After Perfect

by Christina McDowell

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was on the front page of the Washington Post business section today,” he said. “My dad told me this morning.”

  I didn’t know. Ethan inched himself closer to me. I flinched back. “Stop,” I said.

  “We just want to make sure you’re okay,” Abby said.

  I stared down at my empty cup, afraid to say anything for fear that if I did, the tears would come, and they might not stop.

  “So your mom and dad didn’t tell you?” Ethan was concerned for me now.

  “Obviously not, dummy,” Abby said, as if I needed defending. Marcie was busy lathering her skin with suntan oil. She didn’t know my family well. She had met my mother only on the day I moved into my dorm room. My father had been busy working.

  “It says he could go to prison for up to fifty-seven months,” Ethan said. I remember doing the math in my head: Fifty-seven months, fifty-seven months. Twelve times four is forty-eight, so that would be nearly five years. I will be almost twenty-four when he gets out. Why didn’t they tell me this?

  “Can I see it?” I asked quickly.

  “I don’t have a copy of it, but I can email it to you when I’m back at my computer.”

  I wanted more whiskey. I held out my cup. Marcie pulled out another bottle from her purse and emptied it. I chugged the rest. “I’m going swimming,” I said.

  I stood up abruptly, and the world went black until I regained my balance. It felt like I didn’t have the right to feel what I felt. The stigma and shame of having a parent sentenced to prison was slowly injecting itself into me like poison, silencing me. In a strange way, it felt like a death. I was losing my father, but he wasn’t dying. Yet he wouldn’t be there on my twentieth birthday, Father’s Day, or Christmas. I would have only my memory of him. Unlike death, the loss was ambiguous, not knowing when I would ever see him again and how things would change. I didn’t know how to comprehend any of it, and my emotions were isolated—floating and free-falling inside of an infinite possibility of feeling, cementing a trifling numbness in me.

  And I couldn’t say this to Ethan, Abby, or Marcie. Marcie had lost her father to leukemia when she was five, and I felt ashamed for even thinking about comparing the loss. I couldn’t. There were no condolence cards to be sent or sympathy expressed for children of the damned, only humiliating and awkward conversations to be had like this one, yet deep down, the pain somehow felt equal.

  I ran as fast as I could toward the freezing Pacific and plowed into the waves, pushing hard against the current. I dove until my adrenaline subsided and the alcohol made its way through my bloodstream, providing some relief.

  When I got out of the water, I noticed a woman talking to my friends in the distance. I ran toward them and saw it was an employee. As I got closer, the name tag pinned to her white sweater read “General Manager.” Shit.

  “Are you Christina Prousalis?” she asked.

  “Yes?” I said it as a question, as if maybe I wasn’t.

  “Can you come with me, please?”

  “Hold on a minute. What is this regarding?” Ethan sounded stern, like his father, a force to be reckoned with.

  “I’m not at liberty to say, but the president of the club would like to speak with you in his office.”

  “No problem,” I said, casually stumbling backward.

  “I’m coming with her,” Ethan said.

  “That’s fine.”

  The general manager stood patiently like a correctional officer while I stepped into my yellow sundress, still sopping wet. I tripped as one of the straps caught my right foot.

  Ethan and I trailed behind her and up into the main clubhouse while Abby and Marcie waited with our things.

  I grabbed hold of Ethan’s arm. “I’m wasted,” I whispered.

  “I know,” he whispered back.

  “What do I do?”

  “Just don’t talk.”

  The general manager glanced back at us. I smiled at her and then leaned back into Ethan. “It’s like that time in eighth grade we were sent to the principal’s office for walking to McDonald’s.”

  “Shhh,” Ethan whispered.

  We approached the front door to the president’s office. I unlinked arms with Ethan and attempted to stand on my own, the alcohol making me dizzy. I brushed my hair, which was slowly turning into sand-filled dreadlocks, out of my eyes.

  “Ms. Prousalis, have a seat.”

