Mercy's Debt

ONE



San Francisco, California

June 2, 2012



I glanced down at the bill clutched in my trembling fingers, tears smarting in my eyes.

Shocked into immobility, I stood frozen in front of the mailbox, my feet rooted firmly to the squishy earth. I always knew this day would arrive, the day when they’d come looking for their money.

My heart caught in my throat. I was going to be sick.

It will be okay, somehow. It has to be.

I blinked back my tears and took in a deep breath. Today was not the day to fall apart.

Whether or not Stalwart Financial deliberately intended to be sardonic was a mystery, but their poetic timing was not lost on me. The past due notice on my university loan arrived less than eighteen hours after I’d participated in the graduation ceremony. I reached up to my face and tugged at my eyelashes; I was still wearing the same mascara that I’d had on the night before. Oh, the bitter irony.

I ran my fingers over the numbers in a futile attempt to fully comprehend the monetary shitstorm I faced. I owed $108,000 (plus interest, lest I forget) for a single piece of framed linen paper. As if that wasn’t bad enough, I was already three payments behind, and now the bank expected me to magically produce the two grand required in order to bring the account up to date.

There was a bold threat in red writing across the top of the notice, handwritten by my loan officer, Frank Thomas. No more excuses, Ms. Montgomery. And I had come up with some good ones during the last six months that I’d been out of school: lost mail, illness, a death in the family (the last one was true). One more missed payment, and they’d turn me over to collections.

The bank had finally run out of patience, and I couldn’t blame them. I’d used up all of my pleas for extensions long ago.

At least my name looked pretty on my diploma. It was elegantly scrawled in fancy gold lettering, a lovely Edwardian Script: Mercy Delilah Montgomery. Bachelor of Science, Psychology. Dewhurst University.

My private education hadn’t come easy. Or cheap, obviously. But what had I expected? I’d attended one of the most prestigious colleges in America- in the world, in fact- and the paper my diploma was printed on was worth a million times its weight in gold. That’s what the university administrators had assured me each year anyway, as I shelled out exorbitant amounts of money for my schooling. Now that I was a bona fide graduate, a twenty-four-year-old unemployed graduate who couldn’t find work to save her life, I wasn’t so sure.

From what I’d come to understand during my studies, having a bachelor’s degree in psychology is about as useful as a degree in underwater basket weaving, except people actually find a need for baskets. In the patient’s eyes, an advanced psychology degree translates into a more qualified shrink. To the shrink, on the other hand, additional schooling signifies tens of thousands of dollars deeper in the hole. Apparently, those with emotional dysfunctions don’t feel comfortable revealing their deepest, darkest secrets unless the psychologist is on the verge of bankruptcy.

Several of my professors assured me that I shouldn’t expect to have a decent paying job as a therapist until I earned a master’s, if not a PhD. Funny, this little factoid failed to make the pages of Dewhurst’s undergraduate admissions brochure.

With my happiness sufficiently drained for the day, I sighed and stuffed the past due notice back in its envelope. I pulled out the rest of the ominous-looking letters, longing for the days when I had the luxury of feeling simple annoyance due the masses of junk mail I received. If only I could discover a mailbox stuffed full of innocuous neon papers advertising sales on vinyl siding for a house I didn’t own, and coupons for carpet cleaning, hot wings, and family-sized pepperoni pizzas. Those were the good ole days, days when I didn’t experience crippling anxiety from the mere sight of the mailman walking up the sidewalk.

I scowled at the mound of unopened letters, feeling psychic because I was certain of the words printed on them. I wasn’t just late on my student loans; my rent, car, and utility payments were past due, too. Every piece of mail I received lately was a variation of a final warning, most times included with a threat to cut off my services. I hadn’t paid my cell phone bill in two months, and was continually surprised that it still had a dial tone each time I powered it on.

I really didn’t have too many people to call anyhow. When a person found themself as broke as I was, it made having any sort of a social life almost impossible. Chatting with girlfriends over lattes was a simple but small luxury I couldn’t afford. Last time I checked, my bank account was barely in the double digits.

Unlike my classmates at Dewhurst, I didn’t have a cushy trust fund my family had set up in my name the instant I was conceived. In actuality, my family was pretty much nonexistent.

My parents died when I was just four. I was raised in a trailer park on a shoestring budget by my Grandmother, Tilly, who died four months ago from a heart attack.

