Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“Why?”

“Because…” Pam trailed off. “He doesn’t want people to get any preconceived notions about him because of who his parents are.”

“Why? They’re in real estate or something?”

“Paulo’s father is a property developer. I guess you could call him a — a tycoon. A real estate baron. Paulo’s brother and sister are very much embedded in the family business, and meanwhile Paulo just flounced off to the States and started throwing pails of paint on things, or at least that’s how his father sees it.”

Jen piled an entire frond of sautéed spicy soy bok choy between her teeth, folding it in half with an artful curl of her tongue — two tiny droplets of sauce swan-diving out of her mouth and onto the tablecloth as the frond flipped back — and pulsing her head rhythmically as she chomped.

“His parents aren’t judgmental so much as they’re just — confused. About Paulo’s choices, what he wants out of life. Meanwhile, Paulo is concerned about being seen as some rich-kid dilettante. And he’s honestly never taken much — if anything — from them, at least not since he left school. He always wanted to prove that he could make it on his own — and that is something he does have in common with his father, that work ethic. But now that there’s a third party involved, and she is currently taking up the priceless and heretofore undeveloped North American real estate that is my womb…”

Pam trailed off again, looking startled.

Jen shoveled more bok choy and gulped from her water glass. The Animexa tablet had increased the wattage on the restaurant’s surgery-ward lights. Her fingers were numb. She hoped all the food-shoveling had opened the vessels in her face and prevented the blood from draining from her cheeks.

“I never would have guessed that about Paulo,” Jen said. “Not that any of what you’ve told me is some guilty secret. But he seems so down-to-earth.”

“He is,” Pam said, staring at her plate.

“And you never — you guys never—”

“We’ve never lived in anything but shithole apartments?” Pam asked her plate, deadpan.

“And you even split the rent on those shitholes with others!” Jen said.

Pam laughed. “I’m sorry if it’s weird that we never talked about this,” she said. “I mean, like you said before — it’s not like it was a secret; it’s not like it was something to hide or disclose. But he’s so private, while you and I are so open with each other, and I love you both so much, and — it created this weird contradiction sometimes.”

“It’s okay,” Jen said. “It’s resolved now.”

Jen parted from Pam with a promise to visit the work-in-progress space for the scaled-down Break in Case of Emergency ahead of its opening, then turned in the direction of the LIFt offices. Outside, every surface, whether material or atmospheric, seemed frozen in sooty gray stone, letting in little light and less heat. Jen turned back toward the restaurant, realizing she’d forgotten to tell Pam about her appointments with Mrs. Flossie Durbin, but Pam had already disappeared down the stairway of the closest subway entrance. Jen turned back again, corkscrewed around by dizziness. Disoriented as she was, her internal navigator pivoted her three blocks in LIFt’s opposite direction instead, toward Jen’s favorite library branch in the city: a modest, under-patronized brick square of Beaux Arts aspirations, its quiet courtyard garden ringed with benches.

To reach the courtyard, you first walked through the cozy, happily overstocked children’s reading room and its monthly rotation of art projects. January marked a collaboration between a high-school art class and preschoolers learning the alphabet. First the preschoolers had marked bright, bold letters on oversized construction paper. Then the high-school students had interpreted each letter as a representation of an animal. One sloping leg of an A shape-shifted into the scaly back of a grinning alligator. The humps of a B revealed themselves as the ample belly and thighs of an affable bear. The attenuated bottom curve of a C morphed into the flicking tail of a rotund, imperious tabby cat.

The tabby began to wiggle and shimmer, and Jen continued into the courtyard. Then she turned back, because she wanted to know which animal they’d chosen to represent X–Xerus inauris, a giant African squirrel wearing a boa and a monocle — and then she spun around again toward the courtyard. She was dizzy again, or maybe she’d been dizzy since lunch, her peripheral vision streaming with muddy waters, her lower back filmed in a clammy sweat.

When Jen was in preschool, her teacher had handed out booklets intended for a week-to-week alphabet project that students could complete at home with their parents: drawing the letters of the alphabet and cutting pictures out of magazines that corresponded to each letter. Jen misunderstood the assignment, which she had taken up privately with a dull pencil in a visual language that was self-evident to her four-year-old perceptions, though she as yet lacked the fine motor skills to translate those perceptions onto the page: the wobbly pencil asterisk that meant A for Ant, the densely tangled pencil blob that meant B for Bee. At some point, though, there must have been a clarifying parent-teacher consultation at preschool drop-off or pickup, and somewhere around the F ’s or G ’s the largely interchangeable graphite splotches were supplanted by neatly scissored color photographs from the likes of Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping, which Jen’s mother, sitting at their kitchen table, carefully cut and glued onto each page as Jen sat quietly beside her.

“There ya go,” Jen’s mother said, handing the booklet to Jen, having finished filling it in one hurried and mostly silent afternoon session, skipping without comment over X.

So many of Jen’s childhood memories — so many of her memories, period — possessed this quality of hazy misapprehension followed by hard correction, a kind of dipping in and out of cognizance and then a stiff-legged flailing to catch up, to fill in redacted sentences and patch over skipped communications, a state of consciousness that could be measured fairly accurately in unsigned permission slips and half-finished homework assignments and hour upon hour of accumulated tardiness. Jen knew that she could have defined herself against this template, had she ever asserted the willpower to do so. But instead she had fitted herself to the template.

There would always be a room in the house, she thought, where people were gathered, murmuring pleasantly to one another, and Jen would be sure to stumble on it mere minutes before the festivities broke up, and the people inside the room would welcome her, not with hesitation but with mild regret, with kind but uncomfortable smiles, a compassion in their eyes.

Jen sat down on one of the empty benches in the empty courtyard. On her collar she could almost smell the sour breath of her own self-pity. Her self-pity subsisted in part on simple carbohydrates and on the salt mined from the sodium-rich instant soups of a drafty childhood, but it was mostly self-sustaining, feeding on itself, an apparently inescapable genetic susceptibility to self-pity being one of the major reasons Jen pitied herself. She closed her eyes against the yellowish orbital streaks ringing around her head and submitted to self-pity’s embrace, tilting her face toward the slanting winter sun, inhaling and exhaling slowly.

She and her self-pity knew now, as the pleasant people gathered in the secret-seeming room must have known all along, that early adulthood for most of her college peers was a kind of summer camp, a character-building exercise in make-believe, a hope chest of nostalgia, a lakeside idyll that marked the shimmering threshold before real life began. The cramped, subsidized housing where Meg and Marc had lived for nearly two years during law school, throwing monthly four-course dinner parties at which half the guests ate in the tiny kitchen and the other half ate in the tiny bedroom, rotating guest by guest at regular intervals to hybridize conversation and interaction — that was summer camp. When Lauren Reilly, daughter of another partner at Meg’s father’s law firm, moved into her boyfriend’s one-window studio to paper over the year between when she finished law school and her boyfriend started medical school — that was summer camp. Pam and Paulo’s mildewy, transient-filled studio space was summer camp. Meg’s semiannual clothing swaps were summer camp. Pam’s Champion sweatshirts were summer camp.