Free How Happy to Be by Katrina Onstad

NABLATS (Network Alliance of Brown Lesbians and Transgendered Students) mailbox at the student union building, and one day, in the middle of a battle cry on the quad, Sunera surveyed the smiling, supportive white faces: “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to –.” She stopped. Everyone was used to it, including Sunera.
    She left the stage, and read some more, lazily taking the exams for law school to silence her parents. But she deferred all the acceptances (and there were only acceptances) and took one of the magazine jobs that were waiting for her after graduation. She worked at a women’s magazine, composing articles on tampons that kill and massages that save, and theopposite-of-women’s magazines (not men’s magazines, but magazines) courted her, even from south of the border. She considered leaving Canada. She considered it as she wrote her fifteenth piece on national identity, or Quebec sovereignty, or hockey moms. She considered it as she moved up the ranks from junior to associate to senior editor at the country’s only newsmagazine, where there were just two people above her on the masthead, each healthy and nostalgic for the Sixties and refusing to die.
    So she agreed to meetings in New York. On the thirty-fifth floor of a building so old that the black-and-white tiles at the entrance spelled the magazine’s name under her feet, she spent a long hour dazzling an editor with her comparisons between the immigrant experience in Canada and the immigrant experience in America, basing much of her argument on
An American Tail
, the Disney cartoon about an upwardly mobile Russian-American rodent family, the Mousekewitzes. But when she really imagined packing her bags, stepping onto the airplane with a ticket in her pocket, the clouds in the sky clustered to form her mother’s face: “All our hard work, Sunera! All our sacrifice and you leave us in our old age? Oh, the shame of it!”
    Luckily, her younger sister was selling leather pants out of a discount warehouse in Acton, so the parental rage was mostly pointed in that direction, leaving Sunera a little breathing room once she decided to stay. And somewhere in that space, she discovered that family dinners and work meetings were both improved by low-level substances, that their steady hum was just enough to calm the wake of thosetectonic shifting identities, provide some cohesion. But at the end of the day, when the magazines and talk shows ask, Why so single, fabulous girl? I think of how full Sunera must feel stomaching her family’s vacillation between smothering pride and sagging disappointment because all that she’s created can’t be babysat. I don’t think she’s got much left for the Steweys of the world.
    As she sits in the plastic cafeteria chair, talking about Stewey’s teeth, I’m filling out expense forms with false numbers, trying to get my fire-me thing back on track. In the past week, I’ve missed several meetings and sat on dozens of unreturned phone calls and yesterday I propped open the fire-escape doors, causing a four-storey evacuation.
    I fill in the form with six forty-dollar cab rides in two days. A receipt I found on the street for gumboots. A $200 restaurant tab (on the back, I write, “Lunch with Ethan Hawke”), which consists only of vodka and beer and of course took place last Saturday night at a stumbly table with Sunera and the rest.
    Sunera opens a small silver cigarette case filled with blue and pink pills, separates the pink from the blue, daintily pops one of each into her mouth.
    “Should I ask about this?” I say. “I’m asking about this.”
    “Mood evener-outers,” she says, marble-mouthed.
    “Prescriptive or street?”
    “Very prescriptive. You should meet my doctor. He deals exclusively with media whores. It’s like
Valley of the Dolls
in there, with laptops,” she says, smiling that fluttery smile of the recently ingesting. “Interested?”
    I’m a little disappointed that Sunera would engage