I loved my Grandmother, who I referred to affectionately as Grams, and not a day passed that I didn’t missed her. In the end, I may have not inherited anything more from her than a run-down trailer, curvy hips, and a thick head of hair, but the lessons she taught me about poverty were invaluable.

Although she had died penniless, Grams came for a very well-to-do family in New York City. Her parents were stuffy old money types, elitists who cared about keeping up appearances above all else. When Grams was a sophomore in high school, she became pregnant with my mother. The father, my Grandfather- though I’d never known him as such- was an emotionally immature boy from the wrong side of the New Jersey tracks. As the oldest story in the world goes, he skipped town the very day he caught wind of the pregnancy.

When they learned of the illegitimate conception, Grams’ parents had given her two choices: disappear to a “girls retreat” for a few months and give the bastard child up for adoption, or leave the family forever.

Grams chose the latter option, hastily dropping out of high school and departing her parent’s estate in the winter of 1972. She left home with a few personal items, a small amount of savings, and the clothing on her back.

Shortly after her departure, Grams opened her suitcase to remove a pair of gloves, and found a tangled heap of pearl necklaces, gold broaches, and small diamond rings that her mother had secretly planted in her suitcase. She also found a note which contained just two words:

I’m sorry.

In desperate need of funds, Grams pawned the jewelry swiftly, so she wasn’t able to get much for it. Still, she was able to buy a barebones but reliable used car, and still managed to have a little money left over. As a single mother, she bid Manhattan farewell and traveled south to Florida, optimistic about the sunny new life she was going to build for herself and for the baby growing in her womb.

Somewhere near Jacksonville, Grams took a wrong turn and became lost on a secluded country road. Hungry and weary from the long journey, she stopped to eat and ask for directions. She ended up at a café in Pelville, a small town about forty miles inland from the nearest beach. The waitress Grams spoke to was so warm and concerned for her welfare that she decided then and there to make Pelville her new home.

Three days after her sixteenth birthday, Grams gave birth to my mother in a free clinic for women. She did it under the name Tilly Montgomery, an alias she’d made up on the spot by borrowing the names of two women she’d read about in the waiting room magazines.

Ashamed of having been jilted by both her lover and family, Grams continued using her assumed name after the birth of her child. Grams told everyone she met that she was orphaned as a young girl, and that her husband had been killed while serving in Vietnam. She told the lies so often and so convincingly that she eventually started to believe them herself.

She falsified her information on the job and housing applications she filled out, stating that she was nineteen. With her new baby in tow, Grams moved into a tiny studio motel room where she also found work as a cleaner. Each day on the job, she learned how to scrub floors, change bedding, and polish furniture, chores she hadn’t done once in her entire life as the daughter of millionaires.

Grams was doing backbreaking labor for minimum wage, but she was nonetheless happy to be liberated from her parent’s suffocating oppression. That’s what she’d told me, anyway, during one of the few occasions that she talked about her past. She was also proud of the fact that she never once contacted her family. Even so, she couldn’t help but speculate just how mortified her mother would have been if she was to see her only daughter working on her hands and knees, scrubbing toilets while wearing a dingy maid’s uniform with Tilly embroidered above the breast pocket.

I don’t really remember much about my parents.

After giving birth to me at seventeen, Mom surmounted Grams’ pregnancy by a year, something only my mother deemed an achievement. Unlike my grandfather, my dad opted to stick around, resentfully wedding my mother in the city hall in Pelville when she was five months pregnant.

With Mom married off, poor Grams must have felt a tremendous amount of relief to finally be on her own again. Then my parents were killed by a drunk driver- my own father, coincidentally- and Grams was strapped with a young child once more. That young child, of course, was me.

Grams made it her goal in life to ensure that I escaped the life of poverty. She was determined to stop the abysmal cycle she was convinced she’d set in motion. If she accomplished just that one task, she once said, her entire life hadn’t been lived in vain.

It was only because of my grandmother’s sheer determination that I avoided becoming just another sad victim of circumstance. For that, I am forever grateful.

When I reached my teens, Grams insisted that I behaved like a lady. She educated me a great deal about high society customs, which I’ve learned can take a girl like me farther than anyone in the trailer park would ever have ever imagined.

