Privilege

by Mary Adkins

  Veronique was nodding knowingly, and Bea tried to ignore her.

  “There I was, sitting on my bed drinking a Diet Coke. It was 8 p.m. I told myself that if I went to work the next day, it meant I’d made my choice. And the next morning, I got up, I put on my suit, and I went. I’d made my choice. I haven’t looked back.”

  “What happened?” Dionne asked. “To the guy?”

  “He got life. Not the death penalty. I don’t know how much credit I get for that.” He paused to sip his wine. “But that notion—that you have to be able to hold two conflicting values, embrace the paradox—it’s been what’s sustained me ever since. We’ll talk a lot more about it over the course of the semester.”

  Bea blinked for the first time in what must have been minutes. The room had filled with more diners and grown warm; her forearms stuck to the glass tabletop. The burrata had arrived at some point and sat, untouched, oozing, and the scent of truffle oil and garlic wafted through the air as she caught herself releasing her breath, settling into the moment. The world was so big, so complicated, and over the previous forty-eight hours, she felt she was barreling into the heart of it. There was no part of her that resisted, not the smallest ligament held back. She wanted what Dr. Friedman was offering, what Carter was offering. She wanted it all: the yes ands, the gut-wrenching conflict, the two competing ideas.

  ON SATURDAY BEA’S first improv rehearsal passed in a whirlwind, a frenzy of delight, of play—a blaze of more joy than she could recall experiencing in ages or maybe ever. It had felt as if the weight of growing up had been lifted for a few precious hours. It was startling, to remember how to play, to realize that she could, that it was still in her. “Play” to Bea meant “toward no purpose.” She wasn’t working toward yet another feather in her cap, no check mark, notch, or milestone. Improv didn’t earn her a grade or improve her candidacy for grad school; it didn’t qualify her for any coveted internship or status. It just made her body come alive, her right brain dance. In the rehearsal room, just as at the audition, Bea the scholar stepped aside, and out came the child she’d been all along.

  First, Bea learned the fundamentals of a “Harold,” the standard improv show format for the team. A Harold was basically a collection of improvised scenes strung together in a way that gave the show a loose theme. It always began with an opening monologue from a team member, one inspired by a word plucked from the audience. The ensuing series of scenes was then based on that monologue. In the show Bea had seen, Russell, the scruffy Brit with big green eyes who’d she’d since learned was a second-year, had delivered the opening monologue.

  The Harold format was explained to Bea in much more detail by Bart, the most self-serious improviser in the group. Unlike the rest of her teammates, he rarely laughed while watching others perform. His humor was primarily intellectual; it wasn’t uncommon for him to bring up Kant or Nietzsche while improvising, and not in a direct way. He’d make an obscure reference and become frustrated when his scene partner didn’t pick up on it, irritation that he tried, and frequently failed, to hide.

  “Get it? Master-slave morality?” he said to Bea during her first rehearsal following a scene Bea had initiated in which she played a philosophy professor and in which Bart had entered and introduced himself as head of the philosophy department.

  “Nope,” she said, to his clear disappointment.

  At the end of rehearsal, just before they wrapped, Chris informed them that at Bea’s first show the following Saturday, she would be delivering the opening monologue of the Harold.

  “It’s a rite of passage,” he said, smiling playfully at her. “To be followed by a series of hazing activities that may end your life, give you hemorrhoids, or turn all of your shoes into boat shoes.”

  Bart, in boat shoes, groaned, and Lesley laughed, but Bea didn’t notice. She was panicking.

  IMPROV WAS ONE thing—leaning into absurdity, assuming a character, playing a role. She’d found it surprisingly easy to “moo” her way onstage or scramble into the limelight in imaginary flight from a rabid camel. The monologue was different. A story from her actual life? Of course, there were stories she could tell, but in her experience, solicitations involving her personal life invariably wound up touching on the big hole at the center of it.

  “He’s just a man” is what her mom would say with a disinterested shrug when Bea asked about her father. Just a man.

