Note: brief reference to ableist language
Rachel stood at the kitchen sink watching the snow fall softly over the back yard, muffling the world in its white overcoat. She wanted to wrap her mind up the same snug way, but in the living room, her husband was watching some show where commentators loudly traded barbs and lobbed insults at each other. The noise was incessant. Oh! The noise, noise, noise, noise! she thought, visualizing herself poised on a snowy crag, ear cocked to the Whos down in Whoville below, except these were clamorous and opinionated Whos. I’m on your side, Mr. Grinch, she decided, and reached up to turn off her hearing aids. The soft silence outside the window was suddenly complemented by a similar hush within her own head. Ah, much better.
“Did you hear that?” As if on cue, her husband was bellowing for her attention.
Rachel sighed. “Hear what?”
“That guy running for office. He’s a complete idiot.”
Without her hearing aids, Rachel could just hear the skeleton of sentences, mostly vowel sounds with mushy consonants failing to knit them together into meaning, requiring a bit of guess work to decode. It was like wearing a sweater in her ears which is why she had broken down finally and invested in the hearing aids. There were times, though, when she wasn’t all that sure she wanted to hear so much of what was going on in the world. Still, she felt compelled to answer, raising her voice to be heard over his show. “Who?”
“That yahoo running for office with the weird tan. They should call him Colonel Mustard.”
Rachel sucked in her breath upon hearing her husband call somebody, anybody, a “retard.” She didn’t even like to think the word, let alone hear her husband bellowing it from the other room for all the neighbors to hear. “Don’t call people that word.”
“What word?”
“You know, that word. It is totally inappropriate.”
Frank was used to his wife’s often creative interpretations of the world around her and was inclined to take liberties in translation. “I’ll say he’s inappropriate,” he agreed heartily, delighted she was taking a position. She generally didn’t pay enough attention to world events, burrowing down instead into the cocoon of a comfortably retired life.
“Then why did you say it?” she called out.
“Say what?”
“That word.”
“What word?”
“Well, I can’t say it,” Rachel shouted over the noise. “We don’t talk like that about people with…you know…mental disabilities.”
“Mental disabilities?” Frank was surprised. For her to call the candidate mentally disabled was pretty strong. She was usually so polite, so darned politically neutral. About time she saw things my way, he thought approvingly. “Ha! He has no ability, that’s the problem,” he chuckled.
Rachel drew in her breath. What was wrong with the man? First using the ‘R’ word to describe someone, then being so cruel as to suggest that people who are differently abled have no abilities at all! Sometimes, she just didn’t know what to make of the man. “Frank! That is terrible! We all have something to contribute.”
“Over my dead body!” Was his wife insane? _First calling the man mentally disabled, then wanting to contribute to his candidacy? It was that kind of lunatic inconsistency that got the country where it was in the first place!_ He turned up the volume on the tv to make his feelings clear, shouting a final, “We are not contributing a penny to his campaign.”
Unbelievably, Rachel did not take the hint, calling out, “No I don’t think we have any. What do you want champaign for anyway?”
“What on earth makes you think I’d support his campaign?”
“Frank, it’s really just for special occasions.”
“Right. He was charged with tax evasion. And cooking the books.”
“I don’t know. I was thinking of fish. You could have some white wine with that.”