“Antipova…that name sounds familiar,” she prompts.
“My family owns a vineyard a few miles up the lake. Silenus?”
“Oh.” She nods politely, her eyes going carefully blank, and I can tell she recognizes the name of the vineyard and has tasted our wine. She looks at the screen and then frowns. “Oh, goodness,” she says, and glances at me with a new expression.
“What is it?”
“This is quite the loan. I’m very surprised they let a twenty-four-year-old—oops, sorry, twenty-five now!” She beams manically. “Anyway, I’m surprised they let someone your age borrow so much. It’s, uh…” She’s tapping away at her keyboard with frank concern. Zaza, you idiot. How much did you borrow? “I see your mother, Nadine O’Connor, cosigned?”
I nod noncommittally. How did Zelda get Mom to stay lucid enough for a trip to the bank? How did she make her cooperate? I thought I had power of attorney.
“Do you think you could print me out some updated information? The new balance, the interest rates?”
“Well, the balance has only increased, I’m afraid. Dear, you haven’t made any payments on this loan. It’s two months overdue. The bank will have to take action real soon,” she says. She looks genuinely worried for me. I appreciate it, really; I’m just feeling very impatient to get out of here. It’s only a matter of time before someone Zelda and I know wanders into the bank, and I don’t want to risk being called on my charade.
“Things have gotten a little overwhelming, but I’m, uh, ready to take responsibility. For my actions. Choices. My decisions. If you could just print out the information…” I smile brightly.
“Yes, of course. But I’m afraid I will have to notify one of the managers. I’m surprised they haven’t gotten more involved at this stage.” Her mouth has tightened into a taut line of disapproval. A few minutes ago, I was a sweet girl. Now I am a disgraceful debtor, in over her head. Few things are more shameful than insolvency in a country where poverty is a moral failing.
“I understand. How about I make a payment of good faith? Right now?” I rifle through my bag before realizing with a jolt that the name on my checkbook is my own. “Or tomorrow? I don’t seem to have my checkbook with me at the moment,” I finish weakly.
She raises an eyebrow, cynical. “Of course you don’t. You could transfer from one of your other accounts. I see you have some small savings in your checking account.”
“Yeah, let’s do that!” I say in relief. “How about a thousand dollars?”
She looks at me blankly. I’m definitely not going to get called “sweetie” again.
“You don’t have a thousand dollars in your account.”
“Oh. Let’s just move the whole balance, then.” I need to leave. Now.
“Great. I’m moving three hundred and forty-three dollars and seventy-nine cents from your checking account to go toward your loan payment. Which is still overdue. If you’re unable to make the full payment before July 1, I’m afraid you’ll be looking at foreclosure proceedings.”
Oh, Jesus. “Great. That printout? Updated with the payment?” I prompt, looking around the bank. She enters some information, and I hear the clack of an old printer discharging a sheet. She collects a few pages from the printer tray and hands them to me. I grab them anxiously, my bangles jangling, and stand up.
“Thanks for your help with this. And I’m…sorry,” I say. It’s not quite the right thing to say, but she does soften.
“Good luck, sweetie. I hope you’re able to sort it out.”
I smile, and she smiles falsely back. I notice a smudge of bubblegum-pink lipstick on her tooth. I turn to leave, and as I’m walking away, I know she’s shaking her head in disbelief and censure. I’m sure she’s never been late on a loan payment. I grit my teeth and head for the door. As I’m pushing it open, someone calls out.
“Zelda!” Instinctively, I turn my head. I have always answered to her name, and she to mine. A young man is hurrying from the other side of the bank. He looks angry. In a panic, I race outside. I don’t need any more confrontations. I dodge left once I’m back outside in the clammy heat. I immediately duck into the convenience store next to the bank and move to the back of the aisles. I pretend to browse in the fridge, hiding behind a wire stand filled with potato chips. From the corner of my eye, I see the man run by the door without looking in. After puttering around for a few minutes, I buy a pack of cigarettes at the counter, then cautiously poke my head outside. Coast seems clear.
I don’t look at the sheets of paper scrunched in my hand until I get back to the truck. I sit in the cab and will myself to look down at the figures. When I do, the breath is knocked out of me.