  Is he nice? Yes.

  Successful? Quite.

  Did you love him? Once.

  Does he know about me? Yes.

  And the one question she couldn’t ask: Does he want to know me?

  Bea had accrued scraps of information over the years. She knew that he had been on staff at the hospital where her mother had been a resident—which meant that he was a doctor living in Boston at the time. She knew he’d funded part, but not all, of her trust fund and that he was white. And hours upon hours of snooping had yielded one, critically valuable find: a tarnished silver necklace crumpled in a navy velvet box stashed in the back of her mother’s sock drawer. One side of its pendant contained a date two years prior to her birth and the other a set of initials that did not belong to her mother: LRB.

  When Bea was seven, Phaedra had explained to her that he’d wanted to marry her both before and after they discovered she was pregnant but that Phaedra refused, knowing they were fundamentally incompatible. A galaxy has only one center, she said, and they were both the kind of people who would never settle for being anything but stars. They split so that he could be the center of his life and she of hers. And that’s what she was—president of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital system, in charge of over twelve hundred physicians. She and Bea, plus the nannies, tutors, piano and ballet teachers, and boarding schools, formed a constellation with Phaedra at its core. Her father’s absence, if anything, was the dark interstitial space.

  The last time Bea had asked her mother if she knew where he might be, Bea was fourteen. Her mother had said, “I have no clue.”

  The question was only half sincere; by then Bea had already found him on her own. The necklace had been her first clue, and, after that, it hadn’t been hard. The Internet, specifically Facebook, had narrowed her search within minutes. (Typical of her mother’s generation, she’d found, he clearly didn’t understand privacy settings.) He lived in Michigan and had a small son named Roland who was often featured in pictures playing outside with him and his wife, a blonde woman who looked kind. He’d been a surgeon at Brigham back when Bea was born, but now he was head of a research institution based in Ann Arbor that conducted genetic research. She’d meticulously analyzed the few videos he’d posted for commonalities between them and noted with satisfaction that he was, like her, left-handed. This, plus the fact that he didn’t wear glasses, even to read (there was a photo of him reading to Roland), seemed to confirm their relation. (Her mother had worn corrective lenses since she was a child, but Bea’s vision was 20/15—“Better than perfect,” the optometrist had said.)

  He knew about Bea, too, as far as she understood, but only one thing about her: her existence. She was a dot on his time line.

  She’d never truly considered contacting him, as it would have been a betrayal of her mother, although at one point she did change her mother’s Facebook profile, which still existed as a memorial page, from private to public, in case he was ever inspired to search for Phaedra’s name.

  Obviously she wouldn’t have to talk about her father in a monologue. So why was she nauseous?

  On the shuttle back to South Campus she recalled Russell’s monologue the weekend before. Bea loved Russell’s Britishness, which was of a less posh variety than that of the few Brits she’d known. She already adored his “have a laugh,” his bearded ebullience.

  Later, in their room, Early had referred to him as “the English guy who came out,” and Bea had had to explain his punch line—that he wasn’t gay but that his girl was so self-confident she couldn’t imagine another explanation for his reject
ion.

  One thing was certain—she wasn’t going to talk about sex or the fact that she hadn’t had it yet.

  Back in her room, she decided to do a little research, dig up videos of Harold monologues on YouTube. She watched them for over an hour, discovering, to her relief, that they weren’t all exclusively personal. Some were hardly stories. Shaky, poorly lit videos taken on phones captured monologues with hardly any coherence—an anecdote strung together with a political opinion and an observation about human behavior. Some veered into diatribes, for comedic effect but still diatribes: taxes, global warming, the Trail of Tears.

  The monologue began to feel less daunting. If she didn’t have to stick to facts about her own life, well, perhaps it wouldn’t be so dreadful.

  She would find a way to make it work without giving too much away. Hadn’t she always?

