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" My fantasy life has gotten strange: I live alone, in a trailer park. Not actually in the trail-er park--on the edge of it. At the end of a lane. Maybe I have to drive through the crap of hardworking lives--old washing machines and tires and other junk--to get to my trailer, but my spot, there at the end of the lane, is under a big oak. No one bothers me. When I wake up in the morning, I can stay in bed reading. Because I live on virtually nothing, which makes me rich, rich with time. I&amp;#039;ve got all the time in the world.  Reality, on the other hand, looks more like this: My wife and I are in our living room discussing the state of our checking account. It is empty. This is hardly a surprise, because we use one account, Karen and I, dump money in, take money out for bills, groceries, whatever. Especially whatever. We don&amp;#039;t pay much attention to it, so we&amp;#039;re often broke. However, we now have a new problem. The problem is that we shouldn&amp;#039;t be broke. For several years, we didn&amp;#039;t make enough to live on and had to use Karen&amp;#039;s inheritance from her father and run up credit-card debt. But a year ago, I quit my office job, where I was making only $30,000 anyway, decided I&amp;#039;d work for myself at home, take control. Last year I made seventy grand writing magazine articles and corporate newsletters. Throw in Karen&amp;#039;s job as a school counselor and we should be doing fine. &amp;quot;We are doing fine,&amp;quot; Karen informs me. &amp;quot;How can you say that?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re paying our bills.&amp;quot; My take on things is different. It is April. Taxes are due, and we owe $15,000, which we don&amp;#039;t have. I want to know why. &amp;quot;Read the newspaper,&amp;quot; my wife suggests. &amp;quot;Albanians getting kicked out of Yugoslavia, now they&amp;#039;re people who--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Of course. We&amp;#039;re fine. We have a nice life. But you&amp;#039;re not getting it. We&amp;#039;re broke. We shouldn&amp;#039;t be broke.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;How can you say that? We&amp;#039;re not broke.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s a fundamental problem here. According to her definition, as long as you can get up in the morning, turn up the heat, have your coffee, bagel, read the paper--as long as life as you know it goes on--you&amp;#039;re not broke. Me, I have this little problem of actually looking at the checkbook. &amp;quot;What we need,&amp;quot; I tell my wife, &amp;quot;is a budget.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You come up with a budget,&amp;quot; she suggests. &amp;quot;You go right ahead and do that.&amp;quot; For Karen, the word budget conjures another world. One that&amp;#039;s careful and always maintains control. I grab the phone, dial the number to that place, don&amp;#039;t even bother with hello: &amp;quot;Mom, what was your electric bill for. . .February 1974?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Now, why do you want to know what--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Just humor me, please.&amp;quot; Mom sighs. &amp;quot;Hold on.&amp;quot; I nod smugly at Karen, who is trying to ignore me. Mom gets back on the phone in less than a minute, even faster than I&amp;#039;d anticipated: &amp;quot;February 1974, we paid. . .Now, why do you care what--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;How much?&amp;quot; She sighs. &amp;quot;February 1974, we paid $27.83. Of course, it&amp;#039;s gone up considerably since--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Thank you, Mom.&amp;quot; I hang up on her to announce: &amp;quot;Of course she knew.&amp;quot; Karen didn&amp;#039;t have a lot of money growing up, either; still, there&amp;#039;s a somewhat different financial perspective lurking in her past. For example, Karen&amp;#039;s mother visited us in California when her grandson Sam was born ten years ago. We&amp;#039;d just gotten a used Honda, only a couple years old, in good shape. We had been driving a beat-up Toyota with an exhaust leak. When Joyce saw the Honda, she said, &amp;quot;Oh, your first grown-up car!