Following her recent payment of $343.79, Zelda is left with a balance due of $306,000.21.
6
Four hundred grand in debt. I sit in the truck, staring out the window at the bank. The bank statement is on the floor, and I’m fairly sure that if I bend over to get it, I won’t be able to get back upright. Zelda has really outdone herself this time. Over four hundred thousand dollars in debt, and that’s just what I’ve managed to find so far. For all I know, she could have other unpaid bills all over town. Christ. Almost half a million dollars. I knew from the emails that Silenus wasn’t doing well. I know it’s an expensive operation, but this…
If I were a practical person, I would be problem-solving. Brainstorming about mortgages I could take out, people with money I could go to. But all I can think is that I need a bottle of something, and somewhere quiet to consume it. I’m immediately sucked into the pleasure of planning, anticipating, the ritual of drink. First, I will go through a list, examine my palate. Will today be a gin-and-tonic day? Or cold IPAs in frosty brown bottles? Or wine, the classic, my old favorite? And if wine, will it be a buttery, oaked Chardonnay? Too warm for red, so no velvety Zinfandel or bright young Chianti. Maybe sparkling? A light, easy Prosecco, or some creamy Blanc de Blancs. Or will it just be my go-to bottle, a bone-dry Sauvignon Blanc, filled with flint and hints of flowers?
After I decide, I’ll think of where to buy it. The sensible, economical thing would be to take a bottle from the winery’s cellar, but I don’t really want to drink that shit. I could go to one of the vineyards between here and Silenus, only I would run into people I know, be forced to answer questions. And dressed as I am, like Zelda, I’ll probably raise a few eyebrows. At home, in Paris, I have a favorite wine store, a tiny box on my market street where I can duck in and snag a bottle on my way home, before stopping at the fromagerie and the tabac. I indulge in a moment of fantasy, of meeting Nico at home with a bottle of something just outside my price range, of us sitting by the window in my tiny nook and sipping out of my petite wineglasses, considering where we’ll go when the bottle is gone. But those fantasies are too abstract for my purposes here. Today, I will go to a liquor store in Watkins Glen, and I will browse the racks looking for just the right bottle. I tell myself I will buy an eleven- or twelve-dollar bottle, something decent but not extravagant, but I will walk out with a fifteen-dollar bottle if I’m very lucky. Today might be a twenty-dollar-bottle day.
Then I will have to decide where to drink it. Sometimes I want company, people to talk to while I uncork it. When I’m feeling festive or exuberant, I want to chat and burble, marking my journey into tipsiness with my verbal outpourings, measuring my drunkenness in confessions and, eventually, incoherence. But often, I want to just be alone, to tell myself I’m not that drunk, to pour myself another glass without an audience. I want to sit somewhere beautiful, by myself, and drink.
My ritual is interrupted when I notice a meter woman (my politically correct millennial mind refuses to call her a meter maid) writing a ticket and snapping it under my windshield. I lurch out of the truck.
“Hey, I’m right here,” I say. “I’m just about to leave.” She looks at me dispassionately.
“Too late. Already did the printout.”
“Are you fucking kidding me? I’m sitting in my vehicle, rea
dy to pull out of the space. I just got here.”
“Rules are rules, miss. You’re in a loading zone.”
“This is a fucking joke,” I say. “I don’t have time for mindless rules today. I’m sorry that the only meaning you derive from life comes from sanctimonious little strips of paper. I just don’t have the patience to play nice while we pretend you’re anything other than a parasite and a miserable fucking human being with a subpar GED.” I’m shocked at what I’ve said. I sound like Zelda. This is Zelda’s doing too. She’s turning me into her. One of her favorite games used to be for us to swap clothes and try to fool parents and teachers. Of course she would get off on this. She was always better at the game.
I was born face-to-face with my fetch, and we’ve been competing over our lives ever since.
“Well, miss, I’m sorry to hear that. Feel free to complain at the court.” The meter bitch wanders off, and I’m left seething. More bills to pay. Fabulous. I smother a scream that threatens to escape from my clenched and aching throat, then drive directly to the liquor store without taking the ticket off the windshield. It’s in Zelda’s name anyway.
