Without a Net

by Michelle Tea

  I am an intelligent, hardworking woman. I worked my ass off to put myself through college and build up my writing career. But I look at this bank balance, this $10,000 that would seem like nothing to so many, and I feel dumb. I feel like a giant child. I feel like a caricature of overblown irresponsibility on a daytime talk show. I don’t know what to do. One of my first jobs ever was as a teller at a bank and I used to see these kids younger than my eighteen-year-old self come in and put $10,000 checks into their money-market accounts like it was no big deal, and now I’m thirty-six and I have this money and the thought of putting it in savings, or investing it, or putting it in a college fund for my kids—it breaks me out in hives. I know that there are important, grown-up things I could be putting this money to right now to help secure my family’s future, but I don’t know how to start. I feel broken and foolish, and still, the money just sits there.

  I know that this is an opportunity to learn. To learn how to put money aside and watch it grow. To begin to get used to a feeling of financial safety. But I’m not ready yet. I cannot set down this burden of financial struggle because if I get used to moving without it, I won’t be strong enough to carry it when it comes back, and it has never not come back. The burden of financial responsibility will just have to wait until I’m absolutely convinced that it’s here to stay. I’m sure that doesn’t make sense. I’m sure that someone who was raised to “set a little aside” each month is shaking their head at me in disgust. But when I was growing up, every time someone told my family to “set a little aside” each month it was an insult.

  There are worse problems to have than trying to figure out how to not feel desperately poor when your bank account challenges the only reality you’ve ever known. My children are free from the bulk of that burden. Even in the tough times these last few years, they weren’t the type of tough that had my kids showering next door or eating in soup kitchens. They go to birthday parties and go on field trips, and when they grow up they will probably not flinch at a call from an unlisted number and will open their mail the day it arrives. I worry that I haven’t taught my children how to save money—I don’t know how. But I figure that at least not being terrified of money is a head start that I never had.

  I will figure out how to be responsible with this money somehow. Or I won’t. No matter what, I’ll be O.K., because I’ve always had to find a way to be O.K. But right now, I don’t have to try to find a way to be O.K., because things just are O.K. I just have to try to find a way to appreciate that while it lasts.

  STEAL AWAY

  DOROTHY ALLISON

  MY HANDS SHAKE WHEN I AM HUNGRY, AND I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HUNGRY. Not for food—I have always had enough biscuit fat to last me. In college I got breakfast, lunch, and dinner with my dormitory fees, but my restless hunger didn’t abate. It was having only four dollars till the end of the month and not enough coming in then. I sat at a lunch table with the girls who planned to go to the movies for the afternoon, and counting three dollars in worn bills the rest in coins over and over in my pocket. I couldn’t go see any movies.

  I went, instead, downtown to steal. I became what had always been expected of me—a thief. Dangerous, but careful. Wanting everything, I tamed my anger, smiling wide and innocently. With the help of that smile I stole toilet paper from the Burger King rest room, magazines from the lower shelves at 7-Eleven, and sardines from the deli—sliding those little cans down my jeans to where I had drawn the cuffs tight with rubber bands. I lined my pockets with plastic bags for a trip to the local Winn Dixie, where I could collect smoked oysters from the gourmet section and fresh grapes from the open bins of produce. From the hobby shop in the same shopping center I pocketed metal snaps to replace the rubber bands on my pantleg cuffs and metal guitar picks I could use to pry loose and switch price tags on items too big to carry away. Anything small enough to fit a palm walked out with me, anything round enough to fit an armpit, anything thin enough to carry between my belly and belt. The smallest, sharpest, most expensive items rested behind my teeth, behind that smile that remained my ultimate shield.

