The Best Laid Plans (5 page)

And neither do the workmen.

“Sorry, lady, it’s out of our hands.” The cola drinker shrugs as they both collect their tools and the rest of the cookies and leave. Rosie and the girls and I plop onto the cold torn-up floor and lean against the back of the tub. The girls start to pepper me with questions and I promise I’ll explain everything later, after Rosie’s gone and Peter and I can talk to them together. Peter comes into the bathroom, drops his briefcase, and slumps down beside us. He takes off his shoes, loosens his tie, and starts pitching broken tiles.

“ ‘We don’t have any openings.’ ‘You’re overqualified, Mr. Newman.’ ‘Wow, you were earning how much?’ ” Peter says, recounting what amounted to another fruitless day of job hunting, as with each shot he tries to land a tile in the toilet and misses. “Guess it’s not my day,” he says, shrugging and giving up.

“That’s okay, Daddy,” says Paige, who despite her occasional outbursts these days is still a sweet girl at heart. She picks up a handful of tile and leans over to give Peter a kiss. “How about ten out of twenty?”

My eyes well up with tears at the sight of Peter and the girls playing toilet tiddlywinks, though I hope they keep missing their mark—the last thing we can afford is to call a plumber.

“Who needs money?” I say jauntily. “There are two other bathrooms in the house that work just fine. And you know what?” I say, turning around and running my hand along the inside of the cracked porcelain tub. “I’ve always thought this baby would make a great planter.”

Of course, eventually we have to leave the cosseted, fairytale world of the master bathroom, and when we do, my Pollyannaish attitude fades more quickly than my blond highlights. I retreat to the library, where I have a small desk and a computer to keep track of my charity work and appointments.
I pull out a legal-sized yellow pad and with a black Sharpie left over from labeling the girls’ summer camp clothes, I start making a list of “How to Save Money.”
Turn down the thermostat
(
better for the environment!!!!
!) I write in big, loopy letters. I pause, stumped. I go back and write a big number 1 next to my one and only brainstorm. As I sit puzzling over number 2, Paige and Molly come in, full of anxious questions about the future.

“How bad is it, Mom?” Molly, my practical daughter, wants to know. “Will we be able to stay in school?” Paige is worried that we’ll have to cancel HBO and her extra Verizon minutes. Both of them ask if we’re going to have to move—according to Peter, a very real possibility.

“Daddy and I are very resourceful,” I say, trying to allay their insecurities without actually lying. “We’ll figure something out. We love you, we love each other, we’re a great family. Everything that we need we have right here.” I give them each a kiss. Pleading that they need to finish their homework, the girls head back to their room.

“I told you,” says Paige poutily, when she thinks she’s out of earshot. “We’re not going to be able to go on the class trip to The Hague.”

“Oh my God, you are such a retard,” Molly says, as the bedroom door slams behind them. “Didn’t you hear what Mom was really saying? We might not even have a place to live.”

P
ETER’S IN THE DINING
room early the next morning stuffing a last piece of bacon into his mouth. My husband seems to think the Lipitor he takes is a condom providing impunity for him to eat whatever the heck he wants. But it’s not worth making a federal case, today of all days, about his cholesterol.

“What’s all this?” I ask, pointing to the table, which is set with our best serving pieces filled with an array of our favorite foods.

Peter swipes a napkin across his fingers and shows me a handwritten note. “It’s Rosie’s last meal. She took a job with our neighbors, the Mortons. She says she’s sorry she has to leave but she has to think about making a living.”

“And so do we,” says Molly, coming up behind her father just as he’s about to serve himself some eggs. She snatches a silver ladle out of his hand and replaces it with a plastic spoon. “I’m selling all the good stuff on eBay.”

I follow Molly into the living room where she’s amassed a pile of chairs, tables, lamps, picture frames, and a sweater I
bought at a celebrity auction “knit by Julia Roberts”—although I’ve always suspected it’s the work of Brooke Shields. I rummage through the mound and clutch a small pink and white cloisonné box to my chest. “You can’t have it, it was from our anniversary trip to Hong Kong!”

Molly extricates the box from my grip and tosses it back on the pile. “Mom, get a life. We’re fighting to keep this family afloat.”

On the other side of the room, Paige is sitting on a folding chair with her computer balanced on her knees. I look over her shoulder and let out a yelp.

“Paige Newman, how can you be shopping at a time like this?” I ask, startled to see her clicking on a picture of a cashmere cardigan and adding it to her virtual shopping cart, which is already overflowing. “Don’t you understand that we need to save money, not spend it?”

“Chillax, Mom, I
am
saving money. Everything is on sale.”

Molly moans. “Type in ‘thrifty dinners.’ With Rosie gone we’ll have to do our own cooking.”

“Ugh! Couldn’t we just get the take-out menu from Sarabeth’s?” But a few minutes later Paige reads off a recipe. “Barbecue Rice Night, yum! A dollar’s worth of chicken, two slices of processed American cheese, white rice, and twenty-four cents’ worth of barbecue sauce …”

“How do you
measure
twenty-four cents’ worth of barbecue sauce?” Peter asks plaintively. He comes up behind me and rests his head on my shoulder.

