Domestic Affairs (12 page)

Of course the first thing I did was make a call to the city, postponing the interview until the following week. Then I called Steve, back at the house, and told him not to worry. I was so cold from being out in the storm that I unpacked my flannel nightgown and Charlie’s sleeper suit and, even though it wasn’t yet four o’clock in the afternoon, put them on. Then we made a pile of books next to our bed, climbed under the covers, and read every one.

We played tic-tac-toe. We did dot-to-dots. We colored. We took a bath. We sang “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” The motel had an indoor pool, and I, miraculously, had packed a body suit that could pass for a bathing suit, so I went for a swim while Charlie jogged around the pool, calling and waving to me and hiding behind the artificial potted palms. Back in the room, I got into my warm clothes again and ordered a chicken dinner from room service. We set up our food cart in front of the big color TV and watched a couple of shows before drifting off to sleep as the snow piled higher and higher outside our window. Out on the highway, hardly a car passed by. It felt as if the world had stopped.

The next morning I woke early to Charlie bouncing on the king-sized bed. Pulling back the curtains. I could see our car out in the parking lot, completely buried in snow and ice. But the sun was shining. Plows were moving. We’d be out in an hour or two.

We turned on the
Today
show and saw the child-development expert I was supposed to interview the day before, talking about the problems of working parents. We got dressed and headed for the motel restaurant, where we ate French toast and picked up our paper placemats as souvenirs of our trip. We packed our bags, stuffing in a couple of those individually wrapped soaps for Audrey and a postcard of Keene. We paid our bill and headed out to shovel the snow off the car. We were home in time for lunch.

I
N MY YEARS OF
parenthood I’ve given a good deal of thought to the issue of children and money. I’m not speaking, here, of those depressing figures one encounters, periodically, that tell what it costs to raise a child these days—figures that (if I’m to take them seriously) leave Steve and me, with our three kids, about a million dollars short. And that’s not even counting where we’ll stand if even one of them turns out to have an overbite.

What I’m speaking of is how a parent goes about teaching her children (as our Depression-educated parents used to put it) the value of a dollar. About money in general—what it is and where it comes from, where it goes, and most of all, the appropriate attitude with which to regard it. That you shouldn’t love it, can’t hate it. Have to respect it, mustn’t worship it. Not to squander or hoard it. And really, this money-explaining business makes communicating the facts about sex or religion or the electoral college system seem pretty elementary.

A child’s earliest relationship with money is oral. Around the age of twelve months (but of course mine were precocious) they start putting coins in their mouths. Now Willy likes to put pennies in his big sister’s bank, counting as he goes (one, four, seven, two, nine …). He has been known to tap me on the head at three in the morning with the sweetly voiced request, “Penny please, Mom.” And in his rowdier moments, to tear through the house yelling at top volume, “Five dollars. Five dollars. Five dollars.” It doesn’t take long, clearly, for a child to grasp the idea that these are powerful words.

But where Charlie and Willy remain happy with any coin, Audrey has learned about the deceptive value (given their relative size) of a dime over a nickel. Her greatest reverence she reserves for paper currency. And when, once, she observed me bent over a stack of bills, in tears, she hustled off to her room and came back a few minutes later to shower me with a pile of hand-colored tens, twenties, and fifties, all bearing presidential-looking profiles. If money can’t buy happiness, she’s learned, it can at least cheer a person up.

I won’t attempt, here, to fully dissect the bizarre anatomy of this particular family’s finances. Steve and I—who haven’t had a single employer or a weekly paycheck in our seven years of marriage—collect our dollars pretty haphazardly. Every now and then they rain down on us, and (never sure how long they’ll have to last us) we may buy three lobsters or a car, or fly off to the Bahamas. And then there comes a drought, and the next thing you know I’m setting up a tableful of our possessions at the town flea market. Whatever the current state of our affairs, however, they are not typical or stable. Watching a local news segment, we can only laugh nervously as the money expert offers advice on a family’s life and health coverage (and pronounces them, with only a hundred thousand dollars’ worth, underinsured). We work very hard at providing our children with a happy and stable home, at being parents they can rely on. But as for owning a piece of the rock—well, the best we can offer is shifting sands.