  On the day that I was turned away from registration because my scholarship check was late, I dressed myself in my Sunday best and went downtown to the Hilton Hotel. There was a Methodist Outreach Convention with meetings in all the ballrooms, and a hospitality suite. I walked from room to room filling a JCPenney shopping bag with cut-glass ashtrays showing the Hilton logo and faceted wineglasses marked only with the dregs of grape juice. I dragged the bag out to St. Pete beach and sailed those ashtrays off the pier like frisbees. Then I waited for sunset to toss the wineglasses high enough to see the red and purple reflections as they flipped end over end. Each piece shattered ecstatically on the tar-black rocks under the pier, throwing up glass fragments into the spray. Sight and sound, it was better than a movie.

  THE PRESIDENT OF THE COLLEGE INVITED ALL OF THE SCHOLARSHIP students over for tea or wine. He served cheese that had to be cut from a great block with delicate little knives. I sipped wine, toothed cheese, talked politely, and used my smile. The president’s wife nodded at me and put her pink fleshy hand on my shoulder. I put my own hand on hers and gave one short squeeze. She started but didn’t back away, and I found myself giggling at her attempts to tell us all a funny story. She flushed and told us how happy she was to have us in her home. I smiled and told her how happy I was to have come, my jacket draped loosely over the wineglasses I had hooked in my belt. Walking back to the dorm, I slipped one hand into my pocket, carefully fingering two delicate little knives.

  Junior year my scholarship was cut yet again, and I became nervous that working in the mailroom wouldn’t pay for all I needed. St. Vincent de Paul offered me a ransom, paying a dime apiece for plates and trays carted off from the cafeteria. Glasses were only good for three cents and hard to carry down on the bus without breaking, but sheets from the alumni guest-room provided the necessary padding. My roommate complained that I made her nervous, always carrying boxes in and out. She moved out shortly after Christmas, and I chewed my nails trying to figure out how to carry her mattress down to St. Vincent de Paul. I finally decided it was hopeless, and spent the rest of the holidays reading Jean Genet and walking through the art department hallways.

  They had hardwood stools in the studios, and stacking file boxes no one had opened in years. I wore a cloth cap when I took them, and my no-nonsense expression. I was so calm that one of the professors helped me clear paper off the third one. He was distracted, discussing Jackson Pollock with a very pale woman whose hands were marked with tusche. “Glad they finally decided to get these out of here,” was all he said to me, never once looking up into my face. My anger came up from my stomach with an acid taste. I went back for his clipboard and papers, but his desk was locked and my file broke on the rim. In compensation I took the silk lining out of the pockets of the corduroy coat he’d left thrown over a stool. The silk made a lemongrass sachet I gave my mother for her birthday, and every time I saw him in that jacket I smiled.

  MY SOCIOLOGY PROFESSOR HAD RED HAIR, FORTY SHELVES OF books, four children, and an entirely cordial relationship with her ex-husband. When she invited me to dinner, I did not understand what she wanted with me. I watched her closely and kept my hands in my pockets. She talked about her divorce and the politics in the department, how she had worked for John F. Kennedy in 1960 and demonstrated for civil rights in Little Rock in ’65. There were lots of books she could lend me, she insisted, but didn’t say exactly which ones. She poured me Harveys Bristol Cream, trailing her fingers across my wrist when I took the glass. Then she shook her head nervously and tried to persuade me to talk about myself, interrupting only to get me to switch topics as she moved restlessly from her rocking chair to her bolster to the couch beside me. She did not want to hear about my summers working in the mop factory, but she loved my lies about hitchhiking cross-country.

  “Meet me for lunch on Monday,” she insisted, while her eyes behind her glasses kept glancing at me, t
urning away and turning back. My palms were sweaty, but I nodded yes. At the door she stopped me, and put her hand out to touch my face.

  “Your family is very poor, aren’t they?”

  My face froze and burned at the same time. “Not really,” I told her, “not anymore.” She nodded and smiled, and the heat in my face went down my body in waves.

  I didn’t want to go on Monday but made myself. Her secretary was confused when I asked about lunch. “I don’t have anything written down about it,” she said, without looking up at her calendar.

