“Is Mara still sleeping?” I asked. Mara was about to be leaving to finish her second semester of her junior year in a few days. It was her winter break, and she had flown out from Texas to say good-bye.
Chloe shrugged, her eyes glued to the television screen, taming her emotions. “Probably.”
Mara had informed everyone the night before that she wouldn’t be waking up to say her good-bye; it would be too early in the morning for her. At the end of the night, she wrapped her arms around our father’s neck, standing on her tiptoes to say good night as if it were just another night before bed.
When I walked into the kitchen, it was filled with an eerie combination of sitcom laugh tracks and my mother hyperventilating in the background as I searched for Diet Coke. Of course, we were out.
“Bambina!” My father, beaming, came walking into the kitchen. He was still wearing his Santa hat. “Mom’s not feeling well this morning. What do you and Chloe think about taking your ol’ dad to the airport?” I knew that “not feeling well” was a euphemism for “being incapable of operating a motor vehicle because your husband is going to prison.”
“Okay, yeah. When do we need to leave?” I asked in a fog.
“We need to leave here in T-minus fifteen minutes.”
I threw on my Ugg boots and my blue Juicy jumpsuit. I walked back over to Chloe, who was still lying on the sofa and now wearing her Langley High Lacrosse sweatshirt.
“Get up, we gotta go.”
She grabbed the remote and turned off the TV.
Chloe and I waited for Dad by the front door, fumbling with our hands and staring at our feet, not saying a word to each other. We could hear our parents in the bathroom—my mother crying and a few of my father’s whispered words as he kissed her good-bye: “It’ll be okay. I love you.” I tried not to listen, as the thought repulsed me, but I couldn’t help but wonder if they talked about things like sex. I wondered if they had a conversation about whether or not they would remain faithful to each other for the next five years while my father was gone. From watching movies, I had heard about conjugal visits. I envisioned a sterile room with a single bed, guards standing outside listening, their right to intimacy now owned by the US government along with everything else.
When my father walked out of the bathroom, I turned to grab the car keys on the table, so he wouldn’t think I was eavesdropping. He was wearing khaki shorts and a white polo. When I handed him the keys, I noticed that his usual accessories were absent: he wasn’t wearing his Rolex watch, his gold wedding band, or even a belt. He appeared calm. Unemotional. Hands in his pockets.
“Ready to go, girls,” he said.
“You don’t need any luggage?” I asked.
“Your dad’s got his ID and ticket.”
“What about, like, toothpaste?”
“Don’t worry. Your dad has everything he needs.”
The sun was rising, but the rain kept the light in a faded gray, the kind prone to giving me headaches. Pacific Coast Highway was filled with panic-stricken drivers unfamiliar with how to operate their windshield wipers or drive like human beings. Chloe was curled up in the backseat, while I sat shotgun next to Dad. I looked over at the odometer, and next to it I could see that the red Check Engine light was still on. We were in the white Range Rover, and I wondered how much longer the SUV would last before we’d have to give it away because we couldn’t afford to fix it.
My father leaned over and opened the glove compartment. He pulled out his gold aviator sunglasses, still in their original case, and handed them to me.
“Here, Bambina, hold on to these for me while I’m gone.” They were his favorite pair. The pair he’d worn flying fighter jets in the air force. The pair he’d worn flying over our house when we were little.
“Yes!” I cried, making sure he knew how happy this made me. I put them on despite there not being a ray of sunshine in the sky. I glanced at myself in the side mirror and then looked over at him.
“Movie star,” he whispered, letting me know how cool I looked.
I stared at the clock as we pulled up to the curb at Delta Airlines—7:02—and watched the second hand tick by as it crushed another moment in time between us. The windshield wipers were still slapping back and forth. We hopped out, and I headed toward the back of the car before I remembered: no luggage. Dad wouldn’t be coming back next week, or the week after that, or any time soon.
