Windfalls: A Novel (16 page)

When Travis was twenty months old, Cerise received a letter with her AFDC check saying that the whole welfare program was being revised and informing her of the date and time of her appointment with the eligibility worker who would explain her situation to her and outline her options. During her appointment, Cerise sat on the chair in front of the eligibility worker’s desk and struggled to contain Travis on her lap while the eligibility worker explained that the state understood that Cerise would rather be a productive member of society than waste her life on welfare, and as a consequence, she only had twenty-four months of benefits left.

“But in twenty-four months he still won’t be old enough for kindy-garden,” said Cerise, grabbing Travis’s hands before he snatched her file off the eligibility worker’s desk.

“You’ll need to find a job,” the eligibility worker said, speaking as distinctly as though she thought Cerise were deaf.

“I had a job, before I had him. But I can’t pay for his day care with what I could make at work,” Cerise answered.

“There are programs,” the worker explained, “to train you for a higher-paying job. The state can help with your expenses. But you have to hurry and apply, before the grant runs out.”

“Oh.”

“What do you want to study?”

“I never finished high school,” Cerise said, trying to interest Travis in one of the weary toys she’d brought from home.

“Something in computers or food service? How about child care or office management?”

“Maybe child care?” Cerise said, prying a letter opener out of Travis’s fingers. “That way I could keep him with me when I went to work.”

“Maybe,” the worker said dryly. “But right now the important thing is to get you working at all.”

The only welfare-approved program for training child-care workers that would still accept Cerise for summer quarter was at a community college just south of San Francisco. At first the thought of moving seemed impossible, but the counselor at the community college was so reassuring and her eligibility worker was so unyielding that Cerise filled out the forms and made the phone calls and found the documents to get herself in. She called collect to Rita in Florida and asked to borrow money, though she knew she could not ask again in some greater emergency.

“If you would only get married,” Rita said before she agreed to make the loan, “none of this would be necessary.”

“Travis’s dad got laid off.”

“So find someone else.”

“I’ll try,” Cerise lied. “But right now I need that child-care certificate, or we’ll end up on the streets.”

She called Jake and asked him to come back and help them move, though she dreaded the sting she would feel when she saw him again.

But even so the hardest part of moving was Melody.

“There’s no way I’ll leave my friends,” Melody announced when Cerise told her what she was planning. Melody was in the bathroom, where every day she spent a longer time with the brushes and creams and cosmetics she kept stashed among Travis’s plastic ducks and bags of diapers, and Cerise was in the front room, hunched on the toy-strewn sofa with the community college course catalog in her lap, marking and remarking the classes she’d have to take, as though by memorizing their section numbers and the times they met, she might have a better chance of passing them. “You’ll make new friends,” she called to Melody. “I’ve got to get this certificate.”

“Why can’t you just go back to Woodland Manor?” Melody asked.

“I can’t afford to pay for this apartment and child care, too, on what I made at Woodland Manor.”

“Then stay on welfare till Trav starts school, like you did with me.”

“I can’t. The rules changed. You think I want to leave Travis with someone else all day?”

“I’ll watch Travie while you work,” Melody said, emerging from the bathroom in a leather miniskirt and a velvet halter top. She’d grown her hair out blond again, and with her perfect makeup and her lean legs, she looked as remote and gorgeous as the model Cerise had once dreamed she’d be. Only now Melody’s beauty reminded Cerise of a loaded gun—as much a danger to the person who possessed it as to anyone else.

When Melody bent and swung Travis up out of the pile of toys where he’d been enshrined, Cerise caught a glimpse of black silk panties beneath the supple hem of her skirt. More and more of the clothes that Melody wore were ones Cerise hadn’t bought for her. Suede jackets, designer jeans, and sequined shirts, they were clothes that Melody said she’d borrowed, said were gifts or hand-me-downs from friends Cerise had never heard of.

