The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  “So that’s what you’re doing now when you stay at your mom’s house all day cooking and sitting in Alby’s room? You’re figuring out the world and all of its corners?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Exactly.”

  “Well, I thought I was supposed to be figuring out the world alongside you,” she said, her voice shaking a little.

  “You were,” he said. “And you will be. And I’ll be doing it with you too,” he added quickly.

  The call ended in mutual unpleasantness, and Cory staggered up and fed his mother, and then fed Slowy. He let the turtle sit on Alby’s carpet for a while, until finally it opened its eyes and blinked twice, like a coma patient trying to send a message, saying: I’m still here.

  * * *

  • • •

  How was it, Cory kept thinking, that when a person died they were no longer anywhere? You could search the entire world and never find them. It was one thing for a body to stop working and be carted away under a sheet; it was another thing for the sense of that person to evaporate. The textural and indisputable sense, as strong but as hard to pinpoint as a gas. Cory opened one of his brother’s notebooks and turned to a clean page, then began to write:

  DATE: MONDAY, MAY 23

  CONDITIONS: UNBEARABLE SADNESS EXACERBATED BY FOOLISH HEROIN USE. [HEROIN SHAKEN NOT STIRRED, AKA INHALED NOT INJECTED, BECAUSE I AM NOT ACTUALLY A SELF-DESTRUCTIVE ASSHOLE, DESPITE MY LINGERING, NONSTOP SADNESS.]

  OBSERVATION: ALBY IS NOWHERE TO BE FOUND. NOWHERE. NOT HERE, NOT ANYWHERE. YOU AREN’T HERE, ARE YOU, BRO? IN YOUR OLD POWER RANGERS SWEATSHIRT? NO, YOU’RE NOT. SOMEHOW, THIS IS NOT AN ELABORATE PRANK, EVEN THOUGH IT TOTALLY FEELS LIKE IT.

  TIME SPENT THINKING ABOUT THIS TODAY: 45 MINUTES.

  AMOUNT THAT UNBEARABLE SADNESS WAS LESSENED BY DIRECT THOUGHTS OF ALBY: 0.0000%

  Every day for five days, Cory wrote his observations in the journal, but he soon became aware that nothing was changing for him, there were no glimmers of improvement, so by the time the weekend arrived he left the journal on the desk and sat down on the bed and turned on the PlayStation. All the video games that Alby had loved were in a shoe box beside the bed, and he went rifling through them.

  If Cory couldn’t be with Alby, then at least he could feel what it had meant to be Alby. He sat cross-legged on the small bed, playing game after game that Alby had played. He played Peep Peep and Growth Spurt and Mixed-Up Kids and all the other games; mostly they were loud and clownish and pulled you right in so that you felt yourself leaving this world and entering that other, differently lit one. Some of them were mystical, ambient worlds, like Calyx, a game for adults that Alby had loved.

  While Benedita slept or wandered around whispering or picking at herself, Cory played. “Go, go, go!” he quietly called to the screen as his little car roared along the Möbius strip of a cartoon track, and he felt himself galvanized by the colors and the music, and then, when he’d had enough, he calmed down by playing an hour of Calyx.

  He snorted heroin once more with Sab, but shortly after that second time, he understood from his own wretched response, and the days of recovery afterward, even longer than last time, that that was enough, and that any more than that, he would be taken up by it; he would be taken. Instead, he let himself be taken by Alby’s video games and notebooks, that whole compact and abandoned world.

  Greer made another trip to Macopee before a Loci event in Cambridge. Though the distance between New York and Macopee wasn’t too much greater than the distance between Ryland and Princeton, the trips were less frequent, and it was only Greer visiting him, never the other way around. Whenever she came to see him, the rhythm in the house was thrown off. His mother seemed agitated with Greer around, maybe even self-conscious about appearing unwell in front of her. She retreated to her room and didn’t eat.

