Laura’s life is the life that Samantha wants. It’s not an ostentatious life—the house is modest compared to the luxury monster that the Prices live in; it’s just a one-floor, five-room job (kitchen, dining, living, bedroom, study/office, plus bath)—but it has things like furniture, real furniture, furniture that’s kind of nice, not the secondhand junk that populates the dorm rooms she’s used to. No sagging floral-print armchairs for Laura. No sofas that smell like cigarettes and bongwater. Not a purloined milkcrate or cinderblock in sight. Laura doesn’t have that stalky 20-buck department-store screw-together halogen lamp that Samantha calls the “Generation X light.” You open up Laura’s refrigerator and there’s actually food in there, and not only food but also amenities like salad dressing and Dijon mustard, not just a half-empty jar of pickles and a carton of rotting takeout. There’s an unopened bottle of wine on top of the refrigerator, coffee beans in the freezer. It’s a kind of mild abundance that seems achievable and reasonable to Samantha. She thinks that if the world was closer to the way she wanted it to be, this lifestyle would be the common denominator for everyone. The government should just provide at least this much for everyone. It’s not too much. She can see that there have been concessions made. There’s extra virgin olive oil imported from Italy in the cabinet but there’s also Thriftway generic flour and sugar. Laura even goes with the generic peanut butter.
Samantha recognizes that to get here she needs a plan. She calculates how much money she would need to take on this lifestyle—she guesses somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 a year—and she starts to think about how she could get that much money.
She won’t make it in retail. God knows she won’t make it going back to the movie theater dressed in that fucking monkey suit. Corporations are out. She’s not going to drone in someone else’s hive, getting carpal tunnel and sick building disease and that peculiar maggoty paleness that people who toil their daylight hours away under fluorescent lights seem to get. She doesn’t want to just help generate capital for some financial abstraction, even if it would kick enough back to her to enable her to line her nest in the way she wanted.