A Fool's Tools

By the time I had rolled into my family’s lives, bills had long been archaic. My brother had been alive for a couple years while they were still used, but too young to use them himself. Of course, he still remembered them but only physically. He knew what it was my father dumped from three old flour sacks onto the thinly worn rug of our living room. I just watched the thin strips of green paper flutter to the ground in an abstract delight, enjoying the mess my father was indulging us in. I looked to my brother, who quirked a questioning smile, raising his eyebrows at our father. He was enjoying the display too, but neither of us knew what he was getting at.

Our father called our mother into the room, the twist of his mouth revealing the pleasure his little trick was giving him. Our mother stopped in silence with her feet at the edge of the carpet and came to her knees, sliding her fingers into the green weave below her. She picked up a portrait of a man who looked far from the faces of any of us or anyone we knew. The bill was barely in her hands as if it was a beating heart, and she was afraid she might kill it. The faces littering our floor stared back at my mother, and my father studied her closely, his mouth still twisting and his eyes bright on the top of my mother’s head. I was the first to break the silence.

“What do they do?”

My brother rolled his eyes as if I was a fool to even ask. As if I should just know. “It’s money, Mikri.”

I nodded dumbly and played along. I knew money. We learned about it in class, about how things were given numbers and the paper was the number. But it wasn’t something we used anymore. The little green bills, as my brother called them, were as obsolete as the buildings that used to house them, the sprawling banks that we repurposed into homes.

“So, what will we use them for, Ama?” We certainly weren’t going to buy things.

He laughed, his eyes shining with well-intentioned mischief.

“Anything!” He cried with the bravado of a showman. “What can’t we use them for? We can line our mattresses, repair holes in the walls, make canvases for our great works of art.” He placed a hand on my mother’s shoulder, finally drawing her attention. “It’s shocking, isn’t it? I was shocked too.”

“It’s the most money I’ve seen in my life. Even before the stoppage.” She was coming out of her disbelief, entering the real world where this was just paper.

“I know me too. It’s okay Alia, look,” he picked up a bill with an older woman on it and held it directly in front of my mother’s face. He ripped it and she reached up as if to stop him from hitting one of her own children. The split halves of the rectangle dangled like curtains on either side of my mother’s disbelieving face.

My brother was quickly bored of the charade, and left for the kitchen. His generation had known money and watched it be phased away, and it meant nothing to him. He hadn’t experienced the weight it carried for years before him, only got used to it enough to where it wasn’t impressive.

I began to pick up one of each different type of bill I could find. I had never seen them before, with their hair-thin lines woven together to create portraits of people I didn’t know. My friends would be astounded, would beg me to touch the soft paper and to hold the bills to the light and see the hidden messages. I could trace the faces and the buildings into my journal later on, immortalize them there.

My mother took a breath and stood, finally catching some of the exuberance falling from my father. This was often how it went with them, one of them started a project, and the other reluctantly skirted it’s edges until it was eventually a shared passion. She took the torn bill from his hands.

“I’ll make these into matches or something.” She said it as if the idea of bringing the money home was hers all along.

The bills came from a decades old vault housed in the bottom of a stone and glass building that was now a community center. Once the heavy door to the safe was cracked open, the community center offered the stacks of bills to anyone who thought they could find a use for them. My father, imaginative beyond reason, had taken the equivalent of twenty thousand, in a selection of ones and fives, tens and twenties, though few that were greater.

My father picked out seven of the most high-ranking bills for me; two bills with a hundred inked into all four corners, a man in the center pinching his mouth together in a bored stare. The other five bills had fifties on them, and some were accompanied with splashes of red and blue ink. My father explained they were not all the same age, and so they might have slightly different pictures.

I wanted to make a mobile, to keep these rarest of pictures safe for the future. I folded the bills into a moon and different shaped stars, stringing them from a smoothed out stick with fishing line. When I showed my mother she said it was the most expensive mobile she had ever seen, and laughed tightly. No one had needed money in years, but our mindless use of the bills still left a bitter screw to her face. We hung it in the corner of the living room above my father’s reading chair, and eventually, it faded into the background of the house, the sum of it forgotten.

