The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  Sometimes Zee and the other paralegals at Schenck, DeVillers, an enormous law firm in the financial district of New York City, were asked to stay very late. Up and down the corridor, lawyers sat in their individual offices, hunched over laptops or phones or black plastic bento boxes. But in an improvised area at the far end of the hall was a little gypsy encampment, where the paralegals all recognized one another as part of the same loosely delineated tribe, yet were also separate, weary, and guarded, in possession of complicated backstories that moderately absorbed Zee and served as one of the only ways she could keep herself at all interested in her job.

  Across from her in the paralegals’ cluster was the heavy woman who had worked in a morgue, and who on breaks told stories about that job, and they all gathered around to listen. Also among them was the long-fingered, long-wristed man; recently Zee had discreetly Googled “abnormally long fingers” and the first hit she got was the medical term arachnodactyly. Fingers like a spider. He definitely had that.

  And surely the other paralegals thought of Zee as just another kind of singular workplace character—in this case, the androgynous, sexually appealing gay woman. In the underheated office at Schenck, DeVillers on this very cold night in winter, she wore a peacoat and watch cap, which gave her the appearance of a member of a boy band who was trying to go incognito.

  “I wonder who decided to turn the heat way down,” Zee said to the young bearded slam poet with whom she shared her corner of the hallway. “Schenck or DeVillers.”

  “DeVillers, for sure,” he said.

  “I’m thinking Schenck. There’s a kind of Schenckian coldness to this place.”

  He laughed; they often tried to amuse each other in this way, because it helped to pass the time. Then there was silence for a long stretch, as all the paralegals typed with cold fingers on cold keys. If you had your eyes closed and suddenly came upon the sound of all that typing, you might not know what it was, for it almost had a rusticated, babbling-brook quality to it, the way so many elements of technology did, as if to trick people into believing that they hadn’t actually given up everything they’d ever loved about the natural world in exchange for the meager glow of a backlit screen.

  Though Zee disliked working there, at least it was a relief not to have a job where she had to dress like a robot monkey woman, but instead could wear a slightly neater version of her usual clothes. Throughout her life, intermittently fearing her parents’ eventual deaths, the only positive aspect about that inevitability was that finally there would be no one on earth who would say to her, “Would it kill you to wear a skirt?”

  In the skirts she had worn over time, for them, the plaid kilt and the Indian-print cotton, the slit leg and the ruffly peasant midthigh, the transgressive crotch-high micromini and the long dark sedate one she called First Violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, she had felt nearly deranged with falseness, as though the clothes would at any moment fall away from her in an act of gender deciduousness, leaving her naked and exposed.

  Once, home at her parents’ house during the long winter break in college, Zee had sent a series of postcards to Greer up in Massachusetts, with the caption “Would it kill you to wear a skirt?” (Greer, of course, actually liked wearing skirts, and wore them all the time, even when it wasn’t required. Also, Cory had said Greer looked very hot in them.)

  On the first postcard, Zee drew a woman wearing a skirt and tripping over the hem, causing her to fall off the edge of a cliff.

  The second postcard showed a woman lying in a pool of blood, the fabric of her skirt patterned in sharp little knives.

  And the last postcard showed another woman wearing a skirt and collapsing in a heap. Beside an arrow pointing to the skirt was the caption “Stella McCartney’s Most Unpopular Design, the Poison-Lined Mini.”

  It wasn’t that Zee imagined herself to be male; she just disliked some of the trappings of femaleness. At her bat mitzvah, under duress, she had worn a green minidress with enormous white wildflowers on it, and a pair of airless tights, and all she had wanted to do the whole day was swap the dress for jeans, or at the very least pull off her tights and run around bare-legged. They encased her legs in such a way that Zee knew she could not go through life in tights, the way her mother did; though in her mother’s case she really could have gone bare-legged, given all that robe. No one would ever have noticed.