Of course our own hard times have no real similarity to the poverty of, for instance, a babysitter we had once, who—at age twenty-two—got all her teeth pulled because she couldn’t afford fillings. For us there has always been an end in sight, the promise of a check in the mail, no fear of being cold or hungry. We don’t let our children entertain the notion that doing without new shoes or this months
Sesame Street Magazine
has anything to do with hardship. Still, it certainly hasn’t hurt them to get the sense, during our leaner times, that my wallet isn’t bottomless, that the bank is not some magical place whose windows one can drive up to anytime (in a car whose gas tank is perpetually full), with a cash drawer forever open and a fat envelope of bills always inside.

Partly because of the intermittent instability of our situation (and also, I think, because this is a universal fascination), Audrey is close to being obsessed with the theme of rich people and poor ones. When Audrey plays with her Barbies, the rich girl, in the evening gown and fur stole, is usually mean and speaks in a vain, cruel voice, while the poor one is sweet and humble. To Audrey, rich means having a house with several bathrooms. And having grasped the meaning of wealth, she’s wasting no time in passing on the news to Charlie. A recent lesson at the school she periodically runs, which he has little choice but to attend, was titled “How to Draw a Rich Girl.” (With lots of frills on her skirt, and smiling broadly, that’s how.)

Like parents everywhere, we hold forth regularly (when Audrey’s making faces over her asparagus and requesting that the crusts be cut off her toast, when she pours the leftover milk from her cereal down the drain) on the hungry children who would give anything for that milk and those crusts. Audrey’s comprehension seems to come and go: I have found her feeding steak to our dog Ron, but also, as she stands at the edge of the giant sand pit that serves as our town dump, throwing away school worksheets and musing on how lucky it is that she did them in pencil, because some poor little girl who can’t afford to go to school could pick them out and erase the answers and do the work all over again.

What else are my children learning about money? The concept of inflation seemed to come naturally: At a recent art show held in her bedroom, Audrey’s pictures started out with price tags of one and two cents, but when (with her father, brothers, and me as customers) they started going like hotcakes, she began crossing out prices, upping them to ten cents, even thirty, as fast as we could hand over our coins.

Audrey is, at least, getting the idea that spending involves making choices and sacrifices, that if I buy her a new blouse, she won’t be getting a turtleneck. We’ve tried to teach her about doing jobs to earn money and about saving it, too. (Like me, Audrey has frequently sold one possession to get the money for a different one, and like me, she maintains a strong appreciation for thrift shops and Salvation Army stores. Her most beloved outfit is a very fancy white organdy communion dress, only a couple of sizes too large, that we found at a yard sale—although she wears it seldom, for fear of appearing rich.)

I try, all the time, but pretty lamely, to make sense of the world for our children: Explaining the nightly news to Audrey as best I can during the commercials. Reducing to a six-year-old’s terms the idea of money for defense versus a nuclear freeze. Playing a car game: Which costs more, a house or a hundred Barbies? a visit to the dentist or a trip to McDonald’s? But I know that, as much information as my husband and I give our kids, the world of finance and economy makes little sense—must seem more than a little surreal, even. We have a two-year-old son who, at the mention of Jesse Jackson, starts dancing wildly around the room and singing “Beat It” or “Thriller.” We have a daughter who believed, after my wallet was stolen in New York last fall, that now we’d be poor. And here am I, trying to untangle things for them, while our checking account stands mysteriously overdrawn again, with our projected monthly budget looking good until the realization hits that we’ve forgotten to allocate money for food.

One of the biggest discount stores in our area was going out of business—every item marked down 50 percent. Now I bet I’ve made about five hundred trips to this particular store over the last ten years—handed over a couple of thousand dollars, for probably a ton of bobby pins, curtain rods, beach balls, and jumper cables. So it seemed necessary to pay (literally) my last respects.

