Page 9 of Margo's Got Money Troubles

“You know what I mean. You were gonna have a career and, like, do things!”

“What things?”

“I don’t know,” Shyanne said. “Whatever you wanted!”

I stayed silent. Mark, Becca, my mom—they kept insisting I had all these options, and I could never figure out what those options were supposed to be. In high school I’d met with my guidance counselor, Mr. Ricci, exactly two times. The first time he told me I could apply for scholarships and financial aid and gave me all these forms to fill out. The second time he seemed to have no memory of me and said my only hope was transferring to a UC. I’d enrolled in Fullerton College, except the whole first year I hadn’t been able to get into a single class I needed for transfer credit; they all filled up almost instantly. So I’d done a whole year of basically fluff humanities credits that would never transfer anywhere. Everyone kept telling me I would lose so much by having this baby, but it didn’t feel like I’d be losing anything at all.

“I’m dreading telling Kenny,” Shyanne said, resuming her pacing.

“Why on earth would you dread telling Kenny?”

“He’s religious!” she hissed. There was something very velociraptor about the way she was stalking back and forth.

“So... wouldn’t he be glad I didn’t get an abortion?”

“No, he’d be appalled you’ve been whoring it up in the first place! Teen mom? I mean, Margo, we would never tell him if you had an abortion!”

“I have to be honest, Mom, I cannot bring myself to care about what Kenny thinks of me. Plus, I’d be twenty by the time the baby’s born.”

“He could wind up being your stepdad!”

I found this unlikely, though it seemed mean to say so.

“Kenny is great,” she said. “Kenny is amazing.”

“Okay,” I said, “yes.”

“It will be fine,” she said. “I’ll just kind of imply that Mark took advantage of you. It wasn’t really your fault.”

I did not intend to leap to my feet, but I did, and then I didn’t know what to do when I got there. “Mark did not take advantage of me,” I said. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Of course you think that. You wouldn’t have done it if you felt he was taking advantage. But he’s a grown man, honey. There’s things you won’t understand about it until you’re older.”

I was so mad that the bottoms of my feet ached and I also really had to pee, so I went to use the restroom. My mom had this big poster of the Eiffel Tower in her bathroom and little French soaps; the whole room was Paris themed. I was thinking how stupid it looked and how annoying she was as I washed my hands with the little soap, rough and spastic like I was peeling potatoes, and then I realized she probably desperately wanted to go to Paris, and she probably never would. I looked in the mirror and could suddenly see how I looked just like her, a knockoff Shyanne, my eyes set a little too wide. Both of us had stupid faces, pretty and sweet; faces that seemed to imply there was nothing inside us at all.

When I got back to the living room, she was sort of draped on the couch in a sitting position, like someone had let the air out of her. I lay down so my head was in her lap.

“When I got pregnant with you,” she said, idly stroking my hair, “I was so scared.”

“Why did you keep me?” I asked. It had never really made sense. It was a one-night stand; she hardly knew my father. They’d met at the Hooters where she worked. She didn’t even know his real name, only his ring name, Jinx. Because in his first match, his opponent dropped dead before he even touched him.

“I didn’t know he was already married,” she said. “He didn’t wear a ring—none of them did, you could lose a finger, but I didn’t know that then. It was really intense between us, and I thought maybe... I don’t know. Maybe, you know? It felt like my destiny, like he was The One.”

The tenderness of her hope and the obviousness of her naivete were too much. I rushed to move on. “What was Dad even like back then? He’s so serious now it’s hard for me to picture. Even the idea of him being drunk.”

“Oh, believe me, your daddy could drink with the best of them. I don’t know. He had those dark eyes that kind of sparkled. And he was on so many steroids his traps were huge, and he didn’t tan. He was so pale and big, he looked like a milk-white bull.”

“Mom, I was asking about his personality!”

“I was getting to it! He was a gentleman. Probably from being Canadian. He was always kind, but he was a heel in the ring, so you didn’t expect it. He was a listener, he liked sitting back and letting other people talk.”

“I can see that,” I said. I had never known my father as a wrestler. By the time I was making memories, he’d already herniated two discs in Japan and started managing Murder and Mayhem. He managed them in the everyday sense of booking their matches; they were rare free agents amid the Monday Night Wars. But he also played the character of their manager on TV because Murder and Mayhem weren’t great talkers and Jinx was a genius at promos. I assumed he stopped using steroids after he got hurt because he lost a lot of weight, and the older he got the skinnier he seemed to become. With the largeness of his frame, in his almost skeletal thinness and shaved head, he’d begun to resemble a hairless cat.

“How did you guys—like, how did you tell him?” I’d spent surprisingly little time imagining all this.

“Well, one night they all came into the restaurant drunk off their asses about one in the morning. And after my shift, he took me to his hotel room, and I told him. He was really happy about it. It was weird. He couldn’t stop smiling and touching my tummy. He told me then that he was married, and that kind of broke my heart. I was crying, and he said, ‘I’m really glad I met you.’ And I realized I was glad I’d met him too. So we just made do with what we had. When he was in town, we’d see each other. I knew he had to save the big money for his wife and them, I always knew that. But he really did come through when he could, I believe that. I don’t think you should count on Mark being the same. And probably a lot of people would say I was dumb for doing that, but you know, I always loved him.”

This I had known. It was obvious, horribly so. Whenever he came to town, she doted on him, constantly offering to make him a sandwich, get him a glass of water. It was a steel cage match for his attention, and I always lost. The few times I’d won, when Jinx had shone that laser beam of love on me, were painful in a different way. One year he was in town for my birthday and took me to a steak house. I was thirteen and absolutely did not like steak, but he took me out for this fancy dinner, and when I got home, Shyanne wasn’t even mean about it, she was crushed. He stayed in a hotel that trip instead of our house. He sometimes did that, and I never knew exactly why or what it meant.

---