This is the second part in a series, so if you have not already done so, you might want to read Part I before continuing.
“Can you not chew your food like that?” Daren, the hunk of the soap opera Sheila was watching, glared at his wife.
She glared back at him. “I suppose you want me to stop eating solid foods just to please you. But let me guess, then you would just criticize the way I use a straw.”
Daren glowered some more and went back to (Sheila had no doubt) plotting to kill his wife.
Sure enough, she died in the next episode. It looked like an accident, but Sheila just knew Daren had killed her.
It made Sheila wonder if the way she chewed her food had anything to do with it. She knew Daren had been wanting to get rid of his wife for a while, but he didn’t have to kill her. What if it was the way she chewed her food that turned out to be the last straw for him?
Sheila started thinking about the way she chewed her food. Was she annoying? She thought back to her conversation with Amber the other day about their recently divorced coworker. What if her husband had left her because he couldn’t stand the way she ate?
What if Sheila got married someday and the thing she did to drive her hypothetical husband away all came down to the way she chewed her food?
She started paying more attention to her chewing. She had always chewed with her mouth closed, but she was especially careful to keep her lips sealed while chewing from now on. She even stopped buying crunchy foods, just in case she reached for them without thinking when she had someone over. She couldn’t bear the thought of getting so close to obtaining a mate and losing it all just because she couldn’t masticate properly.
That led her to thinking about her other bodily functions. She did make noises when she yawned. Maybe that was annoying. So, she trained herself to yawn silently.
She also sighed a lot. Her mom had sighed a lot and Sheila had found it annoying, so she trained herself to stop sighing. Besides, she had read somewhere once that sighing was a sign of weakness, so that was another reason to stop.
Next came the realization that she tended to grunt when getting up. She was only in her thirties, but things had already started to feel stiff, especially when she had been sitting for too long. She still thought she was too young to have difficulty getting up, so that pride, combined with her desire to make sure she never annoyed anyone ever, meant she also had to train herself to stand up silently, no matter how long she had been sitting.
If she did ever get married, she would be the perfect wife. No one would ever be able to say she was annoying.
To be continued…