Pam seemed to spend her days coming up with tasks and complaints. Last night, she made Wojo take her to a Bonita Casita in downtown Amarillo. That was a home goods store. She wanted curtains. What was wrong with the existing curtains in the trailer? She couldn’t put it into words. She said they was kinda you know, or whatever, they was . They was bum-tickety, that was Wojo’s madeup characterization of her blathering on uninformatively about them’s faults. Bum-tickety.
Wojo couldn’t never have done come up with more than like five words about curtains. Color and size. What else is there? Some of ’em have like patterns and that, the fancy ones do. Not Wojo’s. Somehow Pam was gabbing about ’em for hours. Hours! Bet! She coulda writ a novel!
And Wojo don’t mind. He like spending time with her. But he only got a little time at the end of the day, and he don’t wanna spend it wandering around some fufu store looking at curtains. You know there’s different kinda curtains? Bunchesa kinds. Wojo just had them blackout curtains. The only purpose to a curtain was to black out the light, right? So the best curtain must block out all the light. Henceforth, blackout curtains. Forget about it! Pam got other ideas. She got lotsa ideas about curtains. She like different colors and fabrics and some got like belts and sashes and stuff, like a beauty pageant. They was all less effective — and therefore worse, as Wojo saw it — than the plain gray blackout curtains he already had
Unless you get more windows, why would you ever buy new curtains? They don’t go bad! Bet!
He don’t always like being the center of attention. Maybe that was what was weird about living with Pam. There was only the two of ’em, so her attention was always on him — or on curtains — and she expected him to always be paying attention to her. It was exhausting. When they watch something on teevee, she talk during the commercials and that, shoot! She do talk like she don’t realize Wojo just saw the same dang thing. She talks like a professor, but a professor who only studies things that don’t matter.
From Wojo the Action Hero