Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

Karina’s words stood in counterpoint to her confidential, just-us-girls tone — the tone of an old friend asking for advice over coffee. Jen wished she could record the conversation so that Pam could enlist one of her actors to lip-synch it.

“So, instead of choosing trust, openness, and confidence, you’re falling back on their opposites,” Karina continued. “Which is ironic, isn’t it? Ironic because we’re encouraging women to push out of their comfort zones, to speak up for themselves, to think that their ideas actually have merit.”

“Right,” Jen said. The corners of her mouth twitched and jerked. She estimated that she had forty to sixty seconds before her nose started oozing. “Right. Yes. I can see that.”

“It’s interesting to think about,” Karina said. “Something to keep in mind — the importance of walk-the-walk, you know?”

“Definitely. So — so I’ll go ahead and mention the TTC thing to Leora,” Jen said. “Better late than never.” Karina’s office tilted sideways. Jen bent her knees slightly to keep her balance, and they knocked together.

“Don’t worry about it, Jen,” Karina said. “You’ve entrusted me with this, and I think this is a teachable moment for both of us.”

“Are you sure? I don’t want to add to your workload.” The words were old leaves in a drainpipe, clotted and slimy.

“Absolutely sure.”

Jen swallowed again. “Great, okay, then, thanks, Karina,” Jen said. On Great, she aimed for a middle C but landed on an F sharp. “And you know”—the first cold beads of sweat punctured Jen’s brow, but something compelled her onward—“the acronym thing might not be a big deal. It’s not like we’re calling it”—here Jen spaced the words out evenly, the better to drive the joke of the acronym straight into the carpet — I’m Very Fabulous, right?”

Bertha Mason let loose a shrill cackle.

“Ha, ha,” Karina said evenly.

“Thanks, Karina!” Jen said again.

Jen exited Karina’s doorframe in what she intended to look like ebullient hustle. She strode across the office with shoulders squared, passing behind a cubicle row of toothpaste smiles and shiny, shiny hair. She entered the bathroom and felt a passing gratitude that all the stall doors were open.

Zero people here

Log a zero in my ledger

Thank you no one

Thanks for no one

Thanks for nothing

In one swirling and possibly graceful figure eight, Jen slipped inside the handicap stall and shut the door and sank to her knees and yanked her hair back with one hand and leaned the opposite arm against the toilet and heaved, and again, and again. Of all the mistakes she’d made so far that day, her first mistake had been orange juice for breakfast.

jenski1848: Hellooo

whatDaisyknew: AHOY AHOY

jenski1848: I love that you’re listening to “Protect Ya Neck” at work.

whatDaisyknew: SORRY I’LL TURN IT DOWN

jenski1848: So Karina just told me that Leora wants to do a video series for the TTC launch called “When Bad Things Happen for Good Reasons.”

whatDaisyknew: EPISODE ONE: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

jenski1848: I think it’s more like “I was injecting heroin between my toes, then my toes fell off, then I opened a rehab clinic, then I used the proceeds from my rehab clinic to buy new bionic toes.”

whatDaisyknew: TOE TALLY. HA HA SORRY THAT WAS JEJUNE

jenski1848: Or, you know, a car accident brings two long-lost sisters together, or a near-death experience results in an epiphany, etc., etc.

whatDaisyknew: EPISODE TWO: A WILD GIFT FROM THE JANJAWEED

jenski1848: Can you give me a hand with this and put a call out, email people? Oh and we should probably avoid using the word “bad.” “Challenge” or “adversity” or “hurdle,” those work. “Journey.”

whatDaisyknew: EPISODE THREE: LOOK AT ALL THE PRETTY PINK RIBBONS I CAN WEAR IN THE HAIR I DON’T HAVE BECAUSE OF THE CANCER

jenski1848: Thanks, D.

“It’s insane and depressing to me that you can’t get away even for a few days,” Meg was saying. “I don’t get it.”

Meg was grinding spices with a mortar and pestle at her kitchen island while Jen and Millie sat on the floor near her feet, bent over large sheets of construction paper with crayons and markers. Millie was relying heavily on black, purple, and blue to create a thick, raging storm vortex. Jen was drawing an elephant using his trunk to pick from an apple tree.

“Sucko,” Millie whispered to her drawing. “Sucko.”

“Circle, yeah — you see, these apples are kind of circle-shaped,” Jen said. “An apple is round like a circle.”

“Sucko,” Millie said, scrawling more furiously with her violet crayon.

Together, the three of them plus Buzz, Meg’s doleful and red-bandannaed golden retriever, had been hiding from the early-August heat all Sunday afternoon among the cool off-whites and pearly grays of Meg’s central-air-conditioned loft. (Jen and Jim had a single air conditioner that turned their bedroom into a walk-in freezer if the bedroom door was closed and that had no discernible effect of any kind if the bedroom door was open. Jim was there now, in a hoodie and fingerless gloves, reading A Man Without Qualities underneath a blanket and Franny.)

“It’s beautiful. And it’s so big, ” Jen had said after Meg and Marc finished renovating the loft, when Meg was seven months pregnant with Millie. Jen had cringed inside, wishing she’d stopped at “It’s beautiful.” Pointing out the size of Meg’s home veered too close to talking about money; or, more precisely, it veered too close to gawking. Or maybe gawking was just what Jen was doing — because Jen’s gaze was, arguably, empirically stupid; this was not a value judgment but simply a statement of fact in re: Jen’s lack of money, lack of knowledge of money, lack of upbringing in any remote proximity to money, lack of experience discussing money, lack of a conversion table for translating what someone like Meg meant when she referred to “a lot of money,” lack of comprehension of what it was to have money, spend money, or invest money, lack of understanding of what it might mean to point at a giant empty space in one of the most expensive zip codes in the country and not only call dibs but think it a shrewd and even excessively reasonable choice given other, pricier options that were nonetheless also tenable.

“Eh, we’ll all be practically living in one room like savages,” Meg had said, rubbing her belly with one hand and rapping her knuckles on the counter with the other. “The girl-child will see unspeakable things.”

Was the counter — soapstone? Silestone? Jen couldn’t remember.

“Seriously, it’s ridiculous,” Meg was saying now. “You have to come out at least for a few days. I can’t imagine the Mrs. Bluff staying in the city in August.”

“She’s not; Leora is gone all month,” said Jen, who was crowning her elephant with a tiara made of honeysuckle. Honey sucko. “But she’s working from her summer house and has to sign off on everything. The others are gone for a week or two at a time, but they check in, supposedly.”

“So why can’t you go away and check in?” Meg asked.

“It’s complicated,” Jen said. “It’s partly because this stupid video project fell in my lap. Is that a house, Millie?”

“Behwuh,” Millie replied.

“A bear, huh — that’s a big bear. Is the bear a boy or a girl?”

“Guw.”

“Does she need a house in the storm?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, let’s build the bear a house to keep her warm and dry in the storm,” Jen said. “I’m hoping things will be calmer after we launch this — whatever it is.”