* * *
No one felt like eating dinner that night, including me, even though we were having leftovers, which is my favorite kind of meal because it’s the one time I can eat moo goo gai pan, Count Chocula, and olives without Lexie telling me I’m disgusting. I stared at my fake chocolate cereal and everyone else stared at their food and finally Lexie said, “Dad? Why did you get fired?”
“Cutbacks,” Dad answered. “The economy is in trouble, you know.”
I wondered why, as an economics professor, Dad hadn’t seen this coming, but I didn’t say anything.
“You mean the college couldn’t afford you?” asked Lexie.
Dad nodded. “Six professors, two librarians, and several members of the office staff were let go along with me. Other people were asked to take pay cuts. The college is hoping to have a balanced budget by the time school starts again in the fall.”
“But who’s going to teach your classes?” I wanted to know.
“There are two other economics professors,” said Dad, “and my students will be divided between them. They’ll be teaching much larger classes for a lot less money.”
“Why—?” I started to say.
But Mom interrupted me. “Maybe we should have another meeting after dinner.”
I didn’t see why we couldn’t have one now, since we were all together, but whatever.
As soon as dinner was over Mom and Dad and Lexie and Bitey and I sat down in the family room again. Ordinarily, Lexie and I don’t like family meetings, since our parents usually call them so that they can discuss our behavior or attitudes or give us bad news. This time I wasn’t nervous, though. It wasn’t going to be a pleasant meeting, but at least I knew I wasn’t in trouble for anything.
“I’m sure you girls have plenty of questions,” said Mom, starting the meeting.
Lexie nodded solemnly. “What I’ve been wondering,” she said, “is whether we’ll have enough money without Dad’s salary.”
That’s funny. What I was going to ask was if Dad and I could have a Boggle tournament in all his spare time.
Mom and Dad looked at each other, which was not a good sign. It meant they were trying to figure out how to give Lexie and me more bad news. Finally Dad said, “We’ll be all right without my salary for a while, but we will have to cut back.”
I hoped that Lexie’s violin lessons would be the first thing to go.
“You mean like not eat out in restaurants so often?” asked Lexie.
“Actually,” said my mother, “for a while, we won’t be eating in restaurants at all. Well, except for very special occasions, like Pearl’s birthday. And no more take-out food and pizzas. It’s expensive, and it all adds up. Cooking and eating at home is cheaper.”
“There are lots of small ways we can cut back,” added my father. “We’ll have Family Game Nights instead of going to the movies. Or we’ll rent DVDs. We’ll buy cheaper brands at the supermarket. I think that if we pay attention to what we spend our money on, we’ll find plenty of ways to save and be thrifty.”
Dad should know.
Mom rolled her neck around then, like she had a headache, which she probably did. She gazed past Lexie and me, out into the hallway, and finally she said, “Also, there’s one big thing we can do right away that will save quite a bit of money.” Now she focused on my sister and me, looking at us over her glasses. “We’re going to have to cancel the trip with Daddy Bo.”
“Our trip to the Wild West?” I cried. I said this so loudly that Bitey’s tail puffed up like a blowfish and he ran out of the room. “No! Please. We aren’t going anywhere else this summer and everyone in my class is going to a dude ranch or soccer camp or the beach. We have to go somewhere.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mom. “The trip is very expensive, and we haven’t paid for most of it yet.”
My sister turned to me then and said, “Do you have any idea how much rent is, Pearl?”
“Do you have any idea how annoying you are, Lexie?”
“Pearl,” said my father.
“Sorry, Lexie.”
“What about Camp Merrimac?” asked Lexie, without bothering to say, That’s okay, Pearl.
“Camp is already paid for,” Dad replied, “so you can still go.”
I crossed my arms. When I had said I wanted to go somewhere this summer, I had not meant New Jersey.
“Maybe you could get your money back from Camp Merrimac,” said Lexie, although she didn’t really look like she meant it.
Mom shook her head. “We paid for it last fall. It’s non-refundable.”