  At the law firm, Zee herself was noticed; one person who noticed her was a first-year associate, a toned and thin-lipped recent graduate of Georgetown Law who was of no real interest to Zee, though she did smell intriguingly like fresh-cut grass. But Zee didn’t want to get involved with anyone now. It would have been too hard to do that while living in Scarsdale. “I’m not in the closet,” she’d explained to Greer when they first met at Ryland, but she wasn’t comfortable introducing anyone to her parents. And anyway, she wasn’t sure she would want that person to see her posters of the Spice Girls and the endangered baby chinchillas.

  Animal rights, and then being a vegetarian, had started on a class trip to a petting zoo. Zee had squatted among the baby chicks with down floating in the air around her like pollen. The chick sounds were soft yet insistent and seemed to have more in common with insect life than animal life. But when Zee held a little quivering packet of chick between her palms, she was suddenly goony with love.

  The next day she checked an oversized book of animal photos out of the Scarsdale Public Library, and late that night, sitting in bed with the book open in her lap, Zee began to look at color pictures of baby chicks and otters and fauns. There among the most darling photos in the world appeared one that was incongruous and startling and absolutely terrible: a photo of a baby seal in a trap, its mouth open in pure-form pain. The seal’s eyes made a direct appeal to Zee Eisenstat, who found herself first shocked and crying, and then churning at the injustice. These animals were life, she thought, her mouth going tight; they were life, and more than that they were souls, and because of that, she had to do something.

  When Zee’s parents were out playing tennis with another two-judge couple, Zee sat at her desktop computer posting on an animal rights message board under the embarrassing handle Me&myanimalpals. Soon she received several responses. DANNYSGRANDMA wrote back to Me&myanimalpals with advice on how to get started “in the animal rights community.” Vikingfan22 wrote to ask if by any chance she lived in the Twin Cities, because, if so, maybe they could meet for “a couple of cold ones.” No one knew she was an eleven-year-old girl, and her anonymity gave her courage. She was a baby chick but not a baby chick. Like everyone else on those message boards, she was impelled by the sense of something tender being destroyed.

  Later on, Zee’s MySpace page was thickly spread with adamant statements about animal rights and shocking photos of animal cruelty, as well as a few shots of puppies and kittens frolicking (other people’s puppies and kittens; her mother was allergic), in order to even things out. She constantly posted pictures, and in high school she spent a few Saturdays standing in a parking lot picketing outside a local fur store. But by then she had also branched out broadly into the world of humans and how they kept one another down.

  All kinds of social justice movements stirred her and she found herself a dervish of activity online and in the world. At college, handing out leaflets against the war in Iraq, she’d try hard to imagine herself in Karbala, instead of inert Ryland. She went in the direction of what drew her, and as a result her grades were poor, just as they’d been in high school. Her math SAT score had been so low, and the essay she had to write apparently so unreadable, that her guidance counselor had stared at the printout from the Educational Testing Service for a long time, tapping his pen and frowning, before thinking of how possibly to advise her about college choices.

  Though Zee knew she would always be political, and would eventually become one of those feisty old women, those coots, protesting whatever futuristic cause needed her voice—p
ollution caused by jet-pack fuel emissions; equality for the robot population—sometimes you were not a political being but merely a sexual one. In this version of herself she regarded the hot first-year associate at Schenck, DeVillers and decided against pursuing her, or letting herself be pursued. Zee was in a moment of flux, as she thought of it. This was her life now, but it wasn’t really her life. There had to be something else ahead, something better and more engaging, like what Greer had, working at Loci and living on her own in Brooklyn and being committed to Cory.

  Zee’s erratic work hours sometimes allowed her to sleep late, and when she woke up it was just her in the big house. Sometimes, if she wasn’t needed at Schenck, DeVillers until later in the day, she even watched afternoon talk shows, but these depressed her. “I think,” she’d said to Greer on the phone recently, “daytime talk shows are a plot to keep women dumb and passive. Whenever I watch one of them, I feel my brain matter disintegrating. Today the topic was ‘My Son Is a Gang Member.’”