My father’s project with the bills became expanding my mother’s sketchbook. He began by bleaching the bills as close as he could to the same paper-cream as the rest of the pages. I watched as he did this through trial and error, using a combination of chemicals and multiple washes to rid it of the green drawings.

“If you washed the drawings off of a bill could you still use it? To buy things?” I asked him.

He laughed as he dunked his gloved hands back into the mixture. “Well, of course not. No one would know how much the bill was worth if it had been one dollar or twenty dollars, or a hundred. The value was not the paper itself; it was the idea.” He passed a wet bill with a fading pyramid into my gloved hands, and I laid it delicately on a kitchen cloth and then put a pan on top of it to keep it flat. Later, my mother would iron out the creases and he would paste together two bills for sturdiness, and then paste four units together to create one long page. He did this until he had enough pages to sew together a thick signature that would last my mother another fifty drawings.

He broke open the sketchbook’s black binding with the utmost delicacy like the spine was an extension of my mother’s own. My father glued the signature into the backing material with a homemade paste, his hands working with an unwavering steadiness under the warm light of the kitchen lamp. He began the next day reassembling the black notebook, pushing the unblemished end paper back to the soft corners of the leather case.

He used our sharp vegetable scissors to trim the paper’s edges to the same size as the rest of the notebook. It gave them a frayed appearance and was soft to the touch, which I learned came from the fact the bills were fabric, and not paper at all. The part of the sketchbook that had once-been bills was darker than the rest, closer to an ivory white than the pearly sharpness of the original pages, and it looked all the more luxurious. It seemed older and more well-loved despite being the newest addition, and my mother praised the color of the pages for being richer than the original book. My parents shared a kiss over the once-money bound in deep leather, each one of them with a hand on the book like they were swearing a silent oath.

My brother did nothing exciting with the bills. His unrelenting practicality made him boring to me back then. He could only see the bills for what they were, thin slips of a cotton and linen compote. He tore them up and used the strips in paper mache to repair the floorboards in his room. Then, he moved his way through the house methodically, applying the bills and glue to holes around the windows or the spaces under the cabinets where water roaches would make their yearly appearances. Our parents had not passed onto him their endless conjuring of romantic ideas.

Where my father’s projects lived and inhabited our home, my mothers slipped seamlessly into our lives. My father would spread his ideas across our table and walls until they breathed the same air as us. My mother’s implementation of the bills silently made our house grow greener, bills lining the doorways and mirrors, the handles of brushes, or folded into neat bows. It was an unexpected and calculated vibrancy. She selected the bills she used carefully, looking for evenness in color and fade so that her projects held the tightness of perfection. She always knew exactly how many bills she would need, never cutting or ripping like my brother and father were so easy to do.

My father would excitedly beg her to damage a bill, saying, “Alia, my love. Amor. Habibi. Rip one dollar. Let your hands be reckless.” It was a nightly game, seeing if any of us could get my mother to destroy a bill. “It’s one dollar! Even before the stoppage one dollar would have been nothing.”

“It would have been everything.” She said it with a hard sarcasm, and she won that night’s round in so few words.

What would get her to release her tension with the bills was my brother's insistence that whole or torn, the bills were worth the same now. It made no difference if she put a whole bill on a picture frame or a partial bill. They were not being used for their original purpose one way or another. There was no reason to honor them or what they stood for. She hummed in acknowledgment, but that was all. Later that week my mother replaced the handle of my lunchbox by meticulously slicing bills into thirds and braiding them together. The colorful handle was soft in my fingers, unlike any I’d ever seen. When I asked her about it she simply said, “Your handle was falling apart, Mikri. What should I do, let you go to school without a lunchbox?” It was a justification of love, of practicality. She could turn what she found so variable into an constant through the work of her hands.