The Madwoman and the Roomba

by Sandra Tsing Loh

  Three: Net neutrality. You won’t do anything. You’ll at least do no harm.

  Four: No help is provided, no support, no cocktail. In fact, you are actively hazing me for even trying to address my audit. You’re saying: “Fuck ’em! Just throw a shoebox of receipts at them!” Perhaps subtly implying that I am a loser for even taking my $34,000 audit seriously—that it is a sign of my extreme neurosis.

  “GODDAMN IT!” I yell at him. I pour his smelly tea all over the lawn. Professor Moonbeam looks at me with a guarded expression. I am not enlightened, but I do hold the building’s title. He must tread carefully.

  I RETURN FROM teaching (otherwise known as “paid employment”) at 5 p.m. Three vans are parked in our driveway, their doors flung open, their contents blasted all over our backyard. There are red prayer books, golden necklaces, purple scarves, black Hindu lingams everywhere.

  They are hammering. And hammering. And hammering. Zing! Zing! Zing!

  Charlie meets me at the back door, apologetic, but also thoughtful, as if he is sharing a very interesting insight about this diligent group.

  “They’ve never had the space and time to actually empty out and rebuild the vans. Okay!” he yells to the group, clapping, “day’s over!”

  Charlie has the sense to immediately mix me an icy cocktail, even though no one else is apparently consuming anything but mung beans, phlegm, and air.

  I take a sip and almost miss him saying, “Um, and they need to stay here a few extra days—”

  Before I can respond, Shakti is at my side. He bows, offering me a small statue. “It’s a Ganesha. Blessed for you. He removes all obstacles.”

  “See?” Charlie says. “Removes all obstacles.”

  Shakti says, “Charlie told us about your tax problem. We are praying for you.”

  “Thank you,” I say, once again touched.

  And in fact, as the sun goes down and candles are lit, I do feel a bit better. The cocktail helps, as does some medical cannabis Charlie slips me. We all sit down to another curry Charlie has made, along with a smorgasbord of dinged aluminum trays of vegetarian Indian food—peas, potatoes, lentils—from the tour. There seems to be a quiet consensus among the brotherhood that The Girlfriend is about to Flip Out. Everyone is eagerly passing food to me as though I were a fragile bipolar invalid princess.

  There’s a door knock.

  And here they come, the Gentleman Callers. They’ve come to fraternize with the Hindu monks, of course, but clearly Charlie has also sounded the alarm about my audit.

  Which is to say, the Gentlemen Callers enter as solemnly, and cradle their gifts as carefully, as Chinese court eunuchs carrying jars of their private parts.

  They, in short, have dug down into their special magical archival mines and brought up . . . their 2015 paper receipts.

  “We heard all about your audit,” Jerry says, smoothing his Utilikilt.

  “Trust me,” Bradford whispers, “these are the really good receipts.” He utters that in the same hushed tones as you would say, “Sun Ra on vinyl.”

  Bradley hands me a shoebox of receipts. The actual shoebox is for some sort of exotic Italian loafer—Ferrante!

  Tex proudly hands me his receipts, in a dented manila envelope, puffy with age, as carefully as if this were a raft of winning lottery tickets.

  “Laura always does our taxes,” Jerry says. “I can only offer you a bottle of her producer’s merlot.”

  “I’m very touched,” I admit. “That you all went to this effort.” Everyone bows.

  “Ganesha provides!”

  IN THE MORNING, slightly hungover, I piece through the receipts.

  The attention is apparent. They are, indeed, minor works of art, Bradford’s in particular. Each receipt is annotated at the bottom in florid penmanship, glorious, sweeping. And, as Bradford lives alone with a cat and never eats out except with opera people, these are all in fact “business expenses.”

  First problem: THE LEGALITY, as they aren’t actually my arts-related expenses. Second problem: Bradford neither makes very much nor spends very much.

  “$23.44!” he writes fussily.

  Charlie has also handed me the crumpled manila envelope that is the crown jewel of his paperwork: his gas receipts. Because we drive together to various meetings, for occasional theater or performance projects, these would, technically, be legal. That’s right! Eureka!

  We’re going to take down this $34,000 elephant $8 (and sometimes as little as $3.62) at a time!

