A Special Place for Women

by Laura Hankin

  She sat forward again and reopened the leather portfolio, pulling out a stapled document and a pen. “Anyways, Margot has spoken very highly of you”—She had? Embarrassingly, I thrilled to this news—“and I’ve found talking to you to be an interesting albeit unpredictable experience. Plus we don’t have a novelist yet. So we’re thrilled to offer you membership to Nevertheless.” Caroline handed the document to me. “Why don’t you take a moment to read this over, sign at the bottom of the second page, and then we can head back to the clubhouse to celebrate?” As I took the paper from her hands, she pulled out her phone and began replying to work e-mails, her tongue poking out the side of her mouth, an impressive feat of focus. If any woman would truly be able to have it all—to mediate a fight between her children one minute while leading an important conference call the next—it would be Caroline. I stared down at the paper in front of me. Membership Contract, the text read, as the sheet trembled in my hands.

  I’d done it. Holy shit, beautiful sweet baby Jesus, I had done it. All I had to do was sign and then she’d lead me back to the clubhouse and I’d be on my way to providing all the info I needed to the fact-checkers. The women would open up to me now, letting me in on the secrets, their history. Fuck yes, I thought as I skimmed the legalese about membership responsibilities like when dues were to be paid (within a week of joining, and then monthly on that date, so thank God for Miles stepping in to help). Yup, there was the nondisparagement agreement that Libby had mentioned, saying that members agreed not to speak ill of the organization publicly. (Ridiculous! Was that some kind of free-speech violation?) I turned the page to read the last bit of it.

  Clause 16: Nondisclosure, the text read. Shit. So these women didn’t just keep their secrets for fun, or because of some unofficial omertà. There were real legal consequences for blabbing. I read the section once, then again, trying to make sense of it. Member agrees that all identifying information of the organization, including membership, location, and member activities, shall remain confidential. It went on for a full paragraph in confusing legal terms, but I got the gist. By signing this contract, I wouldn’t be allowed to share information about Nevertheless with anyone outside of it. Okay. I could handle this. Miles had said that sometimes, it was possible to get out of nondisclosure agreements. I just needed to check with him before I signed. That was the deal.

  “Do you have a question about something?” Caroline asked.

  “Oh,” I said, my voice cracking like a preteen boy’s. I cleared my throat. “I’m just trying to understand this nondisclosure agreement. I hadn’t realized that would be a part of it.”

  “Yes,” she said. “We had to add that somewhat recently to protect ourselves. A member told her boyfriend all about us, and when they got in a fight, he showed up at the building trying to cause trouble. Luckily we have an excellent security guard. You’ll meet her later.”

  “Smart,” I said. “So now if someone blabs, you can sue the pants off of them?”

  “Basically,” she said pleasantly. “Is there a problem? Otherwise, it’s time to sign.”

  “Oh, I was just wondering, would it be okay to look this over with a lawyer before signing it?” I asked, then said breezily, as if it were a joke, “One can never be too careful with contracts. I learned that from The Little Mermaid.”

  “Love The Little Mermaid! And isn’t it so great that the remake has more diversity?” she said. And then her smile dropped entirely, revealing the steel underneath. So Caroline could turn off her politeness with one firm twist, like a faucet, when different methods were called for. “But no,” she said, and I shivered. “It’s actually now or never.”

  Plan B, then. I’d do what Miles had said originally: call it right here and now, write the article about what I had already learned, and live with the fact that I’d written something good instead of something discourse-defining, scandal-uncovering. I’d been riding a grand roller coaster, but it was time to ask it to let me off, disoriented and unfulfilled, right before the loop-de-loops began. No chance to see the clubhouse again, to solve the mystery of Nicole, to get behind the door. I’d never untangle the complications behind Margot’s blithe facade or get a smile out of Vy. It’s not like they’d deign to talk to me in the real world if I turned down membership, if our paths ever crossed again.

