Do Not Deny Me

by Jean Thompson

  We got through our downsized Christmas well enough. We couldn’t stop noticing that there were fewer and fewer of those big gaudy energy-slurping light displays in the neighborhood.

  “A little less holiday overkill isn’t such a bad thing,” I said. I was wrapping (sensible, thrifty) gifts for our families in off-brand paper. “There’s so much excess and pressure and ostentation.”

  “Yeah. We could do like, Christmas on Walton’s Mountain. Whittle presents for each other.”

  I gave him a quick glance, but he wasn’t being snotty, just making a joke. He said, “You know, we didn’t exactly have the big happy holidays when I was a kid. Some years we just skipped Christmas.”

  “Oh honey. That’s so sad.”

  Bobby shrugged and picked up his Santa mug. We were using them for our coffee, in an effort to feel more festive. His wallowing phase was over and he was just low-grade depressed these days. I felt so bad for him, my handsome husband, the way you might feel bad for a beautiful golden retriever with a hurt paw. It was painful to see him make the circuit of the mailbox, the answering machine, the email account, with less and less expectation of any good news. It wasn’t doing anything for our sex life, either, I can tell you.

  Of course I was patient. Of course I was understanding. I wasn’t some horrible accusing-type person and I didn’t intend to become one. I kept taking my birth control pills (no matter how seldom they might be required), because I wasn’t going to trick us into a baby. Even though a baby would be the next best thing to going back in time, find that little boy Bobby had been and spoil him like crazy, give him all the Christmas presents he’d ever wanted.

  In January I said, “We could go somewhere else. Sell the house, eat the loss, move on.”

  Bobby propped himself up on one elbow from his spot on the couch. He was watching a basketball game, which was a normal enough Sunday afternoon thing to do. I never nagged him about how he spent his downtime, since I understood this would be demoralizing. The TV was never on when I got home from work, although once, picking up something that had been left on top, I couldn’t help noticing that it was still warm. Bobby said, “Go where? And do what, exactly, once we get there?”

  “Oh I don’t know. Gosh. Live on the ocean, run fishing boat charters. Go to Maine and open a bed and breakfast. Any old thing.”

  “Be our own bosses. Dance to our own tune.”

  “That’s the idea. Sure.”

  Bobby raised his chin to look out the den window at the backyard, which at this time of year wasn’t a view to lift up your heart. Sad, sad brown grass, bare and undersized trees that we’d only recently installed. “Babe, I don’t think the world lets you operate that way anymore. They got all the screws tightened down. You can’t make a move without somebody lighting on you, crossing you up. Everything you’ve ever done is in a computer somewhere, ready to be used against you. All your bad debt and preexisting conditions and anything you ever signed off on. We’re like damned cows or pigs, they figure out how much profit per pound they can get out of you. Pot roast and sausage and boil up the hooves for glue.”

  “That’s putting it a little strongly,” I said, trying to hide my alarm. “Who’s ‘they’ anyway?”

  But Bobby was through with his talking. He turned off the TV and said he was going out for awhile. I didn’t ask him where. The truth was, it was a relief not to have him underfoot every minute.

  This was about the time I began to worry about the Liberty Income Tax guys. I saw them every year, but only now did they strike me as depressing and sinister. Liberty Tax is one of those franchises, a little shop that sets up in strip malls and does a brisk walk-in business from people too confused to do their own returns. Their big gimmick is hiring guys who dress up as the Statue of Liberty and Uncle Sam to walk back and forth on the sidewalk, waving potential customers inside. It was sad, I tell you, really corny, plus they were out in all weathers, toting signs and jumping around to keep warm. The Statue of Liberty was an especially pitiful getup, a kind of green plastic shower curtain with an inflatable spiked crown that was always in the process of deflating and flopping over.

