Breaking the Bank (3 page)

“Pennies,” he said quietly. “You gave me
pennies.
” His voice was no longer angry, though; he just sounded worn out and sad.

“I know,” she said. “And I'm very sorry.” There was a sob gathering in her throat, but she wasn't going to let it out. Instead, she looked down at the four dollar bills—the last four dollar bills from her wallet—that were crunched in her moist palm. “Here,” she said, giving him the money. “Take it.”

He stared at the bills and then up into her face. “Why are you giving me this?”

“Why not?”

“Are you sure?” he said. He sounded suspicious and held the bills by their edges, as if they were not truly his.

“I'm sure. Just get yourself something to eat.” The sob had subsided, but the heat in her cheeks was still there, an uncomfortable flush. “Get yourself lunch.”

Fingers closed around his prize, he sprang nimbly to his feet. Mia watched him lope off and waved back, weakly at first, and then with gathering energy, when he turned to look back at her.

S
O NOW, STANDING
there on the sidewalk contemplating the lost groceries, she was well aware of just how much—or, more aptly, how little—money she had left. She had no credit cards, having some time ago snipped them up and tossed them away; temptation was worse than penury, she had decided.

But she could go to the bank. Yes, that was a good plan; she would run up to the bank on Fifth Avenue, and then stop at the market on the corner of Carroll. True, it was more expensive, but it was getting late and she had to feed Eden. She would buy edamame, strawberries, organic frozen yogurt—all food her daughter was likely to eat. The issue of Eden's eating had come to dominate much of Mia's thinking these days: would she eat, what would she eat, had she eaten enough, how could she tempt her to eat again. It was like having a picky toddler all over again, and it was grinding her down.

T
HE BANK, COMPLETED
only months ago, was all chrome shine and gleam. Mia pushed open the heavy glass doors and headed for the row of cash machines against the wall. She quickly inserted her card and followed the prompts by pushing the necessary buttons.
GET CASH
, she commanded the machine. There was a brief dimming of the screen, which Mia thought was strange, but it was followed by the familiar whirring sound, and then the bills were spit from a slot. She took the money without counting it, checking the receipt first to see how dangerously low her balance had dipped.

The constant, grating anxiety about money was new, the result of the divorce and the nearly simultaneous loss of her longtime job as a children's book editor. Now that her unemployment checks had run out, she had been freelancing, temping, and even filling in for her friend Julie as a waitress some nights—doing whatever she had to do to keep herself, and Eden, afloat.

Mia checked the balance again; she had enough to pay the rent, which was due at the week's end, but not much more. Lloyd owed her money, of course, but since he had flown the coop, it was going to be impossible to collect it. Still, she should call her lawyer. Right now, though, she was going to go to the store so she could make a meal for her child.

She stuffed the bills into her wallet. The wad seemed unusually thick, so she began to count. One, two, three, four, five, six—but wait. There were more twenties than there should have been. She had taken out one hundred dollars, so why all the bills? Had the machine spewed out tens instead?

Mia checked again. No, they were all twenties. Only more of them than there should be. She looked again at the receipt. One hundred dollars was deducted from her account. Just to make sure, she stepped back to the cash machine to check her balance.

An odd thing happened when she did—the screen paled, and for a second, it seemed to shimmer. A prelude to the machine shutting down or malfunctioning in some way? But no. She was able to check her balance and saw that the information on the screen matched the information on the printed slip.

Slowly, Mia counted the bills again. Ten twenties, two hundred dollars. A bank error in her favor, sure. Would they catch it tomorrow, next week, or in a month? And if so, was someone going to get in trouble, maybe lose a job? She looked again at the machine, the panel of squarish buttons, the hyper-blue of the screen. If the machine made the mistake, then no one could be blamed. She decided not to debate
this with herself any longer. It was just good luck, and she certainly needed some of that. Tucking the bills and the receipt carefully into her wallet, Mia headed back out through the double doors and into the street again. She bought the food she had planned; since Eden was famished by the time Mia returned, she ate everything without comment or complaint.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Mia didn't have time to think about the extra money. She spent twenty minutes trying to arrange Eden's hacked hair into some semblance of an actual style, but eventually had to give up and admit defeat. This meant that she was late dropping her off to school and late heading into the publishing firm where she was filling in for someone on medical leave. Once she arrived, the day took off, non-stop. There were the calls from both the psychologist—clueless—and the teacher—hostile—to contend with. There was a long drawn-out meeting at which she was expected, God help her, to participate. The company had made a mint on the Mommy Mousie series, books so treacly and asinine that Mia wondered daily if their appeal was not pure camp.
Mommy Mousie and Her Six Baby Mousies,
a major hit, was followed by
Mommy Mousie Minds Her Manners
and
Mommy Mousie Makes a Milk Shake.

