* * *
If men are from Mars, then Carol is from… some planet outside the solar system. (Attributed to her husband, Ron Koch.)
Privately, Ron did think that she might be from Venus. But also, as a good Lutheran, he thought that the Venus aspect of her life wasn’t anyone’s business except her husband’s. Besides, it didn’t have anything to do with the way she conducted a debate.
Ron never argued with Carol. Over the past twenty years, he had realized that there wasn’t any point in it. It wasn’t that she pouted. It wasn’t that she sulked, or screamed, or threw things. It wasn’t that she didn’t fight fair.
She just didn’t follow the argument script. A proper argument was like a minuet. The first speaker performed a step. The second speaker responded with the appropriate riposte. The first speaker took the next step in the dance. The second responded with the expected answer. In Ron’s view, a proper argument was almost liturgical in form.
It didn’t work with Carol. If he advanced with the first minuet step, she offered a mental pirouette. If, disconcerted but persistent, he nevertheless performed the second step in the minuet, Carol did a bit of a tango and added some cha-cha-cha as a codicil.
Just because they were on opposite sides of the official debate, Gary, Jonas, and Carol didn’t see any reason why they shouldn’t eat supper together. It was a relief just to speak plain American English for a change. While the two counts were dining with one another, the three of them occupied a corner bench at the Freedom Arches.
“They’re going at it all backwards,” said Carol with annoyance. “If the confirmation class mothers had taken this, ‘I won’t give an inch’ sort of attitude, we’d never have agreed on a class time that everyone could make.”
“I think,” said Jonas cautiously, “that the schedule for a confirmation class really is adiaphoral. Possibly even from Professor Osiander’s perspective.”
“Not if one person digs in her heels and says it will be nine A.M. on Saturday or else and four of the kids can’t make it then. Men! They go in and toss all these demands on a table. ‘This we’ve got to have.’ Well, they can’t both eat the whole cake, so even when they negotiate a compromise, they all go home with a grudge, thinking that they’ve lost something.”
If Dickens had been writing Carol’s dialogue, she would have added, “Bah!” Bah! was inherent in her tone of voice.
“Er,” Gary said. “That’s the way negotiations are done. It’s laid out in all the business textbooks.”
“No.” Carol was firm. “Yelling, ‘it was at 9:00 on Saturday morning when I was growing up’ or ‘we always had it on Tuesday in our church’ just causes fights. The way to do it is to make up a paper with squares, right at the beginning. The days of the week and the hours of the day. Then you take a red hi-liter and mark out what’s impossible—like school hours, or when the pastor holds services at the retirement home. Everybody gets a copy of that. Then, at the first meeting, all the mothers say what’s impossible for them—like Kevin’s sports practice or Alyssa’s flute lesson. Mark those out in orange. Then everyone says what would just be a little difficult—like, ‘We might be ten minutes late some days if the traffic gets tied up.’ Mark that in yellow. When you finish, you look at the white spaces that are left and you know what you have to work with. It might be that nobody in the whole room would have suggested ‘after supper on Thursdays,’ but if everyone can make it then, it’ll do. You’re down to what everyone can agree on, or at least work with. And nobody goes home mad.”
Both Gary and Jonas looked deeply saddened. There had to be something wrong with that, philosophically. Politically. Somehow, such a procedure reflected a lack of strong convictions. A guy who thought that confirmation classes ought to be at nine A.M. would stick with it, come hell or high water—a firm ideological commitment. If Carol Koch was a reasonable specimen of the workings of the female mind, they could only reach one conclusion. Women were frighteningly, terrifyingly, pragmatic.