Column: Guilty Party, Dec 2007

“You eat, I'll just sit here in the dark.” Or, So Long Grandma, and Thanks For All the Guilt!
Volume 1.: A Ring of It.

“Oh, how the mighty have fallen.” My boyfriend is looking at my ring, which I am flashing, flicking in his face, spelling out, “Hey, look at my Fat Rock” in Heliograph code. Probably. I am a hypocrite. Definitely.

I always swore diamonds were tacky, flashy, for people who care too much about things that matter too little, and not for someone who can't tell her Balenciaga from her Jimmy Choo and will never care to do so. I believe – this is true -- they are a waste of money and I wouldn't even have permitted him to buy me one when we could buy something we both could enjoy instead. But there was one going.

That was bad enough. Until this thing was slipped onto my finger and the toxic cocktail of guilt at my glee became as powerful as the glee itself. You'd want to see this thing.

“Wanna see my ring?” for the thousandth time, until my boyfriend offers to return the favour.

Mine's bigger.

Someone probably died for this ring. (But have you seen it?) Probably people died for it. (That's one Fat Rock.) And no matter how often I tell myself that the ring is over a hundred years old (Christ, they don't make 'em like this any more, do they?), how nice it looks despite nails to the quick and top knuckles gnarled from years of nervous picking, I cannot bring this person/these people back from the dead. Diamonds are beautiful for the same reasons animals are made of meat, booze makes hangover, and dessert makes ass: not to test us with first-world problems that have real consequences, visible or not, but to test how we rank those consequences. But do past consequences count? And present? Ring was present. Mmmm.

My grandfather had two spinster aunts, lived in a big house together, gangsters' and gamblers' molls. When boyfriends' times were good, they dressed them in diamonds and furs, and when times were bad, fed them bathtub gin and cobbled together the ends of scavenged cigarettes. A poker game, a bad bluff, a broken poker face, or too much of that bathtub gin, and one of the boyfriends presents his trophy to the moll or the dame, or whatever they were called in the Other Noughties in Boston Irish. Really, though, some sap pried this thing from his maybe crying wife's finger to squander it on a bad hand of cards, and she didn't get to leave it to any kids – if he hadn't maybe gambled them away, too. Back there! In my historical mind's eye, slowly drowning in the 1919 Molasses Disaster (really, look it up), having been adopted by some Boston Italians to offset some Catholic emigrant guilt, maybe on their way to a factory job.

It (sparkly ring) ended up on my grandmother, my grandfather having given it to her as a token of his misunderstanding of spousal privilege. By marrying her, she could not testify against him, which he, a lawyer, should have known only applied to communication that takes place after marriage, which maybe isn't fair to expect him to know since he lived and died before there was a Law and Order. He went to jail anyway, six months, which in those days was known as The College, before you could do college in prison. He'd gone to college anyway, then maybe Harvard Law and he came from a family of politicos and wannabes and lived in a big house, but not as big as the Charles Street Jail which, as I already mentioned up there, he also lived in for a while. That was back when even high powered lawyers would sometimes do Actual Time for, you know, teeny tiny things like jury tampering. Not big. Big like my Fat Rock.

And my mother has been saving it for me.

“I had it sized a bit larger because your fingers will swell when you're pregnant.”

What pregnant? Who? Oooh, costly.

(From Totally Dublin December 2007)