My Parents and Tution

Prof. Rebecca Chace
Advanced Fiction, Fall 2009


As I copy and paste 70 email addresses from a word doc to my send box, the earplug to my phone is hanging from my ear. My mother says to me, “Have you spoken to him about your loans yet?”

“Mom. He’s still in grief. He says he’ll pay half of it if I raise half in six months after graduation.”

“Right. Look. I don’t care if his wife died. He told you in your fourth year that you had to pay the twenty grand. If you keep working for nonprofit organizations, you’re not going to pay half of it in six months.”

I return to another web tab and scroll through addressses. “I have to get back to what I was doing.”

“Homework?”

“Outreach. I’m way behind because of Joan’s funeral and dad needing attention.”

“He needs attention?”

“Yea. He always wants to tell me the same stories and I don’t have the guts to cut him short. Like how he bought all this
stuff for Joan but she never used it.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing.”

“Tell me. Actually, maybe I don’t want to know.”

“Yea so I have to get back to reaching students.”

“Are you coming home this weekend?”

“I don’t think I can leave the house just yet.”

“Bruce wants to see you. Don’t forget he actually has cancer.”

“I’ll probably come in the middle of next week.”

“Well you can at least call me back when I call you.”

“I speak to you at least three times a week.”

“Bruce says you don’t call him back.”

“I have to go mom.”

When she finally let’s me go my father calls a minute later. I answer, “Hi dad!”

“Who’s this?” he asks.

“What’s up?”

“Are you home?”

“Yes. I took care of the dog.”

“Do me a favor. Pick me up from Finnigans.”

“Your car is here?”

“Yes. I’m on the train. Listen. I’m going to let you drive my car. Wait a second. Let me figure this out.”

“I’ll pick you up it’s fine.”

“Listen. At 10:30 be at Finnigans. Just don’t fuck up my car.”

“It’s not even far. I drive mom’s car all the time.”

“Listen!”

“Yes?”

“Do me a favor. Listen. That car was seventy thousand dollars. Ok. Don’t even let me know tomorrow that I let you drive it.”

“Okay.”



The next day is the day that we looked at boats. I deposit change into the Coin Star machine early on a Sunday in Stop n’ Shop. As it counts up past five dollars I start cheering it on. “Yea!” I contemplate whether I should save lunch money by buying bread but it’s only industrial bread and has soy in it and I can’t afford the farmers market bread so I’ll just go broke buying lunch everyday. Then the machine asks if I want to donate to World Wild Life and I curse it for fucking with me and press cash instead of donate, which is for bad people. Then my father calls me. “Listen. Your grandfather canceled on me. Do you want to come with me to the boat show?”

“Will it take all day?”

“You have a date today?”

“I’m just really behind on my internship stuff. I have to reach out to more students. I keep getting side-tracked.”

“Fine. But listen. My father died when I was seven. I can die. You’re going to look back on these times and you’ll be happy
you spent them with your father.”

“I guess I’m coming.”


My mother calls me as I walk home. I say to her through the dangling earpiece, “We’re going to look at boats.”

“He wants to buy a boat!”

“God. I don’t know! We’re going to a boat show.”

“What’s a boat show?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t even wondered that myself.”

“Ok. When are you coming home?”

“I told you about twelve hours ago.”

“When did you say you were coming?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe mid week next week.”

“Call Bruce back. He can use the call.”

“I spoke to him an hour ago.”

“Well he just told me that you’re ignoring him.”

“God. I have to go.”

“Why?”

“I’ll just call you back.”


We stood on the dock and looked at a thirty-two foot boat. “That’s the one,” he said.

“That’s the one that you like to just look at because it makes you feel like you are in the sea.”

“That’s the one I’d like to get. I think it’s affordable.”

The board says $90,000. I say, “Yes. You can say that in a general sort of universal way, or I should say relatively compared
to these like Universal Studios level items, sure, I mean like, if my taxes went to a boat like this I might not even refuse to pay them because I mean like in a world of satellites and ipods, I mean, you can say that if you have perspective of a peripheral mindset of a sort.”

He quietly looks at it. The sky is Bruce. I don’t know what he is thinking. Then he says, “Are you up to some Mexican?”


