Break in Case of Emergency (25 page)

Jen stopped and sat back. Her lips were dry and her bladder was full and her head was full of ungulate children.

She pressed the delete key and watched the entry rewind on itself, first letter by letter, then word by word, then entire lines evaporating in one backward swipe. She made a mental note to ask LIFt's web developer to put character limits on TTC posts. She quit the browser, shut the laptop, and curled up on the couch without taking off her clothes, brushing her teeth, emptying her bladder, or switching off the lights. The dented tub of ice cream on the coffee table sagged and melted throughout what remained of the night. In the morning, the dried streak of ice cream had crusted over the back of Jen's hand. It looked like a blister, the remains of a burn that might not leave a scar.

Jen sat in her LIFt cubicle, spine straight, hands folded in front of her keyboard, eyes trained on her desk phone. She picked up the receiver, replaced it, and watched the phone some more. She broke off half an Animexa tablet and swallowed it dry, watching the phone. She picked up the receiver, dialed a number, replaced the receiver, and watched the phone some more. She walked to the vending machine, procured pretzels, ate the pretzels while watching the phone. She walked back to the vending machine, procured a diet soda, drank a diet soda while watching the phone.

Jen picked up the phone and dialed and chewed the edge of the mouthpiece as it rang.

“Hi, Dakota,” Jen heard herself saying. “I'm sorry to bother you—I'm realizing that we never settled on my fee for Mrs. Durbin's portrait, and I was hoping we could discuss it now?”

Dakota said nothing.

“I admit I should have brought this up before, and I understand that the prestige of this project and the honor of being asked to do it are generous payment in themselves?”

Dakota said nothing.

“And I'm so very grateful to Mrs. Durbin for the opportunity?”

Dakota said nothing.

“And really with all that in mind I would be happy with any fee you thought was appropriate and again I do apologize for not raising this earlier?”

Dakota said nothing. Bertha Mason laughed, then slipped both hands around Jen's neck to silence her.

“I will discuss this with Mrs. Durbin,” Dakota finally said. “In the meantime, could you send me your bank routing information?”

When Jen hung up the phone it immediately rang again.

“Hi, Jennifer. This is Shawna from Dr. Lee's office. We were expecting to see you during walk-in hours sometime last week. Just checking in to see that everything's all right?”

“Oh, yes,” Jen stammered. “I've been meaning to—I mean—but everything's fine.”

“We were hoping maybe—you'd had some good news on your own?” Shawna asked.

Daisy—it must have been Daisy—had pinned a photograph of a camel nuzzling a Komodo dragon to Jen's cubicle wall. Jen watched the camel and the dragon as a puddle of absurd despair spread inside her chest.

We were hoping

Jen wasn't even sure which one Shawna was. Nose-ring Shawna? Banana-clip Shawna? Shawna who had an expeditious rapport with the billing department? Or was that Sheila? Shana? It had never occurred to Jen that the generically pleasant people behind the henhouse desk had ever conceived of her in more than generically pleasant dimensions, certainly not to the extent that they could formulate expectations and desires on her behalf.

Good news

“Jennifer? Are you there?”

What is good news? Is a lack of good news equivalent to bad news? Is it good news if one doesn't actually spread the news? And what about last time? When good news turned into bad news? Wasn't the only way that bad news happened last time was because good news happened first? Doesn't good news—sometimes, maybe, last time yes—beget the worst news you could ever imagine?

Better no news

Say nothing

Thanks for nothing

“I'll keep you posted,” Jen said.

Above Jen's bathroom ceiling, a hollering child repeatedly body-slammed himself to the tile, as he was scheduled to do every morning between six-fifteen and six-forty-five a.m., as Jen sat on the edge of the tub staring at the test, then at the small pile of broken tiles and unidentified black ooze collecting where the edge of the tub met the floor, then at the test again. It never seemed very scientific. It looked like something out of the play doctor's kits her brothers had as kids—alongside the plastic stethoscope and cartoonishly oversized bandages, maybe they'd find a popsicle stick attached to a pen cap, Magic Markered in blue with a positive or negative sign.

Jen walked down the hall from the bathroom to the room for the hypothetical tiny future boarder, opening the door for the first time since the night of the LIFt party. Jim was curled in a sleeping bag atop the naked futon, his curved back to the door. Jen molded her body to the shape of his and pressed her face into the back of his neck.

“I'm sorry,” Jen said into Jim's hair.