“I don’t know, honey, maybe with a thimble?” I turn around and give him a kiss. Then I put on my jacket and tell the girls not to be late to school. “Don’t sell the crystal,” I say, with as much confidence as I can muster. “Fingers crossed, I might have a way out of this mess.”

T
HIRTY MINUTES LATER
, wearing a white T-shirt and my best Chanel suit, I’m sitting across a table from Suze Orman. We’ve served on a PBS fund-raising committee together and when I called, Suze suggested meeting in her favorite diner, a dive with worn checkered linoleum floors and beat-up black leather booths held together with silver duct tape. Not the sort of place most wildly successful authors and TV show hosts frequent, but then again, maybe that’s why Suze has the money to pay for a perpetual spray tan, and I don’t, at least not anymore. A waitress named Vy takes our order and returns with two cups of watery Sanka and a pair of bran muffins. Suze just has to be able to help us, she’s a financial genius, isn’t she? When I finish telling her our troubles, she shakes her head and runs her hand through her trademark wedged bob. Just like she does on TV.

“Tru, sweetheart, girlfriend, how can you expect to be flush with a broken bathroom? Fix it!” She leans in to tap a perfectly French-manicured nail on my handbag, which is propped in front of the jukebox. “And what’s with the
red
bag? Do you see what’s going on here? Do you know what I’m saying?”

“It was on sale,” I lie, quickly snatching the strap of the purse and taking it off the table.

“It was not! And it’s not just about the price, it’s about the color.
Red
, girlfriend,
red
! This bag is sending the wrong message. You want your finances to be in the
black
!”

I take a gulp of coffee and pick at the top of the muffin. I love the bag but if that’s all it takes, I guess it’s worth the sacrifice. I dump my wallet, makeup, keys, and credit cards onto the table and I call over our waitress.

“Here, would you like this?” I say, resigned to relinquishing the fire-truck-red Birkin I waited six months to get. Vy looks suspicious, but before she has a moment to consider, Suze seizes the pocketbook and tosses it into a nearby wastebasket.
“What’s up with that, sister? You want our friend Vy here to go bankrupt, too?”

“A twenty-percent tip would be fine,” Vy says, warily.

“You see, our girlfriend here’s got her head on straight,” says Suze, motioning for Vy to sit down and join us.

“You want to hold cash and bonds but stay away from domestic and foreign stocks and for heaven’s sake,
burn those credit cards
!” Suze rat-tat-tats. Lacking access to a book of matches, she reaches for my Visa and American Express cards and determinedly starts to saw through them with a butter knife.

“But …” I say.

“No buts,” says Suze. “You have to bite the bullet. No credit, credit is bad. I own seven homes and I don’t have a mortgage on any of them.”

“I just put down all cash for a one-bedroom condo,” Vy says.

“That’s what you should have done, Tru,” Suze says, as I slink down a little farther on my side of the booth. “So your husband’s out of work and you’re racking up debt. Boo-hoo! Snap out of it, sweetheart! My father sold chickens. When his business failed he took in boarders. When one of the boarders fell down a flight of stairs and sued us my mother became an Avon lady.”

“I love their Skin So Soft!” Vy says.

“Did you know that it’s not only a moisturizer, but it works as a bug repellant? Mom kept a roof over our head selling those products door-to-door, one sale at a time. Though she never told anyone she was working—she was embarrassed about being the family breadwinner.”

“You do what you gotta do,” says Vy, the philosopher of the Four Brothers Coffee Shop.

“After college I became a waitress, just like you!” Suze says
clapping her hand over Vy’s. “One of my clients gave me fifty thousand dollars to start my own business and I invested the money with a stockbroker, but the son of a bitch stole every last dime. Did I crawl under the covers and cry? Not a chance!” Suze says, turning toward me and, although I didn’t think it was possible, opening her wide eyes even wider, so that she looks like one of those unnaturally bug-eyed children in a Keane painting who are supposed to evoke pathos but frankly give me the willies. “I became a stockbroker myself and made a ton of money. Then I made a ton more money teaching other women how to make money!”

Suze’s story reminds me of Scarlett O’Hara’s I’ll-never-be-hungry-again speech. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that at one time in her life, Suze had made a ball gown out of curtains, too. I lean in, waiting eagerly for Suze’s words of wisdom.

“Do you understand what I’m saying, do you know what you have to do?” she asks urgently.

“Kill chickens, learn to sling hash, stay away from bad stockbrokers? Please, Suze, tell me!”

“Get a job!”

“Get a job?” I sputter. “That’s it? Don’t you have something like … like an insider trading tip?”

“If that’s what you wanted you should have called Martha Stewart. Of course then you’d wind up in jail. Get a job!”

“But I haven’t worked in twenty years. Who would hire me? What would I do?”

“Start by checking with your last employer, maybe they’ll have something or can give you some leads.” Suze pulls a copy of her latest book out of her handbag—her
green
, color-of-money handbag—writes an inscription and hands it to Vy. Then she stands to leave and gives me a go-get-’em thumbs-up. “Remember, sister, today is the beginning of the rest of your life!”

“The rest of my life,” I repeat numbly. But first, I have a more pressing problem. Now that I’m bagless, I have to stuff my lipstick, keys, and limited cash into the pockets of my beautiful Chanel suit jacket. And then there’s the matter of the check. It takes me a moment before I realize—thank goodness!—that Suze already paid it on her way out.