This Time Tomorrow

by Emma Straub

There were so many kinds of rich people in New York City. Alice was an expert, but not because she wanted to be; it was like being raised bilingual, only one of the languages was money. One rule of thumb was that the harder it was to tell where someone’s money came from, the more of it they had. If

idiocy of the young twenties, when one was suddenly expected to know how to do adult things; the panicked coupling of the mid- and late twenties, when marriages happened as quickly as a game of tag; the sitcom mom period, when you finally had enough food in your freezer to survive for a month if necessary; the school principal period, when you were no longer seen as a woman at all but just a vague nagging authority figure. If you were lucky, there was the late-in-life sexy Mrs. Robinson period, or an accomplished and powerful Meryl Streep period, followed, of course, by approximately two decades of old-crone-hood, like the woman at the end of Titanic.

Alice understood—her friend’s greatest powers were in situations she could control and organize, like studying for the LSATs or marrying a boy who worshipped her.

Academics who moved from Ohio to Virginia to Missouri in search of a tenure-track job probably marked time by their shifting health insurance or the school mascots.