He scooped up Chloe in his arms first and told her that he loved her. I couldn’t hear whether or not Chloe said she loved him back; she just wanted to get out of the rain and scurried back into the passenger seat, avoiding any kind of real good-bye, her sadness and rage lost somewhere inside of her too.
“Make sure to pick up some more Diet Coke for Mom on the way home,” my father said. He stood in front of me, neither one of us holding an umbrella.
“Okay,” I mumbled. I was fighting back tears when suddenly he kneeled down, grabbed me underneath my arms, picked me up, and twirled me around the way he used to when I was a little girl after I had fallen asleep.
“Bambina! Time for bed.” My father strolled into the family room.
“Carry me, pleeeeeease!” I begged, his little damsel in distress all snuggled up on the sofa.
“What do I need?” my father asked, puffing up his chest.
“Spinach!” I cried, cupping my hands and pretending to feed him. My father gobbled up the spinach, and his chest got bigger until he sang, “I’m Popeye the sailor man!” And picked me up in my pink feety pajamas and flew me off to bed.
“Butterfly kiss! I want a butterfly kiss!” I demanded once all tucked in. My father leaned down, brushing his lashes against my cheek before I felt it was safe enough to fall fast asleep.
“I love you,” he said, setting me down on the curb. I wasn’t ready for him to let me go.
“I love you too, Dad.”
I didn’t know how I would reach him, or when I would ever see or hear from him again. All I knew was that he was flying to a prison camp somewhere in Nevada, the same camp where Peter Bacanovic, Martha Stewart’s former stockbroker, was incarcerated. There were so many unanswered questions that filled my head, and I felt it was too late to ask a single one.
“Remember, Bambina.” My father wagged his finger at me. “The best revenge is success.”
And that was it. He turned around and walked through the automatic sliding glass doors, carrying nothing but a plane ticket. I studied him as he entered the concourse, looked left, then right, and then left again. He was figuring out which way to go. It was the first time I had ever seen him look uncertain.
-8-
Debt
My father’s shoes were dumped in a pile by the front door. Sprawled out on the sofa were his Brooks Brothers suits and ties, still hooked on hangers. The Nantucket tie with little whales on it I gave him for Father’s Day one year was on top. His underwear and white T-shirts were in another pile, while his wedding band and Rolex watch were in a Ziploc bag next to it. A half dozen boxes filled with old family photo albums were waiting there too.
“Mom?” I asked. “What is all this?” I could see her sitting at the table in the kitchen, going over paperwork.
“It’s going into storage!” she yelled back, as though my father were dead. He’d been gone only a few weeks.
I walked into the kitchen to see what she was doing. There was an open letter from LMU addressed to me on the table. I picked it up. “What’s this?”
Dear Christina,
Our bank has informed us of a check returned for “Non-Sufficient Funds.” It is the policy of our bank to resubmit checks before returning them NSF. After the second presentment your check was returned. We understand this may be an oversight on your part, and we would like to resolve it quickly.
The check amount was $9,024.99 dated December 12, 2003. We assess a $25.00 service fee to all checks returned by the bank.
Your check may be redeemed immediately by payment via cashier check, money order, cash,
Visa, or MasterCard credit card (no personal check). Please remit total amount due of $9,049.99 immediately.
Your Spring 2004 registration will be cancelled if payment is not received by January 9, 2004.
Very Truly Yours,
Collections Coordinator
Student Account Receivable
My father never finished paying my tuition. I had taken a fall leave of absence and was planning on returning for spring semester. It was the third week of January. We’d missed the cutoff. We didn’t have the funds.
“Why are you opening my mail?” I asked.
“I’m trying to fix this,” my mother said quivering, on the verge of tears.
Then I noticed two American Express cards on the table. One green. One platinum. “These have my name on them,” I said. I picked up the statements next to each. One said Christina Grace Prousalis, American Express bank statement balance of $11,994.00; the other, Christina Grace Prousalis, American Express bank statement balance of $32,617.00.
