Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“And later on in, you know, the really grotesque comfort of my hotel room,” Leora said, her voice breaking and healing itself in one phrase, “later on, that question came up again. What is your excuse? The question reverberated through my dreams. In the morning, I heard that question, I felt it, I saw it as if it were written in steam across my bathroom mirror: What is your excuse? ”

Leora raised her palms toward the ceiling. “Now,” she said. “What do I mean by this? What is this question?” Like Donna, she teepeed her hands together on the jade-top table. “What I mean is that if I can look this person in the eye, after all she’s shared with me, after all she’s been through, and knowing all that, and yet also knowing that she somehow finds the strength to get up in the morning, to work, to provide for her family, to cook and clean and mend and comfort, to care for herself and her babies and her community when the whole world seems to have been so careless with her — has she not earned my gratitude for sharing so much of herself with me?”

She held her hand to her chest. “My gratitude. I think we can agree that she’s earned it. My gratitude, which I log as faithfully as an accountant, ladies, and so should you. Like a doctor keeps a patient’s chart, like the captain of a ship keeps a log to show the distance he’s come and the miles he’s yet to go, the latitude and longitude of my life I mark with gratitude, always gratitude. And there, right there, a debit in the gratitude column. Make no mistake.”

Jen tried to survey the room without moving her head. She thought of an oil painting with the eyes cut out in a Scooby-Doo haunted mansion.

“So how do I pay that debt?” Leora asked. “Well, let’s start with how not to pay it. Let’s start by facing my greatest fear, and my greatest fear is to be ungrateful. To lose track of my gratitude. To run up a gratitude debt.” The t of debt was a puff of air. “How could I be ungrateful? Wouldn’t the height of ingratitude be if I did not work to earn, to pay back, what this amazing woman gave me? If she can do all that, if she can be that strong, that powerful — and it is the weakest among us, you see, who must summon the most power, because that power is not simply handed to them — if she can be that powerful, what is stopping me from fulfilling my full potential? Aren’t I required by natural law to do right by her? Do I have a choice not to learn and grow and live a bigger, better life owing to her example? How could I not? Do I even have the option? Do I?”

Sunny fled the room in tears. Karina’s eyes were full and her nose was red, and both hands clamped a lock of hair to her jugular like a cluster of funereal lilies. Donna’s lips and bangles murmured and trembled in prayer. The row of toothpaste smiles and shiny, shiny hair fidgeted as one. Daisy was texting.

“What is your excuse?” Leora repeated. “Now, I’m going to keep asking this of myself. But now we need to ask it of ourselves. We need to ask it of LIFt and as LIFt, as one voice — many, many voices in one. This woman — this incredible woman — posed a challenge to me. She didn’t know it, but she did. And this challenge is one I cherish and one I want to pay forward. I want to gift us with a challenge. A challenge to the mind, the body, the spirit. A challenge to look at yourself, and ask yourself, What can I change? ”

Sunny had returned to the room and sat down again, puffy-eyed and hiccupping. “That’s right,” she said, her voice a watery tapioca. “That’s right.”

“And so,” Leora said.

Sunny blew her nose and chuckled to herself. Karina reached over and patted Donna on the hand. Donna held three fingers tenderly to her lips as she looked up at Karina, her bangles collapsing in a cathartic heap against the crook of her arm.

“Love,” Donna jangled. “Love.”

“Now,” Leora said after a contemplative pause, “all of you may be asking yourselves: What does all of this mean in practice?”

Jen opened her notebook.

“It means speaking with a louder voice that carries across the seven continents.”

“ Yay -yuh, we even want the damn penguins to be singing our song!” Sunny said.

Jen began drawing a singing penguin.

“It means we’ll be launching and offering support to a slate of exciting new programs around the world,” Leora continued.

Jen turned the page and took her first note of the meeting: New programs:

“It means we’ll be pushing harder than ever, more creatively than ever, to find the best, most effective, most innovative ways of helping women help themselves, all over the world.”

Jen took her second note: Who was L.I.’s inspirational lady? Name/country/program?

“It means we’ll be ramping up our communications efforts.”

Jen’s hand and pen dangled over the page.

“It means having a clear and unified message,” Leora continued.

Jen turned back to her singing penguin. Its lower beak, Jen decided, would quaver with vibrato.

“It means sending that message through the best channels, led by a remarkable team of — ah — ah — Julie?”

The women in the room looked around at one another.

“Julie,” Leora said. “Is Julie here?”

One of the penguins’ implausibly long and dexterous wings, Jen decided, would be clapped soulfully to one ear of its studio headphones.

The social-media intern smiled shyly and raised her hand, wiggling her fingers. “Hi, everyone,” she said. “My name is Jules, actually—”

Jen looked up as she realized Leora’s mistake, and cushion-laughed. “Oh, sorry, I think you mean—”

“Leora,” Donna intoned, “can we talk about messaging for a moment?”

“So let’s talk about messaging for a moment,” Leora said, without looking at Donna. “Just as I was challenged, I want to engage and challenge all our compatriots around the world. Our fellow women deserve to have a new clarity, a new purpose — a new challenge.”

Jen shut her notebook and looked out the window.

“We will call it TTC: Total Transformation Challenge,” Leora said.

“T-T-C,” Donna said. “No more half-measures.”

“Spiritually comprehensive,” Leora said.

“Holistic,” Donna said.

“Catchy!” Sunny said.

“A challenge to the mind, the body, the spirit,” Leora said.

“The idea, and stop me if I’m wrong, Leora,” Karina said, raking and twisting her hair, “is to issue a challenge to all LIFt allies across the country — allies across the world , really — to set themselves a goal in each of these three categories, and they can log their progress on our website. So for one of us, maybe Mind is learning Arabic, Body is setting aside forty-five minutes per day for meditation or yoga, and Spirit is — hmm, what would be a good example of Spirit, Leora?”

Karina’s upward-management skills were so impeccable that Jen couldn’t tell if Karina was strategically infantilizing herself before Leora or if she honestly couldn’t come up with an example.

“Not three categories, though,” Leora said sternly. “Seven. We should have seven. Seven has prana. ”

“Seven, it definitely needs to be seven,” Karina said, performing a remonstrative once-over of the rest of the group.

“Mind, body, spirit,” Leora said. “What else?”

“Soul,” Donna said.

“What is soul?” Daisy asked, looking up from her phone.

“Soul is where you come from and where you’re aspiring to go, ” Donna said.

“But what’s the difference between soul and spirit?” Jen asked.