College fund, new front yard, a year of unmolested time to work on comics. Driving back to campus, I would forget the number, then remember it again. A few seconds would pass, then it would come back, along with everything I could do with it. I would play with the number, subtract all or part of our credit card debt, another five figures laid out in horrifying installments to the IRS, other unpleasant amounts to the bank and my mother-in-law and whoever had signed the note on my car.
I wasn’t sure whether to be afraid. On the highway, drivers in cars going the opposite way looked worried, too. The world was the same for them. They feared rain, they feared life. I tried Robin. She didn’t pick up. I called Adam. He was afraid, couldn’t sleep, had planned to do the principled thing and quit, but hadn’t quit yet because he had three kids and no one else had offered him a job. We wondered if there would be more cuts, but the damage was done. Everybody good had left. Eventually we discussed my next assignments. We agreed that the future looked terrible, and then I hung up and didn’t worry about his sorry ass anymore.
I made a list in my head of a dozen former colleagues in advertising. I would send them chatty notes. I’d give my former publisher a call. “Hey, asshole, thanks for giving up on me,” I’d say. “I’m back from the dead.” I’d send him new pages in a month or two. I needed to register on a job board for teachers in fine arts, graphic design, illustration, and cartooning. I needed to write a letter of interest and dust off my CV.
I called my parents. My dad had been answering the phone since he’d retired, but I still wasn’t used to it. Of course I only ever called to talk to her, but she was out. He liked to start in the middle of a sentence, as if I had just watched an instant replay of his morning and had called to hear the follow-up on the latest rash between his toes or a dead bat in the attic. Maybe if I’d taken the money and could give my parents $75,000 I would’ve felt different, but I felt the same, suffocated by adult burdens, amazed and enraged after almost two decades of this feeling that no one had warned me about how hard it would be. He’d spent his morning raking heaps of algae out of his friend’s scuzzy pond, to use as fertilizer in his garden. His elbow hurt, but he’d saved a couple hundred bucks. He offered an update on his macular degeneration, and how much that bastard charged for eyedrops, and the sixty-eight-dollar co-pay. Then he waxed poetic about the benefits to his intestines of unsweetened cranberry juice with a teaspoon of lecithin granules. He talked to me now the way he’d always talked to her, offering a kind of inventory that I tried to discourage.
Bioflavonoids, grapefruit, wheatgrass, ginger.
I think that at least half the world grows up with a parent who’s scary and a little nuts, and he’d been mine, and I forgave him a long time ago, but I didn’t want to hear about his granules, I didn’t want to be his friend through this next phase of degeneration, and I sure as hell didn’t want to be his wife.
“I love you, Dad.”
“Give those kids a kiss from us,” he said. “Tell ’em we’re nuts about ’em.” When he let me go, I felt worse. We were a defective bloodline, destined, blighted; my fears had been confirmed.
I kept drifting back to the beautiful discovery in the teacup and the conditions under which the earrings had been lost. I was meant to take by other means what ordinary life had withheld. But I couldn’t do it. A quiet descended, a simple and damning quiet of living within my means. I’d ended up right where I belonged, and it was looking to be a bad rest of my life. Amy was the one who’d earned those things. She’d lived through brutality. She had paid.
Fog had come in and covered the town, and I parked on campus and walked down Main Street. A fine, warm rain blew sideways, right into my open mouth, the bay at high tide, waves washing into the street, big puddles everywhere, people taking cover on the steps of town hall. I went into the post office and stuck her earrings in a box. The line snaked around the lobby. It didn’t seem to be moving. The woman in front of me wore a waitress apron and tapped her phone. A wet, smelly dog with sandy feet who didn’t seem to belong to anyone trotted into the lobby and shook himself, prompting obscenities. I called to him, and held open the back door, and on second thought followed him out. He cut between the post office and a motel on a soggy path to the beach. He watched me, ready to play fetch. I ripped the earrings out of the box and threw them into the bay.
A little farther down Main Street, someone had laid rubber floor mats in the doorway of the hardware store. People pushed in and out. Two little boys bought stickers for their skateboards, and a girl behind the counter patiently unrolled their wet money, three dollars, flattening the bills.
I went into stores, touching all the things I couldn’t afford, waving at clerks, requesting information. I sat in furniture, smelled genuine leather. A small boy walked past me carrying a turtle. He held it gently by the edges of its shell, beaming, delighted.
The money was like a noxious cloud. It wouldn’t let me breathe. I keep thinking of what I should’ve done with it. I went back to Stoler’s Jewelry. They greeted me warmly. We were old friends. I sheepishly placed three wire bracelets on the counter, thin pieces of junk for sixty-five dollars, for Robin, paid, and walked out to the beach again and stared at the bay, yanked off my shirt and ran out there in my sneakers, thrashing around in the dark green water, grabbing handfuls of hard sandy bottom, then quit, grieving, and slapped myself dry. I went into a children’s store and calmed down, and bought a rubber alligator for Beanie and a pack of hair bows for Kaya. My soaking-wet sneakers made clown farts.
Back on campus, I stood in the lobby of the main building, listening to Carl, a puddle forming at my feet. The whole conference was still buzzing from last night’s slide talk, he said, most of what comes along is just filler, great work is rare, but blah blah. It was clear that he’d hired Solito without having seen even a page of his work, saw it for the first time yesterday. In six years, Carl had never asked me to give a slide talk on my own work at this fucking conference, although my first year here I’d given a lecture on the history of comics, starting with the cave paintings of Lascaux, the Codex Mendoza, and Commodore Perry’s arrival in Japan with Punch cartoons; eleven people had shown up. When he noticed that I had nothing to add, he pulled an envelope from a wad of them in his binder.
“In case I don’t see you tomorrow,” he said. It was my check, $2,750. After all these years, he’d given me a raise.
I sat on the porch at the back of the main building in a wicker love seat, looking out at the flagpole in the rain. Kaya picked up, sounding normal, a credit to the supernatural healing powers of a four-year-old kid. I didn’t interrupt as she let go a partly understandable solid wall of words. Something about Sammy, a cross-eyed three-year-old from camp, and Rigby, a boy who never smiled and chased her around with a territorial scowl, and Molly, who told her there were “witches in our country.”
“There are no witches, honey.”
“If you see a witch, you gotta chop off da head.”
“Did Molly tell you that?”
“Yah. Do you know dat spiderwebs can trap your hands?”