Breaking the Bank Read online

  The man, however, seemed to find the single bill a gift of astonishing grace and goodwill.

  “Why, thank you, little lady,” he said to Eden. “Thank you so much.” He bowed slightly, and in so doing, swayed a bit on his feet. Alarmed, Mia thought she might have to pick him up if he toppled, but he didn’t.

  “He smelled really bad,” Eden said in a low voice when they were out of earshot.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s because he lives on the street and doesn’t have any place to take a shower, right?”

  “Right.”

  “That lady yesterday . . .”

  “What about her?”

  “She lives on the street, too, doesn’t she? But she didn’t smell bad.”

  “No, she didn’t.”

  “Why, Mom?”

  “Why didn’t she smell bad?”

  “No. Why does she, I mean, why does anyone have to live on the street? I don’t get it.”

  “You know, I’m not sure I do, either,” said Mia.

  “Can’t the mayor or the president find a place for at least some of those people to live? How about at the White House? It’s big enough.” Eden had gone to Washington on a school trip, and she couldn’t stop talking about the White House, which to her was on par with the Taj Mahal or Versailles.

  Before Mia could reply, she heard Eden’s name being called, loudly, from a few feet away. It was Caitlin, and Eden ran to meet her. Mia followed behind. After she said good-bye to her daughter and made plans for picking her up a few hours later, Mia headed home. She was free for a while, though of course she had plenty to do, like start cleaning up the apartment before Lloyd descended on her; he always ragged on her for being a slob, and she just didn’t want to hear it this time around. Plus, she had some work she could get a jump on. Mommy Mousie was, mercifully, squeaking away on someone else’s desk at the moment, and Mia had been given a new project. It was called All That Trash: The Real Story of Your Garbage, and she loved it. Who knew that every ton of recycled paper could save seventeen trees, save seven thousand gallons of water, and eliminate three cubic yards of landfill space? Or that for every ton of waste we generate, another twenty tons were generated to produce the products we used? And that in spite of recycling, the per capita discard rate in 1996 was 25 percent higher than it was in 1960?

  Mia devoured this data and had been peppering her conversations with such tidbits, tossing them out to her brother and mother, to Julie and to Eden, who was initially interested but who then asked her to please stop talking about garbage. Settling down with the manuscript for a solid couple of hours suddenly seemed more important than cleaning up for Lloyd. So the place would be messy; he was the one who manipulated his way into staying over. If he didn’t like it, he could go somewhere else.

  As she reached the corner of Garfield and Fifth, she saw—and smelled—the guy who was standing there a little while ago. He was still in the same spot, but he was wearing the baseball cap now, and had substituted a cardboard coffee cup for the change he was collecting. You already gave him money, Mia thought. You don’t have to give him anything else. But this rationale did not seem to satisfy her, and instead, she impulsively ducked into the bank, marched over to the machine, her machine, and slipped her card into the designated slot. She requested one hundred dollars and waited. It won’t happen again, she admonished herself.

  The screen color repeated its weird mutation from light to dark, and again there was the dot of light at the center. Wasn’t it bigger this time though? Yes, she was sure it was. Before it had been a pencil point; now it was the size of a popcorn kernel. She felt herself drawn into its light before it vanished, to be replaced by the familiar screen. When the whirring noise stopped, she reached for the bills.

  They were hundreds; she could see that in an instant. But there were a lot of them—more than last time certainly. She quickly hunched over, as if she’d been sucker punched, to count. One, two, three— her fingers skittered through the pile. There were twenty in all. Two thousand dollars. She stared at the screen, as if it contained a clue she might have missed. Nothing.

  SHE HAD THE sensation again, the one of simultaneous heat and cold. Somehow, some way, this was all going to catch up with her. But for now, the debit read only one hundred dollars, while she had twenty times that in her hands. She felt rich, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof. Still hunched, she squirreled the bills away in the waistband of her jeans, all except a single hundred, which she neatly folded, so that it was concealed in her palm. Then she strode out of the bank, straight toward the stench and the man. She gave the folded bill a tiny squeeze before placing it in his coffee cup.

