Breaking the Bank Read online

  Mia’s father taught astronomy at Columbia University and spent a good deal of time up on the roof of their building with a small phalanx of telescopes. Sometimes Mia and Stuart would go up there with him, but they were generally too impatient to see whatever it was their father was trying to focus on with the long, vaguely riflelike lens. When he was downstairs in the apartment, he was, despite his distraction, a mostly indulgent, even tender parent. He sang lyrics from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas; he walked ten blocks to buy a pint of Mia’s favorite Louis Sherry pistachio ice cream. On the nights her mother was out, he spent the evening playing Monopoly with them; dinner was Twinkies or Devil Dogs accompanied by Cheez Doodles and washed down by a whole gallon of milk.

  Their mother, Betty, also taught—in the Political Science Department—and was a tireless signer of petitions, an organizer of movements, a veritable nucleus of progressive causes, concerns, and agendas. She was also an occasional painter and covered the walls of their apartment with her large-scale canvases, mostly fuzzy blobs of color on which she worked in a fevered, joyful frenzy for days at a time, ignoring most of her other responsibilities until the wellspring of creativity had, for the moment, run dry. Stuart and Mia were united in their disdain for these paintings as they were united in so many things back then, and one of their favorite games was devising what they deemed impossibly clever titles for them.

  “Big Blotch About to Devour Little Blotch,” said Stuart as they viewed their mother’s latest effort, still wet and propped against the dining room wall. It depicted a huge squarish shape the color of a rotted eggplant that was butted up against a smaller shape of a similar color. Mia stood back so she could let the feel of the thing, atrocious as it was, enfold her.

  “How about Grape Gone Wild?” she countered.

  “It has definite possibilities,” Stuart said. “I like it.”

  But to Mia’s surprise and grief, the cement that held her family together seemed to crumble when her father died. Mia’s mother decided to take early retirement and sell the apartment. Suddenly unmoored from her home and her work, she took several extended trips out west, married a local, Hank Heyman, and settled into a cream-colored bungalow near Santa Fe. At first Mia and Stuart had a lot of fun with Hank’s name—“Hey, man”—but they did have to acknowledge that Hank, a short, athletic guy in his seventies who sported a stunning pair of eagle tattoos on either bicep, did make Betty happy. Abandoning all her paintings, along with almost everything else in their old apartment, she had invented herself anew in the relentlessly scorching and sun-baked landscape. She took up gardening, and now presided over a yard filled with a dozen varieties of cacti and succulents, tumorlike forms covered in long, lethal-looking needles. Mia had tried to enlist Stuart’s contempt for their mother’s new hobby, but Stuart had, inexplicably, become Betty’s biggest booster.

  “Don’t you find them, oh, I don’t know, a little threatening?” she had asked him in a phone conversation not long after she had returned from a visit to their mother’s. “Vagina dentata and all that?”

  “I think you’re being too hard on her,” Stuart had said. “They actually look kind of cool to me. And I’m glad she’s rebounded from Dad’s death so well, you know?”

  “Rebounded. Right,” Mia said, miffed that Stuart was no longer her partner in crime, even in a matter as inconsequential as this. He had grown so tolerant; she missed the judgmental, scathing Stuart of her youth.

  MIA HAD, IN recent months, contemplated asking Stuart for a loan. He could certainly afford it. He was a corporate lawyer and lived with his corporate lawyer wife, Gail, in Greenwich, Connecticut. They both made serious money and owned a big, pretentious house with a big, pretentious swimming pool, to which Mia and Eden had been invited exactly once. Gail’s repeated attempts at in vitro fertilization—many thousands of dollars a pop, none of it reimbursed by health insurance, of course—eventually resulted in two sets of twins, a quartet of wan, fair-haired girls called Marguerite, Cassandra, India, and Skyler. In their coordinated hand-smocked dresses and velvet hair bands, they smiled frozenly out of the annual holiday card Gail sent to her two hundred and fifty closest friends and business associates. Mia knew that Gail wanted her precious, pampered daughters to have as little to do with their weird, child-of-divorce cousin, Eden, as possible.

