Jeff Burkhart: Some people have ulterior motives

Spring brings with it a sense of hope, new beginnings and spaghetti straps. Maybe not in that order. But certainly it was the case on this Wednesday night.

When you observe humanity in the abstract, as all bartenders must do, you start to notice some things, like how two women hanging out often start to dress alike, act alike and even look alike.

That certainly can be said for most men, too, but most men already seem to dress alike, if cargo shorts and baseball hats are any indication, and I would argue that they are.

“Two chardonnays!” said the two women in unison.

If one were an uninterested observer, one would recognize that they were not only on key, but they were also harmonized, much like two young girls saying “thank you” to their grandparents after being nudged by their parents.

“Thank you,” they then said in unison.

It had been a routine of theirs for some months, minus the spaghetti straps. They would stop by for a couple of drinks after whatever it was they were doing. If it was a baseball game, it was matching baseball caps. If it was a golf game, it would be matching golf shirts. If it was tennis, it was matching skirts. The spaghetti straps were something new.

“He just doesn’t understand,” said the redhead.

“He doesn’t deserve you,” said the blonde.

They clinked glasses, took a sip and then adjusted their spaghetti straps. Friendship at its best.

Roxane Gay, author of 2014’s “Bad Feminist,” once wrote that we must “abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic or competitive.” And by the looks of things, these two women certainly had abandoned that myth.

Over the preceding weeks and months, they had confided deeply in each other, in public, and noticeably. It’s shocking to hear what people talk about while sitting at a coffee shop, standing in the grocery line or even sitting at a bar. You do know that all of those other people can hear you, right?

Their overt conversations were heard by many and often. But what are the expectations when one must actually raise one’s voice in order to be heard over the surrounding conversations? Privacy should not be among them.

When the redhead got up to use the bathroom, her blonde companion studiously fixed her makeup and fluffed up her hair, using her cellphone as a modern-day compact.

She then looked at me, and I looked at her. It was as if I had caught her doing something she shouldn’t have been doing. An inkling only reinforced by the fact that she then shrugged and smacked her lips.

When the redhead returned, the confiding began again in earnest. And much of it was specifically about the redhead’s boyfriend, or more correctly, what he was lacking as a boyfriend. A common theme in bars, no matter the sex.

The blonde leaned in and listened intently. At one point, she even put both hands on the other woman’s knees. The other woman stopped for a second but was so consumed with her rant that she just continued. Those hands stayed on her knees for quite some time.

“He’s the worst,” said the blonde, hands still firmly in place.

Her hands were there long enough for me to notice and long enough for the woman sitting next to them to notice, too. Because when the redhead excused herself to answer an urgently beeping cellphone, that woman said to the blonde, “How long have you two been together?”

“Oh, we aren’t together,” said the blonde. “Yet.”

She looked at me and did that shrug thing again.

In the bartender world, we tend not to get involved because how much can you know when you’ve only known people for 15 minutes? People are like icebergs in social situations; so much of what’s really happening is happening below.

“Stop wiggling,” said the blonde, holding the other woman’s foot on her thigh as she tried to adjust the straps on her sandals. I couldn’t see what was going on below the bar, but I could see all the wiggling above it.

“Just leave it, I’ll fix it later,” said the redhead, leaving me wondering why they had even tried to fix it in the first place, especially here, and especially now.

The blonde shrugged that shrug again. And sometime later, in a response to a comment not uttered loud enough for everyone to hear, I heard her say, “Men are the worst.”

When the redhead went to the bathroom yet again, I looked at the blonde.

“Men?”

She shrugged one more time.

“A girl’s got to do what a girl’s got to do,” she said, and then she smacked her lips again.

Leaving me with these thoughts:

• Oscar Wilde once said, “Between men and women there is no friendship possible. There is passion, enmity, worship, love, but no friendship,” which seems like a peculiar thing for him, in particular, to say.

• Not all friendships involve the same goals.

• Winter might be the time for friends, but spring certainly is the time for lovers.

Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com