Loud and clear

I recently spent four weeks at a Guatemalan language school, studying Spanish grammar and adding words like "penoso" (awkward) and "infiel" (unfaithful) to my vocabulary. The instructors supplemented the language units in the book — drier topics like jobs, weather, and a very eerie section on murder — with their own personal stories. Rosa, by far, had the best.

She was shorter than most of her students, built thick through the middle and wide through the hips. She had a pre-Colombian frame, the kind still visible on the native women who sold tortillas on the street corners and mangoes in the marketplace. She had a dark fringe of hair covering her upper lip that she would stroke — not ironically — when we studied vocab for physical descriptives like "beard" and "mustache." Her best story went like this:

"When I was a little girl," she said, "and we lived in the countryside, there was a crazy man who lived in the bushes by the road. Whenever a woman passed, he would jump out completely naked." Rosa chuckled and sat back in her chair. "This went on for some time. Finally, a woman from our pueblo, a big woman with large muscles, picked up a stick covered with thorns, and the next time the crazy man jumped out at her, she chased him with that stick. The woman said, 'We don't like what you're doing, and we want you to stop.' And he did. He never jumped out of the bushes again." Rosa sat still for a moment, running a reflective finger over the whiskers on her upper lip. "You know, I don't think he meant any harm by it," she said finally. "I think he thought we liked seeing him naked. He just needed someone to tell him that we didn't."

Back home in the States, as I watch my girl friends and their passiveaggressive tactics in relationships — who am I kidding? As I watch my own — I often think back to Rosa's story. In this country, women seem to have lost our voices. We have to be coached on how to be forthcoming; we need Oprah and Tyra to tell us how to tell it like it is. Not to say all our beating around the bush (figuratively, this time) is for nothing. When it comes to smoothing things over with polite talk, women are the masters. But perhaps in relationships we need less indirection and more specifics.

Which is why I love this personal ad from craigslist. "Here goes the list of things I am looking for," the poster says. "I am gonna get specific" - why, you ask? - "cause I can." She lists 40 must-haves for the man she is seeking. The list begins with, "I want a guy between the ages of 26-33" and moves on to "Someone from the south, Texas, Oklahoma, Lousiana, you know somewhere like that."

The man must like draft beer (No. 5) and be ok going commando (No. 39). He can't hit on her mom (19) but should have a good last name (34).

The list is demanding, but I give her credit for clearly speaking her desires. Sometimes that's exactly what it takes.

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