Chapter 1

Mildred and Hiram responded to my newspaper ad for the project. Instead of providing the preliminary kind of information I asked for, they simply wrote "We wish to participate in the marriage seminar." It was odd phrasing, but I'd met some odd people during the project.

I called to set up the initial appointment.

"Randall residence, this is Mrs. Randall speaking."

Now I don't normally put last names of the study participants in a narrative, but I needed to this time, simply because the way she answered the phone told me something about her. I have, of course, changed the name to preserve confidentiality.

I knew immediately that I was speaking with an old fashioned woman. These days, the average greeting one hears on the phone is "Hello?" A less frequent, but still normal greeting is simply "Yeah?" or "Yes?" Occasionally there will be a gruff voice asking "Whadda ya want?", but for most of us this simply signals a wrong number. But the old-time formal phone answering routine, where the name of the family is identified, and the person speaking identifies him or herself, is fairly rare, at least when a call is taken on a home phone.

Not that being old fashioned meant anything in particular to me concerning their participation in the study. Marriage is becoming old fashioned itself these days. I just assumed that an old fashioned girl would be married to an old fashioned guy, and that, being old fashioned, their marriage might be stronger than many others.

Never make assumptions. You never know how things will turn out.

I made the appointment and found out they had been married for twelve years. Other than that I was flying blind. Mrs. Randall wasn't the type to chat on the phone.

When I arrived at the house, I actually stopped and stared at it for a few minutes.

There was a picket fence. It was white. Inside of and along that fence were carefully tended flower gardens containing Geraniums, Iris, Pansies, and four or five other flowering plants I didn't know the names of. The grass looked like a putting green. There were bushes and fruit trees scattered about. It was a traditional cape cod house, white, with dark blue shutters on each and every window. It had a wide, covered porch, with a porch swing on it. An elm in the front yard had a tire swing hanging from it. That swing looked wrong somehow, and I studied it. I finally realized that the grass under it was undamaged - no bare spot where little feet had torn and killed the grass as those feet skidded on it.

It looked like something out of a storybook, or a picture post card. That, in itself might not have been so odd, but it was sandwiched between two cookie cutter houses in a fairly new subdivision of cookie cutter houses, none of which had fences, or even trees, for that matter. It had the appearance of a farm house that had been picked up by Dorothy's tornado in The Wizard of Oz, and plopped down on top of the wicked witch of the suburbs' house.

I went up to the porch. There was a welcome mat. There were also decorations beside the door, above the bell, made of wheat straws woven into beautiful geometric shapes. I rang the bell. A high pitched tinny bell, just like you'd find in an old farm house, rang until I removed my finger.

A woman way too young to be named Mildred came to the door. She had on an apron and was wiping her hands with a towel. Her hairdo looked like the house... like in the pictures you see of women celebrating after VE day in the papers. She had on a dress that came to below her knees, and sensible shoes.

"Yes?" she asked, opening the inner door, but not the wooden screen door. I hadn't seen a screen door like that since I was a kid. It was the kind that had a long spring nailed to the jamb and to the edge of the door. When you opened the door the spring dragged across the edge of the door, making a repetitive twanging sound.

"I'm Bob," I said. I like to be informal.

"Oh yes," she said. She said it with all the enthusiasm of a person who's just been told that the kids who are going to leave a bag of burning dog shit on your porch are here. "Please come in."

She was polite, but there was no heart in it.

Hiram was sitting in an upholstered chair that had wings on the sides, as old fashioned as the house. The floors were some dark hardwood and gleamed. There were rugs scattered about, but no actual carpeting. Hiram was sitting, reading the paper, and I swear on my mother's grave, smoking a straight stemmed pipe. He had on slacks and a sport's jacket, over an open-necked button shirt. I looked around for the tie. It had to be here somewhere. I didn't see it, but I knew it was there. He also had a crew cut. I had a feeling I was looking at Dennis the Menace's father.

"Hiram, this is Mister Thompson. He's here for our appointment about the marriage seminar."

"Oh," said Hiram. He stood up, folded the paper and put it on his chair, and then stepped forward to offer me his right hand, while his left removed the pipe from his mouth. "How do you do?" His grip was neither firm nor limp.

"I do pretty well, Mister Randall," I said, as formally as I could. "How 'bout yourself?" I don't do very well at being formal. Too many years in college, I suspect.

He took his hand back. "Shall we begin?"

No pussyfooting around with this bunch. That was for sure.

