by Nell Zink
In the fall she added a minor in environmental studies to her bachelor of science in chemistry. Her career goal came into focus. She would assist government in the formulation of policy to reduce planetary self-harm, specifically in the area of soil quality. Humanity had strayed onto an untenable path, but there was no use boring it with the facts. It was too much like a teenage girl. The solutions lay with the institutions empowered to intervene and guide.
She spent the summer before senior year interning at an environmental NGO that was trying to establish legal standing to sue waste disposal contractors engaged in illegal dumping on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. She went out a few times with the “cowboys”—young employees and interns camouflaged by their beat-up pickups—to ride herd on garbage haulers as they drove from factory gates to dumping sites. It was always a little disheartening to see a truck put eight tons of bright blue laundry detergent into a federally protected wetland while they sat taking notes and pictures. She wanted to stop it happening. More hardened interns explained that you can’t prosecute a crime before it happens, while amateurs can’t gather evidence that’s admissible in court.
By summer’s end, she had helped attract local law enforcement’s attention to a waste disposal company that was an especially egregious offender. Local law enforcement was not enthused. It had barely finished getting rid of the old waste disposal contractor from the Calabrian Mafia. Continued malfeasance cast an unflattering light on local businesspeople whose support the democratically elected DA badly needed. The substances to be recovered were not drugs worth millions, but poisonous trash whose street value was a large negative number.
The NGO was invited to solicit funding to clean up the wetland. The staff celebrated its defeat with an outdoor fish fry, pivoting to upcoming projects as if the whole summer had never happened.
FLORA GRADUATED IN 2014 FROM GW WITH A MAGNA CUM LAUDE HONORS THESIS ON soil degradation. The work involved long hours at the microscope picking nematodes out of Argentinian soil samples with tiny tweezers and assessing their mineral content for a paper whose author was Ndu.
She assumed that the latent tension accumulated in four years of waiting to start doing something meaningful would propel her on her way like an arrow from a bow. After five days in Ginger and Edgar’s hammock and nearly a week at her desk, she was forced to assume that she must unconsciously have chosen to take a year off.
Grad school was the only sensible next step, but she hadn’t applied or even taken the GREs. She hadn’t looked for work either, because she planned to go to grad school.
She didn’t regard herself as listless or aimless. She was a powerless twenty-two-year-old who wanted to help save the planet. Before setting forth, she needed to find her way. An additional academic degree was surely required of her, but did it have to be in geochemistry? She felt there was a big picture she was missing. It couldn’t hurt to expand her knowledge of geopolitics, meteorology (she knew a lot about weathering but not so much about weather!), and energy issues affecting land use. Her monkey wrench had to be applied to the bureaucracy in the right place. Otherwise she wouldn’t make an impact.
She told her grandparents she was going out and walked over to her old school. It was a cool, breezy day with puffy clouds, ideal for walking. Inside the cathedral, blue-stained glass glowed dimly from on high. Her badminton coach stood by the altar, leading a tour group, not reacting to Flora’s nod. But the statues remembered her. She had been sharing her troubles with them for a long time. They were excellent listeners, as attentive as Secretariat. She sat down.
She didn’t formulate her quandaries, because the statues could read her mind. She could tell by their expressions that they were preoccupied with important things, their thoughts hinging on purposes and principles that made sustainability look like what it was (the nutrition label on selling out).
After a quarter of an hour, the desired effect set in. She sensed the scale of geologic time and the limits of sophistication.
The cathedral was a glorified rock pile. Its art depicted Europeans in a place where, ten thousand years before, there had been mammoths. One or two thousand years had passed since the time of the saints, almost nothing, geologically speaking; and if those years were nothing, what could she say to the time since the wars of the twentieth century, with their memorial windows dedicated to men who killed and died a geologic nanosecond before she was born?
She thought of Joe, who’d been dead for thirteen years, longer than she had known him. In geologic terms, he was her contemporary, still alive. He had taught her to love life. Her education had taught her to see its shortcomings. So of course she was unhappy! A person couldn’t pass for educated unless she was a little bit unhappy. She remembered how he used to introduce her to his sick and homeless friends as if they were baby ducks on his farm. It had taken growing up for her to know they’d been sick and homeless. It wasn’t a net loss to be smarter, just depressing as fuck. She needed to make her world a better place, to bring it into alignment with a more demanding happiness.
She thought indistinct thoughts about the huge and diverse world. Her career issues seemed less pressing and important. They weren’t resolved, but she didn’t mind. She felt young again. She walked home, happy to be out on streets filled with life and motion.
SOMEWHAT ABSURDLY, FLORA’S GRADUATION FROM COLLEGE AFFLICTED PAM WITH AN acute midlife crisis. She kibitzed with Daniel about chances she’d missed, ranging from startups to real estate to her failure to learn to play an instrument. None had been missed from close range. She’d never closed her grip on an opportunity and felt it wrested away. That upset her most of all, to know she hadn’t tried.
