My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #8, August 30, 1999

SECRET LIVES

Do you know who you love?
Does anybody here have a clue
Just who they're with?

Beautiful South

When I saw a friend of mine performing with her band recently, I was blown away. This was CarolAnne? I'd heard her sing before, in a lovely pure soprano. But I'd never heard her get down and dirty, belting out the songs of Bonnie Raitt, Cher, Aretha. I'd never heard her voice go from low throbbing sultry sounds to gospel hollerin' -- the blackest I ever heard a white girl sound.

I've known her well for fifteen years. We've laughed and joked, talked about everything that mattered in our lives. And still I didn't know this about her.

I was reminded of a woman who always struck me as whiny, lazy, unimaginative, and, above all, boring. I laterlearned that in her spare time, she's a clown. I thought about a regular visitor to our library, a woman who is religious, vital, interested in learning all kinds of things. Not until I saw her climbing on a bus with a Dan Quayle banner on it, headed for the Iowa Straw Poll did I realize that she was also involved in politics. And then I thought about Shirley Jackson, the writer, who anyone would have taken for nothing but the plain suburban matron and mother of four she was, had they not known she had mayhem, madness and genius lurking inside her head.

It makes me wonder what else I'm missing.

Most of the time, of course, we miss people's personalities altogether because we see them solely in terms of the functions they are performing for us. That's why a fair amount of people get annoyed at restaurants when their servers say brightly, "Hi, I'm Matt. I'll be your server tonight," and grumble things like "I just wanted food, not a relationship."

But even if you do chat up your waitress, even do it day after day, odds are you still don't really know her. You might know that her kid was sick, or her car got wrecked when a drunk slammed into it, but you don't know if she is bitchy to her husband, or secretly sad she never got to be a dancer. For all you know, she might lock her kids into a closet when she's mad at them, or she might spend her spare time delivering meals on wheels to shut ins. She might be a Jehovah's Witness or an anti-tax crusader or a Girl Scout leader. All you really know is her friendly smiling professional self.

We all have secret lives, and we see in each other pretty much only what we're interested enough to see. Why else is it that when serial killers are caught, so often the neighbors say, "He seemed like such a nice quiet man."

But we also see in each other largely what the other person wants us to see. It's surprising how much we take people at their word about what they are. Have you ever noticed how some people can take over a group conversation by sheer self-assurance, set the topic, tell you what the proper view of it is, and sway anybody who started out with a different opinion? Somehow they make us accept their conviction that they are more intelligent and knowledgeable than anybody else -- even if we realize later that their information was wrong, or their logic flawed.

When kids in school adopt freakish costumes, we accept them at their word as people who refuse to conform. What we don't see -- what they don't want you to see -- is that, having already been rejected, they're posing as outsiders by choice, shoving their outsiderness in your face.

Even when we do know people well, they may change in unexpected ways, as anybody who's ever been to a high school reunion would agree. Was the head cheerleader always that boring, or did we only notice it when she gained three kids and fifty pounds? And who'd have thought that the weird kid with cokebottle glasses who liked booger jokes and couldn't quite play his guitar would become Dave Barry?

We don't really know our nearest and dearest, or even ourselves, will respond in times of crisis. Could anyone guess who, of all the men who pledge to love their wives in sickness and in health, would actually do it, caring for her lovingly through years of chronic disability? (Anyone would have correctly picked my kind, straight-arrow brother-in-law, but would anyone have picked Gene Wilder, who stayed by Gilda Radner's side until she died?) Could a Kosovar family whose kids played every day with the Serbian kids next door have guessed that one of those Serbian kids would someday call them enemy and burn down their house?

People are like prisms, with thousands of facets, but our eyes and minds are geared to seeing only a few at a time. We are all mystery stories waiting to be solved, and we are all detectives. No matter how good we get at working out the plots of other people's lives, we will always get fooled on the details. The best we can do is to pay attention, not just to what people say they are, but to what they do and think. We can watch how people treat each other.

And we can give our trust, must give our trust, because we are part of other people's equations. Sometimes it is because we trust that other people become finer, just to live up to our faith in them.

We can be prepared to be amazed, because there will always be something we hadn't noticed before, something we hadn't understood. The joy in any relationship is surely in the newness we find when we look at each other again as for the first time.

We all have secret lives. But the best secrets are the ones we share.

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.