We need jobs, I say to him.
I could call some of the old Lehman guys.
It’s been a decade since he left that job. What was once a fancy degree, youth, and hunger is now a single year of relevant experience and creeping middle age.
What do you want, though? I say.
To pay our rent, he says. To take care of our kids.
Right before the reception disappears, I text my dad to ask if he’s available and he texts back to say he is. I don’t ask for a specific sum but explain the various parts of our dilemma as calmly and as neutrally as I can. We need enough for a deposit, three months’ rent, plus we need guarantors since our credit’s shot.
Don’t call it a loan, though, says my father. Don’t pretend you’ll be able to pay us back.
He’s put me on speaker in his car and my mom’s there. The phone cuts in and out and their voices feel hollow and half-formed; I hear my mother two times mumble something to my father; I hear him say her name and tell her to calm down. They’re building a new house on a new property that they just purchased. The new construction’s proving more expensive than we thought, he says.
They ask a lot of questions, about my job and why I’m not going back to it. I think of telling them because I felt like I was dying walking into that building every morning, because I never saw my children, because I couldn’t stomach watching all those kids not get what their parents had been promised they would get. I think of telling him I was making less at that job than I’ll make stringing together the four jobs I’ve taken since then, except it still doesn’t matter, except neither of these choices pays enough for us to live.
I say: We would pay it back.
I have the adjunct jobs, a part-time freelance gig transcribing subtitles. I’ve sent a résumé to the wine bar where a friend who dropped out of our grad program our third year works.
What’s the plan, though? asks my mother.
I just told you.
But long term, she says. What’s the plan?
I don’t know, I tell her.
I don’t know.
This can’t be good for the children, says my mother. All this stress.
I know, I say. I do not want to start to cry then but I do.
I don’t know the plan, I say. I wish there was one, I say. But there’s only trying to find more work. There’s only hoping that it adds up to enough.
At what point, says my mother, is it time to cut your losses? At what point is it time to give up on this whole dream thing?
I don’t … I start to say but don’t know what she’s asking.
What dream? I ask.
9
THE TWO-YEAR-OLD IS turning three and wants a party. We can’t afford to throw a party, but her sister got a party in December and she’s been talking about her own since then. They’ve been mostly with each other the whole summer; they’ve started fighting more and more often; they’ve begun asking for their friends.
My parents decide, at the last minute, to fly up for the birthday party. They put ten thousand dollars in our bank account the week before we would have had no other options and have served as guarantors on the lease we signed for a one-bedroom apartment farther down in Brooklyn in which my husband built us another loft bed in the room off of the kitchen and our girls sleep in bunk beds that we found on Craigslist even though they’re too young. Even though, every night so far since we got here, I have climbed up into bed with the four-year-old, just to be sure she doesn’t fall.
I don’t know how to feel about this money. I feel grateful and embarrassed. I am lucky and I’m spoiled and my kids are safe and warm and fed.
The Chilean writer’s back in town for the start of the new semester and I invite her to the birthday party. I invite both of my co–homeroom teachers, and, on a whim, the twenty-four-year-old, who is the only one of the four of us who’s going back to the high school next week when they start. I invite my friend who is quadrilingual and her partner, the handful of kids whose parents’ contact info I have from the two- (now three-) year-old’s school list. My husband bakes a cake and we go to the ninety-nine-cents store by our house and get streamers and balloons and plates and cups and napkins, tiny plastic gems that come in white net bags and that each child clutches to her as we walk around the store, that I agree to buy because it’s a birthday party and they’re only a dollar. We get bagels and I cut up grapes and apples and peaches, hoping none of the parents from the preschool ask if they’re organic. I scrub the bathroom as I let the children watch TV and I bathe them and I dress them and I stand a while in the shower thinking what it is I’m meant to be wearing to my baby’s birthday party. I put on black pants and a black shirt, then take it off and put on a long-sleeved purple dress and when the baby sees me she says, Mommy, that’s my favorite color, and she hugs me, and I slip on flip-flops and rub the moisturizer my mom gets me every Christmas on my face.
My parents get there first and bring my sister. My mom wears a dress that’s pink and green with animals all over; my father’s shirt is far too crisp.
Hi, I say. I don’t remember how to touch them.
Our girls come running out to greet them. They lift them up and hold them, kiss them. I let them play together as my husband and
