We talked about his orphanage idea, hundreds of times it seemed, but he never wanted to hear anything I said because I was too negative for him. “You could help me,” he complained. “Instead of telling me what a dumbshit I am.” This was on the day he found a house that he thought would be right for the orphans, but it was way too small and looked like it was stuck between two crack houses.
“I never said you’re a dumbshit.”
“You don’t have to, Kim. I can tell by your expression.”
“I just think you could find a better house if you’re really going to do this.”
“The price is good and it’s not far from where I live. What, do I want you to wear a Kick Me sign?”
I looked at him. Sometimes I didn’t get him. Not even close. His pronouns again, I thought.
He’d found a house in Mundelein, a town about eight or nine miles from the college, where lots of people from Poland and Russia and Wisconsin lived but not too many people from Africa, as far as I knew. Besides its crack-house neighbors with their peeling paint and yards full of deflated inner tubes, the house looked like someone had stolen it from the cover of a book of ghost stories. Its black shutters and four chimneys, or whatever they were coming out of the roof, screamed Nightmare on Elm Street and no way would I want to be a kid who had just lost my parents to a bunch of crazed heroin addicts running around with machetes and have to come live in a house like this one, with neighbors next door that, for fun, grill up huge bratwursts and baloney rings on weekends and beat the crap out of paper donkeys filled with candy and Super Balls on their birthdays. It had five bedrooms and three dinky bathrooms and was not really that big of a place at all, not for an orphanage, but Josh thought that he could put three sets of bunk beds in two of the rooms, and two sets in each of the other three. I didn’t see how. The kids would have to climb over one another to get in and out of the room. I said this to Josh, who scowled at me. “They’re little kids,” he said. “The beds can be shorter than the ones I’d have to get for adults.”
“I don’t know who you’re going to get these kids from. You can’t just put in an order for them like they’re mail-order brides. And who else is going to work at the orphanage? How are you going to pay them?”
“If you don’t want to be a part of this, you don’t have to. You should just say it.”
“You can’t buy that house. It’s too spooky. The kids you order from Africa will take one look at it and beg you to put them on the next plane back to Darfur.”
“I don’t see why you have to make a joke out of this. That’s fucked up.”
“I don’t think it’s a joke at all. That house is scary. I would never want to live in it.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Thanks, I won’t.”
Maybe I was jealous and wished the idea had been mine instead. Maybe I wanted to be the sort of person who lived for saving orphans and actually did it instead of just talking about it. Anyone can tell you how noble and great they’d be if only they had the money or the time. It’s like someone you meet at a party saying she was adopted, but her real parents, who’d been killed by an insane dictator who liked to hunt rhinos and grizzlies in his spare time, had been a prince and princess back in the Old World. How could you tell that girl she was full of shit?
“I’ll help you, Josh. I promise.”
“If you want to help me, you have to stop pissing on everything I say.”
I don’t know. Maybe his friends were telling him that I was a gold digger and he was starting to believe them. Money does change you, even if you plan to give most of it away.
His mother, whose name was Cindy, not Robert, was on my side. She worried that Josh only wanted to start the orphanage because his brains were still goofed up. “Why not save the money for your future?” she said. “You could put it away and retire early.”
“From what?” he said.
“From your accounting business.”
Hearing this, he rolled his eyes. “You don’t know if you want to be an accountant.” He paused, his eyes working back and forth from her face to mine. “I mean, I don’t know if I want to be accountant.”
Her face went a little pale. “You don’t?”
“What I want to do is run an orphanage for kids from Africa,” he said.
His poor mother—besides being called Robert, the things she had to put up with after the accident! He’d tell her that he’d cut his fingers off when what he meant was that it was time to mow the lawn. Sometimes he went outside and climbed the crabapple tree in the backyard and called out that he had never been to such a good museum before. These episodes didn’t happen often, but when they did, they were usually in the middle of the night. He was very cute, though, and tall, which meant that people thought he was in charge, or could have been if he wanted to be. The neighbors also liked him because in the winter he would use his mom’s snowblower on their driveways without them having to ask. His dad wasn’t around to do the snowblowing anymore. I was told that he’d been on a sailboat in the Caribbean during a storm and had not come back. Josh was five when he disappeared and the next day washed up on St. Thomas missing some of his parts because something had gotten to him, but not a shark, because there probably wouldn’t have been anything left if it had been a shark that ate him. Josh told me that he still remembered his dad pretty well—he used to put on his father’s big black dress shoes and shuffle around the house and they would laugh, until one night Josh tripped and landed on his mom’s ficus, which sat in a big clay pot. This irritated her because the pot cracked when he fell on it and he got dirt all over his face and the rug next to it.
His mother told him that if he was really serious about helping orphans, he needed to get other people involved, those who worked with refugees or people in countries with real problems and knew what channels to go through if he wanted to start his own charity. “Call those Doctors Without Borders and see what they have to say for themselves. You probably have to get some kind of license from the state too. I don’t think this is something you can do overnight, Josh. It could take years.”
