If you had told me three years ago that my family would spend itself into the ground, I wouldn't have been surprised. I wouldn't have been surprised, frankly, if you had told me that fourteen years ago, when I was ten, an age which most people tend to consider too young to understand the way money works.
I am not like my family. My father, who has a strong dislike of anything that isn't attractive, enjoys the things he buys with money, but has a general aversion to bills, banks, checkbooks, or offices. He was born wealthy, and, unless some miracle happens in the very near future, he will die poor.
My mother is already dead, having died the same year I began to understand the kind of people my family really were. I have two sisters, one older, and one younger. The older one still lives at home with our father and, now, me. She hates nicknames, and refuses to be called Liz or Liza or Eliza or Beth. She is Elizabeth Elliot. She likes the alliteration. My younger sister married out of high school (or rather prep school), and has hunkered down in the Berkshires with an independently wealthy man of her own. She doesn't have to worry about our future, and I am strongly convinced that she doesn't.
I sound bitter. I know it, and I wish I could be perky, or amusingly sarcastic, or sardonic. I wish I could be better entertainment for you and for my family, who don't like listening to me speak either. But at the moment, I am twenty-four, lonely, and staring at the dismal account book our over-priced accountant produced for us not half an hour ago. The book itself is pretty, but since my father thinks that numbers must have been invented by the loneliest, most friendless, and therefore ugliest, human being in the world, he won't look at them.
I look up at Rochelle, my mother's best friend, who has been filing her nails quietly across the table, giving me time to get over my mild cardiac arrest. "There's nothing here."
Her head snaps up from her immaculate cuticles. "Hmm?"
"There's nothing here, Rochelle. They've spent everything. The second mortgage, my scholarship from the town, my paychecks, dad's trust fund, mom's inheritance, her life insurance, everything. It's all gone. They're living off credit cards now." I hunt down the column of EXPENSES, which the accountant had written in what I thought was an extremely smug all capital letters. "Elizabeth is still spending hundreds of dollars on clothes, dad is still getting his hair styled at that ridiculously expensive salon, and having those hair transplant treatments so he won't go bald, they still insist on eating at expensive restaurants…" I rub my face in my hands for a second, then return to the book, mesmerized by the badness. "We're spending more than we make, no wait, sorry, we're spending more than I make, and we're not stopping, and we massive credit card debt, and they'll never listen to me, and they'll just keep on doing it, and what am I supposed to do?" I look at my friend desperately, at her well-groomed hair, her perfect complexion, her well-dressed, lean figure. She would remind me of a Barbie doll if Barbies had even a smidgeon of elegance. She regards me for a second, then puts her nail file down all together. This is important, and even my cool and collected godmother can see it.
"You're going to get through it, darling, like you always have done. Your mother led this family through so much trouble so quietly that they didn't even know what was happening. Now you have the chance to do the same, and I know you will,"
"But—"
"Just write up a proposal for how they should live from now on. Tell them where, their budgets, any major changes they have to make, and so on. You can do this, Anne, I know you can." She regards me closely, a small, secretive, all-knowing smile dancing around the corners of her mouth, "You have so much of your mother in you, you know. There are times when I think you conceived yourself, because you're definitely not like your father in any way. She was strong, sweetheart. So can you be." She smiles at me again, this time with the air of having just given me the greatest present I could ever ask for, and goes back to filing her nails with a kind of extreme diligence.
I look down at the ledger book silently, thinking of all the things I could have said in protest. My mother had severe stress issues. She had a heart attack because of them. Am I supposed to die for this family, too? And besides, doesn't that whole approach of taking on all the family problems just let them get away scotch free? How are they ever going to change now? But in my long experience with Rochelle, I have never been able to get her to seriously roll her sleeves up and attack a problem. Just like my father and my sister, she left it up to me to solve. But beggars can't be choosers, I think to myself sternly, at least she listens to your problems and acknowledges them.
I get up from the table and head for the bathroom, switching on the light to reveal the expensive rare black marble, the wall sconces, the perfectly feng shui positioning of the toilet and the bathtub, the circular mirror that cost over two thousand dollars. Before, all of this had seemed wasteful. Now it just seemed foolish. Who needed a ten thousand dollar bathroom when you could barely afford to feed everyone?
I turn on the water faucet—this is adding to your water bill, Anne—and splash cold water on my face to cool down. I quickly shut the tap off and look at myself in the mirror. My dark circles have grown larger, I notice. It's to be expected, considering I didn't sleep at all last night. I prod my protruding cheekbone, sighing again in frustration at my appearance. I need to gain weight badly.
I shut the light off, now disgusted with my appearance. I go back to the desk, and Rochelle, and the books, and begin to feverishly write out a plan for the rest of our lives.
"Move? What d'you mean, move?" my father shouts. Surrounded as he is by his family, his personal assistant, his personal assisstant's daughter, and Rochelle, he can't bring himself to sit down and discuss things rationally. Now that he has an audience, he has to play to it.
"We can't afford to live here anymore, Dad," I say, trying again to hand the papers to him, to show him the work I've done. He doesn't even acknowledge their existence, instead he huffs to the window.
"But what would it look like, a family like our moving out of the best neighborhood in the country? What would that say to everyone?"