From the confines of our little mobile home, Grams taught me about proper table etiquette and how to carry myself like a debutante. She trained me how to speak neutrally and a-nnun-ci-ate my words, forbidding me from using parochial slang and developing a telltale “poor white trash” accent. Grams assured me that if I got into the habit of speaking in a low-class manner, it would be something that would hinder my success for the rest of my life.

The way Grams looked at it, she wasn’t instructing me to hide who I was or where I came from; she was merely engineering the finest possible “me” to present to the world.

I took care of myself, and ate the healthiest way that I could on our food stamp budget. I went jogging every night in my thrift store sneakers, always working hard to take care of my body, a necessity since we couldn’t afford health insurance.

When you reach womanhood, Mercy, you may find that you’re broke at times, Grams would say. But you’ll have your looks temporarily and your brains forever. Your beauty may get your foot in the door, but it’s your intellect that will keep you there.

Grams’ words resonated with me, and as a result, I spent my teens studying while all of my classmates partied. I attracted the attention of several boys in town, but I always remained fearful about the risks of pregnancy. I was called all sorts of unflattering names- geek, frigid, ball buster- for my studiousness. I didn’t have many friends, and townspeople accused me of thinking that I was better than everybody.

No matter what those who didn’t truly know me believed, I never assumed that I was superior to anyone. I only wanted to escape.

And escape I did.

It was the happiest day of my life when I was accepted to Dewhurst. I had to delay my admission for a year and a half because of finances, but I didn’t mind. I had found my way out.

I got a job at the only grocery store in Pelville as a checker, worked as many hours as they’d give me, and saved every penny I made. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

No trust fund. No savings. No inheritance. As an adult, every cent I ever had, every connection I ever made, I earned it myself. That much I could be proud of.

I’d never been outside of Florida until the day I flew to California to begin attending college.

When I stepped off the plane in San Francisco, I was overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of the big city. My initial impressions were of the glamorous urbanites bustling around me. Everyone was so polished and important-looking, typing away on high-tech gadgets with upmarket cell phones glued to their ears, like they’d stepped straight out of a magazine. Even the air was different, far chillier than the humidity I’d grown accustomed to in Pelville.

I was scared, an overwhelmed small-town girl lost in a big, bad metropolis. I wanted nothing more than to hop on the next flight back to Florida.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t bear to imagine what it would have done to Grams if I returned to the trailer park a coward. And so I remained in San Francisco, making it my new home.

Four years later, and I could still attest that staying in California was the best decision I’d ever made. Still, in spite of how far I’d come since leaving Pelville, I was ashamed of my irresponsibility and how I’d allowed myself get into such a financial bind.

I’d been living on student loans for the past few months, eschewing work so I could do well in school during my final year. At least my sacrifice had paid off; I graduated as one of the top of my class, summa cum laude.

I’d always naively assumed that I’d land a job as soon as I was furnished with a degree, as if there’d be a fairy godmother waiting for me after the graduation ceremony with an offer for a stellar six-figure job in a private practice.

As a part of this deluded fantasy, I’d accept my fairy godmother’s proposition, later becoming one of the most respected psychologists in town. I’d live in the trendiest part of the city in a sweet little historical cottage. I’d remodel it so finely that my friends would come over and gasp, “You really decorated all of this yourself?” In my home office, I’d have a wall filled with awards and plaques that had been given to me by my fellow scholars. I’d arrive at work each day dressed in designer clothes that, while stylish, were serious enough to show that I meant business. I’d be in such high demand that I’d have to turn patients away because my schedule was just too busy. I’d sufficiently ease the emotional turmoil my patients faced, leaning back in my expensive leather desk chair while noncommittally murmuring, “Hmm, I see. How does that make you feel?”

None of this ever happens to anyone, though, does it? Life never pans out so easily in the same way that it does in the movies. But how I wished it did.

On the days I felt particularly discouraged, I’d question whether I should have just gone to a state school like many of my high school classmates had done. They may not live in San Francisco, or have elaborate diplomas printed on the highest quality linen, but they also probably weren’t in debt up to their eyeballs.

To hell with university bragging rights. And to hell with my fairy godmother. What I really needed was a salaried job with benefits.

The story was always the same each time I went job-hunting. You’re a smart girl, Mercy. You have a great degree, and lots of potential. But… you have no experience whatsoever. Next!

It was time to put on my big girl pants and face reality. I was in serious financial trouble. I needed to find a way to make money. No, not just money. A lot of money.

Immediately.