Musings from an Inept Gossip

When my husband and I met, some 25+ years ago in college, we found common ground in a mutual desire to make other people laugh so hard that they snorted Pepsi out their noses onto their homework. Not much has changed with us although the world seems to expect us to be a lot nosier.

We suck at gossip. We’re duds at cocktail parties, neighborhood barbecues, Superbowl gatherings, and family reunions. We never know what anyone is up to unless we read it in the Police Blotter, and that only tells you what they got caught at, which is much less exciting.

Guy culture being what it is, being a lousy gossip is not as huge of a social deficit for him as it is for me. He can laughingly lateral into talking about stocks or business or lousy management policies and hoot and shake his head with the other fellows. He’s not real big on sports, but he can fake it pretty well.

Me, I wish I drank to excess so I could use that as an excuse for being oblivious. At least it would make me an OBJECT of gossip, so that people would shut up when I come into the kitchen, or wherever females have clustered to gossip, and I wouldn’t feel a wild urge to try to participate in my fumbling, ineffective way.

I blame it on the court-ordered psychiatrist I had to go to after my parents’ divorce, way back before divorce was common. Every adult within 20 miles was sure that being a child of divorce was going to cause me to run wild at the ripe old age of 10, steal cars, take drugs, and belch in church. Teachers squinted at me, waiting for me to run amok and break my crayons, preachers tended to point at me during the sermon, and neighbor ladies wiped away crocodile tears of sympathy when I played with their kids. At 10, mostly I wondered where I had left my shoes or my homework, and I never did turn into the juvenile delinquent I think they were all secretly hoping for to prove that Divorce is Bad for Children. I was glad that I didn’t have to either wake up to or go to sleep to the sound of scary arguments anymore, and I turned out reasonably OK, much to their dismay.

Anyway, I will admit to having been very self-conscious about being a Child From a Broken Home way back when. I couldn’t do much about the grownups back then, but I did worry that maybe kids wouldn’t like me because of it, so I told Dr. Schwarz about it. He said, “They are spending so much of their time worrying about their own problems that they don’t even have time to think about yours.” I figured that meant they weren’t talking about me behind my back, so I never gave it another thought, and that belief has served me well for the most part.

Sometimes I wish Dr. Schwarz had said something else. How would my life as a woman in suburbia be different if he’d said, “Well, then you need to go collect some nasty news about anyone you think might not play Tiddlywinks with you, and glare at them self-righteously when they refuse.” Or, “Ha! Shirley can’t pogo to save her life, May stinks at hopscotch, and Bonnie’s cat likes her sister better!” It would have been really tantalizing if he’d whispered it, too, and made me swear not to tell another soul.

I still tend to believe that folks are doing their own worrying just fine without my help, and consequently, I never know who is on a loony diet, who’s in the process of cheating on their spouse or being cheated on, who missed church, who drinks too much, or who has children in trouble. I couldn’t care less about whose grass is too long, including mine, who doesn’t wash their car religiously, or who got caught at what, unless the police did the catching. I’m a clinker in the collective kitchen of scandal-mongering whisperers.

I do try to keep up on celebrity gossip, though, so I can make a stab at improving my skills. With three kids and being middle-aged, I spend enough time at the dentist and the doctor on a regular basis to have a chance to read People, Ladies Home Journal, and those wee blurbs in Time and Newsweek. Somehow, though, by the next barbecue or cocktail party, all my gossip lore is outdated. The celebrities all seem to be onto some new naughtiness, which everyone but me knows, and I’m not even a contender in the World Wide Gossip League. I wind up using my magazine gleanings to teach object lessons to the kids instead.

I guess I just don’t have the right mindset. As I stand at my kitchen sink, rinsing out my coffee cup and looking out the window, I’m thinking about stuff I need to do that day. If I see my neighbor going for a walk, my only thought is, “gee, I wonder if she’s starting an exercise program?”

If, three days later, she calls me up to tell me that her healthy stroll to the minimart was really the result of a massive furniture argument with her husband where she slammed out of the house, kicked the bootscraper so hard she busted her big toe, and threatened to go live with her sister, who has “nice” sofas, all I do is take her some chicken soup, since you can’t stand and cook with a broken toe. I might call her a few days later to see how her toe is, and it never occurs to me to call up someone else and tell them about her walk, her toe, or her furniture. I think I’m hopeless. At least I can still make my kids laugh hard enough to squirt Koolaid out their noses onto their homework.