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Early on in our relationship, just a few dates in, my future husband/then boyfriend told me that I talked too much. I’d had boyfriends tell me that I eat too much, drink too much, smoke too much, care too much but this one was a first. Later, (because I did not immediately hit him over the head with a cast-iron frying pan until he was even more senseless), I discovered that his mother talked too much, way too much. She had four sons and a husband and not a single one of them ever attempted to stop her. By the time I met them, everybody in the family drank alcohol,(which they actually pretended that they did not do.His mother once announced, at brunch, that we could all go on and have another pitcher of Sangria while we waited to order because, after all, there was no alcohol in it) which made it easier to smile through. Sometimes, tho, she talked just enough.
I felt that my boyfriend was trying to limit my talking because he had not limited his mother’s, that I was being hung for another woman’s crime.
Then I started talking to friends, women friends. They all knew about this. About the jokes, cartoon strips, sit coms, movies, stand up, popular music, literature, history, newspapers, life. They said that it was part of the American man personae to not like it when women talk and to think that women talk too much. One, Carol, looked at me as if I was an adorable poodle who wasn’t, in spite of the hype, very bright.
This, unfortunately, is one of those things, like the dot puzzles, where once you see the pencil, you can never un-see it. I started to see that my (by then) husband had something I will call Spouse Deafness. He looked like he was awake, relatively still, breathing. but inside when I begin to talk, something inside him slips away to a place where all he can hear are dogs barking and the call of the wild.
Someday I think I’m going to stop talking and I’m never going to stop. I’ll talk in my sleep. I’ll have to snack and hydrate like people do in marathons. I’m going to talk talk talk talk talk talk talk talk, just like Molly Bloom’s ‘yes’es, only mine will be talk talk talk.talk talk until I die.