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Thursday, January 22, 2004 Basement Files: The gift card
Christmas morning, my wife and I got up early, opened gifts and, with an hour to kill before her mother arrived, knocked one out on the couch. My wife, Mary, had given me a really nice leather jacket that I'd been coveting and I gave her a photo album. Not an empty one, mind you, but one filled with pictures and sweet messages that left Mary misty-eyed and lovey (thus the couch). And it was with my soul thus restored that I could then brace myself for Wilma's visit. Wilma arrives, as always, on time, and, as always, dressed for an occasion more formal than any she'll ever attend, save her much-anticipated funeral. There are hugs and kisses and soon it's time to open more gifts. Wilma hands Mary a small box that carries with it the promise of jewelry. I'm handed a gift bag overflowing with tissue paper that bears the worn creases of Christmases past and now feels as soft as old money. (Should I mention this small slight later, Mary will remind me of her mother's Depression-era childhood, when FDR would set aside time in each Fireside Chat to urge Americans to conserve their tissue paper, lest Europe's growing menace be imported to our shores) Obviously, I'm meant to open mine first as I'm neither blood-related nor especially liked. At the base of the bag, I feel what is obviously an envelope-encased Christmas card and I'm already practicing my oohs and aahs over the modest check within. Instead, I feel a strange rigidity to the envelope and open it to find a Borders gift card with a stark, white $5 printed atop its glossy laminate. "Hey, look at this," I say, holding the card up for Mary to see and to jog Wilma's unsteady memory. "Well thank you, Wilma. That's really nice." "Well, I know how much you like to read," Wilma says, her hands nervously smoothing her proper skirt over her properly merged knees. "I sure do," I say, beaming like a moron. I'm tempted to add, "I especially like reading the acknowledgements page and the preface, which this card should generously cover," but instead busy myself with preserving the tissue paper for my grandchildren's distant Christmas on the moon. I'm still lost in my thoughts as Mary begins opening what turns out to be a $400 tennis bracelet, but through the haze I hear Wilma say, "A photo album? Well, I'm sure you'll open your nice gifts later tonight." Naturally, it's all I can do not to leap over the coffee table and crush her paper-thin trachea beneath my thumbs. There are, in all of Wilma's words and gifts, both reproach and punishment for my theft of her daughter's other, richer destiny. More than once, I've overheard Wilma saying she didn't "slave my whole life away so you could marry an underachieving cartoonist." (By the way, Wilma "slaved" in the same place where Clarence Thomas was "lynched," that is the fertile, antebellum fields of self-pity.) The gift card has been tucked into my wallet for a few weeks now and today I'm at Borders wondering if I should redeem it. I mean, it's such a multifaceted humiliation. First, that someone should think so little of me at Christmas that they'd endow me with five dollars (No, it's not a last-minute stocking stuffer, My Friendly Borders Clerk. I'm afraid this represents my entire Christmas from a loved one) and second, that I should think so little of myself that I might actually apply it toward a larger purchase. I feel a little like the kid who's been turned loose in a store with a single dollar from his grandfather. All I'm missing is that look of stunned disappointment when the clerk gently tells him that a dollar won't quite cover the cost of the $18.95 remote-control Apache attack helicopter. Oh, that slow, dejected turn back toward the toy aisle...it's heartbreaking, isn't it? You're always tempted to throw an avuncular arm around his shoulders and say, "I'll tell you what, Tiger, I'll help you out with that," but then you realize he'd just run out of the store without thanking you, or without later penning an award-winning high school essay titled "A Stranger's Kindness." It just seems cruel to send someone into a store with too little money to buy anything in the entire store's inventory. Seriously, what kind of "fuck you" is that? Now, I can hear the moralists among you saying that Wilma owes me nothing and that I should be grateful for anything she might give me. Really? Should I? You ever go out to eat with your wife and everything at the restaurant goes wrong? Orders get delayed, empty drinks stand neglected and your waitress appears, if at all, to deliver ice-cold food. And about halfway through your entrée you say, "This waitress is getting 10 percent and that's it." "I wouldn't give her anything," your wife says in a voice surprisingly firm, as if she thought you might have been flirting with the waitress earlier and is now eager to see her punished. So the thought of stiffing the waitress completely begins rolling around in your head. But some devious corner of your mind decides, instead, to leave a humiliating smattering of change. To leave nothing might make you look merely cheap or forgetful, but to leave a quarter says you're both judgmental and vindictive. And the rest of the meal is actually enlivened by the giddy anticipation of the cruelty to come (although you make a point of rushing out of the restaurant before she discovers your mean-spirited gesture). And that, my dear moralists, is how I feel today. Because I've been waiting on Wilma for years. And this Christmas, she left me a quarter. |
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