“How much do you think Abe knew?” the second woman says. Abe is your grandfather. These women aren’t related to you, so they must have been his friends. Maybe they’re just busybodies from this synagogue though.
“His mind was gone,” the first woman says. “They didn’t tell him what had happened. It’s a mitzvah.”
“A mitzvah,” the first one agrees. “If he’d known, it would have killed him.”
You are aware that they have transitioned into talking about you.
You are no longer curious about where such a conversation will lead.
You leave the stall and you step between them. “Might I borrow this?” you say. You take the perfume and you spray it all over yourself. You look at the bottle. “It’s Jo Malone,” you tell them. “Grapefruit.”
“Oh, we were wondering,” the first woman says. “It’s delicious.”
“How are you, Aviva?” the second one says.
“Great,” you say.
You smile at them. You smile too much.
You graduate from college a semester late.
You apply for jobs in your field—jobs in politics mainly, but a few in PR and not-for-profits.
Your most significant work experience is for the congressman, but no one from his office can write you a letter of recommendation for obvious reasons.
Still, you are hopeful.
You are twenty-two years old.
You polish up your résumé and it’s not bad. You speak Spanish fluently! You graduated with honors! You worked for a congressman in a big city for two years, and by the end of it, they were paying you and you even had a job title, Online Projects and Special Research. You once kept a blog that had more than one million hits, not that you can point anyone to this.
And people in New York City, in Los Angeles, in Boston, in Austin, in Nashville, in Seattle, in Chicago, people can’t have all heard of Aviva Grossman. The news story could not have spread that far. This was a regional story, like when you were a kid and Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine were in a tour bus crash. That story was on the news every day in South Florida. Sure, it might have been picked up nationally, too, but the obsession with Gloria Estefan and her road to recovery was regional.
You receive almost no replies to your job applications.
Finally, someone calls you! It’s an entry level position at an organization that helps children from around the world get access to health care. They are based out of Philadelphia. They do a lot of work in Mexico and they LOVE that you speak Spanish.
You arrange to have a phone interview, and if that goes well, you will fly to Philadelphia to speak with the team.
You are imagining your new life in Philadelphia. You browse winter coats online. The stores in Florida rarely stock them. How nice it will be to be somewhere with winter. How nice it will be to be somewhere where no one knows your name or the stupid mistake (series of mistakes, if you’re being completely honest) you made when you were twenty.
It is June. You make your mom leave the house, and you sit in your bedroom, and you wait for the phone to ring at 9:30 a.m. It is summer, and your mom’s school is on break, and she is hovering around you like flies around raw meat.
The phone does not ring.
At 9:34, you begin to worry that you missed the call, or that you screwed up the time. You check your e-mail again to confirm the details. Yes, 9:30.
If you wait for the phone to ring.
If you call (even though the interviewer said she would call you—who cares if you look “too eager”?).
The interviewer picks up on the first ring.
“Oh Aviva,” she says, “I meant to call you.”
You can tell she is not referring to the interview.
“We’ve decided to go in another direction,” she says.
Normally, you wouldn’t ask for details. But you’ve had enough of being ignored, so you say, “Can you level with me? What happened? I really felt good about this one.”
The interviewer pauses. “Well, Aviva, we did an Internet search on your name, and the stuff about you and the congressman came up. It didn’t really bother me, but my boss felt that since we’re a not-for-profit, we need people of impeccable character. His words, not mine. But the truth is, we live and die on donations, and some of those people can be super conservative and weird about sex stuff. I argued for you. I truly did. You’re great, and I’m sure you’ll find something great.”
“Thanks for being honest,” you say. You hang up the phone.
This is why no one is calling you.
Because even if no one has heard of the Aviva Grossman scandal in Philly, in Detroit, in San Diego, they only have to search your name, and they can find every last ugly detail. You should know. Internet searches were your specialty.
Want to know about the shady past of the Kissimmee River? Want to know which city councilmen are homophobes? Want to know about that dumb girl from Florida who had anal sex with a married congressman because he wouldn’t put it in her vagina?
The discovery of your shame is one click away. Everyone’s is, not that that makes it any better. In high school, you read The Scarlet Letter, and it occurs to you that this is what the Internet is like. There’s that scene at the beginning where Hester Prynne is forced to stand in the town square for the afternoon. Maybe three or four hours. Whatever the time, it’s unbearable to her.
You will be standing in that square forever.
You will wear that “A” until you’re dead.
You consider your options.
You have no options.
Click here.
You are depressed.
You read every Harry Potter that has been written.
You swim in your parents’ pool.
You read all the books on your childhood bookshelf.
You read a series of books called Choose Your Own Adventure that you liked when you were young. Even though you’re not the intended age for them anymore, you feel obsessed with them that summer. The way these books work is you get to the end of a section, and you make a choice, and then you turn to the corresponding page for that choice. You think how much these books are like life.
Except in Choose Your Own Adventure, you can move backward, and you can choose something else if you don’t like how the story turned out, or if you just want to know the other possible outcomes. You would like to do that, but you can’t. Life moves relentlessly forward. You turn to the next page, or you stop reading. If you stop reading, the story is over.
Even when you were a kid, you were aware of the fact that the Choose Your Own Adventure stories were pretty bald morality tales. For instance, one of your favorite ones, Track Star!, involves a runner deciding whether or not to take performance-enhancing drugs. If you take the drugs, you’ll win for a while, but then something horrible will happen to you. You’ll be a victim of your poor choices.