“I picked up your shirts at the dry cleaners today,” she said.
“Which shirts?”
“The ones I took last week. Your favorite blue one was in there.”
“Which dry cleaner did you go to?”
“Across from the oil-change place.”
“The oil-change place on 15th?
“No, over by the school.
“Mm.”
“You’ll never guess who I ran into at Walgreen’s while I was refilling my prescription. Oh, by the way, they had Zest on sale, so I bought you some.”
“Oh, who?”
“What?”
“Who did you run into?”
“Oh, guess. But you’ll never get it right.”
“Judy?”
“No, guess again.”
“Mrs. Benderson?”
“No, but you’re closer. Guess.”
“Do we have to play this game?”
“What do you mean?”
“This whole guessing-game thing. Who did you see at Walgreen’s?”
“You don’t have to be like that.”
“Look, I’m sorry. Who did you see?”
“Diana, and she was out with the baby for the first time.”
“Oh wow.”
“Yeah, she looks great.”
“Mm.”
“Oh, did you see that David and Lee Anne got a new minivan?”
“Yeah, I saw it out there. When did that happen?”
“Friday I think. Oh, no wait, Saturday. Oh, no, it was Friday, because I was just coming home from the meeting at school.”
“Uh-huh. What are they doing with the old one?”
“I haven’t asked Lee Anne yet. There’s a ‘For Sale’ sign in the back window of it, so I guess they’re selling it.”
“I guess so.”
“I think they liked it.”
“What? The new one?”
“No, I meant the old one. Lee Anne told me once they were pretty happy with it.”
“Uh-huh. Oh, are we going to that party?”
“What party?”
“The anniversary thing.”
“At the Wassermans?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know. Do you want to?”
“I feel like we ought to.”
“Yeah, probably. We have a bag of chips and an unopened jar of salsa, so we don’t have to pick up anything.”
“Are chips and salsa enough?”
“Don’t you think that’s enough?”
“I wasn’t saying that, I just didn’t know whether we should get something else.”
“We’d have to stop somewhere, because we don’t have much in the way of party food.”
“Mm.”
“You don’t love me any more,” she said.
The sound of the back door slamming echoed a moment in the empty kitchen. Then I listened to the silence for a while.
Note: The assignment was to write two pages on any of a variety of topics suggest by the writer Abigail Thomas on her “Getting Started” web page. I chose “Write two pages of boring dialogue.” She says, “You’ll be surprised how hard it is to be boring on purpose,” but I didn’t find it so hard. Had trouble staying awake long enough to write two pages, though.
© 2008 Edward F. Gumnick
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Ah, yes, I remember that sound! I guess you still haven’t had the deviated septum fixed? 😛
This is one (of two) that “clunked” for me. I know you’re well acquainted with women, but you seem to have forgotten to pack your male-to-female emotional dictionary. The exchange, as written, has her engaged. If she’s really, really pissed, such a conversation would never happen. If she’s so far beyond pissed as to not care, ditto. Either way, it doesn’t seem to work for me as dialogue. Now if the whole conversation were filtered through a male POV, it would seem more credible.
I didn’t mean for her to sound engaged. I meant for her to be absent-mindedly babbling to avoid the painful silence that would rule if he had his way.
I thought about changing the last line of dialog to “I don’t love you any more.” Would that make a difference?
Ooookkkaaayyyy. You accomplished boring dialogue on purpose. But then, I didn’t understand how she suddenly went to “you don’t love me” from that boring dialogue. I guess this is a slice in the middle of a book in your mind where that sentence would make sense if i’d read the 150 pages before these 2.
Naaaaah, I just needed a way out of the conversation.