Sympathy For The Devil, i.e. Lydia Bennet And Amy March: A Friday Chat

Ester: Happy Friday! It smells like hot dogs outside my window which isn’t a bad thing, I guess. Very seasonally appropriate.

Nicole: It smells like coffee in my apartment, which is also seasonally appropriate, if you consider coffee an “every season smell.”

Ester: And most people do! So what are we going to talk about today: our histories as depicted by our Amazon purchases, or whether we are in the top 1% of Millennial earners as per Fusion?

Nicole: Oh, I’m pretty sure we can do both. I dumped my estimated $60,000 income into Fusion and it said I was in the top 10 percent of Millennial earners. Which feels really weird. That means 90 percent of Millennial earners make less than $60K/year.

It also showed me a cartoon image of an apartment complex with a pool labeled “Livin’ Large,” which … nope. Livin’ small. Livin’ super small.

Did you try the Fusion thing?

Ester: I only glanced at it, since I have no idea what my annual earnings are right now. Well under $60K, although more if you factor in what my spouse makes. (The only way I can get away with making under $60K is because I have a working spouse.) I take it they’re not interested in household income? It seem like a metric for individuals.

Nicole: Well, what definition of “Millennial” are they using? Is it, like, the one that includes people through age 35, or the one that still assumes all Millennials are recent college grads or whatever? (Which by the way is not exclusive; people graduate from college at all ages.)

Ester: Yeah, define your terms, Fusion! Maybe no one’s a Millennial anyone once s/he gets married. Maybe Millennial is a catch-all term for an unmarried, out of college, young-ish person.

Nicole: Okay, they do say it’s for people aged 18–34, but don’t specify marriage status.

Ester: OK then. By that definition, I’m a Millennial. I’d long ago resigned myself to being one anyway. Still lucky to be married, though. It’s been an unalloyed good for my financial situation; I recommend marriage highly as a practical matter.

Nicole: Well, don’t read this week’s Modern Love, then, it’s all about how marriage means you have to pay for two people’s mistakes instead of just one — and the writer means paying cash money, too.

Ester: Ooh, excited to read. So often ML is either overbaked or half-baked; I’ve rarely encountered one I wanted to recommend to anyone.

Nicole: Ha ha ha ha every time I’ve had a relationship end, for the past decade, I’ve thought about writing a Modern Love essay about how love is hard and breakups are awful. It’s as reflexive as grabbing the ice cream.

Ester: Breakups are awful. Somehow though it’s uncommon to read something striking and thought-provoking about the end of a relationship — I think that’s partly why I was so struck by the “Prime of Life: The Story of My 20s, as Told in Amazon Purchases” piece. So much of the story is about heartbreak and romantic disappointment, but it’s told through the mundanity of an online order history! It was perfect.

Nicole: I loved that piece. When she got to the part about how she bought Marry Him: The Case for Settling For Mr. Good Enough, I was like “I read that book too! At a similar period in my life!” Except I got mine at the library.

Did you check out your own Amazon purchase history afterwards? I totally did.

Ester: I haven’t yet, though I want to! Maybe I will right now. I mean, for the last years, it’s been boring baby-related shit; that’s not fun. But yeah, I too felt a jolt of pure sympathy for the author when she mentioned buying that particular self-help book. I was so annoyed with the coverage of it when it came out! Like sure, there are all these marriageable men just hanging around hoping against hope some too-picky woman will settle for them. Like our fundamental romantic problem isn’t Apatovian man-children but ladies who don’t want to get married enough. ??!?!?!? I mean, have you seen Pinterest?

Nicole: Ester, I am literally LOL-ing. If those ladies would only try harder at getting married! Pull themselves up by their strappy heels!

Ester: Hahahaha yeah! So what treasures did you unearth in your Amazon history? I will go back and look at mine while you enumerate.

Nicole: Most of the physical items I’ve purchased on Amazon have been holiday gifts for other people. Amazon doesn’t have a super-great clothing selection (and I say this knowing it has an enormous clothing selection), so I usually buy online from Old Navy or Ann Taylor Loft or somewhere else where I know my size.

But the super-telling part of my Amazon purchase history is in the digital media section, and you have to go to a different tab for that. It is essentially a pastel pile of movie musicals and costume dramas.

Also, because this is the most ridiculous anecdote I have to share: I recently got Fiddler on the Roof from Amazon because when you’re doing FitBit and want to get 10,000 steps, the movie version of “Tradition” with the long violin solo at the end is pretty much exactly 1,000 steps if you do one step on each beat.

That might be the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever shared on The Billfold.

Ester: Oh my god. I love it. Did I ever tell you I was Tzeitel in Fiddler in middle school? I got to sing “Matchmaker.”

Nicole: So cool! Tzeitel is totally the best character. When I was a kid I wanted to be Hodel, but now I’m all “Have some agency, girl! Don’t run to Siberia with the first mansplainy dude who comes along!”

Ester: Me too! I wanted to be Hodel and had to get over it. It’s the age-old dialectic again: Beth or Jo, sweet or feisty.

Nicole: Team Amy. Because she has to deal with being talented but not being a genius.

Ester: Nicole. She is not talented. She is obnoxious. There is no Team Amy; take it back right now.

Nicole: Will not. Artistic Attempts is one of my favorite chapters in the book. Like, hard work doesn’t get Amy anywhere. And then she marries rich so whatevs?

Ester: Uggggghhhhhhhh no! Amy has no character. She burned Jo’s stories. She traded on being young and pretty and stupid about limes. Where’s your sense of loyalty?

Nicole: Ester, are you PULLING RECEIPTS on Amy March? You gotta focus on who she is at the end of the book, not who she is at the beginning? (Okay, I put an accidental question mark at the end of that sentence and decided not to edit it out. Maybe this is a question and not a declarative statement.)

Ester: Nope, denied. She is a terrible child who grows up into an unredeemable human being and I am SURPRISED AT YOU Nicole Dieker. Who else do you identify with from children’s literature that you’re not supposed to?

Nicole: Well, I was always in support of Lydia Bennet’s decision to get laid.

Ester: I’m laughing really hard right now. I mean, I don’t want to slut-shame Lydia or anything, but she does have execrable taste in men. Like, sure, get it, LB, but maybe pick a guy who doesn’t have to blackmail your family to pay off his debts?

Nicole: No, no, he totally blackmails Darcy’s family. Wickham has no beef with the Bennets. It’s all good.

Ester: NOPE. If Darcy hadn’t stepped in, Daddy Bennet would have had to pay for everything (with his BIL’s help), and it might have ruined him. Darcy riding in on his white horse made of inherited wealth was the merest fluke.

Nicole: Have you seen Bride and Prejudice where Georgiana Darcy is played by li’l Rory Gilmore and it’s implied that Wickham got her pregnant and then Georgiana had an abortion?

Ester: Whoa. No, but that makes sense to me. After all, in Sense and Sensibility, that rake Willoughby does get an unfortunate minor character pregnant and abandons her. Austen doesn’t like the letter W, does she?

We seem to have strayed from the point. Or perhaps the point has strayed from us.

Nicole: I think the point is: movie musicals. Watch them all.

Ester: And also my Amazon history is super boring. Sorry to disappoint. It’s all sports bras and presents for family members. If I need an interesting framing device for my next piece of memoir, I’ll have to try something very different. “The Jo Who Wanted to Be Beth: The Ester Bloom Story.”

Nicole: I’d read it. From the library.

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