Love Saves the Day

Then again, there were the Mandelbaums, who’d always struggled over money, especially after failing eyesight had forced Mr. Mandelbaum to retire from driving his cab. We’ll get by, Mrs. Mandelbaum would say. Remember, we’re supposed to thank God for our misfortunes as much as our good fortune. And Mr. Mandelbaum would reply, Ida, if I stopped to thank God every time I had problems, I wouldn’t have time to scratch my own head. But there would be affectionate good humor mingled with the exasperation in his voice.

People who worried about accumulating a lot of expensive “stuff,” or who felt a need to be “fulfilled” by what they did for a living, were people who had gotten used to luxuries that Laura had never been able to afford. Stuff was nice and feeling fulfilled was probably even nicer, but money was more important than either. Without money you ended up the way Mr. Mandelbaum had. Without money you would rot in the streets or in one of those wretched SROs and nobody would care. Laura had no desire to live extravagantly. By living on less than half her take-home, she’d managed to finish paying off her student loans the month before she and Josh were married. Now all she asked was not to have to worry about having enough money to live decently and pay her bills on time.

But these days all she did was worry about money. She’d pace around her office with the door closed, during all of that “extra” time that had once been given over to accumulating billable hours, calculating what she was likely to earn this year with her smaller bonuses, trying to think up a budget that would allow her and Josh to meet their current expenses and leave something to carry over into next year in case Josh still couldn’t find a job.

At a certain point, Laura had acknowledged that worrying about these things as much as she did could only be counterproductive and distract her from her work. But even that made her worry more rather than less, until she began to wonder if worrying about worrying was some kind of diagnosable mental disorder.

She thought about her mother, who’d also tended toward obsessive thoughts, although Sarah’s obsessions had been of a pleasanter kind. Sarah had sometimes spent whole days listening to a single song—like “Baba Jinde” by Babatunde Olatunji, or Double Exposure’s “Ten Percent” on a twelve-inch album—if she was in the right kind of mood. When she was small, Laura had marveled at the intensity and focus something like this required. Now, as an adult, she understood.

The apartment was silent when Laura let herself in after her sweaty slog home from the subway, empty except for Prudence, who was curled up asleep in a box that had once held a ream of paper and was now waiting by the front door for someone (Me, Laura thought, a touch resentfully) to carry it to the trash room. Josh was out somewhere, perhaps at some meeting of the tenants’ association in the Avenue A building, or at one of the networking events he attended with less frequency as the months went by and they failed to yield any job leads. Possibly he’d even told her about it that morning and she’d forgotten. It wouldn’t surprise her at all, considering how snarled her mind was these days.

She went upstairs to her bedroom to remove her watch and earrings and place them in the wooden jewelry box Josh had surprised her with in the early days of their courtship. She’d admired it in an antiques store they’d ducked into during one of their walks. It had reminded her of Mrs. Mandelbaum’s jewelry box, which had rested on her bedroom dresser amid framed photos of Mr. and Mrs. Mandelbaum’s wedding, their honeymoon in Miami Beach, the two of them with their son, Joseph, as a towheaded toddler in a Thanksgiving Pilgrim’s costume and later as a laughing young man dressed for his high school prom, and pictures of Mr. Mandelbaum in his World War II fighter pilot’s uniform. The box itself had been filled with pieces in the art nouveau style that Mr. Mandelbaum had bought for Mrs. Mandelbaum over the years, none of it terribly expensive yet all of it beautiful to Laura’s young eyes.