2relatives

“You will never believe how incredibly slow of thought she was! Slower than all the traffic in the world squeezed through a one way street terminating at a train station, with the five miler, Santa Fe un-express rumbling, no dragging, no whining its pitiful way across progress in complete prevention.” He continued, “And of course she became so hideously annoying, constantly telling us everything about her life, how it was for her with this and that boyfriend—and to the most ridiculous end of detail! More inscrutably precise than a textbook about medical textbooks, only a dozen times more of a frustrating bore! As if we really cared to hear about any of that: the past is the past! And besides, there’s something frightfully uncouth in a girl telling her beau every single detail of any relationship she might have hawked with any other; it tends to take any pitiful wind of cheer (which has been trying to summon a final gasp for good measure all along) and collapse and snuffle it as shortly as the tail of woe and weeping is long! That sort of talk takes all the magic, all the fun, all that’s important about boys and girls when they come together (as only they do) and makes it all so…so…”

“Dreadfully serious!” his friend chimed in. “Well, as he was coming ‘round to saying, I finally grew so tired of her, so irritated at even the thought of having to suffer through one more of those aimless discussions of hers, that I asked him one day, ‘Please tell her I’m not around, should she ever threaten felicity through the telephone.’ ”

“Of course,” he asserted, “she, being the sort of thing she assumes to be (despite her desperate aims at attraction), undoubtedly supported any qualms he had by calling our dormitory—you know, the one on the south end of the campus by the library—that very afternoon. And how many times did she call? As many times as there are curses in as many tongues as can ever be dreamed to spite such as she! And each time she called, I said, of course, ‘He’s not in right now. Yes I told him that you called yesterday, and also the day before that, and also the day before the day before that. No, I don’t know why he hasn’t called you back. Yes, I’ll tell him again you called, just like I did yesterday, and the day before that…’ Can you ever imagine how dull she was?”

“You know how it is,” her old playmate spoke up again, “There are freshmen, and then there are freshmen.”

“Yes, well, I think you are familiar with what sort she belonged to!” his roommate added.

“Yes, you know how it is all right, like I said at the first.”

“So, one day, after she has called a thousand upon a thousand times before, and I replied as I had politely—‘Sorry, he’s simply not in right now’—she got all snooty with me. Can you believe it? And so I said, ‘Well now there’s certainly no sense in taking that tone with me! I’m not the one who hasn’t called you back; I delivered all those messages for you and you’re just going to sit on the other end of this line and reward the mountains of my humble, conscientious efforts with this tirade!”

The one of the three who had silently listened the whole time then responded (in one of those slight, yet pure voices), “So, it has come to this. You never had the courage to treat her as a person should be treated, or maybe never cared to risk your sense of entertainment, by plainly telling her that you grew tired of her presence, that she was no longer as fun as she seemed to be at first and, hence, had grown to be more of a liability to all of your serene joviality (that is the constant companion of every violent drunkard) than the boon you once took her for. You didn’t care to speak truth to her in a more kindly fashion: that you no longer thought the relationship would work (it had always been such a wonderfully sublime thing of mutual respect before), or that you weren’t ready for the sort of partnership she deserved (whether she knew she wanted such or not).”

Their mouths hung a'limping.

“So instead,” the quiet one continued, “You asked him to help smooth things over with that oil of the most plentiful stock these days (the more you use it, the more there is! Our mothers and fathers did so in their day almost as earnestly as we now), while you evaded in silence to her and in-the-mean-time frivolities of the sort you had thought her good for at the start. And now you berate her as one of the most pitifully rude variety, since she is not as fluent in idiom of the most common tongue we have all adopted.”

At least three whole minutes of beautiful tension passed, one for each of the speakers. It was the sort of interpersonal silence so uncomfortable that you realize you are probably closer to seeing the truth of a very intimate matter than you would ever care to stumble upon—the kind some children giggle at, and others grow timid before, but all feel ashamed to hear (whether they realize it at the moment or not); the kind some older children (for that is all anyone ever is at best) try to divert by introducing a new subject of conversation while some others (who have persisted, whether they actually wanted to or not, in silencing such inner feelings) become immediately disgusted, and amused, and angered, and enthralled with it all at once before a quiet bitterness eclipses everything else.

The silent one had said all he had without that biting demeanor common in all sarcasm, but with love in his heart and eyes for his present companions. The sort of love a grown man can have for another whom he hardly knows, but every praying grandmother has for the wayward son most dear to her heart; the kind of love that longs so much for its object’s best that it is afraid of startling and frightening away the same by its terrible veracity.

“Well,” said the bolder of the two shortly, “I thought she was certainly unique upon this earth; in fact I thanked the glory of man that I wouldn’t have to lose another moment of peace to her sort once I fended her off.”

“I suppose,” said the other, in flamingly cold agreement, “that's one bit of thanks that needs recanting more than all the rest.”