  They had a shop practically across the street from us, at the entrance to our subdivision, so that I saw them every time I came or went. I’d never paid much attention to them, except a brief, occasional opinion that it was a pretty annoying, tacky idea, then to reconsider that it might still be smart advertising for those exact same reasons. Now I wondered about the Liberty Tax guys, what kind of down-and-out person you’d have to be to hire on for such a stunt. Bums, I’d always thought, when I’d thought about them at all, bums who’d look on it as a way to get a day’s drinking money. They were often pretty rough-looking characters, what you could see of them underneath their costumes. One of the Statue of Liberty guys in particular just plodded along scowling, like he dared somebody to mock him, like he’d lived a life that equipped him to make people spit teeth. But what if they were the normal unemployed and hard-up people like our neighbors who had fallen on hard times? What if that was me, Miss Liberty, and Bobby, Uncle Sam, all pride gone, whooping it up out there on the sidewalk?

  Of course that was just where worry could bring you to, just such a foolish point. I don’t want to give the impression that I lost sleep over it or considered it an actual possibility. More like a symptom of my general dread. I spent my days at work trying to be the essential, non-fireable employee, then I came home to the limited good cheer that Bobby afforded. And the bad news of the world went on and on, with one thing or another closing down, broke, or defaulted. The stock market might go up for

  awhile—we still had some investments—but really, it was like one of those cartoon characters, Wylie Coyote, maybe, climbing a ladder, while the Road Runner chopped off the legs. It was

  as if the entire country had been turned upside down and shaken. There was something creepy about Uncle Sam and Miss Liberty prancing around, inviting you to drop what remained of your money. Come on in! Line up, sign up, we got one more bad investment for you: the American way of life!

  By now we were actively trading down. I bought groceries at the discount store, shuffling through coupons and loading up on the specials. I missed my old, ridiculously precious food store, with its fresh gnocchi and caramels with sea salt and stuffed chicken breasts, its uncrowded aisles and cheerful young clerks. Everybody at the discount grocery seemed blighted somehow. They had withered arms, or a walleye, or they overflowed the motorized carts they used to chug around the aisles. Oh, I know that wasn’t literally true, it was just me being a snob and feeling sorry for myself, and anyway, who was I to hold myself above anyone? Hadn’t I grown up on peanut butter and saltines and cans of fruit cocktail, the kind with gooseberries and maraschino cherries and those pale, pale, almost unidentifiable bits of pear?

  I didn’t want to believe that who you were was a matter of money, its presence or its lack. But maybe it was truer than I wanted to admit. Maybe I was going to look into the mirror one of these fine days and see the girl I’d always been, just equipped now with better hair and clothes: anxious about the world having room for her, not even knowing how much she didn’t know.

  There was something about the discount grocery that turned people chatty, made them initiate long, personal conversations with the checkers. “This is my third marriage,” the woman in front of me said to the turkey-necked man scanning her purchases. “Number One don’t count, and the one after that was just a mean son of a bitch. But this one now is my honey bunny.”

  Maybe they couldn’t afford counseling. Maybe it was just the lonely lives most of us lead these days, or maybe talk radio and daytime TV had done away with any silly notions about private trouble staying private. For whatever reason, I heard all about their heart attacks and their parents’ heart attacks, their knee replacements and diabetes, all the complications of their lives. It wasn’t even eavesdropping, because they weren’t just talking, they were broadcasting. “My son went into the Army and we go
t his little girl with us now because her mama run off to Arizona.” “Once we get that carburetor fixed, we’ll be in business, yeah, Camaros hold their value pretty good.” “These minute steaks? You ever try them? We had some the other night while we was waiting for the vet to call and tell us if the cat died, and he did.”

  The checkers just kept on passing groceries over the scanner, blip blip blip, and putting them in sacks. Every so often they offered a little noncommittal agreement or acknowledgment, but really, they’d heard it all before and they were going to keep hearing it. Times were tough all over. One of these days it would probably be my turn, watching the register to see that the frozen potatoes rang up correctly and confiding my domestic problems.

