The Rich Part of Life

by Jim Kokoris

  Charlie slipped me a note when I approached him. I opened it and was treated to a very good likeness of the Monopoly chance card “Bank Error,” featuring the little old man winning money from the bank. I nodded and smiled. As a rule, I didn’t speak to him in public much. I knew this made him uncomfortable.

  “Do you want to come over today?” I whispered.

  Charlie looked hard at the back of J. R. Lawler, who was standing directly in front of us in line, then he shook his head very slowly and carefully.

  “How about tomorrow?” I asked.

  Charlie nodded this time.

  When we got into class, Miss Grace smiled at me and said, “Well, there he is! We’ve been seeing a lot of you in the news, Mister Teddy Pappas!” I looked at her and smiled, then looked down at the floor, my cheeks burning red. Earlier that morning while I was still in bed under my covers, I had wondered what her breasts would look like with tassels on them. Over the summer, Johnny Cezzaro had shown me a picture of a naked woman with tassels on her breasts. He had said that the woman used to be an exotic dancer but now worked as a receptionist at his uncle’s auto dealership.

  Before we started history, Miss Grace asked me to tell, “in my own words,” what it was like to win the lottery. Her face was unusually flushed and looked like my mother’s used to after she did her sit-ups or drank too much Jim Beam.’

  “My father told me not to talk about it,” I said, standing next to my desk. Miss Grace made us stand when we spoke, for vague reasons distantly related to posture and diction.

  She looked surprised, but said, “Of course, of course,” and cleared her throat. “And we will respect his wishes for privacy.” Sensing her and the class’s disappointment however, I quickly said, “We’re probably going to buy a farm. But we’re not sure.”

  “Oh. I see,” she said. Then she said, “My.”

  “A lousy farm?” Johnny Cezzaro whispered. But he whispered it too loudly and Miss Grace gave him a punishment penmanship assignment and then we began a discussion about the Fertile Crescent.

  During Enrichment period, when I was writing my letter to Ergu, my Christian pen pal who lived in poverty in a mud house in a remote part of Africa I could never locate on the map, Miss Grace walked over to my desk and softly asked if my father was planning any major charitable contributions.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. Miss Grace was a small woman with soft brown hair and large green eyes that I frequently lost myself in. I enjoyed having her close so I could smell her scent, which reminded me of fresh rain on flowers. Hoping to keep her near me another moment, I said, “I think we might give some money to Ergu and his family so he doesn’t have to eat as many roots.”

  “That’s very Christian,” she said, her eyes watering. Miss Grace always seemed to be on the verge of tears for reasons we could only guess at. Her poems about barren trees, gray skies, and squirrels that had been run over by semitrucks frequently appeared in the Wilton newspaper under a pen name, Sylvia Hill. Everyone knew they were her poems though. Even Mrs. Plank, the principal, knew. She was always calling Miss Grace our “secret poet” in the hallways even though it was apparent that Miss Grace was embarrassed by this, her face growing stop-sign red.

  “Is Ergu still poor?” I asked, looking up at her. When she smiled at me, I wondered whether breast tassels hurt to wear or were instead painless like wax lips.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s especially hard during the flood season.”

  I looked over her shoulder in what I hoped was the direction of Africa, then asked, “How long is the flood season?” I received virtually all of my information about Ergu from Miss Grace, since Ergu had never actually sent me a letter even though I had been his Christian pen pal for almost two years.

  “A long time,” she said, patting me on my head and walking away. “A long time.”

  Since Miss Grace saw all of our letters before they were mailed to Africa, I wrote a longer letter than usual to Ergu, telling him that we had won some money and that I was going to see if we could send him some. I also suggested that, with the money, he and his family might consider buying a raft to use during flood season and paddle to another, drier country that might have modestly priced restaurants. Then I asked what his school was like, reminded him that I was praying for his family and handed my letter in to Miss Grace. Later that afternoon, during Reflection period, which was when we were supposed to reflect about Jesus but usually just looked out the window and reflected on the St. Pius parking lot, I watched Miss Grace silently read our letters at her desk, her sweet face intense and focused. When she came to my letter, she looked up and smiled. A few moments later though, she called Johnny Cezzaro to her desk and slowly ripped up his letter in front of him and made him throw it away, piece by piece in the wastebasket by the side of her desk. Johnny was always asking his Christian pen pal for money and I concluded that he had done so again.

