I liked Olivia. I knew she was only trying to be friendly. I wanted her, in this moment, to drop dead.
I asked Olivia if she’d heard about the girl who went missing in Guelph. She said she had （hadn’t everyone? the missing girl’s face had been on the front page of all the major newspapers all week） and that she hoped the various search efforts underway would be successful. I said it was annoying that her disappearance was getting so much press just because she was tiny and blond. “That’s true,” Olivia said. “So many women go missing every year and don’t get that kind of coverage, because—”
“That picture they’re using is essentially a glamour shot,” I said, louder and faster than intended. “If I was her, I’d be like, hope my ex sees this! Though I guess if something bad did happen to her, in all likelihood it was her ex who did it.” I smiled and absentmindedly closed a tab, revealing the contact page of a local plastic surgeon. I closed that as well.
Olivia sucked her entire lower lip into her mouth. “Hey, is, uh, everything okay?”
I told her everything was no more or less okay than usual. I guessed I was frustrated that, since every other area of my life had fallen apart, I now had to be defined by my work, which I did not feel particularly passionate about. “But that’s life,” I said. “Nobody likes their job.”
Outside in the hall, a cluster of students perused a shabby corkboard for book sales, poetry nights, and families in need of tutors or nannies. An older professor passed by with his arms full of envelopes. Olivia ran her spoon around the empty inside of her yogurt container, scraping metal on plastic.
“I like my job,” she said shyly.
“Me too,” said Jiro, not shy at all.
He stood in the doorway looking carefully tousled and holding a small espresso cup with showy delicacy. “I’m very passionate about the history of block printing.” One of the students at the corkboard made eye contact with him and giggled.
Jiro went on about a “startling frontispiece” he had recently seen as I tried to remember if I had ever been passionate about anything, least of all my profession. Honestly, I had just been not terrible at it, and the idea of working toward a PhD seemed sort of impressive, and having a “real job” with a traditional schedule and money on the line and targets （？） to meet sounded onerous and boring. Why shouldn’t I discuss ancient plays for my living? What else was I going to do, learn to code?
Being half-interested in my work had seemed fine when it was only one part of my life. If I wanted meaning, I could find it in my relationship or, if things became very desperate, have a baby. When I first got married, it had been scary to think that the rest of my life （this part, anyway） was fully planned out. But it had also been comforting—one less thing to worry about. At least that was sorted, no more romantic choices to be made. With that piece removed, the entire puzzle looked wrong: did I have to re-choose everything?
I thought about the long nights working on my master’s thesis at our kitchen table, Jon covering our rent and groceries to give me space and time to pursue my alleged dream. It had felt exciting and important then, like I was going to contribute meaningfully to the world’s knowledge. Jon had joked about me stepping forward on an airplane: “Are there any doctors on board?” “Yes! What part of Coriolanus is he struggling with?” I had been so lucky and so stupid.
I tuned back in to Jiro’s story in time to hear him and Olivia say, “Movable type!” in joyful unison. Both laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. I told my colleagues it was easy for them to like their jobs. They had other things to define themselves: fitness, a dog, and a fiancé, for Olivia; being a pretentious asshole who spent too much time at board game cafés, for Jiro. Olivia’s mouth dropped open. Jiro merely sighed in a louche way, finished his coffee, and walked off. I made a face to Olivia like I was kidding. Maybe I was.
“If you’re not feeling connected to work, maybe it would help to get a bit more involved,” she suggested, rising from her chair and adding self-consciously, “I’m standing up now, but it’s not because I want to leave, I just need to recycle this.”
It was pretty clear that she did want to leave, but Olivia was a good sport in every sense. She trotted back to the chair beside me after disposing of the yogurt cup and told me about an upcoming conference in Ottawa—“Belabored: Birth and Other Women’s Work on the Jacobean Stage”—that had recently put out a call for papers. She had submitted one linking midwife characters to the seventeenth-century textile industry. I found the conference’s website and browsed some of the upcoming presentations. They felt as nonsense as clicking through my tabs: Twelve of the Best Fools; These Women Are Defying What It Means to Find Love in Illyria; Experience: I Avenged My Father the King and Died in an Ill-Conceived Final Scene Where Literally Every Prop Onstage Is Poisoned.
I told her I resented the idea that I had to love my job or even like it. It was not providing me with a pension, or dental benefits, or a competitive salary, or much life satisfaction. My hours were random and solitary, the path to publication opaque and arduous, and department functions had instituted a two-glass maximum on complimentary wine. Why, then, should I like my work, or try hard to be good at it, or even show up on time? The version of this job that I had heard about and imagined, getting into it, was not the version of the job currently available.
I asked her to think about air travel.
“Air travel?”
“Have you ever seen a picture of an airplane in the seventies?” I asked, though I did not want an answer. I wanted to do my little speech. “It’s like a fancy restaurant in there. Like a private club. In the nineties airplanes started looking like buses, but they still fed you and gave you that dry little pillow, and you could move your legs without jostling the person in front of you. Now you don’t even get a free checked bag. Every human element of the air travel experience has been taken away, and you have to buy back each individual thing. Let’s be honest: ‘premium economy’ is a contradiction in terms.”
Olivia said she did miss the free cookies Porter Airlines used to give out.
“Exactly,” I said. “Late capitalism at work.”
I sounded like my uncle when he got drunk and talked about being tracked by his credit card company. Still, wasn’t I right? Didn’t she see what I was saying? Olivia said she did, but wasn’t sure how the erosion of the in-flight dining experience related to marriage, or anything else we had been talking about.
I told her it was not only planes that had been made terrible over time. This was true of basically every aspect of modern life. Home ownership was totally out of reach. Adulthood would not involve a lot of vacations or weekends away or even single-occupancy one-bedroom apartments. Screaming in the streets would not force anybody important to do anything about climate change, and all the body positive messaging in the world would not alter the fact that my favorite store stocked something called a “triple zero” but did not make sizes larger than a ten, and even that you had to buy online, like a thief in the night. The only thing that really offered what it said on the tin was marriage.