Now that John was working again, when he did get a big check, once every six or twelve or eighteen months, we splurged. He didn’t have the foresight to take $20,000 and divide it into allocations for the months when there would be no checks at all. I could tell him what to do, but it wasn’t my money. I wanted to feel carefree, too. Let’s go to Blue Hill at Stone Barns and eat waste-fed pork ribs with pickled lardo and fiddlehead ferns. He needed a new MacBook. I needed Hamilton tickets.
This is what it will be like all the time, I told myself, once Richual is acquired. It was like a dress rehearsal for my future life. Trying on clothes off the rack without checking the price tags first.
We refilled our Metro cards and paid rent. Then John took whatever was left and sent it to the credit card company, or made a back-taxes payment, and we were back to living on my salary, ordering Seamless, entertaining ourselves with HBO Go.
When I needed a rush of sanctimoniousness, I could always go online and read other people’s money diaries. There was a urologist who didn’t think she’d ever be able to buy a home because the only time she ever felt good was when she was shopping and all her disposable income went to paying her credit card balances. An itemized breakdown of the skincare products in her medicine cabinet totaled $3,600. You’re an idiot, I thought. I religiously followed the blog of a single woman who shared her income and expenses every month as she tried to pay off the debt she’d accumulated having a baby: first, two rounds of IVF not covered by the only insurance plan she could afford as an aerial yoga instructor, then hiring the doula-tographer, needing a lactation consultant, and then the six weeks of time off from teaching yoga postpartum. At least with student loan or medical debt, there was some finite ending to the balance. But a baby? Get a real job, I thought. There was the married couple with over $200K in student loan debt from law school, but the wife stayed at home, and they sent their two kids to private school and only shopped at Whole Foods. Their parents paid the grandkids’ tuition, they said. The Whole Foods was nonnegotiable, they said. We’ll probably have this debt until we’re dead, they said.
Not planning to have children made me feel like my future self had money in the bank.
* * *
...
“Your dad will pay for college,” my mom always promised. I assumed this meant that they had made a plan. A plan that explained those few bad years. Maybe instead of paying child support, he had been putting the money aside in a college fund.
But when we told him I got into NYU, there was no money. Nothing.
“I don’t understand, Steve,” I said. I hardly ever called him by his name, but it felt like the only leverage I had, to speak as one adult to another.
“I tried, kid,” he said.
That’s not true, I thought.
You don’t even know me well enough to have a nickname for me, I thought.
I felt my teeth vibrating with anger.
My mom and I had to downsize after she finally quit Amway. By the time I was in high school, we’d lost the little two-bedroom rental house and moved into a one-bedroom above a strip mall. She let me have the bedroom. My mom had no credit and Steve wouldn’t even cosign my loans. I should have sucked it up and gone to a state school, but that would have been an admission that I was ordinary, not destined for any life other than the one I already knew.
I went to my AP US History teacher and she helped me cobble together my financial aid, with Pell grants and merit scholarships, and tens of thousands of dollars in loans for which she cosigned.
My mom and I lived on the same flavor of hope: that someday our payday would come. We would attract abundance through our positive thinking. Our flaws were our strengths. Our sacrifice had a purpose. Our wrong turns were leading us to the right path. The cycle of circumstances that conspired to keep us broke would be broken.
* * *
...
John got the Alpine mac and cheese with Gruyère and bacon and onion rings and apple compote and a Diet Coke, and I got the Rive Gauche with Brie and figs and lobster and a fourth glass of pinot grigio. John moved a stack of books from the coffee table to the floor so there was room for us to eat. I kept thinking our relationship would improve if we could afford a table and chairs, to look into each other’s eyes when we talked, instead of at the TV. But there wasn’t any room for a table and chairs.
“Your mom called.”
“She called you?”
“She said she tried texting you.”
I hadn’t had time to look at any messages that weren’t related to what Evan had done, the question of how much Richual users were aware of, or talking about, what Evan had done, and Devin’s defense of what Evan had done.
“She wanted to ask if you needed any refills so she can meet her monthly goal.” He handed me a Post-it note, on which he’d scrawled:
True Color Smooth Minerals Powder Foundation Soft Ivory $8.99
Anew Multiperformance Day Cream SPF 25 $22.99
Breathe Again Roll-On $34.99
Forgiveness Essential Oil $70.99
In the bathroom, I had trays of product I never wore. Who wore Avon in New York? Like buying tickets to a friend’s fringe theater performance or donating to a GoFundMe, I ordered makeup and skincare products and essential oils from my mom out of pity and obligation.
“I’ll call her back after we eat.”
“I told her to just order it and you’d send her a check,” he said, his mouth full of hot yellow mush.
Thanks, John, I thought. Thanks for all your help. My wrists tingled and my hands were pins and needles. This had happened before. It was a symptom of overwork.
“I finished the scene today,” John said. “Of the couple eating the turtle.”
“I thought you wrote that scene already.”
“I had an idea for how it would go, but I wasn’t sure if I was right in how I imagined someone would eat a raw turtle. You wouldn’t believe what I found on YouTube.”
“Please don’t show me.”
“You know what this means?”
“What?” I said.
“My novel. I’m done. It’s ready for you to read. It’s eight hundred pages, but I can worry about editing later.”
“That’s great, babe,” I said. I tried to mold my face into a realistic impression of genuine excitement.
I kept my phone next to me on the couch while we ate, just in case it buzzed or rang. This must be how surgeons felt. I might be needed in an emergency. No, working online was worse than being a surgeon. Your career as a surgeon didn’t continue in virtual space while you slept or ate breakfast or had sex or shopped at Fairway.