  When school was over, Mrs. Plank, our aged principal, and Miss Polk, the assistant principal (whom everyone said was a woman-loving lesbian, because she had short hair and used to be a disc jockey), pulled me out of line in the hall and started asking me questions.

  “Were you excited when you won?” Miss Polk asked. She was chewing gum and cracking it in her mouth, lesbian-style.

  “Tell your father that St. Pius needs a new furnace,” Mrs. Plank said, laughing and rubbing my head with a very old hand.

  I nodded and smiled. Mrs. Plank had never touched me before and I began to feel nervous that Miss Polk would soon feel the need to start touching me too.

  “You’re going to become very popular around here, Teddy. You and your brother,” said Miss Polk. I smiled at her and noticed for the first time that she had facial hair. Thin, almost transparent whiskers lay calmly on her upper lip, unrepentant and growing.

  “Your father’s going to be pretty popular around Wilton too, I suppose,” Mrs. Plank said.

  Miss Polk said, “Oh, Mary, really, that’s terrible,” and then Miss Polk laughed through her soft mustache and they let me go.

  Near the front door, Mr. Sean Hill stopped mopping the floor and smiled at me as I tried to pass. He had thick red hair, a thick red mustache, and a blotchy, dirty-white face that reminded me of snow in March. Whenever I was near him, I sensed a strange current of anger lurking just out of reach of his smiling face. Rumor had it that he had been a member of the Irish Republican Army before almost becoming a priest and then moving to America to become a janitor.

  “Jesus Christ himself would trade places with you now, Teddy Pappas,” he said in his Irish brogue that sounded like off-key music. “Jesus Christ his own fuckin’ self.” Then he smiled violently and slowly started moving his mop over the floor, wiping my invisible footprints clean.

  On the way home, a group of older girls from sixth grade kept yelling “Moneybags” at me from across the street. Embarrassed and flattered, I swallowed hard and tried not to look over at them. I was at the age where girls were starting to matter, moving slowly but steadily up my list of priorities. Up until that point, I had occupied a very low rung on the social ladder at St. Pius, a step above Charlie but several miles below Benjamin Wilcott and other members of the school football team, an arrogant group of boys with sharp elbows and hard knees. Tall and thin with red hair and freckles, awkward at sports, and recently made motherless, I received occasional pity but little else in the way of attention from the plaid-skirted girls of St. Pius. When the girls yelled again, I ducked my head and walked faster.

  When I got to our block, Mrs. Rhodebush, our next-door neighbor, was sitting out on her lawn, fanning herself with a large pink fan that Mr. Rhodebush had brought back from the Far East before he died of massive heart failure while cleaning his gutters. He had rolled off the roof and onto a large evergreen bush, where Mrs. Rhodebush found him some time later, suspended in the bushes, and dead.

  “So you’re rich now,” Mrs. Rhodebush said. I looked at my shoes. I had always found it difficult to talk to Mrs. Rh
odebush. She was old and had clear, liquid eyes that slid quickly through her wrinkled face. She lived alone and spent most of the day observing and, I thought, judging my family. My father said her mood was due, in part, to a gum disease that made her legally disabled. She didn’t have any permanent teeth, a condition she allegedly took advantage of by parking in handicapped spaces whenever she shopped at the mall.

  “You should ask for a big allowance now,” Mrs. Rhodebush said. When she smiled I noticed that she had once again lost her false teeth. She had lost them the week before and had called my father and asked him to send me over to help her find them. After I located them behind the television, she had given me a can of creamed corn as a reward. When I gave the can to my father he studied it for awhile, then put it quietly away into a cupboard, after saying, “Well.”

