Mean Woman Blues

hokey stuff
, she thought.
    And then the video stopped. The camera went back to the present-day, well-groomed, confident Corinne beaming and once again tearing up.
    “Tell me, Corinne, did we make it right?”
    She seemed a bit overwhelmed. “I won my case,” she said. “People wrote letters. And I had lawyers…”
    Wright stopped her again. “Our staff lawyers, yes. You won your case, you say?”
    Corinne added, “People picketed too. She just… dropped the eviction. She said I could stay there until I got on my feet.”
    In addition, someone had offered her a job. She was working now as a secretary but taking computer courses at night toward the moment when she could make enough money to get out of the hole she was in. Subsidized child care had been found for her. The show’s viewers had contributed food and clothing. The show had gotten her a makeover at a salon.
    After Corinne’s story was told, the second guest was called, an elderly woman who’d run a red light on the way to visit her daughter in the hospital, the victim of a traffic accident. The cop who stopped her found she was driving without her glasses, because she grabbed the wrong pair in her rush, and he’d taken away her license, which meant that she now had no way to get to her daughter’s house to take care of her grandchildren while their mother was recovering.
    This time, in the present, Terri got to see the offertory baskets being passed and hear an optometrist offering to fit her with new glasses. She was betting the police department of the woman’s town was about to be shamed into returning her license.
    A piece of her recoiled at the cheesy show-biz tone of Mr. Right’s particular brand of justice, but it wasn’t a big enough piece to stop her from copying down the phone number and e-mail address that flashed on the screen when the show was over. “Do you have a wrong that needs righting?” Mr. Right intoned. “Call or e-mail us before your life spins out of control. It’s what we’re here for.”
    Deep in her heart, Terri knew that she’d been the victim of a scam. Maybe not a deliberate scam— she doubted the bank actually meant to get her thrown in jail— but there wasn’t a single aspect of what had happened to her that was right. She wanted justice, and darling Tiffie wasn’t about to get it for her. She felt as if someone had thrown her a rope.
    She obeyed the impulse and dialed. She got a recording saying to tell her story briefly and someone would get back to her.
    And then it was like her brain returned from a short vacation. “Oh, sure, you will,” she told the phone. “I’m a student without enough money to stretch from one week to another. The bank never told me it was going to hold my checks for a whole week and then fine me twenty-two dollars for each check I couldn’t cover. Do you realize how impossible that made it to cover the next one? I had to borrow money from my mom to pay them off, and they took it and didn’t even have the decency to tell me they’d already put out a warrant for my arrest. They just waited till I got stopped for some traffic violation and had to go to jail! I’ve never knowingly broken a law in my life. And now I’m about to have a felony on my record. Sure you care. Sure you’re gonna call me back. I’m really holding my breath on that one.” But she left her name and number anyhow.
    She had no idea why she’d sounded off on the phone, except that she couldn’t help it. In disgust she changed the channel to a daytime soap.
    * * *
    At the same time, in Dallas, the former Karen Bennett turned off her television, reaching, as she always did, for yet another tissue.
Mr. Right
was her favorite show. It always got to her. She had been one of Mr. Right’s first guests and was perhaps its primary beneficiary.
    She’d fought the biggest Goliath of all— the IRS. She still had the tape of the show, and watched it frequently, reliving the Cinderella saga that had become her life. She was barely twenty-six, and she’d gone from riches to rags to semi-riches again. When her life had gone wrong, it went wrong really fast. And it went all the way wrong.
    It was the kind of thing that could only happen in a prominent Southern family, a Southern
religious
family in which the men think just because their God is male and they’ve made some money, they must be God too. In the end, she humiliated her father in front of the whole town, but she’d had to end up in the gutter