Pie in the Sky

Pic: The Walt Disney Company

My girlfriend and I almost never leave the house. Most of the time this suits us just fine, but we realised things might have got a little out of hand when we received the following invitation:

We were wondering if you and the lovely Janine might be available to come over for dinner this Thursday evening? I know you prefer to do your eating and drinking within the hermitage of your home but we would be happy for you to wear PJs.

Any claim to inaccurate characterisation disappeared in a hail of derisive snorts when we told my girlfriend’s son what had happened. The little bugger actually laughed out loud when we said we were going out. 

Clearly something had to be done - long-term. “Listen,” I said. “We don’t actually have to be normal. We just have to look normal. Sometimes. Like, leave the house. Do normal people stuff.”

The trouble is, it’s not as easy as it sounds when you essentially live in a cave and were raised by wolves. Even in my distant youth my cousins gave me a Gary Larson birthday card featuring a gorilla flapping its arms with the caption, “For Pete’s sake, Phil, can’t you just beat your chest like everyone else?” The truth is, neither my girlfriend nor I have any idea how to behave. When we’re alone, we don’t even bother with nouns or verbs most of the time. We communicate either in grunts or by creating rhyming nonsensical lyrics to the tune of my cellphone ring. We’re apparently terribly rude to each other from time to time (other people need to point it out: we think we get along great)*.

I don’t even blame us. It's not like we had role models. My parents are really happy, but their idea of a balanced marriage is one where the partners are equally insane. They are like Nell in her forest, wandering  around blissfully in a world of their own joys without really understanding that normal people don’t spend their lives balancing pillows on their heads for fun (true story) or playing adventure games during power cuts.

When Eskom was cursed far and wide during load shedding periods, the only people in the country who didn’t hold it against them were my parents. My parents eagerly awaited 8pm on Monday nights, which gave them an excuse to create a new adventure to pass the time. Some weeks it was pretending to live in another century. Some weeks they would haul out candles and flasks and pretend to be camping before gleefully scampering off to bed. And one particularly memorable night, my dad found himself stranded in the pitch dark on the other side of the house, with no glasses and no candle. Clearly there was only one solution for a sensible man.

“MAAAAARCOOOOOOO!” he yelled.

“POLO!” my stepmother hollered back, without skipping a beat.

So what exactly do normal people do? As far as examples go, you understand we are – literally – in the dark.

“I know!” my girlfriend cried, pointing a triumphant PW-finger in the air. “They go to markets!”

So began the long process of finding a market we could attend. We spent some weeks rolling out of our stupor at noon on a Saturday and realising the organic lettuces we’d fantasised about would be more verlep than Patricia Lewis’ hair in a snowstorm by the time we got on the road. Faced with repeated failure, we needed more drastic measures.

“A night market,” Girlfriend said darkly. “It’s the only way. ”

So we piled our struggling teenaged captive into the car and began our attempts to impersonate a normal family. That’s for laughing at us in our hour of uncoolness, we muttered. Voodoo the child with some market mojo.

The trouble is, either we misjudged our target, or normal people don’t effing go to markets. The first people we saw were a quartet of lesbians: two middle-aged and quiet as Quakers, two young, spiky-haired and very, very large. 

To be fair, plus-size lesbians are a sensitive subject for me, since I only recently spotted my own post-Spain cameltoe (a function of sloth and contentment, I suspect). But I nonetheless clawed my desperate way into non-identification and gawked. Because for as long as we watched the four of them, all they did, all night, was feed each other pies.

I don’t just mean they bought pies and offered each other a bite. I mean it was full-scale arm-wrestling shove-the-pie-in-the-face match. If these women were Springboks, they wouldn’t know their scrum from their lineout. Attack and defence mingled cruelly in an epic battle for survival between hand, face and pie.  The pies lost, but only just.

 

We looked around. The entire market was crawling with chewing hippies, shoveling edibles at each other.

“Oh my God,” Janine said. “Is this it? Is this what normal lesbians do? Go to markets and feed each other pies?”

“Yuh-huh,” I said. “Seems so.” 

So that was it for normality. At least our pointless activities are fun, we argued. And we went home and made up harmonies for our polyphonic ringtones. 

But we're working on our social life. Anyone fancy a flipped main switch and some Marco Polo?

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* Example: apparently normal people tell their partners how beautiful they are. We, on the other hand, take attraction as a given, although the assumption does sometimes backfire. Last night I made the fatal mistake of saying I cared more about Janine’s personality. This morning I was putting on my exercise clothes when she snorted and said, “Should you not be doing exercises for your inner beauty, baby? A gym for the soul?”

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** Update: Why does everyone think 'I care more about your personality' means 'You're ugly'? *shaking head* Obviously my girlfriend can never leave me, since anyone else would dump me in about 2.5 seconds for tactlessness. Actually I think she's 'n lekker warm stuk stert, but I wouldn't care if she wasn't. Or maybe I would. I don't know. We should test the theory. Try some of that pie, baby.