Pink Slip Party (7 page)

“I need rent money,” I say.

She considers me a moment. “Young people. Always spending what they don’t have,” she sniffs. “Well, if you pay my way, I’ll let you come along for the ride.”

“Deal,” I say.

Bingo is in the basement of the local Y, about four blocks away from our apartment. There’s a healthy showing of seniors, and by seniors, I mean stooped women with blue hair and smudged red lipstick. It’s wall-to-wall oversized pearl earrings and leisure suits.

“Don’t embarrass me,” Mrs. Slatter hisses at me when I balk over the $35 she wants me to dish out for her set of Bingo cards. Reluctantly, I hand over the last of my MasterCard cash advance, and we take our bingo cards and sit at one of the long tables.

The Bingo sheets are practically poster size with gigantic letters and numbers on them, I guess for the hard of seeing. Across the table from us there are two women with ten sheets in front of them and giant markers made exclusively for Bingo.

“Show-offs,” Mrs. Slatter mumbles.

The banner at the front basement wall reads BINGO FOR CHARITY but it doesn’t say which charity. There’s an overwhelming smell of gym shoes and moth balls in the basement, and my allergies are threatening to attack me. I rub my nose and try to concentrate.

The announcer, a middle-aged man with a shiny bald head wearing salmon-colored polyester pants and a too-small golf shirt, approaches the microphone to announce the start of the game and the feedback is deafening to me, but none of the other women in the room seem to hear it.

“Let’s get started with round one,” Mr. Salmon Pants says, sounding like an over-enthusiastic game show host. “Today’s jackpot is $5,000.”

One woman lets out an “ooooh” from the back.

“Ah, shut it,” Mrs. Slatter grumbles, taking out a round highlighter from her purse and hunching over her score sheet.

There’s a bent wire cage with balls in it up front, which looks like someone has kicked and stomped on it, because it’s completely caved in on one side and is leaning dangerously to the left.

“B-1. The first number is B-1. Did everyone hear that? B-1 is our first number. That is B as in boy, and one as in the number one,” says the announcer in salmon pants. His voice is breathy in the microphone and he sounds like he’s really trying to get into Bingo announcing, as if he were a radio DJ.

“Bingo!” a woman cries.

“Simmer down now, simmer down!” Mr. Salmon Pants cautions. “There can’t be a Bingo after just one draw.” He laughs a staccato laugh. “Now
that
would be really something. Wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it folks?”

No one answers him.

“Again, our first number is B-1. That’s B as in Bingo. Ha. Ha. And one as in the number one.”

There’s a thwack, thwack, thwack sound as Mr. Salmon Pants turns the wire cage over and pulls out another ball.

The women in front of us with the multiple Bingo sheets are poised over them with two highlighters in each hand.

“N-32. The next number is N-32. N as in Nancy. Thirty-two as in Thirty. Two.”

“Bingo!” shouts the same woman.

“Alzheimer’s patients,” Mrs. Slatter mutters under her breath.

“Will someone get her out of here?” someone else shouts.

This could be my future. Right here. Bingo playing. Every Wednesday.

This thought, or the mold in the basement, I’m not sure which, causes me to sneeze. Not once, but three times in a row.

This reminds me that should some horrible medical condition befall me — like the sudden onset of asthma — I would not be covered with health insurance. I couldn’t go to a hospital for treatment. I couldn’t even go to my primary care doctor, the one that takes four weeks to see. I couldn’t, sadly, even get to a vet’s office. I feel worse than a fugitive. I feel like a leper. No treatment anywhere, except for self-induced exile. I don’t know what happens exactly for people who don’t have health insurance, but I’m pretty sure that once the paramedics find out, they just dump your body on the side of the road. And if you manage to actually sneak into a hospital, then, in exchange for treatment, the government extracts all your eggs and fertilizes them with alien DNA like on
The X-Files.

I could, of course, apply for Cobra. But I don’t have $350 a month to spare. If I pay for Cobra, then when I’m evicted and living on the street and get sent to the emergency room for starvation and exposure, my medical expenses will be eighty percent covered. Sure, sign me up.

“Oh-75. That’s O as in orange. And seventy-five as in Seven. Five.”

“Bingo!” the same woman yells again.

I decide that if I’m ever diagnosed with a life-threatening illness and want to make sure that every last minute of my life is stretched to its fullest capacity, I will come here. Two hours feels like twenty years.

