Flummoxed by Money
Bex O’Brian
Queen Oona de la Fée
The day before my mother, my sisters and I were due to leave Montreal and fly out to London to spend the summer with our grandmother, our cleaning lady, a Polish woman who had escaped the Nazis and whose knees were completely flat from years of scrubbing floors, handed me a dollar and said, “For your trip.” This was a woman who saved the forgotten breakfast crusts of bread, hung up all our clothes on one single hanger, and splashed around the bathroom so much bleach that the first to pee after she left had burning thighs for the rest of the day. So even at the age of seven, I knew this dollar meant something.
Going to bed that night, I couldn’t decide if it would feel better to have the dollar bill, or ten dimes or four quarters.
The next morning, still not sure, I snatched the bill off my bureau and went to my father and asked if he had four quarters. He had. An hour later, I was back. Did he have ten dimes? He did. Nothing felt right. By lunch, I had demanded my dollar back. I am still amazed that my typically impatient father would indulge me this way. It must have been because he was about to have a month free before joining the family in England.
What with all my high-finance machinations, there were now only about twenty minutes before a car was due to arrive to whisk us off to the airport. The dollar was tucked in a little change purse, where it was to stay until I got to England and I would buy something sweet, I didn’t know what, a teacup, or tea towel, tea something, which I would show to our long-suffering cleaning lady whose flat knees fascinated and horrified me.
Fifteen minutes before departure. I felt for my little purse.
Ten minutes.
I couldn’t stand it a second longer. I needed to spend that dollar. What did I want with a teacup or a tea towel? Off I ran down to Fry’s, a store whose likes doesn’t exist anymore. Penny candy, board games, superballs, party supplies, and come the fall, the tiny store was jammed with kids getting new school supplies. I blew the wad (or wadette) buying a bag full of penny candy: shoestring red licorice, caramels, jawbreakers, Pixy stix, etc.
I didn’t want my sisters, who had also received a dollar, to know what I had done, so as I hurried back up the hill, I stuffed all the candy in my mouth. Needless to say, I was bouncing off the bulkhead throughout much of the flight, until just before we landed when I completely crashed out.
A month later, my father arrived, and as was his habit, he dumped his change on the bedside table. I remember my sister coming out of my parent’s bedroom, holding a dime. We marveled. After grappling with the chunky English currency, this dime, this tiny sliver of a silver thing seemed so ridiculous that it was impossible to believe it had any value. In an instant, money had become an abstraction.
I’m sixty, and money still isn’t real.
The other day, in one of those mad clean-ups where the good is thrown out with the bad, I started to dust a large shallow bowl that sits on the hall table where my husband and I unload our loose change. Looking at the array of quarters, nickels, and dimes (I throw out pennies, they ruin the look), I thought, ‘Gosh, there’s a lot of money there.’ The radio happened to be on at the time, and the news was all about how Trump owes over 400 million in back taxes. Turning from my dust-free change, I wondered, “Is that a lot?”
Is this a form of money dysmorphia?
Well, if it is, and I have it, so does my husband, Charles.
And thus, a tale of money woes that has plagued our long-standing marriage. Naturally, we each accuse the other of being the one who is the cause of our ever-evolving battle to stay afloat.
When he was given a large book advance, I had us booked on a plane for a year-long jaunt through Europe before the ink had dried on the contract. We had a fabulous time. Came home broke.
Now, twenty-odd years later, after a day sitting poolside at a friend’s country estate or evening spent listening to how they have their road to old age and death paved with financial gold, there is the inevitable row on the drive home.
“If you hadn’t forced us to have a blast, travel Europe, eat fantastic food, and generally made our lives far more fun than any life had a right to be, then we’d have a pool.”
These, naturally, aren’t his words, but the ones I choose to hear as he is banging the steering wheel and spitting with rage.
I counter, “I don’t want a pool! You have a pool, then you have to have a pool boy. And, may I remind you while I may have left us broke, it’s because of you that the IRS is gnawing on us like so much carrion!”
I think of this as my zinger, my drop the mic moment. And, if I really want to twist the knife, I paint a picture of me, innocent me, going to get something from his desk drawer only to discover, to my horror and dismay, ten years of filled out but never mailed in tax returns.
“I’m sixty, and money still isn’t real.”
The rest of the drive home is spent in the toxic silence of a stalemate. What I have never revealed to him was how on that plane ride home from Europe, with barely enough money for the cab ride in from the airport, how relieved I felt. I had done it, spent it all.
The truth is, neither of us is wrong or right. There are just aspects of money (all) that are beyond us.
I suspect in marriages where there are houses paid for, vacations saved for, 401s and portfolios, there is one stern taskmaster slapping their spouse’s wrist if they so much as even eyeball an unnecessary indulgence. If anything, Charles and I aid and abet our worst money spending habits.
Quite unlike a man I met once at a dinner party who blithely told me he had recently lent his wife money but was good enough to give her a favourable interest rate. I couldn’t have been more shocked and blurted out, “Can married people even lend each other money? Isn’t what is yours, hers?”
The conversation abruptly ended.
Lying in bed that night, I told Charles what had happened. He let out a low, slow sigh. Which, in the darkness, I interpreted as a ‘some people’ sigh rather than a ‘why did I marry a woman who has a worse concept of money than I have’ sigh. After he fell asleep, I lay there feeling a little lost. I would never understand money, beyond that I want it, and I want it gone.
Bex O’Brian
Bex lives mostly in Brooklyn with her husband and their dog. She is the author of the novel Promiscuous Unbound and Radius both under the name Bex Brian
