Julie and Romeo Get Lucky (14 page)

“Can I even tell you how much I miss coffee?” she said.

“I can't even imagine it. Back when I was pregnant we didn't have to give anything up, we just had to cut back a little: two glasses of wine, ten cigarettes a day. Coffee was essentially considered to be dark tap water.”

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” She drank her water down in one long gulp and handed me back the glass. “Thank you.”

“I'll get your breakfast.”

“Wait, tell me how Romeo is. Should I call him?”

“I'd wait until tomorrow. I don't think he's going to be answering the phone today. He's pretty bad off.”

“And the littlest Rockefeller?”

“Already gone to school.”

“I can see it now: Sarah gets elected homecoming queen and captain of the basketball team and the cheerleading team and student body president, while all of her new little friends line up at the door to see if we give cash advances against allowances.”

“Except that Sandy told both of the kids not to tell anyone about it.”

“Sarah told every kid in school she was going to win the lottery. Do you really think she's not going to tell them, now that she actually has?”

“I'm just hoping that Sandy was sufficiently threatening to at least hold her off for a couple of days. I don't have any idea how Sandy's going to handle this, and Sandy seems to think it should be my decision since I'm the one who bought the ticket.”

“What's there to handle?” Nora asked.

I sat down on the edge of the hospital bed. “Where to begin? Do we just put it all in a trust and give it to her when she's eighteen? Do we give it to her when she's thirty? Do we give her a little bit now? I have no idea. This wasn't a problem I had when you and your sister were growing up.”

“You're really thinking we should just turn all the money over to Sarah?”

It was clearly a trick question, but I still wasn't getting it. “It's her money.”

“So Sarah gets to go to Princeton and have a dorm named after her, and Little Tony goes to community college, works at Dunkin' Donuts, and lives at home?”

“I'm sure Sarah would help…” I said, but the words were not completely convincing even as they were coming out of my own mouth.

Nora lowered her eyebrows at me. “I know this is politically incorrect of me to point out, but Sandy and Big Tony are in fact poor people. They are smart people and kind people, but they have the financial planning abilities of goldfish. Big Tony's in school and wants to stay in for more school. I doubt that after his years in the Peace Corps and the World Health Organization he's earned more than sixty thousand dollars sum total over the course of his life. Sandy is still paying off the credit card bills she racked up in her first marriage. The only thing that keeps them from living in a one-bedroom apartment in Roxbury is you, and you're not exactly loaded yourself.”

Nora was never one to beat around the bush.

“Little Tony, being a poor kid, is basically fine in this family dynamic, but now Sarah is a rich kid, and that changes everything. A rich kid cannot be raised by poor parents.”

“You make it sound like she's going to be slicing truffles on her Cheerios in the morning while the rest of the family sits there sharing a piece of toast.”

“It's not an entirely unlikely scenario. If she has all the money, she also winds up with all the power, and too much power never brought out the best in anybody, especially a strong-willed child. Why is she going to let Sandy tell her what to do if Sandy is poor?”

“Because she's her mother.”

“In case you haven't noticed, that in and of itself is not enough to make a child listen.”

“So how do you suggest we solve this problem?”

“It's perfectly clear: You give the money to all of them.”

“But it's Sarah's ticket. How can we just decide arbitrarily to take it away from her?”

Nora shook her head. She was trying to exercise patience with me, but it was early, and she hadn't had any coffee. “There's nothing arbitrary about it. You, as the adult, are making the decision that will best protect the child—and this child will be best protected by not having things get completely out of whack in her family. They should buy a house, Tony should go to medical school, Sandy should buy a real car, both of the kids should have cello lessons and tennis lessons, and if they want to go to private schools, well, that's what money is for.”

“You're making something that's very complicated sound very easy.” I straightened up the covers and reached over and pushed the hair out of her eyes. “I appreciate that.”

Nora smiled at me. “You're a really decent person, Mother. You have a big heart, and you always want to be fair. But families aren't democracies. You don't make your children feel good by giving them a fair say. You make your children feel good by protecting their better interests, regardless of what they want. What if Sarah wanted to spend seven and a half million on Pez?”