  “Why, thank you, little lady,” he said, echoing his earlier words to Eden. “Thank you so kindly.” Again the small bow, and this time, an actual click of his heels in their dirty, laceless sneakers. Maybe, like Dorothy, he was hoping to find his way home.

  He doesn’t even know how much it is, Mia thought, smiling and walking away. He doesn’t have a clue. She imagined him sifting through the change and the crumpled ones in the cup and coming upon the hundred; her own smile grew larger, until it felt like it was taking over her entire face.

  BACK IN THE empty apartment, Mia looked again at the mystery money. She still could not get over it, the weird and unaccountable fact of a bank machine that spit out money with no memory and no record. The bills were fresh and new, as if hers were the first hands to touch them. She stared for a few more seconds before tucking them away in the shoes and sitting down with the manuscript and her red editing pencil.

  Garbage, she realized, was the natural consequence of money. The more money you had, the more garbage, the better garbage, you could produce. Lobster shells and artichoke leaves, empty champagne bottles by the score, the rinds of rich imported cheeses. Bags, tissue paper, and ribbons from exclusive shops in Paris, London, New York, Rio, Tokyo; elegant, robin’s-egg-blue boxes from Tiffany’s that held gold rings, collars of diamonds. This was not just any garbage—it was expensive, tasteful, high-class garbage. Would that man on the street be able to produce such garbage? Would she? Not now, of course, but given enough money, anyone could. Money and garbage, garbage and money. There was a relationship between the two, one worth pursuing.

  As she read, she wondered if the author, one Howard W. Shapiro, was going to address this issue anywhere in the text. Garbage as an indicator of class, of social rank and status. If he didn’t, she was going to suggest it. The more she thought about this idea, the better she liked it. Garbage was more than what you threw away; garbage was, in some ways, what defined you. The miraculously accumulating pile of bills in the shoe box and the plastic bags full of modest trash that she deposited in the battered cans downstairs were different but connected parts of her existence, interwoven strands from the same dense cloth. Tightening her grip on her pencil, Mia settled down to read.

  FOUR

  MIA WAS ON a cleaning jag. Even though she had told herself she wouldn’t bother, she decided she was too proud to have Lloyd come here and think she had let everything go. So on her lunch break, she shopped for supplies: mop, rubber gloves, various biodegradable potions guaranteed not to poison the water table. She lugged everything home and, after she had given Eden dinner and—more or less—successfully presided over the nightly homework battle, devised her plan of attack.

  To her surprise, Eden wanted to help, and did a respectable job scouring the minuscule bathroom sink—the sort found at a gas station—and the shower walls. She polished the bathroom mirror and wiped down the tiles surrounding it.

  “I think Daddy will really like it here.” Eden crumpled the used paper towels into a ball, which she attempted to pitch into the waste-basket. She missed but, to Mia’s amazement, got up and threw the wadded-up towels away without being prompted.

  “I hope he’ll have a good visit,” Mia said carefully. “Maybe he’ll have such a good visit that he’ll want to stay.”

  “I don’t know about t
hat.” Mia flopped down on the love seat, dust rag in hand. “He’s got a lot of work he’s doing right now, remember? And he said it was just for the weekend. He’s going back to California on Monday.”

  “He could change his mind,” Eden said. “He could,” Mia said, trying to be gentle. “But I don’t think he will.”

  “You don’t know everything, Mom,” Eden huffed.

  Mia agreed with her there.

  * * *

  AFTER EDEN WAS in bed, Mia resumed her cleaning. She lugged two large bags of trash to the door and debated taking them out then or waiting until the morning. While she stood there deliberating, she heard voices in the hall. Voices, and what sounded like a scuffle. Her heart began a nasty acceleration. Who was there? Should she check? She remained inside, ear pressed to the door.

  “Fuck, you hurt me, man.” The voice was loud. “You pushed me first, asshole.”

  “Shut up, would you? Just shut the fuck up.”

