by Meg Wolitzer
On a Monday in March, a little over a week before the summit, after night had fallen and everyone was staying at work as long as they were needed, Faith said she had an announcement. She stood up before them and said, “I know you’re all tired. I know you’re worn down to the bone. And I know you have no idea how the summit is actually going to go. Neither do I. But I want to say that you are all the best people I know. And you have all been working your asses off, and there’s just so long that that kind of asslessness can go on”—laughter—“without someone having a nervous breakdown. Probably I’m that someone. So I’ve decided that what we all need is to get the hell out of here.”
“Right now?” someone called. “Taxi!”
“Oh, I wish. Actually, what I mean is that I’d like to invite you all to my place upstate this weekend. There will be food, and wine, and I think we’ll have fun. What do you say?”
It was very late notice, and though it wasn’t a command performance, of course everyone would go. It would be like entering a fortress and seeing its mysterious insides. They’d get to know a little more about Faith, who left very few clues about herself. On Saturday the group took the same train, and then they split up into different taxis, and headed for Faith’s house. Apparently there was very spotty cell phone service there in the woods. “Tell your loved ones you will be out of commission,” Faith had said to them.
Greer’s taxi plunged off the main road and onto a small weedy one that took them past a scrambled mess of greenery, and kept plowing through until suddenly the greenery thinned and parted, revealing a pretty brown-shingled house with red trim in the middle distance, with Faith standing on its porch, waving. She was actually wearing an apron and holding a rolling pin, and her hair was blowing. She looked like a beautiful, brave pioneer woman.
Once inside, Greer couldn’t even fully take in all the particulars of Faith Frank’s weekend house. Objects radiated various degrees of meaning, some of it probably imagined. A maroon leather chair was positioned beside a reading lamp, the leather indented and the dye rubbed off where Faith’s head had tilted against it over dozens of years. Briefly, when no one was looking, Greer sat in it, leaning her head back, but though it was no big deal she leaped up in a moment, like a dog that knew it wasn’t supposed to be on the furniture.
Greer’s room, which at first glance was simply a guest room, revealed itself to be something more. Across from the narrow white wrought-iron bed stood an old dresser with some knickknacks on it, among them a small, dusty trophy, on which was engraved:
Pee Wee Summer Soccer—1984
Lincoln Frank-Landau
Most Cooperative
Faith’s son had spent summers in this room. Now he materialized like a genie from the gold-plated trophy. Even in phantom form he was a mild threat, giving Greer, a perpetual only child, a sense of what it must be like to have a sibling. Or at least what it must be like to have a sibling if you were the child of Faith Frank. You would both be very lucky, except for the fact that you had to share your extraordinary mother. But maybe Lincoln had always felt he’d had to share her. Faith fought for women and girls—“When the world doesn’t look out for them, we have to,” she’d said—and maybe Lincoln had been in competition with them.
And maybe Lincoln had also felt he’d had to share his mother with the people at her job. For even now, Faith was intensely involved with the team at Loci. She went out of her way to call Greer into her office sometimes, or to sit with her and a couple of others at lunch once in a while, all of them with paper plates on their laps. She asked Greer about her life, and Greer shyly told her about Cory living on the other side of the world. Faith continued to praise Greer for the speeches she had been writing. Sometimes the women who told Greer their stories stayed in touch afterward, telling her about their lives—a new job, or a setback.
“You really bring out the voices of these women,” Faith had said recently. “I know we’ve talked about how hard it is for you to speak up sometimes. But maybe you’ve compensated, because I have to say you’re an excellent listener. And that is just as important as speaking. Keep listening, Greer. Be like . . . a seismologist, with a stethoscope pressed against the earth. Pay attention to the vibrations.”
Here at the house, Faith’s voice could be heard in the distance; she shouted something, and someone laughed and shouted in response. Now there was hammering on the door, and then a slightly less loud sound of other doors down the hallway being hammered on too. Marcella called, “Faith wants us downstairs for cocktail hour and food prep!” Everyone appeared downstairs within a minute or two; there were no stragglers.