  “She’s terribly precocious, isn’t she?” Gail had said during that ill-fated visit. “Precocious,” in Gail’s lexicon, was code for “perverted little sex-obsessed tramp.” Her comment had been prompted by Eden’s having drawn purple pubic hair and cherry-colored nipples on Cassandra’s Barbie doll. Never mind that when presented with Eden’s handiwork, Cassandra had shown more animation than she had all day; the child was so without affect that Mia had secretly wondered whether she might be borderline autistic.

  Mia disliked her sister-in-law, a relentlessly organized achiever with streaked blond hair, waxed eyebrows, and a gumball-sized diamond engagement ring at which Mia had seen her gaze, rapt and besotted, as if into the face of her newborn child. Gail, Stu had confessed, was a person who actually scheduled sex with him into her iPhone.

  “And the reason you put up with this is . . . ?” Mia asked when he told her at one of their infrequent lunches near his Park Avenue law firm.

  “We have a very powerful . . . connection,” he said. Mia thought he looked embarrassed; he took a nervous sip of his imported bottled water.

  “You mean sexual?”

  “Yeah. Sexual.”

  He turned pink with the disclosure. Mia had trouble believing his sudden modesty—this was the brother who used to make elaborate charts rating and ranking the various body parts of the girls he wanted to screw.

  “What, she’s so great?”

  “Not great.” He put down the water glass with a muffled but still emphatic thump. “Incredible.”

  Mia, both jealous and unconvinced, said nothing.

  Stuart’s defection to the corporate ethos and his marriage to the über-corporate Gail was an ongoing loss for Mia. Stu was only fifteen months her senior, and they had been inseparable throughout childhood and adolescence. Stu was the one who had shepherded her through all the major teenage rites of passage like cutting school, smoking pot, and drinking. The first boy she’d ever slept with, Josh Horowitz, was Stu’s best friend, and as soon as Josh’s breathing had slowed sufficiently to roll away from her, she had gotten up and found a phone so she could call her brother to tell him about it. When Stu went off to Oberlin, Mia spent the first couple of months without him in a kind of quiet mourning, but she pulled herself together and managed to follow him there the next fall. His decision to go to law school was initially puzzling, but it had not interrupted their continued closeness; when he came home, they still holed up in his room the way they always had, sharing a bottle of Heineken or a joint.

  Now it felt like there was a chasm between them. Stu still called her, though always from his cell phone or from work, never from home. But their lives had diverged, leaving Mia circling kind of forlornly at the perimeter of his existence. She knew he would give her money if he could, because he was and had always been a generous guy. But now that he had to answer to Gail, things were not so simple. And Mia couldn’t bear Gail’s knowing how hard up she was. Gail had already made it clear that she thought Mia was a loser; asking Stuart for money would only confirm that belief.

  Stu’s birthday was approaching, and Mia was trying to decide what to get him. Not that there was much he couldn’t get for himself— Mia had seen the bespoke suits, the Thomas Pink shirts, the T. Anthony accessories that filled his closets—but still, she wanted to find something that alluded to their special bond, something Gail would not have thought to buy. And now she even had some money with which to do it. The secret stash of bills from the ATM was burning a hole in her wedding shoes; she was in a position to spend, even splurge a little.

  One thing that Mia was absolutely sure she wanted to do, though, was take Eden for a real haircut. On Saturday a
fternoon they walked over to Goldilocks, a local hair salon presided over by Simone, an obese woman with creamy skin, beautiful auburn hair, and an unapologetic attitude about her weight that Mia found immensely heartening. No muumuus or shifts for Simone. And no black, either. She wore her plus-sized jeans tight and studded with rhinestones, her tops clingy and vibrantly hued—red, turquoise, and violet.

  When they walked into the shop, Simone took a quick look at Eden and said, “Halloween come early this year?” Eden’s response was a joyful snort. Mia had not heard her child laugh like that in so long, she could have kissed Simone with gratitude. After settling Eden in a chair and shampooing her with something smelling of mango and mint, Simone deftly proceeded to crop the rest of Eden’s ruined hair into something both waiflike and adorable. Peter Pan, thought Mia. Jean Seberg. She paid and, owing to her little windfall from the bank, handed Simone a hefty tip. Eden was supremely happy with her new look; on the way back home, she took her mother’s hand and began swinging it as they walked.

