This is a story about a woman who has spent the past seven years sending her sister thirty-seven dollars every month, the Zelle memos she has written on those thirty-seven-dollar payments, and what has happened, in her sister’s private life, to those memos.
The woman — I will call her Nadine, because that is the name she has chosen for this piece, and because when I asked her why, she said, “It sounded like the name of someone who would send her sister thirty-seven dollars a month for seven years without ever explaining why, which turns out to be a very specific kind of person” — is forty-one. She lives in Cleveland. She is an accountant at a mid-sized firm. She has one sister — I will call her Lorna — who lives in Milwaukee. Lorna is thirty-eight. Lorna is a middle school science teacher.
The sisters, by every account I have been given, are close. They speak on the phone approximately twice a week. They see each other, in person, three or four times a year. They have, in Nadine’s own words, “the kind of relationship where we do not say much but we know what we mean.”
Since December of 2018, Nadine has sent Lorna thirty-seven dollars, once a month, on approximately the first of the month.
She has, in the seven and a half years since, written a different memo on every payment.
She has, over the course of ninety-one payments, never used the same memo twice.
She has, until approximately three weeks ago, been unaware that anyone besides Lorna has ever read them.
The origin of the thirty-seven dollars
The thirty-seven dollars, and the monthly rhythm of the payments, has an origin story that is, in Nadine’s account, “unnecessarily long, and possibly not even true, but here is what I remember.”
In November of 2018, Nadine and Lorna had, over the course of a Thanksgiving weekend, spent approximately three hours attempting to reconcile a shared expense from a trip they had taken together the previous summer. The expense was, in origin, a rental car. The rental car had been split unevenly, for reasons that had made sense at the time and no longer did. The two sisters had, over the course of the three hours, been unable to definitively determine who owed whom what.
At the end of the three hours, Lorna had said — in Nadine’s memory — “I think you owe me thirty-seven dollars.”
Nadine had said: “That does not sound right.”
Lorna had said: “That is what I think it is.”
Nadine had said: “I do not think you have done the math.”
Lorna had said: “I have not done the math. I just think it is thirty-seven dollars.”
Nadine had, in her own account, considered the situation, considered her sister, and considered the fact that she had, by that point in the weekend, been extensively cornered by their mother about her personal life. She had, at the moment, wanted very much for the accounting to be over.
She had sent Lorna thirty-seven dollars.
The memo on the first payment, in Nadine’s memory, was: “for the rental car. under protest.”
Lorna had responded with: “accepted with grace.”
The next month — December of 2018, according to Nadine’s records — Nadine had sent Lorna another thirty-seven dollars. She has told me she does not remember why. She has told me the payment happened, in her memory, “almost by accident.” She had been paying a bill. She had been in her Zelle app. She had, in a moment she cannot fully reconstruct, sent her sister the same amount she had sent the previous month.
The memo on that payment, according to Nadine’s records, was: “for whatever else i probably owe you.”
Lorna, according to Nadine, had responded with: “noted for the file.”
The following month, in January of 2019, Nadine had done it again.
The memos
I want to describe the memos, because the memos are, in the end, what this story is about.
Nadine has, on each of the ninety-one payments she has sent Lorna over the past seven and a half years, written a memo. The memos have varied in length. Some are short — three words, four words. Some are longer — full sentences, small paragraphs of the twenty-two-character limit Zelle allows.
I have, with Nadine’s permission, been given access to a spreadsheet Lorna has kept.
The spreadsheet contains, in chronological order, every memo Nadine has ever sent.
I want to reproduce a sample. I will not, at Nadine’s request, reproduce all ninety-one. I will give you what I consider a representative selection.
“for the thing”
“for being wrong about the dress”
“i heard what you said to mom”
“catch-up, general”
“in exchange for not telling dad”
“the wine glass we never talked about”
“for accepting the guy at christmas even though”
“seven dollars is for the movie, thirty is for what came after”
“for the phone call last Tuesday. you know the one.”
“for having a better memory than i do”
“in advance of something i am going to do wrong”
“for the summer of 2004”
“for that thing you said about how i eat crackers”
“for real this time”
“for none of this”
“for the record”
“the record is now closed”
“the record has re-opened”
“i cannot believe you still remember”
“for being right about the guy”
I have, in my three conversations with Nadine, asked her whether she has ever explained the memos to Lorna. Whether, over the course of the seven and a half years, the two of them have discussed what the memos are for, or what the thirty-seven dollars is, or why Nadine has continued to send it.
