Judge Not

We belong to the New Haven Lawn Club, which sounds hoity toity but for us, more than anything, it’s just a convenient place to go to the gym. Most of the members are perfectly nice people, but there are some exceptions. One woman I have grown to loathe wears a floor-length mink coat to the gym, and has a frightening penchant for bright orange lipstick. She also has a habit of braying, instead of speaking in a normal voice, and always seems to be expounding on pretentious things like privacy hedges and how to cook a leg of lamb. The net effect is obnoxiousness, which is forgivable, but my last straw issue with her was something she said about her teenage daughter. The daughter was next to me, sweating away on an elliptical machine, when fur coat woman leaned toward me and brayed, “She will never lose those tree trunk hips and thighs. She’s built like a sturdy Russian peasant.” My horror was compounded when I found out that she had, in fact, adopted her daughter from Russia.

Yesterday, I was at the gym, talking to my friend Bernie, who happens to be the head of maintenance. Our sons grew up together. Tragically, several of the boys in their grammar school posse got into drugs in their early twenties and died of overdoses.

“Crazy,” Bernie said, “to think that three or four of those kids are just gone.”

“I know,” I replied. “Who would have ever imagined it, watching them growing up?” That’s when I noticed fur coat lady hovering nearby.

“Laura, do you mind if I interject?”

“Not at all.” I assumed she was about to tell us how drugs had infiltrated the nearby elite prep school, but she turned to Bernie. “Those old fashioned florescent bulbs in the upstairs ladies’ room are so unflattering,” she said. “I would like them replaced with something less harsh. I see myself in the mirror under those lights and I just want to shoot myself.”

Just hand me the gun, and I’ll do it for you, I thought. Here we were, talking about something so personal and tragic, and this is what couldn’t wait? What massive self-absorption! I wasted no time in adding it to the list of transgressions- the ostentatious fur coat, the bray, what she said about her daughter, who by the way is now at boarding school, thank god. It took me a few hours to calm down enough to realize that maybe I was overreacting.

An uncomfortable memory surfaced of a time when I was working at a convalescent home as a housekeeper. I was emptying wastebaskets. I went into a patient’s room to get hers, but the door seemed to be jammed. I pushed against it, and a woman poked her head out. I told her I needed the wastebasket. She said it wasn’t a good time. I told her it would just take a second. She repeated it wasn’t a good time, and if I had taken a moment to examine social cues, such as the woman’s tears, I would have proceeded to the next room. But I had a schedule to keep, so instead, I insisted I needed to get the wastebasket, which was when a nurse whispered in my ear that the patient had died during the night. The woman was waiting for the coroner to take her mother’s body.

I’m sure this woman thought I was the most horribly insensitive person alive, but really what it came down to were obliviousness and bad timing. And while I can find her lipstick appalling, her voice grating, and what she said about her daughter unforgivably cruel, fur coat lady’s interruption could well be attributed to the same two things.

It hit me that fur coat lady and I have something else in common; today, we were both making an effort to cast her in a better light.