"That we're on the verge of being bankrupt and we don't want to die of starvation? These people can handle the truth at least once in their lives. Besides, they already know, anyway—"
"I do not want to sell this house here so that we can go and live in some disgusting little flat of the kind you're used to, Anne. I won't allow it! How will your sister live, without her friends around her?" I look at Elizabeth, who is slowly and methodically eating her way through a box of chocolates, doing her best to look both thoughtful and rapturous at the same time.
"Dad, I know you don't want to leave. I understand that. But we don't exactly have a choice if you want to keep on eating. My paychecks aren't enough to cover food and credit cards and water bills and electrical and oil. I don't make the kind of money that can support a house of this size. So you need—we need to change our lifestyles a little bit. Just…listen to my ideas, all right? Just listen, okay?"
"Walter, Anne has never asked for a thing from you before," says Rochelle, having fixed my father with her steely, calculating gaze. "Now she is trying to help you, at least listen to what she has to say."
My father looks from her to me, then sits regally in the chair behind him, and nods for me to continue.
"Okay," I start, looking down at my papers and trying to collect my thoughts, "the first thing we need to do is move. That doesn't mean," I say, cutting my father off before he could protest, "that we're going to sell this house. We're going to rent it out to people. The value of this house has tripled since we bought it thirty years ago, which means a reasonable renting price will have gone up, too. That will help pay off the mortgage on the house in case we ever do want to sell it again, and will also give us a steady income to pay off other bills like credit cards. Like you said, this is a hugely desirable location, right on the water, right in town. People would kill to own it, and kill to rent it, especially in the summer. Then you'd rake it in. Next, we have to cut back on our expenses. This means we have to sell the things we don't need anymore, like old clothes and furniture and shoes and appliances, and your BowFlex, Dad, that's gathering dust in the attic. We're keeping only what we need and buying only what we need. Elizabeth, I'll have to introduce you to the idea of bargain shopping and the like. Not everything we own can be designer anymore. It just can't."
"I hate this!" Elizabeth bursts out, flipping her chocolates on the floor, "how is it that you can tell us how we should be living? You don't do anything at all! You're barely even useful as a sister! Daddy, how can you let her tell you what to do?"
Rochelle's eyes flash, and she snaps, "Anne's been the backbone of this family ever since your mother died, Elizabeth. She's shown more patience today than I've ever seen anyone else possess. She works harder than you've ever had to in order to keep you two happy, and she's far more mature than you are at this moment, for all you're the eldest. Let her talk, because she's making very good points."
I look from Rochelle to Elizabeth uncertainly, to make sure they're really done, then I clear my throat and continue. " If we take the right steps, we can go without severely crippling our financial futures. We just have to curb some of our habits right now a little in order to make do. It won't be that hard, once we get the hang of it, I promise." I hand the papers to my father, thankful that I have copies in the desk in case he decides to destroy them in a noble huff.
"You should consider it," my father's assistant, Michael Clay says gently. His daughter, the twenty-something Hope, with her vacant smile and her Jimmy Choos, nods in agreement. I try to hide my dislike for her. I have noticed how much more invested in her appearance she's grown since she met my father. Hopefully I wasn't saving our money only to have her marry into it.
"Absolutely, Walter," Rochelle says, her voice now reassuring and calm. The maid scurries to clean up the chocolates Elizabeth dumped on the floor, and I nod to her in thanks. "You should listen to Anne. You know, that just today I heard that the Crofts have been looking for a home here for awhile. Adam Croft, the soccer coach? He and his wife would almost certainly take this house, and Lord knows they have the money."
I freeze at the sound of the name. Rochelle seems to have noticed, and stops her speech, but Elizabeth grabs it by the horns and charges. "Oooh, the Adam Croft! You know them, Daddy, his team won the World Cup at least three times! And I think his son-in-law was on the last team…what was his name? Waldren—Wellberg—W-something, I'm sure."
"Wentworth," I say quietly. Rochelle glances at me sharply, but doesn't say anything. I meet her gaze placidly, trying to prove that I have no regrets. I'm not fooled. Neither is she, I think.
"Wentworth, that's it. Anyway, Daddy, he's supposed to be the best soccer player in the world."
My father stretches out along his arm chair, and I settle myself back for another of his tirades. His lips purse into a nasty little smile, and he moves his hand lazily by the wrist as he says, "Ugh, athletes! There is nothing attractive about them whatsoever. First they sweat and smell and chase balls around for fun, then they get fat and lazy in the off-season, and expect everyone else to pick up the tab! And soccer players! Have you seen their thighs, Elizabeth? And their butts? Huge! Absolutely enormous, I'm telling you. Besides, they get old and injured before their time, and then what do you have? An impotent, fat ex-soccer player reduced to coaching children to get by. Disgraceful!"
"But Walter," Rochelle says in her most patient voice, "if he and his wife are willing to take the house, then you will let them rent it, won't you? They are very good people, and I know they'll take good care of the place. They have no kids, anyway, and a family without kids won't break any of the furniture. At least consider it, won't you?"
There is a long pause while my father considered. Then he nods, flipping through my papers. He glances up at me for the first time, and says, "Your sister Mary called. She wants you to go there and help with the house and everything. She's expecting you on Sunday." Then he returns to shuffling my papers.
I do my best not to look hurt or upset by his flippant use of my time, and by his apparent lack of need of me. I get up to leave the room, followed by Elizabeth's resentful stare, the Clays' impassive ones, and Rochelle's sympathetic gaze.
Nothing ever changes.