“Romeo said Barbies.”

“You'd stop her. Tell me you'd stop her.”

Maybe certain things skipped generations. Maybe Nora would turn out like my mother. She would never pick up a hula hoop; she would stand back and be distant and wise while her children came to my house to roll around on the floor with me like a pack of puppies.

“Help me up,” Nora said. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

Nora went to the bathroom a lot. She was allowed only the briefest trips out of bed, and every time her feet touched the floor, she teetered like a sailor who was standing on dry land for the first time in years. She could make it by herself, but she liked it when I held her hand and walked her all the way to the door.

I wondered about my mother. I know she would have done this for me, I know she would have taken care of me had I shown up at forty with an incompetent cervix that was trying to hold back triplets, but I don't know that I would have been able to ask her to hold my hand on the way to the bathroom, not when both of us knew I could have made it on my own. So maybe there wasn't one right way to be a mother. Maybe something about my sloppy, indulgent love had done some good.

I waited outside the door for Nora and walked her back to bed, then helped her get comfortable. “I'll wash your hair this morning,” I said. “We'll get you a little bath while everybody's gone, then you'll be all straightened up again.”

But Nora wasn't listening to me. When I looked at her, she had tears in her eyes. “What's wrong?” I said. “Does something hurt?”

She shook her head and put her hands on her belly. “I just hate getting up, is all. Every time I get up, I'm so afraid I'm going to lose them.”

W
ITHIN A WEEK OF WINNING
, S
ARAH HAD DISCOVERED
the Post-it note. She now made notes to herself about everything. After school, she immediately sat down with the massive stacks of catalogs that found their way into our house every day and marked all the items she was interested in.
I WANT THIS
she would write, then stick the note on the page. She preferred to write in red crayon or fat blue Magic Marker, and what with all the capital letters and various-sized exclamation points, she got her message across. Sometimes she managed to put a yellow sticky on every page so that the catalogs were thick and wouldn't stack properly.

“You want sterling silver napkin rings?” I asked.

“My dolls can wear them as bracelets,” she said. “You can get them monogrammed, too, but I'm going to put my initials on them, not the dolls, so I can use them for napkins when I grow up.”

“Very canny.” I kept flipping through. She wanted a chrome blender and heart-shaped cake pans and a Tiffany watch and patio furniture, despite the fact we had no patio.

“We will,” she said cryptically.

“Men's shoes?”

“Those are for Romeo.”

“That's thoughtful.” I didn't tell her that Romeo wasn't a tassel sort of guy; what counted was the thought.

Catalogs, of course, can only offer a limited amount of what a girl wants. So Sarah took notes while she watched television, too. She wrote down all the things she was interested in having on the commercials—the Easy-Bake Oven, a Mac computer in orange—but she also jotted down the random things she saw on shows that caught her fancy: a red couch, a blue car. One note said simply: high-heeled shoes. These notes she would leave on the refrigerator next to the grocery list. Soon they were layered like shingles. She put them on every door in the house as gentle reminders of her every desire. What impressed me the most was what a good speller she was.

“This is full-on insanity,” Sandy said, when Sarah presented her with a stack of catalogs the minute she walked in the door from work. “Do you think I'm going to sit down and order all of this for you just because you want it? You don't even have the money yet.”

“Keep a list,” Sarah said. “I'll pay you back.”

“You won't pay me back because you can't have it. Even if you could afford it, I'm not going to just let you have everything you want.” She slapped her hand down on the stack of catalogs, and they slid awkwardly to one side. “I did not raise you to be spoiled.”

“There's plenty of stuff in there I'm going to buy for you,” Sarah said, but I felt like the word
maybe
was lingering in the air, as in,
Maybe if you're good.

“Go play with Aunt Nora,” Sandy said darkly.

Sarah sighed the way rich people sigh when they talk about how hard it is to find good help these days.

“And you need to feed Oompah-Loompah and clean out her box. You haven't been taking care of her at all.”

“Tony can feed her.”

“She's your cat. You promised me that if I let you have a cat, you'd take care of her.”

