Nostalgia Pesto
For this recipe, I use a variety of types of basil leaves. Lemon is especially good.
•2 cups fresh basil leaves
•2 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
•1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
•1/4 cup pine nuts or walnuts, toasted
•1/4 cup Parmesan or Romano cheese, shredded
•Sea salt, to taste
In a food processor, pulse the basil and garlic until combined. Add the nuts and cheese. Pulse a few more times. Gradually drizzle in the olive oil until the mixture is smooth. Season with sea salt. Serve over hot noodles to a wistful crowd in a cheerful, sunlit room.
Chapter Two
Late one April night, I woke to a strange, gasping sound. David lay beside me, his face buried in a pillow. For a moment, I was perfectly still, groggy, unsure of what to do, unsure even of what exactly was happening.
“What’s wrong?” I finally asked. “Is something wrong?”
He was quiet for several minutes. And then he said, “Two IRS agents came to my office today.”
For a long time, that was all he said. Still half-asleep, I struggled to figure out what he meant. David routinely dealt with the IRS through his job, so it didn’t make sense that this was a problem, yet something told me not to ask questions, to just let him talk. So I waited. The room was still and dark, the only sound the whir of the fan on the dresser. Maybe he hadn’t spoken after all. Maybe I had been dreaming. I was just drifting back off to sleep when he spoke again.
“We owe back taxes,” he said.
Even now, years later, I can still feel the weight of the quiet that followed, the weight of everything I had ever thought or believed crashing down all at once. David and I had been married twenty years, and because he was an accountant, he had always been in charge of our finances, including our taxes. He had filled out the forms, then brought them to me to sign. My income information was simple, straightforward. I never made more than ten thousand dollars a year, and because I didn’t know how much David made in any given year until I actually saw the return, there was not a lot to discuss. I just signed the forms he handed me, usually in a rush on April 15, after all his clients’ taxes had been completed, when I was in between running the kids to school and soccer practice and play practice and choir and he was too exhausted to explain it all.
“Sign here,” he would say.
And I did. Lying next to him now, I could not figure out how he could have made such a mistake. He was an accountant, for Christ’s sake. He had been filing other people’s taxes for almost twenty years. But of course, if we owed back taxes, we simply had to pay it—one hundred dollars, one thousand dollars, two thousand dollars—whatever it was. But even as I formulated those thoughts, I sensed that the problem was bigger than that.
“How much?” I finally asked.
In response, there were no words, only that strange gasping.
So I asked again. “How much?”
And that’s when he told me. The whole saga unfolded in jerky sobs, in starts and stops and half-formed thoughts, David’s voice odd and strained, a faraway echo. For the last several years, we had not filed tax returns. With the late penalties, we owed more than one hundred thousand dollars to the IRS, another eight thousand dollars to the state. Wide awake now, I both heard him and didn’t hear him. What he was saying was not real. It was a dream. He was telling me there was a little green man on our roof, a unicorn in our yard. I wanted him to go back to sleep and stop dragging me into his nightmare.
“I just didn’t have the money,” he said, his voice fading like a distant train. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
I struggled to remember. Hadn’t I signed a return last year? Or the year before? Or two years before that? And if not, how could I possibly not have noticed? How does one not notice four years of missed tax returns? But even in the haze of shock and denial, in the aftermath of this seismic shift wherein my husband was not dead but was still, nonetheless, not the man I had known just hours before, I knew that everything he was telling me was true, that our lives had just been upended, that I had fallen asleep in one world—a world in which I believed that David would always work things out, could always work things out—and awoken in quite another world, one I had no clue how to navigate.
There had, of course, been signs that things were not going well, signs I should have seen but somehow didn’t. When I was growing up, my parents had created for my brother and me the perfect upper-middle-class lifestyle. We had everything we needed and most things we wanted. We took piano lessons. We went to summer camp. We swam at the local country club. We had college funds. And while what I should have learned from living a relatively privileged childhood was the value of hard work and frugality, what I learned instead was that money was not something with which I needed to be overly concerned. If and when I needed it, it would magically appear—like a genie.
It was this sort of head-in-the-clouds approach to finances that allowed me to ignore all the indications that something was very wrong with our finances—the stacks of unopened bills in David’s home office, the telephone that rang incessantly but that we never answered unless we recognized the caller ID. That had been going on for years. More recently, though, there had been other, even more obvious indications. Twice, the phone had been disconnected. On more than one occasion, I had come home to find the power turned off. We had also been visited by a sheriff’s deputy delivering a summons to appear in court for a bill that had not been paid. And then one day, I was sitting on a barstool at the island in the kitchen when there was a knock at the door. The front door was open, and the sun cast a large, yellow rectangle on the faux-wood floors.
A man about my age stood on the front porch. He wore jeans, a T-shirt, a baseball cap. Thank God. He was not with the sheriff’s department, the power company, the phone company. He held in his hand a piece of paper, and I assumed he was trying to deliver a package to one of our neighbors. It happened often. The houses in our cul-de-sac were numbered from the right side of the road to the end and back down the left side, so even though our house was the first on the road, we were number twenty-three.
