The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  “You look scared.”

  Zee looked up. “It was very scary. Very shocking.”

  “I don’t mean that. I mean now,” Noelle said in a constricted, nearly formal voice. “Because of me.”

  “Okay,” Zee admitted. “You can be a little scary.”

  “Is that all I am to you? A scary person?”

  Zee took her time, trying to make sure she was understanding what was happening, the new voice Noelle was using, and what it meant. There was a familiar feeling here; Noelle had to be aware of it too. Think, think, Zee thought, wondering if she had missed an interpretation. Nothing else occurred to her. Crisis usually abated to reveal calm, but this one was revealing another, different kind of crisis. “No,” Zee said. “Not only.”

  “Then what else?” This was said as a direct challenge.

  All Zee would say was, “This is weird.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I don’t know what it is.”

  “Are you sure you don’t?”

  “Okay, I guess I do,” said Zee.

  “Is it okay, then?” asked Noelle, and Zee nodded.

  Neither of them knew what to say next. They went back to the business of eating dinner, and they drank their cold beers and shared a banana pudding for dessert, both spoons dipping into the same beige mass, reminding Zee of watching Noelle in the faculty lounge eating a cup of yogurt, which made that little galloping-hooves-on-plastic knock knock sound. It was the sound of a self-contained woman eating the international symbol of female food: yogurt. Women with their calcium needs. You could go so many places in the world and find women eating yogurt.

  “Want to get the check?” asked Noelle. She waved an arm around for the waitress. She was a little drunk, Zee realized, and she felt worried that perhaps Noelle’s low-level drunkenness was the cause of her apparent interest in Zee. Maybe Noelle had been tricked into flirting only by virtue of the beer, and later she would be horrified with herself, because after all maybe she was a guidance counselor at a charter school who was as straight as the day is long.

  “You’re tipsy,” Zee said. “That’s why you’re being this way? Three beers?”

  “No,” Noelle said. “I deliberately had that third beer because I was starting to be this way.”

  “‘This way.’”

  “Attracted to you.”

  “Oh.”

  Noelle drew a finger down the side of the beer glass, bisecting the condensation. Why was it that the words attracted to you were like lightning? It slayed Zee that Noelle Williams, the imperious guidance counselor, an older, African-American woman with an impossibly elegant bearing, was attracted to her.

  “Okay then,” said Zee, and they both laughed.

  And how strange, too, that laughter would characterize so much of what they did from that night on, even if some of it was the laughter of helplessness in the face of what was unfixable. There were other bad things that happened at the school: a boy beaten so severely on his way home that his eye popped from its socket; another Teach and Reach faculty member giving up the ship; a broken boiler that rendered the school uninhabitable for two days.

  But on the night after Shara’s baby was born, they walked from the restaurant out into the suddenly blowing snow—spring snow, because this was Chicago—onto a quiet street, and got on the train, which took them mostly in silence and fluorescence toward Zee’s six-flat, because it was closer than Noelle’s place, which was a good forty-minute ride, and in forty minutes the spell might well have been broken. Thank God the place was clean, Zee thought as she threw on the lights.

  “Studenty,” Noelle declared, and Zee saw the room as Noelle saw it: The sofa that was covered with a generic Indian-print fabric. The small framed flyer on the wall advertising a college speech in the chapel several years earlier, given by Faith Frank. The clementines in a blue bowl. The photo of Zee and another woman, clearly her good friend, in graduation gowns. The new life that Zee Eisenstat was trying to settle into here in Chicago.

  “Yeah, I can’t help it,” Zee said. “I was a student for so long that it’s the only way I know how to be.”

  “I remember all this,” said Noelle, who then decisively brought Zee toward her by the shoulders, which was as much a relief as it was a thrill. They kissed for a long, leisurely time. When they lay down on the narrow mattress that Zee had purchased at a garage sale upon moving here, and had carried on her own back like a Sherpa the seven blocks home, she couldn’t help but think a little bit about power: who had it right now, the older woman or the younger one. Power was hard to understand sometimes. You could not quantify it or calibrate it. You could barely see it, even when you were looking straight at it.

  “That’s what everyone was talking about at the first Loci summit,” Greer had said recently on the phone when the subject came up. “The meaning and uses of power.”

  “The summit you missed, because of Cory’s brother.”

  “Yeah. But everyone who was there—the rest of our team—said that it was clear that it’s a topic we’re going to return to, because no one can get enough of it. It excites everyone. Power! Even the word is powerful.”

  “Right,” said Zee. “It has the word pow in it. Like in a comic book.”

  To live in a world of female power—mutual power—felt like a desirable dream to Zee. Having power meant that the world was like a pasture with the gate left open, and that there was nothing stopping you, and you could run and run.

  Noelle looked formidable with or without her clothes, though of course without them she was more vulnerable to Zee’s impressions of her. Their hands were on each other—on Zee with her curated boyish look and Noelle with her carefully feminine look that was slightly tempered by the nearly shaved head and prominent hipbones and the careful comportment, giving her the quality of one of those artist’s mannequins. The arms and legs could be rearranged any way you liked, link by link, and this was what sex was too, when power was fluid. You could rearrange the other person, and they could rearrange you.

