Throwback Thursday: ‘Glass Curtain’ by Susan Pieters

“Why is the grass always greener in Sally’s yard?” I ask this out loud, and my husband takes my question literally. He joins me to look over the fence where Sally is placing a vase of flowers on her picnic table.
           
“The angle of your perspective means you can’t see the bare spots.” He’s a true scientist. “It also has to do with the shorter wavelength of blue light.”
           
I am not asking a scientific question. “I don’t mean that.”

“You mean, why did we have children?” He gestures behind me at our patchy lawn. In the corner by the garage, our three kids are nailing spare wood to build a two-story fort. It looks like a shanty-town.

I don’t mean that, either. The grass is not just greener, but brighter and happier in the neighbour’s yard. As I watch Sally putting out chairs, my husband stands closer to me. I tell him she’s turning fifty, and he grunts in surprise. From here, Sally looks much younger. “That’s what I mean. Why does everything look better from a distance?”

My husband shrugs.

I try another example. “It’s like those awful mirrors in department stores, in those cramped fitting rooms. Up so close, they make me look fat.”

My husband looks down at me. “Mirrors are mirrors. They don’t change anything. They can only distort if they’re bent.”

“You mean that’s how I really look?”

He senses a diplomatic answer is in order. “You look fine, but you should change for the party.”