Vignettes of Marriage #1: Their Soft Spots

"Do you always have to be a smartass?" he asked.

She quipped back without missing a beat, "Better than a dumbass."

She chuckled, pleased with her own cleverness.

From the outside, it might look like a mean-spirited spat between husband and wife. But it wasn’t. They were playing. They were having fun. In truth, they rarely ever fought.

Sure, they might nip at each other now and then—like puppies do. Like marriages steeped in sarcasm and humor often do. A nip: when two puppies tussle and one bites just a bit too hard, or the other is just a bit too sensitive. The fun turns sour. One is nipped, the other the nipper, and both are left confused. A few minutes later, they're playing again. They aren't bad dogs.

But the soft spots—

They lie dormant, waiting. A nip draws them out.

In marriage, it might look like this:

She holds the cat while he gives it a pill. She strokes its fur and murmurs, “It’ll be over soon. We’re doing this for your own good.”

The world pauses.

The air is still.

The cat is still.

The pill is gone.

The sun isn't shining through the window.

Then, the looming bellow: “Don’t say that.”

“Why?”

“Don’t ever say that. Don’t say it’s for their own good. You never know what’s good for someone else.”

She’s taken aback. “So what should I say?”

He sighs. “If you have to say anything, say, ‘We’re trying our best to help you.’ At least that’s true. But never say it’s for their good. We don’t get to decide that.”

Like a puppy biting too close to the tender edge of an ear, she had hit a soft spot. A bruised place, like fruit just past ripe.

Did this spot trace back to a priest speaking to an abused boy? A parent? A teacher? Maybe to soldiers in Vietnam, justifying horror with, It’s for their own good.

She’ll probably never know. He isn’t opening up—not in this moment. But when he does talk, his soft spots often lead back to Vietnam. Not in stories about the war, but in everyday conversation—so casual, it gives her millennial mind whiplash.

Sometimes she just shrugs it off as a "Boomer thing." One of the small conveniences of an age-gap marriage: you can blame anything on the generational divide.

Like when they’re watching Cheech and Chong and he says, “That’s like a marijuana shake-’em-up.”

She feels the pull of a story and asks the question he seems to will her into asking: “What’s a marijuana shake-’em-up?”

“Oh,” he says, “it was this paper cone with loose—so loose—cheap weed in it. The Vietnamese women sold them. You’d shake them forever to get them packed enough to smoke. Those women would always try to get you to meet their daughters. I guess they thought we’d take them to America if we fell in love. But the shake-’em-ups were cheap and everywhere. The girls too.”

He pauses.

Is he seeing one of those daughters now? Recalling a mother offering her child in exchange for a chance at another life? Is he tasting the rough, stem-and-seed shake? Smelling burning napalm?

He once told her napalm smelled really good. Sometimes, she wonders what napalm actually smelled like. He said it could pass for a cologne or a candle—if no one knew what it really was. He said it was kind of like gasoline and laundry but sweet. So sweet.

She would close her eyes, feel the heavy dampness of Vietnam air, the loud and strange noises of war in the jungle, see a large snake in the waist-deep water. Napalm was there too, but she didn't know what it smelled like.

But the scent of burned human flesh? She knew the smell. Because he said it reminded him of slow-cooked food. The burning hair, he said, smelled gross. But the flesh? Familiar.

That’s why he won’t eat Southern BBQ. The smell reminds him too much of war—slow-cooked meat, smoke, charred skin. It's the same thing. So, despite living in Alabama, she’s never had a bite. Her coworkers keep telling her she’s missing out. Maybe she is. But she doesn't believe it.

Maybe war tastes like BBQ too.

The most mundane things like BBQ can awaken a soft spot. Even pants could bring something up.

At Costco, he holds up a pair of cargo pants. “We had these in ’Nam. But the pockets were deeper. You could fit a body in them.”

She wanders under fluorescent lights into the chips aisle wondering: Was he exaggerating? Are children’s bodies that small? Or were the pockets really that big? She stuck a hand in her tiny front pocket with just lint and a quarter—the kind you save for parking meters or gumball machines.

But sometimes, it’s her soft spots that awaken his.

Yes. She had soft spots too.

One in particular surfaced a few years back, on a quiet drive through her old neighborhood. They were headed to a funeral—her best friend’s mother had passed—and they took a route that wound past her childhood home. Freshly renovated. A new family inside. It looked both unfamiliar and unchanged, like a dream someone else had remembered for her.

After the funeral, they visited her best friend’s grave at the front of the same cemetery—mother and daughter together at last. It was easy to find, next to a big, shady tree. She placed a little red Hot Wheels car—bought earlier, just for this—on the headstone and broke. Shaking, sobbing, reaching for anything—a napkin, a tissue, a scrap of cloth.

He took off his shirt and handed it to her. She wiped her eyes, then blew her nose into it. It smelled like fresh laundry and his sweat. Maybe even a little sweet. Maybe like napalm.

Bare in just an undershirt, he wrapped his arms around her and said, “Baby, you can never go home.”

She looked up, startled. “What do you mean?” This was home. Her city. Her roots. A block from the diner where she worked after school. She was born here.

“You can never go home. You’ve seen the elephant. That’s what we told the new guys—ones crying for their moms, wanting to go back. How can you go back to the farm after you’ve seen the elephant? You can’t. You’ve been shot at. You’ve shot back. You’ve seen the elephant. You’ve grown up. You’re different now. You’ll never crawl into your mama’s arms again, drink a milkshake, or watch a movie the same way again. You’re different. And this”—he touches his chest, white undershirt, gold chain—“this is home now.”

This wasn’t banter.

This wasn’t playful.

This wasn’t a nip.

This was two soft spots meeting, melting, hardening.

This is how he had survived, and how she would too.

Back in the truck, he took her hand.

“Don’t look back,” he said. “Look ahead. We’re going home.”

He lit a cigar and the smoke caressed her face.

Unlike Lot’s wife, she obeyed.

She didn’t look back.

She didn’t look ahead, either.

Just down at his crumpled shirt in her lap—soaked in her tears and snot. They were quiet the rest of the way. Him without a shirt and her not looking back. Just a smartass and a dumbass in love.