I must have been 6 or 7 when I got a taste of what it is to be a guilty guest. It was not the only horrid taste I was to experience that day. My father had taken me to visit some friends of his, who had an elegant and well-furnished house. As the adults sat chatting outside, I was encouraged to explore.
Drifting through the sitting room, I happened to see something intriguing on the fireplace mantle. It was a real little bird’s nest made of twigs and hay. Inside it were three realistic-looking little eggs, pale blue and lightly speckled. They looked so pretty. They looked as if they were made of chocolate.
Maybe they were chocolate. Maybe I could eat one of them.
I mustn’t eat a whole egg, though, or the people would notice one missing. With the confused cunning of the young and chocolate-obsessed, I reasoned that I could, however, take one bite of each egg and then put them all back so that the bitten parts wouldn’t show.
Carefully lifting one of the eggs, I put it to my mouth and bit down.
Crunch. Gush.
Yuck! It was not a chocolate egg. It was a real robin’s egg. It was an ancient, fermented, stinking robin’s egg! Frantically I tried to wipe away the revolting bitter taste of rotten yolk, as the pretty shell’s repulsive contents leaked down my arm. What to do, what to do?
Somehow, with the help of a Kleenex and many terrified glances over my shoulder, lest the adults start wondering where I was and come to find me, I wiped clean the now-empty shell and placed it back with its intact brothers. Just as I’d planned when I thought the eggs were made of chocolate, the bitten part didn’t show.
But oh, the horrible taste — and the flood of guilt! What had I been thinking? These nice people had invited us over, had allowed me to wander through their beautiful house, and I had repaid their hospitality by biting into the decoration.
It is a terrible thing to be a guilty guest, I daresay almost as bad as to be the abused and deceived host. To break something at a friend’s house and not come clean; to drop an ember on someone else’s carpet, and move furniture to hide the burned spot; to use White-Out rather than confess that you have accidentally put a bad scuff in your host’s wall? These are the criminal acts of guilty guests, and I hope you never commit them.
That day, I remember, the rush of shame was followed by an even more powerful desire to get the heck out of there. What if they noticed the damaged egg before I could make my escape? What if they noticed the next day, and realized that I was to blame? And what if they never noticed at all?
Even at 6 or 7, I hazily perceived that that was the likeliest outcome. For some reason, it made me sad.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
