35 pages • 1 hour read
Martyna MajokCost of Living
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Loneliness on the Margins
All the characters endure isolation due to the ways that they are marginalized and made invisible in society. Each guards the parts of themselves that are personal and sensitive, unwilling to burden others with their pain, even as they long desperately for someone to see them. The play starts with Eddie, who has come out to Brooklyn from New Jersey on the off-chance that he might make a connection with the stranger who texted him. He ends up talking to another stranger, who is invisible, creating the effect that Eddie is visibly alone.
As a long-distance truck driver, Eddie had been accustomed to isolation, but Ani was there to remind him that he wasn’t truly alone. During his separation from Ani, Eddie had a girlfriend who moved into his apartment quickly, presumably, at least in part, to stave off loneliness. With both Ani and the unnamed girlfriend gone, Eddie is alone. He leaves the lights on in his apartment at all times to announce that he still exists. Even if no one sees him, Eddie won’t simply fade away in the dark.
John lives on the margins; his disability has othered him. Jess teases him for never leaving the apartment. This suggests that he has isolated himself because he is afraid of judgment, a subject he mentions multiple times. John is uncomfortable with his own body, and he expects others to be uncomfortable as well, including Jess. When he describes what his disability feels like, John tells Jess that no one ever asks him about it. When John has a date, he speaks about it as if it is nothing short of miraculous. He had considered hiring prostitutes in the past because he didn’t think anyone would ever see beyond his disability.
He hired Jess as someone who would be less clinical and more personable than a professional nurse or caregiver who would simply treat the needs of his disability. He is essentially hiring Jess for companionship, just as he would hire a sex worker for sexual gratification. Jess sees John as a person and develops romantic feelings for him. But in the end, John can’t see Jess as a person other than his employee.
Jess is the daughter of an immigrant. She is a homeless service worker and works so many jobs that she has no semblance of a social life. She has no family in the country. Although she has been sleeping in her car for weeks, Eddie is the first person who sees her distress.
Eddie has recently become attuned to vulnerability. After her accident, Ani was relegated to the margins of society, forgotten and alone aside from the attention of medical professionals. To Ani, Eddie is the face of that forgetting. Although they were separated at time, they remained married. Ani remains tied to Eddie because she needs his insurance. Ani is lonely, but she has also come to prefer the company of nurses who don’t really see her; she would rather live in her imagination than her disabled body. At first, Eddie offers a constant stream of holistic therapies as if he can “save” her, but Ani makes it clear that she can’t be “saved,” that her disabled body is her new reality. Eddie learns to see Ani again as the woman he loves, but as soon as he takes his eyes off her to take a drive for work, she disappears.
The Intersection of Disability and Privilege
John and Ani are the two characters in the play with disabilities. The play juxtaposes them to show the way privilege and disability intersect, although the two never meet or even know of each other’s existence. John and Ani have many physical similarities. Ani has quadriplegia, which means limited to no use of her arms and legs. John has cerebral palsy, which manifests in little to no control over the motor function of his body, including his limbs. Both need a caretaker to perform daily bathing and bodily maintenance. They are fully consciousness of their disabilities and care that feels like a surrender of adult agency. Both characters experience marginalization that Eddie and Jess don’t quite understand.
The divergences between John and Ani demonstrate that privilege and marginalization are complex. Privilege and oppression intersect and compound each other. John is wealthy. He has therefore likely had, throughout his life, the best medical care that money could buy. He has been highly educated at exclusive, expensive schools, which not only gives him financial advantages, but enriches his intelligence. John can choose the conditions he lives in, and even choose the person he hires to take care of him. His wealth, education, and familial connections significantly improve his safety and quality of life.
In contrast, Ani is poor. She relies on Eddie’s insurance, which means that she has little choice in the help and treatment she accepts. Because she is a woman, she is also more vulnerable to sexual assault. Even with Eddie’s well-meaning care, it’s apparent through the ease with which he touches her sexually—unintentionally, without her knowledge—that the disadvantages of being poor and a woman compound and multiply when they intersect with disability.
Privilege in one area doesn’t negate lack of privilege in another. John and Ani both need another person to bathe them, which requires allowing another person to see and touch their bodies in ways that can feel intimate and violating. On Jess’s first day of work, John is in the vulnerable position of letting a woman who is essentially a stranger take a razor to his face to shave him. Jess may have privilege because she’s able-bodied and educated, but she is also poor, female, and a first-generation citizen, which exposes her to racism and the misogyny she experiences while bartending.
Living in her car makes Jess vulnerable to the violence of passersby and exposes her to the elements. When Eddie sees her, she’s in danger of freezing to death. The play demonstrates that social oppression and subjugation takes many different forms, that there is often a disconnect in which someone who experiences one type of marginalization has trouble imagining or empathizing with someone else who experiences another. John understands vulnerability, but he can only see Jess as a threat to his financial privilege rather than understanding that she is equally vulnerable.
Cost of Living
The phrase “cost of living” refers to the level of income or financial resources that a person needs to maintain a particular quality of life within a specific area or location. The literal cost of staying alive is high in the United States. In many places, particularly in metropolitan areas, the workers whose labor sustains the city are forced to live on the outskirts and commute from cheaper housing. John is rich and lives in the costly area around Princeton. He doesn’t consider that Jess is unable to do the same.
Eddie’s work, when he was employed, required him to travel long distances from home for extended periods of time. One of the common benefits of financial privilege is the ability to work near home. Time at home creates the opportunity for increased leisure time, while the addition of a tedious commute—on top of long working hours—is detrimental to achieving a healthy amount of rest and threatens familial relationships. Eddie lost time with Ani that turned out to be limited, and Jess has isolated herself completely.
When John learns that Jess does nothing but work and sleep, he says that he doesn’t consider that to really be living. For Jess, who has no home, living has devolved into grasping for survival. Ani and Jess are both acutely aware of how prohibitively expensive it is to obtain medical care in the United States. For Jess’s mother, the cost of living included the healthcare needed for her illness; she had to return to her home country to afford it and remain alive. Thus, cost of living required her to separate from her daughter completely. Based on Jess’s phone message to her, they didn’t just lose time together: Jess permanently lost the years in which her mother was lucid and mentally present.
Unlike many people in the United States, John’s health has not been compromised due to finances. John seeks a connection from Jess to ease his loneliness. He sees their relationship as a paid service the way he sees sex work as commodity to purchase and ease his physical loneliness.
The costs of living beyond survival are not always measured in money. None of the characters feel comfortable burdening others with their emotional needs without compensating them. Eddie talks to a stranger about his issues, but he keeps his stories as light as possible and when he doesn’t, he pays for companionship by buying drinks. The characters reach out to each other, but the emotional cost of allowing connection is the risk of being hurt.
John’s attempts to connect with Jess alternate between entitlement and genuine kindness. When Jess allows herself to be emotionally vulnerable with John, the cost is high. She is not only humiliated and hurt, but she bears the financial cost of losing a job that she badly needs. In the end, Jess and Eddie both take a risk in trusting each other, each putting forth their own meager offerings in exchange for quality of life.
