Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“Okay,” Meg said, pulling Jen into a hug. “Maybe you should go. Maybe not. Let’s just take a moment together to think about it. But either way, do you want me to wrap up some cheese in a go-bag for you?”

Jen laughed into Meg’s shoulder. They stood quietly in the din, Meg’s fingers rubbing Jen’s back as they watched the crowd, until Jen felt another hand grasping hers.

Pam was pulling Jen back to the cheese plate, where she had arranged the cheddar crumbs and cracker shards into letters that spelled out STAY WITH US.

Pam had coaxed the trickle of Jim’s wine into a little underlining flourish on her message.

One of Jen’s hands was held in Meg’s and the other was held in Pam’s.

“You know what, I will stay a bit longer,” Jen yelled. “He needs to be alone. Meg, maybe I’ll just go cry in a bedroom with your ancient charge until we fall asleep.”

“You’ll wake up as somebody’s new wife,” Meg said.

Ever since the commencement of the Project, Jen had mostly steered clear of drinking — even in small social doses, even just after a Monthly Adverse Development and at other times when she could be empirically certain that a bottle of beer after work or a glass of wine at a party could not possibly flood and scurry the nascent brain-cell choreography of a hypothetical tiny future boarder. Jen recognized the irony of this aversion, given how many Projects that alcohol must have rushed into production over the millennia. But the inflammatory effects of the Sermoxal — the bloating of face and midsection, the reddening of nose and cheeks, the attachment of an amplifier and rumbling-bass effects to her Monthly Adverse Developments — had led Jen to suspect that her body had been swarmed by volatile yeast metabolites, her flesh rising and folding into a ruddy, sluggish dough, distressing to the eye and bitter to the taste. Sermoxal was at least a kind of useful poison, Jen thought, while ethanol was a useless one. Her reproductive system — her body in its entirety — seemed already beleaguered and broken enough without the proximate demolition effects of alcohol as it took a power-sander to the stomach lining or the beveled teeth of a wrecking bar to the liver or a jackhammer to the bony labyrinth of the inner ear. Tonight it had smashed and crowbarred the barriers around the Thing That Happened, which Jen had disclosed to Meg and Pam as they’d sat together on the edge of the bed in Leora Infinitas’s guest room: eggshells and sea greens, princess-and-the-pea stacks of linens, hotel-anonymous. Meg’s ninety-four-year-old guest of honor slept beside them, emitting turtle-dove coos and snores. Jen’s disclosure had come apropos of nothing but the liquefying effects of the wine, which had dissolved the border between Jen’s public and private selves and poured out her inner life in a cascade of sloppy disinhibition. Fragments of this episode spotted her line of vision hours later; her body still felt warm from the four arms wrapped around her.

Soon, of course, Jen would feel embarrassed, and she would probably apologize to Meg and Pam. She knew that even now. For the moment, though, she enjoyed this period of reprieve from the symptoms of congenital shame. Her friends were supposed to know these things. And yet, Jen thought, if she were a better friend she wouldn’t burden them. What, after all, were they supposed to do with such information?

As Jen tumbled out of the cab and into her building’s lobby, as she slapped meatily at the elevator button a few times before noticing the OUT OF SERVICE sign, and as she galumphed up five flights of stairs, then down one flight, a matter-of-fact voice cutting in and out amid the jagged smear of her consciousness was asking Jen a familiar question.

Here is the swimmer.

Where is the shore?

“She drowned,” Jen murmured wetly to her key as she stabbed it in the vicinity of the lock on the door to her apartment. “She der-ow-ooooned. ”

Inside the apartment, both the door to Jen and Jim’s bedroom and the door to the nest for the hypothetical tiny future boarder were closed, and Jen wasn’t sure which room Jim had chosen to fall asleep in. There were cinders in her mouth. Her legs were licorice. She bandied in her heels to the refrigerator, grabbed a pint of ice cream out of the freezer, and flopped down on the couch next to Franny, who leaped down and took up residence instead on the kitchen counter, five feet away, establishing that she would not take sides in any domestic conflict. Jen jumped at the sound of an admonishing voice. Her downstairs neighbor was scolding her for walking across the floor in heels, tapping her broomstick of judgment against her own ceiling. Without thinking, Jen yanked off her heels and threw one and then the other across the narrow room, where they left scuff marks on the lumpy-sealed fireplace and ejected a cry of infuriation from the downstairs neighbor, her broomstick-rapping now more insistent.

Jen had forgotten a bowl and spoon for her ice cream, but instead of risking the further wrath of her neighbor, she popped the lid on the container, licked off some butterscotch-and-chocolate-chunk swirls, and opened her laptop, clicking over to the Total Transformation Challenge submission page. She teethed and sucked more ice cream from the pint and sloppily wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. She considered the instructions for the seventh category and typed a response.

TTC CATEGORY 7: HEART

How can you challenge your heart to open itself to every possibility and spread its love and charity far and wide? How can you make your heart beat in perfect rhythm with that of your world, your friends, your partner, your children?

Your response here:

I challenge my heart to be a better, more understanding, less judgmental partner.

But can I vent for a second? It drives me crazy when Jim drops inside jokes in conversation with other people, and it drives both of us crazy that it drives me crazy. It’s a stupid little thing that doesn’t matter, but marriage has a way of magnifying those stupid little things — I know it’s a cliché, but it’s also like, if it’s such a little thing, then it must be easy to fix — so why not just fix it? Whenever he drops the inside jokes without any sense of his audience, I feel this compulsion to explain what he’s talking about, translate for him, not make the other person feel left out and awkward, even though the other person is by definition left out of a marriage and it just makes things more awkward to linger over it — oh, and also, just by the way, it makes Jim feel like shit, which seems relevant. Why do I fixate so much on stupid little things when he is (generally speaking in most respects not tonight but almost all the time) so great?

Anyway, this is how I would have explained the inside joke to Meg tonight. On our first date, we were in this wine bar, and it was too bright and too loud and too first-date-y, but then this song came on, “Burning Airlines,” which is the first song on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), the Brian Eno record. It was so random — the soundtrack to the date was, like, a Springsteen song and then the kind of lite bossa nova you’d hear in Starbucks and then boom ENO ART ROCK. And Jim and I started talking about that record title, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), how it’s the best title of a record ever, and we didn’t know at the time that Tiger Mountain is an actual place with an actual mythology, we thought maybe it was the name of Brian Eno’s estate and it had tigers having pool parties in a moat and operating trebuchets and stuff, and we just started riffing about how tall Tiger Mountain might have been, and the weather conditions on Tiger Mountain, and the types of tigers populating Tiger Mountain, and different strategies for taking Tiger Mountain and winning the hearts and minds of native Tiger Mountainers — Mountaineers? Mountainites? Mountainians? — whom we’d assume would battle fiercely and to the death with any marauding infidels with plans for taking Tiger Mountain by strategy or otherwise. It was just the dumb, half-drunken bullshitting you do with someone when you’re figuring out that you really, really like them and part of the reason you like them is that you like the same stuff.