“Fine,” he said. “There will always be orphans.”
As it turned out, Doctors Without Borders did not have much to say once he got someone to answer the phone in their dusty office with shirtless little kids running around playing soccer outside with a ball made from an old wig, wadded newspaper, and a few rubber bands to hold it all together (this was how I pictured it) and listen to what Josh was planning to do in Mundelein, Illinois, in his haunted house with the piñata-smashing, baloney-ring-noshing next-door neighbors. After the first four or five times, they stopped answering his calls. They said they were doctors who dispensed medicine and treated things like tapeworms and malaria, not orphanage administrators. Wherever they were, in Liberia or India or Brazil with the wig soccer ball, they must have had caller ID, because they stopped picking up, and after another week or so of trying to get through and convince someone to come and help him get things going, Josh moved on to bugging the Red Cross people. He said that the last he’d heard, the Red Cross was based in Switzerland, and that meant they must have a decent office with free chocolate bars up for grabs by the entrance, and more than one person to give kids vaccinations and file paperwork and answer the phone.
The Red Cross person told him to get his local government involved and maybe a church or a school too; that was really the only way to get permission to start an orphanage. He would need synergy between local political people and a tough nun and some kind of consultant person who would know how to start an orphanage. “Synergy,” Josh repeated to me later, over and over. “Synergy synergy synergy. That’s a stupid-sounding word, like taco. Taco sounds dumb, doesn’t it. Taco taco taco.”
“If you say any word over and over, it’s eventually going to sound dumb,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“Maybe we should try it sometime sometime sometime,” he said, very d
epressed and tired that no one wanted to help him start the orphanage.
“Sometime is a nice word,” I said.
“I need a vacation vacation vacation, I think think think,” he said.
“You have to stop that,” I said, already annoyed.
“Okay, okay.”
“Stop,” I said again, trying not to yell. “I think you should open a dog or cat shelter instead. That’d probably be easier.”
“No,” he said. “Orphans. Human ones. Not orphan cats or pit bulls. But you know, that’s not a bad idea. Maybe after I start the orphanage, I’ll start an animal shelter. I know a veterinarian. Maybe she would donate some of her time, or I guess I could pay her too. I did win the lottery.”
“The Little Lotto,” I said.
“Yeah, I know, thanks.”
The haunted house, by some miracle, or maybe it was black magic spells cast by the real estate agent, sold before Josh had a chance to put in a bid because he was wasting time trying to get help from the Red Cross and those heartless Doctors Without Borders. He got more depressed and nearly flunked Spanish and he started eating nothing but popcorn, but several different kinds: kettle corn, white cheddar cheese corn, lightly salted with rosemary and parmesan corn (my favorite), extra-salty corn, caramel corn, air-popped and no-salt corn, and that neon orange kind they sell in huge bags for a dollar and a half but it tastes like greasy Styrofoam and turns your hands into Day-Glo monster claws.
I told Josh that he should give some of his lottery money to his mother, so that she didn’t have to sew oven mitts twelve hours a day. He looked at me strangely when I suggested this and I asked him what was the matter with helping her out?
“Let me see. For one, you can’t stop her from doing what she wants. She loves to sew as much as you should love helping orphans. And I already give her two hundred dollars a week to live with her. I thought I knew that. Wait, you thought I knew that. I mean—”
“I got it,” I said. “You really give her two hundred bucks a week? That’s a lot of money.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“That’s good. She really shouldn’t shop at Bargain Barn anymore then. Their paper towels are—”
“Like I said, I can’t stop her from doing what she wants.”
That was when I had the idea that made Josh fall for me forever, or at least that’s what he said later when he gave me a bunch of daisies and a stuffed pink bear wearing a bib that said, I HEART HONEY.
“I think you could go to an orphanage that already exists and help them get new beds and clothes and toys for the kids that already live there,” I said. “And maybe you could also bring in some new orphans through whatever network they already have in place?”
He was so excited by this idea that I thought he was going to propose. I worried about this for a few seconds because I wasn’t sure I wanted to get married. Not yet, even if I did love him. My parents were divorced. They were the kind of couple that had gotten divorced, then decided they’d made the worst mistake of their lives and got married again a few years later, only to get a divorce eight months after they’d signed the second marriage license. In my head, I thought this was like taking your car to the junkyard, selling it to the scrap metal guy, and then going back a little while later to see if it was still there and buying it back for more than the guy had paid you for it in the first place.
“That’s what I’m going to do,” he said. “You’re a genius.”
I blushed. “No one’s ever called me that before.”
He looked at me, smiling. “Well, that’s their problem, not yours.”
I blushed harder. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
I thought he looked especially handsome right then, and if I had been the type of girl who sometimes forgot to take her pill in the morning, later that day I would have gotten knocked up three times. But I never forgot to take my pill because I set an alarm in my phone, and I also didn’t think I wanted kids so I always remembered the pill, alarm or not. There were enough kids on the planet already, and as I had been learning through being with Josh, more than enough orphans to go around too.
