by
Lisa Taddeo
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Lina has lived an entire lifetime between her first kiss with Aidan and this kiss with Aidan. She has gotten married and had two children and more than one golden retriever has died and she has peeled four thousand garlic cloves. But the whole time it’s as though she has been a sleeping beauty in between these two kisses.
[...] It goes on for a long while and she loses her self-consciousness not completely but enough to enjoy sex for the first real time ever. She cannot believe how good it feels, how much even as she is losing herself in the moment she is concurrently feeling every inch of her soul waking up and smiling up at God, for the very first time grateful to be alive.
Now Lina gets these pains, and she believes in her clearer moments that the pains are the heartaches of the past, of being lonely for eleven years. Of being raped. Of being lonely her whole life. She knows there are women out there whose husbands don’t want to fuck them or French-kiss them. And they will understand her. But a lot of people will tell her to shut up, to be happy with her children and her nice house. She and Ed even have a generator in case of storms.
:')
In the car he’s cockier than usual. As a teacher, she decides, he’s far nicer. He’s never entirely tender—even at his warmest, he exudes the pale sweetness of a cashew—but now he is armed and cool. Getting into the car has triggered an acute shift; she goes from feeling half woman and half child to feeling like a toddler. They’re talking and there’s no music on. The roads of Fargo are flung ahead like foreign airstrips. Maggie experiences a distinct feeling of doom. It’s normal, when you’re this close to thrall, to worry over losing it. This is nothing like what she felt for Mateo. With Knodel, it’s this thing that’s been building—has it been building since she was a freshman?—so it’s that much more important because of its history. Also, because of the quality of his person. He’s top-shelf. Being with him, she feels her own stock rise. She visualizes an actual accumulation of wealth. At the same time, she feels that she isn’t good enough.
:(
The best part of her whole life happens next. He slows to a stop on a quiet street, parks his wife’s car at the curb of a house with no lights on, and just looks at her. He does it for ten seconds, maybe less. In those seconds, every bad thing she has ever thought about herself is erased, and she feels like a supermodel.
[...] Why am I living this life? What’s the point of lying down in that bed every night? And I said if it gets to three months, I’m leaving.
And then it was three months, and Lina became—not overnight, because it had been coming for years, but overnight it rose from under her flesh up to the surface—a woman who wasn’t going to be forgotten. She wasn’t going to be her sisters, fading into the shit greens and browns of winter Indiana. She wasn’t going to be every woman who has children and then cares for them and the house and has hobbies like pottery but nothing that feeds her otherwise.
So as in a fairy tale one morning she wakes up and her skin is a different tone. Like the chicken stegosauruses in the clean oven, she has gone from yellow to brown. She is possessed of self. All the pain from growing up, of being told she wasn’t good enough, followed by marrying a man who felt like a cylinder, something to pass a life through without any accumulation of wisdom or inspiration. All those evenings watching him and his friends drink beer and talk about nothing and not touch her so what is the damn point of throwing all those beer cans for all those useless men into the garbage. What is the point of anything. What is the point of washing all his underwear. For a man who makes no decisions. For a man who does not even decide on the route of his day. All of that was shedding off like the weight she lost. Pounds of years. Pounds of desperation.
In this way Mark Wilken was effectively forced to retire. One bright spot was that he’d won his full pension for twenty-two years of labor, but with that he was barred from working at a for-profit company. It was as though the company was saying, We will give you this bit to survive, but you must stay where you are, in your place. Get drunk if you must but do it with cheap beer. So he took a position as a courier at a hospital, hallwaying around interdepartmental mail, manila envelopes with red string. Before taxes, he made $7 an hour.
Nobody knows exactly what he felt, because he didn’t share the dark bits. But the dissipation of dignity can drive even the strongest men mad. He didn’t sleep and went to a lot of AA meetings.
Government policy makers, once enamored of fast-growing tech firms for their ability to boost GDP figures, have come to recognize the high cost of runaway growth. While such companies do increase in size, the real economies in which they operate are being drained rather than nourished. Lawmakers are starting to realize that authors and publishers shouldn't be made poorer by Amazon; cab companies shouldn't be made less profitable by Uber; and the people of San Francisco shouldn't be priced out of their homes by Google's inflationary presence. In New York, new regulations have been imposed that prevent an app like Airbnb from altering the fabric of a community by turning the city's apartments into flophouses.
There is something troubling about the way Google is impacting the world, but neither its buses nor the people in them are the core problem; they’re just the easy target. Google’s employees are not oblivious to the increasing poverty outside the bus windows on their way to work. If anything, such sights only make these workers cling to their jobs all the more desperately, leaving them less likely to question the deeper processes at play. They do want to become millionaires—but not so that they can live a life of luxury. In a country without a strong social safety net, workers are told that they have to become millionaires or else face penury as soon as they retire or, worse, get sick. [...]
deeper structural cause for this polarisation: the psychological effects reinforcing
[...] So each tech company must become as intrusive, extractive, divisive, time-consuming, wasteful, expensive, job killing, exploitative, and manipulative as the next one. As for their impatient shareholders, well, they are the likes of us: we are the ones holding these very stocks in our own 401(k) and college savings plans, counting on them to go up, and selling them if they don’t. None of this worked out as we thought it would, and we’re all frustrated by the results.
ok this is actually bullshit. how many people own substantial assets at all??? inequality in asset ownership is wild and this narrative conceals that fact