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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Talk About Confusion Even A Simple Conversation Can Become A Jumbled Mess

Joan Silverman Special To In Life

It happens every day. Two people are talking about one thing, and suddenly the conversation shifts gears. There’s an unexpected pause, a gap in the wrong place a sure sign of trouble. With any luck, somebody says something.

“Excuse me,” a friend said anxiously in a recent phone call. “What did you just say?” I repeated the comment that my hall light had just gone out. My friend laughed, having heard something else: “I thought you said, ‘my whole life just went out.’ “

Then last week I heard a woman discussing her husband’s death, and how she made peace with it. Her friend gave her a perplexed look, and asked, “Why would you make pea soup for your husband’s death?” And they both laughed. Through some oddity of transmission, “making peace” had turned into “pea soup.”

In the scheme of all that can go wrong when two people try to talk, this much is clear: the voice can say one thing, while the ears hear another. But what of the misunderstandings that have little to do with voice and ears, that come from thicker ambiguities?

Ten years into a marriage, a wife was trying on a new skirt. Her husband likes the skirt, and tells her so. “You know,” he says, “I’ve always liked you better in skirts.”

“Really?” she says, in total surprise. “I thought you preferred that I wear slacks.”

Perhaps once he did. Perhaps he made some passing remark, years ago, about a particular pair of slacks, having no relation to other slacks - a certain drape of fabric that appealed to him. He could have never articulated it - the part about the slope of her waist turning roundly into hips, so different from the straightness of his own waist. And unknowingly, this translated into slacks, not skirts, for years.

Had his wife understood this in the first place, would she have complied? Would certain skirts have become part of the daily code between them, of small gestures that bind partners in marriage?

And yet, there was another layer, in which he knew that the roundness of her hips reminded him, also of something else: It was like the floating ball he held onto in the pool, when he was 4 and unable to swim, that kept him alive until someone pulled him out of the water.

He liked her best in skirts is how he put it. But what he meant was all roundness and floating ball. It is the way we often speak, hiding behind the same words that also reveal us. The telling, and what is told, are separate facts. But how could his wife have known which was a preference for skirts, and which was something more?

How does any of us ever know?

We come to ourselves, and to each other, as a collection of vaguely familiar parts - words and deeds that only sometimes mean what we think. So we muddle through conversations about light bulbs and pea soup, clearing the brush from the path as we go. It is amazing that two people ever come to know each other in any detail; it’s hard enough to grasp the contours, much less what lies beneath. While we don’t operate in the dark, exactly, we’re only working with limited light.

We should be thankful for whatever glimmers manage to get through.

MEMO: Joan Silverman is a free-lance writer who lives in Boston.

Joan Silverman is a free-lance writer who lives in Boston.