  The president stood tall, with an authoritative presence. He wore a yellow collared shirt and navy blazer with a gold club pin, little crisscrossed flags below his handkerchief.

  Ethan stood next to me, and I sat. I could feel my wet butt leaving an imprint on the felt seat cushion. There were gold trophies on his bookshelf. They looked like stupid kid trophies, I thought. My eyes wandered up toward the ceiling as the president accused me of stealing cheeseburgers and Cobb salads. What was he talking about? I had given them our club number. Wasn’t he upset that I was drunk? Maybe he didn’t notice. I was playing it cool. I stared at the fluorescent lights. I wondered if I stared at them long enough, would I go blind?

  “Ms. Prousalis. Ms. Prousalis.” The president tried to get my attention.

  “Yeah.” I blinked heavily in his direction. It was hard to see him. His face was covered by a giant black dot.

  “Where are your parents?” he asked.

  Where were my parents? I hadn’t seen or spoken to them in weeks. I knew they must have known that the trial would be written about in the Washington Post. They were busy packing up the house, selling family heirlooms, doing things I didn’t want to think about, but did they honestly think that I wouldn’t find out? They could have at least warned me. It’s one thing not to tell me about a Chagall being sold; it’s another when Dad is being painted as a criminal in the Washington Post for all of my friends and their families to read about.

  “Your father owes us money, Christina,” the president continued.

  It was then I realized he had pulled me into his office not because we had snuck alcohol onto the premises but because my father owed them money. We had been suspended from the club, and I didn’t know.

  “Unfortunately, you and your family are no longer welcome here. Please exit the property immediately upon leaving my office.” The president removed himself from behind his desk and walked to the office door. He opened it like a gentleman.

  I sat for a moment; my thoughts clouded with denial. Is he kicking me out? Why didn’t Mom and Dad tell me not to come here? California was supposed to be safe; a place where being sent to prison gives you street cred, not exile. Why didn’t they have a discussion with me about Dad’s sentencing? What it means, how long he will be gone for. I had to find out that Dad is leaving for prison from two best friends whose parents told them right away—before I even knew the article existed. Mom and Dad could have at least spared me the humiliation; the kind of humiliation everyone spends his or her whole life avoiding, no matter how much money there is in the bank.

  My cheeks felt flushed, and my temples pounded above my ears. My family had always had a veneer of respect and order around money, as we never discussed it—because it was rude, because it was none of my business, because it was being taken care of. Sitting in that chair was the first time I became aware of the fact that Abby’s father was a partner at a major Washington, DC, law firm. Ethan’s father was a senior executive at a Fortune 100 company. Marcie’s grandfather was a prominent judge, and her grandmother was a descendant of old railroad money. They spent summers on Jupiter Island, where Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Fords, Doubledays, and Bushes mingle. Where ordinarily I felt I could tell my friends the truth, this time I couldn’t. I felt the divide. I was embarrassed. I had no idea it was just the beginning of a seismic shift that would split me in two. I was about to drift so far away from the only life I ever knew, and the insecurity and anxiety of the unknown left me sitting there with nothing to say.

  The president stood in the doorway, waiting for me
to exit. I got up and shoved the chair behind me, leaving it awkwardly in the center of his office. Ethan reached for my hand.

  “You didn’t have to be a prick about it,” he said to the president’s face. It was the bravest I’d seen him since the night he lit his desk on fire in the ninth grade.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Nice trophies.”

  Ethan pulled me through the parking lot. We called Abby on her cell phone, and she and Marcie met us by my car. They sauntered over with our beach bags in tow looking like two bag ladies—if bag ladies could afford YSL. Marcie pulled out a Corona and handed it to me.

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “Don’t ask. Just drink.”

  I threw Ethan my keys, and we lugged our bags over into the backseat of my convertible.

  We peeled out of the parking lot and made our way down the club’s elegant driveway, skinny palm trees on either side of us, families playing croquet by a lake filled with swans as we approached the exit gates. Abby threw her hands into the air and howled, “Fuck country clubs!”

