Purity by Jonathan Franzen Page A

Rancho Ancho calls finally came to an end, at 6 p.m., Pip saved her call sheets, strapped on her knapsack and bike helmet, and tried to sneak past Igor’s office without being accosted.
    â€œPip, a word with you, please,” came Igor’s voice.
    She shuffled back so he could see her from his desk. His Gaze glanced down past her breasts, which at this point might as well have had giant eights stenciled on them, and settled on her legs. She would have sworn they were like an unfinished sudoku to Igor. He wore exactly that frown of preoccupied problem-solving.
    â€œWhat,” she said.
    He looked up at her face. “Where are we with Rancho Ancho?”
    â€œI got some good responses. We’re at, like, thirty-seven percent right now.”
    He nodded his head from side to side, Russian style, noncommittal. “Let me ask you. Do you enjoy working here?”
    â€œAre you asking me if I’d prefer to be fired?”
    â€œWe’re thinking of restructuring,” he said. “There may be an opportunity for you to use other skills.”
    â€œGood Lord. ‘Other skills’? You really are creating an atmosphere.”
    â€œIt will be two years, I think, on August first. You’re a smart girl. How long do we give the experiment in outreach?”
    â€œIt’s not my decision, is it?”
    He waggled his head again. “Do you have ambitions? Do you have plans?”
    â€œYou know, if you hadn’t done that Twenty Questions thing to me, it would be easier to take the question seriously.”
    He made a tsking sound with his tongue. “So angry.”
    â€œOr tired. How about just tired? Can I go now?”
    â€œI don’t know why, but I like you,” he said. “I’d like to see you succeed.”
    She didn’t stick around to hear more. Out in the lobby, her three female outreach associates were putting on running shoes for their Monday after-work female-bonding jogging thing. They were in their thirties and forties, with husbands and in two cases children, and it required no superpowers to divine what they thought of Pip: she was the complainer, the underperformer, the entitled Young Person, the fresh-skinned magnet for Igor’s Gaze, the morally hazardous exploiter of Igor’s indulgence, the person with no baby pictures in her cubicle. Pip concurred in much of this assessment—probably none of them could have been as rude to Igor as she was and not been fired—and yet she was hurt that they’d never invited her to go jogging with them.
    â€œHow was your day, Pip?” one of them asked her.
    â€œI don’t know.” She tried to think of something uncomplaining to say. “Do any of you happen to have a good recipe for a vegan cake with whole-grain flour and not too much sugar?”
    The women stared at her.
    â€œI know: right?” she said.
    â€œThat’s kind of like asking how to throw a good party with no booze, desserts, or dancing,” another of them said.
    â€œIs butter vegan?” the third said.
    â€œNo, it’s animal,” the first said.
    â€œBut ghee. Isn’t ghee just fat with no milk solids?”
    â€œAnimal fat, animal fat.”
    â€œOK, thank you,” Pip said. “Have a good run.”
    As she descended the stairs to the bike rack, she was pretty sure she could hear them laughing at her. Wasn’t asking for a recipe supposed to be good coin of the feminine realm? In truth, though, she had a dwindling supply of friends her own age, too. She was still valued in larger groups, for the relative bitterness of her sarcasm, but when it came to one-on-one friendships she had trouble interesting herself in the tweets and postings and endless pictures of the happy girls, none of whom could fathom why she lived in a squatter house, and she wasn’t bitter enough for the unhappy girls, the self-destructive ones, the ones with aggressive tattoos and bad parents. She could