  “I never played the lottery,” she said. “I’m surprised your father did. I never would have taken him for a gambler. I never gamble. Except for the stock market and then only dividend-paying utilities.” Then she said, “It’s a shame your mother isn’t around to enjoy this. A shame.”

  “Yes,” I said. I was surprised that Mrs. Rhodebush even mentioned my mother. They hadn’t liked each other much and had fought frequently over the condition of our house, Tommy’s behavior, and the bathing suit my mother would sometimes wear while cutting the grass in the summer.

  “You have your mother’s red hair,” she said. “Your mother had pretty hair. She was an attractive lady. Everyone knew that. More and more, you look just like her.”

  “I know,” I said. People were always commenting about how much I looked like my mother and how the Nose Picker, with his dark looks, looked like my father.

  “You’re very rich now, young man, very rich,” Mrs. Rhodebush said. “I suppose you won’t be wanting to help me find my teeth anymore. Rich people don’t do many favors. They just take cruises on big ships and sit in large chairs and allow negroes to fan them.”

  Her description of our future was very different from anything I had ever pictured for my family and I tried hard for a moment to imagine it. Finally, when I realized that she was staring at me I said, “I can help you find your teeth anytime you want,” though I had no intention of ever doing so again. I had found the experience (as well as her teeth, slimy and covered with rug fuzz) disgusting. I had already decided to send the Nose Picker over to help if and when she called again.

  “You’re a fine young tycoon,” she said. She pulled me close to her. She smelled like old flowers. “Tell your father to be careful. There are snakes and weasels in the garden. Snakes and weasels.”

  “I will,” I said. The old flower smell was overwhelmingly sweet and I began to take short breaths.

  “Being rich isn’t as easy as you think. I know. Mr. Rhodebush made a basketful of money. But with that money came responsibility and guilt,” she said. “And guilt.”

  I nodded my head and wondered what act, event, or disturbance had to take place in order for Mrs. Rhodebush to stop talking so I could go into the house. She was being unusually nice to me though, a fact I attributed to the painkillers I knew she sometimes took for her disabled mouth.

  “Wilton is full of people who have money. Look,” she said, sweeping her hand around the neighborhood. Our block, like most blocks in Wilton, was very nice. Large, old homes framed by large, old trees dotted the wide streets. A magazine had recently listed it as one of Chicago’s nicest suburbs. There had been three movies filmed in Wilton since I was born. My mother said they were all about rich families in big homes who had children who hated them. Our house was a bit small and run-down and was never in any of the movies.

  “No one in Wilton has as much money as your father does now though,” Mrs. Rhodebush said. She leaned back in her chair and nodded her head. “No one,” she said.

  One house over, Mr. Tuthill, whom everyone called the Yankee Codger because he once lived in Vermont, started his lawn mower. I watched him pull the cord once, then heard the engine slowly sputter and come to life.

  “What are your father’s plans for the money?” Mrs. Rhodebush asked. “Are you going to move?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. Then I said, “We might move to Paris.”

  “Paris?” she said. “My Lord, why?”

  I shrugged and looked at the ground again. Even though I was scared of Mrs. Rhodebush, I sometimes felt the responsibility to confuse and shock her.

  “Well, Paris would be a big change,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s in France.”

  “Before you go moving, you should do some work on your property. It’s an embarrassment to the neighborhood. Your father should get some new landscaping, some new grass and shrubs. The Yankee is always complaining about your lawn and he’s right. I shouldn’t have to look at that jungle all day. And you should get a new roof, too, while you’re at it. It’s sagging. And a new car. That car your father drives around is older than me.”

  I looked up at our roof and noticed that it seemed to be bending a bit in the middle. Then I looked over at our wild lawn, tall grass and waving weeds. I didn’t have to look over at the Buick in the driveway though; I was well aware of its prehistoric origins.

  Mrs. Rhodebush kept fanning herself and looking at me. A bee hovered near her head but she didn’t seem to notice or mind. Except for the hum of Mr. Tuthill’s lawn mower, the block was perfectly still. I felt the afternoon sun on the back of my neck and moved over a few feet to stand in the partial shadow of a tree.

