Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

Jen laughed. “I don’t even have three hundred dollars to spend on anyone, and I’m supposed to figure out how to spend three hundred dollars on Dad ?” she asked. “All he ever wants is a power tool or a biography of a president.”

“Look, I know it’s not a perfect system,” Jen’s mom said. Jen could already hear her fading out, her mother’s slender fingers slowly turning the volume dial on this particular conversation from low to off, her eyes sliding away toward the closest table in need of retidying or the closest glowing television screen. “This is truly the best way your father knows to keep it equitable. Okay, hon? I’ll let ya go now.”

Jim and Millie were sweeping the perimeter of Meg and Marc’s loft playing Magic Carpet Ride while Jen and Meg sat at the glass-and-oak dining table, shelling pistachios. Magic Carpet Ride involved placing Millie atop any soft, smooth-bottomed object — a rag rug, a bathroom mat, Buzz the golden retriever’s dog basket — and Jim pulling Millie and the smooth-bottomed object as far and rapidly as possible until the smooth-bottomed object had wrested itself free of Millie or Millie had collapsed over on her side squeeing with laughter, whichever came first.

Magic Carpet Ride also had a vocal component.

“Magic carpet ride! Magic carpet ride!” Jim called out.

“Magi cop rye! Magi cop rye!” Millie called out.

Meg was asking Jen about her Thanksgiving. Meg had spent Thanksgiving at the home of her maternal aunt, who was a countess by marriage, or maybe a baroness, and who, in a move inexplicable to the rest of her exceedingly discreet family, had just assented to a glossy magazine feature about the top floor of her town house, which consisted entirely of a bathroom carved out of gold Calacatta marble imported from Italy. “We have the equivalent of a Roman aqueduct flowing beneath the floors — no more cold feet after a warm bath,” Meg’s aunt had explained to the magazine writer.

“It was stupid,” Jen said. “Thanksgiving was stupid. It wasn’t as stupid as the trip to Belize.”

“You look fine, by the way,” Meg said now. “You look beautiful. A bit pink, but healthy pink. I thought you would look like something I forgot on the stove.”

“You can’t see my back, though — it’s covered in cobwebs, only the cobwebs are sautéed flesh, ” Jen said.

Millie ran hollering past with Buzz’s dog basket over her head, with Jim crab-walking a few paces behind her.

“So far as I can tell,” Jen continued, “Leora wanted someone to go to Belize to talk with Baz Angler about joining her board, and Karina espied an opportunity to finagle a romantic Caribbean getaway with the Indiana Jones of nutrition bars, so long as she could loop me in to handle the actual work. But that’s just an educated guess. Is this what people do?”

At the periphery of Jen’s vision, Millie flew through the air hooting and floomph ed onto the sofa, Magic Carpet Ride having readily segued into the Hammock Game.

“No,” Meg said. “This is not what people do.”

Jen chomped a pistachio. “At least the fact that they sent me does bespeak a confidence in my abilities.”

Floomph

“Do you actually want Leora Infinitas’s confidence in your abilities?” Meg asked. “Is that an ambition of yours?”

“I have never even made eye contact with Leora Infinitas,” Jen said. “I don’t think she knows my name or what I do. I’m not even entirely sure she knows I went on this ridiculous trip or that she paid for it.”

Floomph

Jen snapped another pistachio. “You know,” she said, “speaking of meeting people, I never met a single Belizean there who wasn’t serving me in some way. Handing me a drink. Taking my bags. Boating my boat to nowhere. I never had a single conversation with someone with whom my organization was nominally connecting.”

Floomph

Meg shrugged. “But that was up to you,” she said, not unkindly. “What was stopping you?”

“You’re right,” Jen said, as a screeching Millie skidded into her lap and climbed atop her. “Nothing was stopping me,” she said, hugging the little girl to her chest and looking up at Jim, who was panting with Buzz’s red bandanna kerchief clenched between his teeth.

The train was all messed up again. Jen was bundled for the cold, but per usual it took Jim a month or so to habituate to dressing for wintry weather, and so he had equipped himself for the long walk home from the last stop in merely a light jacket, no scarf or gloves or hat. This seasonal sartorial pattern never varied, and neither did Jen’s annoyance with it. Jen would have testified under oath that her irritation was an expression of empathy for her partner’s comfort and of concern for any undue stress on his immune system at the start of flu season. She guessed that Jim would have testified under oath that his partner’s irritation was in fact a form of judgment — a judgment that he lacked in basic adult competencies, that he was short on commonsensical foresight, that he could not project himself into a predictable future, such as, for example, the cold, windy future located just outside their chronically overheated apartment whenever he left it to report to work or visit friends, and that this shortcoming was somehow symbolic — microcosmic — of Jen’s Jen-like grasp of Jim’s Jim-ness.

“Aren’t you cold?” Jen asked.

“I’m fine,” Jim said.

Jen rubbed one mittened hand against Jim’s hunched back and hustled to keep up with his brisk pace.

“I love watching you with Millie,” Jen said.

“I love watching you with Millie,” Jim replied, blowing air into his cupped palms and then covering his red ears with his hands. “You’re awesome with her.”

“Do you want my scarf? You could kind of wrap it around your ears.”

“No,” Jim said quickly, taking his hands away from his ears.

Jen linked her arm in his and they walked silently for a while.

“You know, this is going to sound weird, but — you know that I love Millie for herself, right?” Jen asked.

“Of course you do.”

“But do you know what I mean?”

“Not really.”

“Then why did you say you know something when you don’t know?”

“Why don’t you just tell me what you mean?”

“I mean that I love her not as — not as a metaphor for something I want for myself. She’s not a symbol of what I long for and don’t have.”

“You don’t have to convince me of that,” Jim said.

“She’s not a substitution,” Jen said, more insistently. “Millie is Millie.”

“Honey, don’t take this the wrong way,” Jim said, “but when you’re trying to talk yourself into something, or out of something, you don’t have to pretend like you’re really having a conversation with me. You can just talk to yourself. I don’t need to be involved.”

“It’s like she’s not useful, ” Jen said.

“What?” Jim asked.

“Nothing,” Jen said. “I’m just blathering.”

“No, you’re not,” Jim said, and pulled one arm tightly around her. They walked past the uncharacteristically mellow dogs of Brancato’s Grocery, shoulder pressed to shoulder.

What Jen tried and failed to articulate was that her relationship with Millie stood as the purest one in her life, because Millie had no precise or measurable utility. For the first years that Jen and Jim were together, Jen could not have said that Jim had a precise or measurable utility, either. In more recent years, though, and especially since their marriage, she had assigned to Jim empirical values: the numerical amount of his contribution to their shared rent and household expenses and his projected monetary contribution in years to come; his contributions to household chores as measured in time; his ability to provide speed-trial results of regularly assessed and reliably consistent high quality in the Garden of Earthly Delights; etc. Conversely, Jen was painfully aware of her lack of any precise, measurable utility to Meg: Jen would never find herself in a position to line up gainful employment for Meg if she needed it, or a cost-free vacation rental house for Meg if she so desired it.