The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  “As you know, I agree with everything you’re saying.”

  “I’m not sure we’re doing anything, Faith,” Greer said. “I like to think we are,” she added quickly. “It’s hard to know how much we ever did, quantifiably. We don’t have a product. And I know that from a money standpoint we’re a huge success now—and when we started, we weren’t. But I feel like we’re in a rut. Or anyway, I am.”

  All Faith had to do was poke at it a little bit, and Greer told her everything she felt; she’d always been this way, and it was no different now, though now she spoke less haltingly. Like the others—at least the ones who had been there since the beginning—Greer Kadetsky disliked the glitter of the foundation, the fact that she never directly got to help anyone. Greer still did a lot of writing—strong writing, Faith thought—but it was all for the newsletter or the annual report, which certainly added to that corporate feel she described.

  “And when was the last time we did a special project?” Greer persisted. “They energized everybody here, because we could see something happening in real time. Where’s our money going, exactly? I know that Emmett funded the foundation so it could be big. So it could be different from your experience at Bloomer. But my understanding of being big is that it means you have an impact, isn’t that right? You can tell me to stop talking, Faith, but I just think sometimes there’s a self-satisfaction about the whole thing. Not from you. Not from us. But from the events themselves. It doesn’t feel so good to me these days. Maybe it will change, but I don’t know. So I fell asleep. Sorry,” she added.

  “I know,” said Faith. “I really do know.” And because she couldn’t think of anything else to say yet, she put a hand on Greer Kadetsky’s shoulder and said, “Let me work on it.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Turn over, miss,” said a voice, and Faith, marinating deep in her memories, made a grunting sound, returning from all of that to the present moment. She had to take a second to remember what that present moment was. The smell of baby oil struck her first. Then the all-string version of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.” Then the awareness that her face was mashed against a vinyl cradle whose towel had slipped off. The massage had placed her in a stupor.

  She obediently rolled onto her back, one breast briefly flapping out from the protection of the towel. She opened her eyes and found herself staring, much too close, into the face of her masseuse. It was startling to really take in how young the woman was. She was almost a girl. Maybe she was a girl. Maybe this was child labor. Jesus Christ. Immediately Faith felt all her muscles contract, and the woozy dream state calcified. “May I ask your age?” Faith asked calmly.

  The woman looked down. “I am not a girl,” she said. “I am mom of two. Boy and girl. Keep young by working hard.” She laughed dully, as though she had been asked this question many times before.

  “Do you like working here?” Faith persisted, but the woman didn’t answer.

  This was a question that now preoccupied her. The day after Greer Kadetsky had fallen asleep at work and then expressed her work frustrations, Faith had called a meeting in the conference room, which turned into an hours-long session, like a kind of consciousness-raising group from the past. They had all sat around the table and she listened as one by one they told her why they had originally come to Loci, and why it felt different there now. They told her about their worries that the summits were elitist, that there was a kind of feel-good feminism in the air. “I recognize that feminism can’t only be ‘feel-bad,’” said one of the newer hires, a very bright IT person, a trans woman named Kara. “But there’s too much of an emphasis on how everything feels, one way or another, and less on what it does.” This was the refrain, said in various ways.

  Someone else said that she missed the special projects, and everyone chimed in. Yes, the special projects, which brought immediate results. In a way, Faith knew, another special project might remind them all of what they were doing there. Afterward, Faith had gone upstairs to see Emmett. She couldn’t tell him how unhappy everyone was downstairs—that seemed risky. “If they’re so unhappy, let’s end it,” she worried someone at ShraderCapital might say. Instead, she told him she had a good idea for a special project. “It’s been a while, Emmett,” she said lightly but she hoped strongly. Then she described for him the project she had in mind. Again and again at work over the years there had been bulletins disseminated about human trafficking, an issue around which she felt helpless. Loci had brought in speakers before, but now it felt like it was time to do something more.

