All day? I said.
Before she answered, I went into the empty study. I considered taking a nap in the chair. Everything had been organized; the surface of the desk was clean and smooth. My roommate Julie texted me to remind me that I needed to mail her a rent check. I got up and returned to the kitchen where I heated up a potpie in the microwave for myself, a disgusting, glue-like potpie, which appealed to me in the moment, but I knew I would regret it later. I passed my adoptive mother in one of the living rooms. She sat in a wicker-basket chair with her eyes closed and her palms on her knees as if she were meditating. I brought the potpie with me into the study and sat at the desk. I leafed through a few drawers until I found a box of checks. It’s all the same money, I thought, isn’t it? I wrote a check to the landlord and slipped it into an envelope, which I addressed with a careless scrawl. It didn’t seem like my adoptive father kept very good track of his finances anymore, which was strange because saving money had once been so important to him. I only knew he didn’t keep good track because when I asked my adoptive brother how he could afford to fly to New York City since he didn’t have a job, he told me he had cashed a couple of my adoptive father’s checks that he had written out to himself. He told me he had an entire box of our adoptive father’s blank checks in his possession. If my adoptive father knew about it, he never said anything.
I ate my potpie with thoughtful bites. My adoptive brother and I had this in common: we were both prone to being careless with money as a concept and as a vital material. I could never afford my rent with my part-time job helping troubled young people; I relied partially on a small monthly amount from my adoptive father’s parents, both dead, the Bach-abusing schizophrenics, which my adoptive father sent to me reluctantly, and I refused to feel badly about it, because there were times when those Bach-abusing schizophrenics were also emotionally and verbally abusive toward my adoptive brother and me, sometimes they had said very inappropriate things to us, especially my adoptive grandfather, especially around the holidays, he would really get into it, first he would hand us each a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill, fresh from the mint, and before we could thank him, he called into question why the two of us had been adopted when there were millions of starving orphans roaming the streets of Korea and eating out of garbage cans.
Why you and you, he would say, pointing at each of us, why the two of you in particular, what’s so special about you?
And he seemed to especially enjoy verbally abusing my adoptive brother.
Little man, he called him, and not in an affectionate way.
Small hands, he said shaking his head. You know what they say about boys with small hands.
For some reason, I escaped most of his wrath, although when I graduated college, he told me if I didn’t start to have babies I would get uterine cancer.
I didn’t feel any qualms about cashing his small monthly checks because all I did was keep myself alive with the bare necessities, the staples, the basics. My ultimate purpose was always to simplify my life, to keep it as small as possible. The first thing you can do to contain your life is to just stop buying things. I almost never purchased anything, not even health insurance. The black turtleneck was a $20 extravagance. While living in New York City, I learned to wear clothes left on the sidewalks of all the richest neighborhoods like SoHo and the West Village. I learned how to alter pants and shirts with a sewing needle and thread. The last time I bought brand-new shoes that fit, I turned twenty-five. I wore shoe sizes from 7 ? to 11, men’s and women’s. I liked to stuff socks into the toe to make them fit and I always had blisters, but I was never uncomfortable.
Walking has always been a huge part of my mental process, I thought as I sat in the chair.
If I can walk, I can think, I thought.
I always had enough money to live on and I never had enough time to live, whereas time was never of any concern to my roommate Julie and her lifestyle. It was strange to live with someone who had so much time for every whim, every impulse, even artistic ones. I, too, once had artistic impulses, I thought, but then they died away. A few weeks ago, she told me she was leaving for a week to take cooking classes in Mexico. She wanted to rediscover her love for cooking. I enjoyed when she left on these little excursions, because it was almost as if I had a normal-sized apartment to myself, even though there was no time to enjoy that space and freedom, I had almost no time for anything when I wasn’t at work, I never had time for anything but answering phone calls from my troubled young people. I talked to them all the time; when I was supervising them on the clock, I talked to them about their troubles at home, and when they went home, I had to talk to them on the phone about the troubles they had with other supervisors, my coworkers. They swallowed up countless hours, my hungry troubled young people. Even though it was a part-time job, it took up almost sixty hours a week. That’s why they call me Sister Reliability, I thought, I’m always there.
Ever since the suicide, I had set up an auto-reply for my email. To put it plainly, I copied and pasted the content of the email to my supervisor. Of course it’s not necessary to subject yourself to such exhaustive work practices, because I believed it was possible to live on nothing in the city and still survive like the cockroaches and rats. It’s about knowing the right people, the rich ones, or the friendly ones, and listening to their problems. In fact, I once wrote and designed a FREE PAMPHLET out of my own goodwill, specifically for my troubled young people, titled How to Survive in New York City on Little to Nothing.
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HOW TO SURVIVE
IN NEW YORK CITY ON
LITTLE TO NOTHING
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