Couplehood Read Free Page A

heavy?”
    “No.”
    “Seriously.”
    “You don’t.”
    “C’mon, look at this picture from last summer—you gonna tell me I don’t look thinner there?”
    “Let me see … well … maybe a little, yeah.”
    “Oh, like
you’re
so perfect?”
    “I didn’t say anything—you asked!”
    “Just drop it.”
    Hours later: “I can’t
believe
you said that.”
    N ow, certain body measurements
never
change. Height and shoe size, for example. These are areas, that, when we were kids, kept growing along with everything else, and then just stopped. No warning. No fanfare; they just hit a number and stayed there.
    And back then, getting bigger was a
good
thing. You were proud to be expanding. You showed off your progress. “Look—I’m over four feet already.”
    Then one day you notice you’ve been wearing the same sizes several years in a row, and you realize, “I guess I’m done. This is who I am. Five foot ten, and not an inch more. I’m 5′10″, 9½ shoe. Forever. That’s who I am.”
    I think it would have been nice to know about it when it happened. You could have had a party.
    “Hey, what’s everybody celebrating?”
    “I finished growing.”
    “Well, congratulations!! How’d you make out?”
    “Five seven and a half, size eight in a dress shoe.”
    “Good for you.”

Let’s
Do
Something
    T he need to
do something
can kill you.
    You walk into work Monday morning, they’re all over you.
    “How was your weekend?”
    “Have a good weekend?”
    “What’d you do with the weekend?”
    “Do anything good?”
    What the hell could I do that’s interesting enough to withstand that kind of pounding? It’s a weekend, two days off. How good is it supposed to be?
    But they bombard you with How-was-your-weekends,and I feel this great pressure to have
had
a great weekend. For
them.
    “I went skiing, let’s say. Would that be enough for you?”
    This is what they’re looking for. Some kind of action verb.
    “We went harpooning. British Columbia.”
    “We ran a test launch for the space shuttle, alright? Stop grilling me, I tell you!”
    Because, invariably, what you do is—nothing. You hang around the house. Read the paper. Take a succession of naps. And even then, people try to make it sound like more.
    “So, you relaxed? Took a little R & R?”
    “I didn’t say I relaxed. I didn’t ‘R’
or
‘R’. I just did nothing.”
    And for me, that
is
a great weekend. Doing Nothing. Shutting off the phones, lying on the couch with the woman of my dreams, and just reading—I can’t really ask for more than that.
    I love reading the paper, and I don’t know why. I don’t even really read it. I just like to get it, hold it, and look in the general direction of the printed surface. It’s the sheer challenge of actually managing to find the time to sit down with a paper that’s appealing. That’s all it is.
    Because the content itself—I’m not all that interested.
    Truly. As soon as I sit down with the Sunday Paper, the first thing I do is throw half of it away. Lose the stock reports, lose the grocery coupons, lose the stuff for sale, and lose the travel section. (Where am
I
going?)
    Now you’re left with a manageable pile: Sports, magazine section, TV, and regular news.
    Here’s my thing with the news: I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t mean to sound insensitive, it’s just that by the time I read about something, it’s obviously too late to help. It already happened.
    Now, if you told me that
tomorrow
a bus was going to go sailing off the Himalayas, I would get involved. I’d pick up the phone and warn them. “Don’t get on the bus. Didn’t you see the paper?”
    But if I read on Sunday that something happened on Saturday, what can I do? At best I can call to console. “I only just now heard.”
    O nce in a while, I’ll actually read the entire paper, so I’ll feel like I’m at one with the global community. I know what’s going on, I’m okay. I go to sleep.