Tuesday, May 13, 2008
He made me angrier than I'd been in years. He lied to my face and cheated me. But my rage took me into a dark place.
Dec 5, 2005 | I was driving along one day not too long ago, when I passed a small carpet store nestled in between several taller commercial buildings. It had been sandwiched there forever: One day you'd expect to find it gone, like a missing tooth. Right out in front was the perfect carpet remnant for the nursery school at my church, sea-foam green and plush, rolled up and leaning against a fence. I pulled over, picked up the rug, checked the price, and walked into the store and gave the man behind the desk the cash.
"This is perfect for the nursery school at my church," I enthused. The man was middle-aged, plain and so quiet that at first I thought he might be mute. He gave me a receipt, and we said goodbye.
That Sunday, I dropped the rolled-up carpet in the room where the little kids meet. One of the mothers called the next day. She said that when they unrolled the carpet, it had a moldy spot right in the middle, and so she had returned it to the carpet guy.
"Did you get our money back?"
"No, his accountant wasn't there. But he'll have the money by today. Can you pick it up?"
I stopped by the next day. "Hi," I said to the man. "I'm from the church school. We had to return the green rug, and the woman who dropped it off said you would reimburse me."
There was a moment's pause. "Someone already picked it up," he said.
"That's not possible," I explained.
I fished my receipt out of my purse, and held it out to him. He studied it and nodded. "Someone picked it up. An hour ago."
"But no one else would have picked it up."
We both held out our palms, the universal sign of being amiably perplexed.
I was not particularly tweaked at this point: I kept sliding off his surface friendliness into worry, but at the same time I felt that there had been a simple misunderstanding, and we could clear it up, that if you are sincere and rational, and trusting, everything sorts itself out.
I went to a pay phone and called the woman who had returned the rug. "Did you stop by and pick up the money from the carpet guy?" I asked.
"No, I thought you were going to." I went back to the store.
The man was finishing up some business with another customer, so I waited. This time I noticed how crummy his carpet store was. Dozens of carpets were rolled up, stacked to the ceiling like timber, and the lights were low, like it was a place where bad things go down.
When the other customer left, I threw up my hands again but this time with a faint maternal gesture of displeasure. "No one else picked up the money," I said.
"Yes they did," he said. "An hour ago." Then he tapped his ledger. It was soiled, and filled with tiny words and numbers. There was a pencil notation in the margin that said, "$50." He tapped it.
"Look," I said, in my sternest Sunday school teacher voice. "I don't want to make trouble. But no one picked up the money. And I'd like it. Now."
He tapped the "$50" again.
"That doesn't mean anything," I said. "I'm from a Sunday school. This is for little children." Then, for good measure, I added, "with asthma."
He tapped the ledger again, and then waved me away, like a servant, or a bee. I wanted to wail like a child, wounded and self-righteous.
"Hey," I said. "Buddy." I had my hands on my hips, and glared, like Dale Evans. I was as furious as I can ever remember being, thinking about the innocent little children at our Sunday school, the asthmatic little children, scampering about on the mold! Thinking about Sunday school made me remember to pray -- Help! Help!
I got my answer: Start behaving well, and you will feel better. This is what Jesus would want, and He is there in the rug store. Maybe he was embarrassed to tears, like when your kid has a tantrum in public, which pretty much captures the scene. I stared off at the log-pile of rugs. I was trembling, and you could have opened walnuts with my self-righteousness. But Jesus doesn't hold this against a person. His message is that we're all sort of nuts and suspicious and petty and full of crazy hungers, and it all feels awful a lot of the time, but even so -- one's behavior needs to be decent. So I would try.
"We've got a problem," I said. He rolled his eyes. See -- that's where decency will get you, I thought, and tried another tack: "Do you want me to call the police? Huh? How about that?" He waved me away again. The door to the most primitive place inside me opened, then, where the betrayed child lives, terrified, wounded, murderous. And on top of that, I felt a deep, familiar self-loathing, the inevitable side effect of feeling angry, vulnerable and small.
Glaring at each other, I found all that angry energy kind of heady, like a drug.
I stormed home and called one of the men from church, Sam's Big Brother, Brian. Brian has been helping me raise Sam since before Sam was born, although he is not a formal Big Brother. He's 45; he does not look the part of an enforcer. He's owlish and sturdy and enthusiastically neutral, positive, well behaved -- not at all a hired-assassin type. However, he was coming by to see Sam that night, and I figured he could help me wrap this all up by dinner.
I explained the whole story to him over the phone and he was flabbergasted.
"How about if I call him?" he volunteered. "And I'll call you right back."
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