&amp;quot; I was thirty-four years old, had somehow managed to get around just fine for fifteen years in the various old Darts and Chevies I&amp;#039;d driven. Get a whiff of exhaust, roll down the window. My in-laws have been plenty generous to us over the years, but I&amp;#039;ve never bought into the idea that nicer stuff is a worthwhile rite of passage. In fact, it seems like a big waste--the waste of spending your time making the money to get the stuff. And Karen has always agreed. I managed to hit my mid-forties with the idea intact that I still had control, that I could change my life if I wanted to. And last year, after I quit my job and came home, our lives did seem to slow down; we were running things for a change. Or so I let myself think. Spending is insidious. A while back, we had a bowling party for Nick&amp;#039;s sixth birthday. One mother was wearing a luxurious mink when she brought her son in. Karen and I exchanged a glance; it was Sunday, noon, a goddamn bowling alley--we&amp;#039;ll never be one of them. No, we prefer to dribble our cash away, especially when we can feel good doing it. Nick&amp;#039;s birthday! The bowling party cost $105. Plus a $25 cake, throw in another $25 for party favors. But Sunday wasn&amp;#039;t his actual birthday; Thursday was, and he wanted to go to the diner for dinner: $35. Then we came home for ice cream cake: $20. And then there were cupcakes for his class at school: $12. Still to come were two more get-togethers, one for my mother to fete Nick, one for Karen&amp;#039;s side to do the job. We provided food and wine. So we ponied up $250 or so before we even got to gifts. I joined the fun by tipping the nice woman at the alley $15, secure in the hunch that blonds in fur coats don&amp;#039;t bother with such unseen niceties. If you&amp;#039;re not counting, it all makes sense, especially when there&amp;#039;s more cash to get rid of. It makes sense to buy our sons new sneakers every three or four months. It makes sense to buy them a bunch of educational CD-ROMs, to fire off fifty bucks to public radio, for Karen and me to go to Philly once a month for a nice dinner, to buy a tent and lantern and sleeping bags and head off to the Shenandoahs, to get a landscaper to clear the poison ivy out of the backyard, to get the radiators, which are chipping lead-based paint, sandblasted and repainted, to get a new computer so that the kids can actually use the CD-ROMs, to zip down to Florida to see Karen&amp;#039;s sister, to redo the bathroom, which looked like 1962. It all makes sense; everything we do makes sense. The easiest thing in the world, getting rid of a hundred grand. I want to get off this train. I don&amp;#039;t mean leave; I would never leave my sons. And neither would my wife. But something&amp;#039;s got to give. I try again: &amp;quot;We need to discuss this.&amp;quot; Karen, lying on the couch, looks up from her novel as if she has no idea what I&amp;#039;m talking about. &amp;quot;Money.&amp;quot; She goes back to her book. &amp;quot;Look, I&amp;#039;m not saying we should count every nickel.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What are you saying, then?&amp;quot; I think for a moment. She reads. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m saying that when we have no idea how much we&amp;#039;re spending, we spend way too much. It&amp;#039;s that simple, really.&amp;quot; Karen&amp;#039;s feet twitch; her eyes stay down. &amp;quot;You have nothing to say to that?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not going to change.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;So you&amp;#039;re saying it&amp;#039;s impossible, that we can&amp;#039;t look at our finances and make some decisions and rein ourselves--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s exactly right.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What&amp;#039;s exactly right?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not going to change! We can&amp;#039;t just .. . stop.&amp;quot; I remove myself slowly from the room and continue right on out the front door. My town in southern Jersey is very small, a couple thousand people huddled together in handsome frame houses, surrounded by farmland. It&amp;#039;s a clear night but warm now--the surprise of spring holding the scent of rich, dry-ing earth. I pass a refurbished, dull-brown Victorian with cornices and window trim painted a deeper tone. It&amp;#039;s dark, save for a handsome lantern porch light hanging from a gold chain. A perfect house, a sharp-edged lawn. It all looks dead. My wife, I&amp;#039;m afraid, has gone over to the other side. I come to a run-down place on a corner with a rotting porch that always gets done up on Halloween as a haunted house. One first-floor room is so close to the sidewalk that I can see in. Books on sagging shelves cover one wall. Rec-ords--actual vinyl records--along another. I get up on my toes; there&amp;#039;s a man on the couch, I can&amp;#039;t quite see what he&amp;#039;s doing in his glowing room.. ..  