She was sprawled on her bed, dressed only in a black camisole and black tights, having yanked off her stiff work dress the moment she’d gotten home. Staring up at the ceiling, she clutched a wine bottle to her chest.
Ellen was on the armchair, cross-legged in yoga clothes as she sipped water. She’d recently introduced a no-drinking-before-Friday rule for her and Aaron.
Rae was drunk enough not to scold herself for gulping straight from the bottle or using economic jargon to describe her life—both habits she’d thought she’d shed.
“You’re definitely growing,” Ellen declared. “Just at aslightlylower growth rate in your career than you projected.”
Rae grunted her best contrarian grunt.
“And anyway,” Ellen went on, “stagnation is better than a recession.”
“False,” Rae said. “At least after a crash you know there’s going to be a bounce back up. Stagnation’s a perpetual standstill.”
All notions offorwardandupwardhad been exposed as a cruel hoax earlier today when she’d received her performance review at work.
She’d been ranked “outstanding” in every category, but when she’d asked about her career trajectory (she was too timid to use the wordpromotion), her boss had told her there weren’t enough slots for her to be promoted this year due to factors outside his control, but that if she continued to demonstrate meaningful value-add to the firm, it would be on the table next year.
She’d asked if Co-wannabe, who’d been there only a few months, was getting promoted, and her boss’s cagey response had told Rae all she needed to know.
When Rae had pressed for areas for improvement, her boss had said, “A little more presence, maybe—you know, commanding a room with real authority.”
Afterward, Rae had locked herself in her toilet stall, flinging irate texts at Ellen, and this evening Ellen had scurried over to talk it out in person.
“They want presence?” Rae growled. “I’ll give thempresence.” She stood up on her mattress, stumbling to keep from falling over, and held the half-empty wine bottle as a microphone.
“Attention, ladies and gentlemen,” she belted to the wall, not caring if her neighbors heard. None of them knew her name or even made eye contact in the elevator. “I need you all to put your head up your butts. Even farther down—no half-assing it! Now hold your breath and close your eyes. Just like that! Good work, everyone! Now just keep wasting your whole fucking lives like this.”
Ellen stood up and took the wine bottle away as Rae collapsed onto her comforter with a defeated sense of victory.
“It’s sexist bullshit,” Ellen said. “You’ve worked so hard for this.”
“It’s not about how hard I’ve worked,” Rae said, though it partly was. “It’s that I objectively deserved it. I got a top fucking performance review.”
“You’d have gotten the promotion if you were a man,” Ellen said.
A car horn from the street below punctuated the truth of the sentence.
“Fuck my boss,” Rae said.
She knew it wasn’t his decision—it was his boss’s boss’s boss’s decision—but she also would bet her bonus that her boss had fought for Co-wannabe, who’d been in his same college fraternity, and not for her.
“And fuck Dustin,” Rae said, angry at him for the first time since the breakup—a sudden but overdue surge. “I was a fucking angel to him.”
“A fucking angel,” Ellen repeated, nodding solemnly.
“I would’ve done anything for him.”
“Youdiddo anything for him,” Ellen said. “You gave him so many chances.”
“Like, I get it, he was hurting,” Rae said, syllables slurring into one another, craving connection. “But guess what? I was hurting too.”
She wondered if she’d caught depression from Dustin through emotional contagion. Or maybe she’d always had it in her, the dark but necessary flip side of her own depth, but she hadn’t felt entitled to acknowledge it, given its relative mildness. Or maybe she wasn’t depressed at all, she was just being overdramatic from a bad day at work and too much wine and it would look better in the morning.
“It’ll look better in the morning,” Ellen said.
“No it won’t,” Rae said.
She was heading back to Indiana for Thanksgiving next week and had hoped a promotion would cancel out the lack of a proposal. It was one thing for her high school classmates to all be married or engaged, but with Ellen now in that category too, Rae felt the smack of something she wanted to call betrayal but couldn’t.
