Break in Case of Emergency (5 page)

The Leora Infinitas Foundation, also known as LIFt, will work tirelessly to support women's education, entrepreneurship, and empowerment all over the world. We will acknowledge that no matter where they are on the planet—in a village in sub-Saharan Africa, in a corner office in Shanghai, or at a kitchen table in Des Moines—women share the same hopes, the same dreams for themselves and their children. We may sometimes seem far apart culturally and geographically, but our similarities are so much vaster than our differences. We women—all of us women—can own the means of production, with a cross-platform multimedia foundation. We can lift each other up.

That's what the “LIFt Yourself” concept is all about. Women in the developing world and women here “at home,” fulfilling their dreams, helping one another fulfill those dreams, and discovering our common ground.

Speaking personally for a moment: I take this word
foundation
literally. This is the foundation of everything I do: communication, conversation, transformation. It is the foundation of my identity as a woman, as a mother, as a communicator. One message across all platforms, consistent, solid, through and through.

—from the first draft of the “Proposed Platform of the Leora Infinitas Foundation (LIFt),” by Leora Infinitas in collaboration with Donna Skinner

Karina—LIFt

Friday, March 27 5:15 PM

To: Jen

Subject: Happiness!

Dearest Jen, I'm so thrilled you've accepted the position here at LIFt. I'm sure Leora is sorry she couldn't make it for our chat, but I'm also sure she's just so amped to meet you. Promise me that, on your first day, you'll let me take you out for a proper lunch—an old-school, glamorous, steak-and-wine lunch. We should celebrate! Indulge me? xo K.

Jen

Friday, March 27 5:19 PM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: Happiness!

Karina,

I'd be thrilled to! I'm so excited to be joining LIFt. You've already extended such a warm welcome! Very grateful—and looking forward to lunch.

All my best,

Jen

“Remember,” Meg had said, “don't accept the first offer.”

“Number one,” Jen had said, “obviously I won't, and two, we are not there yet.”

“Just don't accept the first offer. Write that on your hand. Leave notes around the house. Chant it before you go to sleep.”

“Oh my God,” Jen had said.

“You negotiated, yes?” Meg was saying now. Jen could hear Millie trilling in the background over the phone line.

“Um,” Jen said.

“You didn't.”

“I'm unemployed! Or I was.”

“So you just took whatever they offered?”

“What position was I in to negotiate? Did I have a matching offer from the unemployment office?”

“A lot of places would have rescinded the offer the moment you accepted without negotiating. They would see it—and look, I'm not necessarily agreeing with this, I'm just telling you—they would see it as a sign that you're—that you're not—well, it doesn't matter.”

“No, what? A sign that I'm not what?”

“It doesn't matter. I'm sorry. This is good news. I'm happy for you. I am.”

“You have to finish that sentence. A sign that I'm not what?”

Meg sighed. Millie hooted. “That you're not a
fighter,
that you don't fight for yourself. Which in your case is
not true.
I'm just saying.”

“But wait,” Jen said. “Isn't it a sign of solidarity with the organization to take less money from them? Like I'm looking out for their best interests at a time of financial uncertainty? You could see it that way, couldn't you?”

“Yes,” Meg said, “you could choose to see it that way.”

Jen

Monday, April 6 9:14 AM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: Happiness!

Good morning, Karina! I was having trouble getting buzzed in, so I sneaked in with a UPS guy—hope that's okay! I've parked myself on a couch in reception. Do you happen to know where my desk is located? Or someone else who could help? Sorry to bother you with these mundane matters. And most important: Are we still on for lunch today? Thanks!—Jen

Jen

Monday, April 6 11:47 AM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: Happiness!

Hey Karina, I knocked on your door earlier, but I think you were on a call. My wonderful new colleague Daisy found a cubicle for me and is helping me get on the grid. Let me know when you have time to chat today—does lunch still work? Thanks, Jen

Jen

Monday, April 6 3:52 PM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: Happiness!

Hey Karina, things are humming along here, but I will need your sign-off before I can log on to my computer and get set up with email. You might have noticed that John from building IT has been calling you—his extension is 25233—and all he needs is a signature to get us going here. Thanks, Jen

Karina—LIFt

Monday, April 6 4:52 PM

To: Jen

Subject: Re: Happiness!

Belatedly, welcome, Jen! Sooo glad you're here. Been slammed all day and need to run—tell Jon yes it's fine—and send me days for lunch. :)

Jen

Monday, April 6 4:55 PM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: Happiness!

