How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater (26 page)

We both jump up and down and do a little happy dance. “I just need a signature I can forge and we're done,” he says. “Where do you suppose she keeps her canceled checks?”

I grin. “We don't need canceled checks,” I say. I wave the flashlight around the room at Dagmar's photos. Each one is signed “D. Teufel” in huge letters, like she wanted to be certain everyone knew who did them.

Natie's button eyes brighten. “Jeez, this is almost too easy,” he says. He does a few practice drafts while I relax on the floor. I lie back, gazing at a still life of moldy bread. For the first time in months I feel completely, totally at peace. I've bought myself a year, a whole year! Natie writes a check for $10,500: ten grand for Juilliard, five hundred for his commission. He leaves the rest in the account in case Dagmar writes a check.

“Now all we need to do is launder the money and we're done,” Natie says.

“Okay, explain to me what money laundering is again.”

“Jeez, Edward, didn't Al teach you anything at those business dinners?”

He's about to explain when we hear the rumble of the garage door.

“Shit, they're home!”

We frantically put the closet back together, knocking our heads together like we're Laurel and Hardy, then make a mad dash down the hall for the front door. But right as we reach the entryway the back door opens. Adrenaline soaring, I grab Natie by the scruff of the neck and pull us both behind the sofa in the furniture museum. My heart is beating so hard it feels like it's banging on my chest to get out, but I feel reasonably safe. No one ever goes in the Museum of Furniture.

I hear the click of Dagmar's spiky heels on the kitchen linoleum, followed by the sound of Al's keys as they slide across the counter. “I still don't understand what I did wrong this time,” Al says.

“Vell, if you don't know, I'm certainly not goink to tell you.”

“That makes no sense. How am I supposed to find out, then?”

“Oh, you know already.”

“No, I don't. I really don't.”

“LIAAAAR!” Dagmar screams.

I feel Natie flinch next to me. The yelling at the Nudelman's doesn't sound anything like this.

“You play tsese games to torment me!”

Al groans. “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about,” he says. “All's I said was ‘Did you have a good time tonight?' and you've been screaming at me ever since.”

“Goot time? Goot time? I'll show you a goot time.”

For a split second I worry that this little scene might be some kind of sick prelude to a noisy, angry fuck when I hear the unmistakable sound of glassware being thrown.

“What're ya' tryin' to do, kill me?” Al yells.

“No, it is you who are tryink to kill me,” she screams. “How can I create ven I am subject to your rules, your restrictions, your chudgments? I am suffocatink here! Suffocatink!”

I know how she feels.

Dagmar starts to wheeze and I hear her grab her asthma inhaler and suck in.

“You all right?” Al asks.

“Stay avay from me,” she croaks. I hear the swoop of the keys as they're lifted off the counter, then the clicking of Dagmar's heels on the linoleum.

“Where are you going now?” Al asks.

“Avay from you!” she bellows, then slams the door.

“Crazy bitch,” Al mutters.

From the garage we hear Dagmar's voice echo, “I heard tsat, azz
huuuull.”

It's quiet for a long time and I wonder what Al's doing, but I don't dare move. Finally there's the sound of crunching glass as he walks out of the kitchen and around the corner to the entry of the furniture museum. I peek between the couch and the end table and see him standing there, rocking back and forth on his heels and jingling the change in his pockets absentmindedly. He looks old to me. His shoulders sag and he sighs as he slouches over to the liquor cabinet. He pours himself a drink, straight, downs it and then pours another. Can't say I blame him. I knew Dagmar was a monster, but I hadn't realized it had come to this. Al flicks on the stereo and pulls a record off the shelf.

It's Frank, of course. “That's Life.” A good choice.

Al roams the room aimlessly, listlessly picking up various pieces of bric-a-brac and putting them down as he sings along. He begins softly at first, but as the music builds, his voice grows stronger and louder and I hear for the first time what my father's singing voice sounds like. He sounds just like me, actually, or I guess I should say I sound just like him. I had no idea. It's a warm and croony sound, and has a real vibrato. I always assumed that I got my talent from my mother, who is the creative one, so it's a real shock to realize I inherited my voice from my dad. Al gives a full Vegas-style performance, and it's really so good I almost want to applaud at the end. But when the song's over, he turns off the stereo and, shoulders sagging again, trudges out of the furniture museum and down the hallway to his bedroom.

I almost feel sorry for the guy.

The next day after school
Natie and I go to the Wallingford Public Library to do research. We have to walk there because Kelly's off in the Wagon Ho with Doug, no doubt losing her virginity, and by the time we've arrived the place is full of students pretending to work. We wander around looking for a table until we see Ziba by herself in the corner with her Jackie O sunglasses on, as if she were hiding from the paparazzi. A shaft of sunlight falls across her table from a tall library window and as we get closer I can see all the particles of dust floating in the sunbeam. Is that really what the air we breathe looks like? Disgusting. Ziba is concentrating very hard on three open volumes of encyclopedias spread out in front of her.

We put our backpacks down on the table. “Whatcha doin', Zeeb?” Natie asks.

She doesn't look up. “Trying to decide which of these articles to plagiarize for American history.”

“It's best to take a little from each,” Natie says. The voice of experience.