  AFTER CLASS THAT AFTERNOON THE SOCIOLOGY PROFESSOR EXPLAINED her absence with a story about one of her children who had been bitten by a dog, but not seriously. “Come on Thursday,” she insisted, but on Thursday neither she nor her secretary were there. I stood in the doorway to her office and tilted my head back to take in her shelves of books. I wanted to pocket them all, but at the same time I didn’t want anything of hers. Trembling, I reached and pulled out the fattest book on the closest shelf. It was a hardbound edition of Sadism at the Movies, with a third of the pages underlined in red. It fit easily in my backpack, and I stopped in the Student Union bookstore on the way back to the dorm to buy a Hershey bar and steal a bright blue pen.

  On the next Monday, she apologized again, and again invited me to go to lunch the next day. I skipped lunch but slipped in that afternoon to return her book, now full of my bright blue comments. In its spot on the shelf there was now a collection of the essays of Georges Bataille, still unmarked. By the time I returned it on Friday, heavy blue ink stains showed on the binding itself.

  Eventually we did have lunch. She talked to me about how hard it was to be a woman alone in a college town, about how all the male professors treated her like a fool, and yet how hard she worked. I nodded.

  “You read so much,” I whispered.

  “I keep up,” she agreed with me.

  “So do I,” I smiled.

  She looked nervous and changed the subject but let me walk her back to her office. On her desk, there was a new edition of Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages. I laid my notebook down on top of it, and took them both when I left. Malinowski was a fast read. I had that one back a day later. She was going through her date book looking for a free evening we could have dinner. But exams were coming up so soon. I smiled and nodded and backed out the door. The secretary, used to seeing me come and go, didn’t even look up.

  I TOOK NO OTHER MEALS WITH PROFESSORS, DIDN’T TRUST MYSELF in their houses. But I studied their words, gestures, jokes, and quarrels to see just how they were different from me. I limited my outrage to their office shelves, working my way through their books one at a time, carefully underlining my favorite passages in dark blue ink—occasionally covering over their own faded marks. I continued to take the sociology professor’s classes but refused to stay after to talk, and when she called my name in the halls, I would just smile and keep walking. Once she sat beside me in a seminar and put her hand on the back of my neck where I was leaning back in my chair. I turned and saw she was biting her lips. I remembered her saying, “Your family is very poor, aren’t they?” I kept my face expressionless and looked forward again. That was the afternoon I made myself a pair of harem pants out of the gauze curtains from the infirmary.

  I studied their words, gestures, jokes, and quarrels to see just how they were different from me.

  MY PARENTS CAME FOR GRADUATION, MAMA TAKING THE DAY OFF from the diner, my father walking slow in his back brace. They both were bored at the lunch, uncomfortable and impatient to have the ceremony be over so we could pack my boxes in the car and leave. Mama kept pulling at the collar of my robe while waiting for the call for me to join my class. She was so nervous she kept rocking back on her heels and poked my statistics professor with her elbow as he tried to pass.

  “Quite something, your daughter,” he grinned as he shook my mama’s hand. Mama and I could both tell he was uncomfortable, so she just nodded, not knowing what to say. “We’re expecting great things of her,” he added, and quickly joined the other professors on the platform, their eyes roaming over the parents headed for the elevated rows at the sides and back of the hall. I saw my sociology professor sharing a quick sip from the dean’s pocket flask. She caught me watching, and her face flushed a dull reddish gray. I smiled widely as ever I had, and held that smile through the long slow ceremony that followed, the walk up to get my diploma, and the confused milling around that followed the moment when we were all supposed to throw our tassels over to the other side. Some of the students threw their mortarboards drunkenly into the air, but I tucked mine under my arm and found my parents before they had finished shaking the cramps out of their legs.

  “Sure went on forever,” Mama whispered, as we walked toward the exit.

  The statistics professor was standing near the door telling a tall black woman, “Quite something, your son. We’re expecting great things of him.”

