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By LC Van Savage
Butter Knives from Hell
It’s happened to all of us. We’ve all received hideous gifts from well meaning people, (right; more on that bit of chicanery later) which we’d never think of using even if the barrel of a big, cocked gun were pressed at our skulls. But what can you do when you find yourself opening what turns out to be a truly ghastly gift, so gawdawful your heart collapses in your chest, your eyeballs turn to granite marbles, your very breath leaves your body, and the loving gift-givers are standing before you with expectant, joyful smiles?
You act. That’s what you do. We all have unplumbed depths of Thespian agilities we didn’t know we possessed until that one terrible moment of truth. We gasp. We gush. Our eyebrows go up in wildly happy surprise. We stutter with joy and look into the faces of the givers with such grateful adoration they are completely convinced we are thrilled to our very marrow by their fabulous, beautiful and totally unexpected gift.
Ah, but if we could look into the minds of those spurious givers, we’d know their smiles do not come because they’re experiencing the joy of giving. Instead their smiles come from exhaled relief, because now finally, they are rid of that cursed thing which is now our gift, that awful thing they’d been given less than a year back. They are free of this terrible offering that’s obviously been passed through many, many hands. Now someone else can be revolted by it.
For us it was butter knives. At least I think that’s what they were. My husband “Mongo” and I had recently moved into our new home in New Jersey and were giving a house-warming party. We’d expressly written “no gifts!” on all invitations, and we meant it. We just wanted to be with our new friends, and that was all. And all of those new friends honored our wishes and came to the party giftless. Except for one couple. They decided to disrespect our wishes and bring a gift anyway. It was elaborately wrapped and when we tried to thank them as quietly as possible, they loudly insisted we open the box to see what they’d bestowed upon us.
Trying to do it with as little fanfare as possible and desperately attempting to send a signal to all the other guests that I really didn’t approve of this couple’s blatantly disregarding our “no gifts!” edict without actually letting the givers know I was doing that (stay with me here,) I softly tore off the wrapping paper trying to keep the sound of that as quiet as I could. The box inside was red and I knew immediately it had seen lots of other owners; the corners were worn, the genuine imitation leather was torn and frayed on the bottom and there was a small stain on the top someone had clearly tried to scrub off. But being the gracious lady I am, I ignored all those visual clues that I was being scammed and pulled up the lid. There inside, nestled in their red, fitted, faux velvet openings lay six of the most horrible looking butter knives ever created. The handles were as thick as a wrestler’s thumb, and made of imitation ivory or bone and I was grateful for their fakeness since it would have filled me with searing guilt if an animal had died to give up its tusks or bones to make handles for those dreadful scimitars. The greyish handles were deeply carved in all sorts of strange and unrelated shapes; sunbursts, stars, deer, birds, triangles, and the edges of all those peculiar carvings were sharp and painful to the touch, thus gripping them would require some amount of courage had the butter been hard. The knives' shafts were thin as string, imitation gold (flaking off) and about four inches long and all of this ended in a mini-machete, a small, flaking gold, curved and dull knife with a curled end. And there were etchings on those short, fat blades too, words in some language carved in strange, unidentifiable hieroglyphs. Those horrid little butter daggers were just simply awful, but what could I do? I gushed and grinned and blathered something about “never using them except on the most special of occasions!” Ugh. Yeah, like maybe the anniversary of Mussolini’s birth.
But the time came when I would be able to unload those horrid little lancets. I’d waited long for the opportunity. The people who’d given them to us had moved so there was no danger they’d find out. I hauled them out and spruced up the red box as well as I could, wrapped it beautifully and handed it beamingly to an old teacher being honored for his fiftieth year of teaching. Forty years before he used to make me walk home in the middle of geography class to retrieve homework I’d usually not done but told him I’d forgotten to bring in. It was really hard trying to get that homework done properly in the freezing cold, holding it against my knee so I could write in the answers while I was running back to.
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