At the far end of her desk was a picture of Celeste and Michael the weekend she visited them in Trinidad. The fog had been heavy that summer afternoon, so you really couldn’t see the craggy rocks behind them, but you got a sense of the damp air, the coast. Michael and Celeste were smiling like fools, young beautiful fools in love, Michael’s cool eyes twinkling into the camera, Celeste eight months and three weeks pregnant, breathlessly waiting, waiting, waiting.
And she’s still waiting, thought Mercy each time she saw the photograph. Celeste would die, or kill her, if she ever found this photo, which was why Mercy kept it safely on her school desk. Mercy continued to love Michael, because he had loved Celeste.
Currently there were no men in Mercy Amado’s life. At the end of the day, after organizing her desk for the next morning, then reapplying her lipstick, Mercy walked into her principal’s office. “John, I need to talk to you.” Mercy approved of her principal, John Wolfert. One, because he was attractive. And two, because he always wore a suit.
“Mercy, if it’s about the air conditioning, the district has sworn up and down it will be fixed this weekend.”
“No, John. It’s about me. I really admire you. You’ve got to know somebody.” John didn’t understand.
“Somebody, John, somebody you could fix me up with.”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh.” He swiveled sideways in his chair. “Oh.”
“Just wanted to be sure you were thinking about that,” she said. Then she went back to her classroom.
Monday night. The minute Jack stepped into the house Miriam sang out, “Dad, Mom let Becky miss school again.”
His jaw tightened. He closed the front door, shook his head, kissed Miriam’s smug face and walked upstairs without another word. He was going to talk to Becky.
Right then, Sylvia hated Miriam. She hated the cheap door Jack had walked through, the creaking stairs as he trod upwards, the cold granite counter top island where Miriam sat. They had moved to Pasadena for Jack’s law practice. Instead of ending up in a rustic Spanish, a sweet bungalow, or an imposing craftsman, Jack insisted on a new home in a gated community. Gated, for God’s sake. Was it to protect her daughters from the kind of people she herself had grown up alongside or was it to keep all the bad things inside her home from spilling out into the community?
The thin veneer of brand-spanking newness of their home swiftly rubbed off, revealing underneath the cheap materials, the haphazard design and the shoddy construction. Brand-new light fixtures didn’t work due to brand-new faulty wiring. The carpet unraveled and the kitchen countertops stained. Jack had wanted a maintenance-free, turnkey house. They had paid a mountain of money for it.
After she put the girls to bed in their rooms, she hid in the office, catching up on her Russian Lit chat group. Jack walked in.
“Why did you let Becky stay home again?”
“Her back was bothering her.”
“It’s hard enough me getting ready to go on this business trip without you destroying any shred of confidence I may have left in your skill as a mother and a homemaker.”
“So don’t go,” Sylvia said. Her eyes were fixed on the slick monitor with its bold colors. Her chat group always valued her insight into Babel or Gogol or Bukanin.
“What?”
“I told you,” Sylvia said, turning around to face him. He wore blue silk boxers. His chest muscles were well-defined and lightly covered with brown hair. She didn’t remember the boxers, but he was as fastidious about his dress at night as he was in the day. She had found it rather charming after all the grungy guys she had dated, hung around, then slept with. Jack was different. Jack was crisp and clean and smooth. Look at him, she thought. Even his pajamas sing money.
“Don’t start,” Jack said.
“I told you, you want the kids raised a certain way, you stay at home and raise them. No more arguments.” Sylvia smiled. She tried to make it as pleasant as possible.
“The problem with that, Sylvia, is that you don’t earn a red cent. You haven’t worked in eight years. You don’t make those decisions.”
“I make the decisions that affect my children in this house. And, if you’re going to second guess me every day, I’ll…” she faltered.
“You’ll what?” Just a slight raise of the eyebrows. Sylvia knew that look. “Hmmm? You want to tell me what you’ll do?”
At that moment Sylvia hated only one person more than Jack: herself, for not being able to find a way out of this. Not a way that she could live with.
Jack closed the door behind him. The steps creaked as he made his way upstairs. He was leaving tomorrow for New York, some kind of merger/arbitration/litigation/who the hell gave a shit. Sylvia stopped listening.
After a moment, she actually felt quite calm, almost happy. Jack would be gone for two weeks. That gave her plenty of time to figure out her next step. Wasn’t there a Chekhov story like that? She tapped in her question.
At the end of the day, Celeste drove to her townhome, started boiling water for the pasta she would make, then opened a bottle of wine. Pinot Noir. Oregon.
Over a bowl of pasta, she opened her laptop and ran through her own accounts online. The mortgage balance was dropping nicely—the savings, the retirement, the mutual funds, the emergency funds, all accruing at the rate she had anticipated, some even higher.
But that’s how it should be. No use having a financial planner who can’t make her own money grow. Just to spice up the emotional component, Celeste had invested in something she never recommended to her clients unless they had a tolerance for risk as well as the financial capacity to lose money—a high risk investment. This one was a telecom in Ecuador.
When it quadrupled, Celeste sold half. When it next doubled, she sold half again. Now she held on to it just to see how low it could go.
Celeste logged off. No elation, no guilt. Not even a sense of accomplishment. Just another item to cross off her list. The charitable giving that she preached to her clients manifested in her own life through monthly automatic deductions. Her returns were higher than she anticipated, so now she wrote out a number of checks, little bonuses to Save the Children, World Vision, and Doctors Without Borders. Little bonuses to the masses of people living on such a mean scale of pain and desperation that it was almost, but not quite, incomprehensible to Celeste.
Celeste had heard Oprah say, “It’s not about writing a check, it’s about touching someone else’s life.”
“No, my dear Oprah,” Celeste said out loud, “Now there you’re wrong.” It is about writing a check. It’s quick, clean, simple and easy. As long as you have the money in the bank to back it up, it’s easy to give money, but it’s hard to give of yourself.
Herself, she had conserved for her family. Where had that gotten her?—Nataly cursing at her.
Well, there was no point in thinking about that now. Celeste poured more wine. Nataly, what did she know? How long would everyone let her be a thirty-two-year-old kid? How long would everyone pretend there was actually a future in stitching remnants of material together and labeling it as some kind of lofty art?
During college, Celeste had brought up the topic of socking something away for retirement. Celeste mentioned compound interest. Nataly had looked blankly at her, yawned and changed the subject. Why did that irritate her so much?
Because, for Christ’s sake, if she had yawned when Nataly was explaining the theory behind her tactile installation pieces, Nataly would have savaged her. Nataly was an artist, after all, something beyond the comprehension of practical-minded Celeste,