  “So don’t watch it.”

  “But it was so interesting!”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “I need something to do with myself. Something compelling,” Zee said. “My whole time growing up, while you were reading all those books by Jane Eyre—”

  “Jane Austen!”

  “Yes, that’s what I meant. While you were doing that, I was out protesting.”

  “You could go out protesting now,” said Greer.

  “I’d love to. I’m just too tired when I get home. My job has weird hours.” Zee sighed. “I wish I worked with you at the foundation. It would be like going to work and being political all in one. I even like saying it: ‘the foundation.’”

  “Well, it’s not all that great,” said Greer. “You know that I’m basically an assistant.”

  “I doubt it,” said Zee. “Anyway, it’s a lot better than what I’m doing.”

  Greer had originally tried to get her a job at Loci; she’d given Faith the letter Zee wrote, but it hadn’t done any good. “No worries,” Zee had said to Greer, which was an expression she and Greer both hated, so it was spoken by her ironically. Young, thin, uninteresting-looking women standing behind the counter in boutiques singsonged this phrase in response to just about anything: “Nuclear holocaust?” “No worries!” The expression was absurd, because everyone knew that everyone had legitimate worries all the time. How could you not have worries, particularly if you were a recent college graduate entering the world at this fragile moment? The US economy had been saved from falling into a hell pit, but by the end of 2010 it was still precarious.

  Being needed was something that Zee wanted too. Being needed or loved; one of these or both. Preferably both! They weren’t the same, but they occupied related territory. Love would happen to her too, or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe her life would never settle, would never gel, either professionally or in terms of love. Still: no worries!

  The letter Zee had written to Faith Frank and given to Greer in a bar in Brooklyn had begun:

  Dear Ms. Frank,

  I am sending this to you courtesy of the hand-delivery service of Ms. Greer Kadetsky, who is my great friend from college. In Greer, you could not have a better, smarter, or more quietly diligent person working for you. She is super-focused and organized and well-read. Me, I’m different.

  Then Zee had gone on to write a little bit about herself, moving quickly through the highlights of her political involvement, talking about how energized she was about various feminist issues and gay rights, including marriage equality, which was going to be the next Roe v. Wade. The letter was short, and she ended by telling Faith that as the child of two judges—“not kidding!” she wrote—she had grown up watching her parents interpret the law, while she herself was detained following an animal rights demonstration outside Van Metre Furs in sixth grade.

  It had been clear to Zee, early on, that her parents, being judges, tended to judge everything in their midst. That might have included all the children in the family, but the Eisenstat boys were spared some of the scrutiny because their mother had gotten it into her head early on that boys could not be tamed, so there was no point in even trying. The Hon. Wendy Eisenstat and the Hon. Richard Eisenstat let Alex and Harry have the run of the neighborhood until long past the hour when most kids had gone off to math tutors or Torah study or bassoon lessons or lacrosse.

  Alex and Harry, a year and a half apart in age, neither of them a good student or nimble with the Hebrew alphabet or particularly musical or athletic, liked to ride their skateboards up and down the smooth, wide surface of Heather Lane, where the Eisenstats lived in a $3.5 million Tudor with a pool and a greenhouse and a lawn that went on and on until it became indistinguishable from that of the Tudor next door.

  The Eisenstats’ judgment—mostly Judge Wendy’s—fell on Zee, although she wasn’t Zee yet, not in the beginning. She was still Franny then, Franny Eisenstat, because when her parents fell in love, up in New Haven when both of them were at Yale Law, Richard Eisenstat had said to Wendy Niederman, who sat beside him in Procedure, “One thing you should know about me is that I am a J. D. Salinger fanatic.”

  “J. D., as in ‘Juris Doctor’ Salinger?” she said.

  “You’re funny.”

  “I try.”