Melody said, “We’d have fun, wouldn’t we, Travie?” and Travis burst into a chortle of joy as she swooped him toward the ceiling.

Cerise asked, “Where did you get that skirt?”

“Oh, this,” Melody said, glancing down at it and then setting Travis back on the floor and shrugging. “Justine gave it to me. She said she was tired of it.”

“You sure?” Cerise asked.

“What do you mean, am I sure?” Melody snapped. “Like I wouldn’t know if my own friend gave me a skirt?”

“I just want you to be sure,” said Cerise doggedly.

Coolly Melody changed the subject. “So I’ll watch Travie for you, and you can go back to work.”

“You have to go to school,” Cerise answered. “The new rules say if there’s a minor who’s not in school, the assistance unit will lose that portion of their aid.”

“What the fuck’s an assistance unit?”

“Don’t use that type language around the baby. An assistance unit’s a family—like us.”

“I hate school.”

“You have to finish high school,” Cerise repeated. “You don’t need to do things the hard way, like me. With your brains and looks, you—”

“Brains and looks—” Melody tossed her hair down her back and straightened up to face her mother. “Get real. What kind of stupid TV la-la land do you live in, anyway? I’m not going to get one goddamned chance—”

“You’ve got to take it,” Cerise pleaded. “You’ve got to make it for yourself.”

“Look,” Melody said, spitting out the word as though it were rotten, “I could be a good girl. I could go to school and study until I’m fucking blue in the face. I could get good grades. And maybe if I’m real good and I’m real lucky, I can go to the community college, too. Oh, goody.

“And then,” Melody went on nastily, “I can bust my butt and work two jobs and study a bunch of meaningless shit and get a little piece of paper so I can work my ass off at some stupidfucking job for the rest of my life. Thank you very much, and no fucking way. I hate school. School’s a hoax.”

“Your report card came in the mail yesterday,” Cerise said. “You’re failing every subject.”

Melody spun around, “No way. What about art? I got an A in art.”

“Art’s not a subject.”

“What?”

“English is a subject,” Cerise said. “Math is a subject. History is a subject. Science is a subject. Art is like—PE. Or band. It’s not anything real. Not real work.”

“I work hard at art.”

“What—taking apart toasters? Drawing pictures of Dumpsters? If I were your art teacher, you’d fail that, too.”

“I can’t believe this.” Melody rolled her eyes toward the ceiling as though up there she would find an impartial judge.

“Art,” Cerise said, “is not going to get you anywhere.”

“Oh, right. Like you’re an expert on how to get somefuckingwhere.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do, right now. Get somewhere. And,” Cerise said loudly, to drown out the waver of terror in her voice, “I’m going to take you with me.”

S
IX WEEKS AFTER
E
LIOT WAS DENIED TENURE
, A
NNA STOOD IN FRONT OF
the bathroom sink, a pink-tipped plastic wand dangling in her hand. She leaned toward the mirror, and the face that met hers there was strained and stunned. Dark half-moons hung beneath her eyes, harsh lines framed her mouth, and the flesh of her cheeks looked soft and pulpy. Catching her lower lip between her teeth, she pressed it until she felt the hurt, wished she had the courage to bite for blood. Her eyes sought their reflection as if she still hoped she might find some kind of answer there. But her eyes were only holes that led directly to her brain, and her brain was only a meaty tangle of despair.

A little plastic vial half filled with urine sat on the counter in front of her. She picked it up, emptied its contents into the toilet, and closed the lid. She fitted the vial and the wand back into the box they had come in and tucked the box beneath the other trash at the bottom of the wastebasket, where no one else would see it. Then she sat down on the toilet, buried her face in her hands, and tried to think.

She was at least eight weeks along—maybe as much as ten, or even twelve. When she first realized that her period was late, she’d assumed she’d been so worried about what was happening with Eliot that she’d made a mistake about the dates, and later, when her period still hadn’t started, she’d thought it was stress that was keeping it away, had thought that stress was making her feel weary and nauseous and uneasy.