  We were getting close to the end of Bobby’s severance checks and still nothing had come through for him. We were going to have to make some kind of move pretty soon, get rid of one of the cars or liquidate the last of our stocks or whatever else we could do to play things out awhile longer. And I didn’t want to be the one to call the question. I wanted Bobby to make some kind of forceful decision, act the man’s part. It wasn’t good for either of us to have him so droopy and sad sack. A man is his job, often enough, and if he loses that, it just hollows him out. Women are the practical ones. We put our heads down and pull the load any way we can, and too often that load includes a man’s broody feelings.

  Then one night I came home from work and walked in to the smell of cooking, I mean real cooking, aromatic and high style, not burgers or chili or the usual supper Bobby threw together if he was in the mood. He sat me down at the dining room table and poured me out a glass of the good stuff, the like of which we hadn’t seen for some time. “What’s the occasion?” I asked.

  “A little money coming in,” he said carelessly. He darted back into the kitchen to yank a tray of stuffed mushrooms out of the broiler. “Watch it, these are hot.”

  “What money? Coming in from where?”

  “Pennies from heaven.” He made a show of pretending to burn his fingers. “Hot, hot, hot.”

  I put my glass back on its coaster. “Bobby, what’s going on?”

  “A project I’ve been working on is finally coming together.”

  “What kind of project? Bobby?”

  “Speculative. Profitable. Don’t give me that look. It’s solid. It’s idiot proof. It’s going to turn things around for us.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Can’t just yet.” He mugged at me, giving me a big wink. “Maybe later. Tonight let’s just be happy. Pretend I’m a caveman and I just brought home a dead mastodon. We’ll have meat and hides. Our cave will be warm, our tribe will prosper.”

  “Oh Bobby.”

  “What? You think I haven’t thought this through? I’ve had however many months it’s been. I’ve studied it from every angle. There’s no happy-ever-after option. I’m doing what I need to do for the both of us. So, quit asking me. You don’t need to know any details. Better you don’t. Anyway, it’s just a onetime thing, not a way of life.”

  I quit asking, and we ate our nice dinner, and that night we made love like one of us was going off to war the next day. You’d think that sex would be one of the last great free pleasures, and technically that’s true. But often enough, nothing in the bank means there’s nothing in the tank. One more way that men let things get to them. I was just glad we had the comfort of each other again, for however long that would last.

  As for Bobby’s new source of income, I saw no evil and heard no evil. There’s a sense in which I just gave up and gave in on everything. Maybe it was the long burden of worry that had worn me down. Or maybe I’d never had any real principles to begin with. Judge not lest ye be judged, is all I’d say in that regard. Call me when the same thing happens to you and we’ll swap stories.

  Of course there were occasions when, in spite of myself, I tried to fathom what Bobby was up to. I snooped around on the computer and kept an eye out for mysterious paperwork. But Bobby might as well have been one of those Godfather guys, and I was the wife who reminded him to bring home the cannoli. We just didn’t talk about it. I had my own notions. Some kind of Internet flimflam or hacking job. Bobby was always clever that way, always messing around on the computer and coming up with outlandish stuff. It really was amazing, the way computers ran everything now, and how much power they might give to the criminally inclined. Newfangled varieties of plain old-fashioned crookery. About all that was left of my morals was the hope that he wasn’t ripping off anybody who couldn’t afford it. I hoped he was targeting some big fat plum of a corporation, which I know is just as illegal but would be less personal.

  Every so often Bobby gave me cash money, one or two or five or six hundred dollars, and it was understood that I was to use it for our day-to-day expenses. Everything off the books. I assumed he kept his pockets full as well. In this way we caught up on the mortgage and even began to make some payments on our heap of debt. Now whenever I saw the Liberty Tax guys, I felt a new kind of dread. No doubt our tax returns were going to be fiddled and faddled to the nth degree.

  You can get used to most things, and so there was a space of time when I did just that. If Bobby was to mention that on such and such a day he wasn’t going to be answering his phone, and therefore not to bother calling, I said all right. If he gave me money one day and asked for it back the next, I let it go by. One night, while I was doing the dinner dishes, he leaned up against the refrigerator and said, “I took out an insurance policy today.”