  “That was so fun.” Eden said.

  “Uh-huh,” Mia replied, squelching the impulse to correct and say, so much fun.

  “Almost as much fun as going out with Daddy.” Eden unconsciously corrected her grammatical error.

  Mia was quiet; she knew better than to pounce on that bait. See, she addressed an imaginary audience, I’m being good, I’m not a bash-the-ex-in-front-of-the-kid bitch.

  “You have fun with Daddy.” It was a statement, neutral and safe.

  “Lots of fun.”

  “What did you like best? Of all the places he’s taken you?”

  “Barneys,” answered Eden without a second’s hesitation. “Would you take me there sometime?”

  Mia squeezed her daughter’s hand but did not reply. Her heart was slamming around too furiously in her chest for that. Barneys again. This was Lloyd’s fault, of course. Impractical, selfish, self-indulgent Lloyd, stoking appetites in Eden that there was no way Mia could appease.

  “Well, can we go?”

  “We’ll see,” said Mia, offering the universal maternal equivocation. “We’ll just have to see.”

  WHEN THEY GOT home, Mia waited until Eden was otherwise occupied—cartoons again—before she attempted another visit to the machine; in her mind, she could see the italics. Whatever magic, black or otherwise, the thing possessed was not something she wanted her daughter to witness, even in the most passive of ways. What if there was some Faustian bargain at work here? Endless supplies of cash in exchange for Eden’s health or, God forbid, life? She knew it was crazy, but then a machine giving out money that was neither requested nor recorded was pretty crazy, too.

  In fact, the whole thing made her so skittish that she actually donned a disguise of sorts. She located a big square silk scarf buried in a drawer and tied it under her chin, very Grace Kelly. To this, she added dark glasses and vivid red lipstick, a shade she had not worn in so long that it qualified as part of the costume.

  “Hey, is Halloween early this year?” Eden said, parroting Simone.

  “Very funny,” said Mia, grabbing her bag. “If we’re going to Barneys, I’ll need to freshen my look a little. So I’m experimenting.”

  “Whatever,” said Eden, clicking the buttons on the television. The remote went missing ages ago, and Mia had not yet replaced it.

  WHEN MIA OPENED the door, she saw Mr. Ortiz and one of the Pomeranians. The absence of the other dog was somehow weighty, a thing alive.

  “Hello, Mr. Ortiz,” she said. Guilt, sadness, worry, shame shuffled rapidly through her brain like a deck of cards.

  He squinted in her direction; clearly, he did not know who she was. Then, recognition settled on his face, and he smiled.

  “Señora Saul,” he said, inclining his head. “Nice to see you.” The dog minced along the hallway, squatted, and piddled. Mr. Ortiz bent, with difficulty, to clean the mess with a rag, but waved off Mia’s offer to help. Mia waited a moment, and then when he went back into his apartment, she left. She was still thinking about him when she arrived at the bank a few minutes later. But thinking about him and doing something for him were two different things. Mia knew herself to be deficient, but could not shoulder the burdens of Mr. Ortiz’s life. Not now.

  She looked at the row of machines. Several of them were free, but the machine was being used by an elderly woman who carried a big umbrella and wore a faded black raincoat, though there was not a cloud in the sky. With an uncertain hand, she punched in the numbers so slowly she might have been underwater. Mia fidgeted impatiently. Should she wait? Wouldn’t it look suspicious, when there were other machines available? The woman did not appear to notice Mia; however, she must have made a mistake because Mia heard her say “Jesus Christ,” quite audibly. The elderly woman consulted a slip of paper in her hand and started punching numbers again, this time at an even more excruciatingly slow pace.

  Mia abruptly turned and walked back outside. She was so nervous she was shaking. Get a grip, she scolded herself. She retied the scarf, adjusted the sunglasses, and checked her reflection in the bank’s highly shined window. She was not used to wearing such thick, heavy lipstick, and her lips felt oily and slick. Then she headed up Garfield Place toward Sixth Avenue, turned the corner, and walked back down on Carroll Street. When she zeroed in on the bank again, the woman was gone and the machine was waiting for Mia, almost beckoning her to enter.

