W(hate)ver. Deirdre liked the T-shirts and tractor caps at first. She bought an XL, green-letters-on-white, as a sleepshirt for her 12 year-old son. Afterward the phrase came to represent for her the essence of passive-aggressive response. WHATever. WhatEVer. Not nice, really.

And later still, riding the bus home one night, glancing out the window at a stop, she saw a bulldyke wearing the shirt with a brown leather pilot’s jacket over it, hands in her jeans pockets so the jacket hung open, its bronze zipper teeth like tiny horizontal fringe, cropping to “hate” the Whatever.

Progressions like that made Deirdre distrust her initial responses. She figured she must be counter-intuitive, so often disagreeing with herself. Gradually she learned to reserve judgment. She began to see beauty even in dereliction. Broken glass in a vacant lot, viewed in the sun from her commuter train, sparkled like morning-gilt ocean or mica in a sidewalk. The scab-faced rope-haired crazy drunk, leg-splayed on the floor of the train station against a tiled wall with his penis apparent in the gaping hole in the crotch of his smear-stiff corduroys: that penis the only handsome thing about him, large like a Scandinavian, circumcised and smooth.

If she weren’t reserving judgment she wouldn’t be dressing for the school holiday pageant. She always hated these events. Having to hope for a crowd. Glaring garish lights. The seesaw between embarrassment at the amateurism and the face-thickening demands of emotional manipulation. How heartwarming is that diversity…

But everyone said she should go. Mom and Connie, SuddenJim. Everyone but she and Ian. Deirdre reserving judgment dressed to leave her house.

Her phone rang (Connie). And didn’t (Jim). Connie as usual called for no reason Deirdre could determine. She did some big-sister bossing about what Deirdre should wear to the pageant (“Not the old T-shirt again, Dee,” she declared. “You have to set an example for Ian.” As if clothes could make the boy behave.) And she wanted to rave about some guy she and Duane met in a bar the night before. Connie prided herself on the accuracy of her first reactions to new people. She claimed she could size a person up, character-wise, in five minutes of conversation, and this guy was going to be good for Duane’s career. Deirdre figured that if Connie’s assessments were that accurate she would never be disappointed in people, and since her sister was almost always complaining about how someone let her down, her first impressions probably weren’t often as correct as she thought.

Connie had said Jim Sullivan was a catch when she first met him. She tried to sell Deirdre on him. She described him as eccentric but highly intelligent, weird but fascinating. Actually he was quite smart but had a cognitive disorder; he’d always been distractable unless the subject grabbed him, and he’d coped with his problem by narrowing his field of engagement to what he could manage, and by taking in every kind of stimulant. He drank quarts of black coffee each day. He went through a carton of non-filter cigarettes a week.

If the schools caught a Jim Sullivan now, they’d get him to a shrink and onto some form of speed. They could even test him for his ailment; he has attention deficit disorder, and the doctors would see it if they gave him traceable glucose and watched how little of it was taken up by his brain. Like so many boys with ADD, his condition made him hyperactive the way a toddler who misses his nap is hyperactive; the poor man had a tired brain and needed a little wake-him-up.

But Jim is 54; back when he was in school they just told him to pay attention and punished him when he didn’t. They called him impulsive. They nicknamed him Sudden Sullivan. He learned to hate school, to go into a trade where he could work his body and therapize his mind, to limit his appointments and engagements so he could remember to keep them. At this point medical science figured he was coping well enough that he didn’t need any meds.

Jim latched onto Deirdre when he met her three years earlier. Connie introduced them, and she and Jim concluded that he and Deirdre made a wonderful couple. They were both into enneagrams and the numbers worked. Deirdre didn’t necessarily agree, but she reserved judgment. She couldn’t see a purpose to personality typing systems. She enjoyed some conversations with Jim, especially the ones that took place in bed after languorous kissing and vigorous sex. She didn’t see herself as half of a committed couple, but gradually she realized that Connie, and SuddenJim, and the rest of the world did. She tried to argue about it but no one wanted to listen; she sometimes thought she’d have to stop seeing Jim just to prove to them all that it was casual.