The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Do we ever get to be together?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What if you tell them you won’t go?”

  “Then I have no job. All the entry-level consulting jobs have been locked down by now, and I need to be a big earner. Lionel and Will and I agreed on this. Look, I feel like crap,” he said. “I wanted us to be in our place. I pictured the whole thing. Framed shit on the walls. Big spoons in the kitchen.”

  “Spoons?” she said. “We never discussed that. You pictured spoons?”

  “Yeah,” he said, a little shyly.

  College ended in a fractured, frantic way, just as it had begun. Greer and Zee began to pack up their dorm rooms, and neither of them was happy about what immediately waited for them. Zee would be moving back home to her parents’ house in Scarsdale, to live there while training to be a paralegal, which both her mother and father had urged her to do—“semi-forced me to do,” Zee said—because she had no other plans, and no skills. She would have liked looking for a paid job as an activist, perhaps as a community organizer, she’d tentatively suggested, but they had swept it away. “Be serious, and think long-term,” her mother had said. “Those jobs don’t have earning potential.”

  On the very last night, the entire Ryland senior class took buses to a scruffy beach an hour away from campus, where a bonfire was built and Dog brought out the ukulele again, and many sad, emotional songs were sung. Greer and her cluster of friends sat together in a huddle. Zee walked on the sand in circles, saying, “Really? It’s all over now? This is so depressing. It’s like a final field trip for people at a hospice.”

  Greer went back up to the house in Macopee while she figured out what to do next. Cory flew business class to Manila on Cathay Pacific, settling in under a downy blanket, drinking a glass of Shingleback McLaren Vale Shiraz as the lights in the cabin dimmed. “All you need to know about my new life,” he texted her when he landed, “is that they gave me pajamas to wear on the plane.”

  In Macopee Greer found a full-time job at Skatefest, the same place where she had worked part-time in high school. She spent her days now handing out skates, and her evenings sending out her résumé and eating morose dinners, often by herself in front of a novel. She was finally not as angry at her parents as she used to be, she realized—they were too marginal for that, too weak—but her connection to them seemed vague, as if she had to remember who exactly these two people were. Being here is temporary, she thought. It’s just a lily pad. It’s what happens to you after college. I will be able to leap off one of these days.

  Cory sometimes called from Manila while Greer was sitting at the skate-rental counter in the middle of the day. It was twelve hours later where he was; their lives were opposites in all ways. “I’m lonely and I’m bored, and I miss you something sick,” he said.

  “I miss you too. Something sick,” she added. “I like that.”

  “I want to be in your bed right this minute, Space Kadetsky,” he said. “Why can’t I make myself really small and crawl through the holes of the phone?”

  “Maybe you can.” She paused and sighed; he sighed too. “I had a dream last night,” Greer told him, “in which we agreed to ‘meet in the middle.’ Which was a raft on the ocean.”

  “Was it nice?” he asked.

  “Very. But then somehow my mother was there, dressed as a clown. Kind of spoiled the mood.”

  “I can imagine. You know,” he said after a second, “maybe we could do something sexy over the phone.”

  They’d had occasional phone sex and Skype sex during college; Greer had always felt a little nervous, afraid that somehow it would be intercepted. “The NSA doesn’t care about your orgasms,” Cory had said. “Believe me.” But then again, she tended to be on the quiet side even when they had sex in person. “A nun and a mouse had a baby, and that is me,” she’d said to him once after they’d slept together in her childhood bed.

  Now she said, “‘Do something sexy over the phone’? I can’t, Cory, I’m at work. There are people here.” She felt the back of her neck prickle at the thought. In the distance, teenagers and parents with little kids were moving around the Skatefest rink. The sound was like an ocean, coming at her in scratchy waves as the skaters moved closer and then receded. She thought of Cory on top of her, his hands all over her, proprietary, welcome. Her arousal lifted her away from the smells of people’s feet and the glass box of rotating, candied-looking hot dogs.

