Read Online We Are Still Married by Garrison Keillor - Free Book Online Page A

price for their presence. They don’t beg or threaten, they are self-effacing, and they do what they can to make human life smooth and enjoyable. The fact that there are no flies on you doesn’t qualify you as nice, nor the fact that you never burned the flag or that an independent prosecutor has decided not to seek an indictment. It’s who you are that counts, not your reputation. So it’s unfortunate that nice people are so sensitive about vicious slander.
    When your Aunt Hazel, the Mother Teresa of Bonhomme, Iowa, hears via the Methodist grapevine that a neighbor named Mildred has told numerous Bonhommeans that she, Hazel, isn’t as nice as everyone thinks but is “selfish” and has a “glorified opinion” of herself, it knocks your poor aunt flat on her back. Stunned, she leaves the community outreach luncheon in tears, drives straight home, and spends the afternoon lying weeping on the couch, bewildered by hostility from a woman she has gone out of her way to be nice to. She imagines Mildred cutting her up all over town with lie after shabby lie, but this cruel injustice does not make your aunt angry, it fills her with sadness, and she feels depressed for days, imagining the terrible things people are thinking about her. It does no good to tell this wonderful Christian woman, “Ignore that slut. She’s a tramp, a liar, a piece of baggage. She drinks big tumblers of sherry in the morning, her house is filthy, her cucumbers are puny, her begonias are all eaten up with bugs. Don’t let the bitch get you down.” Hazel is unable to think in those terms. She’s all torn up over it.
    Of course, who can blame Mildred that Hazel’s extreme niceness invites disbelief? Hazel’s reputation suffers from a lack of interesting negatives. Her faithful service to the church, the library, the Girl Scouts, the 4-H, the park board, the Bijou Theater renovation committee, the soup kitchen and shelter where she volunteers two days a week, her Sunday visits to the county jail, the parade of damaged children she has taken under her wing, her lifetime of Christian charity and hopeful good humor in the face of drought and illness and death—people are hungry to hear a bad word about her. Some Bonhommeans suspect that Hazel suffers from occasional depression and that she may take medication for it. They speculate about this from time to time. If on the other hand, she were a professional wrestler named Olga the Mistress of Death & Whore of Babylon, a three-hundred-pound witch with black lipstick and green-and-purple hair who spits big gobs on the flag and carries a whip and waggles her boobs at the referee and gouges her opponent Betty Anderson’s eyes and screeches weird obscenities into the darkness, she’d have a million fans around America, including many in Bonhomme, who’d say, “You know, in real life Olga’s really a nice person. She knits and cooks and is devoted to her husband and children.” But as Hazel the Soul of Kindness she has a hard row to hoe: after her three decades of good works, people say, “I hear that she may have seen a psychologist at one time.”
    America is a big two-hearted forgiving country. If Hitler was alive today, he’d be on the “Today” show, talking about his new book, My Struggle. Around the country, people would turn away from the toaster and stare at the little screen: Hitler. “A lot of people still have hard feelings toward you because of that whole Auschwitz thing, you know,” the host is saying. “What do you say to that? How do you deal with animosity on that level? I mean, personally, you and Eva. Is it rough on your marriage? How do you explain it to your kids?” The former Fuhrer speaks in rapid German and we hear a woman’s voice translate: “Bryant, a person can’t look back. I live in the future. People who still carry a grudge from forty—what was it?