  In the heat of summer, there are, of course, now ants, exacerbated by the Indian food and smelly tea and ripening avocados.

  But here again, Ganesha. Looking for these Costco ant traps I bought, in the highest shelf in the kitchen, I pull a cupboard open and it all rains down on me. . . .

  The holy grail.

  Receipts. VISA statements. Canceled checks. All of my date books dating back to 2008. It’s the Da Vinci Code and I’ve found the codex! I crow hoarsely with excitement.

  I decide I’m going medieval. I’m channeling what Charlie thinks is my latent Asperger’s. And I’m okay with it. Bring it on.

  The ugly glasses are coming out, the ones from Walgreen’s that are my actual real prescription. That’s right. The bad boys. The 2.75s. Gone are the days when I thought I could get away with $9.99 glasses that were 2.25s and kind of Tina Fey-looking.

  No: the kooky purple ones that make me look like Moms Mabley are the only ones I can actually see with.

  I select a piece of super ugly clothing. The BIG Pema Bollywood pants, and a Pokémon GO shirt. And my retired red Crocs.

  It’s my medieval tax warrior costume.

  I assemble around myself my various Hindu trinkets, statuettes, sacred fruit. I go to Office Depot. I decide I will buy the hugest binder I can find—a five-incher. No, I will get two—I am going to do this in duplicate. These binders—jet black and blood red—are so massive they are like jaws of life, or death. These are medieval torture instruments.

  I begin to read IRS code like sacred scrolls, the Bhagavad Gita. If husband and wife travel together for work, they can deduct 100 percent of travel for business. But if they make a side trip to Boston by train to visit her sick dad, they cannot deduct that. Even on business, though, they can only deduct half the food.

  I buy one thousand page protectors. As in the Hindu mantras, I won’t stop until I have filled 880 of them (a magic number). Every gas receipt gets its own sleeve. Every category is color coded.

  I cross-link each entry two to three times in mechanical pencil. It becomes my personal Talmud. For every computer entry, there is a check stub, a bank statement, an invoice, and a receipt.

  I start to become very excited. It’s like a performance art piece. This thing is going to be in New York’s MOMA. It is a paper document of extraordinary resonance. It weighs twenty pounds.

  Due to the burden of proof it represents, it is a piece of conceptual art worth $34,000.

  Spontaneously, the state of California bursts into fires. I wonder whether I should store my binders in a fireproof locker?

  IT’S THE NIGHT before my audit. 9:30 p.m.

  I’m sitting up in bed with my masterpiece around me. Just as I’m about to triumphantly snap my binders shut, two nagging questions come to me:

  1.My “writing office.” Is that part of my house or is it listed as a separate deduction? Where does writing take place? Can it take place in two places? Does it exceed 35 percent of my home?!?

  2.If I drive more than twenty-five miles across town to a business dinner, is that just mileage or does it go into the category marked “Travel”?

  My mind is a snarl of receipts, categories, Excel spreadsheets . . . (“Is there a NOUN you might disturb? Pair it with an ACTION verb!”)

  “Jeez,” I say, biting my lip, trying to focus, which is difficult as I appear to hear . . . thumping.

  I pad downstairs in disbelief. There are like a dozen Hindu crew members mingling in our downstairs, male and female. Charlie is
practicing yoga asanas with the men, a couple of Indian women in saris are frying naan at our stove, and our washing machine, which is in our kitchen, is going full blazes—thumping, thumping, thumping!

  A female crew member named Salma—also in white pajamas—explains it to me. She has a strong German accent.

  “In the woman’s house, Leonore had an allergic reaction to the pillow foam, and was trying to sleep. Since the washing machine there was near Leonore’s bedroom, I wanted to wash Amma’s linens here so Leonore can get some rest.”

  I pull Charlie aside. “Amma’s linens?”

  He explains. Because Amma is a holy guru, she must have fresh linens every day, and there are certain rules about them, like they need to be facing east or west and need to be sprinkled with lavender or tamarind—

  I freak out.

  “Why is your Hindu ‘mother’ so needy? Where’s my mother?”