  Now the snow fell steadily, and after a long, expressive round of new-person sex, the two women finally settled themselves in for the night. Power had been there a moment ago, but now it wasn’t. How strange that Zee had just been thinking about it, and suddenly it was irrelevant. The day had been impossibly long and difficult, and all that she needed to do now was collapse.

  “Sweet pea,” Noelle called her before they slept, in a third and entirely different use of that term of endearment.

  PART THREE

  I Get To Decide

  EIGHT

  The red awning above the storefront read QI GONG TUI-NA RELAXING INVIGORATING UNFORGETTABLE MASSAGE, words that did not register as interesting to most New Yorkers passing this street corner in the west 90s on a mild night in the fall of 2014. But Faith Frank knew their significance, and once a week after work she had the car and driver take her there, for she just loved a good Chinese massage. She felt, simply, that these bracing, almost disconcertingly vigorous massages helped her marshal her thoughts and make good decisions and stay calm and dispense advice to all the people who came to her for it.

  She had discovered this one day, two years earlier, when she’d had a bad stiff neck, and in desperation on the way home from work she’d asked her driver, Morris—her contract with Loci had included the use of a driver and car—to stop there. As Faith lay on a table in this dim establishment with her face in a cushioned cradle, and a small woman working an elbow into the base of Faith’s spine, ideas began to jump out of her as if sprung from captivity. So now here she was again on this night, with another stiff neck. She’d been all checked out by her internist and found to be in good health, but the body still needed fine-tuning at this age. As Faith approached the staircase to enter the establishment, her cell phone softly pulsed against her breast like a companion heart, and she reached into her coat.


  LINCOLN, read the display. “Oh hey, honey,” she said, invigorated in the way that she always felt when he called.

  “Hey, Mom.” The voice of her son, Lincoln Frank-Landau, had been cautious since childhood, as if he was afraid to expect too much from life. “You’re in the middle of something?” he asked. The answer was always yes, not that she always told him that.

  “Well, I’m about to be. Getting a Chinese massage in a minute.”

  “Your neck is tight again?” he said. “Mom, you should slow down. All that travel is bad for you.”

  “Oh, my schedule’s not so bad.”

  “I actually don’t believe you. I saw on your website calendar that you have that Hollywood event coming up. And I saw who was going to be there. Jesus!”

  “No, Jesus is not going to be there, Lincoln. We couldn’t afford him.”

  “Well, it’s still a far cry from what you used to have at Loci in the beginning. Female sea captains.”

  Faith laughed. “Well, ShraderCapital told us we needed to go high-profile. Everything is about branding, they say, which of course is a despicable thing, because it really means everything is about corporations. But here we are, in the America of today. So now, yes, we have the female action star of Gravitus 2: The Awakening. And did you read about the feminist psychic who’s been hired to entertain between talks?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, it’s such bullshit,” Faith said. “I imagine her standing before a huge group of women, closing her eyes, and saying in this really spooky voice, ‘One . . . day . . . you . . . will . . . stop . . . menstruating.’”

  Lincoln laughed easily. “Plus complimentary manicures, right? And all that foodie type of food. I saw a picture on Instagram recently. What were you serving?” he asked. “It was really exotic. Maybe pelican butter?”

  Faith laughed too, and said, “Something like that.” But the subject of the excesses of the foundation, four years in, was actually depressing to her. Over the past two years in particular, the foundation had been relentlessly urged in this direction by an increasingly vocal presence at ShraderCapital. “I keep telling Emmett that rich women attending conferences with massages and wonderful food doesn’t get at anything,” she said to Lincoln. “That it doesn’t grapple with structural issues like parental leave, child care, equal pay. It doesn’t put hands on levers. And yet, as he kindly reminded me, we have to grow. And they’ve been generous.”

  As she talked, she began to mount the stairs in the narrow, dark hallway. Distantly, a thin Chinese version of Muzak could be heard. “They’ve agreed to some things that they have no interest in,” she went on. “Though fewer and fewer over time. But I think I told you about the rescue mission we funded recently. One of those special projects we sometimes do. I had to fight for this one, they’re getting so infrequent.”

  “Ecuador, right?”

  “Yes. The young women who were saved from trafficking. A hundred of them. And then they were hooked up with female mentors.”

  “Don’t say ‘hooked up,’ Mom. It sounds like you mean something else.”

  “Good point,” said Faith. “But you get the idea. We connected them with women who taught them a trade. So sure, we may have a psychic, and mani-pedis, and fancy lunches with pelican butter, but we also have missions like this one. So maybe it evens out.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “Actually,” Faith said, “one of the rescued young women is flying in for that LA event. And I’m supposed to introduce her.”

  “Is it essential that you do it? Your neck? Your exhaustion?”

  “Lincoln, I love you with all my heart, but please don’t tell me what to do. I try not to tell you what to do.” There was a churlish silence, and she wanted to break it fast, so she said, “So how’s the tax code?”

  “Still kicking.”

  “And still shockingly unfair?”

  “Depends on your bracket,” he said.

