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“I’m sure you will go far, Melanie,” she says, patting my arm.
I smile up at her. “I hope so.”
Soon after, as a little gift for my dedication, I come across a piece written back in 1929, the year A Room of One’s Own was published, that criticizes Woolf for making a grammatical error. I stop. An error? What was it? The article doesn’t say. It only gives the page number. So I look up the page number, as it would have been in the original publication, and can find no error. But I read it again, and notice that she says, “nobody in their senses.” ‘Nobody’ is singular, and ‘their’ is plural. What should she have said? I put the book down. She should have said, “nobody in his senses.” I check on it and, yes, that was the grammatical rule at the time. That rule was a creation of the patriarchal society that Woolf passionately opposed. She was an avid supporter of equal rights, and it makes perfect sense that she would buck that sexist grammatical rule in her writing. So, in fact, it wasn’t an error at all, but rather a statement.
I work on my argument after I get home from waitressing, and after my other school work is done. Every Wednesday, I go to the McNair classes, practice for the graduate records exam, and give updates on my research paper.
“It’s going well,” I tell them. “I think I have a good argument.”
After months of drafting and supporting and revising, my paper’s finally done. I put it away for a couple weeks, like my McNair mentor says I should, and then I pull it out and read it again from a reader’s perspective. A few more days of polishing it, and I’m done. I show it to my McNair mentor and she says it’s great.
“Unique. Well-supported. Now you should publish it.”
“Really?”
“It’ll look great on your grad school application,” she tells me.
“Who should I submit it to?”
“Start with the most prestigious. Then if they turn you down, submit it to the next in line.”
I thank her and walk away, straight to the library. But it’s not the most prestigious journal that I gravitate to. I pick up the one I found the most interesting when researching my paper. Feminisimos is out of Spain and publishes a range of international voices on a variety of topics. And, it just so happens to openly call for submissions right on the inside cover. I spend the next week formatting the paper according to their requirements, and I send it in.
Idea
Scott’s loss prevention job is getting worse. He managed to get by for quite a while without busting anyone, mainly by focusing on other ways that the store could save money like ensuring that product pricing rings up properly on registers and that store conditions are safe so that there aren’t any employee accidents. But management is starting to pressure him to increase his apprehension numbers. They know people are shoplifting, and they want Scott to bust them. And that’s where the conflict lies, because Scott doesn’t want to bust them.
He figures out how many people he needs to apprehend in order to keep management off his back, and that’s what he does. It’s about one per week, give or take. So he selects who he’s going to bust out of the many that he could bust. One week it’s a tough guy who’s being a jerk to his girlfriend; another week it’s two cocky teenagers. He lets all the moms with kids go. Apparently, women with children are the most common shoplifters, at his store at least. Or maybe they’re just the ones who are the most obvious about it. At any rate, Scott is limping along like this, doing everything he can to walk the line of doing a good enough job so that nobody pressures him, and doing a bad enough job so that he’s not busting people left and right. It’s really not a nice situation to be in.
I wish it were better. I wish I could tell him it’s just temporary, like mine. A year from now, I’ll be a graduate student. I’m sure I’ll get a full fellowship, so I won’t need to waitress anymore. It’s the light at the end of the tunnel for me. This stage of my life is coming to a close. I’m moving forward. But Scott doesn’t have that same hope to look forward to. His job is indefinite.
One afternoon near the end of summer I’m at the laundromat, loading the industrial-sized washing machines, and I find a sheet of paper folded in his jeans pocket. I unfold it and find, in tiny letters, “I HATE MY JOB” written over and over and over again across the sheet, reminiscent of the scene in The Shining where Jack has written “All work and no play” over and over. Not quite as creepy, but still a little unsettling. I stand there, staring at it. It must have taken him an hour to write this.
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