the difference is all the difference

She isn’t a smart Midwestern woman. Those are the best, he thinks. They’re not prudish, because they’ve seen their drunk uncles’ dicks, but they’re still a little modest. They tend to brandish their sexuality less than the ones on the East Coast, who use it as a currency, a stepping stone to the corporate ladder or a vault into the splendors of the marriage bed, whose furnishings are discarded expensive robes and blouses. Midwestern girls just like to fuck, because they know they shouldn’t be ashamed. East Coast girls bite it down to get what they want, and for that they are brave.

This girl isn’t East Coast, either. She’s a dumbshit Midwestern girl, the kind who thinks they know everything for the cost of nothing. She struts mightily, and most of the girls she spends time with are impressed with her bravado, and can’t think to say anything about how full of shit she is. It’s only when she gets too big for her strained sweatpants that the girls think it isn’t right and tell her so, and then she’s nothing, just a small deflated version of her old fat self. Without her friends there to agree with her, she has nothing but herself. When that happens, she’s faced with two options: either scurrying away and finding another group to infect with her substance-less sputum, or sucking up her pride for the moment when they’ll take her back, and then slowly ingratiating herself on them again, slowly gaining confidence, slowly talking shit.

This is one of her favorite stories: “So I says to her, I says, ‘Dawn, that’s bullshit. Lois gets away with doing half the work of the rest of us, all because she’s on slight disability. And that’s bullshit too. Everyone knows Lois only got it because her husband’s on the board decides those things.”

She’s so pissed off and drunk she’s forgetting every second breath, and the words come out as gasping. “This job has done its toll on my body just as much as it has on hers. I told her, ‘Dawn, I’m getting fucked on my insurance, and my body—lifting these bodies off and onto hospital beds—it’s all a bunch of bullshit.’”

So Dawn says to her she’d better back down or she’s going to get fired, and Jennifer hauls back and slaps her in her face.

No. She doesn’t. She really would have liked to. That’s what she says when her friends ask, “Did you really?” Jennifer sometimes mixes up the facts and their supplements, those things she would have rather done than listened and not done shit.

She’s proud of the number of citations she’s gotten. Otherwise, she wouldn’t talk about them so much. When she does (and it’s almost everyday), there’s that dignified and heated tone, the words tumbling out too fast to be anything but self-righteous, and the love she has for her foolish self is most apparent when she talks about her butting heads with her superiors.