  But I’d get over that. I just needed some kind of evidence before I left. And both my phone and my camera were inside my bag, with Libby. As my brain ran through possibilities of how to make this work, Libby reappeared from her walk down the pier. She waved, beaming as she saw the contract in my lap, then leaned against the railing, watching and waiting for things to be official. Two sets of eyes burned a hole into me. My throat constricted. My brain turned sluggish, lazy. Now or never. If I didn’t sign, Nevertheless would be done with me. They couldn’t be done with me just yet.

  “Jillian?” Caroline asked, a note of impatience creeping into her voice.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Just excited!” I had no choice. Miles would understand. The pen slipped against my sweaty fingers. I grasped it tightly, pressed it to the paper, and signed my name.

  As soon as I’d finished, Libby squealed and clapped her hands. Caroline whisked the paper away, tucking it back into her portfolio. “Congratulations, Jillian,” she said. “Let’s head back to the clubhouse.”

  As Libby skipped ahead of us and Caroline and I rose from the bench, I asked, “So, what happened to that member? The one who told her boyfriend about everything?”

  Caroline tilted her head to one side. “What member?” she asked sweetly. Then she turned and began to power walk east. “Come on,” she said over her shoulder as my stomach dropped. “Time for your initiation.”

  FIFTEEN

  I never would have picked out the nondescript, eight-story building they led me to as the site of mysterious doings. And yet that was where Caroline stopped, keying in some numbers on a push-pad at eye level on the right side of the door. “Every woman receives her own personal code to get into the building during active hours,” she said briskly, but with a hint of pride in her thrown-back shoulders. “We’ll get you yours later tonight.”

  “Are there businesses on the other floors?” I asked as Libby swung open the door to the entryway.

  “No,” Caroline said. “We own the whole building.” Holy shit, they paid for an entire building in the freaking West Village, and just left floors and floors of it empty? The amount they’d make by renting the rest of it out for just one month could have paid off all my mother’s medical bills and saved our house, but it didn’t even matter to them. Every time I thought I’d adjusted to the elitism at play here, a new piece of information slapped me in the face.

  A middle-aged woman with broad shoulders sat behind a desk in the dimly lit entryway, the glow of the iPad in her hand lighting up her face. She pressed pause on it as we entered, and sat up straight in her chair, her security guard’s uniform neatly pressed.

  “Hi, Keisha!” Libby said.

  “Hi, Libby. Beautiful evening, isn’t it?” Keisha replied.

  “Sure is!”

  “Jillian, this is Keisha, our head security guard,” Caroline said. “She is incredible. Just so strong. Like, look at those Serena Williams arms! Show her, Keisha!”

  “Woo! Go, Keisha!” Libby said as Keisha shook her head slightly, then flexed her biceps.

  “She used to compete in bodybuilding competitions professionally,” Caroline said to me, and then asked Keisha, “How many pounds can you bench-press?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Keisha said, a tight smile fixed on her face.

  “Come on, you totally do!”

  “Two hundred and fifty,” Keisha said.

  “Oh my God, that’s so cool,” Libby said. “I can hardly even get through a Zumba class.”

  “That man I mentioned, the one who came here looking to start trouble? Keisha took him down like
that,” Caroline said, snapping her fingers. “Anyways, Keisha, this is our newest member, Jillian Beckley, so she’s free to come and go during opening hours as she pleases.”

  “Hi, nice to meet you,” I said, reaching forward to shake Keisha’s hand.

  “We need to get a picture of you for the computer system, for when the other guards are on shift,” Caroline said to me, gesturing toward the large computer monitor on Keisha’s desk. “So they can verify who you are if you ever want to come during the daytime to do work or to freshen up in between meetings.”

  Keisha fiddled with a camera attached to the top of the monitor, aiming it in my direction. I gave a stilted smile as she clicked the computer mouse. Stupid, stupid, stupid, a voice in my head recited. You signed the contract and made a very stupid mistake.

  “Ooh, gorgeous,” Keisha said. “Now, have a nice night, you all!” She waved good-bye heartily as we stepped onto the elevator. But I caught a glimpse, as the doors closed, of her face dropping, her performance of good cheer over.

