Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

The tote bag shrugged, slumped, and, in three slow, deathly flops, drifted and fell off the chair onto the carpet.

“We can’t deny the material, the corporeal,” Donna said, sniffing the cashmere. “But we can make it speak to our spirit.”

Leora looked down at the crumpled tote bag, its nubby woven handle splayed over one toe of her heels.

“People should look into their gift bag at the end of a beautiful night and not only be delighted but also know — feel— exactly what LIFt stands for,” Karina said.

Leora daintily extracted her foot from under the tote bag’s handle, her mouth twisted in confusion.

“No one can take our message away from us, our mission,” Donna said. “Certainly not some nameless online nobody.”

“Stop oxygenating, will ya!” Sunny said.

Leora, still staring at the tote bag, limply kicked at it, once. Soundlessly, Sunny materialized at her side, plucked the tote bag off the floor, and sequestered the tote bag on its own chair across the room, as if the tote bag were to be quarantined for an unnamed contagion.

“I can’t figure out if we’re going for a bonsai or a synecdoche,” Pam was saying over the ambient blare of the cement mixer parked across the street from her studio. As Jen arrived, Pam had just marked off three-eighths of the studio’s square footage with electrical tape and stood at one corner with hands on hips, trying to visualize how to cram in some representative cross-section of the original Break in Case of Emergency. From the floor, Nick Cave seethed tinnily from mason jar — sized speakers attached to a Sony Discman that Pam had rescued off a Greenpoint stoop the previous day, Murder Ballads still inside.

Her backpack still slung over one arm and a plastic dry-cleaning bag folded over the other, Jen chewed one thumbnail. “What if it almost became like a living sound installation?” she asked. “The WellnessSolutions operators would be milling around, talking into their headsets, but then you’d also have the parody commercials, the sounds of breaking glass—”

“The sound of Jim popping bubble wrap,” Pam interjected, her eyes still on the empty space. She wore a tight little smile.

“Oh, yeah, he loved that part,” Jen said.

“You know,” Pam said, “people asked me if Jim was part of the installation. Did I ever tell you that?”

Pam’s tone was needling, but Jen couldn’t discern where the sharp points were aiming. The cement mixer revved and groaned.

“No, you didn’t,” Jen said, following Pam’s eyes down to a scuffed floorboard. “He’ll be happy to hear it.”

“I wish everyone had been as into it as Jim was,” Pam said.

“Yeah,” Jen said.

“Too bad Mrs. Flossie Durbin wasn’t so into it,” Pam said.

Jen exhaled and sank down to the floor, hugging her knees with her forearms, backpack and dry cleaning bunched in her lap. “Okay, since you brought it up—”

Pam drew herself up to her full height and squinted with renewed intensity at the empty space. “Since I brought what up?”

“I didn’t know,” Jen said, “if it would be weirder to bring it up or weirder to not bring it up, so let’s just do it: I’m sorry that Mrs. Durbin came to see your work and — and whatever — got distracted by mine.”

Pam brayed, a short, sharp expulsion of laughter. “Oh, come the fuck on, Jen,” she said.

“I’m sorry if it made things awkward — I don’t — I don’t know how to do this or what to say,” Jen said. She felt abject down on the floor, but getting up would only reinforce what a bad decision it had been to assume a supplicant’s pose. “I’m sorry.”

“Stop saying sorry,” Pam said.

“I’m glad it happened, of course,” Jen said, “only I wish it had happened differently.”

“Meaning what?” Pam asked.

Jen tried to smooth the plastic sheet across her legs. “You are making this harder than it needs to be,” she said.

“And you are making this a thing when it’s not a thing,” Pam said.

Things aren’t things unless they happen to Pam, Jen thought, and shook her head to shake the thought away.

“I’m sss — I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Jen said, although Pam had brought it up.

“What do you want me to say, though?” Pam asked. “Do you want me to say that I’m envious?”

Jen closed her eyes. “You have no cause to be envious of me,” Jen said. “No cause.”

Jen rested inside her head for a moment. When she opened her eyes, Pam had sunk to the floor, too, arms wrapped around her knees. They stared together at the same floorboard.

The blare of the cement mixer halted, and the dirge of Nick Cave’s baritone rose all alone through the empty air.

And with a little pen-knife held in her hand

She plugged him through and through

Jen and Pam laughed, exactly at the same time. Each dropped her head back, chin in the air, open smile as if to catch raindrops on her tongue. It was a gesture that Pam had picked up from Jen, or maybe that Jen had picked up from Pam, or maybe both of them had picked it up from Meg, but it belonged to all of them now.

“Is that what I think it is?” Pam asked, her finger making tiny circles in the air in the direction of Jen’s lap.

Jen stood up and held the dry-cleaning bag aloft by the hanger. “We should put this somewhere safe.”

Pam stood up, stepped out of her leggings, and yanked off her tunic. She walked toward Jen in only her underwear. She was still so thin, Jen thought. The curves of either side of her waist had flattened out. Her breasts were lower and heavier, her round belly hard and taut. Pam ripped open the plastic bag in Jen’s arms and pulled The Dress over her head.

“I am a bride in white,” Pam murmured, looking down at herself. “So it has come to this.”

“You are going to be a wife and a mother,” Jen said.

Silently, Pam fingered the fabric pulling at her hip as Jen smoothed one of the straps against her shoulder. Nick Cave was leering at Pam from the floor.

There she stands, this lovely creature

“This is so fucking corny — let’s turn this off,” Pam said matter-of-factly, her head still bowed.

“Don’t worry,” Jen said, as she leaned over to inspect a loose thread on the hemline. “He’s not singing about you.” Jen stepped back to look at Pam in The Dress from head to toe, and she smiled. “The lovely creature doesn’t make it to the end of the song. But we will. Just wait.”

“I think it will be great for Pam in terms of exposure,” said Jen. “But I think Break in Case of Emergency in its original form is the stronger statement.”

On the night of the LIFt party, the train was all messed up again. On the long, blustery-cold walk to the closest working station in her highest heels and translucent hose, Jen tried to talk enough to drown out her own discomfort.

“Twice as strong,” Jim replied, “because it had twice as many of your paintings.”

Jen rubbed Jim’s arm rapidly, as if to file down the edge in his voice. “Pam will be there tonight, by the way,” she said brightly.

“Even though doing an interview with your boss destroyed her reputation?” Jim asked.

“No, it turns out that Paulo’s mom knows Leora somehow, overlapping social circles — anyway, Pam could not have been nicer about Mrs. Durbin’s, um, endorsement of me,” Jen said.

“You were in some suspense about that?”

“Well, it was Pam’s show, but I–I ended up with some of the attention. That could have been awkward for both of us.”

Jim pfft ed.