Olga’s Job
Olga runs a business working as a wedding planner. But not just any old wedding planner. Olga caters to a very specific and lucrative demographic: the super-rich of New York City. This may sound like a dream come true to some readers. But a little imagery can go a long way toward reversing the view that many people still retain that the super-rich are just like normal people:
“(The wedding of a rich person also had, at least for the workers involved, the looming possibility of litigation hovering in the near future. Not-rich people’s events had forgettable glitches. Gaffes to the ultra-wealthy were unforgivable grievances that only the courts could remedy. A recent tale of a florist in fiscal ruin because she substituted an Ecuadorian rose for an English one after her shipment was stuck in customs had struck a nerve. Everyone, from the delivery guy to the wedding officiant, was on their toes.)”
Hurricane Maria
Significant to the story is the real-life historical natural disaster of 2017 when Puerto Rico was devastated by a direct hit from Hurricane Maria. The damage inflicted upon the island is only part of that significance—the other being the lackluster response from the Trump administration—but it is hurricane itself which provides for visceral use of imagery:
“People, either unable to believe their own eyes or certain that later they would be doubted, were posting videos of the storm’s fury. In one, a woman in Utuado screamed as Maria ripped the roof off her home, in the background the wind knocking the crowns off her royal palms. In another, a family in Humacao cowered together in a bathtub while Maria, with the ferocity of a vengeful lover, pounded their glass patio door determined to make her way in, indifferent to the shattered glass eventually left in her wake.”
A Place for Dick
Olga has a strange sexual relationship with a guy named Dick. He has a place in the Hamptons that is not really a home, but the kind of impulse purchase rich guys make after a divorce:
“It was a lavish bachelor pad, with a game room and movie theater in the basement, and glass walls that looked out on the infinity pool and the ocean just beyond. The kitchen was comically masculine. Walls of dark gray invisible cabinets, a massive wine fridge, and a marble countertop…It was a `sexy’ house, in the way that pornography is sexy—it screamed the most basic desires a man has while seeming utterly ignorant to how and what might give a woman pleasure.”
Brooklyn Before Gentrification
Olga and her brother the Congressman grew up in Brooklyn. The neighborhood has undergone significant alterations since then as part of the gentrifying of Brooklyn that marks the borough’s 21st century history. A little background description of what things used to be like is provided via imagery:
“If Park Slope had a `scene,' Fifth Avenue would be it, as it was clustered with restaurants, sports bars, and lounges. Bay Ridge, home to Saturday Night Fever, long provided the alternative to schlepping to Manhattan for some nighttime fun. But for generations, if you drove through the Polish stretch, which began at Eighteenth Street, and Sunset Park itself, you would not see a bar on Fifth Avenue until you hit Feeney’s Pub on Sixty-second Street. Dives peppered Third and Fourth avenues, serving whatever workers remained at Bush Terminal and catering to men hooker-shopping under the BQE, but the Polish and the Puerto Ricans had happily restricted their commerce to the family-friendly variety.”
