THE STRUGGLES OF A WANNA-BE ANGEL - Part 4

4. THE SURPRISE  (Kelly)

  I really did feel bad for Melanie. I didn’t understand why Larry, or Lawrence as she liked to call him, had married her, but they were happy, they had their little girl and another one on the way, so who am I, or anyone, to judge someone else’s marriage? Although I have a good moral compass, and am generous, considerate, and helpful to others, I’ve had a blind spot when it came to Melanie. Maybe I felt she’d stolen our brother from us; but the fact of the matter is, Larry had pushed himself away from us to the point where it seemed like he was in some kind of outer orbit, like Saturn or Uranus. Not all the way out to Neptune, but the distance was there and we had to accept it.

If I’m honest, my sisters have gotten more comfortable with her. Of course, they have kids, the great glue that bonds all mothers. No matter how much free babysitting I do for them, I’ll never be in that club until I have one of my own. My dad loves Melanie, to the point where I’ve wondered if he wished that we had all turned out to be more like her. My mom, on the other hand, although she never says it, seems to share my mistrust of her. Just by the looks on her face sometimes, and the occasional remark, like “she spoils that child.” Nothing more.

Anyway, I felt my dislike of Melanie hurting my soul. I remembered the sermon our pastor gave where he said, “Love is not just a feeling, love is an action.” An action that’s not always easy, I might add, when the feeling’s not there, but I wanted to give it a try. So, I organized a surprise birthday party for Melanie.

Everyone was in on it. Larry let us know she had a board meeting the Saturday before her birthday, so the minute she left, we came in and decorated their minimalist living room until it was almost unrecognizable. We actually bought some tiki lamps for the backyard — they may have been too tacky for Melanie, but if she didn’t want them, we’d take them home with us — and draped colored lights and crepe paper banners and flowers on the fences. They already had fairy lights on the deck, and the cumulative effect of all the colors and lights reflecting off the pool was magical.

When Melanie came in the door at 6 o’clock, we all yelled “Happy birthday,” as one does on these occasions. She was stunned. She broke out into a big smile and made high-pitched sounds indicating surprise and appreciation. Everyone had kept it a secret, so it worked perfectly, but my heart sank a little, because my intuition was now telling me that Melanie was a person who did not like surprises, although she would never say it. She did seem to enjoy the dinner Sheri and I made, though, and Jocelyn’s lemon cake and ice cream, and marveled, sincerely for the most part, I thought, at each gift.

We moved to the living room, and somehow our conversation turned to pranks we had pulled on each other. Like taking the filling out of an Oreo cookie and replacing it with toothpaste. That was Larry. Offering some “rosewater” for me to smell which turned out to be ammonia, a betrayal on Sheri’s part that, although I don’t talk about it, I never quite got over. I got her back, though, five years later, by dropping a water balloon out the second story window onto her when she was on the porch, ready to go to a dance with her new boyfriend. No one had ever admitted to that one until now, when Jocelyn, for whatever reason, spilled the beans. Sheri acted still mad until I reminded her of the ammonia incident, and we argued semi-seriously about which was worse, but ended up laughing about how bad we all were, except Jocelyn, whose mind didn’t work that way. Thank God one of us had some sense.

Melanie was quiet, but listened, eyes glued to each speaker, to the whole history of our terrible behavior. When she spoke, she was smiling, but I sensed danger behind the smile.

“Gosh,” she said. “Being an only child, I always wished I had brothers and sisters. But y’all are making me wonder about that. I have to say, I never have been a person who enjoyed pranks.”

“Amen,” said Jocelyn.

“Even just someone snapping the back of my bra in middle school, it felt so humiliating to me. Maybe it would’ve been different--maybe I would’ve been used to it--if I’d had siblings. But even now, I think about that time when someone wrote that thing on my door.”

That would have been me, doing probably — no, definitely — the worst thing I’ve ever done: painting “WHITE SUPREMACIST” on her front door. It made some kind of weird sense to me at the time, though.

“I’ve tried and tried to think of whom I might have offended enough for them to do that to me. Someone who knew where I lived, and knew I was on vacation.”

My stomach felt tighter and tighter, like the knot in a rope trying to hold a boat steady during a storm. The extra time Melanie’s gaze spent on my face was almost imperceptible as she looked around our group, but I perceived it. Then she made a U-turn and looked right at me.

“I’ve had to conclude that it was some kind of joke. A definitely-not-funny practical joke. I asked all the neighbors, and no one saw anything suspicious. Only one saw anything, and that was Kelly driving away. Not surprising, since you were feeding my cats. But it was six in the morning. Early, to be on your way to work.”

You would think that if you were a good person, doing the right thing wouldn’t take much thought. It would be like a reflex. But if it is, my goodness reflex wasn’t working at that particular moment. I needed to step outside myself and ask, “What would a good person do in this situation?” It sounds simple: bearing false witness has been a sin for some time now. Shouldn’t I let Moses be my guide?

I looked Melanie in the eye.

“Melanie, I swear I wouldn’t do that to you. It was a terrible thing for someone to do, and I’m sincerely sorry that it happened.”

Then, of all things, Melanie started crying. Not sobbing, but with tears and sniffling.

“I’m so happy and relieved to hear you say that,” she said. “I feel terrible about accusing you falsely, but, I don’t know, it’s always seemed like there was something between us, some kind of animosity. So I had to ask.”

I was truly moved, that it meant that much to her to be liked by me. She was sitting alone on a footstool, and, to my surprise, I went over and hugged her.

And I still count myself a good person, because I didn’t really lie. The person I was when I said I wouldn’t do that to her really meant it. I wouldn’t do it now. And her knowing that I did it back then would only have added to the sum total of suffering that exists in the world, of which there is already plenty. Love isn’t just a feeling, it’s an act. And maybe the act can lead to the feeling, or at least make a good person into a better person.

Fin