Receipts
By Amy Cook
The use of “receipts” as slang dates back to a 2002 interview, wherein Diane Sawyer accused Whitney Houston of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on illegal drugs. And, Whitney, you know, wanted Diane to show proof.
When my brother was eight or nine, he would often complain about his grades. He’d be marked partially wrong, he said, for not showing his work. He couldn’t fathom what the teacher wanted. He’d look at a long division problem, having to put one four-digit number into a six-digit number (or maybe vice versa), and he’d simply do the dividing. He’d just…write the answer down. “Do they want to look inside my head?” he moaned. He grew up to be a lawyer, although he could have really done anything.
I never took calculus or physics; never got that far. One marking period, I received a D for my (lack of) effort in Geometry. My mother was speaking with her mother when I brought in the report card. The coiled off-white phone cord stretched across our kitchen, as she hollered for me to come back and explain myself. What did I say? I was fifteen and wrote poetry to survive.
The year after that, my algebra teacher died in a car accident; if we wanted to go to the funeral, they made us come down to the office and explain ourselves.
That was the second funeral I’d been to. The other was my grandfather’s, which had the unfortunate occasion to be the first time all nine of his grandchildren were in the same place at the same time. It was not unlike a vacation. My cousin, Zack (5), made a poster with brightly painted stick figures. Someone’s handwriting above them, read: “My Papa Who Died.” His other papa, whom we all called Opa, was a Holocaust survivor.
Both of my grandfathers were gone before I was seventeen. Lou Gehrig’s for one, heart disease for the other. I mean, they said it was heart disease. Their widows outlived them by decades.
Alan King is the funniest Borscht Belt comic. One of his bits was a routine called “Survived by His Wife,” wherein King makes fun of obituaries. Every dead man on the page had left a living spouse. Which, back then, meant wife.
At my brother’s wedding, we stood around, doing shots. Eight cousins, this time. (The ninth is a working firefighter.) Zack (31) regaled his new girlfriend of how, at Cousin Amy’s wedding, the only reading was a text written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. How embarrassing.
We used the Obergefell ruling in our ceremony because it is artfully written, and I happen to have worked on the case.
The day that we won the New Jersey marriage case, I, a lowly paralegal, was the one who took the call. Our co-counsel on the phone was a guy named Larry. I could see my boss, shepherding a meeting from my office, as Larry and I spoke. I remember knocking on the door of the conference room, thinking, “Hey, boss, I’m about to change your life.”
The thing about legal work is that you always have to show your proof. You can cite back to cases from a hundred years ago, as long as they haven’t been overruled. But I do not like to edit briefs; my eyes cannot see whether a comma is italicized or not. This is an important skill. I have memory for detail, but no eye.
My first memory is of a rocking horse in our New Jersey den. It was white and brown, with warm pink cheeks. I could not walk, being disabled, but I could ride that thing all day.
I did not use the word disability to refer to my own defect until I was forty-one years old. My parents would not have allowed that in my youth, and my youth bled into my adulthood for a very long while.
The night I turned forty-one, my father, my husband, and I dined at a French café that sits just off Central Park West. It was pouring rain outside; the sort of cold rain that would normally aggravate the soul. But I was thirteen days post-vaccination, with my CDC card carefully tucked into my purse. I was limitless that night.
When I finally got COVID, I was forty-two. I tested positive for twelve days in a row, with no symptoms other than the nightmares and the double line on every rapid test.
I don’t sleep well. I wake up screaming.
Every day, I wake up to my cat hitting me in the head. This is, normally, five or ten minutes after I’ve fed him, pre-dawn, and gone back to sleep. I call this the celebration wake-up, because he demands to be petted and feted for the achievement of having consumed his breakfast. “Look, mama,” he nudges, “I did it again. I’ll show you my receipts.”
I am unclear if the being that’s attacking me on Twitter is a person or some sort of AI bot. He or she or they or it write(s):
There’s no punctuation, but I suppose they must mean, “I bring receipts, bitch.” I also suppose that I am the bitch.
They are peddling in the market of illusion, and even that is a generous word. When we, the survivors of the storm, say things like, “there was a morgue truck on my corner and there were hospital tents in the park,” we are flooded with responses that label us deluded, and insane. This one person says that the tents were empty. That nothing was needed.
But I ran by them every day. Six people died in the first two weeks, alone and outside. It was not a warm spring. I thought about these people as I shuffled up the deceptively steep hills of East Drive, training for canceled races. I thought about what and who they were leaving behind.
“My receipts are that I live here,” I reply. Then they call me a Lorax.
19. At one point, someone started a rumor that thousands of mole children were being liberated, trafficked through New York’s underground subway system, and deposited in the Central Park tents. That turned out not to be true, either. At least I’d like to think so.
20. General Eisenhower demanded that his soldiers take photographs of the concentration camps that they liberated, knowing that the future would claim their non-existence. I have no pictures of the tents in the park, because I did not want to photograph death.
Citation for 19: Kunzelman, M. (2020, April 17). “Virus-fueled conspiracy theories take aim at hospitals.” AP NEWS. Retrieved October 29, 2022, from https://apnews.com/article/united-nations-us-news-ap-top-news-queens-virus-outbreak-d1740aa31fd97af37900b3a3 335b9a03
Amy Cook (she/they): MFA candidate, Rainier Writing Workshop, 2021 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Cook’s work has appeared in The Advocate, Queer Families: An LGBTQ+ True Stories Anthology, and fifteen literary journals. Affiliations: BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop (Advanced), NYCGMC alum.