In the kitchen Faith held up a knife and said, “Who wants to be my sous-chef?” and everyone volunteered, their hands shooting up. But Greer’s shot up the fastest.
“Okay, Ms. Kadetsky, the job is yours,” said Faith. “Can you do the onions first?”
“Sure.” Greer could do onions; they would unflower in her hands. If Faith had said, “Can you solve Fermat’s Last Theorem?” Greer would have said, “Why yes I can,” and then sat down at a blackboard, chalk in hand, and done it.
Faith handed her a mesh bag swelling with onions. Greer positioned herself at the counter, hoping to look like someone who belonged here. A pinot noir was brought out, along with hand-blown tumblers of different colors. Greer’s was sea-glass green, with little bubbles of imperfection trapped inside like carbonation, and she welcomed the bite of the wine and felt it charge to her head and her thighs at the same time.
“Tonight is steak night,” Faith announced to the kitchen, and there were sounds of approval.
Greer was going to say, “I can just eat the side dishes,” but then the subject changed, so she would remind Faith of her meatlessness later. Now everyone began talking about the summit, which would begin Tuesday.
“I still wish we’d gotten Senator McCauley,” said Helen. “I can’t let go of it.” There was studious quiet. Whenever the senator’s name came up everyone became a little depressed, almost destabilized. Senator Anne McCauley from Indiana was a powerful force, an antichoice steamroller, an alarming figure who had done a lot to chip away at women’s reproductive rights, and in particular the reproductive rights of women living in poverty. Despite being in her late sixties, Anne McCauley showed no sign of stopping.
“I tried,” said Tad. “I sent her office a slavish and eloquent letter. I used all my rhetorical flourishes, but they didn’t work.”
“It would be weird if she did agree to come,” said Iffat. “She’s no friend to women.”
“No, it wouldn’t be so weird,” Helen said. “She speaks at lots of events. She likes a good debate.”
“I swear, she’s going to try to run for president,” Evelyn said. “I know she’s getting up there in years, but still.”
“She scares the shit out of me,” said Bonnie.
Marcella said, “I grew up in Indianapolis, and I remember when she was running for reelection. She had this whole campaign against her pro-choice opponent. I remember there were pictures of fetuses.”
They talked about abortion rights, and the composition of the Senate, and about human trafficking, which was a subject Faith felt particularly strongly about, her voice sharpening whenever it came up. And then somehow there was a brief side trip into a discussion about a TV crime show from the UK with a hot female character named DCI Gemma Braithwaite, who was beleaguered by the sexism in her department and the violence in her district. Most of the people there loved Gemma Braithwaite, and the entire group, Faith included, quoted aloud a line from a recent episode, which had become sort of a catchphrase: “I shall take no shite from anyone. Sir.” Then they all laughed, and drank some more.
Helen started talking about women being part of an economic structure so unjust that it could only be fixed by undoing the whole thing. “Piece by fucking piece,” she said, and Ben raised his glass. Faith dismissed this. “Even
if that ever happened here,” she said, “women would still get shafted. Look at Cuba and Venezuela. Women there still aren’t equal.”
“What’s your perspective on that?” Greer heard herself ask. Everyone looked at her. Marcella’s mouth was pulled tight, as if she was thinking: You dunce; who would ask such an ignorant question? But no one else looked at Greer like that; certainly not Faith, who was glad to try to answer.
“I think the ideas about what men are and women are, what they essentially are, go very deep,” she said. “That women are subordinate. That women will always be thwarted. These are the ideas that have taken hold everywhere. Sure there’s an economic piece, and that’s always been true. But there’s a psychological piece too, and we can’t forget it.” A few of them nodded, although they’d heard versions of this from her before. Bonnie and Evelyn, who in particular had certainly heard many versions of this, looked happy to hear it again.