—
After buying the wine (twist-offs, fuck it), I get back into the truck, feeling calmer. Before turning the key in the ignition, I look at Zelda’s phone again. There’s a new message.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Dun dun dun
June 23, 2016 @ 5:04 PM
Dearest Twinlet,
Debt, debt, debt! I’m up to my eyeballs in debt. Which you’ve doubtless disconcertedly discovered. Does my disappearance make more sense now? You’re surely putting together the pieces, Ava darling.
Silenus has been on a downward spiral for the last little while—since before you left, really; it was starting to slip under your watch, dear professionalized twin! But it has gotten really quite bad of late, and I’ve had to take certain measures I’m not entirely proud of. We needed new equipment, had to pay everyone who works at the vineyard. (Honestly, this living-wage shit is a thorn in my side. Gasp away, my socialist sister. My politics have gotten distinctly rural since the family farm started going under. If there were illegal Mexicans to employ in this neck of the woods, I’d be scooping them up by the truckload.) The bills are due, and we have no more money. Bankruptcy is inevitable, I think, but it will destroy what’s left of our mother’s shriveled heart. Marlon’s, too, I reckon, in some small way, though he has done his best to emotionally divest himself from this place, from us. I hope it hurts him, I really do.
You know, it’s interesting. They didn’t falter when I sauntered into the bank asking for money. There I was, twenty-four years old, no assets, no college degree, in possession of just a failing business and a failed parent. I was not a good financial risk. But they just signed that check right over with barely a blink and a background check. I was relieved, but I have to say, more than a tad concerned about our national finances. Here we are, post–global financial collapse, and our local bank seems blithely uninterested in vetting its future debtors. Don’t we learn through repetition? How many times does shit have to go wrong before we change our fucking behavior? I say this on a macro as well as a micro level, dear sister.
I’m not sure I’m cut out to slum it, though. Penny-pinching is not in our bloodline. I’m afraid I find myself very resentful when confronted with the necessity of “cutting back.” The prospects are grim. I was holding out for this particular vintage, one you presided over, Little A, perhaps you remember: a tasty Gewürztraminer, one of the classic Finger Lakes grapes. It was from 2011—do you remember the season? We took a risk and held off harvesting until October, which was dangerously, riskily late, but we were hoping it would pay off with more intense flavor. We wanted a Gewürztraminer with very low residual sugar, nice and dry, low acid and low pH. It was a mild winter, and a nice damp spring gave way to a hot, lovely summer. You and Wyatt were prowling the fields and fussing over your tomato plants like first-time parents with a colicky child. You were working on an internship for your degree and took obsessive notes. Zephyrs scraped across the whole dilapidated vineyard, gouging deeper those juicy fissures we plowed, burrowing into the maxed-out wrinkles that already produced such poor-quality nectar. We hadn’t bothered with cover crop that year, relying on chemistry to do the work. You were pinning it all on the Gewürz but by the time the cloudy autumn rolled around, you were flipping the fuck out over Botrytis bunch rot, which had you quaking in your boots. I swear, I could hear your moaning about it at night.
I was hoping that all this nervous energy, this studious and scientific stewing and fretting, would give us the light, expressive, and crisp wine you were after. How could you bear to leave before you knew if the fruits of your labor were everything you’d hoped? If wine is a story, you left just before the ending! But, spoiler alert. It was not a happy ending. Your tweaked and micromanaged vintage was just another uninteresting, slightly puckery table wine. It tasted heavily of cheap floral perfume. Quel dommage.
But moving on from past harvests and all the grapes already plucked and fallen. (Why dwell on the done deal?)
Your Scheming, No-Good, Very Bad, Undead Sister,
Z is for Zelda
I almost throw Zelda’s phone across the truck in exasperation. I finally scream, letting out the pent-up, hoarse yelp that has been caught in my throat all day, making me gag. I slam the heel of my hand against the steering wheel and shake my head like some sort of feral animal. A fellow boozehound in the parking lot glances at me in concern before tucking both of his brown paper bags more firmly into his armpits and ambling to his car. He probably thinks I’m drunk. I’m not yet, but boy, do I plan to be.
