Speaking: Pt. 2 Through her Teeth

Once, as an acting exercise, one of my directors asked me about my worst date ever and I told her this story:

I had liked this guy for months.  I didn't know much about him, except that he was gorgeous.  At the time, I thought that's all that mattered.  If two people were attracted to each other physically, the rest of it would have to be worked out.  Relationships were hard fucking work, and that work started on day one.  He always thought I was terribly naive; for once, he was right.

We had been out once before for coffee and all I remember from that date was a constant condescending look that said, "You're making a mistake dating me."  He spent the next 8 months giving me that look.

So on our second official date, we decide to go big and get dinner.   We sat in a corner and stared at each other.  Just stared.  We were suffering through the kind of silence that can only be endured with the help of an intense physical attraction.  I was pondering the cheesy fresco above his head when he suddenly bursts out, accusingly, "I only speak when spoken to."

I meet his eyes and think, we were sitting in a comfortable silence, weren't we?  Sometime in high school I had confused "comfortable silence with friends" with "any silence".

"Tell me a story," he says.
"Tell you a story?"  I ask incredulously.
"Yes."
"About what?"
"You're telling the story."

I miss the comfortable silence, I thought.  The next hour or so were spent racking my brain for things to say, and getting brisk one-liners in return.  As I poked at my undercooked fettucini I started to focus my mental energy on what we'd do when we got back to the dorms; I honestly didn't realize how badly the date was going.  Again, I kind of thought that's how those things went.

Our longest conversation was over the check:

"Why won't you jut let me pay for you?  I'm trying to do something nice."
"I just... like to be independent."
"So what, from now on you'll just pay your own way?  I want to do nice things for you.  Why can't you just let me do this, it's important to me.  I'm trying to be a gentleman."
"It's important to me to pay for myself."
"Why are you being so contrary?  I'm trying to be a good guy here!"  He didn't sound like it.  He sounded mad as hell.
I don't remember who won that one, but he sulked about it all night.

Then he saw his friend from across the restaurant and went to say hello.  "She saw us together," he said to me later.  "She said, 'Why are you here with her?  She talks through her teeth.'"  His tone made it clear that she didn't approve of me and he kind of agreed.

Posts on Speaking: Pt.1 Wallpaper

I was in middle school when I first realized that I was socially awkward.  That it was harder for me to make conversation than most kids.

My fifth grade class was very tight knit group, and those loyalties carried me through sixth grade.  Seventh grade lunch period was when things started to get a little rickety.  At the time, I sat at the overcrowded popular table with all my popular friends from fifth grade.  My best friend was fifth-grade social elite, our elementary school Jackie O.  She had just moved, but her legacy left me with a faint aura of coolness that I would ride for the next couple of months.

You were only allowed to have 14 kids per table and we were popular and awesome so we crammed in 16.  This made us rowdy and loud.  Well, this made them rowdy and loud.  I have this overwhelming tendency to fall dead silent in large groups  (A trait that seems to endlessly annoy my consistently gabby Sig O's). Surrounded by wall of sound clamor, I find I have no inclination to add to the din.  It's not that I'm uncomfortable speaking up or that I'm disengaged; in fact, I usually don't even notice haven't verbally joined the conversation until it's pointed out.  For me, being uncomfortable in silence was a learned trait.

Point is, for the first couple weeks of seventh grade I would sit at the rowdy popular table, eating my lunch, contributing to the atmosphere as much as an off-white piece of wall-paper.

Now again, I didn't really notice that this was a problem.  Until we pissed off the lunch monitors.  "That's it.  There are too many people at this table.  Two of you have to move by the end of the week."

And so middle school clique-politics took hold.  Now, being wall-paper, I was actually safe.  One kid moved voluntarily.  He knew he was in over his head, reaching for an unattainable dream.  So then they start to bully out some other kid.  He was awkward, I suppose.  And not quite cool enough.  But nice.  And not planning to go anywhere.

One day, Queen Bee Kristen was needling this boy, telling him to move, that he wasn't wanted.  "I don't know why you're trying to stay, no one wants you here anyway.  Why would you stay at some table where no one likes you?  We're all just going to hate you more if you don't move.  You just sit alone at the end of the table, why do you want to stay?"

I was appalled that she could talk to another person this way.  That she could be so unabashedly mean.  I snapped at her.  Something simple, but cold as ice.  It was probably the first words, I'd said all semester.

Kristen looked at me, disgusted.  Suddenly that innocuous off-white wall-paper had transformed to a tacky orange that clashed with all her furniture.  "It's not like we're saying this to you."  It was obvious she meant, "but I should be."

At the end of the week, the lunch monitors changed their minds.  One boy leaving was enough, there was no need to pick another exile.  They didn't know, of course, that it was all too late.  I had already laid  the groundwork for my own isolation.  I spent the rest of the semester reading books alone at the end of the table.