  And though Greer kept trying to get him to come down to New York—he’d sworn to her he would—he didn’t want to leave his mother for the weekend, even with one of the aunts, who didn’t know everything that had to be done. So Greer came there, and it wasn’t great. This weekend, Loci would be cosponsoring a mini-summit about sexuality and the law at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She drove up in a rental car a day early, and she came into Cory’s house and looked around. The Pintos’ place was clean and orderly again—he’d gotten good at that—but she didn’t even comment, and it actually hurt his feelings a little.

  His mother drowsed in her chair; eggs were lightly knocking together in a pot of water on the stove, emitting that distinct hard-boiled smell. Everything was under control here, but Greer just said quietly, “Cory, what’s going on?”

  She looked as if she might cry, and he was slightly offended by that. What was so terrible here that could almost bring her to tears? What was she seeing? He’d been trying so hard to manage every aspect of his mother’s life, and Greer had come in and basically held a mirror up to everything, which wasn’t something he’d asked her to do. How could he not take care of his mother? How could he go back to Manila to be a consultant when in fact the one who needed his consulting skills was right here, in a housedress with a repeating pineapple pattern, agitated and confused and unwell?

  How could he return to being interested in his “relationship” with Greer? Relationships were a luxury designed for people whose lives were not in crisis.

  For some reason Greer didn’t understand any of this; it was so unlike the way she had always understood everything about Cory since they were teenagers and lay together in her upstairs room, their bodies being revealed to each other for the first time like monuments undraped at a public ceremony. He had shown himself to her, his slightly crooked penis and his heart fat with longing, and then, indisputably, the love he’d been storing up. His toes like fingers. His desire to do something useful with himself someday, to spread money around the globe because he hadn’t had much money growing up, and because he’d learned in his economics classes about how everything was connected through intricate systems. And Greer had shown him all that was hers as well: the small, warm body, and the muted self that, these days, was being replaced by something less constrained. She was less timid; Faith Frank had brought her out more than he ever could.

  But he had the distinct feeling that she didn’t understand him anymore, which was news, because for years they had always taken each other’s understanding for granted. “What do you mean, what’s going on?” he asked.

  “We had a life,” she said. “Not living together, I know that, but we told each other things, and we were in it together. Come on, why do I have to say all this? You know what I’m talking about. You’ve basically removed yourself from me.”

  He just looked at her. “This doesn’t only go one way, Greer.”

  “You think I’ve been distant too?” she said. “I always call you and text you. I want to hear everything.”

  “Yes, you’re very responsible.”

  “What do you want, Cory? Am I supposed to move up here with you too? Maybe I am,” she said frantically. “Maybe that’s the only way I can show you what I feel.”

  “No,” he said. “This isn’t about obligation, Greer.”

  “But you don’t go to me for comfort anymore. You don’t go to me for anything. Not even distraction. Our lives are just totally separate. You’re not even trying! I know you’re upset, I know you feel shattered. But when I try to get you to come down to New York to see me and be alone with me someplace where we can really talk and be together, you say you can’t.”

  “Right. Because I can’t.”

  “I have an apartment now, Cory. I have big spoons. I just don’t have you there.” He didn’t say anything, and so she kept talking, making it worse. “I know your mother needs protection and care, of course she does, and you have to see that she gets it. But I know you can get other people to help with that, at least sometimes. It’s not the sum total of who you are. I haven’t hea
rd you talk about anything else in so long. You seem completely uninterested in the outside world.”

  “In your world, you mean,” he said, and this was a little mean and he knew it. But it was true. Her world had become abstract to him; she had stayed firmly in it, planted in it. No, he didn’t think she should move here. She shouldn’t give up her job with Loci and Faith Frank and come up here to live with him. Though really, he thought for a second, if she had done that, then finally they would be living together. They could live in Greer’s bedroom; her parents would leave them alone. They could live there and his mother could heal and he could heal, and they would have some version of a life. But Greer couldn’t do that, and he would never, ever ask her to, because she would have to give up so much. This time of life was meant to be about adding on to yourself, not taking away. It was all backward now, and he didn’t know how to stop the backward motion from continuing, accelerating.