The place had been pretty well stripped by the time I got there, with half of what was left broken or dirty, and heaped on the floor. The snack bar, where I had hoped to purchase Charlie’s tranquility with a bag of popcorn, was closed down, looking like Pompeii at the moment the volcano erupted, with grape soda still percolating in a cooler and coffee cups on the counter. No time for coffee anyway. Shoppers were racing ahead of us, cleaning out all the most popular bra sizes, stripping the shelves of shampoo and vacuum-cleaner bags and batteries. The speakers that used to pipe gentle organ music in my ears were transmitting urgent messages, meanwhile—like an emergency broadcast system during a wartime air raid, notifying shoppers of additional markdowns (“hurry, hurry!”) and reminding us that soon the doors would close forever. I picked up my pace and flung a pair of crew socks into my cart for my husband, hitting Charlie on the head by mistake. We were off and running.

There is a danger, at an event like this one, of confusing the end of this particular store with the end of civilization in general. You begin to feel as if this were your last chance ever to buy anything. So you get four lipsticks, and enough photograph albums to see your infant son through high school graduation. I bought sneakers for my three children’s next three sizes, and, for Steve, five packages of underwear and (an impulse from somewhere out in left field) a set of car seat covers.

Charlie was pretty quick to pick up the tone of the event. Having rejected the seat in my shopping cart designed for children in favor of the deep basket section of the cart, he stood, as if at the prow of the ship, facing out to survey the ocean of merchandise before him. Sometimes he’d reel in a string of Christmas lights or grab a stuffed animal by the tail. In the shoe department he hauled in a whole clump of tangled together fuzzy bedroom slippers. His diaper had come undone and was hanging down one pant leg; he had appropriated a hat, and he was waving to people as if he were running for office. I had never seen the particular crazed look that appeared on his face when, after I let him down from the cart for a moment, he clutched a bag of sponges and began to spin in circles, singing “Beat It.” Even after I picked him up and was walking briskly down the aisle with my son under my arm like a rolled-up newspaper, to regain my cart, he still kept reaching out hopefully for kitchen spatulas and panty hose. And of course I know where he acquired the tendency. As I loaded my bags into the trunk of our car, I couldn’t even remember, anymore, what it was I’d bought.

The morning after our excursion to the going-out-of-business sale I spread my purchases out on the bed to show Steve. The crew socks were terrific, he said, but they were women’s socks. The top of the blender was great, and so was the bottom. They did not, unfortunately, go together. Boxer shorts, when taken out of the package, turned out to be the kind of underwear that certain very corny comedians are discovered to wear when their pants fall down on stage. Steve informed me that he does not wear this type of shorts, but if he ever decides to join the circus he’s all set, with nine pair. By the time I brought out the car seat covers we were both expecting the worst. The covers were intended, of course, for bucket seats. But who knows, someday we may buy a car like that.

Though the store had announced a policy of Positively No Returns or Exchanges (and did not seem at all touched to hear of what a devoted longtime customer I had been), a few days later I was able, after making the thirty-mile trip once more, to replace my two half-blenders with a fancy reel for Steve’s fishing rod. When I got home, he looked at it with interest and said he has been meaning to learn how to fly cast, and maybe in a few years he’d get the hang of it.

This morning Steve stopped at our local clothing store—just for a minute—and bought a complete wardrobe of underwear. He said he would’ve looked for a sale, but he didn’t think we could afford one.

The ice show was in town. Not in our town, of course (we had a circus with a couple of performing dogs one time, and that’s been about it), but in the nearest big city, a hundred miles south of where we live. We thought we’d take the children.

Steve took Audrey to see this particular ice show several years ago, a couple of weeks before the birth of Charlie. Audrey was four then. Tickets cost a lot, but she’d never seen an extravaganza like that—all that glitter, those feathers, the sparkling lights, the twirling skaters in their ruffled skirts—and we knew she’d love it.

Audrey and Steve got home late that evening, after the long drive home, but she wouldn’t go to bed until we’d studied every page of her souvenir program. She explained to me—with only the faintest wistfulness—that some kids got these special flashlights, with Mickey Mouse ears, and when the house lights were turned out for the show to begin, all those kids turned their flashlights on and spun them around. But if you got the light, you didn’t get the program, and the program was better.