  I storm back into the kitchen full of Hindu devotees and scream into their faces, like Linda Blair in The Exorcist: “I’m getting audited by the IRS for $34,000 and it is my washing machine not your Hindu mother’s and get out of my house or ‘home office’ or one-quarter home office or whatever it’s called right now. . . . Fuuuuuuukyouuuuuuu!”

  THE MORNING OF my audit, my male IRS agent has come down with a mysterious bug. Perhaps it’s the same bug that got my old Bear accountants.

  A female IRS agent steps in.

  I am completely shattered and drained and exhausted.

  But it’s true that I speak slowly, with lots of pauses, and don’t react. “This is the kind of research I do,” I explain. “It’s all about science and depression and menopause. So much menopause. I am a writer. At times.” Upon perusal, we see that Malik simply forgot to log one $20,000 contract payment. You can see all the fluttering tissue 1099s that have a pencil checkmark at the bottom right corner, and then there’s one that doesn’t.

  Clank of the dungeon.

  The IRS agent revises the tab down to $4,700. Ganesha!

  I’d Rather Be “August” Wilson

  Tampa

  I WAS WALKING IN Brookleaf Park this morning. In front of the Kidsplay Children’s Museum was a radiant young mom taking iPhone photos of her adorable blonde young son.

  One and a half, I think. Barely walking, halfway between baby and toddler, when they’re only half-formed. They’re made of a jellylike substance called Baby. They are almost two-year-olds, but they’re still made of Baby.

  He was trying to climb onto the red K of “Kidsplay.” He was picture-perfect in his white-and-blue-striped jumper.

  The Kidsplay Museum is in a parklike, rhapsodic glen with a symphony of somewhat rare yet native plants, those certain kinds of important wild grasses. An open amphitheater is fringed by a canopy of willows. Colorful well-kept miniplaygrounds demonstrate the science’s deep and intuitive principles: gravity, rotation, flight.

  “Hands on! Hands on!” you can hear the Stanford-educated mothers in sunhats calling out, bouncing their BabyBjörns made of hemp(?), Hold Everything Tupperwares of homemade mini banana muffins, and BHP-free water bottles.

  I remember, when I was a younger mom, a time of healthy snacks. The idea was, if you cut healthy food (cucumber, cantaloupe) into smiley faces and animal shapes with special fringed cutting tools (dot with raisins for eyes) and place them in your child’s cooling pak (mysteriously but pleasingly spelled with a k), your child will eat them!

  It’s such an appealing fantasy, the perfectly constrained/constructed/articulated ballet canvas of motherhood. It invokes child psychology and early education and a deft hand to use the melon baller and a bit of visual artistry to add a dab of color balanced by a calm spirit because one went to morning yoga.

  I so miss that idea.

  It’s like no children who ever set foot into the Kidsplay Museum are obnoxious or smelly or interested in picking their nose. Oh no, with delight they crawl through a rain forest and play with bugs and watch a starfish grow.

  Oh, if only I had left my children in there, my daughters. They would still be two and six, in high ponytails, and all would be well. They would still be eating healthy food, delicious, cut up into aardvarks. They would still be in yellow safety helmets driving little cars around the track and tripping through the singing fountains.

  WHICH IS TO SAY, I wasn’t aware of how long parenting would take. If I’d known, maybe I wouldn’t have blown out of the starting blocks so quickly. I wouldn’t have played all that Mozart during pregnancy. I wouldn’t have pumped all that breast milk and measured it to the half-ounce. I wouldn’t have taken my six-month-old babies to learn drumming at Gymboree. When they could barely sit up. Drumming!

  I was so proud of getting two girls through childhood without either of them having swallowed a bead. For years I was fixated on that—choking on a bead. I guess the bar was fairly low. No one choked on a bead. I rocked at motherhood!

  Now my daughters are tween/teenagers and it’s like snakes popping out of a can. Why did I put in so much effort when they were small? I should have rested for ten or twelve years. To be ready for this.

  Which is to say, unfortunately, instead of resolving itself, somehow, due to the wayward and inconvenient hearts of adolescents, the story of JJ has continued. Remember? JJ? Suicidal fifteen-year-old boy from Tampa?

