Right House, Wrong Day

Showing up on the wrong day for a party at someone’s house isn’t merely embarrassing. It’s a hideous mixture of shock, shame and horror -- unique among embarrassing moments in that you can’t rush home, shut the door, and try to forget it ever happened. It involves people you know.

First you must pretend to be amused by your own stupid mistake. You must laugh heartily and ruefully shake your head and after a few moments pretend to have quite gotten over it. The truth is your face will burn at the recollection for days and even the hope of looking forward to a time when it can all be forgotten is denied you. Because you know that your dear friends and loved ones will remind you about this day for years to come. Maybe even for the rest of your life.

Let’s compare such an event with the ‘anonymous’ embarrassing incident. If I thrust a mental hand into my Embarrassing Memories Box I immediately come up with the time I fell down the stairs outside my apartment in Calgary. I don’t know why that particular memory was the first to be found – goodness knows there are dozens to choose from – but it will serve the purpose here.

My apartment was on the second floor of a fairly shabby building. The stairs were external and wooden, the minimalistic sort with nothing but air between each riser. On that morning I emerged from the second story door and began to descend when my heel caught on something and I lost my balance. I was wearing high heels and a dress. I was in the middle of my intense but short-lived glamour phase and never left the house — even for a morning in the fruit-fly lab with the weird smell and dozens of tiny flies buzzing around my head — without heels, full make-up and jewellery.

It was a cold day in October, no snow yet but a hard frost covering everything. I don’t remember if there was frost on the steps themselves but it seems likely. What remains vivid in my mind is the horrified shock of finding myself tipping face first down the stairs, the awful hardness of the stairs as I landed on them, and how I threw out my arms to try to catch hold of something.

Loud thumping accompanied my fall. It had been an absolutely still, silent morning and the sounds bounced around the parking lot and reverberated up the alley. Luckily the old wooden staircase creaked and heaved under my crashing form and absorbed a lot more force than a more solidly built structure would have done.

I didn’t fall all that far. It was more of a dive, sprawl and slither. When I came to a stop I found most of my body surface area in direct contact with the stairs so I suppose the instinctive effort to splay myself out brought me to a halt much more effectively than say, curling into a ball and bouncing all the way to the bottom.

What I must have looked like in that position, however, occurred to me within milliseconds of my coming to rest. My mind, shocked but doing its best to get on, observed that the hideous and wholly unprovoked event seemed to have ceased as suddenly as it had begun and immediately I considered my position, draped sideways across the stairs in a dress, with books and pens and tubes of make-up scattered down the steps.

I pulled myself quickly to my feet. There were throbs of pain from many quarters and I saw a long, red scrape just starting to bead with blood on my leg through a tear in my nylons but I managed to pick my things up and put them back into the bag with nonchalance. My shoes had remained on my feet throughout the ordeal and hadn’t even broken a heel.

My soul purpose in life for those two or three minutes immediately following the fall was to demonstrate to anyone who might be watching my absolute indifference to the accident, to appear to care not a bit that I had just fallen face-first down a flight of stairs.

I’m pretty sure a number of people did see me fall but I didn’t look around to take stock. The not looking around was a critical part of my nonchalance, you see. To look around would be to admit something unusual had occurred. And of course, by never knowing for certain that anyone had seen me I could always cling to the faint hope that they had not.

Certainly no one was in the immediate vicinity of the stairs — a fact which almost brought tears of gratitude to my eyes — and I hobbled to my car with all the dignity I could summon.

Later in the quiet privacy of the university library I examined my bruises and scrapes. I had sustained no major physical damage, though the shock took many hours to wear off and I can tell you that I took care to hold the handrail of stairs after that. The point is that no one I knew had seen me fall, which made it infinitely easier to put behind me than say, the time M and I showed up on the wrong day for a barbeque.

That was in Saudi, the first year or so of our marriage, and the people hosting the barbeque were not close friends of ours. In fact, we’d never even met the husband. The wife, Francis, was a friend of my neighbour’s.

One day Francis rang and said that she and her husband were having a barbeque and would be glad if M and I could come.

On what I thought was the right day I made a cake to take with us, then we showered and dressed in good time and rang Francis’s doorbell bang on the dot at 6 o’clock.