  “You got something more important to do, Kadetsky?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “Rent skates to skinheads.”

  “Ah.”

  “I wish I could do it, though,” she said sadly. “I really, really do.”

  “I know.”

  Sadness, excitement, then sadness again; it all rose and fell like the sounds of skaters scuffing the floor of the rink. Hold tight! she thought, conveying this to both herself and Cory, thinking of them in bed together, and the joint effort couples had to make to be a couple, and stay a couple. If one let go, then that was it, both of them fell. Hold tight! she thought, imagining his body, and her own much smaller body against it.

  “You should go to sleep,” Greer finally said. “It’s late where you are.”

  “I have to look over my deck pages.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know what that means.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t either, but I’m pretending I do. We’re flying to Bangkok in the morning for a meeting. I miss you,” he said again. “Imagine me in my douchey white shirt and tie.”

  “I bet you look hot,” she said. “Imagine me in my orange Skatefest tunic and little cap.”

  And so it went, conversations with Cory on a different continent while Greer leaned across a sticky, shellacked skate-rental counter. After work in the evening she drove her parents’ old Toyota home along the highway. Sometimes, on Woburn Road during that standstill summer, she would park the car and get out to talk to Cory’s brother, Alby, who was now eight years old and handsome, big-headed, and could often be found outside on his Razor scooter, powering down the slant of the driveway.

  “Time me, Greer, while I go around the block,” he said one evening when she came home from work in her parents’ car. He’d been waiting for her, she realized, riding in circles until the car pulled onto the street. So she agreed to time him with the stopwatch that he held in his hand for just this purpose. “I want to beat my personal best,” Alby said. “You know what that means, right? It’s the best record a person has thus far.”

  “I can’t believe you just said ‘thus far.’ Well, actually I can.”

  “Miles Leggett told me his dad calls me an idiot savant.”

  “Well, then his dad has no idea what he’s talking about.”

  “Someday he’ll know. Like when I win the Nobel Prize.”

  She laughed. “Aim high. What field are you going to win it for?”

  “Oh,” said Alby. “I didn’t know you needed a field. Do I have to decide now?” Even as he said this, she knew she would recount the conversation to Cory tomorrow, on Skype.

  “No,” Greer said. “You definitely don’t have to decide now. Okay, go ahead, I’ll time you.”

  “Keep an eye on Slowy too,” said Alby, and then Greer saw that his turtle lay humped in the grass at the side of the driveway.

  “Ready?” Greer asked, and Alby nodded. “Get set,” she said. She paused and watched him angle himself forward. “Go!”

  Greer lifted the start button as Alby headed down the driveway; soon he was out of view. The front door of the Pintos’ house opened, and Greer turned to see Benedita on the front step, looking for her son. There was always a stiffness between her and Greer. “I’m timing him, Mrs. Pinto,” Greer explained. “He’s going around the block on his Razor.”

  “All right,” Cory’s mother said, coming over to
her, and the two women stood in silence, neither one moving, both of them short, and as still as the turtle at their feet. They waited for Alby, the way sailors’ wives used to wait for their husbands to return from the sea. The silence seemed to go on for too long, and then, as if the sound barrier had suddenly been breached, there came a scrape of wheel on road, and they both looked up at the same time and saw Alby make the turn onto Woburn and head in their direction. Watching him approach, they both shifted into a state of unaccountable, shared happiness.

  Alby kicked his way back up the slanted drive and wound up at the feet of Greer and his mother. He was out of breath, his face hot, his narrow shoulders heaving. “Greer, what was my time? What was my time?” he asked her. At which point she realized that she had forgotten to stop the little silver stopwatch, which still beat on in the palm of her hand.

  * * *

  • • •

  One night late that summer when Greer was sitting in bed at her computer, an email popped into her inbox from an address that she didn’t recognize: FF@scvc.com. She clicked it absently, assuming it was spam. Later she would say to Cory, “What if I had deleted it and never wrote back? It makes me ill to even think about.”