  Once when we were little, I brought Abby to our country club in Washington, DC. Before we left, she said, “My parents don’t mind this country club, because they allow Jews here. The Chevy Chase Club didn’t used to allow Jews.”

  I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. Fuck country clubs. So many memories from my childhood had happened there, and it felt as though the president had taken them all back. Like they meant nothing. I tried not to think about my parents when we drove off the private property. I never told them what had happened. What was the use? Instead, I flicked my membership card out the window and kissed that country club good-bye. I didn’t belong there anymore. Where I did belong, I didn’t know. And I wouldn’t know for years.

  Ethan put his hand on top of mine as we merged onto the 405 freeway. We would never talk about that day at the beach club. Eventually my friends would go back to their respective universities, and we would all lose touch. They would graduate, climb their way into the upper-class scuffle of corporate America, and make new friends, beginning new chapters of their lives, while I was just beginning to spin backward into mine.

  -5-

  Money Laundering

  “Meet me at the pink Starbucks on the corner of Sunset and Swarthmore,” my mother said. I shifted gears, speeding past the iron gates of Bel Air toward Pacific Palisades. It sounded urgent.

  My mother had flown out to California early to avoid watching twenty-five years of her life sold off to strangers and filed away in brown cardboard boxes. She didn’t want to be there when the bank took the house. We were staying at her friend Suzanne’s house, one of her sorority sisters from her days at UCLA, who owned the local stationery store in town. During the last six months of my freshman year at LMU, I got to know the exclusive beach town just south of Malibu where shiny Escalades, Maseratis, and Range Rovers rest in front of outdated storefronts. Suzanne hired me part-time when she found out about my father’s arrest. I sold Christmas cards, Bar Mitzvah invitations, and baby announcements, schmoozing all day with the wealthy wives of agents, producers, and directors, helping them capture their important milestones and memories. The mothers loved me. “Young college student from Washington, DC; daughter of philanthropist and lawyer” was the story I told them, even though I knew it was no longer the truth and wondered if it ever had been.

  “Where are you?” my mother text messaged me.

  “On my way,” I replied.

  She had been looking for a rental and needed to register Chloe for high school as soon as possible. Everything back home in Virginia would be gone within the week. What few items were left needed to be shipped to California. Three mattresses, three bed frames, my bedroom set, two couches, the breakfast table, six chairs, five lamps, one television, two desks, two rugs, kitchen dishes, pots and pans, boxes of old family photos, five enormous Louis Vuitton trunks, the Range Rover, and Mom’s Jaguar.

  I asked my mother how we were able to keep our nice cars if we had no money. She said, “There’s a lien against the cars, honey; we can’t sell them.” I didn’t know what this meant. When I learned they were being used as collateral in exchange for a loan, wherever that money had gone, it was gone with the wind, like everything else. How were we going to lease a house or an apartment? How were we going to move everything out to California? My parents were in $12 million worth of debt. The feds were watching. Their accounts were drained.

  I arrived in Pacific Palisades and saw my mother standing on the corner in her Christian Dior sunglasses, holding a latte. I parked and walked over to her.

  She began explaining to me that we had run out of choices. My father had arranged for a man named Gary in Boca Raton, Florida, who worked at a bank, to wire money into an account for us. “Two hundred thousand dollars,” she said. But there was a problem. We needed a name for a bank account that would go unnoticed, a name that would slip right under the radar so that in return, we’d have a roof over our heads and food on the table. Mara was out of the question, because she was back in Texas applying for student loans and financial aid. Chloe was only sixteen. I, on the other hand, was over eighteen years of age and considered a California resident, a struggling actress with a clean record. Who would notice?

  “I don’t understand. Why do you have to use my name? Why can’t we use yours?” I asked.