As we stood on the doorstep waiting for someone to come M looked around at the absence of vehicles and commented that it didn’t look like anyone was there yet, and that he hated to be the first ones there when we barely knew anyone.

I shushed him, saying that only in Lebanon were people expected to come late to someone’s house and that by North American standards we were doing the polite thing by arriving on time.

The door open and Francis was there, smiling. If she was surprised to see us she didn't show it. I handed her my cake in its tupperware cake box and she cheerfully invited us inside, leading us through to the living room. The kitchen was open to the living room and we saw that Francis was in the middle of cleaning fresh lobsters. She told us that she was preparing them for the barbeque.

Francis’s husband came in from the other room where he'd been watching tv, and she introduced us to him, and a few more minutes of chitchat followed. Then M said something about being the first guests to arrive and Francis looked at him quizzically and a moment later it all came out. The barbeque was the next day.

It doesn’t sound so bad, writing it down here today, but you have to remember that we didn’t know these people well. Why Francis hadn’t immediately said that we’d got the wrong day made more sense as I got to know her better in the following weeks. She was from the American South, from a small town, and was so friendly and hospitable, so accustomed to people dropping by to visit at any time that I honestly don’t think she was surprised by us coming by unannounced, and certainly wouldn’t have dreamt of saying anything if she was.

But I was mortified. M was beyond mortification and in danger of heart failure. When I looked at him I saw that his entire head had turned red, something I’ve only seen happen to him a few times in all the years I’ve known him. I was too horrified myself to dwell on that, however. We apologized, earnestly, many times, and Francis was as good about it as any human being could be, but there was something about suddenly realizing that we were essentially sitting uninvited in the middle of these people’s home while they were getting ready for their dinner that no kindness could alleviate. We blurted out a final apology and fled.

You might wonder if we went to the barbeque the next day. We did, and it was all right, but you can be sure that the embarrassment from the day before cast a pall. The tale was retold a number of times, and though no one was unkind about it I’d be lying if I said the laughter didn’t cut deep.

That wasn’t the first time I’d done something like that, nor was it to be the last. Last week while we were in Dubai I was going to meet with some friends from my writers’ group. I had emailed them a few weeks before my trip with the dates I would be there to make sure I wouldn’t miss seeing anyone.

Every other social call during the six days I was in Dubai was spontaneous. The writers’ group coffee morning was the only thing I had planned in advance and the meeting’s details were fixed in my mind: second last full day of the trip, 11:00 am, Colleen’s house. There was no need to write it down.

But the dates of our trip to Dubai had undergone a 24-hour shift since the initial planning phase. I had decided we would spend one week there, leaving Beirut on a Thursday and returning on a Thursday. For one reason or another at some point we decided to shift the whole trip one day earlier, so we were leaving on a Wednesday and returning on a Wednesday. Somehow – and I implore you now to remember the trouble I’ve had with the little men inside my head who control the inflow and outflow of information – I got it muddled. I thought we were leaving on Thursday.

I turned up at Colleen’s house exactly at 11:00 on the second-last full day of the trip. Except that it wasn’t. It was the last full day of the trip and the meeting had been the day before.

Like the time at Francis’ I had brought a cake with me, and I was pleased with the cake and this somehow made it worse. While Colleen grinned at me over the threshold and said, “Where were you yesterday, then?” I could only stare at her in dumb incomprehension.  I handed the cake over. It’s as if some instinct in my body takes over at times like this, an instinct that says even if you understand nothing about what is happening and time seems to have coiled in on itself, hand the person in front of you a cake.

I don’t know what I said in reply or how many minutes it took to understand that the meeting had taken place the day before. It was a nasty moment, full of ugly sensations that churned in my stomach. I simply couldn’t believe I’d got the day wrong.

Colleen made me tea and was as lovely and gracious about my blunder as Francis had been. It soon came to light that no one from the group could have reached me  because no one had the number of the phone I was carrying.  I had recently misplaced my own sim card (just never mind about that) and was using M’s.

Colleen and I had a great chat. I was really glad to have the chance to visit with her but I am bound to confess that I couldn’t enjoy it the way I would have ordinarily done. I was just too embarrassed.