Forty Days and Nights: Love Stories. 10. Tilt

Once there was a house with a boy and a girl in it who always thought they would get in trouble. They had so often been in trouble, for things they didn't understand and couldn't remember doing. They were so often in trouble that they came to expect it all the time.
When a person said, Have you heard what happened? they tried to remember how it had happened when they had never meant it to happen at all.
If a person said, Wow, come over here and look at this, they wondered sadly, while they walked over there to look, which thing this might be that they had somehow broken, accidentally.
If someone said, Oh, I've got something for you guys, they put their hands over their faces and waited for the something to be bad news.
When someone said to them, Hey, I want to talk to you two, they put down their heads and held hands tightly and waited to find out what bad thing they had done. While they waited the boy would say, I don't understand why that was wrong, and the girl would say, I don't even remember what that was. Then the person who wanted to talk to them would say, Why do you have your heads down? and the boy and the girl would say, We're waiting to hear why we're in trouble, and the person who had wanted to talk to them would say, Stop that! You're not in trouble! Why do you always do that? You always think you're in trouble! It makes me so mad! and the person would go off in a huff and forget what they had wanted to say in the first place. We're sorry, the boy and girl would always call to the person who was stomping up the street, but no person ever answered back or forgave them.

It was a sorry way to live.

After a long enough time the trouble they were afraid of even seeped into their house. The doors stuck, and the windows went up and down crookedly and leaked cold air, and the floors tilted and the curtains fell down or started on fire. One day the boy said, Look, we've got to do something about this. No one ever finishes a conversation with us and I think we might have missed some important stuff, like this year's tax return. The girl said, We get a tax return this year? and, Do you know why those curtains are on fire again even though snow is blowing in through the window? and the boy said, That's just what I mean.

They tried to think what they could do to stay out of the way of the trouble. This was new to them, and they felt uncomfortable at it.

The boy asked what might happen if they went about with their hands always over their ears so they couldn't ever possibly hear what had happened.
The girl wondered if they might just keep their eyes closed so they never accidentally looked at what was over there.
The boy thought maybe that if a person had something for them they should tell the person to just keep it. With their compliments.
The girl supposed that they might have little cards made that said, Please Cut to the Chase, to quickly hand to people if people said they had something to tell them. Then at least we'd know if we're in trouble right away instead of waiting and waiting, she said.
The boy ventured an opinion that they might be better off just staying inside their house forever.

The girl wondered if they were going about this the wrong way.

She also wondered if, while they thought it through, the boy would please put out the curtains? They were smoldering again.
The boy threw water over the curtains and the girl said Oh! Like that! Well! and then she said they might as well wash the windows now, after that, so they did. They scrubbed and scrubbed and had to open and close the windows lots of times, while they were trying to get them cleaned, and that was hard at first but after some serious work the windows went up and down very smoothly. The girl said, Look at that, there is almost no snow coming in through the closed windows anymore.
The boy went off to go outside and check whether the windows were really closed now or whether the snow was just all gone, but he couldn't, the door was stuck. He had to call the girl for help and she came right over. The door was harder to fix than the curtains or the windows, but they both worked a long time til they could open it and close it without having to yell for help. That made them happy. They went happily out and in and out and in until they had to go take a nap.
When they woke up the boy had to face something. He sat up and looked at the girl and his shoulders were slumping and he didn't feel rested anymore. He said sadly, I suppose we have to fix the floors while we're at this, they tilt, you know. But the girl said, Are you crazy? Do you have any idea how much work it would be to fix a tilt? The boy said, I don't understand how to fix a floor anyway, but I'm afraid, I think you're sleepy now but tomorrow you might get angry that I didn't fix the floor, and the girl said, Sometimes you just have to let things be the way they are. The boy turned away his face for a minute, and the girl waited for him to say the next thing and while she waited she started to get scared. She knew she used to be right, but wondered how it must look, that she didn't care about a tilted floor enough to make the boy fix it, and she couldn't remember what was better about a floor that had no tilt. She put out her hand to the boy to touch him and to say, This way we never lose anything under the bed because it rolls right back out, and at the same time he turned to her and said, I have to tell you that I can't fix this floor and I want you to hold me. She was reaching over to hold him, anyway, so she went ahead with her plan.

He said, We should just quit this, shouldn't we?
She said, Do you think we can?
He said, This was such a wonderful day.
She said, Have you heard? I have a lovely thing for you, but you have to come over here to see it.
He said, I was wanting to talk to you about that, and about everything else.
She said, I don't want ever to leave this house.
And he said, We can stay and stay, we fixed the door.
She said, Let's have a party. So they did. It was no trouble, no trouble at all.
The boy wrote a song and all the guests sang it as they stomped up the street, going home. It was a stomping song.
Sometimes, the song said, sometimes you just have to fix things up and let them be the way they are. Fix them, fix them, fix them, said the chorus. Sometimes you have to just fix things up to let them be the way they are, but never let your curtains, your curtains, your curtains burn.