I look around at other people’s tickets. Everyone has more squares blotted out than I do.

It’s going to be a long afternoon.

Clearly, Bingo is not the proper gambling outlet for me. I should have tried slots, or better yet, the lottery.

If I ever won the lottery, I’d set up a special charity fund specifically for people like me. Lazy people. People without clear career goals. I’d set them up for a year — a full year — doing absolutely nothing. I would call it “A Year of
The View”
or “Pop Culture Sabbatical” — something like that. The laziest person wins. No type-A personalities. No essay questions. Any hint of motivation or actual ambition would disqualify you from my fund. It would be like welfare for the uninspired.

Ron says if he wins the lottery, he will charter a cruise ship, fill it up with his closest friends, and sail around the world for a year. It would be stocked with the best drugs money could buy. “In international waters, drug laws don’t apply,” he says. “Plus, I’d be fucking rich, so I’d hire the very best doctors to be on board in case of massive overdose.” Thank goodness Ron doesn’t actually play the lottery. I shudder to think about what a boat of 1,000 stoned and terminally high people would do for a year. Not to mention, he’d no doubt ask me to go. And if I didn’t have a job by then, I know I’d be tempted to say yes, if only for the free health-care. Then, I’d spend the next 365 days regretting my moment of weakness. It’s a lot like my whole relationship with Ron: eight months of sexual relations, a lifetime of regret.

“Bingo!” someone yells, and I realize it’s not the demented woman, but Mrs. Slatter, who’s sitting next to me. She jumps up and pumps one wizened fist in the air. “In your face, you old biddies!” she cries. “I’m going to Vegas!” She does a little victory dance, as much as her arthritic hip will allow.

I fail to convince Mrs. Slatter to split her winnings with me, even though I technically bought her Bingo cards. She double-bolts the door even as I’m talking, and less than an hour later I see her dragging a suitcase down our stoop along with her little white fluff dog in a carrying case.

*   *   *

Because I still have Landlord Bob’s rent money to fetch, I’m left with Plan C: Get a loan.

I dig out a legal pad and make a list of the possible candidates. Let’s see.

There’s
Steph.
She’s broke, like me. And I suspect, like me, she has limits on the cash advances on her MasterCard.

Ron.
Also broke.

Todd.
Out of the question. If I asked him for a loan, I would be handing over a “Lord This Over My Head for Eternity” card. When I was twelve, I borrowed twenty bucks from him to buy New Kids on the Block tickets, and he’s never let me live it down. For years afterward, he’d introduce me as his “little sister who borrowed money to go to New Kids” even when I was sixteen and listened only to The Smiths and The Cure.

Kyle.
Even worse than Todd because technically he’s not a blood relative, but because he’s Todd’s best friend he’d feel the need to tell Todd, who would naturally lord it over my head anyway, even though he didn’t actually loan me the money.

That leaves
my parents.

My parents lead simple lives, a rare thing on the North Shore in Evanston. My dad works in insurance, and my mother is a housewife. They are both industrious people who cling to the outdated dream that working hard will actually get you somewhere. Dad spent a lot of time grooming Todd for a career and Todd is now an actuary at an insurance company with nice offices downtown, but Dad didn’t spend a lot of time on me. He just assumed Mom would teach me how to bake and I’d go off to college and find a nice husband, and my husband and Todd and Dad could stand around the barbecue pit in July and complain about the humidity and the Cubs. This is the life Dad envisioned for me. The worst contingency he ever foresaw was me marrying a White Sox fan, and even under those circumstances, Dad had planned to be open-minded and magnanimous.

I disappointed him by not meeting Mr. Accountant in college and by dating boys with no ambition and no money and odd piercings. And then I graduated college with an art degree (something Todd was forbidden to do, but was all right for me since Dad never planned on seeing me single at twenty-eight and really just humored me while I was studying at college). I found a job, only to be laid off six months later. I’ve never moved back home with my parents, so maybe that will win me good favor and the $2,000 I need.

Plus, I have something even better than the I’m-Your-Daughter-Please-Help-Me card to play. Tomorrow is my twenty-ninth birthday.

“Happy Birthday!” cries Steph into my phone line the next day. She’s bubbly and happy as is only possible when it isn’t your birthday and when you have a job. She’s calling from an office supply convention in New York, where her boss has sent her to stay until Friday.