She pummeled him with allegations. If his rent hadn’t been so cheap, they might have bought an apartment; real estate prices since their arrival in New York had risen by orders of magnitude. How do you express it as a percentage when a fixer-upper you could have bought for $200,000—back when it would have been impossible for you to borrow that kind of money—sells for $15 million? Life-changing asset appreciation can evoke only two emotions: smugness and loathing. The situation was similar with respect to the IT startups Yuval had seen no need to cofound. And then there was that ungrateful daughter who had taken all her savings to pay for a worthless degree. The longer Flora idled, the more worthless it seemed. When Pam was in an especially creative mood—thinking way, way outside the box—she even imagined persuading Professor Harris that Flora was Joe’s rightful heir, so that she could pay her back in cash.
In practice her resentment assumed the form of imposed financial independence. It was necessarily trivial and silly, since neither of them had ever knowingly consumed anything expensive, with the exception of Flora’s education. Standing at the register in D’Agostino with a pound of spaghetti noodles and two cans of tomatoes, a month after graduation, Flora would sense her mother standing at attention beside her, eyes front, not going for her wallet, and realize that the five dollars were suddenly her responsibility. It was like taking part in a second awkward adolescence imposed from above.
Unable to recover lost time, Pam flailed. She recovered things she didn’t want, such as Marmalade Skye. She played out; people danced; the band had nothing to do with her art. It was ironic, a parsimonious solution to the question of how to get gigs. Look pretty. Warble. The band was an unwelcome reminder of labor’s intractable continuing alienation even in a milieu of playful professionals in a city devoted to making the labor theory of value look stupid.
At an art opening in Bushwick, she went out to the alley behind the gallery with a famous sculptor to use cocaine. They kissed for an entire minute, and he invited her to the after-party at his nearby converted loft. There, over the course of a single half hour, she saw him kiss two other women right on the mouth. He was older, and she had thought he was hot, but next to the flesh of healthy young women his face looked ashen and droopy. She was revolted, and the women—less successful sculptors—seemed to her little better than whores. She
stocked her bag with five bottles of Staropramen from his fridge and started drinking them on the subway.
She ran into Daniel and Flora on Chrystie Street as they were coming home from having wine after dinner. There were so many new independent shops selling books and vinyl, and so many new hole-in-the-wall bars, that for Daniel it was like the old days. He loved to take Flora walking around.
“Don’t tell me I’m drunk,” Pam said preemptively, addressing herself to him.
“Mom, chill!” Flora said. “Nobody cares if you’re drunk.”
“I never get drunk. I wish I could.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I need to start over, because my life is fucked.”
Daniel sighed heavily, and Flora said to her mother, “I know exactly what you’re talking about. Starting over won’t help, because we all start out basically identical and get differentiated by experience. So if you live your life over and don’t go through the same things, you become somebody else, which is no help to anybody. I think about this a lot.”
“So you’re telling me all these successful artists and rich guys are basically me with different lives, and I should love my neighbor as myself?”
“I’m going upstairs,” Daniel said.
“Stay down here,” Pam said. “I want you to hear this.”
“Hear what? You being mercenary? Saying your life is fucked because you’re not rich?”
“If I hadn’t gotten pregnant—”
“That’s it,” he said. “Scram. I can’t believe you’re saying this in front of Flora. Go get drunk.”
Pam said, “Don’t tell me what to do, hayseed!”
“Mom, what in the world is wrong with you?” Flora asked. “Did something terrible happen?”
“I’m Silly Putty. I’m a spineless parasite. That’s what happened!”
“Maybe you could go upstairs,” Daniel suggested to Flora.
“But I can totally relate,” Flora declared. “The better you are at what you do, the more committed you are, the more you specialize, and the fewer options you end up with. It’s like the only way not to get trapped is to be a hobo.”
“I specialized from an early age in getting drunk,” Pam said.
“We’ll see you later,” Daniel said, shepherding Flora toward the store entrance while Pam wandered away across the street and through the bustling park.
“Don’t worry about her,” he said as they climbed the stairs. “It’s true what she said about never getting drunk. She’s probably had two beers, and after two more she’ll pass out. She won’t even have a hangover.”
He almost meant it. Only Flora’s jaded resignation gave him pause. He thought, Is that what they teach them at college now? He still thought of her as Joe Junior, but she was changing for the worse, like everyone else.
AFTER FLORA’S RETURN TO D.C., PAM MADE AN IMPASSIONED SPEECH TO DANIEL ABOUT her musical frustration. She claimed that if she played one more soft and harmonious ostinato on acoustic guitar, she would go into spasms. She needed space—as in volume—to be raw and emotional.
“The problem is you’re not really an expressive guitar player,” he said. “You’re an amazing singer, but when you play electric, it just sounds angry.”
“What I’m saying is I can’t keep playing like a fucking elf just so I don’t sound angry!”
“So don’t. Since when do I not like angry guitars?”
“It wouldn’t be Marmalade Skye. We won’t get shows.”
“So I won’t tell the audience until our set is over.”
She didn’t laugh. She said, “Oh, yeah. That’ll go over great.”
“What’s the big deal? We’ll tell them it’s the blues. Is it the blues?”
“I don’t know. Is it?”
“You’re not sure whether it’s the blues?”