  “She’s so great,” Caroline said, leaning forward to press the button for the fourth floor.

  “So great!” Libby echoed.

  “Great,” I said.

  Stupid, the voice in my head repeated, visions of Caroline sweetly asking What member? playing over and over in my mind. What had I expected, that these women who had quite possibly taken down a beloved mayor would just roll over in defeat if someone spilled their secrets? What would they do to me? Oh God, what would they do to Raf if they found out that he’d been helping me? I wanted to vomit.

  As the elevator doors rolled open onto the clubhouse, they revealed Margot waiting, a bottle of champagne in her hand. When she saw me, she loosened the cork and let it fly.

  “It’s initiation time,” Caroline called out, and the various women scattered around the room left their private conversations and gathered in a circle around me while Margot poured the champagne into flutes for whoever wanted some. My heart strained against my chest at all the attention as they eyed me, some of them familiar, like the woman with lungs of steel who had fogged up the bathroom mirror.

  Vy was there too, waving away champagne to focus on what looked like homemade kombucha in a mason jar. A white, rubbery mass floated in the liquid, the yeast and bacteria that fermented regular tea into . . . whatever kombucha was. The shiny blob bumped against Vy’s lips as she sipped. She seemed unperturbed by it.

  Margot pressed a glass of champagne into my hand, letting her fingers linger on my wrist, her eyes glowing as she smiled at me. Margot had the kind of eyes that could light up the dark.

  Once everyone had assembled, Caroline cleared her throat, and the room grew quiet. “Jillian Beckley, raise your right hand.” She demonstrated, so I switched my glass over to my left hand and raised my right to mirror hers, like I was taking a pledge, being sworn into office on a glass of expensive champagne instead of a Bible. Earnestly, with a great sense of self-seriousness, she said, “Do you swear to kick ass and smash the patriarchy?”

  “I . . . I do,” I said.

  “And do you swear to support and take care of your fellow members, to lift them up in the workplace, on social media, and in life?” Caroline swept her arm out to indicate the crowd, and I glanced at them. Margot had a bemused expression, a slight smile tugging at her lips, as she watched Caroline lead the ritual. Vy’s face drooped so much with apathy that it looked like she’d been shot full of Novocain. She lifted the blob of yeast out of her kombucha jar and began to gnaw on it. (Was that thing even safe for human consumption?) But most of the women in the circle nodded along, entirely involved, some with fond, moved looks on their faces as if they were remembering their own initiations.

  “I do,” I said.

  Caroline raised her eyebrows. “And just as importantly, do you swear to take care of yourself, to be kind to the shining, special goddess you are—”

  “A boss witch!” a woman in the crowd whooped.

  Caroline pursed her lips in annoyance. “Please don’t interrupt,” she said to the circle, before turning back to me. “To be kind to yourself because you are a woman who deserves the world?”

  “I do,” I said.

  She gazed at me benevolently like Lady Liberty, then lifted her chin, delivering the climax of a campaign speech that she had delivered dozens of times before, but that she was still working hard to imbue with passion and excitement. “Will you be a nasty woman, a badass who smashes glass ceilings and then reaches out her hand to help another woman climb through that shattered ceiling with her?”

  “I will,” I said.

  “Amazing,” Caroline said. She reached out to put her arm around my shoulder, then realized she was too short for that, and put it around my waist instead. “And now for all of the rest of us,” she continued, turning to the crowd. “Do we swear to welcome Jillian with open hearts and minds, to lift her and support her as we were once lifted and supported?”

  “We do,” the group said as one. “To Jillian!” Then they all lifted their glasses, and we toasted. This was it, the grand initiation? Bit of a letdown. Vy tore a hunk off the yeast blob with her teeth and choked it down her gullet.

