Good Things Happen to People You Hate

by Rebecca Fishbein

  In these moments, I revisit my teen urge to toss the person I am most of the time—one who makes deadlines and gets sleep and doesn’t fuck other people’s boyfriends—in favor of a person who cares less. Sometimes I want to stop trying. Sometimes I want to see who I am when I am untethered. Who would I be if I didn’t owe anything to anyone, if I had no one to impress and no one to disappoint? Who would I have been?

  It’s impossible to know. In the end, I always remember those I’m letting down, what I’m wasting, how hard everyone else worked to put me here and how little I deserve it. I am easily bored. I am spoiled as shit. I have been loved. People catch me when I fall.

  Good Things Happen to People You Hate

  When I graduated from college, I got a job as a cashier at a popular clothing chain. We were paid almost nothing, and since landlords don’t accept spandex dresses and chiffon blouses as rent, I ate stewed tomatoes straight out of the can for quite a few meals. But for a short period of time, it was the best job I ever had. I spent my shifts flirting with my hot hip musician coworkers and doing little else. At night, after we closed the store, we’d all do drugs and go to shows together at various now-shuttered Williamsburg DIY venues, whose other attendees were also employees at the clothing chain’s other outposts. On my days off, I worked as an unpaid intern at a local magazine, where I fact-checked restaurant listings and complained about how I was too cool to be there. I got a lot of cute free clothes. Indeed, I was living the 2011 Brooklyn Dream, canned tomato dinners notwithstanding.

  Still, there were some downsides to this laissez-faire life of music and fashion, besides poor nutrition. The store I worked at was on a wealthy stretch of the Upper East Side, which made for an eclectic customer base and a strong contrast with my current lifestyle. We got a lot of rich teen girls, many of whom liked to swarm the store in hordes and steal all the leggings. And we got a lot of the teen girls’ rich mothers, who liked to buy the leggings and then yell at us about the return policy.

  In the angry moms’ defense, the policy was horrendous—the store permitted only exchanges or store credit, so once you handed them your money, they held it hostage forever. As cashiers, we tried to make this fact as clear as possible. “There are NO refunds,” we’d say before swiping credit cards. “You will NEVER see this money again,” we’d say after, while circling the small print at the bottom of the receipt. “Please note that your money is now DEAD, and this is its DEATH CERTIFICATE,” we’d conclude, handing the customer a bag containing their new outfit. But inevitably, each day five or six people would try to get $20 back for a T-shirt, and we, the hapless employees earning $9 to $13 an hour, were responsible for absorbing their subsequent rage.

  There was a stark difference between what we earned and what our customers were able to buy. People brought $400 worth of sweaters to the cash register for me to ring up (i.e., five or six sweaters). On Halloween, we were swarmed with people dropping major cash on shiny leotards and ballerina skirts they’d probably wear one time and toss. Later, at a Halloween party hosted by a college friend, I’d see other attendees wearing the clothes we sold. Each of their outfits cost more than I made in a day.

  Once I went to a fancy bar in Brooklyn for a story I was doing for a magazine, on the magazine’s dime. I noticed I was wearing the same pair of shiny “Olivia Newton-John in Grease” pants as another patron. The pants were ridiculous. I got them for free. She had bought them for $150.

  I was very good at this job, in part because I never let anyone buy anything I knew they would hate and ultimately attempt to return. Salespeople, generally, are not to be trusted. A salesperson’s job is to sell you stuff so they can pay their rent; your job as a customer is not to be an idiot and buy something you don’t like just because a stranger said it looked nice on you.

  But I never told anyone something looked good on them when it didn’t, and usually offered (gentle) suggestions for items that might look better instead. If you think I did this out of some deep, impenetrable love for my clientele, you are quite wrong—mostly, I didn’t want any rich middle-aged ladies coming back and screaming at me for letting them purchase a nonrefundable neon leotard. Life is too short to spend it listening to people threaten you over clothing regret.

