Page 18 of Error Handling
“Did you drop off the check?”
Always to the point.
“I just got it in the mail on Friday.”
“Did you drop it off?”
I press my palm to my forehead. “It’s Monday, Dad. I’ve been at work since nine.”
My father, Lloyd Wilkins, funds my college. He insists on sending paper checks via snail mail and making me drop them off at the bursar’s office because he is technologically deficient like my mother.
They had me late in life, my dad at forty-five and my mother at forty-six. Plenty of over seventy-year-olds these days are tech-savvy, but just as many approach advances like online banking with mittens on their hands and paper bags over their heads. I’ve offered to help my dad figure out how to simplify his life with electronic funds transfers, but he resists, saying he prefers living in the real world, where you can feel money. “Electronic moneyisn’t real,” he always scoffs. I insist it is very much real, but Lloyd Wilkins is stubborn, just like my mother.
I suspect there is more to his flat-out denial to modernize. My dad makes money. Lots of it. As a sought-after metal sculptor, who also owns a small but successful jewelry business, he has done well for himself. One of the reasons, I suspect, is because he does much of his work under the table. In other words, Uncle Sam never gets his fair share.
I’ve never approached my dad about this. I know him well enough to know he’ll make his own decisions, even if it means he winds up in prison for tax evasion. Evidence of his questionable money management strategies is apparent in the multiple banking accounts he uses to pay my tuition fees. One quarter it’s PNC, the next Chase Bank, and the next Wells Fargo. I assume he’s diluting his trail. Quite frankly I don’t want to know. I just count myself lucky that he rescued me from the Law Offices of James and Sturgess by sending me to art school, even though his motives weren’t exactly pure.
My mother funded my first undergraduate degree. Rather, my tuition was waived because of her tenure there. Like any overachieving eighteen-year-old, I went straight from high school to college despite not knowing what I wanted to do with my life. I started with an English degree with an emphasis in Creative Writing but realized I wasn’t cut out for it when my classmates were composing deep, heart-wrenching free verse poetry, and I was writing rhymed verse about the caterpillar on my windowsill. Not that a caterpillar on a windowsill can’t be poetic, I just lacked the skills to make it so.
That’s when I realized my mother had been lying to me about my writing chops. I wrote small poems throughout high school, sometimes sharing them with my mom, who raved about them, calling me a natural. A recent perusal through my old poetryjournals confirmed the only thing natural about them was the paper on which they were written.
Since writing metered verse about bugs wasn’t going to lead to a lucrative or fulfilling career, I decided to change my major to Political Science, mainly because the curriculum consisted of memorizing stuff and spitting it back out, and I’ve always had a robust memory.
Mom was not happy.
She’d dreamed her daughter would one day write dense fictional tomes worthy of university-level analysis. Why Mom pinned such hopes on me, I can only guess. She never expresses her hopes, dreams, or desires. Instead, she tells others what theirs should be.
While married to my dad, she often encouraged him to dream of being more than a hack artist who built subpar sculptures in their basement. (She called it encouraging. He called it nagging.) She was tired of supporting a family of three on her own, and needed him to get a real job, something that required higher education, like an accountant, a lawyer, a chemist, a psychologist. She wouldn’t be married to a factory worker, or a mechanic, or a plumber. She needed a man who stimulated her intellectually. Otherwise, she would never be stimulated physically, and she hammered this into him day and night.
I recall it vividly: the constant fighting, slamming of cabinet doors, throwing of glasses, which my feet managed to find months later. Then, there were my dad’s threats of leaving. His first affair. And then his second. And third. All Mom’s fault, of course, for emasculating him with so much nagging, and never fulfilling his needs because of her frigidity.
Oh, the arguments and spiteful words I wish I never heard about their non-existent sex life and my father’s burning physical needs. Yada, yada, yada. I always retreated to mybedroom and stuck my fingers in my ears, but I still heard everything.
My decision to change my major to Political Science was my first real act of independence. Unfortunately, it was an act I quickly came to regret.
After graduating, I landed a job in a downtown Columbus law firm as a file clerk. So much for dreams of greatness. The first lesson I learned at James and Sturgess was that lawyers still use paper, lots of it, and that paper has to be collated, alphabetized, and stored away in hanging files. Job hazards included disproportionately painful paper cuts, bloody staple stabs, low back and foot pain, and self-esteem problems.
If you don’t have a J.D. at James and Sturgess, you aren’t worthy of conversation. You’re merely the lackey who quietly creeps into each lawyer’s office, careful not to interrupt their intense concentration and very important work while you retrieve their daily contribution to deforestation. I was that lackey.
I hated it.
So, I decided to become a paralegal.
And I hated that more.
Turns out paralegals are treated worse than the hourly peons. They are expected not only to grovel, but to stay past five, work nights and weekends, and accept a menial salary for their hard work.
When my father called me and offered to send me to College of Charleston, I knew something was up. His career as a sculptor and jewelry designer had just begun to take off, and he still had a bone to pick with his ex-wife. In essence, he was announcing, “See? I can send our daughter to school too, only I can pay for it.Out of pocket.” A better person might have declined his offer, but I wasn’t a better person. I needed a vacation. A long one. Andpursuing an art degree in a beautiful southern city with quick access to the ocean seemed to fit the bill.
And it had. Mostly. Except it’s soon coming to an end and I still have no idea what to do with my life.
“I need you to drop the check off today and have them put a rush on it,” Dad says.
“I’m here until five.”
“Okay. Well. Can you do it at lunch?”
“I suppose,” I say. I rub out a smudge on my glossy desktop. “I was planning to eat during lunch.”