5 ways to be a grown-up
I am, this very moment, drunk on one full bottle of $8 wine and sitting in a bathtub, 85% of the way through with Pride and Prejudice. I have not read this book since I was 15 and every girl in my high school class was in love with Mr. Darcy, and I said I was too, because he was smart and witty and contrary, and that must be what it means to be in love with somebody. That must, of course, be why you fall in love with a man, because he is witty and contrary and saves your sister, and understands your circumstances, and loves you back, and that is of course what love means.
I am in my bathtub. I live alone in this apartment. I am 33 years old and my mother has co-signed the lease, for my credit is poor and my ability to prove my own worth as a lessor, as an adult, as a human worthy of respect under capitalism, is as weak as ever there was. I pay the rent in full every month precisely on time, for the only alternative is to move in with my mother and her ailing husband my father, and tonight I am drunk on rosé and reading a book I have not read since high school, and my independence is borrowed but no less dear to me.
Earlier tonight, and yesterday, and last week, I pretended to a score of teenagers that I knew things they didn’t. I taught them calculus and how to use the English language and how to pass tests that measure nothing to get into schools that teach them nothing and everything so they can get into schools who will give them degrees that will give them jobs that suit the parents that pay me. If I lived in Jane Austen’s time I would be a governess. I’d be good at it. I know the English language well, and I can use it and I can teach it, and I understand what other people mean, and I understand this book better than I did when I was 15 and did not know what love was except on the few TV shows that were syndicated to Fox at 11 PM on a weekday night.
Two days ago I helped a friend move. Two days ago I, and ten other people, mostly women but also some not-women, some men, some not-any, helped a friend move, and half of them never met her before two weeks ago. One month ago my friend who I barely knew came back to knit night and said, I’ve broken up with my fiance, and two days ago a dozen of us descended upon her place even though none of us had ever been there before and moved her into a storage unit in four hours of work because that is what you do. That is exactly what you do. That’s what a community is, even if you haven’t ever even met the person in need, you show up and you carry boxes and you play Tetris in a storage locker and you drive a car you’ve never sat in before and you make sure, you make sure this girl who belongs to the people you belong to does not ever, ever face her ex alone.
I did not kiss my friend. I made her soup, and she fell asleep on my couch, and I sent her home to my girlfriend, and I stayed alone in my apartment that I pay for every month in my mother’s name, and later on the bookshelfs I built with my own hands I found Pride and Prejudice, which I read when I was 16, and started to read, which tonight I am finishing in my bathtub with an entire fair-trade chocolate bar and one entire $8 bottle of wine.
