Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

The last time my whole family went to the beach together was, I believe, in 2004. As always, we chose the small stretch of beach in the Alabama panhandle (what? Alabama has a panhandle? Indeed, a little-known fact that may prove quite useful at cocktail parties). We used to come here every year during my childhood, but there had been a hiatus for several years due to my grandfather’s illness and everyone’s mismatched schedules. So on this, the Thompson Beach Reunion Tour ’04, after my grandfather’s death, we revisited old haunts by staying at Vista del Mar, a vintage relic that evokes all the charm of 50’s Pleasantville perfection, though now of course with a coating of decaying grandeur. It’s not a bad place, and, although a high-rise, it’s the last of the strip, so that walking down the beach east of the building there is soon nothing but dunes, seagrass, and the big blue sea.

I don’t remember too much about this particular trip. I remember trying to walk all the way to the end of the beach, but never quite making it. I remember playing stupid games with Robin in the pool and laughing so hysterically that the other poolside guests had to have been made quite uncomfortable. I remember heading to the highest level of the building to try to get phone service in order to talk to Jodi. There was my cousin Margaux’s wedding, which is the subject of another story for another time. As usual, there was the overabundance of seafood and the dread of the blast of air conditioning as you walked inside while soaking wet. Other than that, the trip blurs together in a montage of blonde and blue, sand and sky—except for one evening, which began like any other but ended in something akin to the final scene of Lord of the Flies.

So, among our age-old beach traditions is that of buying a Florida lottery ticket. When we started going to the beach, Florida was the only state in the southeast that had a lottery, so we saw it as a once-a-year opportunity to squander a hard-earned dollar or two on a raffle with impossible odds. We always stayed in Alabama, as previously noted, but being only a few miles from the Florida border, we would drive into Pensacola on occasion and usually stop for a lottery ticket at the Florabama—a dive bar that straddles the border (read about their legendary Mullet Toss). During the week before purchasing the ticket, we would all put our best efforts into channeling the supernatural forces that would cause us to win, and write down numbers that revealed themselves to us through divine intervention—the number 27 appeared to us in a dream; we saw 43 on 3 different license plates in a span of ten minutes, the numerology behind my birthdate was 3, etc. We would choose our six fateful numbers this way, and wait. It was always exciting, especially when I was really little. I knew that we faced impossible odds, yet to a child (who thinks $100 is a sum akin to the riches of King Midas), impossible odds still seem just possible enough that it’s worth waiting with bated breath as the numbers are drawn.

So, again, in 2004 it had been several years since we had last played the lottery. By then, I think Georgia had its own, but we never played it, having the irrational (yet fortunate) attitude that the lottery was something only to be done in Florida, and only on special occasions, one week a year while vacationing and channeling numbers through divine inspiration. For some reason, I suppose disinterest or disillusionment, we did not buy separate tickets—one for my family, one for my aunt and uncle, one for my grandmother—but my grandmother, instead, bought one ticket and casually declared that if it won anything we could all share it. I think we all contributed our special numbers, reasoning that the force would be stronger if everyone’s paranormal prophetic abilities were pooled.

We bought the ticket, and, with the drawing the next day, began to playfully imagine what we would do with the winnings.

It began as idle dinner conversation. Simple hypotheticals. The eternal question, what would you do with a million dollars? I believe we began this way, not considering practicalities but simply dreaming, desiring—my parents would fix their fallingdown house that is currently caught in a race between their retirement and its own decay. My grandmother would travel to Paris again, or Sweden, or be set in the event of a medical situation. Robin could pay for school, I could travel, get Jodi a green card, my aunt and uncle could settle the legal dispute over their land and finally have time to finish their house. How wonderful, how perfect, how problemless our lives would be if we could have these simple things! But then, someone, and I don’t remember with 100% certainty who (although I could guess), asked the fateful question: Well, wait—how are we going to split the winnings, anyway?

