In a quiet, halcyon New England classroom, on a tree-lined campus, with the sunlight gauzy and the real world a twenty-minute walk in any direction, I used to spend my afternoons discussing the intricacies of literary criticism with a dozen students and a tenured professor, but never the intricacies of how to make a living.
Leaving aside the six months that I tutored the little girl of a single mother who paid me off the books, this was the basic trajectory of my employment post-grad school, with my specialty, comparative literature, receding further into the background with each passing year, sometimes occluded entirely. This was my job after the Amazon fulfillment center, where there had been benefits and room for growth, which had been my job after Trader Joe’s, where there had also been benefits and room for growth, and which had been my job after Hertz, where, once a week in the predawn hours, I would drive with the regional manager through poor neighborhoods on the outskirts of Buffalo looking for cars that hadn’t been returned on time. There were four other employees, all women, none of whom happened to be there at the time, and he’d said, breezily, “It’ll be nice to finally have some male energy around here for a change.” I could smell the faint scent of gardening coming from below. Then he’d taken me on a brief tour of the office, a former FedEx with the original carpeting and an open floor plan-“I believe in transparency”-which was situated above a topiary shop, of all things.
He’d held out his open hand as I pictured everything I would suddenly be able to pay for-including my student loans. “Why don’t we just make this simple and double it?” he’d said. Later, I would try to piece it all together, remembering how, at my one and only interview for the job, he had offered, without prompting, to give me more money than I was asking for. There must have been some sort of defective wiring in the early-warning system of my brain, because by the time the owner put his hand on my thigh I was already in way too deep.
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