“I'm sorry, too,” Jim said into the sleeping bag.

“The answer is yes again,” Jen said.

“I think I knew that,” Jim said.

“I think the answer has been yes again for a while,” Jen said, “and I ignored it.”

“I think I knew that,” Jim said.

“I shouldn't have,” Jen said. “I've drunk alcohol. I've ingested hundreds of milligrams of central-nervous-system stimulants. I've been on a dangerous boat. The boat was very bouncy. I got a sunburn. I was obliquely threatened with an antique machete.”

“It's okay,” Jim said. “Early on, it's okay. You can do pretty much anything. It's a locked box.”

“I want to forget,” Jen said.

“Yolk sac,” Jim said. “Hermetically sealed.”

“I want to forget,” Jen repeated. “Until we know for sure.”

“Okay,” Jim said.

“Until we know everything.”

“Okay,” Jim said. “We'll never know everything. But okay.”

They exchanged more apologies and affirmations, and rose to brush their teeth, and returned to the room.

Re: Contact Jen!

Not to sound like a stalker and I know this isn't quite your aesthetic. But what if I gave you some photos of my ex and you did a Dorian Gray–style portrait of him? Rotting. Syphilitic. A corpse stuffed in a crawl space.

Only I want it for my walk-in closet, like a “skeleton in the closet.” Like a dreamcatcher or a gargoyle, warding off harm and evil spirits. The scarier the better. Hope I'm not freaking you out!

Re: Contact Jen!

Hey Jennifer, it's Brian from
Politics + Psychology
magazine. We're doing a special issue that's a mash-up of history and contemporary psychology, where we'll try to answer the question “Who was the happiest President?” We thought you could revise iconic portraits of commanders-in-chief to happyfy them: G-Wash flashing those wooden chompers, Tommy Jeff saying “Cheese,” Honest Abe cracking a grin for once in his life! If the idea appeals to you, I'd love to discuss further…

Re: Contact Jen!

3 questions 1) Do you do famous/fictitious people 2) Do you do site-specific work 3) Are you at ease in the spiritual dimension??!!? For my kitchen backsplash I would like a grid of painted “head shots” of hearth goddesses through the ages, Hestia the Greek, Frigg of Norse mythology, Julia Child, Martha Stewart, et al. I want the portraits to have a kind of dark pagan/Gothic feel. Do you know about the tradition of Slavic animism?

The words began to bob and weave on whitecaps of teary lethargy, and Jen, perched atop a closed toilet lid in a bathroom stall at LIFt, set her phone down on the tissue dispenser and rubbed her eyelids with her thumb and forefinger. During low-traffic intervals in the ladies' room, Jen could eke out a micro-nap in relative privacy and comfort, with elbows on knees and head in hands and immediate access to at least two viable receptacles for the contents of her stomach. Jen had been hunched in this position for twenty hazy minutes or more, her nauseated trance unbroken by Petra's wheezing breast pump or slamming stall doors or Donna's chatty bangles or the stifled cries of a freshly humiliated intern.

The fatigue had returned just as the Animexa had to be withdrawn, of course, transforming Jen's brain into a sulfurous swamp, wisps of anesthetic steam rising and veiling the half-submerged trees and clotted vegetation, curling in yellowish plumes around her head, then fragmenting and reassembling in an illegible typography of acid-rain skywriting.

“Oh!” Jen blurted, the vowel bouncing against the stall walls and smacking her in the face as she stood up and scrabbled for the top of the door, clinging hard until the vertigo dissipated. She'd forgotten a mandatory all-hands meeting that had started a half-hour ago, a presentation based on LIFt-funded surveys demonstrating the negative psychological impacts of “emotional labor” on women. Jen pushed the stall door open, drank in the havoc in the mirror—the pink lab-rat eyes, the tetracycline-gray teeth, the tubercular pallor-and-flush—offered herself a queasy little salute, and pushed out the door onto an office floor denuded of people. The lack of their ebb and flow upped the volume on the
whhooooossshhhhh
and heightened the treble frequencies on Jen's general sense of irreality, but it was only when she reached the conference room that she knew she was hallucinating.

There, gesticulating before a fully staffed and stocked conference table in a sharply tailored three-piece suit, clean-shaven and bright-eyed, holding not a machete but a PowerPoint laser wand, was Baz Angler.

