Her Golden Coast: Will these emotional opposites find their forever? by Anat Deracine

Author:Anat Deracine [Deracine, Anat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mayavin Publishing
Published: 2024-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

chapter eight

By 2011, the Darling had grown so large that when Mal eventually started working there, it was in another building. Laurie never saw her. They went to work together on the BART, setting up a daily routine that involved picking up coffee and waffles at the Bluebottle in the Ferry Building by the Embarcadero. For twenty minutes each morning they watched the boats cross the bay, listened to seagulls wail, and talked about anything, everything.

“Nick wants me to pick the restaurant next time,” Laurie said. “He thinks my notions of gender roles are archaic. Is it so wrong that given my job, I want a break from making decisions?”

Mal nodded contemplatively. “You can try telling him we’ve come full-circle, so now the man making all the moves is a rare and subversive kink. He’s actually a true feminist, letting you let him dominate.”

Laurie swatted at her, told her the name of the place she’d been considering, an Italian one up in North Beach, and asked her opinion.

“Last time I was there, I had the Zucchini fiori, but I went home with the waiter. Not as good as the zucchini.”

“Nick isn’t the most skilled in bed, but I’m sure he can outperform a vegetable.”

Mal sighed. “We have high standards for soup, but not for sex.”

Laurie didn’t bother contradicting her. The issues with Nick weren’t his fault. She hadn’t been able to climax since her surgery. Hadn’t even touched herself between her legs except when she needed to treat a yeast infection. She understood why so many women didn’t want their husbands in the room during childbirth; it was hard to hold onto desire in the face of biological reality.

They separated to enter their office buildings. Laurie served as admin to a new Director bent on restructuring his team and cultivating the next generation of leaders. He was completely unaware that his team spent their nights on absinthe and karaoke, that they didn’t have the money for rent so they lived in cars or in RVs parked outside Daly City, or that they had no idea what he was talking about but just parroted the words he said—push the envelope, shift the paradigm, pave the cow path—whichever would let them believe themselves safe from the next round of layoffs.

The pundits gave their generation a name—millennials—and wrote articles about how they’d survived the Great Recession, but those writers never quite understood what it meant to not feel even the pain of a lost future. Even sadness seemed out of reach when pensions were a notion as quaint as chamberpots, when 401Ks were worthless, when all they had left was the gig economy, dystopian novels and Twitter, snatches of life that never built up to anything. They’d refused it all, nostalgia and anxiety, history and hope, in favor of an effervescent, breathless present.

Nick asked Laurie to move in with him. “It just doesn’t make sense to pay two rents in this market.”

This was what she’d always wanted, wasn’t it? A practical proposal. Except it wasn’t a proposal.

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