Today they were discussing the next books in the series and whether the alliterative titles ought to continue. One hot young editor wearing rhinestone eyeglasses and a miniskirt over a pair of olive drab leggings was intent on keeping the “melodious M's,” whereas one of the older editors, all rumpled shirt and well-worn khakis, was in favor of branching out. To Mia, the discussion was immaterial: the stories were smarmy, the drawings inept and charmless. Her mind wandered; it was a strain to look interested.

Finally, it was five o' clock, and even though many of her coworkers stayed later, Mia gathered her things together and raced out. It was only when she passed the greenmarket that she slowed. Given her little
windfall, she decided to replace yesterday's lost groceries. She bought cheese, apples, cider, and, since she was feeling flush, organic cashew butter, pumpkin spread, and some onion rolls that, as it turned out, Eden loved. While they were eating, Mia found herself scrutinizing Eden's hair. Did it look a little better today, or was Mia just getting used to it? Or maybe it was the effect of those extra twenties in her wallet—everything seemed a tad rosier.

The next week Mia received her bank statement in the mail. She tore it open, scanned the page with avid, searching eyes. No indication of the bank's accidental largesse. Mia pored over the statement, looking for clues to what might have happened. There was none. She folded the statement in thirds and tucked it in a drawer.

On Saturday, while Eden was embarked on a marathon playdate— Brooklyn Museum, Rollerblading in Prospect Park, movie at the Pavilion—Mia found herself walking past the bank. She didn't actually need any cash, but she felt herself drawn through the doors anyway. Once inside, facing the row of machines, she stopped. Did anyone else know what had happened last time? And that she was stupidly hoping and wishing that it might happen again? Could there be a look on her face? An odor she emitted? The other patrons of the bank came and went quickly, transacting their business, tucking away their cash, talking on their cell phones, admonishing their children. No one noticed her at all.

Nervously, she approached a machine, the same one she used last time. She inserted the card, punched in the commands to receive one hundred dollars, and waited. There it was again—that paling and darkening of the screen. Then came the humming that preceded the ejection of the money, the printed receipt. She grabbed the receipt first. A debit of one hundred dollars, just like before. She reached for the wad of bills. It felt thick in her hands, and she counted hastily. Ten bills. But they were not twenties, not this time. Instead, she was holding ten one-hundred-dollar bills. Mia closed her eyes, thinking that she was
imagining the number, seeing what she wanted to see, not what was in fact there. When she opened them, the one remained fixed in the corner of the bill, solidly buttressed by the twin zeroes. One thousand dollars. She was overcome with a sensation of heat and cold simultaneously: her scalp grew hot and itchy, as if it were shrinking perceptibly, while her armpits were suddenly drenched with sweat. One. Thousand. Dollars. A thousand dollars. A cool grand.

M
IA THOUGHT About
the money all the time now: while she was readying Eden for school; girding her loins for another round with Mommy Mousie; riding on the crowded subway; trudging through the aisles at the supermarket; nagging Eden to do her homework; lying in bed late at night, waiting for sleep to come and release her from the day.

How could such a thing have happened, not once but twice? That the bank could make such an error, two separate times, seemed barely within the realm of credibility, but the subsequent failure to rectify or even acknowledge such errors was on another plane entirely. She waffled back and forth about what to do next: Tell someone there about what happened and offer to return the money? Consider herself lucky to have hit the jackpot on those two occasions and leave well enough alone? Go back to the bank to see if the magic would work yet again? She tossed all the options in her mind as if she were juggling balls in the air.

Mia wished she could talk to someone about this. Her first impulse was to call Julie, to whom she ritually confided everything. Julie was the person she called when Lloyd told her he was leaving; it was Julie who listened as she poured out her worry about her daughter, about her growing disillusionment with her brother. But even as her mind articulated the desire, Mia knew she was not going to do anything of the kind. To talk about it to anyone else would pin it down, qualify it in some way she was not ready for.