Lexie glanced at me. “‘Non-refundable’ means they won’t give us our money back.”
“Duh,” I said. Then I added, “‘Duh’ means that you should stop talking now.”
“Girls!” exclaimed Dad. “Enough. The last thing we need is bickering. Please focus.”
So we talked for a little while about how Mom would still be earning money with her writing, and then Lexie suggested that we could clean our own apartment instead of paying Mrs. Yardley to do it, but Dad pointed out that we didn’t want to take Mrs. Yardley’s job away from her so we would wait and see, and I said that maybe we could all cut each other’s hair.
We were beginning to feel tired then, so my mother said, “Meeting adjourned,” and we went to our bedrooms. I stared at my homework papers and decided not to study for our spelling quiz. I wandered back to the family room and phoned JBIII. “My dad got fired,” I told him, and JBIII said he didn’t know anyone who had ever been fired. “How does it feel when your father gets fired?” he asked, and I replied, “Not good.”
Back in my bedroom I sat at my desk and took out a pad of paper. Across the top I wrote Pearl’s Income and Expenses, which seemed like the right way to consider a matter of economics. On the left side of the paper I wrote Income, and under that I wrote:
Allowance
Birthday money???
That was it. I had no other sources of income. Lexie sometimes babysat (the most embarrassing times were when she babysat for me) or tutored little kids who were having trouble with math, but no one paid me to do anything yet.
I moved to the other side of the paper and wrote Expenses. Underneath that I wrote:
Savings (I was supposed to put 1⁄3 of my allowance in the bank)
Donations (I was supposed to donate 1⁄3 of my allowance to good causes, such as firefighters and sick cats)
Art supplies
Additional parts to my pirate costume
Movies that Mom and Dad think are not worth their own $$
I tried to figure out how much my expenses might total this summer, and after doing a very long addition problem I realized they were much higher than my income, even if Daddy Bo gave me quite a bit of $$ on my birthday.
Okay. Well, there were ways to cut, which should make Mom and Dad proud. I looked at the Expenses side of the paper again and drew a line through Savings and then through Donations. There. That was better. Then I decided that I could wait until Halloween to add any parts to my pirate costume, so I crossed out that line. And I had a feeling nobody in my family was going to be going to the movies this summer, so I crossed out the last line too. I was left with Art supplies. That seemed reasonable. I could tell my parents they could cut my allowance in half. But then I remembered a few other things I’d been meaning to buy, so I added some items to my expenses: iPod, more stuffed animals, hamster (alive, not stuffed), hamster environment, cowboy hat, geode, snow globe of Old Faithful geyser. I’d been planning to get the last three items on our trip to the Wild West, and I still wanted them.
I totaled up my new expenses and realized I would need a raise in my allowance, but it didn’t seem like the right time to ask for one, so finally I stuffed the papers in my desk and went to bed.
4
I. My dad got fired.
A. My family was shocked.
B. We tried to pretend that saving $$ was fun!!!
The next morning as Dad and Lexie and I rode dow
nstairs in the elevator, Dad said, “Lexie, I can pick up Pearl and JB this afternoon.”
I thought about saying, “Dad, it’s JBThree,” but I didn’t know if it was nice to correct a fired person.
“That’s okay. I can do it,” said Lexie.
“No, really. I’m free.”
“Well, anyway, it’s only me,” I spoke up. “JBThree has to go to the dentist this afternoon. He might need braces. He’s not walking to school with us either, because he’s going out for breakfast with his parents.” Dad looked a little sad when I said that, so I stopped talking.
The elevator doors slid open then, and we all said hi to Mr. Thompson who was sitting on a bench with his dog, Hammer. Mr. Thompson and Hammer are both very old and creaky and have to rest a lot.
