Page 1 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

Chapter One

You are about to begin reading a new book, and to be honest, you are a little tense. The beginning of a novel is like a first date. You hope that from the first lines an urgent magic will take hold, and you will sink into the story like a hot bath, giving yourself over entirely. But this hope is tempered by the expectation that, in reality, you are about to have to learn a bunch of people’s names and follow along politely like you are attending the baby shower of a woman you hardly know. And that’s fine, goodness knows you’ve fallen in love with books that didn’t grab you in the first paragraph. But that doesn’t stop you from wishing they would, from wishing they would come right up to you in the dark of your mind and kiss you on the throat.

Margo’s baby shower was hosted by the owner of the restaurant where she worked, Tessa, who thought it would be funny if the cake was shaped like a big dick, maybe because Margo wasn’t married, was nineteen, and couldn’t even drink, or because it was her professor who’d knocked her up. Tessa was an accomplished baker. She made all the restaurant’s desserts herself and went all out on the penis cake: a hand-carved 3D phallus, twelve layers of sponge swirled in matte pink icing. She installed a hand pump, and after they sang For she’s gonna have a huge baby to the tune of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” after Margo blew out the candles—why? it wasn’t her birthday—Tessa gave the pump a sharp squeeze, and white pudding spurted out of the top and dribbled down the sides. Tessa whooped with glee. Margo pretended to laugh and later cried in the bathroom.

Margo knew Tessa had made the cake because she loved her. Tessa was both a mean and loving person. Once when Tessa found out the salad boy had no sense of taste or smell because he’d almost been beaten to death in his teens, she served him a plate of shaving cream and potting soil, telling him it was a new dessert. He ate two big bites before she stopped him.

Margo knew Tessa was trying to make light of a situation that was not happy. Turning tragedy into carnival was kind of her thing. But it seemed unfair that the only love available to Margo was so inadequate and painful.

Margo’s mom, Shyanne, had told Margo that she should have an abortion. Her professor had been hysterical for Margo to have an abortion. In fact, she wasn’t sure she wanted the baby so much as she wanted to prove to them both that they could not bend her conveniently to their will. It had never occurred to her that if she took this position, they might simply interact with her less. Or, in the case of the professor, stop interacting with her altogether.

While Shyanne eventually accepted Margo’s decision and even attempted to be supportive, the support itself wasn’t always helpful. When Margo went into labor, her mom showed up to the hospital four hours late because she’d been driving all around town looking for a good teddy bear. “You are not going to believe this, Margo, but I wound up going back to Bloomingdale’s because it had the best one!”

Shyanne worked at Bloomingdale’s and had for almost fifteen years. The way her legs looked in sheer black pantyhose was one of Margo’s earliest memories. Shyanne held out the bear, which was white with a slightly constipated face. She did a high, squeaky voice: “Push that li’l baby out, I wanna meet my friend!”

Shyanne was wearing so much perfume Margo was almost glad when she went to sit in the corner and started playing competitive poker games on her phone. PokerStars. That was her jam. She chewed gum and played poker all night long, stomping those jokers. That was what Shyanne always called them, the other players: “jokers.”

There was a nurse who was rude and made fun of Margo’s name choice. Margo named the baby Bodhi, like bodhisattva, which even her mom thought was stupid, but Shyanne slapped that nurse right across the jaw, and it caused a whole kerfuffle. It was also the time Margo felt most loved by her mother, and for many years to come she would replay the memory of that slap and the perfect look of surprise on the nurse’s face.

But that was after the epidural and the whole night of being rabid-dog thirsty, begging for ice chips and being given a yellow sponge to suck on, sponges being well-known for their ability to quench thirst. “What the fuck,” Margo said around the sponge in her mouth, which tasted of lemons. It was after all the pushing and pooping on the table, and her OB looking so disgusted as he wiped it away, and Margo shouting, “Come on, you’ve seen it all before!” And him laughing: “You’re right, you’re right, I have, Mama, now let’s have one more big push.” And then the magic of Bodhi’s slippery purple body when they put him on her chest, pressing the towels around him, his eyes pinched shut. She was instantly worried about the scrawniness of him. His legs, in particular, seemed underdeveloped in a tadpole kind of way. He was only six pounds, despite the song they had sung to her at work. And she loved him. She loved him so much it made her ears ring.

It was only when they released her from the hospital that Margo began to panic. Shyanne had already missed one shift to be there for the birth, there was no way she could take another day to help Margo home from the hospital. Besides, Shyanne was technically banned from entering the hospital after slapping that nurse. Margo told her mom that of course she would be fine. But driving out of that parking lot, her baby squalling in the hard plastic cage of his car seat, Margo felt like she was robbing a bank. His cries were so mucus-y and frail they made her heart race, and she was shaking the whole forty-five-minute drive to her place.