  Iffat Khan, who was now a researcher on the team and no longer Faith’s assistant, had shown Faith some material on a situation in the Cotopaxi province in Ecuador, where young women—in many cases girls—were being lured from home and brought to Guayaquil to become prostitutes. It definitely qualified as an emergency. “If we can save a number of them, it would shine a light on the larger situation,” she said. “Maybe other corporate entities and charities would get involved. It could be an ongoing rescue mission.” Shrader looked gloomy and unconvinced, so Faith told him the rest of her idea. “I was thinking that after the rescue we could connect these young women with mentors. Older women who would teach them useful skills. How to read, first of all, if that’s needed. And computer literacy. Along with a trade. Textiles, maybe. They could learn to knit, and eventually form . . . a textile co-op. A women’s textile co-op.” Faith was excited by her own idea, polishing those last three words individually as she said them, but Emmett just kept looking at her, unconvinced. “And then we could bring one of the young women over here to speak about it,” Faith said. “What do you think?”

  “What, we would fly her here?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Emmett paused, slightly more engaged, and bobbed his head from side to side, considering. He promised to bring it up to the relevant people upstairs, and in June of 2014, a memo came to Faith from upstairs telling her that they were actually going to do it. She was very excited. Mentorship was still a very popular concept right now, everyone was talking about it, and the idea was surprisingly well-received. Someone at ShraderCapital had found a local contact in Quito. Alejandra Sosa was described as a dynamic leader involved with human rights issues in the developing world; her résumé was peppered with acronyms, the names of NGOs with which she’d consulted. All those capital letters, when looked at on one sheet of paper, had the effect of a firewall, or a code that could only be broken by someone much smarter than you.

  A hasty Skype session was arranged. Members of the ShraderCapital and Loci teams in New York sat around a rock slab of a conference table up on 27 facing the projected image of a group of women in a modest Quito office. “Faith Frank!” said Alejandra Sosa. “This is an honor of honors. You have been very important to me as a woman.” Sosa was forty years old and confident, sexy. Faith liked her at once. They exchanged easy conversation about their shared mission. Alejandra Sosa knew of some skilled older women who could be hired to work with the hundred young women and girls after they had been rescued and relocated. To become their mentors. ShraderCapital would fund it, and the agency that Alejandra Sosa oversaw in Quito would take care of distributing money and making arrangements. She was very reassuring, and at the end she said, “It is gratifying to work with you, Faith Frank. You are a force for good.”

  Faith had said to Emmett and his team, “I liked her tremendously, but we need to vet her, of course. You hear about the scamming that goes on in aid work when there isn’t oversight. I don’t want to get caught up in any of that.”

  “Of course, do what you need to do,” said the COO, and in the background one of the assistants piped up, “No worries.” The researchers down on 26 found that Sosa had a record of achieving results. The secretary of the executive board of UNICEF had written her a fulsome, nearly weepy recommendation letter. Then, a couple of weeks later, word came that the modest rescue mission had gone well,
and that one hundred traumatized young women had been paired with older women. The young ones were offered transitional housing in an apartment building in Quito, where they would recover from their ordeal and learn a trade, through which they could make a living and start a new life. Before the end of the year, as Faith had proposed, one of the rescued young women would be brought here to be introduced onstage and say a few words after the keynote at the mentorship summit coming up soon in LA.

  Faith had already begun working on the keynote, but now, deep into October, lying on this table naked under a towel, having her body indelicately pushed and pulled, she thought: I should turn the keynote over to Greer Kadetsky. Let her not only write it but also deliver it. Greer was forward-looking, smart, and passionate. She had the ability to listen well and draw people out; they connected with her and trusted her. Look at those wonderful lunchtime speeches she had written. Plus, Greer was on the verge of becoming her own person, and this would help push her further. She would get to write two speeches, one for the young woman from Ecuador, and one for herself. In her own speech, she would finally be speaking as Greer Kadetsky.

