Young Jane Young

by Gabrielle Zevin

  “Well, maybe they would want to work if you made them feel more welcome,” you say.

  The supervisor nods. “I’m a douche. Officially, a douche.”

  She holds up her iced tea, and you clink your Diet Coke to it.

  Click here.

  At the end of January, just before your last week, he is briefly back from D.C., and he asks you if you want to “hang,” which makes him sound like one of the kids from your old dorm. You don’t want to “hang,” but you go with him anyway.

  You are in his car—the whole point of quitting your job was so you wouldn’t end up in his car—but there you are! You are in his car and you are thinking about Houdini. You have recently read a book about Houdini, and you are thinking how having an affair with your boss is kind of like being in a straitjacket and in chains and submerged in water. You feel like you will need to be an emotional Houdini if you are ever going to extricate yourself.

  You did this to yourself.

  You have only yourself to blame.

  For argument’s sake, who else might you blame?

  A. The Congressman

  B. Your Father, Whom You Love and Who Thinks You Don’t Know About His Mistress

  C. The Supervisor at the Congressman’s Office for Making You Cry That First Day

  D. Your Mother for Interfering Too Much in Your Life

  E. That Boyfriend You Had When You Were Fifteen

  F. Your Boobs for Making Everything Look Slutty

  No, you decide, none of the above. It’s me.

  In the future, you will have interns of your own. And the thought of sleeping with any one of them will seem insane and wrong to you. But at this moment, you are in the passenger seat of the congressman’s car, and he is stopped at a traffic light, and you are thinking, Maybe I should just open the car door and get out. No one is stopping you, Aviva Grossman. You are a free person. You may be an adult, but you can still call your mother to come get you and no matter what she’s doing, she will come. You put your hand on the interior handle, and you’re about to jerk it open when the light changes to green and the congressman starts driving again.

  “Why are you so quiet?” he asks.

  Because, you want to say, I am a person with an interior world that you know nothing about. But to say such a thing would violate the terms of your relationship. That is not the key in which your relationship is played. If he wanted a person with an interior world, he could just deal with his wife. You are the garbage disposal. You are the golf bag.

  “Tired,” you say. “Classes, work.”

  He turns up the music. He likes hip-hop, but it always seems like an act. He is somewhat obsessed with staying young.

  The song that plays is “Ms. Jackson” by Outkast. You’ve never heard it before. At the beginning of the song, the first-person narrator/singer apologizes to a girl’s mother for how he’s treated her daughter. You cannot think of anything you want to hear less.

  “Can we listen to something else?” you ask.

  “Give it a chance,” he says. “Seriously, Aviva, you have to open your mind about hip-hop. Hip-hop is the future.”

  “Fine,” you say.

  “Outkast is our Walt Whitman. Outkast is—”

  You hear the sound of breaking glass, crumpling metal.

  The car’s air bags deploy.

  The driver’s side window’s glass is cracked, and through it, the outside world looks like a surreal version of a stained glass scene in a church. Through it you see palm trees and the windshield of the other driver’s car, a petal pink Cadillac, and an old woman with her head slumped over—she might be dead.

  “Looks like stained glass,” you say.

  “More like cubism,” he corrects you.

  The woman will turn out to have Alzheimer’s disease. Her license had been suspended three years ago. Her husband didn’t even know she still had keys. “How she loved that car,” is what he’ll say when he hears the news that she’s dead.

  The congressman sprains his wrist. You end up with a neck injury, nothing serious, but you don’t know that at the time. In the moment, it’s terrifying.

  “Are you okay?” he asks, his voice sounding remarkably calm.

  You feel light-headed, but you know you need to leave the scene. You want to protect him from what will happen if the cops find out that he is having an affair with a former intern. You think he’s a good man. No, you think he’s a good congressman, and you don’t want him to suffer through a scandal.

  “I should go,” you say.

  “No,” he says. “You stay here. If the woman is dead, there will be an investigation, and you are my witness. If you leave and your presence is later discovered, it will seem as if we were trying to cover up something. It’s the difference between a scandal and a crime. It’s the difference between a storm that will pass and the end of my career. When the cops come, you are an intern who I am giving a ride home. You can say this confidently because it’s true.”

  You nod. Your head feels heavy and light at once.

  “Say it, Aviva.”

  If you run.

  If you stay.

  “I am an intern,” you say. “Congressman Levin is giving me a ride.”

  “I’m sorry, Aviva,” the congressman says.

  “For what?” you say numbly. “She drove into you. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “For what’s to come.”

  You wait for the police. It starts to rain.

  Click here.

  You are in a storm.

  You are pelted by rain, and your clothes are soaked through.

  Your house floats away.

  There goes your dog, but there’s no time to mourn.

  Your photo albums are lost or damaged and waterlogged beyond repair.

  Your insurance doesn’t work.

  You are clinging to a mattress.

  You have no one to call for help.

  Your family and friends have perished in the storm.

  The ones who are still alive are angry that you have lived.

  You think the rain will never stop.

  But eventually, the rain stops, and when the rain stops, the newspeople arrive.