  Sometimes these efforts would fail, and customers still bought the items I tried to talk them out of, eventually returning to bellow at someone (hopefully not me!) about getting their money back. But for the most part, my commitment to honesty cultivated a sense of trust between my customers and me. They started coming back to the store specifically to buy stuff from me, which did wonders for my sales numbers and self-esteem, if not my actual bank account.

  By spring, I’d been promoted to floor manager, which meant I was earning just enough money to add pasta to my stewed tomatoes. (It was also my first ever promotion, and I was very proud.) One day I was working behind the cash register shortly before closing time when a cool-looking woman in cool-looking glasses who appeared to be in her late twenties or early thirties came up to purchase a sweater dress.

  “I’m a little worried about it,” she confessed as she placed the sweater on the counter. “It looks like it’s pilling already. Do you think it’ll hold up?” The sweater dress in question was a new item, and though for the most part my store made clothes to last, I couldn’t say for certain that this would follow suit. Since she’d asked, I told her as much. “I think it’s a great sweater,” I added. “But we don’t do refunds, which is something to keep in mind if it’s something you’re really not sure about.”

  “Are you trying to talk me out of a sale?” she said, her voice sharp. It was not the response I expected. I explained I was trying to make sure she didn’t leave with something for which she couldn’t get her money back. “I just want to know if you think it’s going to hold up,” she said. “It’s not that hard a question.”

  “I’m sure it’ll last the season,” I offered, which at that point was the best my end-of-shift brain could do. It seemed to suffice, as she handed me her card to swipe. “Are you sure?” I asked, card poised over the reader. “Remember, I can’t refund it.” She said she was sure. I swiped.

  “Actually, I don’t want it,” she said, the instant her receipt started printing. “Please refund it.”

  “But we don’t do refunds!” I sputtered. “I don’t care,” she said. “You said it was only going to last the season. I’m not spending thirty dollars on something that only lasts one season.”

  My assistant manager was working that shift, so I offered to call her. “Yeah, you better,” the customer, whose face I was starting to contemplate slamming on the register, said. “I’m going to tell her you tried to talk me out of the sale,” she added. FACE. SLAM.

  My assistant manager was relatively new to our store, and I wasn’t sure how she’d react to this particular customer service snafu. When she came up from the downstairs office to ask what happened, I explained that this dumb bitch wanted a refund on her stupid fucking sweater, but not quite in those words. The customer started harping at her about me, which I was certain would result in some punishment. “It’s her fault. She tried to talk me out of it!” she said, pointing at me. Then “‘I’m sure it’ll last the season,’” the woman said, in a voice I can only assume was a mocking approximation of mine.

  By now I wanted to purchase the sweater myself and use its pilling yarn to strangle her to death. Instead, my assistant manager offered her a special secret refund that the store reserved for customers who yelled a lot about the return policy, because a fun fact about the service industry is that if you’re a customer you can usually get what you want if you’re enough of a jerk about it. Satisfied, and a full thumping $30 richer, the woman walked out. I waited for my boss to berate me. “What a bitch,” my manager said, then headed back down to the office.

  * * *

  Sweater Lady wasn’t the worst customer I had at that store or at other gigs I’ve worked that required me to be nice to people, but something about th
at interaction stamped itself on my psyche. I knew her name from her credit card, so I looked her up. I found out where she went to college—somewhere not as good as my alma mater, not that it matters—and that she had a cushy position at a bank, one that probably gave her enough cash to purchase a dozen $30 sweaters and toss them each season if she wanted.

  I dreamed of this woman’s destruction. I fucking hated her. She’d tried to get me in trouble, for one thing, but for another, she had the gall to make fun of me. At night, I rehashed her mocking tone. Who the fuck does she think she was talking to? I’d think. Doesn’t she know who I am? Not that I was anybody at the time, but I was a person, dammit! And my voice wasn’t nearly as high as the one she used to mimic me! I am an alto.

