Super in the City by Daphne Uviller Read Free Book Online

about finance, which, apparently, improved everyone’s bottom line. But after one woman filed a suit against her employers for hiring a consultant with what she considered an offensive name, MWP was officially born and its lengthier predecessor was shredded, deleted, rerecorded. When all else failed between us, I could talk to Mom in numbers.
    The real reason I ditched Baltimore? It wasn’t because medicine was not exciting. I mean, it wasn’t. Luka Kovac was not berating me in the ER while he intubated a crash victim and demanded a milligram of epi. And Dr. Carter, that trust-fund hottie, was nowhere to be found. Instead, Professor Baumbach was sending us off to learn the modified Duke’s staging system for colon cancer. I could have tolerated all of it, persevered, andbecome a decent physician. But as I paged through
Harrison’s
all I could think about was every other door I was shutting.
    I would never design parks. Never defend a wronged soul in a courtroom. Never end homelessness. Never create video games. Never win an Oscar for cinematography. Never direct a Broadway play. Never be the drummer in a girl band.
    In college, I would often fall prey to homework paralysis: if I were to start working on one paper, it meant there were three others I wasn’t attending to. To pick a profession was to let go of twenty others.
    I had never yet let down Bella and Ollie Zuckerman. That was my brother’s job. Gideon had been born with a mutant Ashkenazi gene: he didn’t care about disappointing our parents. He was working in a film- editing lab in Colorado, which is to say he was ski- bumming. The “lab” was a friend’s basement in Steamboat Springs and the film was about a snow-boarder. He was in his third year of “editing” and showed no signs of returning east or of pursuing a graduate degree. (Even
he
hadn’t had the cojones to turn his back on a B.A.)
    My folks took the news pretty well. I think what did it, what most definitely contributed to their not falling over dead, was the cowardly, impulsive coda to my monologue that went something like this: “So I’m applying to law school!”
    As a deflection method, it was brilliant. Even if my mother had wanted to say boo, my father was instantly over the moon—and once he’s in orbit, no one can bring him back. He’s the guy who put Tommy “The Manhole” Sanchez away for life in a case that began with a traffic ticket and ultimately busted up a fifty- million- dollar-a- year cocaine ring that served snorters from Bogotá to Brooklyn. My dad loves the law. He cherishes it. He venerates it. To have one of his kids follow in his footsteps, so long as we didn’t go the corporate route, was for him to die a happy man.
    “Let’s see how you do on the LSAT,” said my mother.
    “You could work in my bureau next summer!” said my father.
    Applying to graduate school is a gratifying mini career unto itself. First, there is the fresh breath of prioritizing: your vocabulary must be expanded, your reading comprehension practiced, the logic puzzles mastered. (“Construct a family portrait in an oval album with these restrictions: Aunt Minnie can’t be next to Gladys or Grandma Eudora. Teddy can’t be next to Rita, but must be next to Minnie.” How this is a reliable indicator of whether you can ably carry out justice remains a great mystery, especially to convicts.)
    Once the test is over, you vegetate guiltlessly for a few days. And once the scores come, well, you’ve got the whole application process and its attendant fantasy life to enjoy. Will you be moving to California? The Southwest? Uptown? If you go to St. Louis and your future husband is at Michigan, how will you ever meet him?
    So I went to Così Café every day and sat beside the screenwriters who were afraid of Doma Café, and the New School discussion groups who couldn’t afford French Roast, and the salesmen who wished they were at an IHOP. I studied my Kaplan books under the