I searched frantically through the pile of documents on the table: Christina Grace Prousalis, Capital One Bank statement balance of $9,029.00. Christina Grace Prousalis, Chase Bank statement balance of $12,360.00. Christina Grace Prousalis, Chase Bank statement balance of $2,250.00. Christina Grace Prousalis, Chase Bank statement balance of $7,176.00.
I stood there, having forgotten suddenly how to breathe. “I don’t understand.” This was not debt from some reckless shopping spree, as I always had to ask Mom and Dad’s permission to use the credit card. This was debt that had been put in my name without Dad telling me—in just the last year, since the FBI arrested him.
“We’re going to take care of this.” My mother tried to compose herself. “I’m trying to figure this out, it’s just—” She burst into tears. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Your father didn’t explain any of this to me before he left.”
It never occurred to me that my mother might not know how to pay bills, read bills, read credit card statements, write checks, pay rent. And when I thought about it, I don’t ever remember her having her own checkbook. It was always “Honey, go ask your father; he writes the checks.” I assumed she would be able to take care of things once my father left. When I was growing up, she was so organized, with her updated calendars, her fountain pens, her highlighters, and her fancy Rolodex. We never missed a doctor’s appointment or a piano lesson; she organized benefits and cocktail parties.
I had always thought of my mother as an independent woman, when, in truth, she hadn’t looked at a bill in over twenty years. She was free-falling before my eyes—off the pedestal I had kept her on all my life—as she sat there in front of more unpaid doctors’ bills, health insurance bills, IRS inquiries, cell phone bills, and utility bills. The checkbook with my name on it from the Wells Fargo bank account was more than halfway used up. We were waiting on another chunk of money from Gary in Boca Raton to be wired into the account to pay next month’s rent. After that, there would be one more wire transfer. What money was left would go toward our basic needs: rent, food, gas, health insurance, and car insurance. We were doing our best to stay afloat. But all of the money I made on In Search of the Partridge Family was running out. Mara, back in Texas, was fighting to get the financial aid she needed to finish school and landed a bartending job at the local dive bar. My mother took my place at Suzanne’s stationery store in the Palisades working part-time, miserable waiting on all of those mothers whose lives reminded her of what was and what would never be again. And Spencer helped Chloe get a job at the skate shop on weekends, the trendy clothing store up the street from Suzanne’s. We might be able to use a little of the money coming in from Gary to pay off some debt, but not anywhere close to covering more than $80,000 plus interest. Working for minimum wage wouldn’t even begin to cover it.
The financial pressure turned into an unparalleled state of paralysis. Because I never knew what it was like to struggle. I never once pondered the possibility of not being provided for; I was going to be taken care of by my father. He told me I would never have to worry. I was never told how a credit card worked. It was never explained to me. I didn’t learn it in high school. I didn’t learn it my freshman year of college. I didn’t learn it by watching the news or reading any kind of story. This was my introduction into the financial world of credit cards and loans.
If I was lucky, the creditors wouldn’t call me on my cell phone. They would call the rental—those companies whose employees sounded like robots yet managed to instill the most heightened of emotions in me. They called from places named GC Services Limited Partnership, Collection Agency Division, Nationwide Credit, and Risk Management Alternatives. And the lawyers—the lawyers representing the moving company that my father used to ship everything out to California, the reason we had to open up the Wells Fargo bank account in my name to begin with—would not stop calling and threatening to sue me if I didn’t pay up.
My father left me in nearly $100,000 worth of debt and didn’t tell me before he left. I didn’t know where he was. I had no way of getting in touch with him because he was somewhere in a holding facility waiting to be transferred to his designated prison. I didn’t have an address to write him a letter. I would have to wait for him to write or call me. It could be months before I heard from him. I felt abandoned in the middle of a financial ocean where I didn’t understand anything about money, credit cards, or debt; there was so much mystery beneath it that with my initial rage, I wondered and doubted if my rage was even real. My father, before, had never betrayed me. Betrayal was a foreign feeling I couldn’t make sense of; I didn’t know if it was honest or not. I wanted only to speak with him because I believed he would tell me the truth—that only after we spoke would I know what to feel.
