Free You're Not Pretty Enough by Jennifer Tress Page A

blindfold and stood behind me with his hands on my shoulders.
    “What do you think?” he asked, his face excited and hopeful, like a child presenting his first real attempt at an art project.
    “I love it.”
    I hated it. The house itself was fine—nice, actually—but
     I didn’t have a hand in it, and I would forever feel like a renter, a squatter. During that picnic Leo told me how he couldn’t wait to start our life together and that this was just the beginning of how much fun we were going to have.
     Before long, we were having sex on the floor, and I was thinking about the moment Leo would see me walk toward him, soon to be his wife.

    I like big hair and I cannot lie.
    We got married in August of 1994 in a Catholic church with a full mass, complete with Holy Communion, even though half of my family is Jewish and the other half are lapsed Protestants. In other words, I was married
     in a ceremony in which I could not participate. I protested, but my mother-in-law was adamant, and if I pushed, she pushed harder. We had a really progressive priest, I justified to myself, so I lowered the new red flag down
     the flagpole and thought, What’s the big deal? It’s the occasion , not the ceremony, right?
    At our rehearsal dinner my father-in-law yelled at me when he learned the salads would be served family style instead of individually. My
     inner voice said, Go to your happy place, and that carried me through to the wedding where we were joyful and excited about our future. We went on a cruise to the Caribbean, and I cried several times. I thought I was letting go of
     stress, but Leo told me I was acting like a baby. I was twenty-three. I felt like a baby.
    ****************
    The red flags I ignored before banded together and merged as huge, crimson swaths of fabric that covered the walls and the floors and were
     stacked high in the linen closet. Almost immediately after we got married, the dynamic shifted. Leo appeared to be becoming more… traditional.
    For example, he wanted to have dinner every single Sunday at
     his parents’. Now, I liked his family, especially my sister-in-law, but I do not like having a lock on my calendar once a week. Never have. Rarely ever will. So I told him so.
    “I mean, let’s plan dinners, I like dinner! But every single
     week? Nuh uh.” Not my jam.
    Soon after we married, I got a job as a marketing manager for a small economic development agency, and my commute was longer than Leo’s. One night I arrived home and found him sitting on the couch watching TV,
     waiting for me to walk in the door. He greeted me warmly.
    “Hi, honey, what’s for dinner?”
    “I….don’t…know….want to go out?”
    “No, let’s cook something.”
    “OK, what do you have in mind?”
    “Whatever you feel like cooking.”
    I laughed. “Are you serious?”
    He turned from the couch where he was watching TV and laughed back, but said, seriously, “Yeah, why?”
    “Because we’ve been together for five years, and I have hardly ever cooked for you before. That’s why.”
    “Yeah, well, we were just dating then. Now we’re married.” And then he went back to watching TV.
    My first thought was to hit him over the head with one of the heavy pans we received as a wedding gift, but then I panicked and thought, Maybe this is my duty ,and I didn’t want to be a bad wife, so at
     first I succumbed and attempted…cooking.
    I was awful. And I don’t like being awful at anything. Mediocre is barely acceptable, but awful? Out of the question. So I alternated between caustically serving tubs of SpaghettiOsand then feeling guilty
     and actually attempting to make something that resembled a home-cooked meal, which yielded barely edible food and barely civil dinner conversations. I saw the disappointment in his eyes, so soon I gave up altogether. I didn’t cook, I
     barely cleaned, and I sure as hell didn’t put much thought into the house.
    “Why don’t you decorate or spruce up this place?”