  Faith understood that Greer had hit that plateau that comes several years into a new position. She needed proof that her work mattered, not just a nebulous hope that it did. Otherwise, she would continue to feel discouraged, and also she would be in danger of leaving.

  What if they all leave? Faith thought. Of course there would always be someone else who would come; people left now and again. Helen Brand had left last month to be a national reporter for the Washington Post. No one was ever irreplaceable, and yet she always felt a pang, like a kind of brief grief, when someone left, followed by a slight start—almost an increase in respiration rate—when someone new arrived.

  Give it to Greer, she told herself. Faith recalled one specific conversation with Greer Kadetsky, way back in the earliest days. Greer had called her up, crying, and had told her that there had been a tragedy in her personal life and she couldn’t make it to the very first summit, which they’d all been working toward around the clock. A child had been killed, Faith remembered; Greer’s boyfriend’s brother? But it was so long ago that she couldn’t recall the details. She just remembered Greer’s voice on the phone, saying, “Faith?” and then the tears, and how she, Faith, had immediately gone into soothing mode. As soon as she got off the phone with Greer, she was on another call, scrambling, yelling a little to find someone to take up the slack. That was what it was like, running a foundation. You soothed and you scrambled and sometimes you yelled.

  And then one day, sometime later, Faith had overheard Greer speaking to someone in a pleading voice on her cell phone. Faith had come over to her, concerned, and asked if she was all right. Greer looked up, nodding, but she didn’t look all right. That afternoon Greer had come to Faith’s office door—this was no surprise; all the young women eventually showed up at Faith’s door—and she came in and planted herself on the couch and told Faith everything. She and the high school boyfriend had had a rough breakup. “I don’t know what to do,” Greer had said. “We’ve been together for so long, and it wasn’t supposed to end, ever.” Then she’d begun to cry in the sort of loose, phlegmy way that distantly reminded Faith of when Lincoln had been a little boy with croup.

  Faith had listened, and while she hadn’t offered any prescriptions, she’d told Greer that she was welcome to come in and talk whenever she liked. “I mean it,” she’d said, and she did mean it, because Greer was one of the good ones. She had come far; she was sterling, loyal, smart, modest—exactly the right person to have hired and promoted. But now Greer was flagging, and needed to be reminded of why she was here at Loci, four years in. Give her this, Faith thought.

  Plus, Lincoln was right: Faith was tired and overworked. She was seventy-one years old, and though some people said that seventy was the new forty, it wasn’t. This massage today was desperately needed. She wished she could stay on this table for six thousand minutes, with this compact woman pounding her back and placing a line of hot, clicking stones up and down her spine and massaging her neck with baby oil until it was just a loose string gently connected to a head that felt as light as a balloon. Faith was sick to death of the pace she’d been keeping, and she couldn’t bear to go speak at another Loci summit so soon, not the kind of summits that these had become.

  No more psychics. No more pelican butter.

  Let Greer do this one. It would be a symbiotic touch.

  All of this was what Faith thought about as her masseuse went to the other end of the table and began to rub her feet.

  Sue pressed a particular place under the big toe, and Faith startled, then composed a list with two items on it:

  Arrange meeting with Greer to discuss LA. Be sure to find out if Greer speaks Spanish, which would be a help.

  Encourage Greer Kadetsky generally. She still needs encouragement. They all do.

  Faith vaguely recalled their first meeting, back at Greer’s college campus. Greer had been so bright and filled with feeling, but beyond that she had also been upset with her parents. Of course Faith had been reminded of being upset with her own parents at that age. Both sets of parents had held their daughters back, even as they loved them. Faith had been touched, seeing this in Greer, and who knew why you were impelled to do anything you did, but Faith gave Greer Kadetsky her business card, the way she sometimes still gave it out to young women, smiling at them in a way that she hoped would have significance. And apparently it did, for Greer was still here all these years later.