  9

  Stayja

  TUESDAY, AUGUST 22

  “This new schedule of yours isn’t working for me,” Nicole said, thumbing a $4.99 sack of candied almonds cinched with a green ribbon that read Rooster Roast. Stayja reached over, plucked it from her cousin’s hand, and placed it back into the metal bucket labeled “Impulse Buys.” “What am I supposed to do for an hour while I wait for you to get off?”

  Nicole’s shift at the QuikMart ended at nine, and Stayja’s new shift ended at ten. Since Nicole didn’t have a car (and couldn’t drive anyway owing to her DUI), this meant she had an hour to kill every night while she waited for Stayja to finish.

  “Maybe you could learn to read,” Stayja said.

  “Shut up,” Nicole said as LA sauntered in, swinging a half-empty bottle of Sprite.

  “Yo. Hey, what’s that?” he said, nodding at the pack of cigarettes peeking out from under the register.

  “What does it look like?” Stayja said.

  “But you quit,” said LA.

  “Did I?” Stayja slid the pack into her hand, tapped out a cigarette, and put it behind her ear. She was hard enough on herself—she didn’t need anyone else, especially LA, guilting her.

  The possibility of another chance run-in with the Carter guy had infused the habit with fresh appeal. Perhaps it was an addict’s justification, but she told herself that a few more smoke breaks were not that big a deal, just until they ran into each other again and she learned his name, maybe got to know him a little better.

  It was 9:18, which left forty-two minutes in her shift.

  “Why are you still here?” she asked LA. His shift ended at five.

  “I went home and took a nap.”

  “And you came back? Why?”

  “Why does LA do anything?” Nicole said absently as she typed on her phone. A coy smile passed over her face.

  “To bother you, of course,” he said to Stayja.

  “Who are you texting?” Stayja asked.

  “No one,” Nicole said. She slipped her phone into her back pocket.

  “How about Mary and Divorce?” LA said to Nicole.

  “Divorce isn’t a name.”

  “Stayja did Phillip and Flathead!”

  “Someone might actually be called Flathead as a nickname. No one would call someone Divorce.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Actually, LA, the left side of your head looks a little flatter than the right.”

  “Quit tormenting him,” Stayja said.

  “Can I have a brownie?” Nicole said.

  “Yes, it’s $2.50.”

  “Seriously?”

  “It’s called inventory. Yes.”

  Stayja caught the eye of the solemn grad student who spent all day every day at the same table, tapping away at her laptop, who’d just looked up meaningfully. It was a look meant to hush them.

  “You guys talk quieter,” Stayja said. “You’re going to get me in trouble.”

  “Oh, my God,” Nicole said, rolling her eyes. “I’m going to lie down and play Candy Crush until you’re ready. I’ll be on one of the couches downstairs.” She swiveled and strutted out, wagging her hips in the way she did when she thought someone might be watching.

  “I have a story for you,” LA said. “It’s about a bush that full-on attacked me today. I was trimming . . .”

  “Hey!” a voice called from the side door. There he was, taller than she remembered, with an energy that drew her in as it had that first night. His keys dangled from one hand, and he held a six-pack of bottled beer in the other. He dropped his keys into his pocket, lifted the beer, raised his eyebrows, and grinned. Stayja glanced at her phone: 9:23.

  She untied her apron with one hand while moving the CLOSED sign from the shelf to the counter with the other. She’d clean the machines before she went home or, fuck it, in the morning.

  “What are you doing?” LA demanded. “Who’s that guy?” When she didn’t answer, he hollered at the boy, who’d already disappeared through the door, “She already took her break!” She shook her hair from its elastic band and dug out a tube of ChapStick from her purse.

  “Should I wait for you?” LA asked.

  “What? Of course not.” She locked the register and headed for the door. “See you tomorrow, LA.”

  HE OPENED THE back door of his SUV, which was parked in the far corner adjacent to his dorm, and they let their legs dangle off the edge while he drank the fancy beer he special ordered from a local brewery, one with a navy-and-white-striped label in an ornate font. He opened a bottle using a Carter Bulldogs bottle opener from his key chain and handed it to her, then opened one for himself.

