DON'T ASK AND PLEASE DON'T TELL

When you live on an island where the newspaper only comes out once a week, gossip takes on a whole new meaning. I find the men of the Vineyard are just as big at gossip as the women. In fact Edgartown has it's own personal town crier. Bob works at the Stop $ Shop and knows everything that happens. He must listen to a police scanner because after listening to Bob there is nothing new in the paper except obscure facts and letters to the editor. The kind of gossip he doles out won't get him into trouble like the following tidbits might.

Don’t Ask and Please Don’t Tell

I’m one of those people folks like to tell their troubles to. I’m sympathetic, compassionate and keep my own counsel. You’d think this would make me a lot of friends. Not so. The minute people unload their deepest darkest secrets they suddenly realize that the relationship is uneven. They start to resent the fact that they’ve spilled their guts to me and soon drift away.

I had a girlfriend (the operative word here is had) who one day out of the blue told me that her husband had recently confessed, by e-mail no less, that he was a transsexual. Before I had a chance to say, “Too much information”, her skeleton had rattled itself over into my closet. Being a confidante is a no win situation. If word gets out it looks like I blabbed. I could tell the minute she told me, it was only a matter of time before she would no longer be able to look me in the eye unless I confided some equally humiliating factoid about my life.

After endless therapy, which did nothing except make my friend believe she had an honorary degree in psychoanalysis, she spent the next couple of years trying to convince me that I should open up to her about my troubles. When I finally said there was nothing I wished to discuss with her she announced we no longer had anything to talk about and hung up on me. I haven’t heard from her since. I can’t help thinking if I were more self centered and my shoulder was less waterproof these things wouldn’t happen.

A summer visitor friend who happens to be a writer told me recently that when she goes home she’s meeting a man for a drink. Now, that statement might sound innocuous to you but when you’re a woman of a certain age, as she and I are, it is fraught with meaning. It’s a euphemism for you know what. She was getting close to the too much information line but like a dummy I didn’t stop her and now I know her dirty little secret. The thing that really bothered me about this confession is that with great glee she followed up by saying it was going to make a great book. This woman is close to seventy and when she told me her paramour-to-be is forty I pictured a dust jacket with Fabio pushing a wrinkled old bleached blonde around in a wheel chair.

I was soon getting a weekly call and blow by blow, you should pardon the expression, description of her geriatric love life. Due to various reasons that aren’t important to my story she didn’t hook up with the original guy but, having made up her mind, like a lion stalking prey, she systematically hunted down someone else perfect for her. Not wanting this to become common knowledge, hence her confiding in someone who lives 1,000 miles away, she chose a pilot who is only in town two days a month. She calls me to let me in on her latest adventures and she actually giggles like a teenager. Is it just me or is this a little unseemly? I happen to be fond of her poor husband.

After my mother had been a widow for a few years she developed a relationship with a younger man. She of course couldn’t tell any of her friends about it so she bubbled over one day in my presence. I tried to forget about it but at a dinner party I attended the conversation took an ugly turn and the sex lives of oldsters was discussed. It was the consensus that they don’t have or want one. I couldn’t let it go. I mentioned my mother, albeit obliquely, naturally not mentioning names. As luck would have it there was a woman there whose sister was my mother’s neighbor and come to find out was also dating her gentleman caller and had seen his car in my mother’s drive. Needless to say this woman was not as closed mouthed as I usually am and my mother didn’t speak to me voluntarily for several months. Again--trouble caused by a secret that I hadn’t really wanted to hear.

This event, however, did finally provide me with a solution to my problem. I realized that if people thought I would blab their confidences all around town they would no longer use me to unlock their vaults. Since it is against my nature to actually do that I enlisted my best friend who, either has no secrets or more likely doesn’t feel the need to share them. With my permission she told everyone we know that I was on the short list to take over the gossip column in the local paper and anything they confided in me might find its way into newsprint. It must be working. I haven’t lost a friend in months. No one tells me anything any more.