  The newspeople love the story of the GIRL ON THE MATTRESS IN THE STORM.

  “Who is this girl on the mattress?”

  “Where did she go to school?”

  “Was she popular at school?”

  “Why is she wearing so few clothes?”

  “She should wear more clothes if she’s going to end up washed up on a mattress!”

  “Why didn’t she know better?”

  “I heard the girl on the mattress was basically a psycho. She was a stalker. She was a storm chaser.”

  “Does she suffer from low self-esteem?”

  “You’d think the storm would prefer someone thinner and better looking.”

  “I consider myself a feminist, but if you decide to cling to a mattress in the middle of a storm, that’s on you.”

  “Oh my God, the girl on the mattress kept a blog!”

  “Stay tuned for an exclusive with the ex-boyfriend of the girl on the mattress! Says Grossman was ‘always pretty needy and clingy.’ ”

  It’s odd, you think, how everyone loves (hates) the girl on the mattress, but no one seems that interested in the storm.

  Click here.

  It seems as if people will never tire of news of the Girl on the Mattress, but then a bigger storm hits, one with flashier elements, like Terrorism and Apocalypse and Death and Destruction and Mayhem.

  And they forget about you, more or less.

  If you decide to never leave your house again and become a Boo Radley–style shut-in.

  If you decide to go on with your life.

  You continue with your life. Of course you do. What choice do you have really? You get out of bed. You do your hair. You get dressed. You put on makeup. You make sure to eat salads. You make conversations with waiters. You smile when someone looks at you. You smile too much. You
want people to think you are a nice person. You go to the mall. You buy a black dress. You buy makeup remover. You read magazines. You work out. You avoid the Internet. You read books. You tire of salads. You eat frozen yogurt. You make jokes with your dad. You never talk about the thing that happened with him or with anyone else. You masturbate a lot. You don’t call the congressman.

  You go to your grandfather’s funeral, your father’s father. You weren’t close to him the way you were to your mother’s father, but you cry anyway. He once brought you a puppet from Argentina. You don’t have any grandfathers left now. You cry. You cry too much. You suspect you aren’t even crying about your grandfather.

  You go to the synagogue’s ladies’ room. You go into the stall, and you hear two old women enter the bathroom behind you. You can hear them spraying perfume on themselves. The synagogue’s bathrooms are always stocked like drugstores: perfume, but also gum, hair spray, lip balm, moisturizer, mouthwash, hair bands, combs.

  “This scent is delicious,” the first woman says. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” the second woman says. “I don’t have my reading glasses, but I think it’s a knockoff of something else.”

  “It’s not a knockoff,” the first woman says. “There was an uproar last year. Shirley—”

  “Which Shirley?”

  “Hadassah Shirley. Hadassah Shirley said it was immoral for the synagogue to stock imitation perfumes in the bathrooms, so now they’re all bona fide.”

  “Hadassah Shirley is ridiculous,” the first woman says.

  “But she does know how to get things done,” the second woman says. “And keep your voice down. Hadassah Shirley is everywhere.”

  “She didn’t come today,” the first woman says.

  “I noticed,” the second woman says. “Poor Abe Grossman.”

  “How much do you think Abe knew?” the second woman says. Abe is your grandfather. These women aren’t related to you, so they must have been his friends. Maybe they’re just busybodies from this synagogue though.

  “His mind was gone,” the first woman says. “They didn’t tell him what had happened. It’s a mitzvah.”

  “A mitzvah,” the first one agrees. “If he’d known, it would have killed him.”

  You are aware that they have transitioned into talking about you.

  You are no longer curious about where such a conversation will lead.

  You leave the stall and you step between them. “Might I borrow this?” you say. You take the perfume and you spray it all over yourself. You look at the bottle. “It’s Jo Malone,” you tell them. “Grapefruit.”

  “Oh, we were wondering,” the first woman says. “It’s delicious.”

  “How are you, Aviva?” the second one says.

  “Great,” you say.

  You smile at them. You smile too much.

  You graduate from college a semester late.

  You apply for jobs in your field—jobs in politics mainly, but a few in PR and not-for-profits.

  Your most significant work experience is for the congressman, but no one from his office can write you a letter of recommendation for obvious reasons.

  Still, you are hopeful.

  You are twenty-two years old.

  You polish up your résumé and it’s not bad. You speak Spanish fluently! You graduated with honors! You worked for a congressman in a big city for two years, and by the end of it, they were paying you and you even had a job title, Online Projects and Special Research. You once kept a blog that had more than one million hits, not that you can point anyone to this.

  And people in New York City, in Los Angeles, in Boston, in Austin, in Nashville, in Seattle, in Chicago, people can’t have all heard of Aviva Grossman. The news story could not have spread that far. This was a regional story, like when you were a kid and Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine were in a tour bus crash. That story was on the news every day in South Florida. Sure, it might have been picked up nationally, too, but the obsession with Gloria Estefan and her road to recovery was regional.

  You receive almost no replies to your job applications.