  “Because everything in my name is attached to your father’s. We don’t have a choice, honey,” my mother explained. “The government—they’ve taken everything from us, and if they see we have more, they’ll take that from us too. So we either use your name, or we go to the homeless shelter downtown. Your choice.” She had lost ten pounds since the trial, her once rosy cheekbones now empty and gaunt. She was almost unrecognizable the more short fused she became, riddled with anxiety, often forgetting to breathe, and stopping whatever she was doing to rest her hand on her chest to take conscious deep breaths. It was jarring to see her in such a state of desperation; her once calm and nurturing voice whenever I felt anxious under pressure—“How do you eat an elephant, sweetheart? One bite at a time”—now heavy and morose. I wanted to help her. I trusted her. I trusted my father. They would never let me do anything illegal.

  “Christina Grace Prousalis, that’s a pretty name. Is it Greek?” the banker asked. He was pleased with himself for acquiring a new member of the branch. In five minutes, he’d try to sell me a credit card.

  “Yes. My dad’s half Greek,” I replied, glancing over at my mother, who posed next to me sipping her latte so that we appeared normal. The banker handed back my driver’s license with an application to sign.

  “Autograph at the X,” he said. I used to spend hours in elementary school practicing my autograph on classroom chalkboards, extending the bottom of the a so it looped around, crossing over the t and i’s. I wanted my loops to look just like my father’s. I had even perfected his autograph, telling all of my friends, “Watch this: I can forge my dad’s signature.” I remember sitting on his lap at his mahogany desk in the library and asking him to show me how he did it. He put my hand around his as he drew the cursive capital T, looping the o around to the squiggly m.

  On the application, I read the statement in small print:

  Everything I have stated in this application is correct. You are authorized to make any inquiries that you consider appropriate to determine if you should open the account. This may include ordering a credit report or other report (e.g., information from any motor vehicle department or other state agency) on me. I have received a copy of Consumer Account Agreement, Consumer Account Fee and Information Schedule, and Privacy Policy (collectively the “Account Agreement”), and agree to be bound to the terms and conditions contained therein. I also agree to the terms of the dispute resolution program described in the Account Agreement. Under this program, our disputes will be decided before one or more neutral persons in an arbitration proceeding and not by a jury trial or a trial before a judge.

  Everything in th
e application was correct. The banker accepted the application and handed me the Wells Fargo signature folder. It read “Together We’ll Go Far.”

  We walked out of the bank with our new debit card and temporary checks in hand. Had I known at the time what I had done, I might have felt like Bonnie from Bonnie and Clyde, except instead of using a gun, I used white privilege and class. Given the local population, I was just an ordinary girl opening up a bank account with her elegant mother in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

  I couldn’t quite describe the feeling I had other than it felt dark underneath the bright sun as we crossed Sunset Boulevard toward my car, passing young moms in their Elyse Walker sweaters pushing Bugaboo strollers, their sleeping babies all bundled up like cashmere burritos. My mother needed me to give her a ride to the rental house on the corner of Drummond Street so that we could sign the lease agreement and write the landlord a check.

  “Mrs. Gilbert, this is my daughter Christina.” An elderly woman walked down the front steps of the red and white craftsman home. It was a 1950s picturesque lot complete with a white picket fence right in the heart of Pacific Palisades. Mrs. Gilbert shook my hand. “Nice to meet you, dear. Your mother tells me you’re the catalyst for the family’s move out to California. That you’re an actress.” She pretended to be impressed, I could tell.

  “I am.” I shot my mother a look. Did Mrs. Gilbert know Dad was going to prison?

  My mother interrupted, quickly sensing my unease. “I’ve been trying to convince my husband to move out here for years, and now that Christina is here, it feels like the right time.” I studied her, and if my eyes could speak, they’d have said, “I know your secret.”

  “That’s nice,” Mrs. Gilbert said, and she handed me the lease agreement. I guessed my mother had told her it would be me signing the lease. Doesn’t this woman think it strange that I’m the one signing the lease? Doesn’t she need to verify employment? Run a credit check? She never seemed concerned. Maybe she needed the money. I signed the lease and handed her back the paperwork. A wide smile crossed her face.