Dear Money Read Online Free Page B

pretending to understand it, wanting it too, I'm afraid, because it seemed to my mind, with its desperate questions, that the Chapmans, with this house, their desire for and appreciation of it, were gently pointing me to a kind of answer.

Two
    O N A CLEAR MAY DAY my life began, lilacs blooming, their scent flooding the hospital room, a bouquet on the bedside table. In my mother's tired and happy arms I wailed, her gorgeous girl, everything long about me. She admired each toe, each finger, my rosebud mouth, my long dark eyelashes and my bright blue eyes that held an intelligence, she could tell, that almost scared her with its ferocity. She loved to tell me that, the haunting power of my newborn eyes. They became mythic even for me. It was the responsibility that terrified her and fascinated her and which culminated in my eyes.
    I am seduced by beginnings. I yearn for beginnings. I love to start fresh. A new book. A new day. A new dress, slipping into it to become a new person. Before things become messy, before the predicate traps you.
    I was the predicate for my father. He sat in an armchair in the corner of my mother's hospital room, a bit stunned by the wreckage of birth—his wife's dark eyes, drawn and tired cheeks. Looking at me there, a newborn baby girl, he did not think I was beautiful. Rather, he thought I looked like him, with my thin hair and round face, the intensity of my big eyes which held a defiance that declared that I would do as I pleased. He knew this defiance. It was his own, had served him well.
    Fragile and delicate, a girl who looked like a man, like him, I grew into a woman he could not protect as he watched me in my mother's arms. Nestled and swaddled and tucked against her chest, emphatically driven by instinct and will. Through his thick horn-rimmed glasses it was easier for him to see bills—the doctors, the clothes, the food, the education: the roller coaster ride ahead of him. He knew how to pay bills. But me, impossibly small, rubbery, how would he manage me?
    Dread filled him: I was his responsibility. Panic seized his chest. Already he was dizzy, and he hadn't even left the platform. He was thirty-six years old, a successful urologist in D.C., an "intimate of the urinary tracts of senators and congressmen," affiliated with prestigious Washington General Hospital. In a city where proximity to power is the coin of the realm, he liked to say that he had his finger in the Senate. He owned his house, he invested well, he had his daughter, in a few years he would have his son (now a doctor too, living in London with a fancy wife); my mother never had to work. His will had driven him to create this, comfort for his family that his daughter would discard, sneer at and defy. She grew up before his eyes, from mysterious newborn rooting at her mother's breast to a blue-eyed beauty who would not listen. How could he save me if I would not listen?
    That I would not listen made him furious. Standing in our living room, my long hair falling in soft curls about my face, I told him I was going to graduate school, that I would become a writer, that I did not need his blessing. When I was a newborn he could hold me in one hand, but even then he'd felt helpless. He had wanted to be able to explain it to me, the helplessness, the fear, how fragile babies are, how punishing whimsical choices can be. Becoming a writer was whimsy, after all. But he did not know how to bring softness to the negotiating table. Fear did not create tenderness. "I would have written books if I'd had the chance, if someone had believed in me," my mother said in my defense as my father raged about my choice—as if it were a choice, as Theodor so frequently reminded me. "Nonsense," my father declared. "You're a smart girl, capable of choosing. Most writers aren't any good. Most of them don't make a dime, even the good ones. Especially the good ones."
    Mom defended me again when I announced that I had married (eloped with) the