She could not stop sweating.
It started on the train to the interview — a dampness in the palms that she attributed to nerves and wiped on her skirt, — new, black, bought to look like a woman who did not sweat on trains.
By the time she reached the lobby the sweat had migrated. It was on her upper lip, which she blotted with a tissue in the elevator. It was on the back of her neck, which she could feel trickling into the collar of her blouse — the white blouse, the one she had ironed at 6 a.m. while the coffee machine screamed and her roommate slept and the apartment smelled of burnt toast and the particular desperation of a woman who has been unemployed for four months and is wearing her last clean blouse to an interview for a job she does not want but cannot afford not to want.
The interviewer was a man whose name she would later learn was Jorge, and who had once been exactly where she was — sweating in a borrowed suit, in a room that smelled of other people's confidence — and who smiled the way dentists smile: professionally, with an awareness of your discomfort that he was trained to acknowledge but not address. He asked her about her experience. She answered. He asked about her strengths. She answered. He asked where she saw herself in five years and she opened her mouth and a drop of sweat fell from her chin onto the desk between them.
They both looked at it.
It sat on the polished wood like a small, transparent confession. Everything she had been hiding — the four months, the burnt toast, the last clean blouse, the fact that she had cried in the bathroom of the train station before coming here and had fixed her mascara with spit and her finger and had told herself, in the mirror, "you are a professional" — was in that drop.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm — "
"Nervous," he said.
"Ill," she said. Because she was. She was running a fever she had not noticed because the fever felt like fear and fear felt like ambition and ambition felt like the specific vibration of a body that has been running on caffeine and dread for sixteen weeks and has finally, in a room with grey carpet and fluorescent lights, stopped pretending it is well.
She stood up. She meant to excuse herself. Instead she vomited into the wastebasket beside his desk. It was quick, involuntary, and thorough — the body's way of submitting a resignation the mind had not yet drafted.
The interviewer handed her a tissue. Then another. Then the box.
"My wife," he said, after a pause that contained his entire assessment of the situation, "threw up at our wedding. During the vows. On the priest's shoes. We've been married twenty-two years."
She wiped her mouth. She was shaking. The fever was real — 38.4, she would learn later, at a pharmacy where the pharmacist would sell her paracetamol and say "you should be in bed" and she would say "I was in an interview" and the pharmacist would look at her the way pharmacists look at people who have mistaken survival for ambition and ambition for survival.
She did not get the job. She got something else. The interviewer emailed three days later: not a job offer. A recommendation — to a friend, at a different company, for a different role. The email said: "I'm sending you someone who showed up sick and stayed honest."
She started the new job on a Monday. She did not wear the black skirt. She wore trousers, and a blouse that was not white, and shoes that did not pretend to be comfortable. She sweated on the train. She did not wipe it off.