If men could talk, imagine what the walls would hear. They probalby could, too, if (1) women wouldn't say "I knew you were going to say that," hard on the heels of an otherwise nice effort, and (2) if they could remember what it was they implied sometime on June 14, 1975, pertaining to her brother, her thighs, or her brother's thighs.

A male, when pressed, can recall what a '75 Monte Carlo looked like ("Didn't your brother have a cream Monte Carlo, a 327?") and the highlights of the Carter administration, had there been any. He may even recall taking Yoga and Women's Lit during the War Against Male Tendencies, now lost. (You can hold off your male tendencies only so long before they slam you to the mat. I'm not saying that anatomy is destiny, though; if it were, most of us would have pretty short destinies.)

I guess it all boils down to communication, when it doesn't boil away entirely. In my own case (or rather, on it), my wife and I are different sorts of communicators. She tends to be explicit, while facial tics are plenty for me. she expects something called "a response." In my family, we communicated; we just didn't talk about it. Dad took us aside, but tuchis asides were pretty much all we got: poch in tuchis, kish in tuchis, an occasional behind-the-scenes kick in the tuchis. Enough said.

Dad was an innuendist, believing that much less could be said through implication than any other way -- a beautiful economy leaving much to the imagination. Consuela, on the other hand, comes from a family where motions were made, discussed and voted on. I can't recall any plebiscites in our household, where it was strictly one man, one vote and the one man was Father. Mom never stopped talking and Dad never started. Even when he showed me how to pee, it was by example.

He never did tell me about sex, and I still don't believe a lot of what I hear. Consuela, meanwhile, was growing up with the Visible Man and Woman, and, as a result, knows how to get under my skin. A tolerant person, she nonetheless refuses to regard me as a member of a culture deserving evaluation on its own terms, even if those terms be expressed in grunts, mumbles, body language, and odd jobs performed out of implicit concern.

After all, in my male lexicon, reseating the toilet means, "I love you."