I throw the truck into gear and drive back to Silenus. I know exactly where I’m going to drink.
—
My father wanders out into the yard when I’m most of the way through the bottle. He has a worried expression on his face, and he looks like he’s sobered up a bit. He can’t exactly give me grief about overdoing it, considering the morning he had.
“Little A, are you okay?” he asks delicately, looking around. “I mean…” I scooch my sunglasses farther down my nose and look at him.
“Why? Isn’t this a perfectly acceptable place to sit and think about Zelda?” I wave my arm grandly, gesturing toward the sooty stumps of the barn, the yellow tape. There were cops swarming around when I returned, but they left somewhere during my second glass of wine; I think my presence made them uncomfortable, especially after I treated them to a raucous chorus of Edward Sharpe’s “Home.” It’s just me now, parked in the lounge chair, looking directly at the barn. The lake is to my back, and I have dragged out an ice bucket that I filled with my recent purchases, which sit sweating beads of moisture into the melting ice cubes. I’m wearing one of Zelda’s vintage bathing suits, a polka-dotted monstrosity, and a gardening hat that I found in the hallway. It could be my mother’s, but I don’t have a single memory of her crouched on hands and knees, laboring in the garden. Not her style. My father is staring at me in concern, not looking at the barn.
“I understand you wanting to be close to where Zelda…was. But maybe this is a little…”
“Grim?” I finish his sentence, and my glass of wine. I hold the empty glass out to him, shaking it suggestively. “Fill ’er up.” He looks doubtful, but he leans down and fishes the open bottle of South African Sauvignon Blanc out of the ice bucket and splashes the last bit of wine into my glass. “Cheers,” I say, toasting him. “And cheers to you, Zelda. Quaff that kind Nepenthe!” I drink most of the glass in one swallow.
“Ava, what about your mother?”
“She won’t eat anything. She says her pants feel snug and she needs to slim down. Hard to imagine how the drawstring of her silk jammies could feel snug, but…” I shrug, shutting my eyes for a moment. I can tell I’m getting sunburned, but it feels fantastic. “I gave her a bottle of Gewürztraminer for being a pretty good girl
today. Honestly, her stunt should have cost her all but a medicinal tipple, but her kid did just kick it, so I felt bad for her. If it had been her, she would have made me or Zelda go to bed with nothing at all, but I think I’m the nice one in the family.” I’m only slurring a little. Marlon looks at me once more, then just turns and walks back to the house.
—
When I wake up, the sun has set and I’m freezing cold. I’m still wearing just a bathing suit, and the sunglasses are crooked on my face. There’s a knocked-over wineglass by my hand. The wind smells smoky, and there are fireflies blinking in the grass all around the barn. My mouth tastes god-awful; I cringe, not wanting to fully open my eyes.
When I finally stand up, I’m wobbly, but I can tell I’m more or less sober, which means I’ve been asleep for a while. I estimate that I drank close to two bottles of wine before I passed out, which I confirm by nearly tripping over the empties. They are slippery and cold, slick with early dew, and I kick them out of my way with the side of my foot. It’s dark this far away from the house; the barn light used to illuminate the path. I stumble through the damp grass, leaving everything on the lawn. I nearly trip again, this time on a string of yellow tape that cordons off part of the blackened grass.
Inside, the house is quiet and still. Marlon isn’t on the couch when I return inside, and I scan the downstairs rooms, wondering where he’s ended up. I head upstairs. In front of my mother’s door, I hear a quiet sniffling sound and freeze. It is such a foreign noise to me that I’m momentarily stunned, but I recognize it for what it is. It’s the sound of my mother crying. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard that before.
“What do you mean, Marl? She can’t be,” I hear her whimper.
“I know, I know. I can’t believe it either. It’s…I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” Marlon’s voice is soft and delicate. He hasn’t spoken that way to her since my childhood.
“My little girl. It’s like it’s happening all over. No matter what I do, I can’t keep them safe!”
Dead Letters Page 9
