Rumaan Alam

Entitlement

Lindsay

She had never understood that what she most craved was erasure. What a joy to no longer be a person, with her stupid needs, her small problems, her body that required a trip to the bathroom. Now, she was just a task. Smile, soothe, serve. If anyone who knew her saw her, she did not see them seeing her. She was a new woman at last, after all these weeks of trying to be one. She did not exist. That, it turned out, was all she had ever wanted.

She wanted safety in a mad world. She wanted what people most wanted and was the thing that rich people hoarded: not money, but the grace of God and the universe, a way to be in the world and enjoy it. She wanted selfhood.

The people who are obsessed with money aren’t the rich who have it or the poor who don’t. They’re us. They’re the big middle, it’s all the rest of us, because we know what money can do. We know how we’ll never get our hands on it, but we know it could make us free.”

“I’m thirty-three.” A personal question but one she didn’t mind answering. Her mother had always crowed about her own age, never hesitated to pronounce it: forty-three, fifty-one, sixty-two. To be anything but proud of living however long you made it was empty vanity, one of men’s tools for keeping women in check.

Entitlement

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