There were matching chairs, like the one Hiram had been sitting in. There was a table between them, with a lamp on it. The lamp was a huge old monstrosity, with a maroon shade, and from what I could see it would completely prevent anyone sitting in one chair from seeing the person in the other chair. I sat on a love seat. There was no couch. I looked around. Other than a coffee table, the rest was just bare wood floor - lots of it. The place looked more like an old time parlor than a living room. I suddenly realized that one of the things missing was a television. I looked around some more. No only was there no TV, I didn't see a radio either. Maybe they had those in their bedroom. Sometimes people watched TV in bed.

I examined Mildred and Hiram. I had to admit they looked a lot alike. If you've ever seen that painting of the farmer, with the pitchfork, and his wife, they looked similar to that. They were both rail thin and had narrow pinched faces, but at the same time smooth, unlined skin on those faces. They both looked gray and insubstantial somehow, almost like they were only half in this world. The science fiction buff in me toyed for a few seconds with the hypothesis that they were actually aliens, posing as humans, using outdated information. It is hotly debated in the science fiction community that any aliens who visit earth will be fifty years out of date when they get here, because the light waves they can see will be so old. But they'll be traveling so fast that the last fifty years of light will just flash past them. So they'll think everything is like it was fifty years before they got here.

Mildred and Hiram and their house looked a little like that. They also looked way too young to have been married twelve. I decided to find out about that right away.

I pulled out my pen and started asking questions.

"What are your ages?"

Hiram answered for them both. "I'm thirty and Mildred is twenty-eight.

That meant he'd married her when he was eighteen, and she was sixteen. Interesting, but not completely unusual. Maybe he'd gotten her pregnant and had to marry her.

"Any children?" I asked.

"No," said Mildred. It was delivered a little harshly, and it was impossible for me to tell if the idea of having children disgusted her, or if she was pissed off because they didn't have any. At any rate I knew they hadn't "had" to get married.

So far the ambiance in the room was pretty cool. They almost acted like they didn't want to do this.

"Are you sure you want to participate in this study?" I asked, giving them a graceful out if they wanted it.

"It's necessary," said Hiram.

Now that was an odd way to put it.

But I launched into the preliminary spiel about my hypothesis, and told them I'd be asking a lot of questions, some of them quite personal.

"Are you going to ask questions about... sex?" asked Mildred. She sounded slightly ill at the thought.

"Well, sex is an integral and important part of a marriage." I said.

"I suppose so." said Mildred.

I half expected these two to whip out pistols and take their own lives any second. I had never seen two people with less enthusiasm about... anything! Well, that wasn't true. There was enthusiasm about making their house look like something out of 1950's television, maybe Mister Wilson's house. If they'd have had a kid I swear he would have been named Dennis. Not that he'd have acted like Dennis the Menace. Not with parents like these. With parents like these he'd probably torture cats in secret.

For lack of anything better to do I started asking questions.

"How did you two meet?"

Mildred laid her hands in her lap. "We were neighbors," she said.

She didn't say anything else. Now I was beginning to wonder if I wanted to take part in this or not.

"Could you provide me with a few more details?" I asked. My pen was poised over paper, but I wasn't too worried about running out of ink.

"My mother and father brought me here," she said, as if it were this very house. "They told me I would be marrying Hiram. One year later we were married."

I wondered if maybe Mildred worked for the CIA or something. She was about as tight lipped a woman as I'd ever met. I tried another question, just for fun.

"What was it that attracted you to Hiram?" I asked.

"Attracted?" she sounded surprised. "I told you. Our parents decided we would get married and so we did."

I started listening for music that I knew had to be playing softly in the background somewhere. It would be the theme to 'The Outer Limits'. Either that or 'The Twilight Zone'.

"You had an arranged marriage?" I asked, incredulous. It was 1989. It was the twentieth century. People didn't HAVE arranged marriages in America any more.

"There's nothing wrong with arranged marriages," said Hiram, sounding superior. "It's a time-honored tradition in which the more mature judgment of adults establishes things, rather than leaving them to the whims of hormones."

They weren't in a marriage. They were in a... "thing".

"Well, you two are a first for me, that's for sure," I said, trying to be affable. I didn't want to say what first came to mind, which would have been something along the lines of "You two are as crazy as a couple of loons."

At the same time, the psychologist in me was just about as fascinated as the sociologist in me. Everybody has HEARD of arranged marriages, but nobody I know of has actually gotten to STUDY one. This might not fit into my master's thesis, but then again, who knew. I was suddenly much more interested. Now the trick was to get them to talk.