“When the money comes in, I'll hire someone for Oompah,” she said. Then she fixed Nora a Pellegrino, twisted a piece of lime into the glass, and pushed out through the kitchen door.

“A cat nanny,” I said.

“This could be an incredible gift,” Sandy said, flipping randomly through the marked items. “God is giving us a glimpse of the future. There's still time to throw the ticket away.” She pointed to a glossy catalog page. “Look, she wants a mink bedspread.”

“I don't think getting rid of the ticket is the answer.”

“She wants luggage. She's even marked the color. She's eight, where's she going to go?”

“This is just some bizarre aberration. It's like letting a child into a chocolate factory.”

Then Sandy and I looked at each other, and we broke up laughing.

For three days we held the line. It was a raging battle in which we neither progressed forward nor did we fall back. Sarah continued to submit her list of demands, and we continued to explain to her with varying degrees of patience why it just wasn't going to happen. Nora talked to Alex about the tax consequences, Sandy talked to Tony about the emotional consequences, I talked to Romeo about the possibility that someday there might be fewer people living in the house.

“I can see Sarah buying one of those big old four-stories in Cambridge, but I doubt she'd take her family with her,” Romeo said. “So it might not thin out the traffic around here as much as you'd think.”

No one knew what we were supposed to do. The only thing we could all agree on was the fact that until we could agree on something, we shouldn't tell anyone about what had happened. I had always hated that scene in
Wonka
when Charlie first discovers he's found the last golden ticket. He gets mobbed on the street, people are all over the kid, and he's trying to protect his find by holding it up over his head, which is kind of silly, considering that he's a child surrounded by tall adults. It's amazing that someone didn't just rip it out of his hands and make a run for it.

As for me, I held on to the ticket until one day I spent an hour going through my pockets looking for it. I had a load of laundry in the washer, and I imagined Mass Millions going around and around in the hot, soapy water until every number had loosened its hold on the paper. I thought I would have to go to the emergency room with heart palpitations, when I finally found it in an old cardigan I had taken off and put back in the closet. That's when I called Gloria to come over and get me. My hands were shaking too much to drive.

“You're calling me for a ride to the bank?” she said.

“I need to visit the safety-deposit box. I'll tell you all about it when you get here.”

Half an hour later I found Gloria sitting up on Nora's hospital bed, discussing the logistics of breast-feeding triplets.

“Give up now,” Gloria said. “Before you start it. Give it up before you even really think about it too much.”

“Other people have done it,” Nora said. “I didn't invent the idea.”

“No, but you can put a stop to it.” She shuddered. “Do you want us to bring you anything weird, peanut butter ice cream maybe?”

Nora suddenly lit up like the North Star. “That sounds fantastic, actually.” The farther along she got, the more she seemed to lose her way as far as her aggressively healthy impulses were concerned.

Gloria leaned over and kissed her. “I have to kiss you. You look so pretty!”

“I look like a house,” Nora said.

“Darling, you
are
a house. Think of all the people you're sheltering. You're a very pretty house.”

When our kids were growing up, I often considered sending Nora out to live with Gloria. They always knew how to talk to each other.

It was a lovely day, freezing cold and cloudy. Maybe it was just a lovely day because I was out of the house for a few minutes. I was like a little white terrier we had when I was a child, who lived for nothing but the privilege of riding in the car. Like Suzy, I wanted to roll the windows down and stick my nose into the wind.

“How's it going with Nora?” Gloria asked.

“It's okay. She's a handful, but that's no surprise.”

“And Romeo?”

“He hurt his back again. I think he'll be in bed for a few more weeks now.”

“Oh, Julie,” she said, her voice brimming with sympathy. “I don't know how you manage.”

I had been looking for the right moment, the proper way to break the news. Even though we were a family sworn to secrecy, I felt sure that everyone would agree that Gloria was a member of the family. “Actually, there's something else.”

When I told Gloria the news about Sarah, she had to pull her car over to the side of the road to catch her breath. “This isn't something you want to tell a person when she's operating heavy machinery.” She kept her hands gripped to the steering wheel.

