Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“I really don’t see why we need to exclude, ” said Karina, her gaze still trained over Jen’s shoulder. “She just wants more ideas, more research. The more the merrier.”

“Right, of course, but what about all the ideas and research I’ve — we’ve submitted so far?” Jen asked, bobbing and weaving her head slightly in an attempt to cover more of the screen space behind her.

“Nobody’s knocking your work, Jen,” Karina said. “It’s not about that, okay?”

“Oh, no, I wasn’t saying that — sorry, I’m not being clear. I guess if I knew which ideas and research Leora liked and disliked so far — whether or not the research and ideas were mine! — then I would know how to proceed from here,” Jen said. “I mean, she’s so busy, maybe she hasn’t even gotten to them yet, which would be totally understandable, obviously—”

“Your work is good, ” Karina said. “Like anything else, there’s stuff that really sparkles and stuff that could be better.”

“Right, okay, thanks, that’s good to hear,” Jen said. “What could be better?”

“Well, I’m not a mind reader — you’d have to ask Leora,” Karina said.

“That would be great, actually — I can ask Sunny to set up some time.”

“ Naahht too sure she’d have the bandwidth for something like that right now,” Karina said. “Though I can certainly try to bring it up with her.”

“You know,” Jen said, “it’s crazy, but Leora and I still haven’t even met!” The second this fell out, Jen realized the error she had made.

Karina nodded pensively. “You know, I’m curious. If you are asked for three ideas on how to message a LIFt concept, do you come up with ten ideas, and present what you think are the best three? Or do you only come up with three ideas and just present those?”

“Oh, gosh, I don’t know. It depends.”

“Interesting. So sometimes you’re just presenting the first things that pop into your head? Kinda seat-of-the-pants?”

“Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that. There’s probably always a whittling process.”

“Interesting. But then there’s the question of how you determine the best three out of ten. How do you know that you’re not hiding your brightest light under a bushel? Do you trust us to see the ideas you want to hide?”

“Oh, it’s not about hiding — it’s always different.” Jen sat up straight, still holding the earbud cord, severing it with a muffled pop. “You know, I’m sorry to harp on this”—Jen laughed right here, as she often did with Karina, and Jen always imagined these laughs as having mass and taking up space, but plush mass, deferential mass, a comfy cushion to soften any demand or contradictory opinion—“but it would be so amazing, just in terms of time management, to have a little bit of feedback on all the work I’ve done so far. I mean, if that’s possible. I completely understand if—”

“I’m giving you feedback right now,” Karina said.

“Of course, but—”

“Here’s your feedback in a nutshell: More, more, more!” Karina said. “How’s that for a vote of confidence? Just assume that there’s an insatiable appetite for your ideas and your efforts right now. What you have to remember around messaging is that this is a collaboration. ”

“Oh, sure, I know — wait, what does that mean?”

“It means that we don’t hunker down in our hidey-holes guarding our turf. We’re all in this together, sharing ideas, bouncing ideas off one another. Collaboration and sharing.”

“I didn’t—”

“I’ve gotta run, Jen,” Karina said, turning to leave and waggling her fingers over her shoulder. “Gotta tend to the spawn.”

Jen cushion-laughed. “Oh, for sure, you’ve gotta do that!”

Leora Infinitas’s fondness for fortuitous acronyms began but did not end with the name of her foundation, and often a LIFt initiative began and ended with the spark of an inspired abbreviation. Leora proposed a proposal for an “edu-preneurial summit” on the global rise of web-based autodidacticism, to be called Women Inspired for Self-Education (WISE). She proposed a proposal for a series of webinars “reintroducing busy women across the world to their neglected love affair with the REM cycle,” to be called Women’s Initiative for Sleep Hygiene (WISH). She proposed a proposal for a Skype-enabled encounter group session covering seven continents—“McMurdo Station, we haven’t forgotten you!” Sunny exclaimed — on “kicking our sex drives into top gear,” to be called Women Empowered to Love their Libido (WELL). This bounty of acronyms took a turn toward the demotic after Leora, having just served as grand marshal at a drag queen parade in Grand Rapids, Michigan, returned to the LIFt offices with an idea for a body-acceptance campaign, to be called the Women’s Endeavor for Realism and Kindness! (WERK!).

“Have you ever suspected that you had a fake job at a fake organization, and you could be found out at any time?” Jen asked Jim.

“If I ever did, a ten-year-old who hasn’t eaten breakfast at home in a year would kick me in the shins and snap me out of it,” Jim said.

Karina would relay Leora’s ideas to Jen and Daisy, and Jen and Daisy would then spend many hours researching potential LIFt grantees doing work that overlapped with Leora’s acronym du jour and writing bulleted, footnoted summaries of each potential grantee and coming up with copy and branding and infographics and focus-grouping for the proposed projects, even though they knew that the acronyms were ends in themselves — game plans for a Game Over. Daisy, much more than Jen, reacted to Leora’s bounty of acronyms in a spirit of reciprocity. She ideated “a mosaic of learned spiritual responses to the existential question of why we are here” called the Women’s Ontology of Nurturing Karma (WONK) as well as a pan-global crafts-and-baked-goods bazaar called the Women’s Harvest of Outrageous Awesomeness (WHOA). Seizing the opportunity presented by one of Leora’s ever-more-infrequent office visits, Daisy walked right up to Leora outside the ladies’ room to pitch her acronyms — a bold, possibly unprecedented move by a non — board member, and one that Jen watched from across the office while gnawing on alternate thumbnails.

“She’s nicer than everyone says,” Daisy later reported.

Nonetheless, Leora had rejected WONK and WHOA on the spot, calling out WHOA in particular as “jejune.” Jen and Daisy didn’t know what jejune meant until they looked it up.

“Maybe not knowing what jejune means is a symptom of being jejune, ” Daisy said.

Daisy later turned her attentions from acronyms to anagrams — spending the better part of one weekend crossing out the letters of LEORA INFINITAS FOUNDATION to create ADROIT FELON IS IN A FOUNTAIN — but not before designing and silkscreening T-shirts advertising Women in Crisis Constructing Acronyms (WICCA), illustrated with a kitten in a witch’s hat scrambling the letters on a Scrabble board.

Jen climbed off her paint-splattered stepladder, rotating her shoulder in its socket and stifling a mewl of pain. She had been standing atop the stepladder at the back of Pam’s studio for two hours straight, the elbow of her painting arm propped in her opposite palm, doing minutely detailed blending brushwork on a head-and-shoulders portrait of an enormous happy teen: floppy, rust-colored cowlick; glinting rectangle-smile full of braces; the color of his hoodie a spectacularly verdant marriage of cadmium yellow and ultramarine. Coaxing a person out of a driver’s license photo or a magazine clipping and onto the canvas, finding the fabric of its shadows and inventing its light, was scary and exciting. She loved the loamy certitude of unmixed oils, their textures of soil and blood tissue, and the sense of unthinking command and casual mastery she felt in mixing them. She loved the unalloyed physicality of tracing the final images’ outlines in graphite, of laying down the underpainting and base coats. But once she had found the shadows and the light and the colors, and all she had left were the hours upon hours of documenting — transcribing — what she had already found, then a portrait could become at times a maddening exercise in high-level painting-by-numbers: cognitively demanding enough to forestall zoning out, but not nearly demanding enough to assuage an internal tedium that, mixed with increasing physical discomfort, began to quake in a manner not unlike that of rage.