I am of the opinion that it was not the question itself but the semantics that screwed us: note the certainty of the future tense, the rhetorical step that took us from the realm of the hypothetical, the conditional, to the certain. Talking about money you might win (when really you don’t have a chance in hell) is a different beast than talking about money you have won. That was the mistake. But words are so small, their complexities so hard to notice sometimes, so easy to spit out and so impossible to retract. So we all continued the conversation, oblivious to the deadly turn it had taken, discussing how we were going to split our millions.

I think everyone in my immediate family just assumed we were splitting it seven ways—one for each of the people involved. It hadn’t occurred to me that there would be another way to split it—I mean, it should all rightfully go to my grandmother, since she bought the ticket, but if she chose to share, and, I mean, since I had contributed my divine number to the ticket, surely I was entitled to something? But another party objected to that, claiming it wasn’t fair for our “household” to get 4/7 of the earnings when both the other “households” would get less just because there were less people in them. I thought it was rather fair, because more people cost more money, and my sister and I don’t technically even belong to my parents’ household anymore. Well, maybe Robin does/did, as an eligible dependent, but I certainly didn’t. Yeah, so maybe Robin shouldn’t get her share, but I should (haha, more for me!!). But my grandmother sided with that faction, saying it wasn’t their fault that they didn’t have children. Which is true, but not the issue at hand—it’s not like Robin and I would be sharing our millions with our parents, and it definitely wasn’t the case that my mom and my aunt would share theirs with their parents. Parent. Why would we share with those who shed their blood, sweat, tears, and, well, yes, money, on us anyway? It’s not like we asked to be born. They got themselves into this pickle. Just thinking about it sends me into a frenzy a la Finding Nemo, “Mine! Mine! Mine!.”

My mom made a halfhearted attempt to stick up for us, saying that we were people too who should be included in the group we’ll call, for these purposes, “family.” We were over 18 (well, I was), and therefore—but the opposition was too strong, and, while I value my personhood and would have valued my cut of the winnings, after a point it wasn’t worth the fight. My memory of how it ended is unclear. I’m sure someone sullenly did the dishes, plodded through putting away the food. I think I gave up and said that however they chose to split things would be fine. But we went to bed, if not angry, then miffed, disgruntled, off-kilter, wronged, betrayed, misunderstood. As my mom and I were getting ready for bed, we looked at each other with the eyes of doomed puppies. “Oh, my God,” Mom said, “I sure hope we don’t win.”

Do you remember the story by Shirley Jackson called “The Lottery,” which you undoubtedly read in high school? If not, I won’t give it away, but you should read it here. Someone undoubtedly knew something about the macabre dynamics of chance—or, more to the point, of human nature. But we proved, that night, like the best of the deceptive psychological experiments on the demonic nature of humanity (the Stanford Prison experiment, the Milgram obedience experiments, Jane Elliott’s blue-eyes v. brown-eyes shenanigans—don’t tell me the IRB approved that shit!), not to mention Mean Girls and The Devil Wears Prada, that love is a logical fallacy based on the premise that altruism exists. Maybe I’m being harsh. But even without being quite that harsh, I can say with certainty that money (read: greed) will ruin people. You don’t even have to have the money, you just have to pretend you have it for about half an hour to start seeing the effects.

The next day we looked at the paper, or watched TV (I can’t remember now how we heard the news), with dread, for once praying—I was, at least—that we would not win the lottery. Suffice it to say, we didn’t. We breathed a sigh of relief and moved on, stuffing the uncomfortable dynamics under a rug for the time being.

As an epilogue, I should note that following that debacle, my grandmother supposedly (I’m going on hearsay) reapportioned her will so that both her children are considered equally, rather than taking into account the children (i.e. Robin and me) of one of her children. It doesn’t matter. I think in some way she’s trying to level the playing field—my aunt was supposed to have a baby once, but a terrible twist of fate prevented it. Even after a quarter of a century, some wounds are still too fresh to be written, and so I won’t go further, but I think my grandmother is doing all she knows how to make my aunt feel valued and validated as a woman in her own right, with or without having provided grandchildren. If money would provide any consolation for pain, I would give my hypothetical lottery winnings to her in a heartbeat. And my inheritance. Because I suspect she, in a heartbeat, would give all of hers to have her child.