  “What, another one?” He was still covered under his old work plan; we just paid for it ourselves now.

  “It’s a different kind. Here.” He was holding something small, a key. I dried my hands and took it from him, the question in my eyes. “Safe deposit box,” he said. “I wrote down everything you need to know on the wall next to the phone.”

  “I’m not happy about this, Bobby,” I said, meaning, everything. It was the closest I’d come to making objections.

  “Just a little while longer.” And that was the closest he came to any sort of explanation.

  When I look back on it, the wonder is that none of it lasted that long. It didn’t seem that way, since every day brought its full load of worries, and every hour was taken up with sorting through them and deciding which ones you could get away with ignoring. But in fact Bobby had only been a criminal mastermind for a few weeks when the wheels started coming off. It was early March, the first soft spot in the weather, with sunshine and birdsong and puddles soaking into the ground, when I walked out to my car after work and found myself the object of official attention.

  He popped up when I was still a few yards away, a puffy-looking young man in a blue sports coat and a tie like a noose. “Mrs. Crabtree?”

  He was between me and my car. I stopped right where I was. “Who wants to know?”

  He flipped open one of those badge things. “Agent Kyle Roorda, Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “Wow.” My heart was beating up in my throat, but I kept my cool. “Is there a terrorist alert or something?”

  “No, ma’am, nothing like that. I wonder if we could have a word with you.”

  “We?”

  Agent Roorda nodded in the direction of a black Town Car parked across the lot. The windshield was shiny with sun and I couldn’t see anything, but an arm was visible at rest on the open window. “Agent Tate.”

  “What about?” I was going to make him go through his whole script.

  “I was hoping we could go somewhere more private.” Agent Roorda looked a little self-conscious saying this, like he was asking me for a date. There was a patch of rash along his jaw from shaving. His eyes were a light, washed-out blue. Although he was younger than me, he might have been one of the underbred kids I used to play with growing up, the ones who had pinworms from going barefoot all summer long.

  “Well,” I said, “it would take more than a badge to make me go off somewhere with two strange men.” But I smiled, because I wanted t
o keep him off-balance. He didn’t look like a guy who got many full-bore smiles from pretty women. “Maybe you should just tell me what I can help you with.”

  Agent Roorda waited until one of my coworkers passed by on the way to her own car, giving me the scrupulous, none-of-my-business averted gaze. He said, “It concerns your husband.”

  “Bobby? Is he all right? Oh my God.” And of course I really was anxious, but I was also putting on a show of being anxious, as an Innocent Spouse.

  “There’s no emergency. Sorry to alarm you. But we’re making inquiries into some possibly fraudulent transactions.”

  “What kind of transactions?”

  I was hoping he’d tell me, because of course I really didn’t know. But Agent Roorda only blinked, as if the light was too much for his pale eyes. His jacket was too tight across the back, I could see the seams pulling beneath his arms, and his white shirt was too white and stiff, like he’d just unwrapped it from a shrink-wrapped package of three. I wondered if he’d been on the job all that long, and why I wasn’t getting a real, grown-up agent to menace me. My mind was skittering around the way it does when you’re trying not to think about what’s really happening. He said, “Mrs. Crabtree, you need to be aware that you might be implicated if we determine that your husband has been involved in any criminal activity.”

  “I haven’t done anything. And if you think Bobby has, he’s the one you should be talking to. I’m sure he could clear all this up.”

  “Our investigation,” said Agent Roorda, coloring up a little, even as his face remained impassive, “is ongoing.”

  I was figuring some things out. I said, “If you can prove something, you should go ahead and do it. But don’t put me in the middle of it.”

  “You are in the middle of it, Mrs. Crabtree, like it or not.”

  “Possibly fraudulent. That doesn’t sound real convincing.”

  “There’s ways of going right up to the edge of the law, Mrs. Crabtree. There’s people who think they’re so clever, they won’t trip up. But they always do.”