  Finally, someone calls you! It’s an entry level position at an organization that helps children from around the world get access to health care. They are based out of Philadelphia. They do a lot of work in Mexico and they LOVE that you speak Spanish.

  You arrange to have a phone interview, and if that goes well, you will fly to Philadelphia to speak with the team.

  You are imagining your new life in Philadelphia. You browse winter coats online. The stores in Florida rarely stock them. How nice it will be to be somewhere with winter. How nice it will be to be somewhere where no one knows your name or the stupid mistake (series of mistakes, if you’re being completely honest) you made when you were twenty.

  It is June. You make your mom leave the house, and you sit in your bedroom, and you wait for the phone to ring at 9:30 a.m. It is summer, and your mom’s school is on break, and she is hovering around you like flies around raw meat.

  The phone does not ring.

  At 9:34, you begin to worry that you missed the call, or that you screwed up the time. You check your e-mail again to confirm the details. Yes, 9:30.

  If you wait for the phone to ring.

  If you call (even though the interviewer said she would call you—who cares if you look “too eager”?).

  The interviewer picks up on the first ring.

  “Oh Aviva,” she says, “I meant to call you.”

  You can tell she is not referring to the interview.

  “We’ve decided to go in another direction,” she says.

  Normally, you wouldn’t ask for details. But you’ve had enough of being ignored, so you say, “Can you level with me? What happened? I really felt good about this one.”

  The interviewer pauses. “Well, Aviva, we did an Internet search on your name, and the stuff about you and the congressman came up. It didn’t really bother me, but my boss felt that since we’re a not-for-profit, we need people of impeccable character. His words, not mine. But the truth is, we live and die on donations, and some of those people can be super conservative and weird about sex stuff. I argued for you. I truly did. You’re great, and I’m sure you’ll find something great.”

  “Thanks for being honest,” you say. You hang up the phone.

  This is why no one is calling you.

  Because even if no one has heard of the Aviva Grossman scandal in Philly, in Detroit, in San Diego, they only have to search your name, and they can find every last ugly detail. You should know. Internet searches were your specialty.

  Want to know about the shady past of the Kissimmee River? Want to know which city councilmen are homophobes? Want to know about that dumb girl from Florida who had anal sex with a married congressman because he wouldn’t put it in her vagina?

  The discovery of your shame is one click away. Everyone’s is, not that that makes it any better. In high school, you read The Scarlet Letter, and it occurs to you that this is what the Internet is like. There’s that scene at the beginning where Hester Prynne is forced to stand in the town square for the afternoon. Maybe three or four hours. Whatever the time, it’s unbearable to her.

  You will be standing in that square forever.

  You will wear that “A” until you’re dead.

  You consider your options.

  You have no options.

  Click here.

  You are depressed.

  You read every Harry Potter that has been written.

  You swim in your parents’ pool.

  You read all the books on your childhood bookshelf.

  You read a series of books called Choose Your Own Adventure that you liked when you were young. Even though you’re not the intended age for them anymore, you feel obsessed with them that summer. The way these books work is you get to the end of a section, and you make a choice, and then you turn to the corresponding page for that choice. You think how much these books are like life. />
  Except in Choose Your Own Adventure, you can move backward, and you can choose something else if you don’t like how the story turned out, or if you just want to know the other possible outcomes. You would like to do that, but you can’t. Life moves relentlessly forward. You turn to the next page, or you stop reading. If you stop reading, the story is over.

  Even when you were a kid, you were aware of the fact that the Choose Your Own Adventure stories were pretty bald morality tales. For instance, one of your favorite ones, Track Star!, involves a runner deciding whether or not to take performance-enhancing drugs. If you take the drugs, you’ll win for a while, but then something horrible will happen to you. You’ll be a victim of your poor choices.

  You think that if your life were a Choose Your Own Adventure story—let’s call it Intern!—this would be the point where it would say THE END. You would have made enough poor choices for the story to have had a bad ending. The only redemption would be in going back to the beginning and starting again. This isn’t an option for you, because you are a person and not a character in a Choose Your Own Adventure.

  The rub of the Choose Your Own Adventure stories is that if you don’t make a few bad choices, the story will be terribly boring. If you do everything right and you’re always good, the story will be very short.

  You wonder if the congressman ever read Choose Your Own Adventure stories. He’s probably too old, but you think he would get a kick out of them and what a good metaphor they are for life.

  If you call him.

  If you don’t call him.

  You decide to call him even though you know you shouldn’t. In fact, you’ve explicitly been told not to. You haven’t been alone with him or even spoken to him since the night of the crash.

  He doesn’t answer his phone so you leave a message. As you are babbling abut Choose Your Own Adventure stories, you realize that the thought that seemed deep sounds incredibly lame over the phone.

  A few days later, Jorge Rodriguez shows up at the house. He’s important in the congressman’s organization. You don’t know exactly what his title is now, but he used to be the head of fund-raising. You’ve spoken to him a few times, but you’ve never had much interaction. He’s charming, and very handsome. He looks like the congressman, but he is shorter, Cuban, younger. He’s maybe five years older than you.