Three Thousand Dollars by David Lipsky

Author:David Lipsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497663350
Publisher: Open Road Media

ANSWERS

THE MACHINE SNAPS ON right when the phone rings, and I hear my mother’s voice, on tape, saying she isn’t here. Her voice always sounds different from real life on the tape, either too vivacious (like she’s calling in from the middle of a party, one finger stoppering her ear) or else too solemn. I wait. After the beep, my mother starts talking in real life, street noises behind her.

“Richard? It’s eleven-thirty. I’m going to Gristede’s—”

I pick up the phone. “Mom?” I say. I have the receiver too close to the machine, and there’s feedback; I step back, the whining stops. On the machine, my voice sounds breathless.

“You’re home?” my mother asks, in an amused voice.

“The machine got to it first,” I say. This isn’t exactly a lie.

My mother laughs. Hearing her on both the phone and in the machine is interesting, like stereo. A rumbling goes past her, right through our living room. “You’re weird,” she says.

Every time I don’t answer the phone my mother makes believe that she doesn’t know why. But she does know why. I just moved in, after three years of living in Los Angeles with my father. The thing is, I haven’t officially told him yet. I was spending the summer with my mom on Cape Cod, and was due back in California last week, to begin getting ready for the ninth grade. I didn’t go. My mother called my father for me. He refused to listen to her, and since then, I’ve been waiting for him to call me here. When my mother goes jogging, or to the store, or to her studio, I turn the machine on and listen in.

This upsets my mother for two reasons. She wants me to answer the phone like a normal person. And if not, she wants me to at least admit that the reason why is that I’m afraid of my father. I could easily say that, but it isn’t really the truth. For some reason, it’s become extremely important to me, in the last few weeks, not to say anything that isn’t at least partially true—like saying the machine picked up before I did.

I put my sneakers on and walk over to the supermarket. It’s cool in there. At this hour, the only people in Gristede’s are elderly, sweatered women—even now, in 85-degree weather, they’re dressed for January—and their Jamaican maids. It takes a while to find my mother. I don’t want to go around yelling “Mom,” so I kind of say it, in a soft voice, as I pass each aisle. She’s in the bread and cereal section, putting some bran flakes into the cart. I take them out and drop in two boxes of Quaker 100% Natural instead.

My mother gestures at the cereal. “That’s why I wanted you to come,” she says, in an aggrieved way. “I don’t know what you like, yet.”

“Here I am,” I say. In California, I always ate Quaker. I liked to put it in a mug and pop it, dry, into my mouth while I watched television.

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