Chapter 2 - The Archive of Indebtedness
A family’s balance sheet is rarely written in ink. It is kept in the back of the throat, in the small swallows that accompany second helpings at Thanksgiving, in the casual omissions from holiday greeting cards, and in the silence that falls over a Sunday dinner when someone mentions the cost of roof shingles.
My husband, Richard, had worked thirty-two years for the Northern Illinois Gas Company.
He was not an engineer; he was a locator. He drove a dark blue utility truck with two yellow strobe lights mounted on the cab, carrying a radio-detection wand that picked up the low-frequency hum of pressurized cast-iron mains buried five feet beneath the subdivisions of DuPage County. His boots always smelled of damp clay and the sweet, rotten-cabbage odor of mercaptan.
When Richard died of an aortic aneurysm on an ordinary Tuesday morning while scraping three days of wet snow off the Buick’s windshield, he left behind three things: a paid-off sixty-thousand-dollar mortgage on our original two-bedroom ranch house on Maple Avenue, a six-year-old pension that paid fourteen hundred dollars a month with no cost-of-living adjustments, and fifty-two thousand dollars in a certificate of deposit at the First National Bank of Lisle.
That fifty-two thousand dollars had been our fortress.
It was intended to cover the property taxes when the county assessments climbed, the replace-ment of the asphalt shingles every eighteen years, and whatever nursing facility would eventually take the survivor when our minds began to wander into the dark.
Ten months after Richard’s funeral, Michael had sat at my kitchen table on Maple Avenue.
He was twenty-four then, his face still carrying that soft, unresolved doughiness around the chin that made him look like the boy who used to forget his flute in the school band room. He had been married to Tiffany for fourteen months. They had lived in a rented garden apartment where the neighbor’s television played through the shared drywall until three in the morning, and Tiffany had just received a promotion to junior human resources associate.
"Mom," Michael had said, his hands wrapped around a glass of iced tea I had sweetened with two tablespoons of white sugar from the ceramic jar Richard’s mother had brought from Indiana. "The builders are offering a four-point-five percent rate if we can put down ten percent before the end of the quarter. In that subdivision south of 75th Street. The schools are ninety-ninth percentile. If we don't lock it in now, the price jumps thirty thousand when the second phase opens."
The amount they needed was five thousand dollars.
To a boy with an entry-level salary and an auto loan on a leased crossover, five thousand dollars was an abstract mountain, a line on a credit application that stood between him and a lawn with an underground sprinkler system.
To me, five thousand dollars was thirty-six months of property taxes on Maple Avenue.
"We’ll pay it back by Christmas, Mom," Michael had said. He had looked at the linoleum floor between his knees, his thumbs rubbing the condensation off the glass. "Tiffany’s bonus clears in December. We just need to show the bank that the funds are seasoned in our checking account for sixty days."
I went to the First National Bank the next morning.
Mr. Henderson, who had known Richard since we played slow-pitch softball together at the gas company picnics, looked at the withdrawal slip through the bottom of his bifocals. He didn't say anything about the penalty for early withdrawal from the five-year CD. He just tapped his ballpoint pen three times against the marble counter, pushed the cashier's check across the glass, and said, "Give Michael my best, Margaret. Tell him his dad was proud of that college degree."
Christmas came.
There was a five-quart Dutch oven under the tree for me, wrapped in silver foil with a blue satin bow, and a digital photo frame that scrolled through twenty-four low-resolution snapshots of their trip to an all-inclusive resort in Cancun.
The five thousand dollars was not mentioned.
In March, when I mentioned that the property tax bill had arrived and the county had raised the valuation by six percent, Michael had cleared his throat, looked at the ceiling fan in their new breakfast nook, and said, "Things are a little tight right now with the landscaping assessment, Mom. The HOA made everyone put in six five-gallon arborvitae along the rear property line. As soon as the tax refund comes from the state, we’ll take care of it."
The tax refund came and went. Then came the promotion. Then came Sophie.
When Sophie was born, the five thousand dollars ceased to be a debt and became a foundational myth. In Tiffany’s tellings at family barbecues, they had "sacrificed everything, worked eighty-hour weeks, and pinched every single nickel" to buy their first home without asking for help from anyone.
I never corrected her.
I had been raised in an era where mentioning money in the presence of children or in-laws was considered as coarse as clearing one’s nose into a tablecloth. If Richard had been alive, he would have squeezed my knee under the table and whispered, "Let it go, Maggie. The boy’s got a lawn to mow. That’s what we worked for."
So I let it go.
And because I let it go, the gate swung open an inch wider.
When Ben came two years later, Tiffany discovered that the cost of an infant room at the bright, primary-colored daycare center near her office was nine hundred and forty dollars every two weeks.
"Margaret," she had said over the telephone, her voice humming with that bright, urgent cheerfulness that always preceded an assignment. "The pediatricians are saying that institutional daycare before eighteen months actually disrupts the attachment cycle. It raises their cortisol levels. We were thinking... just Tuesdays and Thursdays. Just while Michael is doing his field rotations."
Tuesdays and Thursdays became Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.
Then it became Friday mornings because Tiffany had a team-building breakfast that required her to be in the corporate park by seven-thirty.
For five years, I was the woman who stood at the storm door on Maple Avenue at six-forty-five in the morning, holding a clean dish towel to catch the spit-up, taking an infant whose snowsuit was still cold from the car, while Michael idled the crossover at the curb with the exhaust steaming into the gray Illinois dawn.
I bought the diapers because the ones Tiffany left in the diaper bag were always two sizes too small—"He’s between sizes, Margaret, just double-tape the tabs"—and the generic brand gave Ben a bright, blistering rash that made him scream whenever his thighs rubbed together.
I bought the Pedialyte. I bought the tiny, soft-soled leather shoes that cost forty dollars a pair at the specialty shop in Hinsdale because Michael said Ben’s arches looked flat and the orthopedist recommended structural leather.
When Richard died, I had imagined my widowhood as a quiet, narrow corridor: morning coffee with the radio playing classical music from the college station in Glen Ellyn, the church altar guild on alternate Wednesdays, and four hours of weeding the tomato bed before the sun got behind the neighbors' garage.
Instead, my house smelled perpetually of strained carrots, Desitin ointment, and the chemical lilac scent of the disinfectant wipes Tiffany insisted I use on every door handle three times a day during RSV season.
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I did it because I believed that love was an action, a series of small, domestic surrenders that left a person slightly smaller at the end of each day so that someone else could grow.
I did not understand that to people like Tiffany, a person who surrenders without a receipt is not an elder to be revered; they are an unmetered utility.