“No.”
“Come over here and put your head on my head.”
She sulked, suppressing a tantrum. He sat down next to her on the bed and put his arm around her shoulders. She cried. After a minute’s hesitation, she put her head next to his. They looked across the loft in the same direction until their brain waves synced up.
Proud of his talent for marriage as an art form in its own right—the artistry that goes into creating a de-escalation ritual so weird that a person would need years of decompression to date anybody else—he presented his diagnosis. “With a confidence interval of ninety-five percent, you have the blues. You need to buy a hollow-body and play solo licks when you’re not singing, and I need to start looping keyboard riffs instead of guitar.”
“It’s true,” she said, sniffling. “I’m not the one who fucked myself up, but what I feel isn’t primarily anger. I feel sorry for you and everybody.”
“I gave you seven children,” he sang, quoting a blues number by B. B. King, “and now you want to give them back.”
FLORA’S GRANDPARENTS TOLD HER NOT TO FRET. “YOUR MOTHER,” GINGER SAID, gravely taking her hand, “is indestructible. She’s amazing. She doesn’t learn from her mistakes, because she always lands on her feet, like a cat.”
“Indestructible” seemed to Flora like a pretty basic thing to be. Useful, possibly, but minimal. She wanted more than that. She had graduated from a top school with honors by letting herself be demolished and rebuilt. She had a prestigious diploma saying she was above and beyond, with super skills. Her grandparents claimed she was the most employable family member in history, not excluding Edgar. Knowing that her needs were met and her rights were respected was not enough.
A consensus was reached that she would take a restful gap year to recuperate. She would make good use of it by gaining practical experience and cultivating a social and professional network that would expand her career choices.
That was the idea, anyway. She screwed up from the start by wanting to get paid.
To acquire leverage, a would-be professional do-gooder must commit to long stints of unpaid work. Flora refused to sully her hands with wage dumping. She applied only for salaried positions.
There were many full-time job openings at established environmental advocacy groups with local headquarters. Due to the low pay, the entry-level jobs had high turnover. Also due—from the employer’s perspective—to the low pay, nearly every position was listed as entry level, regardless of its responsibilities, which could be substantial.
She sent out thirty résumés, interviewing unsuccessfully at the National Resources Defense Council, the League of Conservation Voters, the National Geographic Society, Greenpeace, and several others more obscure. She bought a garment Ginger called a “bowling dress” to wear to interviews instead of leggings. A month went by, and another month. Shanaya showed her how to straighten her hair and use makeup. She bought two garments Ginger collectively called a “suit.” She became, rather late in life, a dedicated online socialite. She moped.
She had believed that after she graduated, Ndu would make more time for her. Instead he had taken up with a painter who was friends with his wife. The jealousy made her mildly ill, and the longer it went on, the more she disliked herself.
Then she got over him, which was worse, because she saw the wasted opportunities. Not other boys, exactly, but college itself. The happy weekends she could have spent with friends, rather than reading at home or slaving in the lab on her unnecessary honors thesis, insufficiently suppressing the knowledge that Ndu was with his family.
Another month went by. When an offer came from the Sierra Club, she took it. It wasn’t really much of an offer, but she had inferred from her previous interviews that openness and determination weren’t enough to put a chemist over the top at an NGO. She would need charisma and excitability. Those were qualities that could be acquired. She hadn’t applied herself to obtaining them in college, but she was sure she could catch up.
THE DESIRE—SO COUNTERPRODUCTIVE UNDER CAPITALISM!—TO BE PAID FOR LABOR and even—so naive, so blind!—to equate it with income was a character glitch that ran in the family.
Recovering from her crisis, Pam stumbled into what she thought was a promising line of software development. Hospitals obviously cared which insurance claims might be rejected, but they used variegated databases that required tedious customized parsing into uniform tokens before they would talk to the off-the-shelf data-mining bots deployed by insurance companies. Bored at work in Omaha, she created a data-mining program that automated the customization. She refined it on assignments in Newark and Hartford and tested it on databases she’d already customized. She called it Analytics Helper. Her business idea was that RIACD might somehow persuade insurers and/or hospitals to pay for the privilege of saving incredible amounts of work—that is to say, money they were spending on (among other things) consultants such as herself—and Yuval agreed.
The idea was so obviously a monumental game changer that they kept it secret from the other employees. It required arduous perfecting. She had never worked such long, hard hours in her life, none of them billable. The more she worked, the more she felt she owed Yuval.
FLORA NEGOTIATED A MANDATE TO ANSWER, UNDER SUPERVISION, CHEMISTRY-RELATED queries that came in over Facebook, should any arise. The official duties of her position in membership services were administrative. Soon she was mail-merging responses to handwritten letters and tallying donation checks. Off the clock, she wrote for the organization’s dispiriting yet sensationalistic magazine. She authored an article about the relationship between soil degradation and watershed pollution, and another was about ocean acidification. For a third and final piece, she interviewed a botanist and former Green Beret who was leading an expensive wilderness adventure for military veterans only. He told her that all the club’s most important environmentalists were retiree volunteers and academics on vacation.