“Did you know about this?” Avery asked him.
“I wondered.”
“Leaving aside the indignity—it’s dangerous, and there are diseases. Which antibiotics can’t always treat.”
“She doesn’t have a large skill set,” he hazarded. “And she’s right: my mom can’t support ten people. Except there’s one main problem with Savannah’s chosen career path. From what I’ve seen on the street.”
“That is?”
“Too much competition.”
• CHAPTER 12 •
AGENCY, REWARD, AND SACRIFICE
It would have been around July ’31 when Florence first held a $100 bill up to the light and called, “Lowell? Could you come up here, please?”
Her brother-in-law shambled up from the basement in one of his suits, of a sort common at the shelter: creased fine tailoring that hadn’t seen a dry cleaner in months. He’d stopped shaving, and unevenly scissored a beard that already grew in tufts. Irregular beard lengths had grown trendy, as had “the DIY” haircut: the results of hacking off fistfuls in a bathroom mirror. The popular self-barbering had put most salons out of business.
She handed him the bill. “This has changed.”
Lowell fingered the waxy C-note. “Looks counterfeit. Afraid you’ve been suckered.”
“That’s what I thought at first. But these bills are from all over town. Look.” She pulled the wad from her wallet—they did not make wallets large enough to carry the bills an average shopping trip required, and this wallet would no longer fold in half—and splayed the cash on the kitchen counter. “It’s not the same quality of paper. The ink isn’t right, either. It’s brighter. Greener. Garish.”
“Well, they often change the design to prevent counterfeiting.”
“But this isn’t adding holograms or finer engraving—and Ben Franklin looks smudged, to my eye. It’s cheaper.”
“And why, exactly, are you reporting this to me?”
“You said. That one of the signs was the physical degeneration of the deutsche mark—”
“I do not run the federal mint. If they’ve decided to save on the costs of production, good for them. In an era of belt-tightening, it makes no sense to lavish resources on a mere medium of exchange, which has no value in and of itself but only represents value.”
As he stalked off, she called behind him, “You know how I know this isn’t counterfeit? Because no one would bother!”
She didn’t know what she’d wanted from him. An apology, when he hadn’t done anything wrong? Or more of his improbable optimism, assurance they’d get their furry, avocado-colored dollars back in no time? Florence returned mournfully to the bills, separating the older notes from the stiff, crass reissue. The new bills were smaller, too, albeit in that cheaty, oh-the-little-dimwits-will-never-notice way that a half-gallon of ice cream had evaporated to twenty ounces. Regarding herself as not especially concerned with money, she was surprised by the depth of her sorrow.
Hitherto, the one-dollar bill had not changed its design in her lifetime. Funny, for an item she handled daily, she’d never looked hard at a single. Her corneas stiffening at forty-six, she located a magnifying glass to examine a buck of the sort she grew up with. The engraving was absurd, really. The bay leaves sprouting around the four 1’s and beneath the cameo of Washington. The radiant crisscrossing and minute curlicues around the perimeter. The fine parallel lines shadowing THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. The now-dubious contention in crimped print that THIS NOTE IS LEGAL TENDER FOR ALL DEBTS, PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. The multiple numbers and letters and signatures of ambiguous purpose. The reverse was even more grandiose, the crosshatching yet more exuberant. Insistence on printing “one” over the numbers in each corner seemed overkill. The pyramid on the left, with its unblinking triangular “eye of providence” hovering like a levitation trick over the top, lent the bill a mystic air, as if the currency had magical powers (and maybe it did; maybe the fact that you could ply a total stranger with a bundle of green paper and he would give you a doughnut was nothing short of miraculous). The bald eagle opposite, bristling with arrows in one claw and an olive branch in the other, could only remind citizens and foreigners alike which talon had been historically the more persuasive.
A barrage of Latin always imparted pretension, if not also a desire for obscurity. For the first time in her decades of counting these notes into an open palm at checkouts, feeding them into the grinding maw of a MetroCard machine, and fishing their crumples from a jeans pocket, she looked up the translations online. NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM meant “New Order of the Ages,” implying that the creation of her country marked a transformative era not only for Americans but for the whole world. Ratcheting up the braggadocio still further, ANNUIT COEPTIS meant “He favors our undertaking”—He being God, of course. E PLURIBUS UNUM she already understood—“Out of many, one”—though in the fractious, factionalized USA of her lifetime E PLURIBUS PLURIBUS might make a more suitable slogan. The Roman numerals not a millimeter high at the bottom of the pyramid decoded as 1776. News to Florence, the strings of foreshortening bubbles on the perimeter were purportedly thirteen pearls. For only in America was thirteen a lucky number: the pyramid had thirteen layers; above the eagle gleamed thirteen stars; the heraldic shield on the bird’s chest boasted thirteen stripes. The poor scrap of paper was so freighted with symbolism that it was amazing you could pick it up off the floor. Yet haul this mighty token into a minimart, and it wouldn’t buy a gumball.
Florence rifled the fat wad from her wallet to compare the old one-dollar bill to the new version. She shuffled the stack twice. There were no new singles. Clearly, like the metal coinage technically in circulation but increasingly a form of litter, singles weren’t minted anymore.
Comparing hundreds would have to suffice. The C-note was redesigned in her twenties, at which time a hundred-dollar bill seldom crossed her palm; she was living with her parents, unemployed. But her father brought one home for Jarred and Florence to marvel at. The renovated bill had grown only more self-important, with a host of ingenious devices to prevent counterfeiting. It was less scrip than toy—wrapped like a Christmas present, a purple ribbon vertically woven into the very paper. On close examination, the ribbon shimmered with tiny Liberty Bells, which moved up and down on a diagonal trajectory when shifted one way and switched to 100s when shifted the other. The worn hundreds in her wallet weren’t as dazzling as that first fresh one, but the holograms still functioned. The Liberty Bell in the inkwell turned from copper to green. Held up to the light, a ghostly reiteration of Ben Franklin’s portrait loomed in a rare blank space on the right. Goofy, minuscule 100s in faint yellow freckled the left-hand face, arrayed in the irregular pattern of doodles.
The latest C-note sported no ribbon, only a purple stripe like a slash from a Magic Marker. Poor-quality reproduction smeared Ben Franklin’s expression from a gentle grimace of resolve to a sarcastic smirk. The complex anti-counterfeiting devices had been dropped. The paper was thin and slick. This was a mere gesture toward a hundred-dollar bill, a nod, an allusion—an oh-you-know-what-I-mean from a mint that couldn’t be bothered with all that tiresome symbolism. The bill looked and felt worthless.
Florence had never before reflected on her uncharacteristic affection for her country’s cash. In defiance of her compatriots’ reputation for being uncouth, the design of American bills distinguished itself from more flamboyant currencies with dignity and reserve. Though the new notes’ shrinkage drifted alarmingly toward the size of Monopoly money, the dimensions of the originals were attractively modest. For a yet young nation, its notes had a stodgy, antiquated cast. Like the typeface of the New York Times, whose masthead remained staunchly archaic to its final issue, or the comfortingly eternal form of a Tabasco bottle, dollars felt storied, grounded, timeless. By contrast, her aunt claimed that the notes of individual European nations had never recuperated their grandeur and particularity after the euro debacle. Florence had seen samples left over from Nollie’s travels: the revived pesetas, drachmas, and lire looked plain, stripped down, and interchangeable. They looked embarrassed.