  “I’m trying him again. He said he’d be here.”

  “Said, said, said. He’s a fucking liar.”

  “You’re the liar, dick brain. Manny’s all right. If he said he’ll be here, he’ll be here.”

  Mia’s heartbeat slowed just a little. Customers of Manny’s. If she crept away quietly, maybe they would leave without ringing her buzzer. But then she heard the sound of another buzzer being pressed and the voices started again.

  “You sure you don’t know where he is?” said one. There was a response, but Mia couldn’t hear it through the door.

  “You’re not lying, are you, old man?” said the other voice.

  Old man. They must have rung Mr. Ortiz’s buzzer. No. No, no, no. Mia opened the door and stepped out into the hall. As she guessed, the two visitors—both beefy and inflated-looking, a pair of Michelin tire guys in black leather jackets and black Gestapo-issue boots—were standing in front of Mr. Ortiz’s open doorway. Mr. Ortiz wore a garishly patterned silk robe and a pair of ancient leather slippers with tarnished gold monograms adorning their cracked fronts. No dogs were in evidence.

  “Can I help you?” Mia said. She stood up as straight as possible, and tried to look, if not tough, then authoritative. The act must have been convincing because both men swiveled around to face her.

  “Yeah, if you know where Manny is,” said one of the guys, smoothing back his abundant dark hair with both hands. His fingers were as thick as sausages, his nails glossy with clear polish.

  “Manny? I heard him go out a while ago.” This was a lie; she was too busy scrubbing the inside of the fridge to have heard anything. But it seemed imperative to behave as if she had information. As if she knew something.

  “Really? What time was that?” said the other guy, whose hair was also dark, but curly, drooping over his forehead and crowding the sides of his face.

  “Around nine,” Mia said.

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?” Curlylocks asked.

  “No. Sorry.” As if he checked in with her, Mia thought.

  “See? I told you he wasn’t here,” said Curlylocks to his companion. “We’re just wasting our time.”

  “If I see him, I’ll tell him you were looking for him.”

  “You do that,” said Curlylocks. “You tell him we were waiting.”

  He tugged on his pants and adjusted his crotch. Why did guys always do that? Mia wished she could just tell him to stop; instead, she watched as the two men turned and stomped down the stairs. She was left there, heart slowing, looking at Mr. Ortiz.

  “Thank you, Señora Saul,” he said to her in a low voice. “Those men”—he shook his head—”not refined. Not nice.”

  “Despicable,” agreed Mia. “Like Manny.”

  “Señor Manny . . .” Mr. Ortiz began. It looked as if he were going to cry.

  “Mr. Ortiz, where is your dog? I mean, the other one?”

  “My Chi Chi is dead.”

  “Was it Manny—?”

  “No. The doctor said she had a tumor. But I know better.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She died of a broken heart. After Jacinta died, she didn’t want to live anymore. And I tell you something, Señora Saul.” He looked at her with dark, watery eyes. “I know just how she felt.”

  Mia felt flattened by guilt. Why hadn’t she called someone, done something?

  “I am so sorry, Mr. Ortiz,” was all she said, all she could say.

  “So am I . . .” There was an awkward lull. “Good night, Señora Saul.” He closed the door but not before Mia heard a small, ragged intake of breath, the sort of sound that was generally the prelude to lavish, inconsolable weeping.

  THE NEXT MORNING at work, Mia was wading through garbage, or at least through some alarming and vivid descriptions of it, when she was interrupted by a call from Eden’s teacher.

  “Is she all right? Is everything okay?” Mia put the chapter on toxic waste aside.

  “She’s fine,” said the teacher. “But I just wanted to check something with you.”

  “Of course,” said Mia, trying to be as cooperative as possible to compensate for her many and glaring liabilities as a parent. To wit: she still could not remember the teacher’s name, a lapse that continued to vex and humiliate her.

  “Eden is not leaving school for an extended vacation, is she?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” Mia said, but she had a leaden sense she knew where this conversation was heading. “Why?”