“I’ve noted,” said Faith, “that when people speak about feminism they take one tack or the other. Our foundation has to look at all of it. We need to keep thinking about the role that economics plays. Because no matter how fair a society is, it’s still going to be women who have the babies. And that sets them up for housewifery and the double day.” She reached up to a high shelf and pulled down an old salad spinner. Lettuce was rinsed and dumped in, and then Faith yanked hard on the string again and again, as if it were an outboard motor. She kept talking over the din. “Even in highly evolved places like Sweden and Norway, women end up doing most of the shitwork. Though they probably call it something cute—the way IKEA names all its furniture, so it sounds better. I have a chair at home named ‘Leifarne.’ But we still need to see things for what they really are.” She let the salad spinner putter to a stop, then glanced around at them; everyone was listening, and no one had the recessive, tuned-out quality that could happen when groups of people got together and drank.
“Bonnie and Evelyn and I are so old,” Faith said, “that we remember the sixties as if it were yesterday—”
“—or this morning,” said Evelyn.
“And let it be a cautionary tale. The women’s movement back then had to separate itself from the male-dominated left because, you know what? The left wasn’t all that interested in us. My sense is that we’re going to be seeing that again. We’re going to come up against progressives who will say that women’s problems can’t be solved under the current system, but that everything will change for women more or less automatically when that system is changed. We’re also going to need to show that we support anti-racist work. You know I got Emmett to pour special-project money into a reproductive justice group, and also an organization that supports young black women writers. But of course that’s not enough. Anyway, I hope our first summit makes a big splash. I hope we make a difference.”
They were all silent, and when she was done speaking, Tad said, “Thank you for inviting us here, Faith. It’s really an honor.”
“Oh, don’t feel that way. I want you to feel relaxed around me.” Faith smiled a peculiar smile, amused at herself, and added, “Which is why I drugged all of your drinks.”
“Faith Frank embroiled in a roofie scandal,” said Ben. “That would make the news.”
“And get more attention for Loci,” said Greer.
“That reminds me,” Faith said. “Someone tell me about the music we’ve started to line up. Because if it were left to me, I’d be bringing in the feminist folk singers I met years ago at Lilith Fair. And that would be . . . well, very far from ka-ching!”
Everyone laughed now, and Helen said, “Oh, Faith, you know what? I just love you.”
“And I love you too,” said Faith.
“We got Li’l Nuzzle, by the way,” Marcella said.
“No shit?” said Tad.
“Is it L apostrophe I-L? Or L-I apostrophe L?” asked Ben. “I can never remember.”
“I don’t know,” said Greer. He smiled at her and she smiled back, then they both looked away shyly.
“I’m afraid I don’t even really know who that is,” Faith said.
“A hip-hop act,” said Iffat. “She’s awesome. You’ll love her, Faith.”
“I guess Big Nuzzle wasn’t available,” said Greer. She looked down at the onions and saw that somehow a pyramid of slices lay on the cutting board; how had she cut so much already? Also, she noticed with some bewilderment that the wine was gone from her green, bubbled glass.
“As I said, we’ve got an excellent slate,” Faith said. “Our naval commander. Our activist nun.”
“I love how we don’t even remember their names,” said Marcella.
“I remember their names, and you should too,” said Faith. “But not tonight. Tonight, we drink wine and eat steak and kick back and chill out.”
Greer refilled her glass and looked around at everyone, thinking then how lucky she was to be here with these people, this focus group of the old and the young, the heavy and the thin, the black and the brown and the white, the gay and the straight and possibly the bisexual. Though Zee would say all of this was a completely reductive way to see people, and probably it was. But tonight Greer took in the fellowship of everyone here. The famous and the unknown, the bitter, the salty, and the sweet. And even the umami. Faith was umami, in a way, Greer thought—a special and separate taste that, once you’d tried it, you wanted more of.
