I was always an “A” student. I had a memory like an elephant. I never needed a curfew, and I went to church almost more than I went home.
Yet, I was terribly, awkwardly naive. A bookworm straight out of the solid core of a ripe apple, I didn’t read people as well as words, not until I was much older – and oh how I wish you could shut people up the way you do a book, one flick of your wrist and back they go on the shelf.
But me, no, I never questioned authority, and let me tell you that came to backfire on a lot of children in my generation, in the mid-1980s; pedophilia was nearing an epidemic – remember when Snuffleupagus finally became “real?” There was a sad reason for that – still, I respected my elders, continued to watch Sesame Street, and…
…I never, never put my elbows on the table.
But, as tends to happen, things change.
First, we had a bumper crop of babies in the family. And as they continue to grow older, some things must necesssarily fall to the wayside (last Sunday, Wynn Chandler, 1.5, and Connor, 3, threw a wooden banana back and forth across the dinner table until it hit A.K.’s, 4, very full plate of spaghetti, causing it to fall into his lap and set off an alarm of some sort, a siren, buried in the back of his gut. Poor A.K., who for once wasn’t causing trouble, screamed loudly enough to make up for it).
But, for years, it had only been me, in my adopted family. I was the baby, I was the absolute center of the universe. Careful attention was given to me, like alms and written prayers offered at the Wailing Wall. And I responded to this positive reinforcement.
Nana, for instance, was merciless in her insistence that I be well-bred, especially at the almighty dinner table. Each week I was taught with precision and focus a rule of etiquette. I could set a table for six, for a five-course meal, with formal attire and RSVP’ed regret cards (food allergies to be listed in the space provided on the back of the card) in under ten minutes. When it came to grace and civility at the dinner table, I stood alone. And above. All others. Well, at least other children.
The test came every Sunday. If I mastered the rule from the previous week: placement of water glasses, descending order of forks, the importance of balling a napkin, especially linen, at the end of the meal, as opposed to folding it (a sin!) and laying it in the center of the plate, etc. I would receive a dollar bill, magically slipped under my plate in the interim between the meal and dessert (in my family, we have a sort of digestive purgatory during this interim where we offer coffee and discussion before actually getting to dessert – well, we used to before the, you know, babies. The last time we did this ended up in a clotted mess of coffee, Berber carpet and mashed potatoes).
This went on for years, this Dollar Bill Incentive.
And I can, to this day, clearly remember the Sunday that I Decided I Would Showcase All Rules of Etiquette Learned Ever. I made a huge to-do about it, as well, telling everyone from that Wednesday night on, that Sunday would be the day. I would get absolutely everything right. That table would look ripped from the pages of Southern Living.
We were never served pizza. So, this is a pure lie.
As a matter of fact, it wouldn’t just be set with the Sunday china, or the crystal tea glasses, it would be set with Intimidation. They might not even be able to eat, so crisp would be the napkins, so pristinely placed the plates. Instead, I told them, it might “behoove” them (yet another word I’d picked up from Aunt Maudy) to bring cameras.
Oh, how I practiced in my bedroom, drawing out diagrams, using flash cards – I know, it seems like a lot of unneccessary subterfuge just to set one table, and I know it is, shall we say, for something so truly insignificant in the greater scheme of things (like surviving a recession) but times were different then, and I was a lonely child, so cut me some slack.
I wasn’t entirely innocent, though. No, I had a plan.
I wasn’t just diagraming the etiquette rules I’d been taught by Nana. I was busy inventing new ones, cleverly cloaked in similarity to real, authentic rules. They’d never be the wiser, and when all was said and done, under my plate, that Sunday, would be well over $50. I was about to become the richest 12-year-old in the Wess Chapel community.
That morning I was at church so fast, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d taken a bath.
And God, how church dragged on and on…finally, we stood up for the Benediction. I knew my patience was wearing thin; I could barely, just barely, make it through this, I told myself: the song was “Just As I Am,” the uncut version, and I could already tell we were going to sing every last verse of it. I sat there praying that no one would take the altar. I didn’t have time for that, they could just go find a closet, like the Bible said, and pray on their own time…I had a table to set. Much to my chagrin, two women, the Usual Suspects, strode down the aisle. I thought, fine, get it over with, lay your sins at the foot of the pulpit and get back to the pew…but the heavier of the two women, the one who was solely responsible for introducing Tupperware to the Social Ladies League, did a sneak-around and went to the pastor instead.
