– Diary entry –
Summer. Birdies. Sunshine. I spent today shuffling around Prospect Park, my skin tender, my bones brittle. Misery-battling. It is an improvement, since I spent the previous three days in our house in the same crusty pajama set, marking time until five, when I could have a drink. Trying to make myself remember the suffering in Darfur. Put things into perspective. Which, I guess, is just further exploiting the people of Darfur.
So much has unraveled the past week. I think that’s what it is, that it’s all happened at once, so I have the emotional bends. Nick lost his job a month ago. The recession is supposed to be winding down, but no one seems to know that. So Nick lost his job. Second round of layoffs, just like he predicted – just a few weeks after the first round. Oops, we didn’t fire nearly enough people. Idiots.
At first I think Nick might be okay. He makes a massive list of things he’s always meant to do. Some of it’s tiny stuff: He changes watch batteries and resets clocks, he replaces a pipe beneath our sink and repaints all the rooms we painted before and didn’t like. Basically, he does a lot of things over. It’s nice to take some actual do-overs, when you get so few in life. And then he starts on bigger stuff: He reads War and Peace. He flirts with taking Arabic lessons. He spends a lot of time trying to guess what skills will be marketable over the next few decades. It breaks my heart, but I pretend it doesn’t for his sake.
I keep asking him: ‘Are you sure you’re okay?’
At first I try it seriously, over coffee, eye contact, my hand on his. Then I try it breezily, lightly, in passing. Then I try it tenderly, in bed, stroking his hair.
He has the same answer always: ‘I’m fine. I don’t really want to talk about it.’
I wrote a quiz that was perfect for the times: ‘How Are You Handling Your Layoff?’
a) I sit in my pajamas and eat a lot of ice cream – sulking is therapeutic!
b) I write nasty things about my old boss online, everywhere – venting feels great!
c) Until a new job comes along, I try to find useful things to do with my newfound time, like learning a marketable language or finally reading War and Peace.
It was a compliment to Nick – C was the correct answer – but he just gave a sour smile when I showed it to him.
A few weeks in, the bustling stopped, the usefulness stopped, as if he woke up one morning under a decrepit, dusty sign that read, Why Fucking Bother? He went dull-eyed. Now he watches TV, surfs porn, watches porn on TV. He eats a lot of delivery food, the Styrofoam shells propped up near the overflowing trash can. He doesn’t talk to me, he behaves as if the act of talking physically pains him and I am a vicious woman to ask it of him.
He barely shrugs when I tell him I was laid off. Last week.
‘That’s awful, I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘At least you have your money to fall back on.’
‘We have the money. I liked my job, though.’
He starts singing ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ off-key, high-pitched, with a little stumbling dance, and I realize he is drunk. It is late afternoon, a beautiful blue-blue day, and our house is dank, thick with the sweet smell of rotting Chinese food, the curtains all drawn over, and I begin walking room to room to air it out, pulling back the drapes, scaring the dust motes, and when I reach the darkened den, I stumble over a bag on the floor, and then another and another, like the cartoon cat who walks into a room full of mousetraps. When I switch on the lights, I see dozens of shopping bags, and they are from places laid-off people don’t go. They are the high-end men’s stores, the places that hand-tailor suits, where salespeople carry ties individually, draped over an arm, to male shoppers nestled in leather armchairs. I mean, the shit is bespoke.
‘What is all this, Nick?’
‘For job interviews. If anyone ever starts hiring again.’
‘You needed so much?’
‘We do have the money.’ He smiles at me grimly, his arms crossed.
‘Do you at least want to hang them up?’ Several of the plastic coverings have been chewed apart by Bleecker. A tiny mound of cat vomit lies near one three-thousand-dollar suit; a tailored white shirt is covered in orange fur where the cat has napped.
‘Not really, nope,’ he says. He grins at me.
I have never been a nag. I have always been rather proud of my un-nagginess. So it pisses me off, that Nick is forcing me to nag. I am willing to live with a certain amount of sloppiness, of laziness, of the lackadaisical life. I realize that I am more type A than Nick, and I try to be careful not to inflict my neat-freaky, to-do-list nature on him. Nick is not the kind of guy who is going to think to vacuum or clean out the fridge. He truly doesn’t see that kind of stuff. Fine. Really. But I do like a certain standard of living – I think it’s fair to say the garbage shouldn’t literally overflow, and the plates shouldn’t sit in the sink for a week with smears of bean burrito dried on them. That’s just being a good grown-up roommate. And Nick’s not doing anything anymore, so I have to nag, and it pisses me off: You are turning me into what I never have been and never wanted to be, a nag, because you are not living up to your end of a very basic compact. Don’t do that, it’s not okay to do.
