Sunday, December 4, 2011

Victory Laugh


I have been thinking a lot lately about how we answer what people don't say to us. 

Recently, I tried an experiment. Now, I should stop here and say I haven't always had the best of results with my experiments. Just ask my chemistry teacher or, more recently, my hairdresser, who has taken away my scissors. Or Mom, who even in her advanced years well remembers my paper dress experiment of 1966 involving used grocery bags and a stapler. But I put the past behind me and bravely went where few women have gone before. I tried to create intimacy using an inanimate object. Yes, dear reader, I told the truth on a blind date.

Said experiment began with me reporting my intention to make my living as a writer. The rest, as Shakespeare wrote, was silence, though my still-superior distance vision caught his raised eyebrow and that blink of smugness around the upper lip. I stopped speaking, and in the quiet, could hear these factions bickering within myself, little generals, each with their own hats and flags. 

General Hostess-- wearing a pink WWII helmet and exposing far too much cleavage--whispered frantically, "say something nice for a change!" Her life-or-death mission? To keep the party rolling, so to speak, making sure that everyone is pleased, even if she doesn't ask anymore if she is or isn't. She went to a state school, where degrees are done in four years on the dot, and started their first elocution club. 

She was quickly overpowered by General Burnhim, dressed in battle fatigues and wearing Prada night goggles on her head, shouting, "palm his nose cartilage into his brain; do it now, woman, do it!"  

Then there was General Whine, suggesting I cry, in her best breaking Rene Zelwigger voice, while she fiddled with the netting over her pith helmet. And the one who never speaks unless spoken to, General Sayyes, who had taken off her hat in the presence of male authority. She simply looked at me with pleading eyes, begging me to remember not to bite and kick outside of a sexual context.

And then, I couldn't help it. I started to laugh. And it grew, becoming the contagious kind that encourages itself and makes your nose run. I was not laughing because I knew he would answer me with some social reply. What he thought didn't matter. I was laughing because I knew something all those facile generals, planted there long ago by who knows what 1940's movie or blatantly bad ideal of life, did not know. They had been stripped of their weaponry, and were so busy trying to be in charge they did not realize they had lost the war. I had the hill, and they were way out-gunned.  

He did, eventually, wish me luck "with such bad odds," which only set me laughing again. Obviously, he had not heard about my war record. But that's okay. I won't be seeing him again. He's been shipped out to one of the far territories, somewhere cold. Reporting to General Notlaid, I hear.