In the car he picks up a twenty-dollar bill in the cup holder. “Hey life is funny. I found this walking the dog.”

“Yes,” I say.

After a song on the radio he says, “You’ll get me that boat.”

And for some reason, I imagine him riding the boat, and the wind in his hair, and the expansive ocean. I picture him all
alone on the boat.


At the bar in the Mexican restaurant my dad is on his second martini before our food comes, except for the tortilla chips. “Are you going to your mother’s for the Jewish holiday tomorrow?”

“No.”

“What’s the purpose of that holiday?”

“I don’t remember.”

“I used to spend two hundred dollars a month on Hebrew school.” He shakes his head. “I raised you in the Jewish religion
because your mother is Jewish and now you kids don’t even light the menorah. See, your mother has no religion. She doesn’t go to temple-”

“She’s agnostic.”

“It cost money just to be a member of the temple, Shannon. We don’t have that at church. You put something in the basket.”

I almost go into how I didn’t believe in Genesis in first grade but I figure that would further his point. My beans, guacamole and rice come. He says, “Are you sure I’ve never taken you here.”

“I’ve been here with mom.”

“Your mother?”

I eat my beans.

“Well you’re taking Joan’s place. We came here every Sunday. She was so simple man. Not like your mother. Joan paid the check in restaurants. Your mother- forget it man. Did I tell you about the massage in Tokyo? First of all. Listen.” He drank his fourth glass. “Before I tell you about that. Let me tell you about who gave the German massages.” He reaches behind me and kneads my back with his knuckles. Suddenly catatonic, my eyes close and beans pour out of my mouth.

“Feels good right?” he asks.

“I nod in ecstasy”

“Joan used to give me the German massage. We’d go home from here and she’d jump on my back every time and do that
for me. Your mother- when I just married your mother my sensai treated us to a trip to Tokyo. I was the man. We had this hotel in the Park Avenue equivalent of Tokyo. I order a masseuse. I’m expecting a cute Japanese girl. This little, viajo, old Japanese woman lurches into the room. ‘Mr. Ayala. I do you first. I do your wife second.’”

I’m still listening.

“Now, Shannon. Your mother and I were never in love. But that day your mother and I were happy.”


“Have you talked to him about the loan yet?” My mother says behind the wheel at the stoplight. My duffle bag is on my lap. “Fuck this light,” she says.

“I don’t think he ever will care about my loan. He throws my medicine bills on my staircase.”

“What!”

“I know. It’s like half my biweekly paycheck.”

“Well you don’t really have a job, Shannon.”

“I know but I mean I’m a regional organizer and we have to save the food system and the planet.”

“I’m taking him to court. What does he say about the internship? Does he ask you anything about it?”

“Well sometimes he says I’m going to be a doctor. Sometimes he says it’s a good thing, this job.”

“One has nothing to do with the other.”

“What’s the use stressing,” I ask. “He has his own way of thinking. It all makes sense to him. I totally follow his logic.”

“You’re on his side?”

“No. I just see the way he thinks and there’s no bending it. It’s not greed or cheapness. It’s just an aversion to making one’s life too easy. And you’re never going to confront him with a law suit because you’ve been saying it for years.”

“You just watch. Just wait until you graduate. He’ll have his chance.”

“Is Bruce home?”

“Yes. Spend some time with him.”

“Ok. I told the organization, when I went to the training for this my stepmother and stepfather were both in the hospital.
One didn’t go home and the other went home with cancer. So I’m preoccupied with that and with more local concerns that have come up. For example, I’ve been in solidarity with a local community garden and the educational rights movement. So I’ve hardly been doing my job.”

“What are you saying?”

“I want to tell them not to pay me.”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I really being paid for activism anyway.”

“Shannon. Do not be stupid.”

“Mom. I’m stupid. I’m just as stupid as dad is. Only I’m stupid in my own way and I hope you see the difference.”

“Did you tell your father this?”

“For some reason I don’t tell him the same things I tell you.”

“Like about your medicine?”

“I don’t know how to.”

“You say, ‘father. Please help me pay for my medicine.’”

“But I don’t like asking him for anything.”

“Shannon. You’re not going to survive being nice.”