Fiction Ruined My Family by Jeanne Darst Read Free Book Online Page A

and hungry.
    â€œAll right. Let’s head home, shall we, Jean-Joe?”
    This new life Mom envisioned, the one she paid for, the Westchester us, normal and fancy, didn’t last long. When the CBS job ended Dad began talking about not another job but another novel.

THE CHICKEN SALAD FINANCIAL INDEX
    W ITH THE JOB at CBS over, Dad was fleshing out the idea for a second novel, called Black Ink , inspired by his time at CBS, about the owner of a TV network.
    â€œIt’s done in a Waugh style. The network (like CBS) likes to hire celebrities, and the narrator is there to represent Catholics—he’s written for a Catholic publication, very liberal—and is advised that working for the hawkish network will be just like that but that it might be a little more difficult typing with blood on his hands, otherwise okay. His name is Francis F. X. Xavier, descendant on both sides of the numbertwo man in the founding of the Jesuits, Francis Xavier, for whom many, many Catholics are named.”
    My mother preferred his flesh out on Fifty-second Street. This was not the direction she wanted to be going in.
    I now went to school all the time with no lunch money. I would ask my dad for a dollar and sometimes he’d go to his dresser and take change off of it and sometimes he would just say he didn’t have it. You’ll be fine, he seemed to say, opening the front door for me. Go read, go listen, go ask questions about what you’re learning. Lunch will come. Lunch isn’t why you go to school.
    What I was taught about money from my father was that scraping through life builds character, that driving around in our fume-spewing 1971 Ford Torino wagon while other people had new BMWs with red bows on the front in their driveways on Christmas morning made us more interesting than other people, and of course, that money destroys creativity. And last, the very solid: Money doesn’t make you happy.
    After hustling up some lunch for myself at school, an apple here, a muffin someone didn’t want there, I’d come home ravenous and find my mother in her office, the butcher-block kitchen table. “Never spend your capital, baby” was one afternoon’s money lesson from her. At the kitchen table you would also hear gems such as: “It’s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor man.” And then there was her signature, “Money doesn’t make you un happy, you know.” This was the extent of the financial workings of the world as far as I knew. I was never taught how to balance a checkbook or how credit cards worked. (All I knew was that my mom’s worked, my father’s didn’t.) We had a conversation once about economics and we were talking about other parts of the country.
    â€œWhat about Maine?” she said, puffing on her cigarette. “Now, that’s poverty. A chicken salad sandwich there is only about three dollars!”
    I call this my mother’s Chicken Salad Financial Index.
    WE DIDN’T HAVE health insurance. We knew not to break anything, not to swallow anything other than food, not to fall off anything or trip, not to let anything bite us unless it was our dog. The hot water was shut off all the time. I washed my hair on the third floor in Eleanor’s claw-footed tub, which I could lean over and only my head would suffer the freezing water, and then my hair froze on the way to school because there was no heat in our car and it was twenty degrees outside so I had these popsicle locks. I could see my breath in my room in the winter. When things broke, like the shower in the front bathroom on the second floor, we just stopped using them. When our back steps rotted through, someone deemed the front door the only entrance worth using. The Torino wagon was now so rusted through that you could see the road from a hole in the backseat floor, there was a grease spot on the upholstery on the driver’s side where my dad’s head