  “All right, fine, my world,” she said. “But also your own world. The one you had.”

  “I don’t have it anymore.”

  “You could have a little of it,” she pressed. “Just once in a while. You deserve it. You’re a person, and you still have to live. Why won’t you come down to New York for the weekend? You haven’t even seen my apartment in Brooklyn, not once. And I sound spoiled saying this, and I hate that. I’m sorry, but I had this whole thing in my mind. We’d get Thai takeout at this place I go to. We’d sit in my bed. We’d walk in Prospect Park. You said you would leave your mother with your aunt Maria just for one night. One night. And then you always cancel.”

  “The logistics are complicated.”

  “I know they are, but I feel like being involved with me is this gigantic burden that you feel like you have to carry out. More of a burden than taking care of your mother. You have to want to do it. I can’t make you want it. That’s the thing about a relationship. Whoever is more aloof always gets to set the terms.”

  “So now I’m aloof.”

  “Well, yes, kind of.” He didn’t say a word, but just sat there, taking this. “Cory,” Greer tried, “it’s okay to still care about things. But you don’t seem to believe that. How long are you going to stay in this state where you’re totally removed from everything? How many months are you going to keep doing this?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “What?”

  “I made up a number. I’m trying to show you how completely ridiculous this line of thinking is. How can I put a limit on it, Greer? I’m needed here.”

  “Aren’t you needed elsewhere?”

  “I’m not irreplaceable elsewhere.”

  “You had a plan, and it made sense. Doing consulting for now, saving money, then doing your app. You were so excited about it.”

  “I had to adapt,” he said. “I’m starting to think that you’re the one who can’t.”

  “Can we please go somewhere and discuss this?” Greer asked, agitated.

  So they left his mother alone for an hour and went to Pie Land, the pizza place where once, before they were in love or even tolerated each other, he used to stand and play Ms. Pac-Man while Greer sat stealthily watching him. He would see her in his peripheral vision, and would play better and harder and longer, as if for her, his rival at school.

  Now, on a weeknight in summer, the grown versions of themselves entered this same place, which was empty, apparently doing more takeout business than dine-in. There was even a Pie Land app for the phone.

  “Help you?” said the counter person.

  “Kristin, hey,” said Greer. It was Kristin Vells, who lived on their street, and who’d been on their school bus year after year. Kristin who had been in the bottom reading group, the Koalas. She now wore a red Pie Land smock, and was as affectless as ever as she rang up their slices and their sodas. “You living at home?” Greer asked her.

  “Yeah. It’s not too bad.” Kristin’s eyes passed across the two of them, and she said to Cory, “You’re living at home too, right? I’ve seen you.” As if to warn him: Don’t think you’re so much better than me, the way you two brains always thought you were.

  “Yeah,” he said. He was no better or worse than Kristin Vells. Now Cory noticed that the Ms. Pac-Man machine was gone. Everyone had their own games at home these days and didn’t need to play in public. Over recent years, since the start of the large-scale retraction into the self, Cory had come to understand that feeling, and he actually wished he was at home right now too, playing another one of Alby’s video games.

  He and Greer sat at a table and she held her dripping slice away from her as she ate, saying, “I can’t get anything on my outfit. I have so few clothes with me.”

  “Greer,” he said. “Look at me.” Her eyes did a worried sweep up from plate to face. “I don’t know what our lives are going to be like,” Cory said, improvising. “Because who would have expected this would happen to Alby?”

  “No one,” she said, her voice small.

  “But it did, yeah it did, and then this other thing happened to my mom, and now this other thing has happened to me.”

  “What thing?”

  “Falling from grace with you.” His voice ached with strain. “Things are different for me now.”

  “I know.”

