Mean Woman Blues

reduced…
”
    “To what?” Issac asked.
    “I don’t know. She said I did do something illegal, even though I didn’t know it was. It’s called check kiting.”
    “I’ve heard of it, but I never really knew what it was.”
    Tiffie had explained, but the truth was, Terri didn’t have a clue what she was talking about. “Tiffie just said it’s when you write a check and there’s no money in the bank.”
    “It can’t be that. It’s some kind of scam.”
    “Well, how could I have been running a scam? Look, I’m an artist; this stuff makes no sense to me.
They
were the ones charging me twenty-two dollars a check and never telling me, or not until it was too late. Think about it. That’s more than two hundred dollars for ten checks: my rent, the phone, a couple credit cards… I write that many checks every month, and there’s no money left over. None. You know how much two hundred dollars is to somebody like me?”
    Isaac only nodded. She knew he knew.
    Tiffie, whose lips were as thin as her tiny little waist, wanted to plead Terri out and get her six months probation. Which meant Terri would officially be a felon.
    She ate all the time now, when she wasn’t smoking, and bit her nails, worrying that her parents would find out. She stopped going to class, and one day, instead, had her cards read in Jackson Square. “Look for a sign,” said the reader. “Look for a sign and follow it.”
    She felt so damn miserable she just went home and put on her pajamas and turned the TV on. One thing: Her parents had given her cable for her birthday.
Really great for depression
, she thought.
All the TV you can eat.
    She was an hour into a session of channel-surfing when she heard the words “We right wrongs on this show.”
    Riveted, she turned up the volume. The host was a man named David Wright. (
Mr. Right
was the name of the show.) He was a handsome man, a little slick, maybe, a little Texas-looking, but well-spoken in a Southern kind of way. Truth to tell, Terri found him slightly smarmy, but she sure liked what he had to say. “Let’s welcome Corinne Kay Walker for the second time in a month. Corinne, you look a lot better than the last time you were on.”
    Corinne was a big-breasted blonde who’d evidently just had an expert makeup job done by someone at the station. She looked bright and sassy. The host played a clip of the previous show. Corinne was crying, describing her unfair eviction by a landlord who wanted to sell his building before her lease was up. She was the unmarried, unemployed mother of two small children. In the clip, she had scraggly hair and wore no makeup. She broke down twice as she told her story.
    “My ex-husband declared bankruptcy, and I was on one of his credit cards, so that wrecked my credit. It was as if I’d done it too, you understand? I couldn’t get credit for seven years, and that was only five years ago. I lost my job when the company went out of business, and I got evicted a week later. Mrs. Browning said I broke the terms of the lease— well, I did, Mr. Wright…”
    “David.”
    “Technically, I did, David, but I
asked
her first. I told her my story, and she said, sure I could have a few more days to pay the rent. But then she denied ever saying it. And then I found out about the firm that wanted to tear down the building and build a hotel. Do you see what she did? She used my own circumstances against me.”
    Mr. Right said, “You know what that reminds me of? It’s like the kind of person who picks up a hitchhiker who’s been robbed and then he rapes her.”
    This was the first of the two occasions on which Corinne broke down. She just had time to cry out the words “You understand!” before she lost it. When she recovered, she said, “I mean, it wouldn’t be so bad if, you know, I could just go out and get another apartment, but who’s going to take somebody with my credit record? And I didn’t have enough money for first and last months’ rent, you know, and some people even charge a damage fee.”
    Mr. Right stopped her here and turned to the studio audience. “What do you think, folks? Can we make it right?”
    A roar went up from the crowd. The show’s theme music came up, and suddenly ushers appeared, as if in church, passing collection baskets into which people fell all over themselves to drop money and coins. The camera lingered over a child dropping nickels in, then an old woman unwrapping a hanky.
    Terri wrinkled her nose.
Pretty