Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“This all-media motivational thingy,” Meg said. “Could Jim come first and you could join us later?”

“Well, Jim has all this administrative stuff to get done ahead of the school year that he didn’t have last year,” Jen said. This was true, and also irrelevant to the question of whether or not Jen and Jim could spend some time at Meg’s summer rental.

“But Jim—” Meg stopped.

“But Jim has the whole summer off and could have gotten it done anytime?” Jen asked. “I’ve thought the same thing. I wish he—” This time Jen stopped herself. To verbalize her wish that Jim — who spent his summers reading and running, running and reading — would seek out tutoring gigs or freelance writing assignments or anything that might monetize his yearly three-month sabbatical would also veer too close to talking about money.

“Whatever, I still don’t get it,” Meg said. “Anything you have to do, you can do at the house. And it sets a bad precedent that you’re chaining yourself to your desk like this — they’ll come to expect that of you, and you have to nip that in the bud.”

“You’ll have to pardon me, ladies,” Jen said.

Jen shut the door behind her in Meg’s downstairs bathroom, where she always half expected a man in a tuxedo to hand her a towel, and sat down on the edge of the built-in stone tub. She had lied to Meg, and had erred in predicting that her lie would land clean, would speak for itself, would not demand explanation or amplification.

She tried to remember a time she had ever lied to Meg before, and couldn’t.

Every year since college, Meg had invited Jen and Pam — and, later, Meg and Marc had invited Jen and Jim and Pam and Paulo — to some kind of summer retreat: Meg’s parents’ lakeside house, Marc’s parents’ place upstate, and for the last few years, a beach house that Meg and Marc rented for the month of August. The first year of the beach house, Jen had tried to pay for herself and Jim, to extract from Meg the price of one-third of one-fourth of the rent — because they only ever stayed for one week, anything more would be too much of an imposition, although Pam did not share this view — and when Meg refused either to provide the sum or to entertain the notion of accepting any money from Jen whatsoever, Jen went online to research comparable rents in the area and, a few stunned minutes later, ceased her online research and silently accepted Meg’s generosity.

In each year since, Jen’s palpable sheepishness about the rental house and its estimated price tag had channeled itself into monetary overcompensation: a $250 surprise grocery run, a stream of screen-printed hand towels and homemade soaps and other desperate purchases from the quaint little shops in town, and constant, keening offers to buy gas or pay for gas or offer cash for gas up front.

“ Basta, Jen,” Meg said once.

Jen understood Meg’s exasperation. She was aware of how her behavior turned what should have been a gift into an off-balance and embarrassing transaction. And still, some coagulated recess of Jen’s mind resented Meg for acknowledging her missteps. And when Meg had mentioned the house this year — at this point, it was less an invitation than a reminder — Jen felt a sinking column open inside her like a plunger, trapping a pocket of air at the top of her sternum, and as Meg rattled off dates and times and ideas for day trips, Jen blurted out that she was really sorry, but they probably couldn’t come this year.

Jen rose from the edge of Meg’s bathtub and saw thick horizontal streaks of charcoal and intestinal pink swipe past her; she gripped the side of the sink until the streaks receded into pinpricks of light and the nausea receded with it. She inhaled through her nose and exhaled through her mouth three times each, flushed the toilet, palmed some water from the faucet, and opened the door.

“Do you need help with anything?” Jen asked Meg, who was still grinding.

“Yeah, I need help with the fact that I want you to come to the house,” Meg said. “Just come to the darn house.”

“Next year,” Jen said. “When things have calmed down. And thank you so much, as always, for—”

“Jenfa. Jenfa.” Millie was rubbing Jen’s leg and staring plaintively into the middle distance. “Jenfa,” she whispered.

“What is it, my love?” Jen asked.

“Sucko,” Millie said to a lost horizon. “Wan daw sucko.”

“You want to draw a circle? I bet you can draw a circle, sweetheart,” said Jen, kneeling down and leaning over a fresh sheet of paper, her lower abdomen touching the tops of her upper thighs. Jen slowly drew a big red circle.

Holding the crayon in her fist, Millie approached the page with the same patience and caution with which she would greet and pet Franny whenever she and her mother paid their infrequent visits to Not Ditmas Park (infrequent only because Jen was constantly deflecting the visits; infrequent because Meg and Millie “shouldn’t have to go to the trouble to come all the way from SoHo”). Millie even coached herself using the same mantra she used with Franny: “Jenta, jenta,” Millie whispered to her fist.

“You don’t have to be gentle,” Jen whispered, rubbing her nose against Millie’s ear to make her giggle. “You can attack .”

Millie stuck out her tongue in concentration and pushed her crayon across the page in what was intended as a swooping motion. The completed mark was an off-kilter kiss between greater-than and less-than signs. She tried again and again, layering the page with disembodied Pac-Man maws. Millie squawked admonishments at the page, lowering her head until her nose almost touched the paper, as if she could intimidate it into showing her not the marks her hand actually made but the perfect interlocking rings her mind could see.

Jen reached over to grab an antique miniature globe off a coffee table and showed Millie how to trace around the circular pewter base.

“You know, I never thought about this before, Millie, but it’s really hard to draw a circle,” Jen said. “You have to know exactly where to start, which is also exactly where you have to end, and you can’t really stop to check your work.”

Millie teethed her lower lip and turned to Jen, her eyes round. “Fanny,” she said, in a grave, confessional whisper. “Fanny.”

“Franny’s at home with Uncle Jim,” Jen said. “But she misses you, and is hoping to see you soon, and she told me to give you this special message. Are you ready?” Jen pressed foreheads with Millie and rolled her tongue against her teeth in a loud purr, and Millie laughed.

“That is pretty funny, Millie,” Jen said, looking up for Meg. But Meg had laid down the pestle and padded silently across the great room, where she was fast asleep on a sofa.

Jen had looked up too quickly. She ducked her head back down and closed her eyes, waiting for another rushing foam of nausea to recede.

“Daw Fanny, daw Fanny,” Millie was saying, laughing and rubbing Jen’s arm.

“That’s a good idea, sweetie,” Jen said, opening her eyes and taking the crayon from Millie. “If we draw Franny, then she’ll be here with us.”

There was a young rabbi who had rediscovered her dormant faith after the death of her father. There was a medical resident whose elective mastectomy at age thirty-two had turned her into a health-food nut and ultramarathoner. There was a successful real estate agent whose house burned down and sent her into a surprising state of quasi-Buddhist bliss at the loss of her material possessions. There was a young electronics heiress whose brief, DUI-related jail sentence brought her into contact with women serving harsh sentences for minor drug offenses, which led the electronics heiress to enroll in law school to become an advocate for such women. There was an event planner who found her fiancé in bed with a circus performer she had hired for a four-year-old’s birthday party, which inspired her to start a popular new dating site.