In my life, I’ve owned only one thing of any value. I mean, aside from my house, which is supposedly worth more than anything else, but let’s be frank, it’s a 750-square-foot glorified shed in the ghetto. People have cars worth more than my house.
And my car, which cost—I don’t even remember—$18,000? I’ll be paying my car off for a couple more years.
My computer is a 2006 Mac desktop which weighs approximately a pood. The television that sits in my spare room was a hand-me-down from my friend when she moved back to Europe in 2008.
So really, it was just the ring. My great grandmother’s engagement ring that my parents gave me for my college graduation. Platinum, a round-cut diamond in a square setting with three tiny diamonds on either side, the stones together weighing almost a carat.
I never wore it. Why would I wear it? Most days, I remember to put on a pair of silver earrings, but I don’t do sparklies, I don’t do baubles. No, I kept the ring in a little tan velvety box, which itself sat in a gold cardboard box, accompanied by a brooch and the only pair of gold earrings I own, in the small closet in my bedroom, next to my sock box. Every six months or so, I would open the box, look at the ring, slip in on my finger, and put in back in the box.
And now it’s gone.
I don’t know why—maybe because I was getting dressed in a sparkly sweater for a Christmas party, or maybe because a friend at the gym got engaged last weekend—but last night I noticed the box, next to my socks.
I opened it and found the brooch and earrings. The ring was gone.
No, I didn’t lose it.
No, I didn’t put it in a safe deposit box and forget.
It was in that box, next to my socks, and now it’s gone.
And the hardest part about this situation is that my house has never been broken into.
So what that means is that someone came into my house, invited, looked through my stuff, and stole my ring.
And it could be anybody. I have parties. I invite friends and acquaintances and neighbors. I don’t know them all well. I hang out by the fire pit while they mill about my house. I do that because, and this is the hardest part, it would never occur to me to walk into a person’s house—friend or stranger—and take so much as a postage stamp. So I never imagined anyone would do it to me.
When I was in 5th grade, Monica Green got a birthstone ring. It was purple. She was skinny. It fell on the floor of Mrs. Heller’s classroom. I picked it up and tried it on. It more or less fit my pinkie. Eventually, Monica realized it was gone and saw that I had it. She told Mrs. Heller, who then inquired. No, I said, this ring is my sister’s. And remarkably—I can’t, as a teacher, imagine letting something like that go—I was allowed to leave school with the ring.
Years later, when I read “The Telltale Heart”, I would get sweaty remembering the way the ring had felt awkward on my little finger, the way it had sparkled in my dollhouse bathtub where I dropped it, the way I hadn’t been able to shake the cloud that hung over me, the way the next day I had waited until Mrs. Heller wasn’t looking, walked casually by Monica’s desk, and dropped it on a pile of pencil shavings inside. And the relief—good god, the relief.
I should have said sorry to Monica. I should have confessed to the teacher. I still think about that. But the important thing was the lesson I learned, which was that it’s real shitty to take something that’s not yours. For them, definitely, but in addition, it will make you feel real shitty.
And so I don’t do that. I don’t take things that don’t belong to me.
And now I feel so mad and sad and stupid. The box wasn’t hidden. It was in my closet, but it wasn’t hidden.
Why didn’t I hide it?
As I sobbed to Mom this morning, she said it’s a good thing, or it means a good thing about me, it means that I’m trusting. Is that a good thing?
I know it’s an object. And objects are just objects.
But this object can’t be replaced and neither can my belief in people.