My body almost single-handedly bankrupted us. It also, with a little bit of help, made and then sustained the two best things in our lives. We were just privileged enough to think that we could live outside the systems and the structures and survive it, but we failed.
* * *
I think that there will be court but there is not court. There is a small, windowless room and those sad not-fold-out-but-also-not-quite-sturdy-or-comfortable industrial rows of chairs. There are eight of us there for the 10:30 am appointment. Six of us are clients of the same lawyer. Before we’re brought into that room that is the main room, he brings us into a similar room and prepares us all at once. The lawyer is Korean and three of his other clients are Korean, so he tells us the directions once in English, then he says them again in Korean.
We all nod, and then, one by one, he talks to us about our case. He ushers us all out, then calls us back in one by one.
You guys will be fine, he says, looking at us, smiling. He’s forty-something. He has this boyish, thick, dark hair that he has to sweep out of his face as he speaks. I wonder if he thinks it’s somehow cool or if he just never remembers that he needs to get it cut.
You sure you don’t stand to inherit any money in the next year? he says.
We look at one another, my husband and I; we shake our heads. This is not the first time he’s asked this question. We’re sure, I say.
And you don’t currently have anyone that you might sue, from whom you might stand to get a settlement? Any type of personal injury?
We look again at each other, though he has also already asked us this.
Sure, we say. No.
You guys are all set, he says.
We wait a beat too long and he has to nod toward the door, motion to us to exit, so he can take the next Korean guy.
* * *
We wait outside and the guy next to us asks us the ages of our children. I have four, he says, but they live with their mother. Expensive little fucks, he says, and laughs. He wears jeans and work boots. I am the only female in the room. I feel overdressed.
When we enter the last room, the room in which we will actually be questioned, I keep thinking we are going to get in trouble. I don’t have my phone because they made us hand them over after walking through the metal detectors. This whole building is for people going bankrupt, so, though I’ve gotten so dressed up, the security guards all know why we are there. I am convinced the school will call and I won’t be there to answer; I’m unsure how we will explain that we were in bankruptcy court and therefore could not come to pick up our sick kids.
* * *
The men who speak Korean go first. They call a translation service on the phone and ask to be patched through to a Korean translator.
That’s cool, whispers my husband.
I feel like we’re not supposed to think anything is cool right now, but I nod.
The first two cases are straightforward. The woman who asks the questions is middle in the way women are often middle: age and weight and height. Nondescript in all ways. Her voice stays at the same tone as she asks her questions and at the end she says, Good luck to you, in a way that both feels scripted and, I hope, only feels scripted because she says it every day, to everyone. She has a long face and a long nose and stringy blond hair that looks greasier than it should this early in the morning, but then the lighting in this room is awful, and she must spend so much of her time inside.
I pity her for this and for this job with all these people and their failures. I am one of these people with these failures, but still, I’m glad that I’m not her.
* * *
With the last Korean man—he lost a deli that he’d opened in Midtown with a partner—the logistics are more complicated. Another lawyer is there to contest his bankruptcy, a lawyer from the bank that gave him a second mortgage on his house on Long Island. The other lawyer is young and thin and wears an oddly fitting suit. We all lean forward as the woman asks more questions than she’s asked before this, as she lists the sums, which are bigger than the sums we’ve heard before.
Our lawyer, who is also this man’s lawyer, puts his forearms on the stack of papers he’s set before him and nods solemnly as the other lawyer talks.
You own a house, though? asks the middle woman.
He borrowed 1.6 million dollars against his mortgage to open up this salad bar and deli, except it didn’t work.
What kind of shape is the house in? the man who has come to represent the bank says.
Bad, says the man who borrowed all that money. Real old, real bad, he says. He shakes his head.
He keeps speaking English, even though he asked for the translator; he answers the questions before they’ve been translated. The lawyer keeps telling him to wait, but he keeps interrupting. The man from the bank is young and can’t stop fidgeting. His knee shakes up down up down underneath the table. He has a legal pad he writes on, a large scrawl; circles and squares around specific questions. He takes notes as the man talks.
You can send more questions to my office, says our lawyer. We can answer all these questions for you in writing at a later date.
The bank lawyer nods at our lawyer but keeps looking at the man who looks at the speaker where the translator sits, quiet now that she’s stopped trying.
Is your wife’s name on the deed? asks the bank lawyer.
She hate me, says the man. She want divorce.
* * *
When it’s our turn we sit in the chairs and the woman asks us to say our names and to show her our IDs and to confirm we live at the address on the forms she shows us. She asks half the questions the lawyer told us she would ask us. Then our lawyer is ushering us out of the chairs and then out of the room and then we are outside and my husband says we should go eat before I go back to work.
* * *
We declared bankruptcy today, I text Sasha. I text this to my parents also, who have a lot of money. They have a lot of money but a few months ago, when I told my dad the state that we were in and that we needed help—though I hadn’t asked for help before and for a long time I said fuck them and their fucking money and was angry and was mean—he told me that giving me money would be like throwing it away.
Neither of them responds to me, not Sasha, not my parents. The next day, while I’m staring at a young woman who is wearing too much makeup on the subway on my way to work, my dad texts to say, I know how hard it must have been. My mom texts an hour later: It will all be fine, I’m sure.
I wonder if any family, after too long trying and failing to love one another, can hear one another’s words beyond all the ways that they fall short.
I’m pregnant, Sasha texts at two in the morning.
I wonder if she meant to send this to me, if she sent it like I sent the one on her birthday: not quite knowing what I was doing. I sent it because I needed her to remember that I was still somewhere in the world.
IT WAS HOT already, wet and sticky—college; I was nineteen; she was twenty; she’d driven from her school three hours away to spend the summer with me—and she shaved my head out on the roof of the row house I shared with two other girls and laughed as large chunks of hair fell down to the porch; the buzz of her hands on my neck was the closest that I’d come to joy in years. For weeks, we’d talked about it, a joke I made that she latched onto. I liked the thrill she seemed to get at the prospect: a sort of recklessness I’d receded from—mostly, then, I was locked up in my attic room—just as hers was amping up.