A Fair Trade

Twenty criticisms. That’s all. You have to bear twenty criticisms and you’ll get $20,000.

That was the deal that came to you in a dream last night. At least, you thought it was a dream till you woke up and saw it on your dresser: sheafs of hundred dollar bills, crisp and green and... slightly glowing. It was tangible and real. There was absolutely twenty grand in your hands. The glowing was odd—though, you suppose, no odder than having it in the first place. But that is what the dream-being had said would happen: If you could endure twenty insults in the span of the next twelve hours that $20K would stop glowing and you could spend it. It wasn’t cumulative, the dream-being made sure to mention. It wasn’t a thousand bucks per insult; it was all twenty for twenty grand or nothing.

Twenty grand! God, what you could do with that money.

You pause. What could you do with that money?

A trip to Fiji. Live rent free for a year. Get a better car. Buy one of those extravagant—you shake your head. You’re getting ahead of yourself. You’ve got to endure these insults first. You live alone, which means you need to find people, so you go for a walk, smacking your tongue as you stroll down the street, wishing you’d remembered to brush your teeth before you left.

A stranger in a puffy jacket stops right in front of you. “You eat smoked salmon for breakfast too often,” he tells you, and walks away. That was insult #1. Hmm. Surprisingly painless. Not nearly as cutting as the ones you’d imagined (for example, “you always focus on the negative things and not what you have because you have never learned to cope with disappointment so you’d rather be a pessimist.” That sort of stuff.)

You quickly pull out a little black notebook and jot it down in messy handwriting; you have no idea the rules of this dream-deal (it occurs to you now that you probably should have asked questions) but at least you can note it down for posterity. In a messy handwriting, you paraphrase: #1: I eat too much smoked salmon.

You feel a tug on your jacket and turn. You don’t see anyone till you look down and a tiny girl in braids, who barely comes up to your knee, tells you firmly with a slight lisp: “You are terrible at specificity.”

#2: Bad at specifics.

Insult number two and you’re barely an hour into your deadline! This is going to be easy.

You grab a coffee at the neighborhood place, and the barista hands over an Americano and says, “You get ahead of yourself too much.” #3!

You amble around the familiar spots of your neighborhood, gathering various criticisms (“you walk too slowly!”; “you’re too much a creature of habit”; “your hair never looks like what you want it to look like”), ratcheting up the criticisms. Suddenly, you remember your plan for today—before the dream-being deal and the money—was to visit your mother at her nursing home. Normally, you dread this but it’s perfect for this day. If she’s having an episode (which these days she is, more often than not), she’ll only have insults for you, snarling, foggy, barbed words hurled sometimes right at you, sometimes just left of the mark, a result of being confined to one room when she used to be a woman of the world. You should have headed straight there.

You feel bad thinking this way—the mother you visit now is not Mom, the magnetic, gregarious woman who always had one slim braid in her long, silky hair, a remnant of her hippie days. She’s not Mom, who would let you crawl into her bed every night because you were terrified of the dark. She’s not Mom, who introduced you to Led Zepellin or bought you a guitar, not Mom, who never said anything when you quit playing it after just two months.

“Hello, neighbor,” your neighbor, Kurt, calls as you stand at the bus stop. You raise your hand to wave and he says, “You have no follow through!”

Thanks, Kurt!

By the time, you’ve stepped off the bus a little while later, you’re at criticism #17. The ride wasn’t too bad. You had to stand after you gave up your seat for an old man, but only after realizing he’d holding on to the pole with a shaking frailty for about fifteen minutes, as you were daydreaming about what you’d do with the money. (#15: Your head is in the clouds!; and #16: You are always so slow to act.)

There’s a great sandwich shop right next to the old age home and you stand, frozen in place, as you debate whether to get the sandwich first (you’re quite hungry, your breakfast of, um, smoked salmon didn’t fill you up) or to see your mother, hit the quota of criticisms, and get the twenty grand in hand. You still have more than six hours so you could do either and you waffle back and forth, before realizing you’ve wasted more time debating what to do than if you’d just done it. You wish you had the ability to make a decision easily.

An attendant at the home comes out for a smoke break and sees you standing there. “Hello!” Oh god, you know his name. You’ve met many times! Why are you so terrible with names?

“You are indecisive to the point of paralysis,” he—what’s his name?!—tells you.

He’s joined by a colleague, who turns to you and says, “And you’re terrible with names.”

Wait a minute. Those are things you just thought yourself.

