Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

The building’s architectural quirks struck Jen as most problematic on late Saturday evenings, when the upstairs neighbors’ ungulate children repaired to their grandparents’ house and their parents would celebrate their reprieve with a thumping multiroom sexual odyssey — what Jim called their “weekly all-hands meeting”—often scored to Buena Vista Social Club or, on at least one harrowing occasion, Raffi’s Singable Songs for the Very Young, whose material provided a ready template for marching band — style refrains that the neighbors synced with recognizably percussive motions.

FIVE! LITTLE! SPECKLED! FROGS!

SAT! ON A! SPECKLED! LOG!

EATING! THE MOST! DELICIOUS! BUGS!

Then, occasionally, what sounded like a lamp would chank to the floor or a bedside table would whomp over on its side, followed by the scrabbling of either a small dog’s or a large cat’s paws as it fled for safety to another room.

“Should we tell them?” Jen asked Jim late one night as they lay in bed, eyes wide in the dark, as the woman upstairs improvised a bellowing descant to her husband’s rapid Raffian melody. “It’s like they’re invading their own privacy.”

ONE! JUMPED! INTO! THE POOL!

WHERE! IT! WAS NICE! AND COOL!

THEN! THERE WERE FOUR GREEN SPECKLED FROGS

“I’m just glad they’re happy,” Jim said. Their downstairs neighbor broomed her ceiling, just once, as if in warning.

After the end of her Federloss job, Jen might have assumed that she and Jim would be giving their neighbors more opportunities to invade their privacy now that she was unencumbered by the everyday stresses and timesucks of gainful employment. But Jen and Jim convened fewer all-hands meetings during her enforced sabbatical, for no reason that either could have pinpointed, save perhaps for a sheepishness that floated around the post-layoff Jen like a twilight cloud of gnats. She began too many emails — even to Meg, even to Pam — with “I know you must be totally busy, but I just wondered…” She thanked friends too profusely — even Meg, even Pam — when they met for coffee or a drink, and Jen always insisted on paying. She avoided parties, because she’d “have nothing to say.”

“I just find it hard to do small talk if I can’t account for my time,” Jen said to Meg on the phone.

“Right,” Meg replied, “because there’s always a velvet rope and a horde of squealing fans around the guy at the party who wants to talk about his job. ”

Jen kept an Excel spreadsheet on her elderly laptop titled REAL JOBS AND OTHER JOBS. At first, tapping through fingerless gloves at a kitchen table made dizzy on its oak-finish-and-particleboard haunches by the humidity swings of too many New York City summers, Jen applied for only REAL JOBS: grantwriting, speechwriting, communications work for any worthy cause she could find. But as the winter grew colder and bleaker, she put in for more and more OTHER JOBS. She applied to write copy for the Feminist Porn Collective, but belatedly discovered that she would be paid mainly in feminist porn. She landed an interview to be the research assistant to an elderly romance novelist and semireclusive candle-wax heiress, only to find out ex post facto that the novelist had employed a total of six research assistants over forty years, and each was a white male with a poetry MFA and/or a direct or family connection to Phillips Exeter Academy. She drafted a few speeches for a third-party mayoral candidate whose campaign platform included the abolishment of both private schools and gender designations on government forms. She acted as writing tutor to the sixteen-year-old son of a well-known entertainment lawyer, until she refused to help him forge a Vyvanse prescription, whereupon the teen told his mother (untruthfully) that Jen had absconded with his Modafinil prescription. Jen did not disclose to her charge that she herself had a prescription for a similar cognitive enhancer, Animexa, which she renewed at increasingly irregular intervals following the loss of her blue-chip Federloss Foundation health insurance.

“You live in a fake neighborhood,” the sixteen-year-old had informed Jen one day.

“Ditmas Park?” Jen replied. “It’s real. I’ve been there.”

“You live,” the sixteen-year-old said, “in a real estate agent’s neologism.”

This bothered Jen, mostly because the decision to live in a real estate agent’s neologism had originally been a marker of grown-up prudence and long-term thinking: The mindful marrieds enter their thirties, conserve their resources, steadily pay down their student loans, live well within their means, reserve space for a hypothetical tiny future boarder.

“Feather your nest,” the real estate agent had said.

Now, even living in a real estate agent’s neologism seemed like a grim necessity bordering on presumptuous overreach, regardless of the scuffed thirdhand furniture, the chewed gum — like residue constantly and mysteriously accumulating between the kitchen tiles, the canoe-sized kitchen separated by a cheap flapping strip of countertop from the deluxe canoe — sized living room, the dry rot in the windowsills, the closet doors eight inches too narrow for their frames. Even Franny the cat seemed like a luxury, all those unmonetized hours logged napping and grooming.

Jen began writing down every single purchase she made in her notebook. With the same fountain pen, she also drew a picture of each item. Her student loan debit was represented one month by a graduation cap, another month by the hand-forged wrought-iron gate her college class had walked through on commencement day. Cat-food purchases were represented by drawings of Franny in various states of odalisque repose. Jen made stippled pencil drawings of toothpaste tubes and physics-defying stacks of little tissue packets from the pharmacy and curlicuing cornucopias from modest grocery runs.

The first entry in Jen’s notebook was the price of the notebook. Inside the open notebook, Jen drew a picture of the open notebook, then another inside that one and another, collapsing infinitely into the center.

“So, any news?” Jen’s mom asked.

Jen’s mom never telephoned her, but if Jen did not call at regular intervals, Jen’s mom would complain to Jen’s dad, who would then send an email to Jen asking why she was ignoring her mother. The subject heading of these emails was “Your Mother.”

(Jen’s mom became agitated, however, if Jen telephoned her too frequently. “Enough! I’m fine, ” she’d say in lieu of greeting if one of Jen’s calls followed another too closely. The acceptable interval between calls widened and narrowed at will.)

“Any news on work, you mean?” Jen asked. “Not just yet.”

“Could that Meg find you a job?”

Meg was a program director at the Bluff Foundation for Justice and Human Rights, a private behemoth so agelessly fortified by old money that its temporary hiring freeze was itself a metric of dire economic crisis.

“Meg has been really helpful,” Jen said. “But obviously I don’t want to put it all on her to find me a job—”

“Fine, fine,” Jen’s mom broke in. “Anyway.”

Jen never knew if her mother’s conversational style was symptomatic of mere incuriosity or rather of an extreme wariness of any social transaction remotely resembling confrontation, which presumably included most exchanges of words. At cousins’ weddings and sisters-in-law’s baby showers, Jen watched with dismay as her mother attempted to mingle with people she’d known all their lives: arms folded in front of her as a shield, chin pulled defensively to her neck, poorly conditioned limbic system misinterpreting a niece’s attempts to inquire about her protracted kitchen renovation for a passive-aggressive face-off between two opposing parties.