  “Ask me any Salinger trivia,” he said. “Anything about the Glass family, even about the most obscure members of the family, the ones no one’s heard of, like Walt and Waker.”

  To which Wendy had crowed, “Walt and Waker Glass! I can’t believe you know who they are. I actually love Salinger too.” Not long after that, when they were spending all their days and nights with each other, essentially living together already without calling it that, Richard had gone into a used-book store in New Haven and extravagantly bought Wendy a jacketed, only slightly foxed first edition of Franny and Zooey. So it wasn’t really much of a surprise when, after having two boys who were not named for anyone in particular, her parents recalled the sentimentality of that early date—the moment when Richard had pressed the gift-wrapped book into Wendy’s hands, and she had taken off the wrapping paper and seen the white cover with the very recognizable font, and then touched it emotionally against her chest, because this man knew what she liked. They recalled this moment, after their daughter’s birth, and so they named the small sack of pink and floral-smelling skin Franny. For a while it was a good name for her, a perfect name.

  But when Franny Eisenstat grew older, the name felt to her frilly and inessential, and she had no connection to it. That pink sack of Franny no longer existed. She was now someone who wanted absolute control over her image—and wanted to be seen as angular, confusing, an exciting human puzzle. At her bat mitzvah, she felt shame at being ensconced in the green dress for which her mother had taken her shopping at Saks, under pressure. All the other women at the bat mitzvah seemed comfortable in the dress-up clothes of regular womanhood. Women like Linda Mariani, Judge Wendy’s blond and busty law clerk, who often staggered into the Eisenstat house on heels, carrying an armload of files piled so high that they covered her face. At the synagogue Linda’s dress was canary-yellow and it pulled taut across her chest, straining the stretchy material.

  “Congratulations, Franny,” said Linda that day, and during the obligatory hug it almost seemed as if the pressure made Linda release a very female perfume, the way a sofa cushion, when sat on, lets out air.

  After the ceremony, the adults went into one side of a long ballroom, and the kids went into the other, and an accordion door closed between the two. There was a karaoke machine on the kids’ side, and everyone wanted a turn. Because they were thirteen and it was 2001, gay jokes were the height of hilarity, and everyone tried to turn all the karaoke songs into puns or double entendres about being gay. There on the orange-and-gold, floating-trumpet-patterned carpeting, two girls began to sing a song by some ancient brother-sister duo from the 1970s called Do
nny and Marie, with new lyrics, holding microphones that had been in stands from some already-forgotten bat or bar mitzvah or wedding from the previous weekend.

  One girl sang, “I’m a little bit homo . . .”

  And the other one sang, “And I’m a little bit les-bi-an.”

  Then they pretended to French kiss, one girl dipping the other girl back. It was meant to be both disgusting and hilarious, but much later, back at home on Heather Lane, when the Eisenstat family sat in the living room opening the last of the presents—all the Lucite picture frames, and the gift cards from Barnes & Noble and Candles N’ Things that would soon get lost and never cashed, and all the checks in variants of eighteen dollars, because eighteen corresponded to the lucky number chai, Hebrew for “life”—Franny rose from the whitecaps of wrapping paper, shuffling through it all, ankle-deep, and went upstairs to her own room, where she lay in bed and thought about those two girls from her class singing that hideous old song.

  But what she held on to, what stayed, as specific as something that could be placed inside one of the picture frames she’d been given, was the image of the two girls kissing. Other than that, the whole day had been a festival of falseness, from the recitation of her Torah portion, which she’d performed terribly, for she had never been a good student, to the Truth or Dare game that she and all her friends eventually played in one of the other banquet halls, during which Franny had ended up French-kissing Lyle Hapner, whose claim to fame was his impression of the president of the United States getting laughing gas at the dentist. Lyle had a strange-looking mouth that seemed in danger of swallowing her, the way a snake might swallow a mouse. She felt small with him, and as if she wasn’t inhabiting her full self.