Who Needs Romance?

Laughter mixes well with marriage, a fact I first learned from my aunt.  She belonged to my mother's side of the family, and its women did not reign as beauty queens, center of romance.  They had no need to.  They'd been blessed instead with sociability, unerring charm, and a frivolous humor typically based in whimsy.  All these intoxicants were blended most strongly in my aunt, Belle.

She stood, one time, with her ear pressed firmly to a wall.

"What are you doing?" we asked.

"Ssh!"

"What is it?"

"Ssh.  I'm listening."

Curious we too pressed our ears to the wall.

"Hear it?" she queried.

"I don't hear anything," I complained.

In sorrow Belle shook her head.  "I know.  It's been like that all day," she agreed mournfully.

Another time she sat at our kitchen table.  The dinner dishes had been removed; the table was bare except for one spoon and a puddle of water.  At these Belle stared as if entranced.  One by one, as the rest of the family wandered into the kitchen, she'd beckon to them.  "Look at this!" she'd call.

"At what?" we'd say, approaching unsuspiciously.  We would stare down at the table, seeing nothing but spoon and water.  "What is it?"

"Look closer," she'd encourage.

We'd bend, anxious to examine whatever she'd found.  At that moment she'd press her finger firmly on the tip of the spoon bowl and then release it.  The handle of the spoon would thus fall back to the table and, landing in the puddle, baptize us with fresh knowledge, to say nothing of mixed emotions.  "See?" she'd say, and settle back to wait for her next victim.

I had misgivings when Belle announced her engagement to Ben.  Her betrothed was a warm, friendly person, well suited to our family, but I wondered what marriage would do to my aunt's sense of the ludicrous.  I should never have worried. Magnificent though she was as a solo, Belle was destined for greater moments now.

Her husband would begin a joke: "There's this guy in the Bronx‑
"

"Brooklyn," she'd interrupt.

"Who works as a longshoreman‑
"

"He's a taxi driver," she'd nod knowingly.

"He found a wallet with eighty dollars‑
"

"He didn't find a wallet; he lost a suitcase.  And it wasn't eighty dollars but $263.  You just can't tell a story right."  And then she'd smile up at him, her faced a studied blend of innocence and triumph.

Once he fetched himself a glass of water.

"Umm, that looks good," Belle observed.  "Why didn't you bring me some?"

"Didn't know you wanted any."

"Well, I do, desperately."

"So get some, already."

"No shame," she clucked.  "How can you drink that in front of me, your poor, desperate wife?"

"Like this."  He raised the glass dramatically.

"Don't spill it," she cautioned.

"I won't, I won't," he reassured her, momentarily lowering the glass.

She waited till he raised it again.  "Guggle," she said, a half smile on her lips.

Chuckling, Ben lowered the untouched glass.  "Aw, cut it out.  Get your own water if you want some."

Waiting patiently, Belle made no move.  The glass reached lip level again before she struck.  "Guggle," she repeated, her smile a wicked one.

What there is in human beings that makes them laugh when they're most determined not to neither he, she, nor I knew.  But Ben did know when he was licked.  Still laughing he handed her the drink and went back to the kitchen for another.  He drank it there, too, as I remember.

They went, one night, to the movies, a late show.  On their return they passed through the parlor where I slept, and I heard them faintly as they did so.  Not so faint, however, was their ensuing conversation.  What they said I can't recall, half asleep as I was, but I do remember‑-vividly‑-the sudden glare of the living room lights. 

Mock drama in her voice, my aunt was clutching me to her.  "You can't strike me, you cad," she informed her husband.  "I've got a child in my arms!"  At the other end of my cot stood Ben, his belt swinging pendulum style, his grin wide.  "I'll show you who gets last tap," he was repeating.  And it was only the next morning that I wondered why Belle had chosen to wake me instead of her baby to win the game.

Equally impressed on my memory were their efforts, one year, to satisfy my grandmother's esthetic longings.  Each summer my grandparents, aunt, and uncle shared a bungalow at the shore.  Its porch had a foot-wide ledge which surmounted a half wall of shingle, three feet high from the porch side but five and a half feet up from the ground.  My cousin and I were wont to leave painted sea shells on it for ashtrays.  Nonetheless, this perch always struck my grandmother as bare.  "We should put something on that shelf," she'd murmur from time to time.  "A plant, maybe, or a bowl of fruit.  Something."

And something did show up on it one day.  Gazing in astonishment from the living room window, my grandmother and I watched my aunt neatly arrange my uncle's head there. 

It first rested midway from the ends of the porch.  Stepping back, Belle considered it pensively.  The head raised its eyebrows at her.  She shook her head, her determination made.  The head's mouth drooped and looked mournful.  Firmly she slid it three feet to her left.  Again the eyebrows, quizzical.  Stepping back a pace, she extended her arm, raised her thumb, and sighted the head carefully.  A tentative smile began to play about the head's mouth, but once again my aunt shook it off. 

Stepping forward she tilted the head to the right, then resumed her former position, considering the effect.  The head and its eyebrows waited patiently.  Finally she gave a sign of satisfaction, and the head grinned delightedly and assumed an idiot expression.  "Mom," she called....

Romance, I had found as a child, existed solely in books and movies.  Real marriages tended to be complacently dull, with a quiet broken only by an occasional raised voice or slammed door.  Except for my aunt's, where it was broken by laughter.  And I learned, though I didn't know I had till much later, that a good marriage not only lets you be what you naturally are, but provides a team effort to enhance it.