I flee before he catches me spying, stop a safe block away to laugh. I&amp;#039;m looking, I know, for some simple, clear-cut answer, as if it might come by way of some guy listening to Abbey Road and reading Updike. That fifteen grand I owe the federal government, it&amp;#039;s not such a big deal. I&amp;#039;ll bust ass and pay it off, and things will roll on. But that&amp;#039;s exactly the problem: I&amp;#039;ll keep busting; things will roll on. Karen, in fact, has pinpointed what I want to do: stop. Not forever. But I want to be caught up, do whatever I feel like for a moment. I come to the duck pond. No ducks, just the sweet moon, a big, glowing bowl there in the water. I&amp;#039;m forty-five now. It&amp;#039;s a little late in the game to believe in panaceas. But I&amp;#039;m trying to shake the feeling that this is it, that we&amp;#039;ll keep hurtling onward because we can&amp;#039;t come up with anything better. The pond is perfectly still, and I&amp;#039;m calm enough now to give Karen her due. Money is beside the point. She sees an opportunity to pick up the pace, to make our lives richer; she wants more, not less. Money&amp;#039;s just the currency. For me, it&amp;#039;s the currency of control. This is what we&amp;#039;ve learned. Someone will have to do some unlearning. I go home with a plan. But something&amp;#039;s brewing: Karen&amp;#039;s sitting on our bed talking excitedly on the phone. I go downstairs and wait for her in the dark. My plan is a slush fund. There is no reason to dump every penny I make into our checking account. I come up with a number: $4,000 a month. That&amp;#039;s my contribution. The rest I&amp;#039;m going to hoard, revealing it to her at the appropriate moment, like when I&amp;#039;ve got enough to buy an old RV, take the family out west for a month of aimless wandering. This will require a post-office box for bank statements.. ..  &amp;quot;Listen&amp;quot;--here she is, plopping down in the dark across from me--&amp;quot;that was Peter.&amp;quot; Peter&amp;#039;s an old friend of hers from our days in California. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s going to Amsterdam this summer. I think I can get a cheap flight, go over, and meet Mona and Uwe&amp;quot;--more old friends. &amp;quot;What do you think?&amp;quot; This is what I think: Jesus Christ, Karen, keep right on pushing. But then I smile, which she can&amp;#039;t see. My wife is incorrigible. &amp;quot;Well?&amp;quot; Karen wonders. A week away while I stay home with the kids. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s fine,&amp;quot; I tell her. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re okay with the cost? I don&amp;#039;t think it will be too bad, the flight--&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It doesn&amp;#039;t matter,&amp;quot; I tell her. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not important.&amp;quot; Karen is quiet for a moment, not sure I really mean it. Then: &amp;quot;What are you doing down here with the lights off, anyway?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Nothing.&amp;quot; She laughs. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re weird.&amp;quot; My wife goes back up to dream about Europe. I put my feet up on the arm of the couch, my slush fund (what am I, anyway, a Watergate burglar?) already in the hole. I said yes to Karen so quickly because I wanted some room to think.  The problem isn&amp;#039;t money but struggle. I want a safe place, a harbor. It doesn&amp;#039;t exist. A long time ago, before Karen, I had all the time in the world. It meant nothing, because I had nothing--no responsibility--to give me urgency. This is why we are together: My wife means business. So if I want control, if I really want to stop, take my family out west for a month of aimless wandering, I&amp;#039;ve got to fight for it. That means action. It means I&amp;#039;ve got to get off my couch and get back to work (which sounds strangely like paying off our taxes). In the end, nothing changes except in how you think of it.  Now, though, it&amp;#039;s late. I close my eyes. At the end of a lane in a trailer park. Morning. I take a lawn chair outside under my oak, read some long-winded writer like Henry James, where it takes forever for nothing to happen, so perfect and brilliant and controlled. The place where I&amp;#039;m alone. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a694/esq0899-aug-overboard/>