  She sighed and looked over my shoulder into the street. “You’re too young to realize what’s going to happen to you,” she said quietly. She stopped fanning herself and waved her hand at me. “I can only imagine,” she said.

  I nodded my head and said, “Thank you.” Then summoning up my courage, I said, “I have to do my homework,” and walked away.

  When I got inside the house, the phone was ringing. Thinking that my father was in his study, I answered it in the kitchen.

  “Let me just first say that I wouldn’t be doing this if I wasn’t desperate,” a man’s voice said. He was talking very fast. “I wouldn’t be calling you if I had not exhausted every other option. You are my last hope. If I do not have the transplant, my doctors are afraid I’ll die. All I’m asking for is a second chance for life. I know you don’t know me, I know that I am just a voice on the phone. But of all the things you could spend the money on, what could be more important, what, besides my new organs?”

  “A new furnace for St. Pius,” I said, then I hung up the phone and went over to the refrigerator to get a glass of milk. While drinking it, I thought about the lottery. Up until that point, I hadn’t believed that it would have much impact on our lives. I assumed we would buy some things, but I wasn’t prepared for the interest it was generating. People like Mrs. Rhodebush, Mrs. Plank and Miss Polk, the girls on the way home, even sweet Miss Grace, all seemed drawn to me, like to a light at night. Standing in front of the open refrigerator, feeling the dry, cold air against my face, I saw my father, my brother, and myself as very small people in a very large room. Then I thought of our large, peaceful farm in Wisconsin and my drink-serving robot and I immediately felt better.

  “Please close the refrigerator door,” my father said as he put his coffee cup carefully into the kitchen sink.

  “Are we rich now?” I asked.

  My father’s eyes widened, then narrowed. He coughed, then said, “Yes, I suppose we are. By most people’s standards.”

  “What are we going to do with the money we won?”

  “I don’t really know. I guess we’ll just have it, in case we need it.”

  “When are we going to need it?” I usually didn’t ask my father many direct questions since he was easily confused, but I wanted to talk about the lottery.

  “Well, I’m not sure, to be honest,” he said. “I don’t know yet. I’m sure we’ll need some of it and find, and find a use for the rest.” Then he asked, “Are people talking about
it, about the money?”

  “Yes.”

  He rubbed his hand over his chin. “Well, that’s to be expected, I suppose,” he said. “The prospect of money excites people. It interests them. They speculate over what they would do if they had won. People dream of being rich.”

  “Did you dream of being rich?”

  The question surprised him. His eyes narrowed further, compressing to slits, and I could tell that he was thinking. My father was a man who measured conversation carefully, believing that all words had eventual consequences. “No, not really. No.” Then he added, “I bought that ticket because I was thinking of your mother at that moment.” He looked down at me, his eyes whole again, and tried to smile, but he just looked awkward. “Anyway,” he said, clearing his throat. “Everything will quiet down soon. You’ll see.”

  “What happens if it doesn’t?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry? If it doesn’t settle down? Well.” He took a step back, almost stumbling when he did. I knew then that I had asked too many questions and that he was getting flustered. “Well,” he said again. “It just will, Teddy. Things, well, things always quiet down. In time things take care of themselves.”

  I wanted to ask my father more questions, to talk to him and hug him like I used to hug my mother, but before I could say anything else, he had drifted away upstairs and I was alone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE NEXT DAY, Uncle Frank arrived. He entered our lives loudly, with a sneeze and a smile.

  “Shit,” he said, after he sneezed. He was standing in the front hallway holding a black briefcase. “Goddamn airplanes are like flying petri dishes. They should pass out surgical masks, for chrissakes. Everyone breathing the same air. All the damn germs. Everything’s airborne. You could almost see the microbes.” He stopped when he saw me standing at the foot of the stairs. “Well,” he said, suddenly smiling. “There you are. You must be little Tommy,” he said.