Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“Good to know,” Karina said. “In the future, though, do make sure to give the team a heads-up if you’re going to be late. Otherwise we’ll be worried about you.”

“I did—”

“We need to discuss this, uh, sex thing you wrote up,” Karina said. “Leora is a little, well, let’s just say she’s not happy.”

“Sex thing?”

“ ‘Not happy’ may be a bit of an understatement,” Karina said.

“What sex thing?”

“It was for”—Karina checked her notes—“Women Empowered to Love their Libido. W-E-L–L, WELL.” She set the folder down on the filing cabinet and dusted her fingers, as if some grime or grit had rubbed off.

“Oh, that one was fun. There’s actually quite a wonderful program happening in—”

“This is not how you should be spending your time,” Karina said. “I’m frankly surprised that you couldn’t come to that conclusion on your own.” Karina tilted her head and shook it slightly as she gazed at Jen, more in sorrow than in anger.

“Ah, got it,” Jen said.

“You need to remember — and gosh, this is a good reminder for me, too, and for all of us — that we need to leave ourselves a lot of room to be able to speak to a lot of different people, with different, oh, you know, standards of discourse —not to get all college-seminar-intellectual on ya.”

“Oh, no, not at all, I got it,” Jen said.

“You got it,” Karina said.

“Totally got it,” Jen said.

Karina blinked twice and folded her arms. “Is that it?” Karina asked. “Anything you want to tell me?”

“About — women’s sexual empowerment?”

Karina puffed sharply through her nose. “Just trying to make sure we’re all on the same page now,” she said. “You know, I don’t know what really happened here, but it’s important that we’re on the right track, that we know what direction we’re headed in.”

“What happened,” Jen said, “so far as I can tell, is that you asked me to work on an idea that came from Leora and the board, and now Leora has decided that she doesn’t like the idea. Right?” Jen smiled and laughed to indicate that she was happy and engaged and LIFting herself, no matter what kinds of challenges or friendly misunderstandings might present themselves along the way.

“Interesting way to put it,” Karina said.

Jen laughed again for reasons unknown to her.

“I just think it’s good to keep in mind that we need to be careful,” Karina said. “We have to set the highest standards for ourselves, and then raise those standards. You know, it’s so amazing to work at an organization like LIFt, where we can just let our imaginations go wild, and in service of a greater good — it’s just such an amazing opportunity, that freedom. But with that freedom comes responsibility. Especially with hot-button issues like sex, relationships, female sexuality, reproductive… issues. Do you know what I mean?”

“Totally,” Jen said. “Totally hear you, totally agree. It’s great to have feedback! But just to be clear — you asked — I was asked to work on this. I didn’t go off and make it my own thing. I can show you the email you sent — I mean, the email I received—”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“No, it will only take a few seconds, just so we can reconstruct—” Jen started to turn back to her computer.

“Please, don’t let me distract you any longer from Lady Sally Mineola, ‘Rebelle Without a Flaw,’ ” Karina said.

Jen turned back. “Ha, you got me there, but I just wanted to make sure we—”

“Look, no one is blaming you, Jen,” Karina said. “It’s not about blame. You haven’t been here long and you’ve already made a big impact. I’m proud of you! I just wanted you to know that Leora, well, she just expects us to reach a little higher.” Karina reached up her hand and waved like a pageant contestant. “She would never want us to settle for the lowest common denominator.”

“Well, I admit it wasn’t my favorite idea of the stack so far,” Jen said, in a spirit of agreement and same-page-ness.

“Well, there you go — there’s a lesson in this: Trust your instincts. That’s a key message for us to send as an organization, but we can only send the message if we ourselves have gotten the message! So if you’re working on a project and you don’t think it’s working, speak up. We can collaborate on a solution, or we can walk hand in hand back to the drawing board.” Karina was nodding now, but regret still shone in her eyes.

“Sure thing, Karina, thanks for that.”

“Awesome. You’re a smart cookie, Jen,” Karina said. “You don’t have to prove that to anyone. But you do have to trust yourself. It’s just so important.”

“So true,” Jen said, but Karina was already walking away.

Saturdays and Sundays at the henhouse were always the most crowded, for reasons Jen couldn’t comprehend. Jim speculated that other clients of the henhouse had cracked some code of inbound logistics, allowing them to time their production orders so as to pursue their respective Projects without interfering with a high-pressure workweek.

“It’s possible, right?” Jim murmured, shifting in his beige seat at the beige back wall of the beige-carpeted waiting room. “Like how female roommates sync up their menstrual cycles.”

“That is a myth,” Jen said.

If one of Jen’s visits fell on a weekday, sometimes she could get out of the henhouse in time to get to LIFt by nine a.m. But not always, and never when it was Jim’s day of the month to come in. Too much had to happen.

First, they would wait for Jim’s name to be called. The name-calling nurse was invariably the most petite and sweetest-looking staffer on duty that morning, and would read from the sign-in log apologetically, half smiling, half cringing.

“We should have pseudonyms,” Jim whispered. “Noms de guerre.”

“Don’t worry, we both have generic names,” Jen said. “No one will ever know who we are.”

Jen spotted one of Pam and Paulo’s onetime temporary roommates across the waiting room. The roommate had arrived too late to snag a seat, and instead leaned against a wall, arms crossed over the dark leather satchel held to her chest, and wearing not the telltale hunted, haunted look that marked out most of Pam and Paulo’s tenants, but the calm, empty expression that most visitors to the henhouse cultivated.

Jen looked away, heat in her cheeks. Embarrassment, she had learned through hours of study in the henhouse waiting room, was conspicuous. Whispering, too, was conspicuous, because of its correlation with embarrassment; most henhouse clients, if they spoke to one another at all, opted for a low conversational hum. In impassivity lay anonymity. The key was to present not a closed book, but an open book full of bright, blank pages.

“We should use our porn names,” Jim whispered. “You have a great porn name.” Jen’s porn name was Cuddles Greenacres. Jim’s porn name was Fishy Thirty-second.

When Jim finally heard his name, he would ease his way past piles of crossed legs and close-squeezed chairs toward the nurse, who would usher him through two sets of doors and down a beige-on-beige hallway into a small, windowless room, its beigeness somehow more profoundly beige. Jen was not permitted inside the room, and had only fragmentary, Jim-filtered impressions of it: the scent of water damage and fruity air freshener, the listing stacks of cracked DVD cases, the streaked screen of the television bolted to the wall, the box of disposable plastic sheets for covering the recliner chair that didn’t recline, the green exit buzzer next to the doorknob that visitors such as Jim were not permitted to touch. The plastic vase of dead flowers.