  And Faith, indisputably an old woman now, still thought about her own mother and father with a tenderhearted bunching-up of feeling, despite their unfairness toward her over half a century earlier. They hadn’t known better; they were of their time. She could still almost cry now recalling their gentleness, and all the games of charades they’d played, and how she and Philip had run around the Bensonhurst apartment after a bath, squealing and smelling good, finally being caught up in a towel held out by their mother like a toreador. They had left their wet footprints everywhere, though they dried fast and left no trace.

  Her parents had held her back, maddeningly, but just for a while. Her brother hadn’t taken her side, and she’d held it against him at first, and then after she’d stopped holding it against him, life had taken over—her life, which was so different from his; and finally it was as if they’d barely ever been siblings, let alone twins. Lying on the table, she tried to make a note to be the one to call him on their birthday in a few months, and not the other way around. Get a jump on the day and be the one to call him, asking him if he and Sydelle were planning to come east soon. “I’d really like it if you did,” she would say. “And we can even play charades. So start practicing.”

  Suddenly the hands working on her body began to chop, moving with vehemence up and down over these old bones that had been everywhere, and maybe were starting to slow down.

  “Done!” cried Sue the masseuse, and she slapped Faith’s legs with her two forceful hands, the sound ringing out as if in triumph.

  NINE

  The afternoon of the speech at the mentorship summit in LA was dipped in heat, despite the fact that it was early December. LA was heat and smog and noise, but none of that was felt or talked about inside the cultural center, which was its own self-contained ecosystem. Heat and smog and noise had been replaced by a subtle veil of scent and an ineffable sensation of cool. Also, the event was lacking long, wearying lines, because all the bathrooms, including men’s rooms, had been opened up. Women powered easily through. “Have I died and gone to heaven?” one woman asked another at the hand dryers, which seemed to whirr more pleasingly than usual.

  Drinks and canapés were circulating in the lobby; slender Bellinis and gemological tuna tartare slicked with yuzu gelée. There was a discreet manicure station here, where women sat with fingers spread; here and there, other women openly nursed infants and
no one looked askance. The feminist psychic held sway in a corner. The women here were wealthy and progressive, believed in equality, gave money to left or center-left candidates, and bought tickets to events like this one to see the roster of speakers, including the female film actors and directors. The audience was well-dressed; it was a sea of soft pastel and the occasional basic black, because even though this was California, New York roots ran deep. Clavicles were exposed, understated jewelry on display, and the conversation took place in voices of concern, interrupted by a couple of familiar shrieks that you might hear in a restaurant when there’s a large group of women at a table. Everyone here knew that shriek, which signaled the happiness of women spending time together.

  Greer Kadetsky and Lupe Izurieta stood together watching the scene. They had flown there from New York, the morning after Lupe had arrived from Ecuador. Lupe, pretty, early twenties, in a yellow dress, was exhausted from the long trip and overwhelmed by the number of people in attendance. Greer said, “Do you want something to eat?” pleased to be able to use the high school Spanish that she had studied back in Macopee, and took her over to one of the runway-long buffet tables, but the food must have looked so strange to this young woman from Ecuador—it looked strange to Greer too. High-end, fussy food.

  “No,” said Lupe in the world’s softest voice, which reminded Greer of her own voice back at the beginning of everything. It wasn’t that she was loud now, but she was different.

  A tech guy found them and said, “It’s time to get you both miked. We’re starting in fifteen.” Backstage in the greenroom before the talk, the tech guy brought out some equipment and said, “Who wants to go first?”

  Greer tried to explain to Lupe what would happen. Before she could finish what she was saying, the tech guy had reached a hand inside the collar of Lupe’s dress to clip on a microphone, which made her tense and gasp. “It’s okay,” Greer said, though she knew it wasn’t, for Lupe, but he had moved too fast. Then his hand withdrew, and Lupe breathed out in relief. She was the most frightened person Greer had ever met, and she had sat in silence throughout the flight from New York to LA. Presumably she’d also sat that way during the very long flight from Quito to New York, her first airplane trip ever.