This Month's Story

“What’s that noise?”

I looked up from my book.

I was sitting in front of the living room window with the glare from the beach behind me. Stella could only see me as a dark silhouette, she couldn’t see my face; which was good, because I was smiling.

“What noise?”

We both listened. Nothing.

Stella turned her head to one side, looked around the room and checked her chair.

“I keep hearing a noise, ever so often, like a click. Don’t you hear it?”

“No.”

We sat still for a minute, poised, listening. Then, when nothing happened, we both went back to our reading. It became very quiet. Jennie lay sound asleep on her rug near my feet. Holly slept in a ray of sunlight by the sliding glass door.

I read a bit more and then in the rooms silence, feeling a decent enough interval of perhaps five minutes had gone by, I moved my foot slowly over a familiar board in the living room’s oak floor. I pressed down, it responded as it always did with a quiet, but decisive, click.

Stella responded as she always did with a wild look around the room.

***

When two people live together as long as Stella and I have (it will be thirty years this December), each knows just the right pressure to put on something that will have an effect on the other person., a sort of Pavlovian response. The something involved may be very slight, a word, a touch, a movement or as in the case I’ve given above, a squeak in the living room floor.

I think the success of marriages such as mine and Stella’s is to know when to apply pressure to produce a squeak and when not to. The above vignette was one example of our marital application / non-application of such a pressure, let me give you another.

***

We were in Wal Mart. Stella was picking out some apples for a pie. I had the cart and I stood patiently waiting. Finally, I thought I’d go over to the bakery and get some bread. I started to leave the cart.

“Stay there!” This from Stella.

I stopped and looked over at Stella, who had already turned back to the apples. I looked down at the contents of the cart and didn’t move.

I heard a noise. Moving his cart close to me was one of those large persons that you don’t want to have on the opposing side of a bar room brawl. He looked at Stella for a second and then turned to me.

“I’ve been married thirty five years,” he began, speaking quietly, “and you know what I say when my wife talks to me like that?”

I looked over at Stella and, seeing that she couldn’t hear us, asked the question equally as quietly.

“What?”

He looked over at Stella also to make sure she couldn’t hear and answered me.

“ ‘Yes, dear’.”

With that he rolled his cart on as Stella came over, dropped the apples in the cart, stared suspiciously after my retreating momentary friend, and then grabbing the cart handles told for me to follow her.

I did lagging behind the requisite two paces. Oh, and I did say something, but I’m not sure she heard.

“Yes, dear.”