My eyebrows. If I was suddenly missing my eyebrows...” he trailed off and shrugged. It felt hard to argue with missing eyebrows. He felt a swell of unexpected confidence, imagining himself with no eyebrows, never looking surprised.
“Oh for goodness sake. No one runs around saying things like that in front of their friends. It’s not some trumpet you toot in public.”
“Valentine’s Day,” he said. Leaving it in the air like a polished rock. Musgravite, he decided.
“No one is hanging out with their friends on—”she shook her head in frustration. “No one says that in front of other people. If they do, they don’t mean it.”
“They don’t mean it?” The musgravite disappeared. His eyebrows returned and strained to meet each other.
She spoke to him like she was his kindergarten teacher. “Like, goodbye, I da da da you.”
“You da da da me?”
“Don’t,” she held up a finger. “We agreed,” she said.
“We agreed,” he agreed. “I am doing it. Have I not done it? Am I not doing it right now?” She didn’t answer. Neither was sure if it was a rhetorical question. “Now it’s my turn. I’d like to have my own condition.”
“I knew you would be like this,” she said through a mouthful of oatmeal. She swallowed and then set her eyes on his with weary half-lidded expectance.
His mind found itself suddenly and utterly empty, every last thought scurrying away from close examination. He just needed one decent idea. Something she couldn’t possibly abide by, just as intolerable and preposterous as he found her rule. He caught a whiff of rancid pepperoni and inspiration struck. He grinned.
“We are never taking the garbage out,” he said. He did more than say it, he proclaimed it, imagining himself in a frock coat and in the presence of several Founding Fathers who pumped their ghostly fists in the air. Now, he had a plan. If she agreed to this, the nonsense would be over. He would triumph over lovelessness. The garbage would continue to accumulate. Inevitably the agreement would be broken, and then all agreements would thereby be invalidated.
And if she didn’t agree, then she’d be a barefaced hypocrite and the first agreement would be null and void. He’d shower her with those wonderful, terrible, verboten words in gleeful victory. He’d buy throw pillows and matching shirts and coffee mugs and a shower curtain with the three little words scrawled all over the place.
“Fine,” she said, definitely in the mean way. Her fine had the thick density of osmium.
He blinked in surprise at her agreement. “The amount of osmium produced in the world is very small.”
She frowned at him and shook her head.
“The size of a large tiger,” he said. He drew his hands apart, but it seemed inadequate.
“It’s not sustainable,” she said.
“It’s a naturally occurring metal—”
“The garbage.” She got up and put her bowl in the sink.
“But you said it was fine.” He pointed at her, then covered his own finger. Once, during an intense dispute about the best temperature for the thermostat at night, he’d accidentally poked his own eye and scratched his cornea. She had forbidden him from pointing during arguments since. But this wasn’t an argument—they were in agreement! So he uncovered his finger and tried to point in a non-aggressive way which just ended up looking like an impotent come-hither.
“I’m going to work.” She grabbed her purse and yoga mat and left.
* * *
The garbage grew. Her initial strategy was to empty the bin and leave the bagged garbage next to it. Perhaps she hoped it would prompt him to break their agreement and take the garbage out.
He did not relent.
A few days later, she bought more garbage cans for the kitchen. In all, she brought in five identical stainless steel cans, their maws ready to eat. She used a Bed, Bath & Beyond coupon to get a discount, but it was still very expensive. He frowned at the receipt before tossing it in the fourth can. Their trip to the Grand Canyon would have to be postponed.
When those cans were all full, and the air began to get thick with the sour smell of biodegradation, she added two automatic air fresheners to the kitchen outlets. Even though it was late fall, she began to keep the windows open to let fresh air in. This attracted crows. They hopped outside and plunged their beaks into the screen, curious and hungry.
One morning when the fifth garbage can was nearly full, he caught her removing some garbage. She had scooped it into a tiny dog poo bag and was stuffing the re-bagged trash into her work backpack.
“What’s going on here?” he asked. He pointed at their first garbage can in an accusatory way. It was nearly empty.
She shrugged.
“You’ve taken it out,” he said. Victory was creeping up his shoulders.
“I have not,” she said. She sounded strange because she had foam earplugs shoved up her nose. They were bright orange. She sipped her coffee delicately. A crow cawed outside the kitchen window, cocking its head as it peered in.
She confessed she had been discreetly re-homing the trash to her work bins a little bit at a time. She coolly explained that her method wasn’t “taking the garbage out” in the traditional sense, it was more of a partial relocation, so the agreement wasn’t violated.
He conceded the agreement was intact. And gradually the cans were emptied through her rule-stretching smuggling.
He proposed more conditions.
“The back door cannot be used for entrances.”
She agreed.
“We will always wear black when it’s cloudy.”
She agreed.
“When one person meows, the other has forty-five seconds to respond in kind.” He was a little drunk when he came up with that one, but she agreed. She smirked at him and twirled her foot in small circles, and he was reminded of when they started dating—the night he asked her to be his girlfriend. He was too shy to meet her eyes, so he’d been staring at her twirling foot. She’d whispered into his ear. “Yes,” she said.
* * *
Weeks later he became confused, standing nude in the bedroom, holding a single sock in one hand and a beekeeper’s mask in the other. His stomach let out a pitiful growl. He was no longer sure what he was allowed to eat or wear or say. He took the day off and compiled all the rules in an untitled binder.
They continued in this way. His rules grew byzantine.
“If you intend to use the master bathroom, you must invert this soup bowl and place it on the floor an hour beforehand. Milk is only to be used three days before the listed expiration date. Passing firetrucks must be observed at the picture window in all haste.”
She agreed. She always agreed.
They did not talk about the weather or television shows or politics. They negotiated conditions and performed the accompanying rituals. Frustrating, delightful, and silent rage-filled days passed, and on the second day of spring, no more pages would fit in the bursting binder. An earlier rule stated that no more rules would be added once the rulebook was full. They had agreed without even thinking about how it all might end.
* * *
Their duplex was nearly empty and a half-full moving van sat idling outside the window. They stood opposite each other with the kitchen counter between them and the yawning binder on the counter. She held a duffel bag filled with toilet paper rolls, and he wore two long red scarves across his body, bandolier-style (it was a Thursday).
He opened the rulebook to the first page and drew a long line through the first agreement, then added a note in very small letters, which he then initialed. She quirked an eyebrow. Amendments were something new. After scrutinizing the change, she sighed a little and gave him a nod. She took the pen and added her own initials next to his.
“I loved you,” she said, which was now allowed.
“I loved you too,” he answered.
Craig Tollifson (@thejoyofcraig) is the author of The Junior Arsonists Club. He’s also an actor and a prolific audiobook narrator, having voiced hundreds of books under the pseudonym Andrew Tell. Originally from the cold and steady Midwest, he now lives in the hot and shaky metropolis of Los Angeles.