Margo's Got Money Troubles

by Rufi Thorpe

I like getting to be the me now watching the past me. It’s almost a way of loving myself. Stroking the cheek of that girl with my understanding. Smoothing her hair in my mind’s eye.

“Why do you think it changed?” I asked. “Like, civilization?” “I don’t know what a historian would say, but I would say Jesus: love thy neighbor, and it’s easier for a camel to fit through a needle’s eye than a rich man to get into heaven. In a place like Rome, insisting everyone had intrinsic value—it rattled them. I mean, they killed him for it.”

That way you throw yourself around in the world like you’re invulnerable, when of course you can’t be and you are going to get terribly hurt, and yet there is something beautiful about the abandon, the recklessness, and—and kind of the bravery of it.”

Wouldn’t that be a beautiful human achievement? To learn everything about a person you would never meet?

“All things that are genuinely interesting aren’t quite real,”

She wasn’t rotten! She wasn’t trash—no human being was trash. Jesus had said that. Jesus, who consorted with lepers and prostitutes.

Mary hadn’t worried that having been raped made her any less worthy of marrying Joseph, and she didn’t worry about the fact that she was lying. What she did was put her finger on a scale she could clearly see was rigged against her. If she’d told the truth, she would have been killed. So Mary told a beautiful, golden whopper and became the most revered woman on Earth.

In fact, in the movies and TV shows and books she’d read, you could tell if a character was the bad guy by how much he cared about money. And since she wanted to be good, she’d always been careful not to care too much about money. Now she wondered if all those Disney movies were merely propaganda to keep poor people content with their lot. We may be poor, but we’re the salt of the earth, we know what really matters. The rich are perverted by their hideous wealth—why, look at that Cruella de Vil! But good or evil, every single dollar was power. Power to hire a lawyer, power to control how she spent her time, power to change her appearance, power to command respect. Power to be who she wanted to be.

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.

I didn’t know the love was supposed to come from within me, and that as long as I loved others, the strength and warmth of that love would fill me, make me strong.

“It’s like falling in love,” I said, though maybe that sounded even more insane. “It’s the biggest love you’ll ever experience. And it will change everything about you. At times you will think your whole life is ruined, but you know, like, you wouldn’t change any of it. Just . . . I’m excited for you. That all that’s about to happen.”