We got home late last night from a long weekend of camping, and the house still shows it. Tubs of food are sitting in the kitchen waiting to be put away. There are dirty clothes to wash, suitcases full of clean clothes to unpack, and camping gear that needs to go back into storage. I left early this morning for work, and my wife was right behind me, taking our girls to their homeschool co-op, so all of it is right where we dropped it, waiting for us to come home. Nobody thinks twice about a pile like that. Every family that has ever come home tired from a trip has one.
It reminds me of an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where Ray and Debra come home from a trip too tired to carry their suitcase upstairs, so they leave it on the landing. The next morning Ray heads off to work, walks right past the suitcase, and assumes Debra will put it away. Debra sees it and thinks Ray could have pitched in. It’s his suitcase too, after all, and she’s particularly upset that he seems to think it’s her job. So she decides she doesn’t see it.
Days pass, then weeks. The suitcase becomes the central focus in the house. Each of them pull clothes out of it to wear, hoping the other will crack. Neither will carry it upstairs, because carrying it means losing. Three weeks later Ray has to leave on a work trip to cover the Mets. The sensible move is to unpack the suitcase and use it. Instead he stuffs his clothes into a plastic bag and heads for the door. On his way out, he slips a block of cheese into the suitcase. By the next day the smell can’t be missed. Debra and her mother-in-law follow the smell and find the cheese. Marie suggests putting the suitcase outside. Debra refuses. Moving it would mean Ray wins.
It’s funny because it’s so petty and because we recognize ourselves in it. Most of us have a little Ray and a little Debra in us. We know what it’s like to assume someone else will take care of it, and we know what it’s like to feel taken for granted. But we laugh with some relief, too. We, of course, have never let something that small go that far, or at least we don’t think we have. We have certainly never hidden cheese in anyone’s luggage. So if someone asked whether we have an anger problem, we would honestly say no.
But most of us have a suitcase on the landing somewhere. Anger doesn’t always come out as yelling or slamming doors. A lot of the time it shows up in small choices that we would never think to call anger. Someone hurts us, so we stop talking to them. We answer in one word, or we don’t answer at all, and we let them wonder what they did wrong. In the middle of an argument, we bring up something they did years ago, because we know it still gets to them. We make a joke at their expense in front of everyone, and then say we were only teasing. Or we do someone a favor and then find ways to remind them of it, until they feel like they owe us. From the outside, none of these looks like anger, and each one can even look like a virtue. Holding our tongue is a good thing, after all. Gently reminding a loved one of what they did in the past can look like honesty. A little teasing is all in good fun. And doing favors comes from generosity, right? But underneath each of these, we want the other person to feel something painful. We want them to feel shut out, or guilty, or small, or in our debt. Their discomfort is how we get paid back for the hurt they caused us. That’s what I mean by the polite ways we make people pay.