  To her, I was some idiot salesgirl unworthy of her respect, and her refusal to see beyond my service position enraged me. She deserved nothing short of eternal suffering. I wanted her to lose her job, get dumped, fall through a subway grate, have her identity stolen, battle a roach infestation, get evicted, and generally live a miserable life. I meanwhile would one day grow up to be rich and famous, and one day we’d run into each other, and I’d rub in how magnificent I had become while she’d devolved into a pathetic trash human. I vowed to never forget her. I vowed to hurt her.

  * * *

  Sweater Lady wasn’t the first object of my thirst for vengeance. One summer I went to a sleepaway camp where the girls were baffled by my frizzy hair, cheap jeans, and dog T-shirts. They were troubled when they discovered my family owned only two televisions and one computer. “Do your parents have money for your college education?” one girl asked me one night. “Can they afford to buy you a hairbrush?” When I got home, after forcing my mother to take me to Abercrombie & Fitch and purchase me a lifetime supply of LA Looks gel, I cursed my bunkmates, hoping the mean girls would grow up to be ugly and sad, with zero televisions to their name.

  Indeed, I wanted everyone who wronged me to suffer karmic retribution. When a boy I loved in college dropped me the week before our freshman finals, I cursed him with future miserable relationships. When a man broke my heart years later, I hoped his hairline would recede. When a friend stabbed me in the back and stole a boy I liked out from under me, I prayed for her to be hit with adult onset acne. When I read, while waiting for the bus in the rain, that Lindsay Lohan said in an interview that her favorite body part was her nose, I begged for her to be struck with syphilis. My small miseries at their behest still burned, but I knew it was nothing next to the anguish the universe would bestow upon them in the end.

  In a world where you have little control and everyone else’s successes light up your social media feeds, revenge fantasies are a great source of empowerment. It’s no coincidence that superhero comics started emerging at the end of the Great Depression and the start of World War II. It’s even less of a coincidence that Marvel started pumping out Avengers films amid the twenty-first century’s interminable economic and political turmoil. In times of uncertainty, people take comfort in watching the good guys vanquish their enemies.

  On the night Donald Trump was elected, I was at Hillary Clinton’s presumptive victory party at the Javits Center in New York. I’d been sent there for work—reluctantly, since all I really wanted was to be surrounded by my friends and wine bottles in case the night didn’t go the way I hoped it would. At six p.m., my biggest complaint was that there was no bar and the few food vendors on hand were charging $13 for baked ziti; but when Florida started to flip, I hightailed it out of there like the Dedicated Journalist I am, choosing instead to watch the New York Times prediction widget have a meltdown from the safety of my best friend’s living room.

  For months afterward, I couldn’t stop thinking about violence. In my daydreams, members of Congress were flipped inside out like the giant pig alien in Galaxy Quest. I chopped up their bodies and fed them to their children. I lit their feet on fire and watched their limbs turn to ash in the flames. House Speakers with disintegrating faces danced in my peripheral vision. CNN made me so angry that the receptors in my eyes went dark. My blood pressure spiked from a pretty chill 110/70 to 130/110, which was high enough for my doctor to suggest coming back regularly to get it checked. (I solved that problem by never going back to the doctor.) I typed up tweets I never sent, for fear the Secret Service would mistake my blind rage for a call to action and pay me a visit. My roommate and I watched V for Vendetta and plotted elaborate ways to take down our leaders if we did indeed descend into George Orwell–esque fascism.

  To be clear, these were all just fantasies, but they kept me from sinking into despair. I know what it says about me that I didn’t experience this kind of existential panic until Trump’s election, but for the first time in my very silly charmed life, I had to come to terms with the fact that things weren’t guaranteed to be okay. It was unfathomable to me at the time that the hot president who tried to give us health care had been swapped out for a racist orange blob with a Twitter addiction. I was angry, and I wanted to dream about violence, because violence was the only way to stop feeling scared.