“I made a point not to tell you over the phone. I wanted to be there in case you passed out.”

“So you could install me in the Roseman Hospital?” Gloria took a deep breath, and after she had waited a reasonable amount of time, she flicked on her turn indicator and pulled back into traffic. “I wonder if I could adopt Sarah, become her legal guardian?”

“Gloria! What a thing to say.”

“Well, she's going to torture you and Sandy from here on out. Maybe I'd have better luck, not being a blood relative.”

“At this point we haven't decided to give her up, but I'll let you know.”

We went into the little Somerville bank branch where I've been doing business forever. The bank has been bought and sold and merged half a dozen times since my parents first started taking me there, but it's always been the same building and many of the same people stay for years and years at a time. Not everybody knows the people in their bank, but if you own a small business, have gotten a divorce, and have gone through a couple of second mortgages, refinancing, and a few embarrassing bounced checks, you will.

“Hi, Julie!” one teller said.

“Hi, Jody,” I called back to her.

“So you have
it
with you now?” Gloria whispered.

“Discussion
verboten,
” I said in a low voice. “Sally, I'm going to need to get into my lockbox.” I held up my key as if to show proof of my intentions.

“Sure, Julie, not a problem.”

She opened the cage door, which I have always thought of as very stylish prison bars, and led us into the little room full of boxes. I don't know why going into my safety-deposit box always strikes me as a little bit melodramatic. I feel like I should be taking out a very large diamond or putting in a very small gun. She turned the keys, pulled out the long, thin box, and set it on the table.

“Are you going to be awhile?” Sally asked.

“Not at all.” I reached into my pocket and slipped the tinfoil wrapper in the box, then I pushed the lid closed. “There, see? All done.”

“That was nothing,” Sally said, picking the box back up and sliding it in.

“A little more than nothing,” Gloria said.

I was cutting Gloria a dirty look when Sally turned back around. “Julie, I have to tell you the funniest story. Maybe I shouldn't say anything, but it was so cute. I don't think we have confidentiality laws where kids are concerned.”

“Kids?”

“Sarah, your granddaughter, she called here yesterday.”

“She called you?”

“Actually no, I answered the phone, and she said she had to talk to the president. I gave her to Tommy.” She told Gloria, “He's our branch manager.”

“Sure,” Gloria said, nodding.

“She said she wanted to know how much money you could put in a bank. Isn't that cute?”

“Darling,” I said flatly.

“Tommy didn't understand what she was talking about. He kept telling her she could put in as much money as she wanted, and then she said, ‘But what if I have more money than anybody else?' And Tommy tells her that would be fine, that we would take care of it for her. And she just keeps saying, ‘You don't understand. What if it's a lot more money than you think?' She asks him how much money the richest person at this bank has and he tells her, ‘I'm sorry, Sarah, we can't disclose that information.' So then she thanks him and hangs up.”

Sally was really cracking herself up telling this one. Gloria and I tried to chuckle along here and there just to keep pace.

“I hope she wasn't too much of a bother,” Gloria said. “It was for a school project she was working on. They're trying to help the children understand what it means to save, you know, as a concept larger than piggy banks.”

“Sure,” Sally said, and wiped a tear from the corner of one eye with her finger. “We thought it was something like that.”

After our polite good-byes, Gloria and I ran back and got in the car. For some reason we locked the doors as if we were participating in some particularly nefarious activity. “How do you lie like that?” I asked her. “I could do it if I had some time, but you don't even blink. I'm so impressed.”

“Years of practice,” she said.

“If she's already called the bank, you have to wonder who else she's told.”

As it happened, we did not have to wonder for long.

There was a car I didn't recognize parked in my driveway when I got home. When Gloria and I opened the door, Nora called out in a strange, small voice, “Mom?”

“Yes, it's Mom,” I said, and then I walked into the room to find my ex-husband, his second wife, and a blond-headed two-year-old in my living room.

“Jules!” Mort said, standing up from the sofa to give me an awkward little half hug. “And Gloria, too. I should have known the old partners in crime would be out together.”