“What these surveys are telling us is that organic honesty is the only answer,” Baz was saying as Jen slipped through the door, the downward momentum of the closing statement in his voice. “It's a universal answer—everyone has access to organic honesty, no matter what stage of life. That's what's so empowering about it: There's no price tag or barrier to entry, no group you have to join. Everyone can benefit. I know I can. But nobody can benefit more from the organic-honesty concept than working moms!”

Baz Angler began tossing his pointer from palm to palm. Jen expected him at any moment to reveal its retractable blade.

“Let's be real for a moment. And don't think even a regular guy like me hasn't noticed. Society expects working moms to be happy, upbeat, positive, and uncritical at all times, in the workplace and at home and at all points in between,” Baz Angler was saying. “And if the inside matches the outside, more power to you. But women are carrying a burden heavier than the child in their belly or on their hip, heavier than the paperwork and baby bottles spilling out of their handbags, and that burden is the burden of
the lie.
”

A comic stock image appeared onscreen of a business-attired woman at a computer, looking down in dismay at her mouse mat to see her hand gripping not her mouse but a supine sippy cup.

“When you smile and don't mean it, that's a lie. When you swallow your frustration or your disappointment, that's a lie. And when the lie becomes the habit, that's the boulder on your back and the chip on your shoulder. The lie can bend your spine and pull your muscles and corrode your insides. The lie wants to infect you!”

He paused, licked his lips, breathed in and breathed out. Just for a second, Jen could espy the blade-wielding-homesteader Baz beneath the smooth corporate friend-of-a-good-cause Baz.

“We have to fight back,” Baz continued. “So let's stop lying to ourselves. Let's stop lying to each other. My God, let's stop lying to
our children,
above all. This is where you women have the edge on us men, because there's nothing like motherhood to make you honest. I'm no expert, but I've got a hunch that nobody ever told a lie in the throes of childbirth.”

“Ho, ho,” Karina said, as a discreetly pixelated image of a woman in active labor appeared onscreen.

“Motherhood—fatherhood, too, in its way, but especially motherhood—strips you down to your instincts and builds you back up again, and you're powerless to front and feint in the face of that love and that pain and that ultimate test of your endurance. That primal instinct—it can see right through you. Motherhood is labor enough, so stop taking on all this extra emotional labor. For women's sake, for men's sake, for children's sake. Let's stop trying to keep track of all these lies we've told. Let's set ourselves free.”

Baz Angler held the laser pointer in a benedictory spirit toward Leora. “Leora, what have I missed?” Baz shrugged and grinned in a confident performance of diffidence as he took his seat.

“Now,” Leora said from her seat, “this isn't opinion. This is all based on our own research, not to mention our own lived experience. We have the empathy gene. We have the nurturing gene. We have the gene of emotional openness. That's what makes us mothers, each and every one of us. Those are the essences of femininity, the roots and wellsprings of womanhood. Organic honesty helps us feel those roots and helps us draw from that wellspring. Organic honesty is an organic kindness that will break those chains that make us front and feint. Organic honesty will shatter that happy façade that becomes a prison. When you push down your true feelings, they rot and fester inside you, which can negatively impact not only your emotional health but your physical health, too.”

“Don't invite that kind of negative energy into your life!” Baz added. “Don't seal yourself up and sicken yourself inside a prison of lies. Organic honesty. It's up to us to live a
real life.
”

“Just let it all hang
out
!” Sunny said, widening out her eyes and wagging her head approvingly. “Ayy-men, brother. Finally, it's like”—Sunny exhaled hard—“such a load off!”

“These ideas and thoughts should shape everything the foundation does going forward,” Leora said. “They are the rock beneath our theory of change.”

“So thought-provoking, Baz, really,” Karina said. “We're so fortunate to have your perspective on this. And nice to hear these kinds of affirmations from a
man
for once, am I right, ladies?” Karina added, casting the rest of the room a roguish sidelong glance. The rest of the room tittered and cooed in abashed affirmation.

“My dear friend Baz and I have been talking about this concept of organic honesty for as long as we have known each other,” Leora said. “But one of the many reasons I called upon him now is that we were starting to feel a bit—a bit
sequestered.
”

“Haha, boys don't have cooties!” Sunny giggled. Baz was staring at his phone.

“It's
such
an interesting perspective,” Karina added. “I mean, we're out here living these truths every day, and—”

Leora was staring at her phone.

“We should open the floor for discussion,” Karina said. “What's on everyone's mind, gang?”