The Lord! I thought, This is going to take forever. You don’t walk down the aisle to speak to the pastor, during Benediction, to ask him how’s he doing, or where he got his suit. No, you’ve done some horribly guilty thing if it requires pastoral counseling at a quarter to one, in a Baptist church. I was hoping it’d be about the Tupperware, personally.
I'd pray about Tupperware, too. For forgiveness of it.
You could have cut the tension in that church with a communion wafer – of course it’d have to be on the fifth Sunday of the month, that’s the only time we do Communion. Point is, everyone started praying for that woman, right then. And not in a good way. She was all the time taking advantage of the altar, something that is frowned upon at the church unless your aging mother whom you put in a nursing home even though you knew better has recently died, or your husband has left you for Brenda who up until last Monday had been the secretary at the elementary school, or your neighbor is that crazy woman who everyone knew “drove her husband to the grave with her constant migraines and other things always said in a whisper around children” had started sneaking out to her car, in her own driveway, and kicking the back fender in, and then calling the police and blaming you for it, poor Ms. Ada Lee – she had a walker for crying out loud…those were the only acceptable reasons to take the altar.
Anything else just got you bad-mouthed. They weren’t praying for her, they were praying about her: mainly to shut up and sit back down.
Finally, I guess, the Good Lord took her call and she got what she needed, and if not, we all knew she’d be back next Sunday. Although one time she took the altar on a Wednesday evening service, which just looked bad…no one ever did that, and also she’d worn knee-highs. The minute she kneeled to pray, it was, well, plainly unfair for the rest of us to have to look at that.
I was already out of my seatbelt, the car rolling to a stop, U.L. hollering at me “to quit doing that every blame time until he was fully stopped,” I could see him mentally adding yet another thing to the List of Bad Habits With Which He Blamed My Mother For. It was a long list and I knew, in time, it’d break him and he’d find himself at the altar, too.
I calmly stepped into Nana’s house and began the task that would make me rich and able to ruin the lives of all other children in my grade; so few at my school could afford the food in the cafeteria at the Academy. Which wasn’t really good food anyway. But, after today, I could buy chicken baskets and shrimp boats and pizza slices for everyone.
Dinner passed by quietly, a few stunted mumbles of approval. I could tell that I’d done it, I’d pulled it off, this great heist of etiquette. Not a fork misplaced, not a napkin ring turned over, no water glass unfilled. I could barely eat, even though it was meatloaf, which was, like, number 7, in the secret diary I kept, where on the cover in glowing, loops of letters I’d written in the black magic marker: Favorite Things In Life. Coffee Time couldn’t come quickly enough, but come it did, and as we waited, and waited, so did dessert.
I got up and left the dining room, as was the customary method by which the money fairy would come; she didn’t like to be seen, and I can understand that. I walked into the front den and down the hall to wash my hands, something we all did before dessert (I like to think we did it before the meal, as well). I came back, nonchalantly, not as if I were expecting anything, and took my seat.
I don't know where Heaven is, but I know what ingredients you need to make it.
Dessert was Scotch Chocolate Cake – in my diary, it was number 11.
This was the moment. I picked up my plate, One slice please, took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and I could just about make out the corners of the at-least-fifty-dollars that I knew was lying under the plate. I could see those corners of that money flat through my eyelids. That’s how sure I was.
I opened them and there was not one single dollar bill laying there. None.
I couldn’t hide my disappointment. I looked at Nana, just shy of pitching a fit the likes of which had never been thrown in this family since Pam got a speeding ticket for missing her curfew (she had curfews; they were well deserved) in front of the old Buckstove in the front den. That was a fit for the record books.
But, I bit my tongue and asked, “What did I do wrong? I thought I did it all right.”
Nana, with those large, Merle Norman eyes, said, “You did, honey. It was perfect.”
“Well, then, where’s the money?” I mean, why beat around the bush, at this point. And in that way that all the wizened women in my family have, she put forth a small smile that had both love and understanding and sternness in it and said,
Kris, you’re almost thirteen. You shouldn’t do things because you expect something in return. You should do them because it’s the right thing to do. You should learn to just be good for nothing.
It was a slip of a cliche, probably not intended. But, when she caught herself, she laughed, a beautiful laugh, and then we all laughed, and it was all ok. It was a good lesson to be learned.
And, it’s a lesson that’s stuck…because I’ve been good for nothing ever since.
The Clever Kris 