Margo's Got Money Troubles

by Rufi Thorpe

Except now she was about to start crying in the Goodwill, and she’d never even thought of herself as a materialistic person. Whatever was in Target or thrift stores had always been perfectly fine with her. But she felt if she had to use one of those brown strollers that smelled like bowling alley shoes, then her baby would grow up to spit from truck windows and laugh at racist jokes. And honestly, there was a pretty high chance that was going to happen no matter which stroller she used, and the thought of this made her feel like she couldn’t breathe.

She’d thought, somehow, that keeping the baby would make people regard her with more kindness. But women frowned at her and Bodhi in the grocery store. The eyes of men skittered over her like she was invisible. She seemed to walk everywhere in a cloud of shame. She was a stupid slut for having a baby, and if she’d had an abortion, she also would have been a stupid slut. It was a game you could not win. They had tried to warn her: her mother, Mark, even Becca. But when they talked about the opportunities she would be missing, she’d thought they meant a four-year college. She hadn’t understood they meant that every single person she met, every new friend, every love interest, every employer, every landlord, would judge her for having made what they all claimed was the “right” choice.

Margo knew her mother was trying to pass down wisdom and skill, the dark art of turning an ordinary person into a minor goddess by means of paint and fabric, but what she also heard was: Your face needs to be covered. To be loved, you should put this face over your face. It was even okay if it hurt, if it burned, if it accidentally tore out your eyelashes. “Beauty is like free money,” Shyanne used to say as she did Margo’s face.

“Wrestling is not fake,” Jinx used to say, “it is merely predetermined.” But in a way, wasn’t everything? Margo wondered. That was one of the things Mark had told her, that as far as neuroscience was concerned, free will couldn’t be real. That our brains only invented explanations, justifications for what our body was already getting ready to do. That consciousness was a fabulous illusion. We were inferring our own state of mind the same way we inferred the minds of others: thinking someone is mad when they frown, sad when they cry. We feel the physiological sensation of anger and we think, I’m mad because Tony stole my banana! But we’re just making stuff up, fairy tales to explain the deep dark woods of being alive.

She wondered, as she bounced him, if any of the men here subscribed to OnlyFans. She pictured her voice, as it rose with the others, glowing subtly black. She didn’t know if she was enjoying imagining herself as slightly evil because she disliked these people or because she was afraid of them. She knew they were likely nice people. She even believed that they were probably better than her. But she knew they would hate her. She knew, if pressed, that they would show her no mercy at all. That the lead singer, so delicate, so tender she quaked with the glory of God’s love, lungs fluttering too fast to find the note, would press her gray New Balance sneaker right on Margo’s throat.

She didn’t think she was a bad person, but did bad people ever know that they were bad?

The sadness from the morning didn’t exactly go away; it dried on me and slowly crumbled, leaving me covered in little flakes, like if you eat a glazed donut in a black shirt. That was how it was being a grown-up. We were all moving through the world like that, like those river dolphins that look pink only because they’re so covered in scars.

I’d wondered about the phrase “Hungry Ghost” when Mark first wrote that poem. What did he mean by it? How could ghosts be hungry? But it made perfect sense to me now: The longing for the food you could no longer eat. The memory of having a body. People were constantly giving ghosts food, offerings of persimmons and oranges, pan de muerto on the Day of the Dead; even Halloween was about nothing so much as candy. What the dead wanted, above all else, was to eat, to cram their mouths full, to feel the calories flood their bloodstream, to be part of it again: life. Bloody, squirming, pulsing, hungry life.

“No, no,” I said. “It’s not about that. I’d do it all again. But, like, I didn’t really know you could still die having a baby, or, you know, tear. Kind of inevitably. Down there. And then for the rest of your life when you sneeze, you pee a little. Some women tear way worse and they wind up not able to control their poop all the time. It changes your body in irreversible ways. One of my tits is now a full half cup size bigger than the other.” “Well, yeah,” Rose said. “I mean, of course it’s going to change your body.” “You can’t tell me that if it was men and a medical decision would result in their penis splitting open and them not being able to hold their pee for the rest of their life, they wouldn’t think that should be their own decision.”

Lineage-wise, I was practically falsehood royalty. How many times had I pretended my own grandmother had died?

She thought about what her dad had said about women and why he always ended up cheating. People are all so lonely. Even when they do horrible things, it often comes down to that, if only you take the time to understand them. It seemed like that should mean the world could be better, that people could help each other, like Jesus said. And yet that’s not what happens. That hardly ever seems to happen at all.

There was no changing Mark. Or Jinx, or Shyanne, or how the world worked. They were like chess pieces: they moved how they moved. If you wanted to win, you couldn’t dwell on how you wished they’d move or how it’d be fairer if they moved a different way. You had to adapt.

When you’re going to do something stupidly brave, it helps to have less time to think about it.

Because that’s all art is, in the end. One person trying to get another person they have never met to fall in love with them.