Lexie saw Valerie waiting for her outside and picked up her pace. “Bye!” she called over her shoulder as she sped through the lobby. “Thanks for picking up Pearl, Dad.” She raced through the door, saying “Valerie, you’ll never guess what happened.” I wondered how many of her friends my sister would spread the sad news to that day, but as Lexie and Valerie walked away, I heard Lexie say, “Dallas never called me last night, and I left him seven messages.” Huh. The bad news was about Dallas.
“So what are you going to do today, Dad?” I asked as we started down Twelfth Street. The sky was perfectly blue, probably just like the sky you would see on a nice morning in the Wild West.
I was a little bit jealous of my father, since he didn’t have to go to work.
My father clapped his hands together. “I’m going to start looking for a new job,” he said smartly. He said this in the cheerful tone adults use when they’re talking to kids about things that aren’t fun at all but that they’re trying to make sound fun. Like, “I’ll bet we can clean out your whole closet in half an hour! Wouldn’t it be great if we found your bubble blaster in there?” (The bubble blaster was something I had lost after just one day, and my parents said if I wanted another I would have to spend my own $$ on it.)
I glanced at my father. “You’re already going to start looking for a job?”
“Absolutely.”
“You aren’t going to take off even one day?”
“Finding another job won’t be easy.”
“But could we do something fun after school?”
“We’ll see. I told your mom we’d run errands after I pick you up.”
“What errands do we have to do?” I asked. I hoped we weren’t going to the dry cleaner, which smells a little bit like gasoline and also a little bit like Bitey’s breath.
We passed the deli and I waved to Mrs. Chin, who works at the bagel counter. She smiled and waved back, mouthing “Hi, Pearl!” through the window.
“Grocery store,” said Dad, “stationery store, shoe store—”
“Who needs shoes?” I wanted to know.
“Nobody. I just need shoelaces.”
I’m sorry to admit it, but the errands didn’t sound like a whole lot of fun. I thought things over during spelling class, though, and decided to be cheerful for the sake of my father, the fired person.
I think he appreciated it. At the grocery store that afternoon he put on his fake excited voice again and said, “I have an idea, Pearl. Let’s make a game out of our shopping. We’re only going to buy the least expensive brands, but I have a calculator in my pocket and I’ll keep track of the prices of the brands we would have bought, so that after we check out we can compare the total on the calculator to the total on the cash register and see how much money we’ve saved!”
It actually did sound like fun, and when Dad read off the first item on the list—tissues—I ran right by all the boxes with cherry blossoms and leaping fish and sunsets on them and picked out one that was solid white except for the word BASICS written across the top in big black letters. I compared prices, and the BASICS tissues were definitely the cheapest.
“Excellent,” said Dad.
I put four boxes of white BASICS tissues in our cart, and my father pulled out his calculator and clicked in the price of the brand we used to buy and multiplied it by four.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Seltzer,” said Dad.
Guess what. There was BASICS seltzer, too, and also BASICS laundry detergent and dishwashing soap and quite a few other things, except not bananas or celery, but that was okay.
By the time we were checking out I was excited and felt a little like jumping up and down. “You know what?” I said to Dad. “This would be a good experiment anyway, but it’s even better since you got fired and we can really use the extra money.”
A woman in the next line turned around and looked at us, and Dad said, “Remember when we talked about keeping certain things to yourself, Pearl?”
“Yup,” I said, hopping from one foot to the other. I could not wait until the cashier had rung us up. When he had, I looked at the amount on the register while Dad looked at his calculator.
“Thirty-eight seventy-four,” I announced. “What does the calculator say?”
“Fifty-one sixty-two. And that’s without the tax.”
“Yes!” I cried. “We saved almost fifteen dollars.” (It was amazing how fast I could do math in my head when it was for something really important, instead of for figuring out how many passengers would still be on a bus after a lot of people had gotten on and off, which is the opposite of important.) I smiled broadly at the woman in the other line.
The rest of our errands weren’t quite as much fun as the grocery store, but it was nice to walk around our neighborhood with my father, especially since we weren’t in a rush. We watched some pigeons fight over a bran muffin, and then I entered a contest in a bookstore. I didn’t really want the prize, which was a coupon for $100 worth of kids’ books, but I thought that if I won I could give the coupon to Mr. Potter, my teacher. He could put the books in our classroom. Plus, he would feel guilty the next time he had to keep me inside during recess to finish my undone homework.