  Dear Greer Kadetsky,

  You wrote me a very kind note a couple of months ago at a low moment for me. I fear I didn’t write back; my apologies. You can imagine the volume of notes I received. I’m reaching out personally to a small number of people as I put together a team for a grand new venture, and since you’d been interested in applying for a position at Bloomer, I wondered if you might be interested in coming in for an interview for this instead. It will be very different, though I’m afraid I must be slightly mysterious about it at the moment.

  Warmly,

  Faith Frank

  Warmly! That was a new one to Greer. She had never seen anyone sign an email that way, and it seemed to her somehow not only adult but also more than that: rich, sophisticated, knowledgeable. She wanted to sign her own return email to Faith that way too, but felt that it would be like a little girl trying on her mother’s ball gown. Greer wrote a response quickly, a pulse tapping in her eyelid:

  Dear Faith Frank,

  I was just sitting here checking email and suddenly you appeared. Different email address, same person. Of course I am VERY interested in your grand new venture, despite the mysteriousness—or even because of it. Please let me know how to arrange an interview. Thank you so much for thinking of me.

  Sincerely,

  Greer Kadetsky

  Then it was even more shocking when Faith wrote back immediately.

  Dear Greer,

  That’s wonderful! My assistant Iffat Khan will be in touch with you in the morning.

  Warmly,

  Faith

  P.S. Why are we both still awake? As my mother used to say, we should hit ourselves over the head with a frying pan to get to sleep!

  To which Greer replied:

  Dear Faith,

  Note to self: must buy frying pan. No chance of sleep now. Too excited about prospect of gnv (aka grand new venture). Good night!

  Greer

  Three days later she was on the bus going back down to New York City. The address this time was a mirrored glass midtown skyscraper called the Strode Building. In the lobby Greer was ID’d, and a terrible photo was taken of her in which she appeared to have a snout. Worse, she had to wear the photo as a badge, and was sent through a turnstile that flung its jaws open to admit her; and then she shot up to 26, where the elevator opened onto a space so blank and white and expansive that she could not tell if it was still under construction, or if this was the way it was permanently meant to look. It was like a floating space station, an empty field with a complicated geometry of cubicles hinted at in the remote distance, everything white, and no boldface institutional name hovering above the reception desk, so she still did not know exactly where she was.

  “I have an appointment with Faith Frank,” she told the receptionist with pleasurable but carefully modulated self-importance. The young woman nodded and spoke into a headset, and momentarily another young woman appeared—elegant, composed, a tiny stud in her nose the size of a seed.

  “I’m Iffat Khan,” the second woman said. “Faith’s assistant. It’s great to meet you. Come on back. Faith’s in with some people.” Greer followed her down a white hallway that led like a tributary into a large white office. At a long white desk that was made from a repurposed door—a remnant of a building in which secret suffrage meetings had taken place long ago, she’d learn on her first day of work—sat Faith Frank, and around the room, standing and sitting, were several women of various ages, and two men.

  Faith rose to greet her. Of course she had grown a few years older since the night in the Ryland Chapel, and up close the change was slight but noticeable; she wore it well. Faith still was a person of gravitas and glamour, intelligence, cheekbones, warmth, greatness, all of which was once again exciting. Faith introduced her to everyone, but Greer could barely pay attention to the names, and soon these people stood and left, so it didn’t really matter who they were. If she was hired she would immediately learn their names.

  “Did you get some sleep since I wrote you?” Faith asked.

  “Yes, did you?”

  “Not a whole hell of a lot.”

  “Well, then it’s a good thing I brought you this,” Greer said. She reached into her bag and with a flourish brought out the small frying pan she had bought at the Target near her parents’ house and carried with her down to the city, just in case it seemed appropriate to give it to Faith, which, she’d figured, it probably wouldn’t. But now she was taking the risk. Faith looked surprised, but then she smiled. Suddenly they had a private joke between them.

