Beth Kephart: HOW ARE YOU? • Cleaver Magazine

Beth Kephart
HOW ARE YOU?
An Antonym Story

If there were a Very Special Prize for the world’s most inadequate respondent to the How are you? question, I would be blue ribboned.

How are you?

Well…

How are you?

Just a—

How are you?

No, really. You first.

I am so notoriously arrantly perfectly foul at performing this simple civic duty that I become invisible to myself whenever I am asked. Uh, I stutter, and in the absence of my response, the talk salts up without me, which is to say that I can walk four hills, two cul de sacs, five point two miles, and 12,433 steps, a phone pressed to my ear, without making any sound except for the huff and the puff demanded by my exertions, and the yes, and oh my god, and so happy for you required of a listener. Sometimes, when I’m at the proximate end of my travels and my face is berry red and my hair is whipped into its high humidity frenzy, the gold finch pecking on the crust of the cone flower that I am just then passing will hear me blunder with a short-changed tale, a wedged assertion, a strike of personal news. But even the finch hops away in a flash, arrogant as hell in its pretty yellow feathers.

Five-minute rule, my husband says, when I return from my travels and sit in the drip of my sprawl and report on my latest conversational crash. It’s code for what he believes would cure me of my troubles. Tell a good tale in five minutes or less. Leave the audience desperate for more. Win every time the question is asked: How, how, how are you?

(Sometimes my husband exceeds the five-minute mark. Nobody asks him to stop.)

The thing is: What will leave the person on the other side of the phone begging and pleading for more? Does the trick of the talk live in the discovery I made (only today!) that the paints in my paint jars are moldy? Or in the fact that I haven’t properly vacationed for years, and so I read my way into adventure? Or in the very cherished secret that I sometimes sit in my battered leather chaise watching stubborn spiders spin?

How are you?

I was watching spiders.

How are you?

I was barely breathing.

How are you?

My jars of paint have mold.

Whose tide have I turned? Whose pulse have I sparked? How are you? There should be a primer.

Should I practice exclamations and declarations, bang a pair of metaphorical drums? Should I slap an exclamation mark at the end of every spoken sentence, change my pitch, my tone? Should I propel myself to a cinematic start: You won’t believe the silk that spun out of that spider. Oh my God, am I reading some book. But my quiet life resists every punctuation mark except, perhaps, the comma.

Sometimes when I’m walking with my phone stuffed in my pocket, I do some serious thinking about my absence of intrigue. I imagine hearing the trill of the phone and being How are you? prepared. But then a hawk will fly overhead or an antlered deer will tiptoe past or the sun will stun a triangle of window in an upstairs window frame and I’ll be gobsmacked, I’ll be soul-scorched, I’ll be silenced. What is is what is, and I have born witness, and if the phone were to ring at that very moment, I’d have no words for that.

Nearing now my five-minute mark, I wish to hurry in new facts, to leave you, if you’ve read this far, with this complicating truth: I am, just ask those who know me well, a professional practitioner of blue streak. I can lob opinions, debate a fact, splice the nearest contradiction. I’ve talked literature, politics, weather patterns, history, the weird stuff that happens in my husband’s family until the jar is out of cookies. I’ve delivered lectures in which it is only the sound of my low-pitch voice for sixty breathless minutes. I’ve thrown the book of my ideals at my beautiful son. I’ve been entirely conversational with strangers. I have stood in the summer heat at my parents’ grave, yielding one-sided confessions. Beneath the canopy of trees, in the proximity of bell chimes, I have talked and I have cried and how profoundly they have listened. They have not judged the small in me, the littleness of my mood, my pain, my life, my reason.

It’s the question How are you? that I can’t antonym, can’t oppose or mitigate with any decent answer. How are you? How are you? I cannot surf that wave. Ask the question, and I’ll be knocked down by its force. I’ll gasp in the froth. I’ll flail, I’ll fail. I’ll slip straight off the board. You will rush right past me.

Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of three dozen books in multiple genres, an award-winning teacher, the co-founder of Juncture Workshops, and a book artist. Her new books are Wife | Daughter | Self: A Memoir in Essays, We Are the Words: The Master Memoir Class, and A Room of Your Own: A Story Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Famous Essay. More at www.bethkephartbooks.com and BINDbyBIND.