Ziba takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. “It's useless. There's no way Ms. Toquitz is going to believe I could write anything so dull.” She slams a book closed in frustration. “Persian culture dates back to 3,000
BC,
” she says. “As far as I'm concerned, something that happened two hundred years ago isn't history, it's gossip.” She gathers her hair in a bun and sticks a pencil in it to hold it in place. “What are you boys up to?”

I look at Natie. I'm not sure it's necessarily a good idea to tell anyone we're looking to find the name of someone our age who died as a baby so we can steal his identity.

“We're looking to find the name of someone our age who died as a baby so we can steal his identity,” Natie says.

“Oh,” Ziba says like she hears it every day, “need help?” This is what I love most about Ziba: she is completely unshockable. She treats identity theft as if it were a cool elective she couldn't get into because of a scheduling conflict.

The whole reason we're stealing an identity is so we can launder the money we're draining from Dagmar's account. I just wanted to make the check out to cash, but Natie told me we'd have to cash it at Dagmar's bank and such a large amount would immediately raise questions. By opening a bank account under an assumed identity we can deposit the check into a new account and withdraw it as cash without Dagmar being able to trace it back to us.

Now in case you've never stolen an identity, here's how it works: you comb the obituaries of your local paper from around the time of your birth and find the name of someone who died in infancy. Then you get a resourceful but unscrupulous friend like Nathan Nudelman to find out the Social Security number for you and forge a new birth certificate.

Do I have great friends or what?

Unfortunately, as the three of us sift through the microfiche of back issues of
The Towne Crier
we discover that infants don't die very often in Wallingford. After three hours of thoroughly depressing reading all we've come up with are three Vietnamese orphans and two Thalidomide babies. Despite being one of the Best Young Actors in America, I think I'm going to have a hard time convincing a bank teller that I am either Asian or three feet tall with flippers instead of arms. While Natie and I argue over the possible use of makeup and prosthetics I notice Ziba lean back from her microfiche machine and wipe a tear from her eye.

I've never seen Ziba cry before and I rush over like I'm the little Dutch boy who has to plug up the hole in the dike. I kneel down next to her and look at a microfiche of a page from
The Towne Crier
dated June 11, 1968.

“Expected to recover,” Ziba says, shaking her head. “You don't ever recover from something like that.” Her voice is heavy, like it's got the weight of the world in it.

We all have our personal sadnesses: my mom left, Paula's died, Doug's dad smacked him around, but none of us lost a whole country, a whole way of life. Ziba's family was in the south of France on holiday when the Shah was overthrown, and they suddenly found themselves exiled with whatever belongings they had brought on vacation with them. Their money was in Swiss bank accounts, but they lost everything else, not just a house and cars and furniture, but the things they could never replace, like family photos or, even more important, family itself. I can't help but feel that her sorrow runs deeper than the rest of ours.

Next to the article is a picture of a little black girl, her hair in two poofy buns on the side of her head like Minnie Mouse. It's one of those Sears shots with a fake autumnal background. Her mouth is wide open like she's laughing and she grips a small pumpkin in her pudgy arms.

“That's horrible,” I say.

“Yeah,” Natie adds from behind me, “if it had been a little boy we could have used his name.”

Ziba and I both turn to scowl at him.

“Don't look at me that way,” he says. “I didn't shoot her. I'm just saying it's too bad Edward couldn't pretend to be a twenty-year-old black woman, that's all.”

I suppose he's right in his completely cheesehead way. Except for the occasional unguarded moment when certain Diana Ross mannerisms creep in, I don't think I'd make a very convincing black woman. “So much for LaChance,” I say.

“It's pronounced
LaShaaahnce,”
Ziba says, lingering on the vowel in the French manner.

“How do you know?”

“I just do,” she says. She turns to look at the screen again. “I feel . . . I don't know . . . an almost mystical connection to this little girl.” She runs her long, tapered fingers across the screen, like she's trying to reach inside. “LaChance,” she repeats to herself. “It's almost like a poem.” She swivels around in her chair to look at me and Natie. “Why is it white people in this country never give their children such lovely names?”

The setting sun shines across Ziba's high cheekbones and her deep-set eyes, casting nearly half of her taut, cocoa face into shadow. In that light and with her hair up on her head she almost looks like Lena Horne ready to sing some sultry number in an MGM Technicolor musical.

“Why are you two looking at me like that?” she asks.

D
espite Ziba claiming her
“performing days are over,” like she's Garbo in retirement, she agrees to take a chance on LaChance. I don't know how Natie goes about getting LaChance's Social Security number and forging her birth certificate and I don't ask. All I know is that he doesn't show up at school for three whole days. I'm beginning to worry, so I call his house.

“Helloooooo?” says a voice trilling up an octave. It's Fran. For reasons known only to her, she always tries to sound British when she answers the phone.

“Hi, Mrs. Nudelman, it's Edward. Is Natie there?”

Fran puts the phone down, but not far enough. “STAN, DO YOU KNOW WHERE NATHAN IS?” she screams.

“HE SAID SOMETHING ABOUT NEEDING TO FAKE SOME LEGAL DOCUMENTS.”

Fran laughs, a rattling noise like a fork stuck in the garbage disposal. “THAT KID,” she says, then suddenly she's Julie Andrews again. “Edwaaaard? Are you still theeeere?”

“I heard,” I say. “Just tell him I called, all right?”