She hid the money in a box high up on a shelf in the apartment's single closet. In the box were the ivory
peau de soie
shoes Mia had worn
on the day she married Lloyd. The dress, the ring, the preserved bouquet of gardenias she had given away, sold, trashed. But she had loved the shoes with their delicately curved heels and their low, sexy vamp and was unable to part with them. She rolled up the bills and tucked half inside the left shoe, half in the right. Although she had used a few, and would no doubt use more, she didn't want to keep the money in her wallet. Better to have it high up, so that every time she wanted it, she would have to go through the ritual of dragging a chair over to the closet, climbing up, rooting around for the box.

M
IA HAD
had the benefit of a comfortable if not affluent upbringing in a large prewar building on Ninety-ninth Street and Amsterdam Avenue. The address was far from swanky; the Upper West Side, in those years, was not yet the upscale, monied enclave it would become. The neighborhood was replete with bookstores and bagel places, butcher shops and dry cleaners. Mia was fitted for her first bra at the Town Shop; her mother bought produce at Fairway, herring and lox at Barney Greengrass, coffee at Zabar's. The streets were populated by men with beards, turtlenecks, and wide-wale cords; the local women wore silver jewelry, Birkenstock sandals, and “ethnic” clothing: Mexican shawls, printed cotton skirts from Africa, ponchos from Guatemala. The kids, like Mia and her brother, Stuart, went to private schools but not those rarefied, East Side places like Chapin or Spence. West Side kids were enrolled at Ethical Culture, Horace Mann, or Fieldston.

Mia's father taught astronomy at Columbia University and spent a good deal of time up on the roof of their building with a small phalanx of telescopes. Sometimes Mia and Stuart would go up there with him, but they were generally too impatient to see whatever it was their father was trying to focus on with the long, vaguely riflelike lens. When he was downstairs in the apartment, he was, despite his distraction, a mostly indulgent, even tender parent. He sang lyrics from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas; he walked ten blocks to buy a pint of Mia's favorite
Louis Sherry pistachio ice cream. On the nights her mother was out, he spent the evening playing Monopoly with them; dinner was Twinkies or Devil Dogs accompanied by Cheez Doodles and washed down by a whole gallon of milk.

Their mother, Betty, also taught—in the Political Science Department—and was a tireless signer of petitions, an organizer of movements, a veritable nucleus of progressive causes, concerns, and agendas. She was also an occasional painter and covered the walls of their apartment with her large-scale canvases, mostly fuzzy blobs of color on which she worked in a fevered, joyful frenzy for days at a time, ignoring most of her other responsibilities until the wellspring of creativity had, for the moment, run dry. Stuart and Mia were united in their disdain for these paintings as they were united in so many things back then, and one of their favorite games was devising what they deemed impossibly clever titles for them.

“Big Blotch About to Devour Little Blotch,”
said Stuart as they viewed their mother's latest effort, still wet and propped against the dining room wall. It depicted a huge squarish shape the color of a rotted eggplant that was butted up against a smaller shape of a similar color. Mia stood back so she could let the feel of the thing, atrocious as it was, enfold her.

“How about
Grape Gone Wild
?” she countered.

“It has definite possibilities,” Stuart said. “I like it.”

But to Mia's surprise and grief, the cement that held her family together seemed to crumble when her father died. Mia's mother decided to take early retirement and sell the apartment. Suddenly unmoored from her home and her work, she took several extended trips out west, married a local, Hank Heyman, and settled into a cream-colored bungalow near Santa Fe. At first Mia and Stuart had a lot of fun with Hank's name—“Hey, man”—but they did have to acknowledge that Hank, a short, athletic guy in his seventies who sported a stunning pair of eagle tattoos on either bicep, did make Betty happy. Abandoning all
her paintings, along with almost everything else in their old apartment, she had invented herself anew in the relentlessly scorching and sun-baked landscape. She took up gardening, and now presided over a yard filled with a dozen varieties of cacti and succulents, tumorlike forms covered in long, lethal-looking needles. Mia had tried to enlist Stuart's contempt for their mother's new hobby, but Stuart had, inexplicably, become Betty's biggest booster.