Jane Smiley - Golden Age

“I’ll never get on the basketball team,” said Felicity.

Jen said, “If you worked on your layups the way I showed you…” But Felicity stared her down. Felicity was almost twelve, ready to consign all of her relatives to the outer darkness. Jen was the first to go, but Minnie thought it wouldn’t be long until she, too, was beneath contempt.

The drive to work was harder than she thought it would be, more full of unpleasant surprises. Like the car she hadn’t seen when she started the left turn, which suddenly appeared in her passenger-side window, honking. Like the bike she did see, but came so close to anyway that the cyclist gave her the finger. Twice, when it was storming at the end of her shift, Marian let her stay in one of the empty “suites” for the night, and the suite had a distinct air of being her future home. As for her job, well, there was nothing an old woman liked better than setting things straight. She even, thanks to Felicity, managed to upload all the records onto a couple of disks and bring them in after a weekend. Marian gave her a harried raise, ten cents an hour; the Peaceful Acres Nursing Home didn’t have a lot of money to spare. It was working out, Minnie thought, but it was working out the way transitions did — organizing itself, smoothing itself, breaking you in to a new, less desirable life, helping you forget what you cherished about the old life. She told Jesse and Jen that everything was fine and kept her other feelings to herself, as she always had.

—

ANDY THOUGHT that she understood her computer pretty well. Jared had brought it to her — it was an Apple — and he had overseen the installation of her dial-up connection. She enjoyed it. It worked most of the time. She found that she could look at pictures of lots of places that were quite beautiful, and she would never have to visit any of them. She rummaged around in magazines, printed out recipes, communicated with Janet and Richie and Loretta by e-mail, read newspapers and other “Web sites.” But, most of all, every few days, she checked her brokerage account. There were certain mysteries, such as why the connection worked sometimes but not all the time, why pictures came up instantly or not at all, why she was sure she had typed in the proper password but it still didn’t work. She had never encountered the mystery she encountered on November 6, the day before Election Day (Richie had told her to vote for Gore). According to her account information, the previous Friday, she had had $10,765,986.23. On Monday, she had nothing. The first thing she did was reboot the computer, and the second thing she did was call her broker. His line rang and rang, and no one, not even the secretary, picked it up. With some alarm, she then signed into her bank account. She remembered her password, though it took a moment. In her two savings accounts, she had $68,900.23. In her checking account, she had $14,465.87. So her financial obliteration wasn’t global, as they might say on the Internet.

When she called Michael, he said, “Not you, too.” Her broker, who was someone that Michael knew, though he didn’t have any funds with that firm, was a man almost her own age. She and Frank had put the Uncle Jens fund (twenty-five hundred very impressive dollars) first with that real-estate criminal Rubino (he had been charming, in his way, but when she saw The Godfather she had wondered about his origins). After real-estate investments had rolled it over several times, Frank put it into the stock market with a fellow Jim Upjohn recommended, and then that firm was taken over by this man, who stayed on the job when it folded into a larger firm. What was it, 110 years since the death of Uncle Jens? Andy’s mom had remembered vaguely that he’d left maybe seventy-five hundred dollars altogether. It was a very Norwegian thing to do to hold a grudge for sixty years after you died.

The youngish man who had been overseeing the funds for the last four years had come highly recommended, and she had paid not much attention to him at all, since she had a pretty good track record on her own. But now, according to Michael, and then according to the head of the firm, who called all of his bigger clients, the forty-five-year-old had transferred almost a hundred million dollars to a mysterious account somewhere, and had himself left the country. His whereabouts remained mysterious for another four days, until he turned up in Venezuela.

At first, as Andy sat quietly at her kitchen table, stirring her mint tea and looking out the window at a group of crows arguing in the tree beside her little garage, the most shocking thing was the amount of money he had taken. Andy had thought she was rich — ten million dollars! Maybe because of that old TV show The Millionaire , which she watched when Janet was little, when they’d bought their first television and were living in that tiny place in Floral Park, she’d continued to think that a million bucks defined great wealth. A hundred million dollars! How could you spend that in Venezuela these days? When Andy had visited there with Frank, they had remarked upon how cheap even the most luxurious houses or views or gardens seemed to be.

Only gradually did she realize that she now had about eighty-three thousand dollars to her name, which had to last for some number of years. She was healthy and active, so the number of years might be considerable. She stirred her tea again, drank some more, watched two of the crows, who looked young, square off against one another, then fly away.

No mortgage payment. Not a lot for food — maybe fifty dollars a week? Heat could pose a problem, but her biggest fuel bill had been about three hundred dollars last year. She went down the list. Maybe she could go for three years or four? No new clothes, probably. She sat there. The tree was leafless, still; fog was vaporizing upward in small plumes. Andy took a deep breath and realized that she was happy now, happy that the disaster had finally arrived and had turned out to be nothing but money.

THE FIRST THING Janet hated about Bush was not that he had stolen the election — that was bad, but he had had accomplices. He might even regard himself, she thought, as the ignorant beneficiary of the unknowable power of beings greater than himself (Cheney, Rumsfeld, brother Jeb, and Al Gore, who, not having won his home state, buckled). No, the first thing Janet really hated him for was his offhand comment that the Clinton boom had busted, and that we were now in a recession. He seemed to have no understanding that to a lot of people (namely, those who had invested in Jared’s company) that sort of edict was a death knell — money was running to safety now (gold and, for God’s sake, diamonds), and Jared was worried. It was Bush’s final campaign statement, the ultimate repudiation of the Democrats, and a self-fulfilling prophecy. She told all her friends that he had been nonpresidential and irresponsible to say such a thing, but most of them pooh-poohed her.

The second thing she hated him for was that she was stopped on El Camino Real at the Sand Hill Road light, and the traffic light went from red to black. Everyone at all three of the lights stayed still for a long couple of minutes; then, realizing that the system had gone out, they began creeping across the intersection. Janet was heading for the barn, where she was going to take Sunlight on a little trail ride, maybe ponying Pesky, who could no longer be ridden though he liked to get out, but she turned into the mall and drove slowly around. The mall was dark, too, and people were coming from the stores in droves, yakking and exclaiming. Then a cop car showed up, and a policeman started directing traffic on El Camino Real. Thinking that some sort of war had begun (probably no one else thought this), she turned on the radio for news. But it was not a war, it was another chapter in the ongoing energy crisis, brought to you by Enron. The most enraging thing about the energy crisis, apart from the sneering on all Internet message boards about how California must deserve this for some unknown reason having merely to do with the fact that California thought it was so cool to have attempted to scale back energy usage, was that it was closely — and, Janet would have said, seminally — connected to Bush and his cronies, who were, with absolute impunity, rigging the system in order to overcharge for the electricity they were refusing to send when the lines were available, and then insisting upon sending when the lines were jammed.