Very Nice

by Marcy Dermansky

My professor had told me once that I could be a good writer if I would just let myself write. Most assignments came and went and I did not turn anything in. I wanted my work to be brilliant, which meant it was impossible for me to write anything at all.

Sometimes, I wondered if his leaving my mother was related to Hillary losing.

It was incredibly sexist that he called his female employee a girl. Also, I wasn’t as sharp as a tack. I was sort of slow and dreamy, something that bothered me about myself.

I’d recently had a revelation, an unpleasant one, straight from Bernie Sanders himself, that I might be the daughter of a genuine scumbag. The one percent. That I was guilty by association. By the simple fact of my birth. My privilege.

But I had no interest in the real world. The real world was a miserable place. The real world was a shit show. America was a fucking laughingstock, worse than the third world, fascist, racist, classist.

My fellow writers, every day, were writing brilliant tweets and Facebook posts, protesting intolerance, sexual harassment, and every single thing that was important, that needed saying, and they were somehow also changing the literary landscape and gaining enormous numbers of followers. It was cool to be a person of color. Oppressed. This was not said, but understood. This, at least, I had going for me.

I gave a short defense of adverbs, currently a part of speech non grata in the writing world. In the past, the one criticism of my work had been overwriting, which was ridiculous. Nothing was worse than those minimalist writers and their short, lean sentences. I was contradictory, I knew, rallying against just and really and very but fine with leisurely. I had an aesthetic.

I guess I did give a shit. It was at that moment, when my boss thoughtlessly cursed a woman under his breath, using a word that derogatorily described her genitalia, that I realized I didn’t like him. I realized I might want to get another job. After I got my bonus.

She was young and impressionable, so of course she was going to get hurt. That was just part of life. That was part of being alive. We did not have to regret what we had done. It had been nice. Very nice.