Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“I’m not lying,” Jen told Daisy at the time. “My MetroCard fell out of my coat at the coat check, and as I picked it up, Judy kind of chucked me on the arm and said, ‘So glad we still have a safety net in this society.’ ”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Daisy said. “She could have meant the carpet was the safety net.”

“I was there, man,” Jen said.

This particular iteration of Judy — she would be forever after known as Safety Net Judy — had just filed a LIFe Lines essay to Jen about her volunteer work with a reading initiative for elementary-school girls and how it reminded Judy of the time her fourth-grade teacher had caught Judy cheating during the Great Lakes Read-a-Thon Contest by asking her about a crucial plot point in Harriet the Spy and thus teaching young Judy a lifelong lesson in the importance of authenticity. In order to avoid reading Safety Net Judy’s essay, Jen tabbed to another Judy’s essay that she was also avoiding reading and saw Daisy’s muddy reflection on her screen.

“Who wrote this — Hedge Fund Judy?” Daisy asked, reading over Jen’s shoulder.

“Hand-Sanitizer Heiress Judy,” Jen said.

“Is the piece really called ‘Learning to Lasso the Lingo of the Fertility Rodeo’?” Daisy asked, peering more closely.

“For now.” After all the confusion over what TTC actually stood for, Leora had requested the commissioning of a suite of LIFe Lines essays about women’s experiences with the decision to have children. Hand-Sanitizer Heiress Judy was the first to file her contribution.

“It’s jargon-y,” Daisy said.

“For real. I’ve been spending all this time on infertility websites — you know, just to figure out all the nomenclature in this piece — and it’s truly a whole dialect unto itself,” Jen said. “For instance, what do you think BFP stands for?”

Daisy considered. “Baby for Purchase.”

“Nope, Big Fat Positive. That means you’ve got a positive pregnancy test. Oh, this one comes up a lot, too — OPK. What do you think OPK stands for?”

“Ovary Place Kicker.”

“Close — Ovulation Predictor Kit. You buy a kit, you pee on a stick, and it tells you when to have sex.”

“And there are lots of numbers here, too,” Daisy said.

“Some of those tell you the diameter of a follicle before it ruptures,” Jen said.

“Ruptures to release an egg?”

“Not necessarily — you can test to see when the follicle is going to rupture, but you don’t necessarily know whether or not there’s an egg in there.”

“So it’s like the bullpen gate swings open, but maybe there’s no bull in there,” Daisy said.

“You know,” Jen said, “I’m all for printing whatever is on Judy’s mind, but I’m wondering if there’s a mixed message here. In one section of the site, we’re writing about projects LIFt is funding to help women not get pregnant, and in another, we’re writing about how we can’t get pregnant.”

“Maybe we could fund a grant to cover the shipping costs of mailing all the surplus babies to the Judys,” Daisy said.

“ Is fertility a rodeo?” Jen asked.

“Maybe a mixed message requires mixed metaphors,” Daisy said.

“With fertilization I think of salmon swimming upstream,” Jen said. “I guess that’s clichéd.”

“But in a rodeo you’re in, like, a dusty arena, and you’re trying to lasso — it is a bull, right?” Daisy asked. “Or sometimes it’s a pig?”

“A steer, maybe?”

“So is the lasso the sperm and the steer is the egg? Where are the salmon? What’s the vagina?”

“It’s hard to find a vagina at the rodeo,” Jen said.

“So this Judy was thirty-three when she decided to go to a fertility doctor,” Daisy said. “That’s not so old.”

“It’s not all about age,” Jen said. “It can be so many different things.”

Daisy picked up her ringing phone. Jen, intending to wander back to Safety Net Judy’s essay, instead lingered over the Total Transformation Challenge submission page.

“They’re asking us to do a head count of all the people whose lives were transformed by the program, then divide the organization’s budget by that number of people served,” Daisy was saying into the phone. “This is not humanities — this is math. Are you an addition sign or a subtraction sign?”

Jen considered the instructions for the second category and typed a response.

TTC CATEGORY 2: BODY

How can you challenge yourself to love your body, to treat it as a temple? How can you find ways to express your gratitude for all the amazing things your body can do?

Your response here:

I challenge my body to love itself enough to harvest from the Garden of Earthly Delights.

“That’s because he thinks of his foundation as a vending machine,” Daisy was saying into the phone. “You put your money in the top slot and structural change comes out of the bottom slot with your Diet Coke.”

Jen’s inbox pinged.

Karina — LIFt

Thursday, Oct 22 5:54 PM

To: Jen — LIFt

Subject: Come to Belize with me

Hi Jen

I have a delicious proposition for you. I’m traveling to Belize in December with one of our new board members. Really fabulous guy who — well, I’ll tell you all about it in person. I’m going to have a lot of ground to cover while I’m there, and I’m afraid I just won’t be able to do it all by myself. And that’s where you come in, dear girl!

And look, not to get into this too much, but you should have a break. You deserve one!

Say yes,

K.

Just then Jen identified the physiological components of pleasure, satisfaction, and joyful anticipation whirling into kaleidoscopic coordination with one another before just as quickly spinning away, their limbic messaging scrambled by a sharp retort from Jen’s prefrontal lobes affirming that Jen’s entire stimulus-response network, in order to maintain a gray and anxious homeostasis, was catastrophically dependent on the reactions and approval of indiscriminately selected third parties.

Jen stared at Karina’s “Say yes” long enough that the letters began to twist away from their semiotic attachments, evoking nothing but their own shapes, then switched back to the Total Transformation Challenge submission page. She considered the instructions for the third category and typed a response.

TTC CATEGORY 3: SPIRIT

How can you challenge your spirit to come into full flower and experience maximum connection with the people and values you cherish most?

Your response here:

I challenge my spirit to locate itself and announce itself to me, because I don’t know what it looks like, or what it does, or if I have one.

The really fabulous guy, as Karina later explained, turned out to be Travis Paddock, aka “the Healthy Huntsman,” CEO and cofounder of the fitness company BodMod™ International and face of the BodMod Nutritionals™ line of shakes, smoothie blends, snack bars, and sports gels, all of which used a proprietary blend of ingredients that Paddock sourced from indigenous communities around the world.

“His area of expertise is known as ‘particularizing,’ ” explained Karina, grabbing a BodMod Green Goodness Stack-a-Maca Bang!™ Bar from a box under her desk and handing it to Jen.

To unwrap a BodMod Green Goodness Stack-a-Maca Bang!™ Bar was also to unwrap the weathered Anglo-Saxon terrain of Travis Paddock’s grinning face, which adorned all of his products and which Karina had inevitably described as “ruggedly handsome” and which, to Jen’s eyes, bumped awkwardly against the Malibu-bleached locks that flopped onto his deep-lined forehead from a hairline of uncertain geographic coordinates. But Jen understood that, to BodMod™’s intended audience, Paddock’s decapitated head atop a one-pound canister of BodMod Pro-Team Protein Pow!Der™ instantly signified rude health and complicatedly clean living, and presented a useful stand-in for the intricately managed physique that was showcased in BodMod™’s promotional videos, in which Paddock, in tight-fitting T-shirts and cargo pants, might be glimpsed gripping the husk of a pedicab in Quito to create a bas-relief of his triceps or dashing across the Peruvian highland at twilight, hauling a backpack full of maca in order to illustrate its invigorating qualities.