Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“Whatever, I’m happy for you,” Pam said. “I am.”

“Thanks,” Jen said, looking up at Pam.

“You know, get out of it whatever you can get out of it,” Pam said.

“Yeah.”

“So we don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to talk about it, but just in case you do want to talk about it,” Pam said, “do you want to talk about the Project?”

Pam was the only person not assigned to the Project who knew about its existence. Jen and Jim were the Project’s principal architects (“I prefer product managers, ” Jim said). By mutual tacit agreement, Jen and Jim never spoke in explicit terms about it; the first, unspoken rule of the Project was not to call any procedure, implement, or site related to the Project by its actual name. Jen and Jim had grown fastidious about this rule without interrogating why they had ever instated it in the first place. In the beginning it was just a nervous tic, or a way of imagining themselves apart from their situation. Now the rule was like protective outer gear. A shield against inclement weather. A prophylactic.

They embarked on the Project with some degree of ambivalence, propelled forward largely because Jen, having breached the threshold of thirty without yet crossing the Rubicon of thirty-five, thus found herself in the epoch that women’s magazines, morning talk shows, mutual acquaintances, miscellaneous cousins and sisters-in-law, and occasional prolix strangers on the subway had agreed on as the preferred window for all Project launches. Jen and Jim’s ambivalence tipped into bland relief when the Project did not launch immediately, granting them more time to adjust to the idea of a hypothetical tiny future boarder. But as month after month passed, and as months somehow metastasized into years, relief curdled into tantric panic. They had not known what they wanted, or how much they wanted it, until they discovered that it was not necessarily theirs for the taking.

At first, Jen and Jim worked on the Project in the traditional manner: by themselves, in secret, mostly at home. After about a year, they had tapped outside consultants with medical degrees to explore methods for expediting the Project. The Project halted during Jen’s sojourn in the valley of joblessness, but gainful employment and, more to the point, gainful employer-provided health insurance had redoubled her enthusiasm for the Project. They referred to Jen’s many Project-related appointments as “trips to the henhouse” and sometimes as “black-box testing.” Jim’s significantly less frequent Project-related obligations were “swim meets” or occasionally “speed trials.”

Gainful employment and gainful employer-provided health insurance had also redoubled Jen’s enthusiasm for her Animexa prescription, although licensed professionals had warned her that even small doses of central-nervous-system stimulants would be incompatible with Project completion. Meanwhile, Jim prepared for his swim meets by taking up a diet of sautéed spinach and lean chicken and adopting an at-home wardrobe of size-too-large boxer shorts and the occasional sarong, all the better for producing “new obsolete stock” stored at subzero temperatures in “Han Solo’s Carbonite Tomb.”

Jen told herself that she had designated Pam as the Project’s sole outside observer because she knew all Pam would do is lend an ear, observe without judgment. She knew that Pam’s still-ongoing medical odyssey would keep in check Jen’s self-pity or irritation about the endless trips back and forth to the henhouse. Jen also knew that if she had designated the only other viable candidate, Meg, as a Project observer, that Meg probably would have urged her to take trips instead to a newer, swankier, more high-tech, probably out-of-network henhouse, and switch to a diet largely made up of kale, cranberries, almonds, and peanut butter, and do other things for which Jen had no energy such as acupuncture and cognitive behavioral therapy and not chewing gum and not occasionally breaking off half an Animexa tablet before writing a research memo for an upcoming LIFt meeting.

But if Jen was being honest, she would admit she picked Pam, not Meg, because she doubted Pam-the-real-artist was interested in a Project of her own — and even if Pam was interested, she would be in an even worse financial position than Jen to undertake one.

“That Sharon is having another baby,” Jen’s mom was saying. “Did you see the reveal?”

Sharon was one of Jen’s sisters-in-law. After seven years of marriage to Jen’s brother and two children and one incubating fetus, Sharon had not yet danced into Jen’s mother’s affections with sufficient vigor to shake off the that. Betsy, Jen’s other sister-in-law, had shed the that just three and a half years and two children in. Jim theorized that Sharon lagged behind Betsy because Jen’s mother preferred what she saw as Betsy’s homespun and low-budget approach to the social-media arms race of gender-reveal cakes, a war that Sharon waged by proxy on multiple tiers with hand-piped fleur-de-lis, blowtorched meringue, and frosting carved and shaped into pink-and-blue pairs of pacifiers, partridges, and baby booties.

“I don’t think she makes those herself,” Jen’s mom said, her tone sniffing of conspiracy. “I think she has outside help. ”

“Mom, of course she does,” Jen said. “You can’t make your own gender-reveal cake. It defeats the purpose of having a gender reveal.”

“Hmmpf,” Jen’s mom said.

“You know,” Jen said, trying to keep her tone playful, “you have got to be the only mother of a married childless woman I know who doesn’t give her daughter a hard time about delivering grandchildren on schedule.”

Jen’s mom was silent. “It’s none of my business,” she said after a moment.

“I guess there’s no pressure on me, huh, since your boys have been so prolific.”

“It’s none of my business,” Jen’s mom said again.

“It can be your business if you want it to be,” Jen said. “I don’t mind if you ask me about it. It would be nice to—”

“That’s your private business,” Jen’s mom said with finality.

Jen had never asked her mother for her privacy, and Jen’s mother freely gave it to her nonetheless.

“Hey, Jen.” Karina was standing directly behind Jen, slouching against the empty filing cabinets, holding a slim folder between two fingers, as if it were sticky or flammable.

Jen carefully took out her new earbuds, set them carefully on her desk, and turned carefully away from her computer screen, which currently showed the Grand Rapids Miss Congeniality, Lady Sally Mineola, wrapped in a roller-derby bondage ensemble — helmet estranged from the top of her wig line by a teetering Marie Antoinette pouf — and sipping champagne from a stiletto held in the teeth of a heavily muscled man wearing nothing but Y-fronts, tanning oil, and a bejeweled luchador mask.

“Leora sure has fun friends!” Jen said brightly.

“No idea, no idea,” Karina said. “None of my business.”

“Oh, just so you know, this is for WERK! the—”

“You were a little late again getting in this morning,” Karina said. “Everything okay?”

“Oh, yes,” Jen said. “I had a doctor’s appointment.”

“Another one, yes, I can see that,” Karina said, chinning toward the cotton ball plastered to the crook of Jen’s arm with a Band-Aid. “Hope all is well?”

“Ah, this is nothing, just a bit of medieval bloodletting to balance the humors, no biggie.”

“Phlebotomy,” Daisy said from behind the cubicle wall.

“Phlebotomy,” Jen said.