Nadine has told me, in every instance, no.
She has told me: “They are jokes. They are between us. She knows what they mean. Or she doesn’t. Either way, they are the joke.”
She has told me: “I do not think I could explain them to her if I tried.”
She has told me: “That is what makes them ours.”
The discovery
Three weeks ago, according to Nadine, she and Lorna had dinner together in Milwaukee. Nadine had driven out for the weekend. The sisters had gone to a small Vietnamese restaurant. They had, over the course of the dinner, had what Nadine has described as “the kind of pleasant, meandering conversation two sisters have when they have not seen each other in three months.”
At some point during the dinner, Lorna had put down her spoon. She had looked at Nadine. She had said, in Nadine’s account: “I have to tell you something.”
Nadine had said: “Okay.”
Lorna had said: “The Zelle memos.”
Nadine had said: “Yes.”
Lorna had said: “They are in the group text.”
Nadine, at that moment, had stopped chewing.
Lorna, according to Nadine, then explained the situation carefully.
Lorna’s group text — an ongoing conversation between Lorna and four of her closest friends from college, which has, in Nadine’s understanding, been active in approximately its current form since 2013 — had, for the past several years, been receiving screenshots of Nadine’s Zelle memos.
The screenshots had begun, according to Lorna, in 2021. Lorna had, apparently, on receiving a memo that she found particularly funny, screenshotted it and sent it to the group. The group had, according to Lorna, “responded well.” The friends had asked, in the days that followed, whether Lorna would send them more.
Lorna had.
She had, over the course of the following four years, sent every single one of Nadine’s memos to the group.
The group had, according to Lorna’s account of the group’s account, come to consider the memos “the funniest thing in group text history.”
The group had, according to Lorna, been anticipating the first of every month.
The group had, according to Lorna, developed what Nadine has told me was described to her at dinner as “a serious appreciation” for Nadine’s specific comedic timing.
Nadine, at the small Vietnamese restaurant in Milwaukee, put down her chopsticks.
She said, to Lorna: “How many people are in the group text.”
Lorna said: “Four.”
Nadine said: “Are they my friends.”
Lorna said: “No. They are my friends.”
Nadine said: “Do they know it is me.”
Lorna said: “They know it is my sister. They do not know your name.”
Nadine said: “What do they call me.”
Lorna said: “Cleveland.”
Nadine, at the small Vietnamese restaurant, sat with this information for what she has told me was approximately ninety seconds.
Then, according to her, she began to cry.
Why she began to cry
I have asked Nadine, in each of our three conversations, why she cried at the restaurant. She has given me several answers. She has told me she does not think any of them is complete.
She has told me the first thing that came to her, in the ninety seconds she sat there, was embarrassment. She had been, for four years, without knowing, performing to an audience of five. She had thought she was writing memos on Zelle payments to her sister. She had, in fact, been writing weekly comedy material for a small private group of women in Milwaukee.
She has told me: “I have never, in my adult life, written anything I meant to be funny. I have written memos on Venmo payments to my sister. That is not the same thing.”
She has told me she cried, in the second wave, out of a specific kind of relief. She had, she has told me, “not realized until that moment that I have been trying, for seven and a half years, to make my sister laugh.” She had, in the memos, been quietly, consistently, without ever articulating it to herself, trying to say something to Lorna that she could not, in any other setting, quite bring herself to say. She had been trying to be, in the memos, a version of herself that she was not usually, in front of Lorna, allowed to be.
She had, according to herself, been trying to be the funny sister.
She has told me: “I am not the funny sister. Lorna is the funny sister. I have been, in the memos, briefly, once a month, allowed to be the other thing.”
She has told me she cried, in the third wave, because Lorna had shared them.
She has told me: “Lorna could have kept them to herself. Lorna could have laughed at them privately. Lorna instead sent them, every month for four years, to four people who were not related to me. She did that because she thought they were good. She did that because she wanted her friends to know that her sister was, in this small way, funny.”
She has told me: “That is love. I do not know what else to call it.”
What happened next
Nadine has told me that she and Lorna, in the two weeks since the dinner, have not fully processed the conversation.
They have talked on the phone once, according to Nadine. The phone call was, in her account, “brief and slightly weird.” Neither of them had brought up the group text directly. Nadine had asked Lorna about their mother. Lorna had asked Nadine about her job. Neither of them had said anything about the memos.
