A Snit in the Stern, A Spat in the Aft

My friend the great white-haired photographer is harassing me to write about the fights on board Mazurka. “C’mon, you gotta write about life on Mazurka. You gotta tell us how you fight on board – get to the real stuff – you gotta dig deep!”

The thing is, Mark and I don’t really fight. There are no broken dishes, no screaming, no raising ones voice. Maybe it’s because we’re still newlyweds, or maybe ‘cause we’re both a little older than the 25 year-old just marrieds and we’re still (and hopefully always) invested in seeing each others’ points of view, or maybe it’s because this is a really small space and we pretty much have to get along. But our disagreements – small as they are – are few and far between.

We do have our occasional tiffs, though. The first one happened on board his boat, around midnight, when we were just dating. He was uncharacteristically quiet and cold. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. “I just thought we should slow down a bit,” he said. “Okay,” I fumed, “We’ll slow down.” And I stormed out. It was late, downtown Chicago, and as I walked to the el by myself to go back to my apartment, I kept thinking, “He’ll come after me…he’ll come after me….” I was so mad I got on the train going the wrong way, and had to turn around on the west side to catch a train going up to Wicker Park. I kept thinking, “He’ll be waiting for me at my place.” He wasn’t. The next day, we exchanged a series of emails till we figured out the whole thing was just stupid.

That’s pretty much how our fights go. I feel like he’s not giving me the attention I think I so rightly deserve; I act cold and angry, like I really don’t want his attention, anyway, while of course I’m dying for him to fawn all over me. And then I break down or he breaks down and we’re happy newlyweds again.

Last night was a little different – he was starting in on the generator again, and how the last “mechanic” we’d had out had taken a couple parts off the boat and had yet to return them or return our phone calls. This guy has been the bane of our existence for two weeks, and I was sick of hearing about it. “Just let it go,” I said.

Mark bristled. “I’ll let it go when the generator is fixed.”

So I let it go. I went to the bow and read for a bit, took a six minute shower, was about to climb into bed to read, when I heard him on the phone to someone in his family, complaining about the generator. I heard him say, “Do you want to talk to Felicia? She’s right here,” and he handed me the phone. It was his brother Scott. Scott is married to Jill, who has been my best friend since we were 12 years old, and is the reason I met Mark. Jill is six months pregnant with their first child, and that day had gone for her second round of chemo for a 9 cm tumor they discovered in her breast on Valentine’s Day.

I took the phone and forgot about our tiff, forgot we were getting screwed on the generator, forgot an editor declined the article I’d worked on all weekend, forgot I had gotten another damn parking ticket, forgot that outside Mazurka geese were preparing to dive bomb me. None of that stuff was worth anything, anyway.

You want to get to the real stuff? Life is short. Don’t waste time arguing about stupid shit.