  “Oh, that’s a good one,” said Faith. “Very funny. I’ll definitely conk myself over the head with it when I can’t sleep. And whenever I do that, Greer, I’ll think of you.” She put the pan on a side table and said, “Let’s get down to business before someone comes in with another emergency.” They sat together on a white sofa that looked out on the skyline, the workday. It was impossible to look out on the city from high up without thinking for a second of 9/11, even nine years later. Any overarching view of the city seemed to call for a brief, noble hush. Smokestacks steamed; lights stuttered; there was movement along the grid. The quiet moment now wasn’t unpleasurable. It was just a moment of seriousness, born in something terrible, but now uncoupled from it.

  Faith took a pull on the mug of tea in front of her. Nearby were little tins of oolong and Earl Grey and jasmine. A tea ball lay on its side, with sprouts of used leaves poking through the holes like hair in old-man nostrils. “After Bloomer closed,” Faith began, “I was in a daze, maybe even a mild depression. I went up to my weekend house just to regroup. And one day I got a call from an old friend. We go back a number of decades, and our paths have been very different, to put it mildly. He’s Emmett Shrader, the venture capitalist.” She paused. “You do know who I’m talking about, right?”

  Greer nodded, but she wasn’t completely sure; she knew who Emmett Shrader was, roughly, just as she had once known who Faith Frank was, a little less roughly, though she badly wished she could Google the venture capitalist and billionaire right now, as she had originally done with Faith, so she could be knowledgeable during this interview. “He said he wanted to make me an offer,” Faith said. “I thought that meant he would buy Bloomer and it would have yet another life, straggling along. But he said no, sorry, it wasn’t that; Bloomer was no longer viable in today’s world.”

  “Not even the website?” asked Greer. “I mean, if you revamped it, obviously. No offense,” she quickly added. “But I’ve wondered about that.”

  Faith shook her head. “No. He said he admired our mission all those years, admired our determination, but that he has bigger plans. He told me he wants to bring some of the ideals o
f feminism out into the world in a new way. So here’s what’s happening,” Faith continued. “His firm is underwriting a women’s foundation. What we’re going to do, mainly, is connect speakers with audiences. We want to address the most urgent issues concerning women today. We’ll have summits, talks, conferences. He’s offering significant funding.” She paused. “I know we’ll get criticism, Shrader being Shrader.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Oh,” said Faith, “he is who he is. He hasn’t always put his money to good use. He’s funded some pretty questionable ventures. You can read up on it. I have. It doesn’t make me happy, but he has also frequently been heroic with his money, and he seems genuine in his desire to make this work. It’s a risk. But he’s promised to really go deep. Of course that’s not all of the criticism we’ll get. There’s also me.”

  Greer wanted to say, Who could criticize you? But she knew who could; she had seen them on blogs, and of course in the comments section of Fem Fatale.

  “I do what I can,” said Faith. “I do it for women. Not everyone agrees with the way I do it. Women in powerful positions are never safe from criticism. The kind of feminism I’ve practiced is one way to go about it. There are plenty of others, and that’s great. There are impassioned and radical young women out there, telling multiple stories. I applaud them. We need them. We need as many women fighting as possible. I learned early on from the wonderful Gloria Steinem that the world is big enough for different kinds of feminists to coexist, people who want to emphasize different aspects of the fight for equality. God knows the injustices are endless, and I am going to use whatever resources are at my disposal to fight in the way I know how.”

  “As long as you keep wearing your boots,” Greer impulsively put in. She remembered then that she had thought working at Fem Fatale would have been more exciting than working for Faith Frank, but she understood that it wasn’t true.

  Then Faith said, “There’s another aspect to the venture that I wanted to tell you about, Greer. And this was the reason I finally accepted the position, after telling Emmett no.” She leaned in a little closer. “Here’s the deal. Fairly often,” she said, “we’ll actually be able to initiate a special emergency project that will make an immediate difference in some women’s lives.”