Nadine has continued, on the first of July — three days ago — to send Lorna thirty-seven dollars.
She has told me she thought about, for the first time since December of 2018, what to write in the memo.
She has told me she considered several options.
She has told me she considered writing something particularly funny, in acknowledgment of the audience she now knew she had. She has told me she considered writing something particularly plain, in a small refusal to perform. She has told me she considered writing nothing at all, and leaving the memo blank.
She has told me what she wrote, in the end, was: “hi to cleveland.”
She has told me Lorna, on receiving the payment, texted her a single laughing emoji.
She has told me the laughing emoji arrived, apparently, from a phone that had, seconds earlier, been screenshotting the memo and sending it to a group text with four other women in Milwaukee.
What the group has said
Lorna, according to Lorna’s account to Nadine, has told the group text about her dinner conversation with Nadine.
The group text, according to Lorna, has apparently spent the past two weeks discussing what this means.
The group has, according to Lorna, been in a small state of collective embarrassment. Two of the four women have, apparently, expressed guilt about having enjoyed the memos without Nadine’s knowledge. One of the four has, apparently, said she was worried that if Nadine ever met her she would feel weird. The fourth has, apparently, been asking Lorna whether they should continue sharing.
Nadine has told me, in our last conversation, that she has thought about this a great deal.
She has told me she has decided several things.
She has decided that she does not, in any way, want the sharing to stop. She has told me: “The memos exist. The memos are, apparently, a small good thing. I am not going to take them back. That would be, in some small way, mean.”
She has decided that she does not want to be introduced to the group. She has told me: “I do not want to know them personally. I want to know them as an audience. That is the specific role I want them to have.”
She has decided that she is going to keep sending Lorna thirty-seven dollars. She has told me she is going to keep writing memos. She has told me she is going to keep, in the memos, saying the small things she cannot quite say in other places.
She has told me: “I am, apparently, a writer. In this one very specific small format. I did not know this about myself. It has changed the way I feel about, honestly, a lot of things.”
What Lorna has said
I have, in the course of reporting this story, briefly spoken with Lorna as well.
Lorna has, at Nadine’s request, been somewhat protected from this article. She has agreed to be described. She has not agreed to be quoted at length.
I will, however, share one thing Lorna told me. She told me, when I asked why she had originally shared the first memo with the group text, that she had been at a particularly hard point in her own life. She had been going through a small personal difficulty she did not want to discuss with me and I have agreed not to describe. She has told me that Nadine’s memo, on that particular morning, had made her laugh. She has told me she had wanted to share it with the group text because she had wanted, in some small way, to share the laughing.
She has told me: “My sister does not know how funny she is. She has never known. I have always known. I wanted my friends to know.”
She has told me: “I am glad Nadine finally knows I have been telling them.”
What this is
I have, in the weeks since I first heard this story, thought about the specific small quiet ways siblings communicate with each other, and about the specific small quiet ways one person can be, without knowing it, seen more clearly by another person than they are by themselves.
Nadine has, for seven and a half years, been writing memos on Zelle payments to her sister. She has been, without knowing it, funny. She has been, without knowing it, honest in a way she has not, in the other contexts of her life, been permitted to be. She has been, without knowing it, watched.
She has, in the past three weeks, learned that she has been watched. And she has, in the past three weeks, decided that she does not mind. (For a related earlier piece on the small ways adult people are known by each other in ways that have nothing to do with what they say directly, see the Wattalife story about the woman who came to know a stranger through nine years of misdirected mail.)
Nadine told me, at the end of our last conversation, that she has been thinking about writing something longer. She does not know what. She does not know what form. She has been, over the past two weeks, keeping a small notebook.
She has been putting things in the notebook that she thinks might, someday, be worth writing on a payment.
She has told me the notebook, at the time of writing, has approximately fourteen entries.
She has told me she has, in her own private accounting, decided that this is enough for now.
She has told me the first of August is a little less than a month away.
She has told me she has, tentatively, already decided what she is going to write.
—
Margot Hale is the editor of Wattalife. She has, since reporting this story, considered whether any of her own recent Venmo memos have been, without her knowledge, screenshotted and sent to a group text somewhere. She has concluded that this is probably not the case. She has, however, in the past three days, begun paying slightly more attention to the ones she writes.