I Knew He Was the One When He Made Slippers Out of Trash

Adapted from an excerpt from the book All the Women in My Brain © 2022 by Betty Gilpin, published by Flatiron Books on September 6, 2022.

There’s some fable that I won’t google now as a point of pride (too many procrastination windows currently open in my Safari: disheartening porn, weatherman bloopers, and in a twist Skeet Ulrich Wikipedia dear god this book will never get written if I leave this page), but I know/think the fable is about two bugs. One spends the summer gathering berries and shit for winter hibernation, and one spends it dancing like a homeless fool doing ecstasy and having affairs. Or the fable-bug equivalent of that . . . so . . . let’s say rhyming and square dancing. Then when winter comes, one bug has a mini-Costco bomb shelter of safety, and the other is mortgage-less, alone, and fucked. The latter had more fun, though. The fable always confused me. Which is maybe whyI forgot 98 percent of the details. Which is a better life spent: berry hoarding or square dancing?

Anyway, at this point in life I was certainly the bug in the town square. Any time a dentist receptionist handed me a receipt or form and said the horror-words “for your records” . . . I shuddered. I pictured the haunted wicker basket under my bed where I shoved government documents for three months before I panicked and threw them in the recycling. Or rather on the recycling, right on top in a neat pile for some Talented Mrs. Ripley to come identity-xerox me if she wanted. In my Houston Street apartment shared with Dani and other stoned, split-ended wise-crackers, I did not put any tacks or nails in the wall or take vitamins. I was allergic to permanence.

In a Camel-smoke cloud of denial, I invited the one in Harlem that I insisted wasn’t my boyfriend home for Thanksgiving. As was custom, we Gilpins braced ourselves for a WASP holiday, dry piles of soft wartime rations on each inherited Birds of America plate. Spice, flavor, and vulnerability of course prohibited by law. Though we did pepper in our own elfish fun to deviate from the silent fork clinking of our non-carnie ancestors. Inevitably my mother would wrap her napkin on her head to do her screaming Pope schtick, and my father would tell a moving story involving a Whitman stanza and Yogi Berra adage. We do not know how to season our food, but we do know how to entertain.

Having already raised the eyebrow of every friend and New York bartender with the politics of our arrangement, my blue-eyed plus-one and I knew a decision had to be made to say goodbye or do something drastic, the relationship equivalent of putting a tack in a wall. Which I of course hated, hated that I couldn’t tread water forever in the safety of not having to know for sure if he loved me or not. Investment was too painful. Maybe this Thanksgiving is our funeral, I thought.

While we were both pilgrim-looking people from New England, we couldn’t have been raised more differently. He was born on a barn floor into a circle of capable hallucinating lumberjacks and nurses wearing wolfskin. A family of hippies with trades, people you want on your deserted island, both for the hugs and the skills. He knew every tree type by leaf and liked to cook obscure organs with peppers that made my eyes rain. He could talk for an hour straight about the make of a table leg or a hawk’s itinerary. As for me, when a printer is out of ink, I fantasize about throwing the printer away. Thinking about how the wind works makes me crave a deep nap. He has talked about the wind to me for an hour. His name is, of course, Cosmo.

Still, here we were in a circle with my family, standing on the living room rug I once faux-skated backward across to emulate Tonya Harding. Tonya, whose team I was firmly on, spunky blonde in pink over whining Republican dentist in blue! (No evidence that Nancy Kerrigan was a Republican or a dentist, but brunettes with good teeth always make me feel this.) My father was enunciating through a pre-turkey prayer and asked us to close our eyes and think of something we had that we didn’t deserve.

I peeked at my date’s feet, which were at the moment somewhat upsetting. To the delight of my brothers, within the first fifteen minutes of our arrival, Cosmo had done something in-sane. In the midst of a loud-talking contest with my father (their one Venn diagram overlap) about wiper fluid, my father gestured an apology to my date’s bare hobbit feet having to spend the holiday naked and cold in our no-shoes home. Realizing that all of us had aging Christmas Walmart “house socks,” a look formed in his blue eyes that I could later identify as Must Do Immediate Elaborate Inconvenient Project to Fix Social Situation. Wildly air-traffic-signaling my father to continue his anecdote about 1983 John Lithgow, Cosmo disappeared under the kitchen sink. He emerged with an armful of paper grocery bags and blue duct tape. Energetically nodding and interjecting the occasional “WOW,” he got on all fours on the kitchen floor. Suddenly he was HGTV Hulk, violently ripping the bags like he was gutting a deer on a timer, making sure to return intense “I’m listening, totally here with you” eye contact with my monologuing father. Who seemed miraculously unfazed by my date’s inexplicable craft tornado. My brothers and I shifted in expired Old Navy around him, pretending the paper ripping wasn’t too insane a volume to continue a discussion over. What a wild end, I thought. Is he making a nest to take a shit on before breaking up with me in front of my family? But then the tornado got smaller and quieter. He was cradling and shaping something, softer movements close to his chest, a gentle silent sculpt. As my father rounded the corner to the anecdote’s punchline that my brothers and I could mouth word foreword (DAD I LOVE YOU NEVER STOP THESE STORIES), this wild tinkering Tarzan sat back on his heels to reveal his creation.“What the fuck,” one of my brothers exhaled.

There in the center of chaos sat . . . beautiful, somewhat perfect . . . trash slippers. Shoes. Functional shoes. Made of trash. Confirming my suspicion that there would be no “tada” or explanation, he fired two passionate follow-up questions to my dad while sliding his feet into his creations, now a strange homeless Sesame Street medieval cobbler that I had brought into the home. It was my father who forced the acknowledgment, holding his hand up for silence in what I feared was disgust. But no, it was my father’s specific holy reverence reserved for walk-off home runs and good sentence structure. (The highest honors.) He clapped the untamed cobbler on the back with admiration. “This! Is a man! A man with solutions!”

Post-slippergate, my solution-man dutifully circled the property with my mom. Linking her arm in his, she detailed the history of her contraband ivy collection, snippings literally stolen fromVersailles and Harvard and replanted here, their backstories spoken at a louder volume than the hushed-but-sadly-still-audible jabs at her daughter “THESE ARE THE AZAELEAS well she’s always been like that—you know when she first got her license? I mean, my God, YES THESE ARE PERENNIAL.”

I worried that having him here would feel like reading the results of your colonoscopy at a burlesque show. A mood-killing spell-breaking fluorescent you-can’t-fire-me-I-quit.

But my dad said, “Close your eyes and think of something you have that you don’t deserve,” and I peeked across the circle tot hose insane paper shoes and scanned up to his knees, muddy from an investigation into my mother’s unruly day lilies, up to his mechanic-with-military-history torso that at night ran at a thousand degrees against my back even when I insisted falsely that I hated to be held, up finally to those stupid blue eyes that like a rubber band duh were already open looking back at me.

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