We are not rule breakers, my cousin says.
We are not, she and I. And we huddle together at family gatherings and joke about our defect.
I got divorced, I say, but in this family it doesn’t count.
I am not proud of my adherence to the rules. I am embarrassed. Still, decades after high school, I am embarrassed that I can’t be cooler.
Which brings me to my attempt to return a scale to a box store. It’s a digital kitchen scale, the kind I use for baking, but in this case, I’d bought it for my son to weigh coins when he thought for a minute he would find a precious penny that would turn him into a millionaire. He was not as excited about owning a scale as he was about the millionaire part, and I was supposed to return it, so that he could exchange it for a better gift. That was ten months ago. But we moved and it got lost, and when I found it again in the back of my car where I’d put it last January, it was November, well past any reasonable return policy. Still, scales are not in season or out of season, so I figured I could at least get a store credit.
The whole fact that it’s past reasonable-returning means I’m naturally nervous when I approach the customer service lady. I obviously no longer have a receipt, which is good because she would absolutely not honor it.
Do you have the credit card? She asks.
No, I say, my ex got that in the divorce.
She doesn’t laugh.
Our return policy just changed, the cashier says. And she pushes the sign at me. Even though I don’t want to read it she tells me I must.
Right here, I say, it says you can give me a store credit with 20% off.
I can’t she says, the tape on the edge is coming up. It’s not perfect. And my manager is a dick.
But it’s in the box new, I say.
Sorry, she tells me.
I have other business in the store, so I ask her what I should do with the scale, just leave it behind the counter while I walk around? Because I don’t want someone to think I’m stealing.
We’re too busy for that, she says, you could walk out of here with a microwave and no one would notice. And she hands me a small bag to carry my scale.
I had no business returning the scale, but I’m totally pissed now, because the barely curling tape is a stupid reason to not accept the return.
I move towards the curtains, trailed my hands against the clearance pillows, jabbing into them to watch the spring of their bodies.
As I wander through the kitchen tools and gadgets I come to the scales, and there is my scale, piled in multiples on the bottom shelf.
I crouch down, pulling my scale from the bag and slide it next to its kin on the shelf. Yes, it’s exact except for this small piece of tape that has pulled free.
I paw through all of the scales, checking the tape latches, wanting to know if the small imperfection on my box is really any different than the others.
Spoiler, it is not.
I restack the scales, slip my scale back into my bag, and storm over to my friend who had come to buy some towels of her own.
I lead her to the exit of the store without explanation beyond grumbling that the return policy is insane.
That is my downfall. The exit. Because I instinctively look up at the television monitor above the door and see my likeness, and as I cross the threshold I suddenly realize that there are cameras everywhere, and what a camera would have seen was me crouching down, next to the scale, sliding out a box, and then sliding something back into my empty bag.
I get in the car and say to my friend, They’re going to come after me.
For what? she says.
Stealing.
But you didn’t steal.
But it will look like I did. And the police will come to the house and I’ll have to explain, and what do I say?
The truth? she says.
That’s ridiculous, I say.
My friend tries to use logic to explain that before the store uses the resources of calling the police they are going to need to determine whether anything is even missing, and when they check the inventory, they will of course see all the scales are there.
They’ll find another scale with the tape ripped, I say, they’re going to think I swapped mine.
I’m going to get arrested, I say.
In some ways the rational part of me demands that even swapping out one scale for its identical cousin is in no way wrong, because it is not actually stealing. On the other hand, I could have used that new scale to end-around the store’s stupid policy, which seems on the edge of stealing. Otherwise, why wouldn’t the lady who told me to steal a microwave just suggested the exchange herself?
I need to go back in, I say to my friend
Where?
To the store, I say. I need to go back and exchange the scale-I-stole-that-I-didn’t-steal for the old-one-I-brought-in-that-I’ve-had-the-whole-time, and walk out like nothing ever happened.
But nothing happened, she says.
That’s not what the film of loss prevention thinks, I say.
In that moment, I am convinced that I am going to be arrested for something I have not done and that I will never be able to explain my way out of it. Where has this insecurity come from? Certainly having been in bad relationships where I was accustomed to being yelled at for things I had not done doesn’t help. But really, the terror of rule breaking has lived inside me for my whole life, as it has inside my cousin. We do not like to disappoint people. We do not believe explanations can ever be reasonable enough to wipe our moral tally-sheets clean.
You’re going to get yourself in trouble if you go back in, my friend says. That will look suspicious.
I need to do it, I say.
We walk back inside with the scale in the bag that the cashier had given us, and we walk to the scales and I pull them off the shelf and talk loudly about the precision of the measurements, down to the kilogram. I do not tell my friend but I am scanning the scales to make sure that I had not accidentally real-stolen a new scale the first time I’d been here, as if I would even know. Then I reach in the bag, and put the scale on the shelf and shuffle the scales around and then place the old scale once again in the bag. The moment I fake switching back the scales, I feel an enormous relief.
And then the shame comes. It is not the shame of having done something wrong, but rather of having not done anything wrong and carrying such intense guilt that I somehow need to fake repentance. I saw in myself an ugly need to apologize for that which I have not done, that which could never be proven. I hate myself for my pathetic shame. I hate that my shame is not even really about the potential that I would be the kind of person who would steal something, but that I’d be the kind of person who might be caught, and have others know what I’ve done.
Comments