  This last part was a kind of vaudeville routine that they had been amusing only themselves with over the years since he’d become a tax lawyer. Lincoln was thirty-eight now and lived in Denver. Unmarried, dedicated, he resembled his father, Gerry Landau, an immigration advocate to whom Faith had been married only for several years, until his shocking death at exactly the age Lincoln was now. Gerry had been a pale, mild man who looked hamsterish with his aviator glasses off. With them on, he looked more himself: thoughtful, brainy, distracted. She’d liked him right away. The first time he took Faith anywhere in his car, an old yellow Dodge Dart, he’d had to clear so many papers and books and a bag of bagels off the passenger seat in order for her to sit down that it was comical.

  “When you went to antiwar meetings,” she asked Gerry, “did you speak up a lot?”

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “Those guys wouldn’t let me get a word in. And when I did speak, they interrupted.”

  “Same,” she said.

  Lincoln, now, looked like Gerry then, but much squarer in style, and with less hair. Already her son’s hair had fled his head, as if pushed away by the complexities of the tax code. She still hoped he would fall in love, her reserved and mild son. As a boy, Lincoln had always been resourceful and independent. But after Gerry’s sudden heart attack and death, Lincoln drew into himself and wouldn’t discuss it, preferring to act as though it hadn’t happened. Faith ached for Lincoln much more than for herself. She knew she would never marry again, would never give him another father. She was a loving, busy mother, distracted by her demanding work at Bloomer, and her political activity, and all the interviews she was asked to give back then. She rarely cooked, except for the occasional steak.

  Once, when he was ten, Lincoln had screamed at her, “Why can’t you be like other mothers?”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Why do I have to have Mrs. Smith?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you—”

  “Why do I have to have Sara Lee?” he asked, a little hysterical now.

  She’d said, “What? Who are those women?” But then immediately she realized. “Oh, Lincoln, I’m who I am,” she’d said. “I’m who you got, and I try to be the best I can.”

  “Try harder!” he yelled.

  She tried harder. But as he grew, they were so different. Lincoln was serious, steadfast, methodical, and liked things to be a certain way and a certain way only. Having a prominent feminist as a mother had made him neither wildly political himself nor a misogynist. Once, when he was a teenager and some reporter had asked him if he was a feminist, he’d said, “Well, obviously,” offended at the question. But that was the extent of it. He was conventional, reserved, yet their love was mutual, established, sometimes distracted, and never in doubt.

  She missed his young, vulnerable, ownable self. You never knew when you were lifting your child for the last time; it might seem like just a regular time, when it was taking place, but later, looking back, it would turn out to have been the last. Lincoln’s increasing lack of neediness was hard for Faith sometimes, but it was also something of a relief to think that he was all right on his own. In this way, they were actually alike.

  “Now tell me what’s going on with you,” she said to him.

  “Another time. Go have your massage, Mom.”

  She watched the phone go dark, then held it in her hand for a few more seconds. It was the closest she could get, these days, to holding Lincoln himself.

  Faith pushed through the glass door of the massage place and entered the anteroom where young Chinese women sat on a sofa, waiting for their appointments and walk-ins. One of the women stood and nodded, and Faith nodded back. “You want thirty, sixty, or ninety minute?” the woman asked, and Faith said, “Sixty.” Then with no further comment she was led down a long unlit hall; from inside the curtained cubicles came the sounds of flesh being battered by hands.

  The m
asseuse, whose name was Sue, started on her through the towel, working along the spine and shoulders and neck, oh the neck, all of which were desperate for attention. The long strokes down the length of the back, punctuated by occasional sharp pokes, dropped Faith stupefied into a hole, as if the face cradle were a tunnel and she was going down inside it, to the place where everything waited that had come before.

  * * *

  • • •

  They were twins, having shared a uterus, and then, later on, a bedroom. That bedroom, on West Eighth Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, wasn’t much bigger than the uterus had been, relative to their growing bodies, and so a red gingham curtain hung from a rod dividing the two halves, providing what passed for privacy in that household. At night, though, lying in their separate curtained compartments, neither of them really wanted privacy. They just wanted to talk. They were born six minutes apart in the winter of 1943, wartime, Faith first and then Philip, and their differences were obvious to everyone. She was the student, the serious one, beautiful but remote; he was more popular and sunny and accessible. She worked harder, and he slid by on slapdash charm and athletics.

  At night, through the curtain, Faith and Philip asked each other advice about dating. “Well, the first thing I would say is don’t date Owen Lansky,” Philip said. “He will definitely want to go all the way.”

  She was touched by his protectiveness, and he was proved right about Owen Lansky, who was extremely pushy and had a head of oiled hair that, if you were locked in an embrace with him, would leave your face shining wet.

  They often talked so late into the night that their mother sometimes appeared in the doorway in her robe and said, “You two! Go to bed!”

  “We’re just talking, Mom,” said Philip. “We have a lot to say.”

  “What do I need to do to get you to sleep?” she asked. “Do I have to hit you over the head with a frying pan?”

  “Save your frying pan for breakfast,” Faith said. “Good night, Mom!” As soon as their mother left, Faith and Philip returned to their fevered and intimate conversation.