“Nah,” she says without looking at me. “Just Dad. And those jerks who took our stuff.”
Most of them, I think, but I don’t bother correcting her. It’s difficult liking men when you’ve been financially ruined by one of them. Two, if I count my former boss, who decided to let the female researchers go first when the funding dried up.
I realize I’m about to become one of those people, the men and women with nowhere to go except a busy street corner, hawking the only wares they have left. The problem is, there are so damned many of us. Tanya Jordan, who owns the used bookstore on Walsh Street, sits on the patch of brown grass outside the shop, a weather-beaten sign clapping its rhythm on the door behind her. It’s like a never-ending round of sarcastic applause for the bastards who got us here. Of course, Tanya Jordan threw her money into whichever shitty investments Nick happened to tout at the time.
Clap. Clap. Clap, the sign says. Nick Reynolds, take a bow!
Tanya seems not to see us as we pass. I don’t know where her partner is, and I’ve learned not to ask these questions. The answers are all starting to sound the same anyway. Went back home to her family. Got sick. Threw herself off a bridge.
At the corner where Emma’s bus used to stop, there’s Dr. Ramirez, the high school principal who sometimes plays the organ at early mass on Sundays. I’ve heard she’s good at it, even got a taste of one of her Bach toccatas when I ran by in the morning on my loop through town. My personal church of preference has always been the Starbucks, the one near the park. Four dollars and eleven cents for a latte. Make it an even five with tip.
Five dollars to waste on coffee three times a week. Pure, unadulterated luxury.
“Hi, Dr. Ramirez!” Emma calls out. “See you on Monday morning.” She’s learned to humor the principal since the crisis closed the schools. The woman has kept her nonpaying organ gig, but she’s shit out of luck as far as a steady salary goes. I think perhaps the church thing keeps her going, but just barely.
“You got a date, young lady!” she calls back. “Doors open at seven sharp. Got a letter right here from the Department of Education.” Dr. Ramirez pats her purse before going back to stretching, or practicing tai chi, or whatever she was doing.
I smile back and toss her an encouraging line. Why ruin a gal’s Saturday morning if you don’t have to?
“Do you think she really has a letter?” Emma asks. There’s zero hope in her voice.
“Do you?” I say.
“Nope.”
A few of the people we pass still have their houses. Dr. Ramirez is one—for the time being. The old couple next door, the Schafers, also seem fine; they don’t have a mortgage, and Mr. Schafer didn’t overinvest in failing state pension funds like Nick did. The Schafers haven’t come out of their brick box for a few days, at least not that I’ve seen, but the lights stay on at night in most parts of the house. You can’t see the lights from the front because of the plywood, but if you come at the house from an angle, there’s the incandescent glow of electric sun through the windows that still have glass panes.
The plywood patches—and the broken shards scattered through Mrs. Schafer’s azaleas—are a reminder of why we need to get off the streets after dusk, a Houdini-esque trick when the bank notice that arrived yesterday announced its two-day deadline for us to move out. It’s hard to take shelter in a house whose locks are about to be changed.
Mostly, I think the night people are looking for looting opportunities now that the police force is half what it used to be and the better part of the military has been deployed to the capital. But there are always other targets. Not the kind of targets that fill a belly with supper, but the kind that empty a head of its worries, at least temporarily. At seventy-five, Mrs. Schafer is an unlikely distraction. At sixteen, though, Emma is perfect. Food of a different kind for the starving sharks who walk the streets.
The last time we shopped at the Social Safeway, there were plenty of bread crumbs and Worcestershire sauce in the condiments aisle, but not a single head of romaine or Boston or iceberg. Only a hand-printed sign saying Coming soon. Thanks for your patience!
I should have planted a vegetable garden, I thought at the time.
There are potatoes in the bin today, bruised and pockmarked with rotting sprouts, and a few bags of onions I don’t know what to do with. Emma picks out two russets I’ll throw in the oven for dinner. We still have what’s left of the olive-oil spread in the fridge, and some salt. Bacon would be fantastic, but the expiration dates on it are borderline.
Anyway, after the movers came, I no longer have a frying pan for the bacon. And the bacon might be rancid.
Said the fox to the grapes.
The truth is, I can’t afford the bacon. I checked the last of my money I keep in a sweat-stained canvas belt around my waist, under my jeans. Emma and I discovered early that purses aren’t a good bet, not against a hungry man on a motorcycle. There’s room again for the money belt now that I’ve dropped ten pounds, but for a while I was worried whether I’d soon run out of clothing that fit. I thickened quickly around the middle when I was pregnant with Emma, so why should this time be different?
Don’t think about that now, Miranda. You’ve got too much other shit to think about.
Tuna, the light flake kind, is barely still in the budget, so we head to the canned fish and meat aisle, following what must be half of greater Bethesda. Ten cans go into the cart before we move on to the rice and beans. I pick beans, and an hour later it’s our turn at the checkout line.
“This is hell, isn’t it?” Emma says.
“Yeah. The ninth circle. The one with the embezzlers’ wives and the corrupt politicians.”
Three checkout guys are working today, another testament to the unspoken men-need-jobs-more-than-women-need-jobs policy. It’s like the entire glass ceiling has turned to iron.
“You’re that lady who teaches the animals how to talk, right? I saw you on TV last year,” the guy in our lane says. He’s thirtysomething with a gold band on his ring finger.
“Taught,” I say. “Really it was sign language. And only one gorilla. It’s not like I’m some twenty-first-century Dr. Dolittle.” The line behind me doesn’t look as if it wants my story.
He scans the tuna and beans and potatoes and loads them into our backpacks. “Yeah. Hard times, ma’am. You could try the Food Lion south of town. Heard they’re still open. But we’ll pull through.”
Some of us more than others, I think. But I keep my mouth shut, pay him with my dwindling supply of twenties, and move out of the way.
“You think he’s right, Mom?” Emma says. “That we’ll pull through?”
“Sure, hon. One way or another.” I help her get the backpack on. “Pack too heavy, hon?”
“Nah. I’m cool.”
She doesn’t complain much for a girl in the ripest years of the troubling teens, but her eyes are wide, a little hungry. Somewhere inside the tough exterior she fakes, she’s a scarecrow of a girl—nervous as a crow and scared shitless. I stop outside the closed doors of the grocery store, take five cans of tuna and a liter-sized bottle of cranberry juice out of her pack, and stuff them into mine before shouldering the beast again. It’s what I’ve been doing every day, lightening Emma’s load, adding a little to mine, wondering which can of tuna or beans will be the final straw, the one that breaks me.