Margo's Got Money Problems by Rufi Thorpe

Annotations from "Margo's Got Money Problems" by Rufi Thorpe

But she felt if she had to use one of those brown strollers that smelled like bowling alley shoes, then her baby would grow up to spit from truck windows and laugh at racist jokes. And honestly, there was a pretty high chance that was going to happen no matter which stroller she used, and the thought of this made her feel like she couldn’t breathe.

grew boring, she scrolled Twitter, which was like being bathed in the dirty water of other people’s thoughts

Okay,” I said, softening. I understood the bluff was also for herself. The fact was, my mother’s life was untenable and she knew it. She’d held out for a long time, too long, hoping Jinx would leave his wife and marry her, and that hadn’t happened, and she wasn’t getting any younger. My mom loved bad boys, she loved hunks with big muscles and motorcycles. Choosing Kenny, who went so against her type, was a last- ditch attempt to save herself from herself, and there was a kind of wisdom in that. If you didn’t want the same result over and over, you had to do something different.

I’m not sure an antidepressant would help,” Jinx said. “I think my problem is more of a fundamental failure to attach to other people. I’m not sure that, without love, Zoloft could really do much for me.”

Margo thought about this. She knew that she’d always felt her father was a kind of distant planet, but she hadn’t known he felt himself to be a distant planet. She’d assumed he was closer to other people who were not her.

Even before Bodhi, though, I mean, for years and years, I’ve been thinking about this, about violence and how much we love it and how we can’t stop. And just as all roads lead to Rome, all histories of blood sport lead there as well.” “We’ve always been this way,” I said. “On the contrary, I think we used to be much worse."

Margo winked back and smiled, but she was already so sad her blood had turned to black water, and she was counting down the minutes until it would be appropriate to say good night and head downstairs.

“what is it like to have a whole stadium of people booing you?” She didn’t mention that her mother was one of those people, or that she’d been disinvited from the wedding, or that Mark was suing for custody, or that Kenny had slept in the rec room, or that the Virgin Mary had been raped

The sadness from the morning didn’t exactly go away; it dried on me and slowly crumbled, leaving me covered in little flakes, like if you eat a glazed donut in a black shirt. That was how it was being a grown-up. We were all moving through the world like that, like those river dolphins that look pink only because they’re so covered in scars

Every day, I’m like, The world is complex and wondrous, everything is so nuanced, and then I turn on the computer, and it’s like, ‘Look at my dick, look at my dick, dick, dick, dick, dick!’

There is a desperation to a novel that is unsettling. The world so painstakingly re-created in miniature; this tiny diorama made of words. Why go to all this trouble, to create me, to seduce you, to enumerate so many different breakfast cereals? To make the cunning tiny apartment, the itsy-bitsy Jinx? It’s like going to meet your new boyfriend’s family for the first time and discovering they are all paid actors

There was no changing Mark. Or Jinx, or Shyanne, or how the world worked. 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.

get you being worried about Bodhi, or about decisions I’m making professionally, but can you try reaching out to me directly? Because I think the things we make up in our heads, the assumptions we make, wind up be

ing much worse than what’s really going on. Like, just call me!

Love was not something, I realized, that came to you from outside. I had always thought that love was supposed to come from other people, and somehow, I was failing to catch the crumbs of it, failing to eat them, and I went around belly empty and desperate. 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.

And we shook on it there under the glowing red hat of the Arby’s, with Ric Flair and the Virgin Mary smiling down on us, willing the story to go on, to never end, to start over again, one adventure leading to the next, and we would never die, and we’d be young forever, and we would scream to the crowd, “Look at me! Look at the beautiful, insane things I can do with my body! Look at me! Love me!” Because that’s all art is, in the end. One person trying to get another person they have never met to fall in love with them