No worries! John does actually need a signature, but it can totally wait until tomorrow. For lunch, how about tomorrow, Wednesday, or Thursday? Have a great evening! Thanks, Jen

Jen

Tuesday, April 7 9:22 AM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: Happiness!

Hey Karina, great to chat with you in person, even if briefly! Will definitely get that memo to Sunny about responding to the board's latest brainstorms—really excited to dig in there. You asked me again to send you days for lunch—how about Wednesday? Also, not sure if your original proposal of “steak and wine” was intended as a literal menu or not, but I've never been to Staley's Steakhouse, and I'd be tickled to experience it for the first time. The buttery leather booths, the all-star mural of celebrity caricatures on the walls, the presence of octogenarian talent agents—it all screams old-school cheeseball glamour, at least to me. If we want something lighter, there's a really good vegan place—and by that I do mean “really good,” not just “really good for a vegan place”—one block up from Staley's where the un-burger is better than the un-un thing and the cashew ice cream rivals the hard stuff. Or, if this lovely weather holds, we could just grab-and-go from the dumpling truck and sit in the plaza! Looking forward—Jen

Jen

Wednesday, April 8 11:38 AM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: Happiness!

Hey Karina, are we still on for lunch today?

Karina—LIFt

Wednesday, April 8 12:59 PM

To: Jen

Subject: Re: Happiness!

Oof, today is tough—Friday better

Jen

Wednesday, April 8 1:02 PM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: Happiness!

Sure thing.

Jen—LIFt

Thursday, April 9 4:45 PM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Hello!

Hey Karina, just wanted to let you know that I'm now the proud owner of an in-house email handle. We still on for lunch tomorrow?

Karina—LIFt

Thursday, April 9 8:58 PM

To: Jen—LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Sure. I'm not a big lunch eater—coffee instead?

Jen—LIFt

Thursday, April 9 9:03 PM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Of course. Let's see…Baccalá has one of those patented stir-brewer machines for minimum acidity—I'm not much of a coffee snob, but drinking that stuff makes me feel like I'm in Monti, about to hop on a Vespa. Q.E.D. is a six-block hike but worth it for the cantuccios, and for the adorable ancient lady who makes the cantuccios. And last time I grabbed a latte at Cake Walk I saw Natalie Portman filming a movie nearby, which is an endorsement unto itself!

Karina—LIFt

Thursday, April 9 10:07 PM

To: Jen—LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

There's a Starbucks half a block from the office

Jen—LIFt

Thursday, April 9 10:10 PM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Easy enough! Around 3 or 4? That's when I usually need a caffeine infusion.

Karina—LIFt

Thursday, April 9 10:12 PM

To: Jen—LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Let's say 9.30, I have a call at 10

Jen—LIFt

Thursday, April 9 10:14 PM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Perfect.

Jen—LIFt

Friday, April 10 9:45 AM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Hey, Karina, just wanted to make sure you remembered our coffee date!

Jen—LIFt

Thursday, April 10 10:07 AM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Re: Hello!

Hey, Karina, it's just after 10 and I know you had an important call, so I'm going to head over to the office—see you soon!

LIFt leased part of an upper floor of a midcentury skyscraper, one whose date of completion coincided with the apotheosis of America's postwar white-man's utopia, an industrial ecstasy synonymous with its Midtown Manhattan location and expressed in the vast and echoing lobby—one that strived for timelessness in its haphazard signifiers, in its Art Deco–ish brassy trims and flourishes, and in the Works Progress Administration swagger of the Diego Rivera–manqué mural behind the elevator bank, in which bulbous-muscled iron workers bore aloft a boyish-looking potentate: yellow forelock, three-piece suit. Once upon a time, salons and way stations and anterooms had hugged the lobby like a golden horseshoe. There was the dining room with the glass chandelier supposedly custom-crafted for Mamie Eisenhower and, mounted on a wall like a stag's head, the jewel-encrusted suit of armor supposedly stolen from the Kremlin, each of which came with bottomless permutations of tales about the past-resident banker, broker, or blueblood newspaper editor who had acquired the items and how. There was the carpeted, split-level commissary, with its subsidized prime rib and its free booze after six p.m. and all day Friday. There were the oddly apportioned conference rooms, dotted with alcoves and tiny partitions. By some historical accounts, these vaults and bowers provided randy executives and their conquests with points of rendezvous that promised both a necessary sense of discretion and a frisson of sex-in-public excitement.