A few days after I discovered the debt, an unknown number called my cell phone. I was the only one home. Praying it wouldn’t be a creditor, as it usually was, I picked up. A female operator began speaking: “You have an incoming call. This call is from a federal prison. You will not be charged for this call. This call is from: Tom. To accept the call, dial five. To decline the call, dial nine.”
“Dad?”
“Bambina! Are you a movie star yet?”
“Dad!”
I was so excited to hear from him so soon that I had forgotten, for a moment, the reality of all that was happening. My father let me know quickly that our phone call would be timed. No more than fifteen minutes, and if for some reason his minutes ran out for the month, the phone call could be cut off at any point, and he wouldn’t be able to call me back until the beginning of the next month. He told me he was at a camp on an air force base, and I listened and pretended like everything was okay. He asked about Mom, and I told him that she was working at the stationery store and Chloe had found a job just down the street. He asked about my auditions, and I made it sound better than it was, to make him happy, to make him not feel so bad. A few minutes into the conversation, I mustered up the courage to ask him about all of the credit cards.
“Dad,” I said, “I’m being threatened by creditors, by lawyers of the moving company, because we haven’t paid them. I don’t know what to do.” I didn’t yell at him and was careful about expressing any rage because just hearing the words over the phone—“This call is from a federal prison”—scared me. All I could think about was how vulnerable he must feel. I had this heightened sense of empathy, where I became more worried about my father’s feelings than my own.
“Ignore them,” he said. “Don’t you worry, I will take care of everything as soon as I’m home, which will hopefully be soon. We’re filing an appeal, Bambina. It’s looking good.” He sounded so calm and sure on the phone. Yet I still didn’t understand all that was going on. I didn’t know what an appeal meant, and how could I just ignore people trying to sue me?
“And help out Mom as much as you can, Bambina. I know this is not a happy time, but it could be worse. I could go to Fallujah for a year and come home in a box. So we should thank our lucky stars.�
� He was referring to the war in Iraq. I suddenly felt guilty for bringing up the credit card debt.
“Okay, but Dad—” Beeeep! I threw the phone to the floor and grunted with frustration. He’d run out of minutes. I had to tell someone what was going on. I couldn’t handle it on my own, and my mother couldn’t either. I called Josh.
Josh and I were officially a couple. He had taken me on a date to the movies a few weeks before my father left, and by the end of the night, an unexpected outbreak of hives had me pumped with an IV full of Benadryl in the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
“Stress,” the doctor suggested when I told him I wasn’t allergic to anything but penicillin. I hadn’t taken any penicillin. He asked Josh, standing next to me, what his connection to me was, and he said, “Boyfriend. I’m her boyfriend.”
When Josh carried me out to the car, I looked at him googly eyed, drunk off Benadryl, and told him that I loved him. He knew I was having a hard time about my father by then. I had told him the truth on Halloween night. He was dressed up as Napoleon Dynamite, and I was dressed up as groupie Penny Lane from the movie Almost Famous. He wore a blond curly wig with a “Vote for Pedro” T-shirt, and I wore an old brown suede jacket of Mara’s, plus round sunglasses and a feather boa. At the end of the night, he drove me home and kissed me in the car as we listened to the Beatles’ “I Saw Her Standing There.” I tried not to ruin the moment, but I had to tell him.
“I want to tell you about my dad, but I’m afraid to,” I said.
“Christina, I grew up in Los Angeles; it’s hard to scare me.”
“He’s going to prison. He was indicted for securities fraud and was forced to enter a plea agreement with the government.” My heartbeat felt suspended in time until he responded.
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