A long-ago December I graduated from college a semester late, and my college friends had left town for real jobs. None of them had known me well, all of them acquainted with the fraction of my life that had intersected with the fraction of theirs – maybe a class we’d once took or an apartment we’d once shared. I began attracting the attention of women old enough to be my mother, women whose maternal instincts no longer had utility because their grown children lived far away or the relationship turned grievous. 

I had cobbled-together full-time employment and an Incomplete in Beginning Swimming, having postponed taking classes in Phys Ed until my final semester, when I had 20 credits, including two in Relaxation, in which I earned a C, and two in Beginning Swimming, which I’d stopped attending. I’d floated the first day while the professor described course goals, then fixed his eyes on me and said that anyone who already knew how had to switch to Advanced now. I obediently sank. Late in the semester, bored by my excuse – a nearly Victorian account of toiling for money on the wrong side of town, burning both ends of the candle, studying while spent – he cut a deal. He’d withhold my diploma until I spent X number of hours in the pool in January and February. 

On Monday nights, I got into chilly water with inexplicably cheerful people, bobbed for 90 minutes, then drove home in my warm coat, gloves, and boots, wet hair wrapped in a bath towel, my swimming-restitution a temporary annoyance. I had bigger problems.

I discussed them with my neighbor, Bea. 

I’d first introduced myself, waving from my sidewalk to hers, acting warm yet unworldly, so she wouldn’t worry about a college-age neighbor who might make her life harder with disdain or wild parties. She had a sweet face and wore cardigans over flowered dresses – what my grandmother wore, not my mother in her color-coordinated knit slacks and turtlenecks. My mother and Bea were in their forties. I was clueless, self-absorbed. I thought they’d stopped aspiring and, sidelined, observed life and remarked on it.

Bea agreed that the newspaper where I had two part-time jobs didn’t value my skill set. When I pressed for details about my skill set, she cast about, vague compliments, and I understood she meant only that she liked me, the way I admired her Catholic icons or new yarn for an afghan she was knitting. I told Bea I’d earned high praise in college from a professor other students feared, an old-style academic insisting on research, originally from Mississippi, who read Elizabethan sonnets with a Southern accent. 

Bea and her husband Mac were kind, so I believed them when they said the world won’t pay us to do what we want to do, and hobbies and love console us. Once, on the sidewalk, Mac put his hand on his heart – soulful eyes startling in his plain face – and said that love for Bea was his reason for working. Karl Marx’s four alienations, which I read in school, described the life stretching before me, though Marx, unlike Bea and Mac, said that workers distract themselves with eating, drinking, and fornicating, not with love and hobbies.

Alienation from the Mode of Production. Mac washed city vehicles after snow removal and trash pickup. Me, I’d beaten out journalism majors with my writing sample to get two jobs at one place. The internet didn’t exist yet and cable TV was new. Eau Claire Leader TeleCable was the local newspaper’s visionary-yet-not-quite-it idea of an electronic newspaper. Saturdays and Sundays, midnight until dawn, I pulled stories off the wire and condensed their content to the size of a TV screen. People had a minute to read a story before it was by another replaced by another while Easy Listening music played. 

That part of my job was unobjectionable. But four days a week, I pounded the pavement in Dress for Success outfits, skirted suits with blouses that had flowing bows, the female necktie, because career women were meant to look feminine-while-masculine but not feminist. I sold advertising spots that interrupted the Easy Listening, spots I wrote and produced, which is also why I beat out journalism majors. My voice, closer to tenor than alto, recorded well, and creative writing class had made the imitation of advertising easy: one-dimensional characters with faux-problems and faux-enthusiasm for touted solutions. 

Alienation from the Product. I wasn’t proud of my news stories because no one I’d met knew about the cable channel, and no one I knew heard my voice talking about hot sandwiches or snow tires in the midst of a prefab jingle. I also had sales accounts. How avariciously fast I got at sifting the persuadable client from the unpersuadable, the persuadable someone who’d borrowed money and hung out a shingle, someone who hoped to be paid for doing what he like. Clip Joint Barber, Jim’s Meats. Small business owners bought my advertising because it was cheap and they liked my heartfelt demeanor or, in quick time, the performance of this demeanor. Alienation from Self. I now hated myself.

Alienation from Society. The whole shebang was going under, as I could tell by gloom in our office suite. I called on an auto body shop and the owner praised the spot I’d produced, then said Eau Claire Leader TeleCable was a dumb idea and how about I replace his wife who was bookkeeper and cleaned the shop bathroom. With my weekends now free, I now went out to hear a band, Vern and the Roadhogs, and a biker asked me to dance. I demurred then danced with someone else. With a hurt expression on his face, he said, “You told me you didn’t like dancing.” Uneasy, I simulated friendliness with him, and, after he’d introduced them, with other bikers, his friends, now my friends. We didn’t know each other well, just the fraction of our lives that intersected over Vern and the Roadhogs. 

Debra Monroe, who went to college at UW-Eau Claire, is the author of new essay collection, It Takes a Worried Woman, also two story collections, two novels, and two memoirs. She is the editor of the anthology Contemporary Creative Nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in many venues, including Longreads, The Southern Review, The New York Times, and The American Scholar. Reprinted with permission of the author.