sat shirtless in that chair, his arms and legs bound, his Fantastic Four tee gagging his mouth. Dried tears ran in streaks down his neck and his pants were soaked, the stench of piss filling the room. When the cops led him through the door of our apartment and into my mother’s arms, he turned to me for no more than an instant and though his eyes neither twitched nor blinked, I understood them.
I don’t know what became of Tommy. His parents moved out the next day and the apartment stayed empty for months. That night, my mother bathed Ralph for nearly an hour while my father stood in the doorway and watched over them both without speaking. I sat in the hallway, waiting, until my father turned to me and said it was time for bed.
I lay in the darkness and looked across at Ralph’s bed, wondered what Etan’s bed looked like, empty like that, night after night. I waited for what felt like hours and crept out of bed and down the hallway. My parents’ bedroom door was open and I could see my father asleep in his work shirt. In the kitchen, the spaghetti sat on the table, untouched. I found my mother in the living room, Ralph wrapped in a towel and asleep on her lap. I sat next to her and for a long time I couldn’t be sure if she was awake or asleep, her breaths low and far in between, her eyes difficult to see in the darkness. Then, at around dawn, when the shadows in the room began to shift and I could make out her face and she could make out mine, she pulled me toward her.
ONLY THOSE WHO STRUGGLE SUCCEED
It was the night of the office Christmas party and Lina felt lucky and excited to be included as she was merely an intern, although there had been allusions to, if not promises of, a permanent position in the new year. Because she lived an hour’s drive away, and because she had to go into the office the day of the party, there was the question of how she would get ready for the outing. Her roommate reminded her that a gym membership they shared, a gift to the roommate from parents who found the roommate’s weight bothersome, was the solution to her dilemma. So, after a day of reading scripts and writing notes that summarized their strengths and weaknesses, going on coffee runs and picking up lunches, Lina said, ‘See you later,’ to her co-workers, and went to the closest gym to which the membership allowed her access and made use of its showers and changing room. She blow-dried her hair straight and carefully flat-ironed and sprayed the fine hairs that framed her forehead and which she knew would otherwise frizz and curl in the party venue’s humid indoor air. It was a nervous energy that filled her as she applied her makeup, and she recognized it as one of anticipation, the same she had felt several times before. To her it signaled that her ambitions and desires, to secure for herself a role in the company and gain acceptance into an industry that was derided in public and celebrated in private for being discriminatory and exacting, were ones she could access and with time obtain. She felt in that moment the very potential of her life revealed. Before leaving the locker-room she looked at herself in the mirror a final time, felt satisfied with the pale gold shadow that brightened her eyes, and wiped off the red lipstick she had previously thought festive but which now she deemed made her lips appear too prominent and defined.
The party was held in a bar closed to the public for the occasion, and when she entered her co-workers were glad to see her, and she spoke to men and women who in the office spoke only to one another or to their own assistants. As she made her way around the room, she was welcomed into the various intimate groups that formed, reshuffled and formed again, and was included as gossip was exchanged about people whom she did not know, but whose names she recognized enough to allow her to join in on the laughter that ensued at their expense. Such interactions, she understood, were the blocks required to build relationships which, if they were carefully maintained, could later act as bridges capable of delivering her to the most coveted positions. As she conversed and laughed she began to feel encouraged that the months she had committed to working without pay, complying with requests and orders that were at times intended to humble or diminish her, were in fact worthwhile, and that she was, at last, to be admitted into a life that had initially seemed too extraordinary for someone like her to achieve. She stood near the bar and accepted the drinks handed to her, and later, when the president of the company, for whom she interned directly, and the vice president, who had flown in from New York and stayed for the party, gathered a select few and handed out shots of tequila, she found herself full of verve and jubilance, feelings the gathering evidently inspired within those comprising the small group around her. And thus, though she preferred vodka to tequila, in fact found the latter sickening, she drank it, and then another.
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