But now the pink line claimed otherwise.

“I don’t know who’s the bigger fool,” Eliot said back in February when he’d told Anna the news about his job. “Me, for thinking I could get away with working on a project that might take half a century to show results, or the college, for pretending they can stick to quick fixes, even now.”

They were in the kitchen, where Anna was fixing supper and Lucy was making a cottage for Noranella beneath the breakfast table. Still in his jacket, Eliot stood in the middle of the room and said, “One-third of the world’s arable land has been lost to erosion in the last forty years, and Spaulding University denies me tenure because they claim my research doesn’t show adequate relevance.”

“They’re wrong,” Anna answered, wiping her hands on a dish towel and reaching for him. “We both know that. Besides, your teaching evaluations are the best in the department.”

“Teaching doesn’t matter to a tenuring committee,” Eliot answered. He gave her a perfunctory hug and moved away. “We know that, too. Nothing matters really, except funding. And,” he went on bitterly, “there’s lots more money available for splicing mouse genes into tomatoes than there is for developing perennial wheat.”

“Yes, but—”

Eliot interrupted her. “The bottom line is that I’ve lost my job.” His voice was harsh, but his expression was so desolate it frightened her. “I have no idea what we’ll do,” he said, staring past her to the window above the sink.

“We’ll think of something,” Anna said. “We still have my job. We’ll find something else for you.”

“Not around here,” Eliot answered grimly. “Not unless they’re hiring genetics professors to flip burgers at McDonald’s.”

“We’ll find something,” Anna promised through all her fears. “We’ll work it out. It will be okay.”

“What’s wrong?” inquired Lucy’s voice from beneath the table. “What happened?” Poking her head out from between the blankets she’d draped over the tabletop, she asked, “What will be okay?”

“Everything will be okay,” Anna answered, picking up her knife and trying to resume her work on the salad. “It’s just that things have changed a little.”

“What changed?” Lucy asked, her face scrunched with concern.

“I said this might happen,” Eliot said, ignoring his daughter and speaking to his wife. “But I guess I never thought it really would.”

“It shouldn’t have,” Anna said staunchly.

Eliot said, “We’d have to move, for me to get another job. Or at least I would,” he’d added tentatively. Startled, Anna looked up from her work. “Only you?” she asked.

“Have you thought about all you’d be leaving, if you moved, too?” he answered.

It was a question that left her dizzy. Of course she’d thought about what might happen if Eliot didn’t get tenure, but only dimly, only from a distance. Eliot was too good a scientist, too well respected by his colleagues and his students for her to believe he could really lose his job. In a way it had even seemed wrong for her to think too much about it, as if imagining the worst would somehow cause it to happen. But suddenly a hot anxiety bubbled up inside her. This is real, she thought.

Her eyes swept the room and settled on the window above the kitchen sink. Outside, sunset was burnishing the frozen hills. For as long as she could remember she had loved that view, loved the way the seasons moved across it and the way it looked in every light. She thought of the show she was preparing for—in the most prestigious gallery she’d shown in yet—and once again it struck her how entirely her art depended on what lay outside her kitchen window. She thought of all the photographs she still wanted to make of that land—hundreds of photographs—each one leading to the next like an endless magic, like the inexhaustible pasta pot in the story that was Lucy’s current favorite. She thought of her own job at the university, of her colleagues and her students and her friends. She thought of Sally and Mike in Salish and her parents so close by, in Spokane.

She thought, I’d lose everything if I left.

Lucy said, “Are we moving away from here?” Her voice sounded appalled.

Anna tore her gaze from the window, looked blindly around the room until she met Eliot’s eyes. For a moment she didn’t know him, he seemed so tired and sad, so stricken and alone. She looked down at Lucy, standing waist-high in front of her, the worry on her face deepening as she waited for an answer.