I turned on the bullshit.

"I have to say this is extraordinary luck for me," I smiled widely. "Traditional arranged marriages are quite rare these days, but I have always thought that they fell out of favor at precisely the wrong time in our history. The divorce rate is to high these days it's obvious that marriage is on the rocks - no pun intended." I smiled at my cute little joke. "I'm VERY pleased to be able to interview two people in a good arranged marriage."

Mildred looked at me sharply. Hiram moved around in his chair so much that I thought he might actually be alive.

Mildred's voice was frosty. "It is crude to make light of our situation," she said.

I wiped the smile off my face. "I'm sorry. Did I say something insensitive?"

"I don't see how you can hope to perform decent marital counseling when you mock the participants," she said stiffly.

"Marital counseling," I repeated.

"You ARE here to assist us in salvaging our marriage," said Mildred, the beginnings of worry in her voice. "Isn't this part of a marriage seminar?"

I really should have spent a little more on that newspaper ad.

It would have been easy to say there had been some misunderstanding and just get up and leave. But my professional curiosity was aroused, and I wanted to try to find out what made these two people tick... assuming anything ticked inside their sedate bodies. I wanted to stay. To that end I tried a little more bullshit. This time I thought about it before I used it.

"My research is intended to help people create successful, long term marriages. It is not counseling in the classic sense. What I try to do is help people find the common bonds within a marriage, and strengthen them. If all works well, that does result in a happier and more fruitful bond."

It sounded pretty good to me, even though it was an awful stretch of the truth. OK, it was outright lies. But it sounded good, and if that actually happened I'd be a pretty happy guy. I mean who would feel bad if they helped somebody have a better marriage?

Mildred relaxed a little, and the concern faded from her face.

"We've been having... difficulties. I don't think we're... happy."

"I never said I wasn't happy," said Hiram, fiddling with his pipe.

"You didn't have to," said Mildred. It was the most assertive thing I'd heard her say since I met them. Still, both comments had been made in that flat, listless voice that suggests that it's just words, and that they don't really amount to a hill of beans.

I wanted to stay, but I didn't think I could survive being in this atmosphere a lot longer if things didn't perk up a little. If they didn't blow their own brains out, I might be tempted to blow mine out.

"How long have you been having these difficulties," I asked.

Mildred looked straight at me. "Since we got married." She never even glanced at Hiram. "I don't think we got off on the right foot."

I sat there stunned. She'd stayed in a marriage for twelve years that she had hated since the very beginning? And NOW she wanted to do something about it?

"How often have you talked about it together?" I asked.

"We only decided recently that something must be wrong," said Hiram.

Well, it was pretty clear to ME that something was wrong, and I'd only known them for half an hour.

"Look," I said, not nearly as patiently as I would have liked to, "Here's the deal. If you two want to make things better, you have to talk, and you have to talk about how you feel. To do that you have to unlock the emotion that's bottled up inside you. I'll be happy to help you if I can, but mostly what any marriage counselor does is help you help yourselves. If you're not willing to help yourselves... to take some risks... then we're really just wasting time."

Mildred was stiff again. "What do you want us to do?" she asked.

"Let me ask my questions. I want you to answer them to the best of your ability, and to answer them as completely as you can. That will get us started communicating, and then we can see where it goes from there."

"You said there would be questions about sex," said Mildred.

"Yes," I responded.

"I'm uncomfortable talking about sex," she said.

"That's one of those risks I was talking about," I came back. "Part of marriage is for the making of love... the propagating of the species. That doesn't mean that couples who don't have children are failures. But part of being in love is having sex, and part of having sex should be being in love."

I finally got them to agree to answer the questions, but the first ones I asked weren't about their marriage. They were about their childhoods, and their parents, and how they were brought up. Those they had no problem with, and the answers made lights come on and sirens go off all over the place, at least in my mind.

It turned out that Hiram was raised in this house. It was a farm house back then, on the outskirts of a growing city. His parents and Mildred's parents were neighbors, each with their own farm. They were also part of a religious sect that was traditional, conservative, and which wasn't impressed with modern farm technology. What sect that was doesn't really matter. Religion is a very personal thing, and it's very difficult to apply relegious tenets to broad groups of people. I know we try to do that, but it rarely works. Tradition, on the other hand, MUST be viewed in respect with how it affects broad groups of people, because broad groups of people bow to tradition in the same way. Religion is something you believe. Tradition is something you do.