But Jen only knew all this from pictures. The dining room was now a mobile-phone storefront. The dim, sex-soaked recesses of the conference rooms were now the fluorescent-lit dressing rooms of a T.J.Maxx. Nobody knew where the mural had gone. The lobby had shrunk radically in size over the last decade, as the building's owners partitioned it first for a Japanese steakhouse, then an American steakhouse, and then an Outback Steakhouse.

“Are you ever in the lobby,” Daisy once asked Jen, “when you stop and think you can smell the burning flesh of end-stage capitalism?”

“No,” Jen replied, “but are you ever in the lobby when you hold up your keycard to the sensor on the turnstile, and instead of a beep, you hear the bleating of a little lost lamb being led to slaughter?”

“Yes,” Daisy replied.

Jen and Daisy worked at the geographic center of LIFt's operations, in what Jen estimated to be the precise spot on the entire office floor that was simultaneously farthest away from the women's bathroom, farthest from the main exit, and farthest from the nearest unobstructed window. They shared a cubicle wall, which Daisy interpreted as a canvas for her rotating collages of Shetland ponies wearing Shetland-wool sweaters, baby sloths in tiny macramé hats, and root vegetables that resembled religious icons. Sometimes Daisy would engage the baby sloths in a visual dialogue with photos cut out of gossip magazines of disheveled starlets exiting various nightclubs.

Jen's title at LIFt was Communications Manager and Co-Director, Special Projects. Daisy's title at LIFt was Senior Program Officer and Co-Director, Special Projects. Neither of them could have always stated with certainty which projects they were intended to manage, officiate, or codirect, or which qualities made any particular project special. LIFt convened sporadic meetings, wherein Karina condensed her cumuli of verbiage while finger-combing her hair and Donna riffed on
vision
and
intentionality
and
passion
and Sunny headbanged and Jen, always by last-minute request, took notes as well as tried to think of something to say to introduce whatever new memo that Karina or Sunny had most recently asked her to draw up, whether it was the “Old Programs” memo or the “New Programs” memo or the “Building on Past Success” memo or the “International Applications of the ‘LIFt Yourself' Concept” memo or the “Programs to ‘LIFt Yourself' ” memo—until Leora had another appointment or, occasionally, when it became clear that Leora would not be attending at all or, on one occasion, when Sunny realized ten minutes after the scheduled start of the meeting that at that very moment Leora was in Dubai, presiding at the opening of a jewelry store as part of the promotional tour for her skin-care line, LeoraDiance
™
.

As volubly pointless as these memos and meetings tended to be, preparing the memos occupied the bulk of Jen's hours in the office, and the meetings themselves represented Jen's only in-person time with the women she assumed were busy running LIFt. Donna, Karina, and Sunny had a block of offices on the south side of the floor, with Leora's corner suite tucked safely behind Sunny's perch. Jen and Daisy were stationed on the east side of the floor, estranged from the rest of the LIFt braintrust by a giant stack of empty filing cabinets, a row of empty offices, and an underpopulated maze of cubicles occupied by a smattering of other indeterminately engaged LIFt contractors, most reliably Petra, a freelance graphic designer whose metonym was the black extension cord that snaked from an electrical socket above the ladies' room sink down to the linoleum floor and under the handicap stall, where it powered the
HUNGH-guk HUNGH-guk
of Petra's breast pump twenty to twenty-five minutes at a time, three to four times a day.

The glare from the reflected light of the glass-and-titanium beehive skin of the building opposite made Jen and Daisy's computer screens effectively inoperative between nine-thirty and ten-thirty a.m. each day.

If Karina was in the office, her door was closed.

Jen—LIFt

Wednesday, May 20 10:15 AM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: Hi!

Hey Karina,

I know you've been super-busy, but I was wondering if you might be able to spare even a few minutes in the next few days to discuss what I should be prioritizing going forward. I'm raring to get started, but want to make sure I'm pointed in the right direction first. Let me know when works for you. Thanks, Karina! And we should include Daisy, too—she's awesome and I know she has tons of smart ideas and research.

Looking forward,

Jen

Jen—LIFt

Thursday, May 21 5:12 PM

To: Karina—LIFt

Subject: FW: Hi!

Hey Karina, sorry to be a pest about this, just wanted to make sure you received my message from yesterday—thanks!—Jen

—————Forwarded message—————