He found an orphanage in Rogers Park, a neighborhood on the north side of Chicago. It was more than an hour away from our community college, but they had kids living there who were refugees from the wars in Africa and they were so cute and made mistakes in English that I loved. Instead of button, one of them said billion—as in, “I lost my billion in the garden!” And another one said cot instead of cat. “That’s just their accent,” said the tough nun in charge.
“But if you have a cat and a cot in the same room, how can you tell the difference?” I asked her.
She just looked at me and blinked before saying, “That’s a good question.” She didn’t go on to answer it, and later I complained about this to Josh, but he didn’t care. He was worrying that the nuns would use the money he planned to give them the next day in the form of a big green cashier’s check from his bank to buy themselves fancy salon haircuts and new Birkenstocks instead of bedsheets, yo-yos, gym shoes, Halloween costumes, and cases of coconut-and-chocolate protein bars (Josh’s favorite), along with the occasional ice cream cone and movie ticket for the Congolese kids. The orphanage was close to a convenience store and a movie theater—ice creams and Disney movies wouldn’t have been hard to get if the nuns were serious about giving their orphans these treats.
“Why don’t you give them the money in the form of gift cards to GNC, Target, Jewel, and Sears maybe?” I suggested. “That way, they can’t buy themselves haircuts at some chichi salon on Michigan Avenue, and they won’t be able to buy fancy shoes for themselves either. But Josh, I really don’t think the nuns would do that anyway.”
“Why?” he said. “Because it’s against their religion?”
I looked at him, not sure if he was joking. “That’s one reason.”
He thought over my gift card idea for what felt like a long time before shaking his head. “I can’t see myself walking into GNC, buying three thousand dollars in gift cards and doing the same thing at those other stores. They might think I’m using drug money if I come in with cash, and the next thing I know, the manager puts the cops on my tail and my mom is coming downtown to bail me out.”
“You don’t have to use cash. Just use your debit card,” I said. “Why wouldn’t you call me to bail you out instead of your mom if you got arrested?”
He made a hiccuping sound, which was his way of showing how annoyed he was. “It’s just an expression, Kim. God, chill out.”
I ignored this. “The other thing you could do is buy all the stuff you want the kids to have and give it to them in a U-Haul truck.”
“But then the nuns would know that I didn’t trust them, don’t you think?”
“Just give them the cashier’s check and be done with it,” I said, about to lose it. “You can’t control what they do after you give them the money. You’d probably be happier if you kept the money for yourself. Or else just wrote out fifty-dollar checks every week for the charities you like and give all your money away that way.”
“Jesus, this really sucks.”
“What, winning the Little Lotto?”
He rolled his eyes. “Well, yeah, what else?”
That was the problem with being a generous type like Josh, I guess. If you won the lottery, then you wanted to share all your money with the people you knew and didn’t know. I felt kind of bad for him, eating my rib-eye steak and baked potato with sour cream and chives later that night, which he was eating too but with a sad look on his face. We had gone to the bank before I made dinner and gotten the cashier’s check cut. It was worth fourteen thousand dollars, and I’d never seen so much money before, but it looked so flat, as if it were kidding, as if it were play money, but it wasn’t, and the teller kept staring at us and was probably wondering how a guy with bangs growing past his eyebrows and a girl with a palomino head tattooed on her forearm (I regretted it, which my mom said I would, but at the time, I hadn’t bel
ieved her) could have so much money and why they were making it out to the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. The teller said as he handed the big green check to us, “Don’t spend it all in one place. Ha!”
Josh just looked at him. I sort of laughed and said, “Oh, no, we won’t. We’re just giving them half the check.”
The teller blinked and probably thought I was serious because he must have thought I looked dumb. “Just kidding,” I said, and then we left, and Josh was quiet all through dinner and he kept glancing over his shoulder to where the check was now in an envelope on the kitchen counter. I had one of those black-and-white cat clocks from my grandmother, the kind with the big round eyes that roll back and forth, and it was there above the countertop, leering down at Josh and me and the nuns’ and orphans’ check.
“I just hope it helps make their lives better,” said Josh in a small voice after he’d pushed away his plate, the steak mostly eaten, the potato barely touched, only the sour cream and chives raked off the top.
“It will, Josh,” I said, feeling like I might cry. “You’re such a good person.”
“You don’t have to say that,” he said.
“I know I don’t, but it’s true.”
* * *
What happened after that, I guess some people would say, was a comeuppance or a slap in the face or else just life, plain and kind of simple, maybe. Idealistic young kids being taught a lesson by some tough nuns.
Well, we don’t know. We don’t have proof, but what happened was, Josh and I drove down to Chicago again the morning after the rib eye and the bank and gave the flat money to the nun in charge, who invited us to stay for lunch. There were about eighteen kids at the orphanage and they were all jumping up and down in the back near the garden with the seedlings the nuns had planted a couple of weeks earlier, and they were told from time to time by a little nun who was sitting in a chair watching the kids not to go near the plants because they might fall on them and crush them and then there’d be no tomatoes and cucumbers in August.
The Virginity of Famous Men Page 16