December 26, 2001
Three Painted Plastic Rings
I've been thinking about rings lately.
I was always a shy kid. I was content to re-read the library's copy of Exploring the Titanic over and over and pretend my pencil was a quill and doodle all over my math worksheets.
I was in the third grade. I come into Mrs. Harper's class and take my seat in a nondescript corner of the room. I reach into my desk to retrieve my notebook and a pencil and my hand brushes across some foreign object.
It is an envelope. I pull it out, and think automatically, someone has sent me a love letter.
Now this is ridiculous. No one would ever send me a love letter, not now, not then. But I think it all the same, because I am romantic even for a nine-year-old, the product of reading too many books and not watching enough television.
It is a bit lumpy for a love letter. I open it; it is not sealed. I gasp and feel my cheeks burn. Inside is something altogether better than a love letter, a thousand times better.
There are three rings, the cheap metal painted plastic kind with the little sticky jewels on them in triangle or circle or moon shapes. Girls, you know the kind. Boys, use your imaginations.
When one is a third grade girl, these are like gold. These go with all of your acid washed jeans and neon pink t-shirts.
And they were in my desk.
And they were not mine.
Which left only one solution, which was that someone had put them there. For me.
I nearly squealed, looked bashfully about the room, glanced back down at the treasure in the envelope. Dare I take them out? Dare I place them on my small, ragged-nailed fingers?
At that very moment a tap found its way to my shoulder. Behind me stood Erin, one of the girls in the class whose popularity and beauty I coveted. One of the girls in class who never bothered to speak to me unless it was to beg an invitation to my birthday party, and not because she wanted to come but because she could not stand to be one of the uninvited. That was my position, after all.
"Um, I put something in your desk on accident." She said, and, seeing the envelope, took it politely away from me and went to sit down at the desk right in front of me. Her desk. Her rings.
It was a simple mistake.
I was crushed.
To this day whenever I see a ring like any of those, I remember the pain of this memory. We have them at Cappel's. I've pondered more than once buying myself one, just one, for fifteen cents; for old time's sake.
I remember how ugly and unwanted I felt that day. How embarassed I was. How stupid I was to think that anyone would ever give me something like a ring, ever give me anything at all, for that matter.
And now that I have gotten a ring, it is not the sort I expected. It is not the sort I wanted.
Was his gift a gift of love or a symbol that I am his property?
It would've been so much easier if he would've just bought me earrings.
astera at 8:25 p.m.