Ancient Rome
By Kyle McCarthy, first published in American Short Fiction
A young woman tutors a rich thirteen-year-old girl, and their sessions together prompt the woman to reflect on her less-privileged teenage years and how she ended up with the job she has.
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Plot Summary
A woman tutors a rich thirteen-year-old girl named Isabel Shear. She walks into Isabel's apartment, which has multiple stories, to Isabel's very own tiny office. The woman thinks about how she lives in a studio apartment and did not even know that apartments could have multiple floors. She has been called to help Isabel write a paper for her preparatory school, with a prompt which requires students to consider ancient Roman domesticity in women of the upper class and working classes as well as that of slaves. Isabel finds the sections on the upper and working classes easy enough, but she does not understand how slaves can have a sense of domesticity because they do not have homes. The woman thinks about how she herself serves this thirteen-year-old girl and notes that Isabel is not gracious to the housekeepers that she has in her home. The woman explains how she became a tutor, especially considering that she did not do that well on her SATs. When she was sixteen, the woman wrote a play about Adam and Eve in which Eve murders Adam, and then travels through time to help a heroin addict recover. She reflects on how this was the perfect narrative for second-wave feminists, which caused her play to not only win various awards but also for it to be put on as a show. The women tells Isabel and her other clients that she got into Harvard for undergrad because she liked to write. Isabel calls her tutor "angular," to mean that she is not well-rounded, and the woman reflects on Isabel's privileged childhood, how she is a glamorous world-traveled young teenager who gets headshots done and has souvenirs from all around the world. She thinks that Isabel is one of those thirteen-year-olds who wishes she was seventeen, but she herself wished that she could go back to ten at that age (and still thinks she would like to be ten again). The woman then reflects on the actresses in her play, one of whom was a Black woman. She considers how her play was all about the plight of being a woman, but that she had never experienced much oppression beyond her womanhood. She helps Isabel with her next assignment, which is about the Sermon on the Mount, and Isabel compares Jesus's fame to Beyonce. The woman thinks about the first time she had sex when she was sixteen, how she and her boyfriend laughed through it all, and how Isabel would only see the glamor in sex, not the humor. The Sermon on the Mount session is their last together, because Isabel's mother lets the woman go when Isabel receives a B+ on her ancient Rome paper. The woman considers what it means to be a feminist and realizes that she does not actually know Isabel.