I know, I know, I know that losing a job is incredibly stressful, and particularly for a man, they say it can be like a death in the family, and especially for a man like Nick, who has always worked, so I take a giant breath, roll my anger up into a red rubber ball, and mentally kick it out into space. ‘Well, do you mind if I hang these up? Just so they stay nice for you?’
‘Knock yourself out.’
His-and-her layoffs, isn’t that sweet? I know we are luckier than most: I go online and check my trust fund whenever I get nervous. I never called it a trust fund before Nick did; it’s actually not that grand. I mean, it’s nice, it’s great – $785,404 that I have in savings thanks to my parents. But it’s not the kind of money that allows you to stop working forever, especially not in New York. My parents’ whole point was to make me feel secure enough so I didn’t need to make choices based on money – in schooling, in career – but not so well off that I could be tempted to check out. Nick makes fun, but I think it’s a great gesture for parents to make. (And appropriate, considering they plagiarized my childhood for the books.)
But I’m still feeling sick about the layoff, our layoffs, when my dad calls and asks if he and Mom can stop by. They need to talk with us. This afternoon, now, actually, if it’s okay. Of course it’s okay, I say, and in my head, I think, Cancer cancer cancer.
My parents appear at the door, looking like they’ve put up an effort. My father is thoroughly pressed and tucked and shined, impeccable except for the grooves beneath his eyes. My mother is in one of her bright purple dresses that she always wore to speeches and ceremonies, back when she got those invitations. She says the color demands confidence of the wearer.
They look great, but they seem ashamed. I usher them to the sofa, and we all sit silently for a second.
‘Kids, your mother and I, we seem to have—’ my father finally starts, then stops to cough. He places his hands on his knees; his big knuckles pale. ‘Well, we seem to have gotten ourselves into a hell of a financial mess.’
I don’t know what my reaction is supposed to be: shocked, consoling, disappointed? My parents have never confessed any troubles to me. I don’t think they’ve had many troubles.
‘The fact of the matter is, we’ve been irresponsible,’ Marybeth continues. ‘We’ve been living the past decade like we were making the same kind of money we did for the previous two decades, and we weren’t. We haven’t made half that, but we were in denial. We were … optimistic may be a kind way to put it. We just kept thinking the next Amy book would do the trick. But that hasn’t happened. And we kept making bad decisions. We invested foolishly. We spent foolishly. And now.’
‘We’re basically broke,’ Rand says. ‘Our house, as well as this house, it’s all underwater.’
I’d thought – assumed – they’d bought this house for us outright. I had no idea they were making payments on it. I feel a sting of embarrassment that I am as sheltered as Nick says.
‘Like I said, we made some serious judgment errors,’ Marybeth says. ‘We should write a book: Amazing Amy and the Adjustable Rate Mortgage. We would flunk every quiz. We’d be the cautionary tale. Amy’s friend, Wendy Want It Now.’
‘Harry Head in the Sand,’ Rand adds.
‘So what happens next?’ I ask.
‘That is entirely up to you,’ my dad says. My mom fishes out a homemade pamphlet from her purse and sets it on the table in front of us – bars and graphs and pie charts created on their home computer. It kills me to picture my parents squinting over the user’s manual, trying to make their proposition look pretty for me.
Marybeth starts the pitch: ‘We wanted to ask if we could borrow some money from your trust while we figure out what to do with the rest of our lives.’
My parents sit in front of us like two eager college kids hoping for their first internship. My father’s knee jiggles until my mother places a gentle fingertip on it.
‘Well, the trust fund is your money, so of course you can borrow from it,’ I say. I just want this to be over; the hopeful look on my parents’ faces, I can’t stand it. ‘How much do you think you need, to pay everything off and feel comfortable for a while?’
My father looks at his shoes. My mother takes a deep breath. ‘Six hundred and fifty thousand,’ she says.
‘Oh.’ It is all I can say. It is almost everything we have.
‘Amy, maybe you and I should discuss—’ Nick begins.
‘No, no, we can do this,’ I say. ‘I’ll just go grab my checkbook.’
‘Actually,’ Marybeth says, ‘if you could wire it to our account tomorrow, that would be best. Otherwise there’s a ten-day waiting period.’
That’s when I know they are in serious trouble.