Either/Or

by Elif Batuman

sometimes went with Svetlana to Pilates—even though the logistics of mat placement was deeply stressful, in a way that made me feel like I understood the primal conflicts for land that formed the basis of modern history.

There was the ocean, like a recurring character you forgot about for long stretches.

Lakshmi’s father sometimes joked about women who married for love: how much they must value themselves, to think they were more attractive than the sum total of all other women—to think they were enough, without the institution of marriage, to keep a man faithful to them. He teased Lakshmi, asking if she thought of herself that way. I felt a wave of gratitude toward my parents, who would never have thought or said anything like that about me. On the other hand . . . that didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

In the end, I thought the most likely explanation was that most of the people in the world just didn’t know they were allowed not to have kids. Either that, or they were too unimaginative to think of anything else to do, or too beaten-down to do whatever it was they thought of. That had been a big reason why I had wanted so much to get into Harvard: I’d been sure it would be full of fortunate, resourceful, courageous people who had some better-conceived plan for life that I could learn about. It was a great disappointment to find that, even at Harvard, most people’s plan was to have children and amass money for them. You would be talking to someone who seemed like they viewed the world as a place of free movement and the exchange of ideas, and then it would turn out they were in a huge hurry to get everything interesting over with while they were young.

Leonard said that being a writer meant that you lived your life on the outside looking in. Whenever Leonard went to people’s houses, the men would be in the living room, talking about football, or the stock market. Leonard couldn’t survive five minutes in there; he always ended up in the kitchen with the women. They were the ones talking about stuff he actually cared about: gossip, basically, about real or fictional people. Women were kind, so they never kicked him out, though he had no kitchen skills, beyond chopping things and opening jars. I, like all the girls and most of the boys in the class, smiled at this description—at how the women tolerated Leonard, despite his incompetence. But my smile felt a little mechanical. Why were the women always in the kitchen, and what was it that Leonard had forfeited by being with them? Why was he a writer, and they weren’t, when they cared about the same things? Why wasn’t he better at cooking? Why was there something exciting about the brutishness of the men who only talked about sports and money?