After I had entered the contest, Dad and I tried to guess the names of all the dogs we saw people walking.
Finally Dad said we ought to be getting home. “I’m going to cook dinner tonight,” he told me.
“I’ll help.”
And I did. So all in all, my father’s first day as a fired person was a lot of fun.
After that, the fun part faded quickly.
* * *
The next night, Friday, we were all tired from school and work and job hunting. It was just the kind of night when ordering pizza would have put us in a better mood. But when I suggested it, Mom said, “Remember our new rules, Pearl.”
I did not remember that we had actual rules. I remembered that we were supposed to cut down on our spending. So I said, “Dad and I saved fifteen dollars at the grocery store yesterday. Let’s use that money.”
“But then we won’t have saved it,” Lexie pointed out, looking at me with a sad frown, the same look she might have given to a lost dog that was limping down the street.
“I know!” said Mom. “We have a pizza from the grocery store in the freezer. We’ll just heat that up.”
“Is that the pizza with the really flat crust, the tiny slices, and all the vegetables?” I asked. We keep grocery-store pizza in the freezer in case there’s an emergency, like a blackout or a blizzard, and there’s no food in any of the stores or restaurants in all of Manhattan and we have to eat up the stuff in our kitchen just to stay alive.
My mother sighed. “I don’t know, Pearl. It’s pizza. You wanted pizza, and we have pizza. So let’s eat it.”
That was my clue not to make any more mean comments about the freezer food.
It was about four days later when I noticed how messy our family room had become. This was because now it was not only our family room, living room, and dining room but Dad’s new office, too. In addition to looking for a job, he was writing articles and preparing talks, so he needed an office. I hadn’t realized how much stuff he’d had in his real office
at the college until he brought it all home with him. By the next week his computer was sitting on our dining table. A lot of little boxes with knobs and buttons and flashing lights were connected to the computer with a big tangle of cords that Bitey liked to nap on. Also on the table were piles of papers and a stack of files. And for some reason the fax machine from my mother’s office had been moved into the family room and was also sitting on the table, which I think you couldn’t call it a table anymore. It was Dad’s desk. From then on when we ate meals we could either eat at the desk with Dad shouting, “Don’t spill on the keyboard!” every ten seconds, or on the couch with Mom shouting, “Don’t spill on the cushions!” every ten seconds. It was not a relaxing dining atmosphere, but what with the freezer pizza and the BASICS food I didn’t really care.
“I have an idea,” I said on Tuesday night after I had finished a bowl of spaghetti. (I had eaten it sitting cross-legged on the floor on an old, holey sheet in case I spilled.)
“Yes?” said Dad.
“How about if you set up your office in my bedroom and I move in with Lexie again?”
Lexie, who was eating gingerly on the couch, set her own bowl of spaghetti on the coffee table and shot to her feet. “Absolutely not! No!”
“But we had so much fun. And anyway, I would like to make that sacrifice for Dad. Wouldn’t you like to help out, too?” I asked my enraged sister.
Lexie swiveled toward my parents, who were eating by the computer and fax machine. “Do I have—?” she started to say.
“That’s a very nice offer, Pearl,” Mom spoke up, “but you may keep your room. This is only a temporary situation.”
Lexie sat down again. “Thank you.”
* * *
One Saturday, when Dad had been a fired person for ten days, my parents said that we needed to go grocery shopping again but not at our usual store.
“We’re going to Brooklyn,” announced Dad.
“Brooklyn!” I exclaimed.
“It isn’t that far away, Pearl,” said Lexie.
“It feels far away. Why are we going to Brooklyn?”
“Because there’s a BuyMore-PayLess on Third Avenue,” Mom replied, “and it has the cheapest prices of any store around. We’ll get our groceries there.”