Dream Girl(65)

“What?”

“Do I need to define ‘meme’ for you, or this one in particular?”

“I know what a meme is, Thiru, I just don’t get this one.”

“I’m thinking of the one where people try to craft a message that would alert others they are in danger, while seeming neutral to their captors. You giving up paper checks—that’s darn close. If you said something rhapsodic about Wuthering Heights, I would know for sure that someone had a gun to your head. Or if I ever saw the word ‘limn’ in your work.”

Gerry laughs as best he can. The primary thing is, there will be no checks arriving, no record of his money for Aileen/Leenie to see. It has become all too clear to him that Leenie is very, very interested in money, especially his money.

She’s going to do something stupid with the purse and the phone cover, he is convinced of it.





1972




THE SHOEBOX WAS from Hess at Belvedere Square. Gerry believed he knew exactly what pair of shoes it once held. Two-toned spectator oxfords with a slight heel. His mother was vain about her feet, which were small and delicate, a size six. Whenever they went shopping for his back-to-school shoes, she usually ended up buying a pair for herself, too. How the Hess salesmen loved to wait on her. Gerry knew his mother was pretty, although he tried not to think about it. But whenever he saw her calf in the hands of a shoe salesman, he was reminded not only how pretty she was, but how she must have had her pick of men, and yet she still chose his father.

He was not looking for the shoebox, of course. Who would look for a shoebox in the pantry, behind boxes of generic pasta from the Giant? He had been looking for his mother’s secret stash of chocolate, a game of sorts. She hid her chocolate; he found it, ate a few pieces; she pretended to be outraged. Then she hid it again. He wasn’t snooping, not really. It had never occurred to him to spy on his mother. The only thing she had ever tried to keep from him was his father’s awfulness. But his father was gone, had been gone for almost two years now.

The shoebox was light, too light to hold even a dainty pair of size sixes. Curious, Gerry pulled it down from the shelf and opened it.

Envelopes with cellophane windows. Bills. Six months of bills. He didn’t know much about bills—what fourteen-year-old boy did?—but he quickly realized these were unpaid.

They don’t make money off of us. They make money off people who don’t pay their bills.

His mother had said that to him once when he was trying to understand why a simple piece of plastic could be substituted for cash, why stores would accept it. In the 1960s, there was a single Baltimore charge card, accepted by all the local department stores. He had hovered at his mother’s elbow, watched the clerk press down on it with the metal machine that looked like a stapler. It made no sense to him. All he understood was his mother’s pride at not being one of the people that the store made money from.

He was fourteen. He wanted to shove the box back on the shelf, continue to look for her chocolate. Instead, he sat at the kitchen table and made neat stacks of bills. She had been using a charge account at Graul’s from time to time; strange, because she seldom shopped at that grocery store despite it being in view of their house. She always claimed it was too expensive. But it was the kind of store that would allow customers to have charge accounts. Bills for clothes, but all for him, and not many because he wore a uniform to Gilman. The car payment. Utilities. C&P Telephone.

It was a school day, late afternoon, the sky gray, a boisterous wind whipping around the house. When his mother came through the kitchen door and saw what he was doing, she didn’t seem particularly surprised. If anything, her reaction seemed to be one of relief.

“Gerry,” she said.

“Get your checkbook, Mother. And your paystubs. I can get us out of this—and make sure it never happens again.”

He did, eventually. He worked out payment plans with those who were owed money, then created a household budget. He also got a job—at Graul’s, as a stock boy, which meant not only did he contribute money to the household, he sometimes was allowed to take home unsellable goods—badly dented cans, cans with missing labels. His mother made a game of concocting dinners from these rejects. They were not particularly good dinners, but he admired what they jokingly called her “can-do” attitude.

And every month, he sat at the kitchen table, filling out the checks and then passing them to his mother to sign. He couldn’t help noticing that his father’s name was still on the account, which worried him to no end.





April




“I GAVE UP MY APARTMENT,” Leenie says.

“What?”

“I told you I couldn’t make the rent without Victoria. Besides, you have all this space here. I told Phylloh that I would be staying here until you’re healed.” She frowns. “She asked me about Victoria. I don’t like her. I think she’s nosy.”

Gerry chills at this pronouncement. Time was, he would have agreed. Now he worries something might happen to her. Curvy, innocent Phylloh, who reminds him of a poppy seed muffin, which is something one’s not supposed to say anymore, but can he at least think it? In his aging body and his aging mind, can he allow himself the thoughts and metaphors and pronouns that were permissible when he was young? Is that so much to ask?