The Paris Review - Fall 2016

nightmare of pointless ambition, people waiting in endless lines for nothing.
In Boston they didn’t bother with lines—they just jammed as many white
people as possible into any place showing the Pats. She’d spent her early years
in Princeton, with its liberal, old-money complacency, dominated by “good
families” and “good kids,” most of them zapped awful by divorce and private
school. They’d never get her back there alive, at least not for more than a long
weekend. She’d spent her childhood wanting to be from somewhere else, anywhere
that didn’t draw a wince. Of course, name recognition was the whole
appeal for her father: when people asked where he lived, he could just say
“Princeton” and they’d know he was a man of wealth and taste, whereas when
people asked Leslie, she said “Jersey,” then, if pressed, “Hopewell Valley, in
Mercer County? Near Princeton?” Which was true—one good thing about
New Jersey was that there were so many townships and villages and what all
that you could always just claim the nearest one that appealed. In Montana,
the categories were broader. You were from Back East, Around Here, or
California. It was best to not be from California.
She moved on to copyediting the arts section, her favorite part of the
paper. She hoped that if she hung around the office making snappy comments
for long enough, she might someday be allowed to write a film or concert
review. The current movie critic, Amy Freitch, trashed almost everything she
saw in a biting, faux naive voice, saving her praise, it seemed, only for films
about martial arts and animals. Leslie had gone camping with her once, and
they’d taken mushrooms and read tarot cards. Amy claimed to know how to
do it but seemed to be making things up as she went along, possibly because
she was too fucked up to interpret what the cards portended, probably just
because she thought it was funny. Nevertheless, she’d predicted a hard year
for Leslie, which had proved accurate. But wasn’t every year a hard year? Even
a good year took a lot out of you.
Amy was sexy in a way that Leslie wished she was—boyish in her carelessness
about clothes and posture but still longhaired and vulnerable. She
also drank too much, like most of the people Leslie admired. She hoped that
Amy would get a job writing for a real newspaper or something so that she
could take her place at the Door. She wouldn’t be as good as Amy right away,
but she’d find her voice. “A voice like a girl with ants in her laptop,” they’d
say, “marching in dissolved and scattered ranks toward some obscure but
essential truth.” Most people she talked to disliked Amy’s pieces, so maybe
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