Breaking the Bank Read Online Free Page B

Africa, ponchos from Guatemala. The kids, like Mia and her brother, Stuart, went to private schools but not those rarefied, East Side places like Chapin or Spence. West Side kids were enrolled at Ethical Culture, Horace Mann, or Fieldston.
    Mia’s father taught astronomy at Columbia University and spent a good deal of time up on the roof of their building with a small phalanx of telescopes. Sometimes Mia and Stuart would go up there with him, but they were generally too impatient to see whatever it was their father was trying to focus on with the long, vaguely riflelike lens. When he was downstairs in the apartment, he was, despite his distraction, a mostly indulgent, even tender parent. He sang lyrics from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas; he walked ten blocks to buy a pint of Mia’s favoriteLouis Sherry pistachio ice cream. On the nights her mother was out, he spent the evening playing Monopoly with them; dinner was Twinkies or Devil Dogs accompanied by Cheez Doodles and washed down by a whole gallon of milk.
    Their mother, Betty, also taught—in the Political Science Department—and was a tireless signer of petitions, an organizer of movements, a veritable nucleus of progressive causes, concerns, and agendas. She was also an occasional painter and covered the walls of their apartment with her large-scale canvases, mostly fuzzy blobs of color on which she worked in a fevered, joyful frenzy for days at a time, ignoring most of her other responsibilities until the wellspring of creativity had, for the moment, run dry. Stuart and Mia were united in their disdain for these paintings as they were united in so many things back then, and one of their favorite games was devising what they deemed impossibly clever titles for them.
    â€œBig Blotch About to Devour Little Blotch,”
said Stuart as they viewed their mother’s latest effort, still wet and propped against the dining room wall. It depicted a huge squarish shape the color of a rotted eggplant that was butted up against a smaller shape of a similar color. Mia stood back so she could let the feel of the thing, atrocious as it was, enfold her.
    â€œHow about
Grape Gone Wild
?” she countered.
    â€œIt has definite possibilities,” Stuart said. “I like it.”
    But to Mia’s surprise and grief, the cement that held her family together seemed to crumble when her father died. Mia’s mother decided to take early retirement and sell the apartment. Suddenly unmoored from her home and her work, she took several extended trips out west, married a local, Hank Heyman, and settled into a cream-colored bungalow near Santa Fe. At first Mia and Stuart had a lot of fun with Hank’s name—“Hey, man”—but they did have to acknowledge that Hank, a short, athletic guy in his seventies who sported a stunning pair of eagle tattoos on either bicep, did make Betty happy. Abandoning allher paintings, along with almost everything else in their old apartment, she had invented herself anew in the relentlessly scorching and sun-baked landscape. She took up gardening, and now presided over a yard filled with a dozen varieties of cacti and succulents, tumorlike forms covered in long, lethal-looking needles. Mia had tried to enlist Stuart’s contempt for their mother’s new hobby, but Stuart had, inexplicably, become Betty’s biggest booster.
    â€œDon’t you find them, oh, I don’t know, a little
threatening
?” she had asked him in a phone conversation not long after she had returned from a visit to their mother’s. “
Vagina dentata
and all that?”
    â€œI think you’re being too hard on her,” Stuart had said. “They actually look kind of cool to me. And I’m glad she’s rebounded from Dad’s death so well, you know?”
    â€œRebounded. Right,” Mia said, miffed that Stuart was no longer her partner in crime, even in a matter as inconsequential as this. He had grown