  Dozens of women, a band, a pride, beamed at me. I smiled back, as all the decorative girl-power signs hummed in the background. But the part of me that smiled at the women was only a facade, while my brain stepped out of the circle and observed, taking notes and trying to remember for later. My brain took a moment to mark that this shell of my body held its arms so awkwardly. How had these women not discovered the ruse of me yet? I didn’t belong with them. Some part of me would always be standing outside of the circle, of any circle, uncomfortable in a group, my mind buzzing with what I told myself in my more confident moments was healthy cynicism, and what I knew in my lower moments was self-hatred.

  For a few seconds, before I flung it off, a pure desire shot through me, a wish that I could force my brain back in my body and look into all the faces around me with no facade at all. That I could accept their acceptance of me, and belong.

  SIXTEEN

  The next morning I woke to the buzz of my phone, my head fuzzy from the glasses of champagne that Nevertheless members had pressed into my hands. Miles was calling.

  When I told him what I’d done, Miles was going to sigh. He had a particular way of doing it—heavy, as if the bad job that you had done caused him physical pain. His sigh was a perfect embodiment of that terrible not mad, just disappointed feeling. I’d never provoked it, but I had seen coworkers crying quietly at their desks in its aftermath.

  As the phone rang, the door opened downstairs. Rob and Sara, back already, stomping around their new home like perky dinosaurs. Right before Miles’s call went to voice mail, I finally picked it up, dread churning in my stomach.

  “Beckley,” Miles said. “I’ve been waiting with bated breath here. How did it go?”

  “Great. I’m officially in, it’s officially weird.” I mustered up all the levity I could and continued, “Only problem is they made me sign a pretty intense nondisclosure and it seems like if you break it, they throw you into the ocean.”

  Silence on the other end of the line. I braced myself for The Sigh. But instead his voice got low, tight, and somehow that was worse. “How intense was it, exactly?”

  “Um. They basically implied that they disappeared the last woman who broke it.”

  “I told you not to sign anything without consulting us first.”

  “I know, I know,” I said, still trying to keep things light. Maybe if I refused to acknowledge how serious it was, it wouldn’t be serious at all, and we could just move on. “But, God, you wouldn’t believe how secretive they were about it all, like I was signing on to be a member of the fucking French Resistance.” I laughed. He did not. I began to pace, desperation creeping in as he stayed silent. “I didn’t have a choice. They wouldn’t let me take a moment wi
th the contract and they weren’t going to bring me back to the clubhouse if I didn’t sign. There was no way—”

  “There’s always a way!” I flinched. “Dammit, Beckley, I’ve been vouching for you with the higher-ups. I’d been excited about this.”

  “You can still be excited! Trust me, if I hadn’t signed, I wouldn’t have been able to get proof, and the story would be dead. But now—”

  “It’s dead anyway,” he said, still in that devastating, low tone. “If it’s that intense of an NDA, the bosses aren’t going to fight against it for some story about how a bunch of rich women like influence and astrology, or for some catalog of the insipid girl-power posters they’ve got up on the walls.”

  “It’s not going to be some insipid catalog,” I snapped back. “There’s more going on here, I know it. There are clearly some very real secrets that they don’t want getting out. And we haven’t even gotten into Nicole—”

  “You keep bringing up Nicole,” he said. “But it sounds like you’ve been having too much fun being a part of the club to get a shred of evidence about her.”

  “Hey,” I said. “That’s not fair.”

  “Unless you find a bombshell, and it’s fucking ironclad, this whole thing isn’t going to be worth it.”

  “Please, you have to trust me. I will get you a story.” Still no sigh, just a long stretch of silence. “Are you still there?”

  “Look,” he said quietly. “If you want to keep going, you keep going. I hope you can turn it around, I really do. But I can’t give you any guarantees that we’ll publish it, and I can’t give you more money in the meantime.” Another part remained unspoken: that if I’d wasted the magazine’s time only to screw it all up, it didn’t just mean that I’d never get this article published. It meant that I’d never get anything published. Not in the New York Standard, or maybe, depending on how much editors talked among themselves, not in any reputable publication.