Things We Should Do Better

I particularly love it when other people decide they are my long-lost kindergarten teacher. This happened yesterday when I was buying groceries at a small shop.

‘May I have a bag?’ I asked.

The checkout woman put on her most self-righteous tone as she waved the plastic bag in front of my face. ‘Will you promise to reuse it?’ She looked at me as if, in daring to ask for a bag, I had come dangerously close to the category of shoplifter.

‘I always reuse them,’ I said through gritted teeth.

When I left the shop, I was a wiser person. My environmental consciousness had definitely been raised. Not only will I never again ask that woman for a bag, but I will never again visit her shop.

People who take it upon themselves to enforce minor rules (don’t walk on the grass, don’t bring outside food into our establishment, don’t take photos) are missing their true vocation in the shaping of young minds. They should rightfully be in our elementary schools beating six-year-olds with birch rods.

I recall one especially lovable mentor by the name of Melanie, a receptionist at the university club. She came upon my boyfriend and me as we were reading newspapers on a couch in the lounge. Because dusk had fallen while we were sitting there, our eyes had adjusted to the dimness, and we had not thought of getting up to turn on a light. Melanie suspected the worst when she saw us sitting there in the dark.

‘Oh, don’t do that here!’ she snapped as she hurried past to make an unauthorized personal call in a dark corner.

Unbeknownst to Melanie, I was having a bad day. Not just a bad day, but a bad week within a bad month. Because of unfortunate living situations on both our parts, my boyfriend and I had nowhere else to meet that night. I could not invite him to my house, and he could not invite me to his house. Outside, a cold rainstorm made a romantic evening stroll impossible. We had already been feeling cast out of the human community even before Melanie saw fit to offer her motherly guidance.

I approached the woman as she huddled over her phone call. She was tall and thin, with a beaklike nose and a sour expression.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘What did you say?’

I proceeded to unleash my full fury on this unsuspecting defender of public morals. There are not many times in my life when I have bellowed, but that was one of them. Did she regret jumping to conclusions? We shall never know. In response to my challenge, she was unable to justify the nastiness of her remark, but she refused to apologize because she insisted that we had embarrassed her. She was contemptuous to the core.

Perhaps I should have pitied her: poor, bony Melanie. There could not be much love in her life. Maybe I should have offered her a hug.

As it was, we fled outside into the rain, where we stood for twenty minutes getting soaked to the skin while I ranted about how I was going to lie in wait for Melanie that night and kill her as she came out of the building. All the frustrating forces of the world were concentrated in her scrawny person. Nothing my boyfriend could say would make me move from the spot until I had repeated several hundred times, ‘I will kill her. I will slit her throat.’

I wish I was not the kind of person who was so bothered by these situations. I would like to resist the temptation to be drawn into such people’s sordid little worlds. My brother was good at letting things go and not getting upset. I remember in particular an incident in Yorkshire with a harpylike bed-and-breakfast owner who shrieked at us for using the wrong bathroom. I was about to give her a piece of my mind, but my brother was surprisingly gallant and even went so far as to apologize (!). It was a good thing he did, too, because she came running after us with his wallet and his passport, which he had left behind in the excitement.

In my haste to get away from Melanie, I left my sweater behind. I was nervous the next day when I went back to get it, expecting to find it cut into shreds, but they had saved it for me in the office, and it appeared undamaged. I took it cautiously, as if it were a plague sweater, imbued with all the rage and disappointment and ill feeling of the previous evening.

It just wasn’t worth it.

Tags: sisterhood, vengeance