  “Well, today she told me that she didn’t turn in the worksheet for her social studies project because she wasn’t going to be here.”

  “Oh?” Mia started nervously doodling on the manuscript, which was absolutely verboten. What social studies project? She grabbed an eraser and rubbed so hard that she tore the paper. Damn. Now she needed to find a roll of tape, but the tape was nowhere to be found. “Did she say where she plans to be?”

  “With her father. In Hollywood. She said he’s being nominated for an Academy Award—”

  “The Academy Awards are in February,” said Mia, as if this bit of information would suddenly clarify everything and put it in its rightful place again.

  “Yes, I know that.” She sounded irritated. “But Eden is insistent that this trip is imminent. They are going to be staying in a big hotel with a fountain, a tennis court, and two, no make that three, swimming pools; she’s going to have room service all day long and go shopping for a strapless dress and a tiara. A diamond tiara, I believe.” The teacher paused to draw a breath. “I’d say her imagination is working overtime, wouldn’t you?”

  “I can explain,” Mia said. “You see, her father is coming to visit, and she hasn’t seen him for some time. He’s a filmmaker, and he actually is in Hollywood right now. So some of it is true; the rest of it . . .” Mia trailed off. “The rest of it she wishes were true.”

  “Ms. Prescott,” said the teacher.

  “Saul,” Mia corrected.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Eden’s last name is Prescott; mine is Saul.”

  “Ms. Saul, then,” the teacher continued, still in that irritated tone, “she told this story not only to me, but also to virtually the entire class during recess. When one of the boys said she was making it up, she hit him. And then she pulled the hair of a girl who said the same thing. When I tried to her stop her, she told me to . . .” The teacher stopped.

  “To what?” said Mia.

  “To fuck off.” The teacher sighed, a disgusted and accusatory sigh.

  It was unreasonable of Mia to hate this woman; she knew that. Eden shouldn’t be hitting or cursing. The woman had a right, no, an obligation to call and tell her. Still, Mia hated the teacher all the more for her unimpeachable rectitude. She grabbed a paper clip and twisted it out of shape so that it was no longer a clip, but a wavy, metal line. This was gratifying enough for her to do again, and again, and still again, until she had assembled an entire arsenal of mutilated clips.

  “Ms. Saul, we really pride ourselves here on letting the children
express themselves; this is not a repressive atmosphere. But that kind of language . . .”

  Is precisely the kind of language my daughter hears all too much from me, Mia thought. What she said, however, in a meek voice, was, “I totally understand.”

  “She’s waiting to see the principal now,” added the teacher.

  “The principal.” Mia moved the phone away from her ear for a second; she needed to regroup before she could respond.

  “I just thought I should let you know.”

  “I’m so glad you did.” This was the kind of lie she could spit out in her sleep, the one that went, That’s right, tell me that Eden is screwed up, that I’m screwed up, that we’re the most screwed-up excuse for a family you’ve ever seen, and that I’m supposed to be appreciative, penitent, and, above all, thankful for this unerring assessment, this essential information about who we are.

  “She’s going to see the psychologist after she’s seen the principal,” the teacher said. “That’s in addition to her regular appointment later in the week.”

  Mia didn’t remember when Eden’s appointment with the psychologist was; she had blotted it out from memory, from consciousness, like the teacher’s name.

  “It’s on Thursday,” the teacher prompted. “Thursday morning.”

  “Thursday. Right.” Mia tried to sound like she had known this all along. She wanted to get off the phone with this woman and to speak to Eden herself. “I’ll try to leave work by four and pick her up from afterschool early.” She eyed the manuscript on which she should have been working this very second, and did not see how leaving early would be possible.

  “That would be a good idea,” the teacher said. “I’m sure we’ll be talking more about this, but right now, my prep period is over, so I have to go.”

  Thank God, Mia thought. She clicked off the phone, looked at the manuscript again before putting her head directly down on toxic waste. But she didn’t stay down for long. If she was going to get out of here by four, she’d better hustle.