  Over these past several months, since Sally began texting with JJ, there have been many cliff-hangers. All narrated, minute-by-minute, via buzzing texts.

  JJ sitting alone under a freeway bridge at night in the rain, watching traffic, not able to go home.

  JJ getting into a car with teens he didn’t know were drunk.

  JJ’s Aunt Debra being taken to the hospital in an ambulance, he doesn’t know why.

  JJ looking into a mirror and cutting himself with glass, blood everywhere.

  JJ high on drugs and not making sense.

  JJ having a panic attack, spiraling.

  The issues appear to be:

  His Aunt Debra, who is like a mom to him, has a mysterious illness. He may lose her. Then there would be no reason to live. (Although other threads say Aunt Debra is suffocatingly overprotective.)

  When Aunt Debra gets sick, he then has to stay with his uncle, who hates him. Although there is also the thread that his uncle and wife insist that he eat meals with their family, including his cousins, which makes him feel sick.

  Both sets of grandparents are homophobic and hate him.

  He is messing up at school and disappointing everyone. Though he appears to be bright and accelerated and takes Java programming classes during the summer.

  Also, his antidepressant medication appears sometimes working and sometimes not working. When it’s not working, he wants to give up because he has tried so many things and he can’t try any more.

  Wednesday is the day of the week he sees his doctor. He begins cheerful but by 6 p.m. every evening his mood starts going down.

  But there have been pluses, too.

  On good afternoons, Sally sits up on pillows in bed doing her homework while her little phone vibrates and vibrates. There is comfort. Connection. Laughter. She carries her phone from one room to another like a pet.

  Sally has a bad day at school, and comes home to a package.

  JJ has sent Sally this cunning, multifolded gift box he has painstakingly hand made. It is painted with rainbows and hearts, with Sally in the middle, her face rendered in the beautiful, precise hand of love. There is also self-deprecating humor. There’s a card of a unicorn that farts. There are funny cartoons, filled with many tiny JJ caricatures, cats and Japanese anime characters. Sally is filled with sunlight.

  When calm, JJ has the most extraordinary sense of attention, and is full of gratefulness, sweetness, hugs.

  Sally sends a package back to JJ filled with mysterious beloved objects. A small robot doll she got at the Anime Convention. Striped orange and yellow troll horns she handcrafted out of balsa wood. A magical feather. Notes in a secret language.

 
It is an ecosystem that Sally maintains, protects, and that, in some sense, emotionally sustains her. I think.

  It’s just the hours, the punishing hours.

  Sometimes in the evening, Sally gets exhausted with JJ’s panic attacks. She has homework to do, so she hands her phone to me so I can take over the emergency texting. This is really, I think, not how teen alienation is supposed to work.

  He knows I am Sally’s mom, he calls me a “cool mom,” and I try to be a calm presence for several coasts. One Wednesday, when JJ’s really freaking out, I ask him to draw something for me.

  “What?” he types.

  “Your cat.” He does, and sends it.

  “Amazing!” I say.

  “It’s not,” he says.

  “I’ll show you a cat that’s NOT amazing.” I draw a bad cat. It’s amusing. He laughs. He says he feels better. I still have that cat today. Sally is so grateful I’ve bought her free time. But within two hours he is down again.

  Obviously, these cycles are wearing on us. Sally was anxious about JJ, now I am too. She’ll ask me fretfully in the morning if I’ve heard from JJ. In the afternoon, I’ll ask if she has. The good thing is that I’m close with my tween. The bad thing? It feels like we’re army medics playing a game of Operation on a tarantula.

  I’m at the very least failing my maternal role of Providing Oceanic Calm that quite frankly I wish somebody, anybody, would provide for me.

  It always begs the question: “What am I supposed to learn today?”

  Sally’s new gambit is that she really wants to visit JJ in Tampa. It’s her dearest wish. Is that JJ’s dearest wish? His text:

  I really really want to meet you guys but I’m afraid when Sally sees me she will hate me.

  Because apparently due to his problematic eyesight he has to wear these really thick glasses. We assume.

  Because remember, the only communication has been by text. They’ve never talked, because teens don’t use phones as “phones.” Packages of art have been exchanged but no photos—there’s no Snapchat or Instagram. Nothing.