By ELINOR GOULDING SMITH

MY MOTHER worked awfully hard to teach me politeness, courtesy, and common everyday good manners. “Always say ‘thank you,'" she told me, “and ‘please.’ Don’t tread on people’s toes, and don’t jostle old ladies. Keep your elbows in when you cut your meat, and don’t toy with the silverware. Never blow bubbles in your milk, and don’t make comments about the food. Always modulate your voice, don’t point, and never make personal remarks. Consider others before you speak or act.”

I have tried to behave nicely, but I find now that it was a total waste of time. Wherever I turn, no matter how much I modulate my voice, keep my elbows in, and refrain from blowing bubbles in my milk, I seem to arouse wrath and antagonism on every side.

When I get on a bus, if I hand the driver a dime and ask him politely for change (keeping my voice nicely modulated and remembering to say “please”), he turns on me and shouts, “What’s da matter around here? Don’t nobody never have da right change?” He then proceeds to curse me roundly, not quite under his breath, while I cringe and creep to the back of the bus to lick my wounds.

Sometimes the bus is crowded up front, and there’s plenty of room at the back, but a large, elderly woman is in the way. My mother told me never to jostle old ladies, so I try to squeeze gently past, but the elderly lady is made of too too solid flesh, and not even an eel could get by. The bus driver stops the bus, turns around, looks directly at me, and yells,

“Fa Crise sake, step to da back of da bus, will ya?” I try once again to squeeze past the elderly lady, and she turns on me, glares, and starts to mutter, “Well, I must say, young people nowadays — ” Everybody is mad at me.

I go out in the morning and ring for the elevator. It does not come. I remember my mother’s warning, “Always consider others before you speak or act.” Perhaps, I think, the elevator man is busy delivering a package, and he will come soon. I wait. Meanwhile someone on the floor below rings for the elevator by simply pressing his finger on the button and keeping it there. Presently the elevator arrives at my floor. I step in. The elevator man turns his face away from me and mutters angrily, “King, ring, ring! For God’s sake, what do they think I am anyway?” He thinks I did it.

When I go to a restaurant for dinner, after I have ordered my meal, I usually ask the waiter to bring my coffee with my main course. I always remember to say please, and I keep my hands folded in my lap, but no matter — he acts as though I had just attacked him with a meat cleaver. He casts his eyes up to the ceiling, flings up his hands in a gesture of utter despair of the foibles of humanity at large, and me in particular, and goes off shaking his head with disgust and quietly emitting oaths. I cannot understand why it should be so much harder to bring the coffee with the main course than it is to bring it with the dessert. All I can make of it is that there are things my mother didn’t teach me.

Occasionally I stop at a newsstand to buy a magazine. I stand there as my mother taught me, head up, chin in, gloves pulled on nice and smooth, the hem of my dress even, and my stocking seams straight, and I ask pleasantly, “Do you have a copy of such-and-such a magazine, please?” The news dealer wheels around, rage in his eye, like a dog that has just been deprived of a bone. “It’s all sold out,” he yells out of the side of his mouth. “Sold out this morning!” he shouts, as though it were a calamity equal in horror to the bubonic plague and all my fault. He turns back to his stand, muttering. “What do they think anyway,” he says, “I got nuttin’ to do all day but save old magazines?" He looks as though he were muttering to the piles of newspapers, but I know who he’s mad at, all right. It’s me!

One day I needed a pair of shoes, and accordingly went to a shoe store. A salesman came over. “What do you want ?” he said. “I’d like a pair of black shoes, please,” I said. He stared at me as though I had just murdered his wife and five small children. “What size?" he asked. “Seven and a half, please,” I said nicely, the way my mother taught me. His face flushed with rage. “Seven and a half!” he shouted, baring his teeth. “We don’t have any shoes in size seven and a half,” he yelled in disgust. If I’d asked for size seven, or even size eight, his tone implied, he might have had some shoes, but I had to walk in and waste his time asking for size seven and a half!

I don’t like to suggest that my mother’s advice wasn’t the best, but — from now on I’m going to blow bubbles in my milk whenever I feel like it.

ELINOR GOULDING SMITH is a New Yorker whose work has appeared in several issues of the Atlantic.