Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

AMY TAN
came to their own needs, humans, and women especially, were more
territorial about their bloody psyches—their so-called needs—than
dogs were over their raw meaty bones.
That was the core problem with every woman he had ever loved.
Oh, in the beginning, to be sure, she appeared to be amazingly flexi­
ble, telling him that it did not matter what restaurant or movie they
went to. But later, once she moved in—guess what, she hated sushi,
loathed it, didn’t he ever notice? And while she was always late to
every engagement, she wanted him to phone if he was going to be de­
layed by even a minute. “What good is a fucking cell phone,” the last
one fumed, “if you never turn it on?” Criminy, none of them knew
anything about encouraging behavior, only about criticizing it. It
was all about her, her needs, her perceptions. If she felt he was in­
sensitive, ipso facto he was. If he argued he was not, ipse dixit, the
proof was in his protesting about it. What’s more, the woman always
had to come first, no matter how busy he was with his television
show. Everything became a proving ground for what was most
important—to her. With the last one he dated, he could not go ski­
ing for a weekend with Moff without its becoming a “negative state­
ment” about the relationship. Whose negative statement?
With respect to turnarounds, his ex-wife was practically a multi­
ple personality. His kitchen, for example—as his newly bedded girl­
friend, she had loved it to pieces, adored it, had openly gushed and
admired it for its original 1920s fixtures, as well as that gorgeous gem
of a stove that looked almost exactly like an O’Keefe & Merritt,
which would have been worth thousands had it been authentic. As
newly wedded wife, she began hectoring him about her kitchen, its
defects and disasters. Oh no, she could not possibly be content with
what she derided as “a splash of paint here and there.” She would
not hear of refacing the cabinets; the kitchen had to be gutted, top to
bottom. She wanted custom cabinetry, a La Cornue range with burn­
ers hot enough to weld trucks together, a butcher-block island with a
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