She parked on the street because their apartment came with only one designated spot, but when she went to take Bodhi out from the back, she found she couldn’t understand how the lever that released the car seat from the base worked. She was pressing the button; was there a second button she was supposed to push simultaneously? She began jiggling the car seat, careful not to shake it too hard. If there was one thing everyone had been clear about it was never to shake the baby. Bodhi was crying frantically now, and she kept thinking, You do not have the calories to expend this much energy, you are going to die before I even get you upstairs!

After five minutes of straight panicking, she finally remembered she could just unfasten him, and after fumbling with the freakishly gigantic plastic clasp that went over his chest and pressing the stupid red button of the crotch buckle with the requisite superhuman strength (seriously, she pictured a family of rock climbers, used to hanging by their fingertips off cliffsides, who then decided to design baby stuff), she freed him, but then she had no idea how she was supposed to carry this tiny, fragile thing and also all her bags. Already the stitches in her downstairs hurt like crazy, and she regretted deeply the vanity that had made her pack jeans to wear home from the hospital, though let the record show that they did fit.

“Okay,” she said seriously to Bodhi’s tiny body, his face red purple, his eyes shut tight, “now don’t move.” She set him down on the front passenger seat, so she could slip the straps of the diaper bag and her overnight bag over her shoulders, crossed over her tits like bandoliers. Then she snatched up the tiny baby and waddled up the street to the slumped brown buildings of Park Place. They weren’t exactly bad apartments, tucked away behind the excitingly named Fuel Up! gas station, but compared to the cheerful, whimsically bright 1940s homes that lined the rest of the street, Park Place looked like an uninvited guest.

As she climbed the outside stairs to the second level, she was terrified she would spontaneously drop the baby, his little form, like a Cornish game hen, spiraling downward toward the leaf-choked communal swimming pool. Margo went inside, said hi to her roommate on the couch—the nicest one, Suzie, who loved LARPing and sometimes dressed as an elf even on a random weekday. By the time she made it to her room, closed the door, shucked off her bags, and sat down on her bed to nurse Bodhi, Margo felt like she’d been to war.

I do not mean to insult people who’ve actually been to war; I only mean that this level of stress and physical hardship was entirely outside Margo’s previous experience. She kept thinking, as she nursed him, I am so fucked, I am so fucked, I am so fucked. Because all around her she could feel the echoey space of no one caring about her or worrying about her or helping her. She might as well have been nursing this baby on an abandoned space station.

She held the perfect purse of his warm body and looked into his pinched little face, the tiny coves of his nostrils mysteriously beautiful and fluted. She’d read that babies’ eyes could focus on things only about eighteen inches away, which was exactly how far away their mothers’ faces were when they nursed, and he was looking at her now. What did he see? She felt bad if he was seeing her cry. When he fell asleep, she did not put him in the crib like she was supposed to; she lay down next to him in her bed, aware that the battery of her consciousness was running out. She was afraid to fall asleep when she was the lone sole guardian of this tiny being, but her body was not giving her a choice.

I’d learned about the terms first person, third person, and second person in high school, and I’d thought that was all there was to point of view until I met Bodhi’s father in the fall of 2017. The course Mark taught was about impossible or unlikely points of view. I remember one day, a kid in class named Derek kept trying to Psych 101 diagnose the protagonist of this novella, and Mark kept saying, “The main character is not a real person.”

“But in the book, he’s a real person,” Derek had said.

“Yes, insofar as he is not presented as a cat or a robot,” Mark said.

“So, I am just saying, in the book, I think he has borderline personality disorder.”

“This is not an interesting way to read the book.”

“Maybe to you,” Derek said, “but I find it interesting.” He was wearing a black beanie, and you could tell his hair was dirty underneath, lank and soft, the fur of a sick cat. He was the kind of boy who was never romantically interested in me and whom I therefore spent little time thinking about. He probably watched a lot of foreign films.

“But the character would not be interesting if he were a real person,” Mark said. “You would never want to know someone like this, you would never become their friend. They are only interesting because they aren’t real. The fakeness is where the interest lies. In fact, I would go so far as to say that all things that are genuinely interesting aren’t quite real.”

“Real things are boring, and unreal things are interesting, got it,” Derek said. I could see only the back of his head, but he sounded like he was rolling his eyes, which was brazen even for him.

“The point is,” Mark said, “the narrator doesn’t do x or y because he has borderline personality disorder. He does x or y because the author is making him. You aren’t trying to have a relationship with the character. You are trying to have a relationship with the author through the character.”

“Okay,” Derek said, “now that sounds less stupid.”

“All right,” Mark said, “I will settle for less stupid.”

And then everyone laughed like now we were all good friends. I did not say a word in that class. I did not speak in any of my classes. It honestly never even occurred to me that I should. Teachers always claimed part of your grade was participation. I’d learned long ago this was a bluff. I had no idea why anyone would choose to speak in class, but there would always be one or two who jabbered the whole time like the professor was a late-night host and they were some well-loved celebrity come to promote the movie of their own intelligence.

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