“Hi,” I said, stepping onto the porch.
“Hey,” he said.
My dogs barked furiously, all at the same deafening frequency, and while we waited for them to quiet down, we watched a cow and newborn calf grazing in the pasture across the street.
“That’s not for me, is it?” I finally asked, gesturing toward the paper.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “If that’s your blue van right there, then this is for you. I’m here to repossess it.”
In the hour or so that followed, the man waited while I called David, who somehow managed to come up with the money we owed. The bank was called. A payment was made. The man was sent home without my van. I was tremendously relieved. Our van had almost been repossessed but not actually repossessed. It had been an oversight on David’s part, a slip of memory, and the incident was over, forgiven and forgotten.
The next month, however, the man was back, and this time, he took the van. It took us weeks to get it back, and in the meantime, I drove the old Ford Explorer David had bought used for two thousand dollars several years before. The handles for the driver’s-side door and window were broken, and David had wedged a brick underneath the driver’s seat to keep it upright. I could not move the seat forward or back, so I sat crooked on the edge of the seat, stretching my right leg to reach the pedals.
Up until now, all the things I should have seen as warning signs had simply seemed like minor inconveniences. Somehow, David always managed to fix things. The lights came back on. The phone worked. The subpoenas to appear in court for unpaid bills were withdrawn. It never once occurred to me that the power might be out for good, that one day we might actually find ourselves in court. I was engrossed in the day-to-day aspects of my l
ife, which were distinct in my mind from the day-to-day aspects of David’s life.
I taught three college classes per semester—seventy-five students or more per semester. I prepped for classes and graded papers and attended my students’ concerts and football games. I volunteered in my own kids’ classrooms. I organized their birthday parties and Halloween bonfires and cookie decorating gatherings. I shuttled them from one activity to another—soccer, chorus, theater, swim team, school dances. I coaxed them through struggles in school, arguments with friends, breakups with love interests. I fed and walked our menagerie of dogs. I helped care for my aging grandparents. Money was the last thing on my mind. David was in charge of the money, and as naïve as it sounds, I always believed that whatever our financial problems were, he would eventually sort them out. In fact, that was what he told me over and over again: I’ve got it. He never suggested I take a more active role in managing our finances, and he continued to evade my questions. Every “discussion” about our finances quickly turned into a heated argument. Finally, for what I thought was in the best interest of our family—for peace between the two of us—I stopped asking.
Perhaps I should have asked longer or harder. Perhaps I should have insisted on being an equal partner in our finances or else. He was not willing to considering moving somewhere where I might have been able to find a job more easily, but perhaps things would have turned out differently for us all if I had been willing to move without him, if I had taken a job that offered more financial security, if I had worked four jobs, five jobs, whatever it took to make David’s life less stressful and our kids’ lives more secure. If, if, if… Of course, I see these choices now, but for whatever reason—perhaps because I was raised in a household where the husband was the sole provider, perhaps because I tended to have tunnel vision, perhaps because I was selfish and I wanted what I wanted—I did not see them then.
“This has to stop,” I told David after our van was repossessed. “If the sheriff comes to our house one more time, I’m leaving.”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. I’m doing the best I can.”
Which he was. The truth—the truth he didn’t want to tell me—was that he had no idea how much money he was going to make from one month to the next. Because his income varied wildly and because the terms of my employment varied from one semester to the next, we had no real way of planning for the next week, the next month, the next year. So we were trapped in a cycle of putting out fires, of throwing money at the most pressing problem at hand without any real long-term plan. It was an unsustainable lifestyle, one that was destined to come spiraling down around us.
Lying in bed that strange spring night after David told me about our taxes, I realized that this time, David had no idea how to fix things—no pending real estate deal that might yield a big commission, no credit card we could use. For what seemed like forever, we lay silently, not touching, barely breathing. Wind howled through the walls. It was yet another construction flaw—not enough insulation.
“I’m sorry,” David said again. “I’m so sorry. I will get us out of this. You will not be held responsible.”
Later, I would be angry. Later, I would say to him, “If I had taken care of our children like you took care of our finances, they would all be dead by now.”
And he would look at me and say, “I know. You’re right. I know.”
But now my brain felt sluggish. It took all of my energy to simply keep up with what was happening. Slowly, very slowly, the reality of the situation began to sink in: David could go to jail for this. I could go to jail. At the time, I didn’t know how bad it could be or even what exactly the charges would be, but later, I looked it up. If the offense was considered a misdemeanor, we could be fined up to twenty-five thousand dollars or sentenced to a year in prison for every year we had failed to file a return. And that was the better case scenario. If the offense was considered a felony, we could be fined up to one hundred thousand dollars and sentenced to five years in jail.
