nektros - Cynicism in a Hot Dish

“I’m not exactly a wife-beater aficionado who’s making plans on joining the club any time down the track,” I said, “but really, they’re any normal couple who were only exchanging a few words.”

“Oh, please,” replied the purveyor of bad taste judgements present in all of our lives. “You know it’s a different story when no-one else’s looking. Back there it was a bit of shouting; for all we know, the rest of the time it’s backhands and NASA-approved, industrial-strength foundation to cover up black eyes.”

My head made a spasmodic leap into my palm. “I can’t believe you just said that.”

“Hey, you were thinking it.”

And I was.

To rewind for a moment, the afternoon was so humid that the sun was melting the heat around us into tiny lava-filled balloons, pricking them with pins and giving them all insatiable, downward-whizzing attractions to anything immersed in chlorine. Fast-forwarding to a more irrelevant if less glug-glug description, we were a quintet of pool loungers in a friend’s backyard.

In our eyes, this friend’s life was charmed. I need not go into more detail about the purveyor of unspoken riches and extractor of envy present in all of our lives. We’ve all had that special ‘I don’t know them quite so well, but just enough to hate them for having such a perfect family!’ person in our lives at one time or another.

Until, perhaps, just one moment tipped over the hourglass of opinion on them.

Until they stepped out of their own pool for a moment, went inside to grab a drink, and came back with tears in their eyes in no way attributable to a nostalgic reunion with the family fridge.

After engaging in what I like to term ‘feline-appendage dodging’, I along with purveyor of bad taste judgements volunteered to go inside for snack refills. Our eyes slid from our damp-eyed host’s indifferent expression to each other. In a flash, we were sliding open the back door, and freezing as noises reached us which the preceding years had practically conditioned us to consider a criminal offence inside such a cozy household as this.

Yelling. Parents. Upstairs.

Purveyor of bad taste judgements quietly blurted out the ultimate in bad taste ideas, “Should we go ask what’s wrong?”

After making sure her head was firmly slapped upside itself, I pushed her back outside and shut the sliding door behind us. Our host stared at us as we returned empty-handed, armed to the teeth with excuses of not being able to find the fridge comfortably sized twice as large as my bedroom.

“You think she wanted us to hear?” purveyor of bad taste judgements asked as she drove me to the train station after we had left.

“Get off it,” I replied. “Think about it. Her parents have been together for –” I had less of a clue than a blind person at a bomb defusing convention “– forever, and everyone knows they’re perfect, and they have one off-moment, and now everything’s been a lie and they’ve been secret spokespeople for 101-keeping-up-appearances all along?”

“Exactly!” came the chirped reply.

I deflated in my seat, feline-appendage dodging around a clearly recognisable losing battle.

“What if we thought they were the most miserable couple in the world?” I mumbled. “And we had walked in on them laughing with each other and pretty much doing the opposite of what they did today. Would you automatically assume they were secretly the happiest couple in the world and just wanted everyone to assume they hated each other?”

Purveyor of bad taste judgements pondered my hypothetical double standard for all of two seconds, before answering with a profound, “Whatever. You know I’m right!”

I left purveyor of bad taste judgements that day swearing that I would call our friend to ask for her version of swear-word-spitting events … only I never did.

Because despite my reluctance to admit it, I too had already made up my mind.