Читать книгу Alligator - Dima Alzayat - Страница 11

It was the night of the office Christmas party and Lina felt lucky and excited to be included as she was merely an intern, although there had been allusions to, if not promises of, a permanent position in the new year. Because she lived an hour’s drive away, and because she had to go into the office the day of the party, there was the question of how she would get ready for the outing. Her roommate reminded her that a gym membership they shared, a gift to the roommate from parents who found the roommate’s weight bothersome, was the solution to her dilemma. So, after a day of reading scripts and writing notes that summarized their strengths and weaknesses, going on coffee runs and picking up lunches, Lina said, ‘See you later,’ to her co-workers, and went to the closest gym to which the membership allowed her access and made use of its showers and changing room. She blow-dried her hair straight and carefully flat-ironed and sprayed the fine hairs that framed her forehead and which she knew would otherwise frizz and curl in the party venue’s humid indoor air. It was a nervous energy that filled her as she applied her makeup, and she recognized it as one of anticipation, the same she had felt several times before. To her it signaled that her ambitions and desires, to secure for herself a role in the company and gain acceptance into an industry that was derided in public and celebrated in private for being discriminatory and exacting, were ones she could access and with time obtain. She felt in that moment the very potential of her life revealed. Before leaving the locker-room she looked at herself in the mirror a final time, felt satisfied with the pale gold shadow that brightened her eyes, and wiped off the red lipstick she had previously thought festive but which now she deemed made her lips appear too prominent and defined.

The party was held in a bar closed to the public for the occasion, and when she entered her co-workers were glad to see her, and she spoke to men and women who in the office spoke only to one another or to their own assistants. As she made her way around the room, she was welcomed into the various intimate groups that formed, reshuffled and formed again, and was included as gossip was exchanged about people whom she did not know, but whose names she recognized enough to allow her to join in on the laughter that ensued at their expense. Such interactions, she understood, were the blocks required to build relationships which, if they were carefully maintained, could later act as bridges capable of delivering her to the most coveted positions. As she conversed and laughed she began to feel encouraged that the months she had committed to working without pay, complying with requests and orders that were at times intended to humble or diminish her, were in fact worthwhile, and that she was, at last, to be admitted into a life that had initially seemed too extraordinary for someone like her to achieve. She stood near the bar and accepted the drinks handed to her, and later, when the president of the company, for whom she interned directly, and the vice president, who had flown in from New York and stayed for the party, gathered a select few and handed out shots of tequila, she found herself full of verve and jubilance, feelings the gathering evidently inspired within those comprising the small group around her. And thus, though she preferred vodka to tequila, in fact found the latter sickening, she drank it, and then another.