Tiptoeing Around the Elephant in the Room
- So, they start talking about the wedding. But after complimenting his wife on the veil she wore, the husband sticks his foot in his mouth. The wife has just finished saying how lovely her sister, Ellie, and her friend, Louise, looked at the wedding. The husband says Louise looked really attractive—he was thinking about how good she looked while he was up there at the altar waiting for his bride to arrive.
- The wife says that's funny, because people have been saying Louise has looked really tired recently. It's mean of them to say it, she says, because Louise is older now—twenty-seven and not twenty-three.
- The husband says Louise still looked like a knockout, though.
- The wife acts like she's glad the husband thought Louise looked good, and asks him how he though her sister looked.
- When the husband says he didn't get a good look at her, the wife gets mad. She says Ellie looked great today, and says her husband doesn't notice Ellie or pay attention to her. She accuses him of not liking her sister.
- The husband says he does so like Ellie. But the wife says it's going to make their marriage difficult—the fact that her husband doesn't like her own family.
- Annoyed, the husband protests—he says he likes her mother, her father, and Ellie. The wife says she's seen how marriages go bad because people don't like each other's families. He says he's confused by how angry she is, and that they shouldn't fight like this right at the beginning of the honeymoon. He says he thinks the wife is just nervous.
- She claims she's not nervous and that there's nothing to be nervous about.
- The husband says people say this happens—sometimes newly married girls get nervous on account of thinking about… He doesn't finish his thought and just says, "I mean. I mean—" before going on to say everything will be all right.
- The wife says she guesses she was just nervous after thinking about all those people everywhere, and also about being alone with her husband. She says they won't be like a typical couple that fights all the time, right?
- The husband agrees.