Year Four: Those are the Devil's Shoes

My family is notorious for forgetting things. I've had to remind my uncle repeatedly over the course of several years that I don't eat red meat, and haven't since my sophomore year of high school. This has been an issue at every Christmas Dinner since I went off to college, since he has a tendency to cater in barbeque ribs with six styles of sauce and then wonder why I am not eating. My aunt has yet to learn my university e-mail address, and probably still will not be able to recite it by the time I graduate. Despite this, they have an impeccable memory when it comes to occasions when I have done something wrong, and one of their favorite stories, which they tell at least once each time I visit to people I will never see again, involves the time I dyed my hair purple and accidentally turned the bathtub pink.

I'm not sure why they complain, because it gave my aunt an excuse to remodel that bathroom. Apparently the new house wasn't up to standards. When I asked one night why we didn't just wait to find a house that was, I found myself responsible for the brutal murder of all dinner conversation. And so the purple bathtub left us, and I was given the opportunity to pinpoint a major flaw in my family's remodeling process:

It seemed like a gorgeous idea in my head. When she said "slipper" bathtub, I pictured that beautiful wooden, high-backed, clawfooted, utterly gigantic tub from Secretary. When she said stone floors, I pictured irregularly shaped and spaced cobbling, and somehow in my head it was tasteful. I think it was because I added in lots of plants, steam, a wicker birdcage, and about 20 extra feet of space. And it all matched whatever bold color the walls would be.

What did I end up with? Grey floors, salmon-colored walls, brown and beige towels. Gold tub fixtures mixed with brass towel rods. Did she think it wasn't going to be noticable? And, for some reason, a green floor mat. Green.

The tub is not wooden. It is porcelain and really FREAKING COLD ON YOUR BACK. It is not high-backed, so you have to slouch, and it's too short for you to stretch out and really relax in. It is not claw-footed. There is air in the pipes, so when you drain it, it makes a deafening gurgling noise that reverberates throughout the whole stony interior. Finally, it is terrifying to get out of. I don't know why. It just is. You simply feel like you're g o n n a d i e.

I don't know what went wrong. This is the bathroom people are going to SEE! Why make it the odd one?

I think it's cuz Fam picked the tile and Unc chose the wall color and they collaborated later and decided they didn't care.

I wish they'd have asked me.

And that was how the rest of the house was created. Fam would choose one portion of a room, Unc would choose the other, and the resulting mishmash was considered good enough for everyone. This is how the "sunburnt lion" den with Victorian tapestry furniture that was just waiting to be musty came to be in the same house. I was quite often asked for my opinion, punished when I was honest, and accused of "coddling" if I lied. I generally went with honesty; if I was going to be yelled at either way, I'd rather feel better after saying what I had to say. Their suspicion of my opinion was well-deserved, in any case, because one Christmas previously I had accidentally revealed before the entire family just how good I am at acting genuine.

I'd been pining after a pair of black leather knee-high boots for an entire semester before putting them on my Christmas list. My family decided to get them for me secretly, but substitute my grandmother-in-law's snow boots in the box for the unwrapping. Unfortunately, I had so little faith in my family's fashion sense to assume they got them for me intentionally, so after a split-second's quick thinking I hid my bitter disappointment within a flood of glee.

"Oh, wow! These are awesome!" In truth, they were quilted cotton with wooden heels, pointed cloth toes, and a brass zipper, and gave the overall impression that these are shoes the Wicked Witch of the West would wear to shovel snow. I rip my own sandals off and don one of the floppy monstrosities, commenting about how good the fit is and how warm they are. Both those statements are fact. The fit was so good I was worried they'd never let me out of them, and they were warm enough to make Fam stare at them in suspicion, seeking signs of devilry. The room has gone awkwardly silent, and my grandmother-in-law looks flustered.
"Those are mine. You weren't supposed to like them!"
I smile in relief and make my fatal mistake. "I really don't. I just didn't want to offend anyone."
The entire family stares at me open-mouthed for approximately twenty seconds before someone decides to get me my actual boots. I giggled every time I wore them for the next two years, but my family was not as amused about the whole ordeal, it seems, because they haven't trusted a word I've said since. Now I'm left wondering if they think my red meat intolerance is a farce, as well. If so, they have been waiting for the punchline for six years now.

Any time I had to remind my uncle about my dietary limitations, I would quietly remind myself that the year was coming to an end and soon I would be at a university on the other side of the nation. Even this mantra met its match, however, when they decided to rip the top off our house and perform their most epic remodeling yet. They decided to give me the bad news after a dinner out went horribly wrong and resulted in me doing two things I hated most: crying, in public.

Fam said, and I quote "Hey, this will really top your night. I spoke the the architect about adding on to our house, and he says we'll need to move out from May to July."
And what is THAT shit?! Fam and Unc have this GREAT idea to travel "as a family" for three months! AWW, Hell no. They can go where they want. I'll just uh, tent in the front yard. Alone.

I mean really. Why the hell do we need the add-ons? And why the hell does it have to affect me? I certainly don't care if we have two more guest bedrooms! And neither do the guests we will n e v e r b e h o s t i n g !!

I'd long moved past acronyms, so of course I had to pick up another annoying writing habit. This was the year of the e m p h a t i c s p a c i n g. Luckily, I didn't have to make good on my tent threat. We moved into a condo two miles away for the course of the remodels, and I was given my own bedroom/bathroom suite with a door that locked. That seemed very reasonable, and even kind of them, until I set eyes on the place. Coincidentally, my room was also the room with the twenty-foot glass wall that divided it from the rest of the house. No one got my joke about suddenly feeling like an endangered species, or understood the river of rage that had prompted it.

It was not what I would call a pleasant summer.