As they talked and laughed and drank, Greer imagined telling Cory every detail after the weekend. He liked stories from her New York life, just as Greer liked stories from Manila, where he lived a life in mirror-opposite to hers. She already had so much to tell him from this weekend.
I stayed in Faith’s son’s bedroom, she would say, and I imagined what it would have been like to have had Faith as my mother.
Complicated, I bet, Cory would reply.
Yes, definitely complicated.
Greer saw herself now as if through Cory’s vision; she imagined herself seen by him from the doorway, the light in the room gilded. And then her hand, cutting onions with new, slightly reckless assurance, slipped, and the blade of Faith Frank’s knife slid deep into her thumb.
“Oh shit, oh shit!” Greer cried, jumping back, as though she could escape her own injury.
They were all upon her, and distantly she heard Evelyn murmur, “Look at all that blood. Oh, I’m not good with blood.” Everyone rushed around but no one knew where anything was except for Faith, who calmly took charge, finding a very old, yellowed tin first-aid kit in the back of the drawer beside the refrigerator.
“No one has ever left here thumbless,” Faith assured Greer, who was so mortified and furious at herself for ruining the moment that her eyes streamed with real tears, not onion tears.
“Really? What about Thumbless McGee?” asked Tad, and the comment was followed by silence, and Tad quickly saying, “Sorry. I make bad jokes when I’m nervous.”
Faith turned to them and calmly said, “Why don’t you all go take your drinks into the next room. Greer will be absolutely fine. I will tend to her.”
“Are you sure?” asked Iffat, going into assistant mode. “Isn’t there anything I can do?”
“I’ve got it under control. Thank you, Iffat.”
Faith stood beside Greer over the deep stainless-steel sink, where she ran a thudding flow of cold water down upon the bloody thumb and then dried it, keeping pressure on the wound, and then squirted on some antibacterial ointment, and wrapped Greer’s thumb in a swaddling of gauze and adhesive. The light touch of this powerful woman was profound. So too was her choice to use her power in this tender way. Maybe that’s what we want from women, Greer thought as her thumb pulsed and percolated with blood. Maybe that’s what we imagine it would be like to have a woman lead us. When women got into positions of power, they calibrated and recalibrated tenderness and strength, modulating and correcting. Power and love didn’t often live side by
side. If one came in, the other might go.
Faith was saying, “Let’s keep it like this for a while and see if it stops. Hold it up; keep it above your heart. I don’t think you’ll need a stitch.”
“I can’t believe I cried like that.”
“What’s wrong with crying? I think it’s underrated,” said Faith.
“But right now I feel like a little girl whose mother is fixing her boo-boo. It’s so embarrassing.”
“Not for the mother. I remember doing that when my son was little.” Faith pushed her hair back from her face and said, “In my experience, the rewards don’t necessarily come when you think they will with your kids. And sometimes they come very, very infrequently.”
Greer thought again of the pee wee soccer trophy up in the bedroom, and the highly cooperative boy who had won it, now in his thirties and off somewhere else. “So when do they come?”
“Oh, let’s see,” said Faith. “When they’re happy, isn’t that what everyone says? Or when they’re asleep. Sometimes I was ashamed of how much I liked it when he was asleep. He was a good kid, but it was just so much work. And at least when he was asleep I knew where he was and exactly what was happening with him.”
“And what about now?” Greer asked lightly. “What’s he like?”
“Now? Now I don’t know all that much. His life is his life. He’s a tax attorney, and he’s very different from me. Not sure he needs me too much. And I never get to watch him sleep. I’ve decided that there should be a national holiday once a year, when grown children have to let their parents tuck them in one more time.”
She was silent, and Greer didn’t rush in to speak. Faith was revealing herself, opening up, becoming slightly more known. There was a glimmer of mutuality, and Greer didn’t want to do anything to discourage it. They were standing together in silence at the sink, by the window that overlooked the dark yard, which was lit with a single floodlight, into which now pranced a deer, as if on cue. It stopped in the cone of light, looking around.