Chapter 10 #2
It was exactly the kind of opportunity that girls like Reena said they wanted: competitive and respectful and well paid.
And after all the time I’d spent online in those lonely months of my first semester—all those midnight hours poring through panicked chat threads and editorial screeds about the desperate plight of the uppity working woman—I knew exactly what would come next.
As long as Reena didn’t screw up royally over the next few summers, she’d get a job offer from the firm after graduation, six figures right out of the gate.
Living the dream! She would start working seventy or eighty hours a week, subsisting mostly on a diet of cocaine and Red Bull.
Her coworkers would comprise a bullpen of male colleagues, men who screwed the small handful of women in the office nonstop, personally and professionally.
From here on out, Reena’s life was going to be hard.
She would have to work hard to get the job, and hard to keep it, and even harder to get promoted, and any promotion she received would lead only to more work, more responsibilities, more hours in the office, and in the meantime she would have to squeeze out a few free hours a week to do everything else: date, stay fit, buy groceries, see friends.
If she was one of the lucky ones, she would keep receiving small little bumps to her salary—smaller, of course, than the bumps her male colleagues received, but no matter.
No biggie! Reena would grow used to this quickly: the simple act of receiving less than she wanted at the same exact time she watched someone else receive more than she could have hoped for.
She would spend her twenties feeling disappointment and labeling it gratitude, and then she would convince herself that this was a form of Buddhist enlightenment: be happy with what you have.
This is what she would tell herself each time she was faced with the fact that she had once again received less money, less praise, and even a smaller portion of blow than her male coworkers.
Don’t forget to say thank you! Little bumps, little bumps.
During this time period of professional growth, Reena would also do her best to fall in love and get married, and if she managed that, then years later, when she finally got around to having kids, she would act utterly shocked when her doctor informed her she was a geriatric candidate, and it would be an uphill battle to get pregnant.
If she was lucky (and from what I had seen, Reena had never been all that lucky), she’d have to do only one or two rounds of IVF, and there would be only a small handful of months where she found herself joking loudly about lighting money on fire while her husband jabbed at the fat of her ass with a needle (his mind starting to wander past his miserable aging wife to the fun young assistant in his office, the one who was easy and light and funny, the one who had started to look subconsciously to him like the appropriate age for a woman to become pregnant), and when the time came, when Reena finally gave birth, when she finally looked around and realized she’d made it—she was at the top of the mountain, she had it all!
—the landscape would look like this: her husband no longer wanted to touch her, and her boss no longer wanted to promote her, and her childless friends no longer wanted to spend time with her, and her friends with children no longer had time to see her, and Reena, sweet precious Reena, would complain about none of it, not the disappearing husband or the flailing career or the crushing loneliness, not a word of it to anyone, because she would technically be one of the lucky ones—a flush retirement account and four months’ maternity leave, in Jesus’s name, amen—and in the world that Reena would soon inhabit, you don’t get to complain about those kinds of problems. You don’t get to complain about privilege.
It was clear Reena was dreading it, not just the internship but the rest of her own life.
As if she’d been shot through by some fairy-tale curse.
As if she wasn’t one of the most spoiled people on the planet, free to do whatever she wanted, if only she had the brains or the courage to consider any other path forward beyond the one that feminism, that nasty witch, had offered her.
Silly, stupid Reena had bitten the poisoned apple, straight down to the core.
Standing there that day, she looked so miserable at the prospect of her own empowered future that I nearly laughed out loud.
“Well,” I said brightly, “congratulations to you too, then! I know those internships are so hard to get.” I was practically choking on my satisfaction at this point. The euphoria of my victory was making my vision blur. I won, I won, I won! You stupid fucking bitch (sorry, Lord), I won!
“Well,” Reena said, “I guess I’ll see you around or something.”
“You won’t, actually!” I couldn’t resist. I just couldn’t. “I’ve decided to leave school. Caleb’s graduating this spring, and I can always finish up my degree online. We really want to spend some time in Paris before the baby comes. It’s a girl, by the way. Did I mention that? I’m having a girl.”
If I could’ve punctuated that sentence by socking Reena straight in her miserable little face, I would’ve.
What perfect synchronicity that would have offered to our short, joyless relationship.
Instead, I waved goodbye, making a point to really wiggle my fingers so the diamond caught the light, and then I slipped past her, the first angry woman in my life, and skipped forward into the future.