still mortifying, and then a second later Amy’s boss came to the door of his office and, without really looking at either of them, made it clear that he needed Amy to do something other than sit on her ass and chat with Bev. Bev, for her part, grabbed the clipboard off the edge of Amy’s cube and rushed into his office, hurriedly explaining its importance. After he’d signed it, Bev scurried back out of his office, but not before depositing the Sleater-Kinney ticket, which she’d had in her blazer pocket the whole time, in Amy’s in-box, as if it were just another interoffice form or letter to file.
* * *
ROSELAND WAS PACKED with girls in their twenties who were wearing comfortable shoes and no makeup, and Amy felt better than she had in ages. Next to her, Bev pogoed around to the music unself-consciously, singing along with the band. Amy also wanted to do these things, but she’d had only one plastic cup of light beer and there was still an outside chance that Bev might take the opportunity of any display of Amy’s vulnerability to sabotage her in the office somehow, and also she never danced. She stood silently watching the band, feeling the music reverberating up through the floorboards and into her tensed legs. A terrible gulf of experience existed between the Amy who’d seen this band as a teenager and the Amy who now spent her days filing things and dropping clipboards into in-boxes and killing time on the Internet. Bev turned to her, brushing sweaty hair out of her face, and yelled that she had found out in advance what kind of beer the venue sold and had brought some in her tote bag. Did Amy want one? Amy did, and soon after she drank it, she started bending one knee and then the other in a kind of rhythm. By the time the band played its final encore (an inspired cover of CCR’s “Fortunate Son”), you might have even said she was dancing.
* * *
IN THE WEEKS that followed the Sleater-Kinney show, Amy and Bev started taking their lunches together in the park across from their office building, where previously Amy had eaten her lunch alone while reading submissions. Amy offered to read the proposals that Bev championed in ed meetings and gave her tactical advice about how to appease her boss. Bev took Amy to cheap bars in her deep-Brooklyn neighborhood and listened to Amy complain about her pothead boyfriend. Their friendship officially transcended the workday, surprising them both.
That summer, Amy and her pothead boyfriend finally broke up, undramatically for the most part, except that Amy had to find a new place to live in a hurry. Luckily for her, her alpha-bitch maneuvering at the publishing house had paid off in the form of a promotion, which enabled her to convince herself that she could afford to live alone. She’d had to clean out her retirement account to afford the first and last month’s rent plus security deposit, but the sacrifice seemed necessary. It felt psychologically important—after all those years of premature cohabitation and sedated early evenings eating chicken curry on the couch—to find out what she was like when left entirely to her own devices.
But on the first night in her apartment under the BQE, after the movers left and the energy of packing and carrying and unpacking drained from her limbic system, she surprised herself by not being ready to revel in solitude just yet. She sat at the kitchen table, hungry but too exhausted to figure out how to get food, drinking a dented bottle of Poland Spring water she’d been nursing all day in the July heat. She watched the daylight fade outside her uncurtained windows. A creak in the floorboards above made her jump. She realized that without being aware of it, she’d always assumed that she was safe when her ex-boyfriend was there, which made no sense to her conscious mind; if someone had broken into their apartment, he probably would have offered the intruder a bong hit and played him some prog rock. But
* * *
ROSELAND WAS PACKED with girls in their twenties who were wearing comfortable shoes and no makeup, and Amy felt better than she had in ages. Next to her, Bev pogoed around to the music unself-consciously, singing along with the band. Amy also wanted to do these things, but she’d had only one plastic cup of light beer and there was still an outside chance that Bev might take the opportunity of any display of Amy’s vulnerability to sabotage her in the office somehow, and also she never danced. She stood silently watching the band, feeling the music reverberating up through the floorboards and into her tensed legs. A terrible gulf of experience existed between the Amy who’d seen this band as a teenager and the Amy who now spent her days filing things and dropping clipboards into in-boxes and killing time on the Internet. Bev turned to her, brushing sweaty hair out of her face, and yelled that she had found out in advance what kind of beer the venue sold and had brought some in her tote bag. Did Amy want one? Amy did, and soon after she drank it, she started bending one knee and then the other in a kind of rhythm. By the time the band played its final encore (an inspired cover of CCR’s “Fortunate Son”), you might have even said she was dancing.
* * *
IN THE WEEKS that followed the Sleater-Kinney show, Amy and Bev started taking their lunches together in the park across from their office building, where previously Amy had eaten her lunch alone while reading submissions. Amy offered to read the proposals that Bev championed in ed meetings and gave her tactical advice about how to appease her boss. Bev took Amy to cheap bars in her deep-Brooklyn neighborhood and listened to Amy complain about her pothead boyfriend. Their friendship officially transcended the workday, surprising them both.
That summer, Amy and her pothead boyfriend finally broke up, undramatically for the most part, except that Amy had to find a new place to live in a hurry. Luckily for her, her alpha-bitch maneuvering at the publishing house had paid off in the form of a promotion, which enabled her to convince herself that she could afford to live alone. She’d had to clean out her retirement account to afford the first and last month’s rent plus security deposit, but the sacrifice seemed necessary. It felt psychologically important—after all those years of premature cohabitation and sedated early evenings eating chicken curry on the couch—to find out what she was like when left entirely to her own devices.
But on the first night in her apartment under the BQE, after the movers left and the energy of packing and carrying and unpacking drained from her limbic system, she surprised herself by not being ready to revel in solitude just yet. She sat at the kitchen table, hungry but too exhausted to figure out how to get food, drinking a dented bottle of Poland Spring water she’d been nursing all day in the July heat. She watched the daylight fade outside her uncurtained windows. A creak in the floorboards above made her jump. She realized that without being aware of it, she’d always assumed that she was safe when her ex-boyfriend was there, which made no sense to her conscious mind; if someone had broken into their apartment, he probably would have offered the intruder a bong hit and played him some prog rock. But
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