11.21.19
I have never had problems with money, certainly not with earning money. In college, I worked an array of, at times, three or four jobs at a time: walking the faithful gentle giant of a woman who lost her husband to suicide in the last couple months. She owned a beautiful, hand-laid brick house whose interiors appeared hollow with the absence of children or a husband. I had discovered online that she was the Vice President of Business for some big beauty company whose headquarters lay in the city. And this explained how she often had tiny boxes of samples for luxurious soaps and lotions, why her makeup brushes were often found on the kitchen counter, probably from when she rushed out the door to make it to her train everyday. I imagined there was a beauty standard she had to uphold for her company.
Her dog was a clumsy, beady-eyed boxer who leaped out from his invincible slumber every time I arrived at their house. I noticed he would choose to curl up on that leather armchair by the window, so he could be alerted immediately as to when I would arrive. I would sneak in his daily visit between my college classes. Towards the end of my time with him, I noticed that he would sometimes drag his back feet, but thought nothing of it until I noticed his blood gushing out from one of his toenails. Upon reporting this to his mother, I found out that his time on this earth was short, too: he was suffering a neurodegenerative disease, the same one that took out this poor couple's former dog. I felt for this woman, despite her placid and well-kept skin, despite the wealth that adorned her vintage wooden dresser or the seemingly never ending remodeling projects I imagined she took on to help move on from her tumultuous past. There was, nearly everywhere in this house, a stagnant energy of past loves and lovers that only Oberon, or Obi as I called him, himself, had seemed so free of. The dressers accumulated a layer of dust. The air often felt stale. But instead it was only her. Only she resisted this intangible grip.
There were many other jobs, too. I would help the high school student, jocks whose parents could afford boats and funding private surfing lessons, with his homework, and for a long while sat with the older woman every Saturday afternoon while fighting off the onset of boredom-induced sleep. I tried to nurse along every message she typed to a prospective male interest on sites like Senior People Meet, assuring her that her profile picture did not, in fact, make her look fat, try to reassure her –– without any qualifications as I, myself, was a mere twenty-two year old –– that she still had the beauty she displayed in the portrait of herself as a twenty-something year old. She would clutch that frame in her hand and try to persuade me and persuade me that she had something special, some undeniable charm of beauty and grace that accompanies the well-educated woman. And that she did not have to chase these decrepit old men with their typo-ridden profiles; she merely had to submit her photo to the local newspaper and would receive an out-pour of extravagant love letters each handcrafted with the artistry that cultured, well-read and well-educated men had. Now she had been a widow for over 10 years and she finally was ready to heed to the advice of her long-standing therapist of finding love again. In my year of working with her, nothing had materialized. Only I had made progress: I dutifully collected my fifty-dollars-on-the-hour, played Scrabble with her over a bottle of wine, let her taken me and my then boyfriend out to dinner. She came to my college graduation. And I finally vacated her life as well.
Probably you are now tired of peering into these miniature dioramas of my various clients and their lives, but I cannot forget them. I would come in to feed the hamsters of a Jewish oncologist, the head of his hospital department, who lost his mother to breast cancer some years ago, whose wife, I discovered, also took Tamoxifen, which I looked up and discovered to be a estrogen receptor antagonist antineoplastic agent. Soon I was called to babysit their children, one whose bat mitzvah had just passed and was celebrated at an entirely rented-out summer camp site. They loved their dad and they of course loved the gadgets his wealth collected, such as their voice-activated home theater system. I sat with them as they passed their time playing Fortnite with a friend, and before I could even notice or stop them, they had taken the landline telephone to interrupt their parents' date night to ask for the X-Box password code. Their father of course relented.
It is now I who is stuck like a pebble in free-fall motion lodged between two tectonic plates, neither of which will give. I miss my clients, whose lives provided enough of a substitute for a social existence that evaded my ordinary life. I think perhaps I drowned myself in such eclectic work to avoid the narrowness of dispassion that is now smothering me in whole. And now it is somehow hard to earn money. I am no longer "scrappy," as my friend once described. But what is worse is that I am forgotten. I was merely a fixture of convenience in each of these worlds, whose richness I clung to even in my moments of resentment. My silent witness seemed to provide me, alone, with a sense of living alongside the silent struggles whose footprints are found only in clues like household objects, pill bottles, the stains of blood or spilled wine on the couch. I had the bravery to seek these clues and to remember, to Google my way through the answers for the gaps in these stories.
My own story, however, remained hidden behind a veil of cowardice and shame: I was always the dutiful college student, un-suspiciously looking to make an extra buck, with the happy relationship with her Australian boyfriend, who lied through her teeth about having a college major or a life purpose. The longer I am forgotten, the harder it is to remember what might have ever been my truth, to re-enter the economy as someone with some purpose.