Whhooooossshhhhh

“Wonderful, Baz, just wonderful,” Leora said to her phone.

“Baz, looks like you got the first word, the middle word,
ay-
and the last word,” Sunny said, shaking her head in amazement.

“But aren't you—we—basically talking about overthrowing the social order?”

Jen, subsiding against the wall, was as surprised as anyone in the room to find herself speaking. She leveraged her shoulder blades to push herself off the wall and inadvertently flipped off all the overhead lights.

“There's a difference between honesty and disclosure,” Jen continued, one hand flapping behind her to switch the lights back on. “Just because I don't tell you everything I'm thinking at every second doesn't mean I'm lying to you. Privacy doesn't make you sick. I mean, Baz—”

“I remember you!” Baz exclaimed, fluorescent lights flickering on and off his face. “Julie!”

“Yes, it's me, Julie!” Jen said to the wall as she swatted at the light switches.

“Now
this,
” Baz said to the rest of the room, his eyes wide with secret-disclosing excitement, his arm fully extended to waggle two proprietary fingers toward Jen's back, “this is a woman who tells it to you straight. Julie here is a role model for the kind of organic honesty that we're proposing.”

“Such a role model she thinks she can just swan in and out whenever she feels like it,” Donna said, not quite under her breath.

“But wait,” Jen said. “If we were to do everything that you're proposing, Baz, could we even be sitting in this room with each other right now? We would kill each other!” Bertha Mason rattled weakly at the door, then retreated.

No one replied. Baz Angler's arm retracted in a dying fall. But she had begun, and she couldn't stop.

“Also, I'm wondering—kind of a more big-picture issue—when we say all these things about how women are more this and less that, even if we're praising women, isn't that kind of counterproductive?” Jen asked. “To say that women are categorically one thing or the other? Part of the whole point of ‘empowerment' or whatever we're going to call it—I know we're not on board with the word
feminism
as an institution—but the general idea is that women don't have to conform to prescribed roles. I mean, being empathetic and nurturing and emotionally open are great things, but I don't think a woman should beat herself up if those aren't her super-strongest qualities. Not every woman has to be a mother, you know?”

“You're misunderstanding the research,” Sunny broke in. “What we mean is that the maternal instinct is a
metaphor
for—”

“But even in saying ‘instinct' we're saying that motherliness is hard-wired into us,” Jen interrupted. “Right? I don't think a tough, unmotherly woman is necessarily acting like a man or compensating for being a woman—maybe she's just a tough woman. I'm rambling, but it's just—feminism, sorry, I mean,
empowerment
isn't about backing ourselves into a corner with compliments, and it's not about anybody telling you who you're supposed to be or how you're supposed to act or policing your affect in order to win entry into the womanhood club. We're all already in the club. It's over. I mean,
you're
not in the club, Baz—”

Bertha Mason tapped one ragged fingernail against the door. Baz watched Jen impassively, chin cupped in palm, one finger tapping his temple.

“But the club—the club that
matters
is who has power, and—and um, sorry, I lost my train of thought—and people who say whatever they want, whenever they want, probably have power already,” Jen said, her voice quavering and dipping steadily in volume. Her heart clapped at her throat, as if to dislodge the choking words. “Power and money and status. Saying exactly what's on your mind isn't empowering. It's just symptomatic of power.”

Donna stared at the conference table with her head slightly cocked, as if she were receiving repeated blows to the skull and contemplating the best words with which to articulate the pain. Sunny was trying to make eye contact with Donna by drumming her fingernails on the table. Karina was wince-gazing over Jen's shoulder. Daisy's brow was knotted and she was nodding pensively. Leora and Baz scrolled their phones in tandem.

“Well,” Donna said.

Leora, stirred by Donna, looked up from her phone. “You know, I agree with the group—that word,
feminism,
it limits us. I prefer
humanism.
”

“
Toe
tally,” Sunny said, headbanging.

Karina smiled. “Shall we wrap up?”

Jen walked back to her desk, cheeks ablaze, heart kickboxing. She sat without seeing at her monitor until a surge of nausea overtook her. She looked around wildly, saw that she would not have time to reach the ladies' room, lunged forward, and heaved into her wastepaper basket. Daisy appeared beside her with a half-full bottle of water and, over Jen's feeble protestations, draped a puce beach towel of unknown provenance over the wastepaper basket, replaced it with the basket from her own desk, and turned toward points unknown to deposit the contents of the used basket.