In the coming months, we would be subjected to tax liens. We could not sell our house or our cars, and though there was a cap on the percentage that could be taken in any one paycheck, my wages would be garnished, and the little money we had in our bank accounts would be routinely seized by the state. We had no savings. Our credit was too bad to borrow money from a bank. And when we were finally able to negotiate a monthly payment with the IRS, the payments were set at six thousand dollars a month, a hopelessly large amount, an amount we never once managed to pay.
Many Americans equate paying taxes with patriotism and not paying taxes with subversion, but it was not that we didn’t want to pay our taxes. We had paid the bills that seemed most imperative at the time, the most immediate, and now we had no money left. In our small town, word got around about our situation, and at the oddest times, people would come up to me and tell me their stories. One night, a woman I had known for years came up to me at a party. She grabbed my sleeve, lowered her voice, and leaned into me.
“We owed back taxes too,” she whispered.
And while I was struggling to figure out exactly how she had heard about my tax problems, she added, “A lot. It was a lot of money.”
Later, I would get used to these sudden confessions. Every single time, they were stories, not of intentional deceit, of hiding money in foreign accounts or not reporting income, but of too much optimism and too little foresight, of believing that the current state of things was temporary, that things would surely soon get better. Estimates of the number of Americans who owe money to the IRS range from eight million to twenty million. Some of those people are rich and hiding their money in the ways that rich people have always hidden their money. Others are ordinary, middle-class Americans who somehow got swept up in the current of the bad economy.
For the next several years, David worked more and more, making less and less money each year, growing increasingly tired and despondent, and despite the fact that I had a master’s degree and was constantly searching for a permanent teaching position, I was unable to find full-time work. The college where I taught part time relied almost exclusively on adjuncts to teach entry-level English courses. Every semester, they intimated that they might soon be looking to hire someone full time, and then the following semester, they would hire three adjuncts to fill one teaching position. I considered trying to get a job teaching high school, but I didn’t have a degree in education or a teaching license, so teaching in the public school system was out of the question. I couldn’t even work as a teacher’s assistant because of the requisite credit check. Finally, I began to look at jobs in other fields, secretarial positions and receptionist positions, but every job description I found read like a description of areas in which I was particularly lacking: “Must be highly organized. Must be a self-starter. Must be detail oriented.” They might as well have said, “Must not be, nor ever have been, nor ever aspire to be, an English teacher or a writer.” I repeatedly applied for every opening that seemed even a remote possibility, but I never got an interview or even a phone call. At one particularly low point, a close friend suggested I apply for a job at the Belk department store in town.
“Have you seen how I dress?” I asked her, exasperated. “Do you really think they would hire someone like me?”
She looked at my short skirt and cowboy boots, my necklace made of recycled Coke bottles.
“Well, I guess not,” she said.
Finally, in a last ditch effort to save our old house, David took a second job in addition to his more-than-full-time accounting business. He had some clients who owned a Chipotle-style Mexican restaurant that was quickly losing money. When they decided one day to simply walk away from the business, David offered to take over. While he was still in college, David had successfully managed a seafood restaurant, and he thought he could do it again—turn this business around, make it profitable—so despite the fact that his cooking expertise was limited to scrambled eg
gs and toast, he moved his accounting office into the same building as the restaurant and split his days between the two businesses.
He was excited to be doing something different, and he poured his energy into this new venture. He loved the challenge of trying to make the business profitable. He analyzed costs and prices, overhauled the menu, hired new employees, and developed rules and systems for all sorts of things that needed rules and systems—ordering food, storing food, cleaning, etc. The restaurant was across the street from my office at the college, so some days after my classes, I walked over and tasted new foods, made menu suggestions, and wrote promotional material for flyers and newspaper ads. I suggested craft beers to add to the beverage selection, convinced David to switch to antibiotic-free, hormone-free chicken, and, with a friend of mine, came up with new meat marinade recipes. Savory steak. Ground beef. Spicy chicken. Citrus chicken.
However, the newly revamped menu did nothing to increase our earnings. It turns out good quality juices and olive oils are expensive, and we were never able to raise the prices enough to compensate for our increased expenditures. At best, we were breaking even, and David was spending long hours at the restaurant. If we had been able to invest some money—buy a margarita machine, start a catering business—it might have eventually been profitable, but after over a year of trying to turn things around, David was exhausted and not at all hopeful that he could put the restaurant back in the green. He told the owners he was finished, and a former manager took over.
David and I were very busy those days, but when I did pause to think about our futures, I was able to convince myself that we were just on the verge of finding our way out of this deep financial hole. Other times, when the full reality of our circumstances hit me, my own desperation frightened me. Driving home alone late at night from book club or class, speeding along the curvy mountain road toward our house, I thought of just letting go, of taking my hands off the wheel and closing my eyes. What would it be like, I wondered, to feel the swift rush of cool water as the car careened into the river or hear the splintering of wood and metal as it crashed into a tall oak tree? In the end, would I be sorry or simply relieved? At least this would be over then, I thought. Over.
Flat Broke with Two Goats Page 2