“As soon as I get back, we’re going out, understand?”

“Sure,” I say.

“You want me to come back early, I’ll be on the next plane. Just say the word.”

“No, no,” I say. “I promised Mom I’d come home for dinner tonight.”

“OK, but Friday, we’re tying one on, OK?”

I suspect by then, when I’m evicted, I’ll be in dire need of a drink.

I barely hang up before Todd calls.

“First, Happy Birthday. Second — interviews? Resumes? What’s the score?” If Todd wasn’t a well-meaning relative, he might just fall into the category of stalker. “Have you written to any of the people you met at the career fair like I told you to?”

“Todd, it’s my birthday. I am not sending out resumes on my birthday.”

“Jane!” he scolds. He’s more stressed about me being out of work than I am.

“Todd,”
I scold back.

“You can’t just sit back in this economy and think employers are going to come court you,” he says.

When I don’t say anything, he adds, “You have to take this job hunt seriously.”

“I am, Todd. Believe me, I am.”

“OK, then, how many resumes have you sent out?”

“Fifty,” I say, which is true. I don’t mention that this number includes the resumes I sent to the Barnum & Bailey Circus, Hershey’s Chocolate factory, and NASA.

“Well,” Todd says, momentarily taken aback by my efficiency. “Maybe you need to network more. You know that 99 percent of jobs are never advertised.”

“You’ve mentioned that before.” Only about a hundred times. “Todd, maybe you want to be looking for another job.”

“What?”

“Well, you seem so consumed with my job search, maybe subconsciously you want to be looking for a job.”

“Me? No. I’ve got my own office with a door. If I went to work somewhere else, I’d have to start at the bottom, all over again.”

The thought of this, I can tell, makes my older brother shiver with fear. He’s always walked a straight line in one direction. In life, he never developed a reverse gear. Me, on the other hand, I spend half my time driving backward.

“So I’ll see you tonight?” Todd says. “I can’t pick you up, because I’ve got to work late.”

Todd is always so industrious. He’s always working late.

“Todd, don’t even pretend that you’re going to be late,” I say. Todd is physically incapable of getting anywhere late. He simply cannot do it. It’s like trying to make someone with an obsessive-compulsive disorder step on a crack in the sidewalk. If you held Todd and made him late, he’d start foaming at the mouth.

“Jane, if you really need a ride,” he says, relenting a bit.

“No, no, I don’t need your charity,” I joke.

“Jane, I’ll pick you up, all right?” Todd says. “I’ve just got to pick up Deena first.”

“Deena?”

“My girlfriend,” Todd says.

“Girlfriend — that sounds serious,” I say. Todd usually doesn’t add “friend” to the word “girl.” He generally just refers to the women he’s slept with as Girls. That girl, or this girl. “I went out last night with this girl,” he’ll say. He rarely even uses first names.

“Don’t even start,” Todd says.

“Forget about the ride. I’ll take the train.”

I don’t begrudge Todd’s attempts at helping me walk the straight and narrow path to financial solvency. I understand he’s doing it because he thinks it’s a good way to show he cares, and because he thinks he can run my life better than I can. I appreciate this, and see it for what it is, a show of brotherly affection. It is better than my dad, whose stoic, stubborn silence on the issue of my joblessness is proof of his disapproval. He hasn’t once asked me about the job search, except to drop heavy hints that I should move into a smaller apartment.

I call my parents, trying to get a vibe about how open they’d be to me asking for a loan.

Dad’s first response is not a positive one.

“So, are you eating lunch at your grand dining-room table? Must be a lot of echoes in that mansion of yours,” Dad says when I call that afternoon.

“I’m not eating lunch, Dad, it’s three in the afternoon,” I say.

“Well, since you don’t really have a schedule to keep, I figured you’d be eating at odd hours.”

“I eat at regular times,” I say.

Dad and I have nothing to say to each other, which is why Mom insists that we speak. She’s the one who’s always dragging Dad away from his Barcalounger and demanding that he “speak to his daughter.” It’s the same thing she used to do when I was a kid, and she’d demand that Dad spend quality time with Todd and me on Sundays. After enough nagging, Dad would take us into the office with him, so he could catch up on work, and we could run around making paperclip ropes.