  I laughed and tucked my diploma in Mama’s bag for the walk back to the dormitory. People were packing station wagons, U-Haul trailers, and bulging little sedans. Our Pontiac was almost full and my face was starting to ache from smiling, but I made a quick trip down into the dormitory basement anyway. There was a vacuum cleaner and two wooden picture frames I’d stashed behind the laundry-room doors that I knew would fit perfectly in the Pontiac’s trunk. Mama watched me carry them up but said nothing. Daddy only laughed and revved the engine while we swung past the auditorium. At the entrance to the campus I got them to pull over and look back at the scattered buildings. It was a rare moment, and for a change my hunger wasn’t bothering me at all. But while my parents waited, I climbed out and pulled the commemorative roses off the welcome sign. I got back in the car and piled them into my mama’s lap.

  “Quite something, my daughter,” she laughed, and hugged the flowers to her breast. She rocked in her seat as my stepfather gunned the engine and spun the tires pulling out. I grinned while she laughed.

  “Quite something.”

  It was the best moment I’d had in four years.

  FARM USE

  JOY CASTRO

  AFTER THE DIVORCE, MY MOTHER’S FIRST ENTREPRENEURIAL EFFORT FAILS. She opens a resale clothing shop and gives it a clever name: Encore. But in small-town West Virginia, people’s used finery is a shabby thing. Her clientele has none of the chic-girl-down-on-her-luck wit the name deserves. Instead of Jean Rhys heroines, she attracts fat, bad-smelling women who slap their kids. There is nothing vintage to find. Her racks hold only the same clothes that once hung at Hill’s and Heck’s, the budget department stores. But they’re dingier, with the smell of stale closets. At the counter, irritated women claim their things are worth more than my mother thinks.

  Even in the black-and-white wedding photos, my mother’s eyes have a touch of sleaze, a come-hither Joan Collins glint. My father’s face is young, eager, shining; he looks toward her. She looks at the camera, chin lowered, one white satin toe pointed forward, eyes leveling their invitation.

  Once she and some other stewardesses partied on a yacht with O. J. Simpson, she tells me when I’m nine. I think how much fun it would be: throwing footballs on the deck, eating cake all day.

  HIS HANDS ARE FURRED BLACK, HIS HEAD BALD AND SHINY, HIS gut a fat ball under graying T-shirts. He buys my brother Tonka trucks, buys me the radio I crave, buys my mother clothes and me a plum velvet blazer, very grown-up, for wearing to the Kingdom Hall. “Won’t it be nice,” my mother purrs, “to use the child support your father sends just on school clothes and nice things, instead of bills?”

  She’s got us there. I’m sick of food stamps and government cheese and clothes discarded by strangers. Middle school is a bad time to be poor. And I’m tall for my age and pretty. At assemblies, eighteen-year-old brothers from other congregations flirt with me between sessions, ask my mother if they can take me out. They back away, apologizing, when they learn I’m twelve. I want a black leather clutch purse and combs for my hair.

&n
bsp; But not this way. I argue with her, but things move quickly. He makes fourteen dollars an hour working construction. He’s a respected brother; he’s served at Bethel. A date is set. I’m to wear my plum velvet blazer. My brother, seven, is to give her away in the ceremony at our Kingdom Hall.

  “Won’t that be cute?” she says.

  “No, not really,” I say.

  I CRY IN HER ROOM AS SHE DRESSES, BEGGING HER NOT TO DO IT, not to do it, but I have no evidence aside from the weird way he looks at us. She’s patient for a while, going over the money he makes, the good reputation he has in his congregation—but finally she turns on me.

  “I am just about fed up, you hear? Do you understand me? I’ve just about had it with your bellyaching.” She swings the hairbrush in my face. “Why do you always want to ruin everything? Why? One good thing comes along, something that will actually make me happy for once, and you have to start your whining. As usual.”

  “He’s not a good man.” I’m still crying. She laughs angrily, throws the brush down on the bureau.

  “What do you know about good men? You’re twelve years old.” Her voice is rich with disgust. “Do you think you know what a good man is? Do you?” She shakes me. “Well?” I just cry. “Do you think your father’s a good man?” I look at the brown and green carpet.

  “Yes.”