January 24, 2018  - “Let me tell you a secret.”

         “No! I don’t want to hear it. If you tell me it won’t be a secret,” I instantly replied to the woman that I had just met less than an hour ago at a company cocktail party.

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         Let me set the scene so you understand the situation clearly. I was born and raised in a 2,500 registered-voters-sized small town. I know there is no such thing as a secret staying a secret when one person tells another their secret.  Suddenly, the entire village knows it by the end of the next day.  It’s the same as a vindictive acquaintance saying something that is false, yet in days everyone you know believes it actually happened, and that rumor never dies no matter how you try to denounce it.

I was only five years into being a corporate wife and I was naïve, but not that naïve to strap on someone else’s secret that could get out. We had just moved from a Midwest City to a rural town due to my husband’s new job.  We were only three months into this company and still deciphering which folks were the corporate backstabbers masquerading as potential friends.

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This woman was the wife of a man my husband now supervised. She was past her third drink, but not yet bobbing and weaving.  I perceived this overture as her attempt to make a new friendship with me, a ‘tight friendship’ that would come with future requests of favors from her.

“Let me tell you my secret,” She whispered again. She was perhaps ten years my senior and well dressed and at first blush, I had liked her, until now.

“No, I don’t want to be responsible for it getting out.  I might repeat it by accident and then you’d hate me forever and the whole world would know your secret,” I replied trying to get her to back off. 

I remember I stepped away a few feet, to break the intimacy of our conversation, expecting her to come to her senses.  I did realize she was under the influence of several drinks and wanted to help her from making a fool of herself.

“Oh, let me tell you,” She stepped forward and draped one arm around my shoulder as if we were long-time, intimate friends and hugged me and then pulled me along to the bar set up in the kitchen so that she could make herself another drink. 

She was my size and build, on the plump side, with a creamy ivory complexion devoid of freckles that redheads generally have.  I wondered, did she somehow see a glimmer of her younger self in me.

“No, I can’t keep a secret!” I finally stated flatly knowing it was my best course of action. I shook my head, and tried my best to untangle myself from her. We were alone now out of earshot from the other guests.

“AHH, doesn’t matter, everyone knows about it anyway, you might as well know about it firsthand,” She slurred her words, “It’s all over town, but I want  you  to know the real facts, not the fanciful lies.”  She mixed herself another drink, and I lingered for the inevitable bearing of her soul.  I braced myself in order to handle it with worldliness that I had not yet acquired, until that moment.

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         That was over 30 years ago and I had almost forgotten the secret, but it was a well-remembered lesson in corporate wife politics.  The woman never became a close friend and never asked me for a favor. However, I did get a cherished recipe from her she never divulged to any of the other corporate wives. 

Sweet Potato Biscuits - definitely more delicious than her secret was.