You're Married to Her? (20 page)

As difficult as a facility for wanton conversation must have seemed to a shy man like my father, it was surprisingly easy, in fact a necessity, for those of us for whom silence in the presence of strangers feels impossibly awkward. Although peppering people with questions, telling jokes, making small talk about children or gardens or sports was a habit that served me well on dates and at parties and the like, it drove my wife crazy when I first met her and she did her best to help me curb the impulse. I can still feel it coming on. I can feel myself beginning to entertain people waiting in line at movie theaters. I have to stop myself from jabbering with cab drivers, UPS guys, the plumber at 90 dollars an hour. The willpower to remain silent while staring at the ceiling with my mouth open wide and not to engage the woman who cleans my teeth is almost impossible to muster.

Although a quick glance at any early photograph of myself is all the evidence I need to confirm I am no longer the person in these stories, the impulses of the past, even the distant past, remain. Sometimes I think of them as a phantom limb. Decades removed, they still tingle and twitch.

I've come to think that it's the ability to deny these impulses that sets our early selves apart from the people we've grown to become. A psychologist named Walter Mischel once offered a large plate of marshmallows to a group of preschool kids at Stanford University. He told them they could eat one marshmallow immediately, but
they could eat two if they waited for him to return from doing an errand. After fourteen years of following data on their lives he discovered that the kids who were able to deny the impulse to eat the marshmallow had better SAT scores, were happier, and were better adjusted.

All but one of the stories in this collection re-play the memories of a man who lived them decades ago. I don't remember the last time I was even in the same room with a gram of cocaine and have certainly never done a line of it since. But I still sometimes long for the obliteration of the inner censor and the sublime illusion that whatever I've written is a triumph of the imagination. I was re-elected to office three times since my first disastrous term as a Selectman. I had to train myself not to personalize issues. I had to learn not to befriend town employees however many times the impulse to do so returned. Nor do I get jealous of the success of others. I might experience a stab of envy when a friend receives a great review, but I've learned to put it in context. Given the disappearance of so many independent newspapers today, that great review is likely one of very few he's received. Most miraculously, after thirty-six years, I am still very happily married to her. However many years it has taken, I have learned to wait for the second marshmallow.

Still, the strongest of the impulses somehow win out. Like my mania for talking. I still do it, in a studio, on public radio, every week. Call me.

Ira Wood is the author of three novels,
The Kitchen Man, Going Public,
and
Storm Tide
, co-authored by Marge Piercy, with whom he has also written
So You Want to Write: How to Master the Craft of Writing Fiction and Memoir.
They make their home on four acres of land in a small fishing village on Cape Cod. His talk show,
The Lowdown,
addresses politics, books, and national trends. It airs on WOMR-FM Provincetown, a Pacifica network affiliate, and streams worldwide on WOMR. ORG. His website is
irawood.com
.

Visit Leapfrog Press on Facebook

 

and

 

Leapfrog Press on the Web
(
www.leapfrogpress.com
)

 

Also, visit

 

Ira Wood's website
(
www.irawood.com
)

 

and

 

Marge Piercy's website
(
www.margepiercy.com
)

You're Married to Her? © 2012 by Ira Wood

All rights reserved.

 

These are tales inspired by memory. Dates and places have been altered, events and characters freely compressed, exaggerated, and combined. In addition, characters have fictitious names and identifying characteristics. Since this is the way my mind and my memory work, to claim adherence to some absolute truth, however subjective that might be, would be impossible, and much less fun. As to the veracity of the pronoun “I,” that is shamefacedly “me” throughout the manuscript and my wife, Marge Piercy, that's “her.”

 

Portions of this book in various forms have appeared in
Ploughshares
,
The St. Petersburg Review
,
The Cream City Review
,
The Rowe Center Post
, and
Fifth Wednesday Journal
.

 

Published in 2012 in the United States by
Leapfrog Press LLC
PO Box 505
Fredonia, NY 14063
www.leapfrogpress.com

 

Distributed in the United States by
Consortium Book Sales and Distribution
www.cbsd.com

 

 

eISBN : 978-1-935-24827-9