  Mia had to remove the sunglasses in order to see the screen, but she positioned them on her head, ready to yank down if the need arose. She punched in the password, requested the one hundred dollars, and waited to see what would happen. Again, there was that mystifying change in the screen’s color—first it went light, a silvery bluish color, and then it darkened to sapphire. Then, in the center of the screen, she saw a tiny dot of pure white light. Small as it was, it seemed to glow with an unusual intensity. But before Mia could begin to figure out what it was, it had disappeared, the screen imperceptibly resuming its ordinary hue as the bills issued from the slot. She reached, and ten one-hundred-dollar bills fanned out in her hands with all the glorious promise of a royal flush. Immediately, she collapsed them into a single unit and checked the receipt. There was a debit of one hundred dollars, nothing more.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, Mia and Eden took the R train to Barneys. Mia felt insecure enough to have borrowed clothes—a pair of fashionably ripped jeans, a velvet jacket, black patent leather ankle boots— from Julie for the excursion. But Eden, with her newly short hair and artfully scuffed black high-tops, seemed to feel only a pleasant burbling of excitement, serenely certain of the delights this trip would offer.

  As they approached the store, they stopped to look at the windows, which were populated by several pure white mannequins possessing neither faces nor hair; their legs came to softly modulated points where their feet ought to have been. One wore a tweed jacket with a series of exquisite seams running up the sides; another, a short skirt of supple, fawn suede; a third, a mud-colored coat with a belt that looped and tied fetchingly around the waist. All the colors were lifted from a muted, woodland palette: stone, mushroom, moss, bark. The only exceptions were the white of the mannequins themselves and the burst of brilliant, gold-foil leaves—big, stylized, like Matisse cutouts—that rained down on the figures.

  Once they were inside, Mia had to stop. She was overwhelmed with stimuli and didn’t know where to look first in this rarefied confection of a store. Gem-encrusted sunglasses? Bags from Prada and Kate Spade? A cashmere scarf thick as a blanket? Eden, though, knew precisely how to navigate. She led her mother to a display of handmade jewelry that appeared to have been constructed from Lifesavers, and then downstairs, to the Annick Goutal counter, where, to Mia’s amazement, the young woman busily arranging and rearranging the bottles of perfumes actually recognized her daughter.

  “Eden!” she fairly squealed. “You came back!”

  “I told you I would,” said Eden, smiling as she fingered a heavy, faceted bottle of something heady
, redolent of jasmine, of magnolia, of whatever petals cost a thousand dollars a pound. Then she set the bottle down and turned to Mia. “Courtney, this is my mom.”

  Mia nodded at Courtney, but was really agog at Eden, who was taking her warm reception quite in stride.

  “Here, this one is new,” said Courtney. Eden offered a wrist, which Courtney sprayed lavishly. Closing her eyes, Eden sniffed.

  “It smells fruity. Like peach. Or an apricot.”

  Mia could not stop looking at Eden. Since when had she become so poised with adults, especially ones she barely knew? Was this the same child who was sullen with her teachers, mute with the school psychologist? And calling the perfume fruity—how sophisticated was that for someone her age? After Courtney sent them off with a cache of samples in tiny, gold-tipped tubes, Eden led Mia back up to the main floor, to a large tank of exotic fish, where she pointed out a yellow-and-blue striped creature that was as big as a pie plate and another, whose filmy, ruffled fins looked as if they were made of organza. By the time they reached the escalator, Mia was actually starting to relax. So far this had been fun, and it had not cost a red cent. There were four crisp hundreds purloined from the secret stash fairly pulsating in her bag, and she was primed to spend them.

  The children’s department was on the seventh floor. Eden got to the top of the escalator first and darted off, a little ahead of Mia. She clearly knew her way around, and Mia watched her flit past the racks, pulling out the garments that interested her, a merry little bird in a garden of her own improvising.