fwriction

Story of the Day, in video form:

Tobias Wolff, reading “Say Yes” (from Narrative Magazine, via Huffington Post)

They were doing the dishes, his wife washing while he dried. He’d washed the night before. Unlike most men he knew, he really pitched in on the housework. A few months earlier he’d overheard a friend of his wife’s congratulate her on having such a considerate husband, and he thought, I try. Helping out with the dishes was a way he had of showing how considerate he was.

They talked about different things and somehow got on the subject of whether white people should marry black people. He said that all things considered, he thought it was a bad idea.

“Why?” she asked.

Sometimes his wife got this look where she pinched her brows together and bit her lower lip and stared down at something. When he saw her like this he knew he should keep his mouth shut, but he never did. Actually it made him talk more. She had that look now.

“Why?” she asked again, and stood there with her hand inside a bowl, not washing it but just holding it above the water.

“Listen,” he said, “I went to school with blacks, and we’ve always gotten along just fine. I don’t need you coming along now and implying that I’m a racist.”

“I didn’t imply anything,” she said, and began washing the bowl again, turning it around in her hand as though she were shaping it. “I just don’t see what’s wrong with a white person marrying a black person, that’s all.”

“They don’t come from the same culture as we do. Listen to them sometime - they even have their own language. That’s okay with me, I like hearing them talk” - he did; for some reason it always made him feel happy - “but it’s different. A person from their culture and a person from our culture could never really know each other.”

“Like you know me?” his wife asked.

“Yes. Like I know you.”

“But if they love each other,” she said. She was washing faster now, not looking at him.

Oh boy, he thought. He said, “Don’t take my word for it. Look at the statistics. Most of those marriages break up.”