  “Cheers,” he said, as they tapped the glass necks. He took a long swig, and she followed his lead. It was bitter and surprisingly thick.

  “Nurse, huh?” he said, lowering the bottle. A third of it, Stayja could make out through the tinted glass, had been emptied.

  “If I can ever finish.” She took a gulp.

  He uncrossed his legs and adjusted his shorts underneath him. He finished his beer, stuck the empty bottle snugly back into the cardboard carrying case, and popped open a new one.

  “Can’t you just take out loans? Everyone I know has student loans.”

  “I don’t know,” she lied. No, she couldn’t. For one, her credit was shot. She’d maxed out her only credit card, a Visa, three summers earlier. She was still paying it off—old, stale debt she chipped away at only to see it rise again over the months she couldn’t make payments. Last she checked it was almost a grand.

  “The government’ll give out loans to anybody.” Half another bottle, gone.

  “But then I have to pay it back,” said Stayja.

  “How much will you make as a nurse?”

  This, Stayja could answer—it was the primary reason why she’d picked it, in addition to adoring her own nurse when she’d broken her arm at twelve.

  “The starting salary is around fifty,” she said. “It goes up if you specialize, but I don’t know what I’d want to specialize in.”

  He crawled to the front of the vehicle and fetched a ragged yellow pack of Camels from the glove compartment.

  “At this point even doctors are just glorified nurses,” he said. “They all just do whatever Big Pharma tells them. Just take out a loan,” he said.

  “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Where did you grow up?” Stayja asked.

  “Born in Jersey, raised in Houston.” He explained that his parents moved to Texas shortly after he was born because of income tax. Or, rather, lack of it. He leapt off the car and started doing jumping jacks. As he jumped up and down, lifting and lowering his arms, she shifted her attention toward the trees. His energy was different and beginning to make her nervous.

  “How much do you make here? Or is that none of my business?” he asked suddenly, still jumping.

  She hesitated.

  “Feel free to tell me to fuck off,” he said.

  “Sixteen thousand,” she said.

  “A year? Fucking Christ.” He stopped jumping and began gesticulating w
ith his bottle. Beer sloshed onto the pavement. “Dude, even in Cartersboro, how do you even live on that?”

  My mom’s on SSI and food stamps, and we don’t always have to pay rent because my aunt is our landlady, and we didn’t for a long time, but now we do, and so, yeah, it’s not easy.

  Stayja loathed everything having to do with money. Money had fucked her over again and again. It had divided her mother and her Aunt Adrienne—despite living on the same property, Donna and her older sister were not currently speaking, a standoff that had now lasted months. Adrienne felt Donna took her for granted, even though Stayja was paying Adrienne $300 a month in rent for the two of them. She’d seen how finances had stressed out Nicole and Adrienne, how Adrienne’s health worsened after she was purged from SSI owing to a technical error on her reapplication. One night in the spring, Adrienne had gone to the ER because she’d stopped being able to see.

  She shrugged.

  “We get by,” she said, immediately wishing she hadn’t told him.

  “Do they give you insurance here, at least?”

  She shook her head. “The Rooster is closed in the summer and winter, so I guess it doesn’t average out to enough hours or whatever.”

  “So you’re on Medicaid or something? Do you get a subsidy? Obamacare?”

  She did receive a subsidy, one that made her profoundly anxious, because on the phone the woman had told her that if she wound up making over a certain amount by December, she might have to pay it back. Might have to pay it back were doomsday words for Stayja.

  “Yeah, I had a subsidy,” she said, sighing. “But I just need to become a nurse as soon as possible so that I make enough so that my mom can go back to work.”

  “Huh?” he asked, swaying a little.

  Stayja explained that it depressed Donna not to work, but she couldn’t if she wanted to remain on disability. Without the disability income, there was no way they could afford both Stayja’s school expenses and their living expenses. Basically, Donna made more on disability than she could make working, given her health restrictions—she couldn’t stand for longer than two to three hours a day.