Winifred Johnson 993 words
Route 5, Box 960
Kent, Wash.
The Three-way-fret.
There is one trait in people that irritates me no end, and that is indecisiveness. To go through life in hesitancy and doubt whenever confronted with the necessity of making a decision -- well, there is just no excuse for it. I call this habit the Three-way-fret. The victim begins to fret as soon as he sees a decision looming up over his horizon. As soon as the decision is made -- in fact, right along with the decision -- he frets for fear it is the wrong one. Then, he undergoes an everlasting aftermath of fretting because he didn’t decide the other way.
Once I had a roommate, Myrtle, who was a sufferer from the Three-way-fret. When downcast skies greeted her in the morning, with the remark “It looks like rain”, she would be off on an orgy of fretting. Her head would poke out of the shower curtain to emit “Shall we wear our overshoes?” From the closet would come the muffled question “Shall I take my umbrella?” She would burn the toast while arguing with herself as to which was better, to wear overshoes on a nice day or to go without them on a rainy one.
If it should be thundering or sprinkling when time to leave for work, Myrtle would usually arm herself with umbrella, overshoes and raincoat; but this preparedness did not guarantee a relaxed dismissal of her problem. During our bus ride to work, she would disturb my reading of Ludwig’s Napoleon with remarks such as “Gee, I hope it does rain now that I wore my overshoes; do you think it will?” at too frequent intervals for me to give Josephine the appreciation that she deserved.
The ride home in the evening would be more wretched than the one down in the morning, especially if the day proved to be unusually sunny. In that case, Myrtle’s comments would finally work up to: “I sure feel conspicuous wearing these overshoes on a day like this. Look, that woman is laughing at me.”
“Yeah,” I would say, “she’s laughing at the silly way you’re holding your feet. You can’t hide them up under your seat; you might as well put them down on the floor.”
She would do so; but, for the remainder of the ride home, she would chew her nails and look furtively about for further evidences of merry disapproval.
I used to take a maiden aunt of mine, another addict of the Three-way-fret, to Child’s for dinner about once a month. That was as often as my sense of duty could compel me to suffer her companionship. The waitress would stand, patiently -- at first --, while Aunt Hettie reasoned aloud to herself, “I’d like to order pork chops, but I guess they’re too fattening; and I had steak last night. I know I shouldn’t eat pastries; they make my face break out. My! I’d like to have a cup of coffee, but I know it would keep me awake.”
During the process of eating, she would complain, “Your salmon steak sure looks good; my chops don’t taste real fresh. And you got cantaloupe! That’s what I should have ordered for my dessert!”
If my mood was philanthropic enough to spend the remainder of the evening with Aunt Hettie, it would be interspersed with observations like, “I wonder if those chops could have poisoned me; my stomach feels funny”; “I’ve got to cut out sweets; I know I’ve gained two pounds this week”; and “I know I won’t sleep a wink tonight on account of that coffee.”
Many of these Three-way-fretters came in to Mimi’s where I sold hats. Such-a-one would referee quite a bout between, for instance, a mannish looking hat and a frilly one. She would try them on, first one and then the other, for several rounds. When she put on the severe looking brown one, trimmed with one smooth feather, she would give that round to the little black one with the pink fluff because it would look cute at a Country Club luncheon. Then, when the little black one was perche on her hair -- fast becoming frowzy --, Mrs. Three-way-fret would award that round to the brown one because it would go nice with her suit, “wouldn’t it?”
When she would finally adjudge one hat the winner, I knew, by her continued fussings, that she would never wear the chosen hat with the feeling of having made a satisfactory decision.
If these fretters would confine their peculiar mental reelings to unimportant decsions such as overshoes, hats, or porkchops, the results would not be too unhappy; just a permanent state of indecision on the part of the Three-way-fretters, and a feeling of exasperation experienced by everyone with whom they came in contact. But when one carries it further, as in choosing the annual vacation spot -- well, finding oneself in Miami wondering if he should not really have gone to Los Angeles could lead one into something serious like a split personality.
I realize, of course, that I shouldn’t be too harsh on people with this vicious, vacillating habit. The fact that I make my decisions quickly and without regret should not make me intolerant. Oh, occasionally, I have been a little slow and hesitant about making a decision. For instance, I have been intending to buy a new winter coat; in fact I try on coats every time I go to town. But I can’t make up my mind just what color and style I should buy, because I’m afraid I’ll make a decision that I’ll regret.
I did just that in planning the arrangement of my kitchen. I really made too hasty a decision; it isn’t what I want, at all. It frets me every time I am working in the room.
But, as I said in the beginning, there is just no excuse for people who fret about making decisions; and I am certainly thankful that I’m not one of them.
[a story written for a correspondence course in English through the University of Washington. It’s undated, but with other papers written in 1953-56]
