Giving Misgivings

I’m not sure whether it’s better to give a rotten present or to get one. I’ve done both, so you’d think I could come up with an authoritative answer to this question. But it’s a tough call.

Here are the choices: Wwas it more miserable to have been given, at age 21, by a boyfriend I adored, a copy of the book Fowler’s English Usage, wherein he marked every example, definition, and term he thought I needed to understand more fully? (This was not a gift; at best, it was a lesson plan. At worst, it was penance.)

Or was an even worse experience to have given, to an old friend from college, a beautifully framed and enlarged photograph of herself?

Wait, you think — that gift sounds fine. Thoughtful, even.

I’d had the privilege of snapping the friend’s picture a year earlier. I didn’t realize that, in the space of time since I’d last seen her, my friend had undergone intensive “work” on her face as well as on her extended person. The new woman who unwrapped the gift resembled the mature woman in the photograph just about as much as the Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind resembled the Vivien Leigh in Streetcar Named Desire.

How could I, with my kindly meant gift from Kodak, hope to compete with a lady who’d given herself the gift of Botox? It wasn’t like I was insulting her — I was simply unaware that she had one of those makeovers that cross over the boundary between plastic surgery and special effects. Trying to smile in thanks, she produced only a look so bitter and resentful it was the kind of expression ordinarily reserved for the loyal girlfriends of serial killers.

Now we just send each other holiday cards.

Not the family-photograph kind.

And I still have the Fowler’s, so I guess the rotten old boyfriend’s gift wasn’t so bad after all.