  Three years in, this societal thirst for revenge feels like it’s everywhere. The internet is full of people screaming at one another into the void. Family members threaten excommunication. Television channels and newspapers and verified conspiracy theorists on Twitter run story after story hinting at treason, vast webs of deceit, manipulation by a foreign power, the promise of impeachment, of dragging the bad guys out of the White House by their heels. People lap these stories up. They want proof this isn’t real. They want proof the so-called Good Guys will win. It doesn’t come.

  * * *

  Revenge, in real life, has not been forthcoming. The camp girls that made me feel bad are all beautiful and married with babies whose photographs they splatter all over Instagram, while my feed consists primarily of my selfies, because I am my own baby. Most of my former paramours didn’t lose their hair; even if they did, most of them have hot significant others and careers they appear to tolerate, while I fuse to my couch eating suspicious Hostess bodega snacks and avoiding emails with the words CREDIT CARD STATEMENT in the subject line.

  When my journalist friends lost their jobs, the people who sold out their companies landed on their feet, with money in the bank, while everyone else scrounged for freelance gigs and sublet their apartments so they wouldn’t have to pay New York rents on $300-per-story budgets. The billionaire who shut down my website has yet to be gored by bison, no matter how many times I screamed bloody murder about it in a bar. The congressmen I wish pain upon appear to be doing just fine. I have not yet heard of one ingesting his child. At least Lindsay Lohan doesn’t seem to be doing so hot, though her nose still looks like it’s holding up, despite her best efforts.

  The cliché people spout about revenge is true—the best revenge is, in fact, living well, which is a difficult thing to do when you feel like your life is falling apart all the time. Revenge fantasies make your own personal hell feel a little less hellish, but like chocolate and orgasms, the thrill is fleeting. Ultimately, living well means ceding control. Not caring requires you to give yourself up to the universe, instead of flinging your enemies into the vortex.

  This is a true fact in many different forms. Every time I’ve severed ties with a toxic friend or a toxic man (often one and the same), I’ve wanted them to miss me, but all I can really do is kick them out of my life long enough to stop missing them—everything else is out of my hands. The universe tends to unfold as it should, as they say, but not because it doles out punishments. It’s because you forget.

  There’s also this. No one is bad, and we all are. I’ve hurt plenty of people along the way, but I don’t think of them, and my enemies don’t think of me.

  * * *

  The Sweater Lady incident happened nearly a decade ago, and in the intervening years, I’ve since forgotten her real name, even though I swore I’d remember it forever. I have no idea if my miserable customer ended up with the terrible life I tried to curs
e her with. I don’t know if she lost her job or her boyfriend or her friends or her eye when someone finally punched her in the face and shattered her stupid glasses into her cornea. I will probably never know.

  And I didn’t turn into the super successful, super happy bombshell I hoped I’d taunt her with one day. On the other hand, I left the store and got some jobs and lost some jobs and bought my own pilling sweaters and generally had enough adventures and mishaps and wild nights in my intervening life to mostly forget about hers, which for the most part is the best you can do. Over time Sweater Lady will fade even further, and one day she’ll be gone.

  But if you happen to be Sweater Lady and you’re reading this very essay, know this: I think you’re a bitch. Have a nice life.

  Summer of Death

  A dead body doesn’t look the way they tell you it will. I have never been to a wake or an open casket funeral—my people prefer to keep dead bodies sealed in boxes where they belong, thank you very much—but I have seen a dead body. From what I’ve heard, the IRL Six Feet Under crew cakes bodies with makeup and dresses them so they look like sleeping wax dolls. I assume this is not to disturb the breathing people who come to view the bodies, because real bodies that are no longer living don’t look like dolls or sleeping people. They look dead. The look is unmistakable.

  I grew up in a city where dead bodies were probably everywhere, but I never bothered to look at them. I remember seeing still, frozen bodies on the street in the winter. I saw a bloodied body get pulled out of a cab, and I once saw a body on a subway grate. These were strange bodies. They belonged to people who did not belong to me, so I did not think about them often, even when, on at least one occasion, I saw a canvas-covered body get rolled away on a gurney and knew for certain what that meant.