Waving at the attendants, you walk into the lobby of the nursing home, riffling frantically through your notebook, reviewing everything everyone has said to you and it hits you: they’re all just things you’ve criticized about yourself. You’ve been powering this the whole time—anything anyone has said to you is something you thought about yourself first. You’re sure the dream-being has a lesson in there somewhere.

But you decide you’ll get to it later (the lobbyist pipes up with, “Your mother’s in her room. And you’re a terrible procastinator!”) and head to see your mother. You write down the quick succession of the last few criticisms, and realize not only is the pattern you’ve discovered true, but that you’re at #19. You only need one more to go. Armed with this new knowledge, it should be easy. You’ll just think it and your mother will say it. As you stand outside her door, an old memory flashes in your mind, of a doctor’s grim face as he said the words, “early onset”. You squeeze your eyes shut to get rid of it, take a deep breath and turn the door knob.

But when you enter her room, a small, square space with weak white walls, anemic lighting, and bare furniture, there’s a verve in the air. Music is playing from some outdated technology in the corner, metallic and riotous and buoyant.

“Hi, kiddo!” she says, upon seeing you. Her eyes are bright, dancing to the familiar guitar-riffs.

She’s lucid.

The realization takes your breath away, but you immediately think: how long is this going to last? And then you think that you’re always focused on the negative. Anticipating the pattern, you look up expectantly to your mother, waiting for her to echo it, perhaps in warm, happy tones instead of the usual incoherent yet sharp jabs. But instead she says, fondness like sunshine in her voice, “A Whole Lotta Love was always your favorite, wasn’t it?”

You exhale as you reply, yes, this was always your favorite song. You remember the day you figured out how to play the opening riff.

“Remember? You learned how to play it!” she says, and walks over to you, taking your hand and swaying with the grace of a bygone era. You never actually learned to play the whole song—it was too difficult and you were too impatient—but you were always proud of teaching yourself how to play those opening chords.

“Mom—” you start, not knowing what you exactly how to finish the sentence. Another song comes on, the one whose opening notes always sound like an elegy: Stairway to Heaven.

Her eyes are big and wide with unshed tears as she sees what you’re not saying. “I know, honey. I’ve missed you so much. But I’m here now.”

And she is, in a way she hasn’t been for years, since you were young. So you let her pull you into her arms and you both sway slowly, awkwardly from side to side. It feels just like when you were nine years old and she’d let you stand on her feet and dance to this song. She’d tell you of how she was nine years old too when this song came out and her dad, who passed away before you were born, played it for her and let her stand on his feet.

“Do you remember, Mom?” you ask her.

“This song? Of course I do!” Crinkles form like deep rivers around her eyes as she smiles. You’ve never seen those before, the proof of your mother’s age and happiness at the same time.

“No, the story you used to tell me about this song,” you clarify. When she frowns, you kick yourself for bringing it up. Isn’t it enough that she’s here, truly here? “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have brought it up,” you tell her and she smiles. She holds your chin with her forefinger and thumb and gently shakes your head.

“You are the most thoughtful person I have ever met. Right from when you were a kid. You think about every little thing,” she says, with something like awe.

“I think we call that overthinking,” you mumble. Too much, and too slow.

She shakes her head. “I don’t. It’s amazing to see the world the way you think about it.”

It’s been so long since you’ve seen her like this that you stopped letting yourself believe it would ever happen again. You need to hold on to this somehow. So you pull out the notebook and write what she said down. When you tell Mom what you’re doing, she asks if you’d like her to tell you more, and you say yes. You ask her to tell you everything she can in one day, because you both know this may be all you get.

Later, way past visiting hours (her attendant—Sunil, you remembered his name!—lets it slide), right as she’s falling asleep, she asks you tell her the story of the song. And you know, with a surety you’ve never felt about anything else, that one day you’ll let your child dance on your feet and you’ll tell this story to them, just like you tell it to her now.

When you reach home later that night, the money is gone, as you knew it would be. You didn’t hold up your end of the deal. It’s okay. You pull the little black notebook out and read all of the bad things you thought about yourself today. Then you look at the pages and pages and pages after, where you wrote down what your mother said—the stories, the compliments, the jokes. You tear out the pages with the insults and crumple them up, throwing them in the garbage. You know that if you’d just left her, even for a minute, and collected one more criticism, you could have had $20,000.

Smiling, you close the notebook, running your thumb over the grainy black cover, and place it where the money would have been.