GINA

One of the first women I ever dated, way back, had a name I never once got right.

Something long. Something with more vowels than I had any hope of stringing together in the right order. Like Giononeevavia. I tried a few times, got it wrong every time, and she finally just put me out of my misery.

“Call me Gina.”

So I did.

Lily-white skin. Bright blue eyes. Blonde hair. Hitler’s dream.

She had a top-of-the-line Apple laptop, the twenty-seven-hundred-dollar model. A late-model Volvo. Bohemian-label clothes from Neiman Marcus. She volunteered nearly all her free time, because a trust fund meant she never needed an actual job.

Truth is, I was never really into her. Not the way you’re into somebody. I was into her the way you’d be into a tiger if somebody offered to let you take one home for a while — fascinated, careful, pretty sure this wasn’t a thing you were going to end up keeping.

So I studied her instead.

Gina was early. Ahead of a wave most people didn’t even know was coming yet. WOKE wasn’t a word people threw around at parties back then, but if it had been, Gina would’ve been the one who taught it to the room. What I actually wanted to understand wasn’t the politics — I didn’t care about the politics — it was the anger. How a person gets that offended, that often, about that much. From where I sat, the unhappiness looked self-inflicted. People had been saying some version of the same things for a long, long time. Get over it. Quit demanding the rest of the world rearrange itself around exactly how sensitive you’ve decided to be. That was my working theory, and Gina was the fieldwork.

Every outing was a referendum on how somebody nearby was failing to act right. I couldn’t take her to get a burger without a running commentary on the injustice of the burger place.

There’s only so long you can study a tiger before you want your house back.

Here’s a thing about me that hasn’t changed much since: I don’t break up with people. Not out loud, not in a sit-down, not with a list of reasons. I’ve never had that conversation in my life. What I do instead is quieter and, looking back, a lot worse. I make myself unlikable on purpose and let the other person do the walking.

It’s efficient. It’s also a coward’s move, and I knew it even then.

So I had a plan running with Gina. Fade a little here, show a little less interest there, let the temperature drop until she got there on her own — and then drop a bomb to seal the deal.

I’d made it to the cooling-down phase, where we weren’t seeing or calling each other very much. One Saturday she called and asked if she could come by and hang out. I said sure. She showed up with a trunk full of her own plants, all of them root-bound, all of them needing bigger pots, and stood in my driveway acting like she had no idea in the world what to do about it. A grown woman, suddenly helpless. We drove to Home Depot to buy pots for her plants. When we got to the register, she took three steps back and let me pay for them.

Back at the house, I did the repotting. All of it. Alone. She watched.

It was while I was reaching for one of those pots that I decided the research phase was officially over.

There’s a phrase some people use for jury-rigging something out of spare parts — two words. The first is a slur for Black people. The second is “rig.” I didn’t trail off. I didn’t mumble it. I didn’t leave a single bit of room for anybody to wonder which word I meant. I said both of them, clean and out loud, to a woman who’d spent the better part of a year telling me, correctly, that language like that does damage.

I didn’t misspeak. I aimed it. I let it fly like a missile off an F-16, and I enjoyed every second of the release.

She went white, then red, then she was sobbing and screaming at me about my white privilege. I just looked at her. Then she left, and we have not spoken one word to each other since.

It worked, in the narrow sense that it ended things. I got what my avoidance was after. I’ve never been proud of it, and I’m not dressing it up as anything else on this page — it was a cheap, ugly shortcut around a conversation I was too much of a coward to have honestly.

I’ve used gentler versions of the same move more times than I’d like to admit. Fading instead of talking. Making myself smaller and worse rather than saying the true, uncomfortable thing out loud.

Gina just got the ugliest version of it.