You Might as Well Live Dacia Maraini (bio) Translation from the Italian Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Abigail Keenan on Unsplash [End Page 10] Click for larger view View full resolution A young woman with two degrees and no job hits the streets of Palermo looking for work with only a Dorothy Parker poem to sustain her. Ratty slippers, disheveled hair, puffy eyes, Ramona leafs through the newspaper that a kind hand slid under her door. At the kitchen table, a cup of coffee with milk and a piece of toast sit in front of her. Her gaze falls upon the picture of an emaciated little boy with flies clustering at the corners of his mouth. Her stomach contracts: he's just a child and he already looks like an old man. His forehead is covered with wrinkles. The wrinkles of hunger, Ramona says to herself, as she pensively gazes at this heart-wrenching image. Here's someone who's more desperate than I am. Is it pity she feels? Of course it is, but she realizes that her commiseration has quickly slipped from the child to her own self: thirty-two years old, fatherless, dual-degree magna cum laude, and jobless. Up until now she has lived off her mother's pension, but with the introduction of the euro it's lost half its purchasing power. She had to leave the tiny apartment near the university, which afforded her some degree of independence, and move back to her childhood home, where she sleeps on a couch in the dinette because her mother has rented out her room to a student. Ramona has been getting up at seven for months now to go job hunting, but she's found absolutely nothing. If she didn't have the heated dinette to sleep in, if she couldn't take advantage of whatever little groceries her mother shares with her, what would she do? It's been a year since she's bought a pair of shoes: both the blue flats and the black heels to go out at night are beat up and scuffed. I'll have them fixed, she promises herself, even though she doesn't know where. She's never seen a shoe repair shop in the densely populated Zisa neighborhood where she lives. Do they even still exist? Ramona starts leafing through the paper again, pausing distractedly at the center spread. A half-naked woman is featured in a beer ad. For a moment her mind, still sleepy, lingers groggily, searching for the connection between the beer and the suggestively undressed woman, but she can't find it. Finally, here is the classifieds page. "Shampoo assistant for hair salon wanted." Red checkmark. Why not? Further below there's an ad for a delivery boy from a bakery. But could a delivery girl also apply, or not? Checkmark on that one too. "Bricklayer wanted," "housekeeper wanted," "model for the new line of Comfort and Seduction swimsuits wanted," checkmark or not? A recent grotesque experience at a modeling audition for a Candy panties ad comes to her mind. She found herself trapped in a pink parlor with only a pair of cherry-red panties on while a bald, paunchy, self-styled director instructed her to bend over, lift her leg, push out her chest. Meanwhile, a mustachioed photographer, squatting on the floor, was wielding a large camera that flashed and sounded like a spark-ignition engine. The director forced her to assume increasingly demeaning postures and she complied, albeit reluctantly, hoping it would soon be over and she'd walk out with a little money in her pocket. But it got worse. The bald, paunchy director asked her to take off her panties "to take the shoot to the next level," and as she mumbled that was not part of the deal, she found him beside her on the loveseat undoing his pants. In the meantime the photographer with the bushy moustache kept shooting. At that point she had fled the scene swearing. [End Page 11] Click for larger view View full resolution She finished dressing as she ran down the stairs. Nope, no checkmark. She doesn...