  “But different in various ways.”

  “Like what else?”

  “I don’t know. Things that don’t seem like me. For instance, I snorted heroin,” he said.

  There was a dreadful suspension of time and a quick sequence of facial expressions he’d never seen on Greer before, and then she said, “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “You know, this is a moment when you being all shocked isn’t going to do either of us any good.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. Do you want me to be fake?”

  “Fake would be good. Fake would actually be excellent. What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m basically in a state that is not like any state I have ever been in. And you can say to me, oh, I ought to get a job as your consultant for some upcoming high-profile event in San Francisco, but that would mean that you don’t understand where I am right now. Where my mind has taken me since this happened.”

  “I loved Alby too, Cory. I think about him all the time, and I just fall apart.” Her voice was winding up and tightening. “I can picture him sitting with me, reading Encyclopedia Brown. I can picture him there, and I get so upset that I don’t know what to do.”

  “I get that, but it’s not what I’m trying to say. I let myself be a consultant-in-training for a while, like we agreed I would, and now it’s over, sooner than it was supposed to be, and instead I’m here. And you, you’re out there working for this good place, working for someone who’s this shining example. You write moving speeches that matter, and you’re doing great. Stay with it, Greer. See it through.”

  “So what will you do now?” she finally asked, her voice formal and unfamiliar.

  “Oh, I guess I’ll do what I’m doing. Live here and take care of my mom and clean a professor’s house—and another house that my mom used to clean—and hang out with the turtle and be present.”

  “Cory, listen to how you’re talking. You don’t even sound like yourself.”

  It was too much for her, this otherness he was demonstrating. She couldn’t tolerate it, and she would never say that. She would never say to him, “Enough already, Cory,” but instead she would just keep trying, as if he were an extremely complicated school project. Right away he remembered the condensation project at the long-ago science fair, with all those ice cubes and funnels and water balloons, and his mother standing in front of it, speaking in her broken English. He didn’t want to be Greer’s project, the dreary object of all her hard work. It had never been hard work before.

  From behind the counter, listening to everything, Kristin slid a whole pale pie into the oven for a take-out order, pushing the flat wooden
paddle forward like someone making an aggressive serve in an obscure sport. Rain popped lightly against the plate-glass window, and the sky darkened in this town that Cory had lived in for so long and never imagined he would live in again.

  “I can’t talk about this anymore,” said Greer. “I’ll drop you off at home and say goodbye to my parents, and then I have to get to Boston. Faith is meeting us in Cambridge at the bar of the Charles for a brainstorming thing, and tomorrow is the event.”

  “Then you should definitely get going. The rain.”

  Together they dutifully looked out at the rain, which was quickly getting heavier. He imagined her in her little red compact rental car, her jaw set as she drove with wipers mewing, heading toward Boston and a good hotel and women’s rights and a solid future and Faith Frank, who waited there like someone who could provide relief, which he could no longer do.

  They both dropped some money on the table for Kristin, neither of them wanting to cede the task of tipping to the other. Because of that, it turned out the amount they left her was far too great, which was either an insulting gesture or a magnanimous one, depending on how you looked at it.

  SEVEN

  Very early each workday morning in the large, ivy-wrapped house in the suburb of Scarsdale, New York, Zee could hear the Vitamix TurboBlend 4500 roar as her mother, the Hon. Wendy Eisenstat, made vaguely newsprint-colored smoothies from blueberries and kiwis and protein powder and stevia and ice. “Dick, flaxseed or no?” Zee heard, and then the Hon. Richard Eisenstat called out his preference on this particular day. Then both judges went for a run through the local landscaped lanes of this expensive town, side by side like twin steeds, before leaving for their jobs at the Westchester County Supreme Court. Though Zee had an open invitation to run with them, the thought of it was terrible: running with her parents in the town where she’d grown up, living with them once again like an oversized child, while working at a job she hated. Running, yet getting nowhere.