The Sweeter Middle
By Mary Lou Sanelli
Listen,” my friend Claudia said last month when we were sitting around in her living room, all very merry on eggnog she swore was hardly spiked. I believe the words she used were “virginal, basically,” which is about as racy as Claudia ever speaks. “What you and Larry have is rare.” She was touching my arm now, “My God, you still hold hands.”
“Not always,” I said. Not to deflect, just to get back to lighthearted celebration. Since her comment made me remember two not-so-lighthearted moments earlier that evening. Sure, Larry and I walked hand in hand up to her front door, but in the car, he’d gotten so mad at me, he yanked his hand away. His mood shift seemed to pop out of nowhere. All because I asked him (granted, for the 100th time) if he’d remembered to send a gift to his sister.
”You knooow,” he said, in the drawn-out way he uses when he’s pretending something he’s about to say is all very spontaneous, but it’s not, he’s actually given it a lot of thought, “you’re so much better at choosing gifts.”
“You mean like when you say I’m better at washing dishes because you don’t want to stop watching Larry Wilmore?”
“You mean like when you say I’m better at changing the oil?” But I know what Larry sounds like when he’s trying to lead us away from the bitter edge of an argument and feeling his way toward the sweeter middle. He reached for my hand again. And then instead of admitting that he’d forgotten to send the gift, he blamed the holiday. “Where’d this crazy, screwball holiday come from, anyway?”
“Someday I hope to come up with a perfect word for what you sound like when you don’t want to admit that you forgot on purpose.” So that’s when he yanked his hand away for the second time.
I believe I could string our marriage together with these little hand yanks, and what it takes to come around to holding hands again.
Just like I can string most of my life together by remembering other things that pop up out of nowhere and take me by surprise. Like when I went into Goodwill to look for a gift for Claudia’s gift exchange (she’s the only hostess I know who asks that all of the gifts be second-hand), and I saw a saucer that belonged to my mother’s pattern. It’s not a rare pattern, or expensive; I think the grocery stores gave them away if you spent enough. As a girl, I never dreamed the dishes would mean so much to me. Now, the nostalgia I feel whenever I see one is not so much for my mom, but for my childhood, until my heart either melts or freezes, depending.
Either way, I buy the dish. This time, as a present.
I don’t know if Larry and I are all that rare, really, I know plenty of great couples. I do know that what we have feels safe, but only because we work hard to keep it that way. And that the only secret — if there has to be a secret, Claudia says there has to be a secret — is that one of us tries to find the humor in whatever it is we are fighting about. And fast.
Or you can bet one of us is going to yank our hand away.
And I’d rather do anything else than walk up to a party, two paces behind.
Mary Lou Sanelli is an author whose latest book is A Woman Writing When not working as a literary speaker on the Mainland, she lives in Honolulu. For more of her work, visit marylousanelli.com.
“A SHARED SPACE” is an ongoing reader-submitted column. To share your story, email coconnor@midweek.com
