The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Are you okay?” Greer asked her now.

  “I am well,” Lupe said, but she didn’t look well.

  Greer didn’t feel very well herself. She hadn’t wanted to give this speech at all. When Faith had offered it to her in October, she’d thought she was kidding. “Come into my office,” Faith had said. Greer had entered the white space and taken in the walls that had been breaded bit by bit with photos of girls and women.

  “Greer,” said Faith. “It’s your time.” Faith told her that she wanted her to travel to LA to appear onstage with one of the young women from Ecuador, in order to introduce her, and write her speech for her, and then also write and deliver the keynote mentorship speech herself.

  “I can’t do that,” Greer said, shocked.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t give speeches. I write them for other people. Or I used to, anyway. Short ones.”

  “Anyone who ever gave a speech,” said Faith, “was once someone who didn’t. You’re what now, twenty-five?”

  “Twenty-six.”

  “Well. It’s definitely time.”

  Greer wondered why Faith was giving her this gig. She remembered something Faith had said to the team once, early on: “Men give women the power that they themselves don’t want.” She’d meant power to run the home, to deal with the children and their friends and teachers, to make all decisions about the domestic realm. So maybe Faith, like one of those men, was giving Greer something she didn’t particularly want. Maybe Faith had no interest in giving this speech, and so that was why she was giving it to Greer—passing the power on to her in order to get rid of it. Greer saw, at that moment, Faith glance toward her minimalist desk clock, like a therapist nearing the end of the hour. Greer had overstayed her welcome. Why hadn’t she just said yes?

  “Okay, great, it’s a deal,” Greer said with forced liveliness. “Shoot me now,” she added, putting her finger to the side of her head and trying to laugh.

  The bad moment had fled. All you ever had to do to make a bad moment flee was acquiesce. This was true everywhere in life, even though so much of Loci’s focus was supposedly on not acquiescing. She stood to leave, and Faith looked up at her and said, “It’ll be a good thing, I promise.”

  The dozen or so times Greer had come into that office over the years, unrelated to work, had been because Faith had seen that something was wrong and had called her in; or else because Greer had felt welcome. Faith had encouraged her to come in and talk whenever she wanted. After originally telling Faith about her Cory problems, Greer had returned to her office months later, after a weekend up in Macopee during which Cory had broken up with her. “I love you and I’ll always love you,” he’d said stiffly, like someone in a school play, “and I really don’t want to hurt you. But I just can’t do this anymore.”

  Faith comforted her in the aftermath and told her that the best thing you could do in a hard moment in your life was work. “Work can help,” she’d said. “Especially when you’re suffering. Keep writing those speeches for those women, Greer; keep imagining their lives, what they go through. You’ll find yourself going outside yourself and into them. It’ll provide perspective.And any time you want to talk to me, let me know.”

  That was three and a half years earlier. Over time, in their broken-up state, Greer and Cory spoke far less frequently, and now she was only in touch with him on the occasions when she went home to visit her parents in Macopee. As each year since their breakup passed and they moved farther away from each other, she was able to see, objectively, that Cory had turned into a tall, skinny grown man who lived in his mother’s house with a plastic-covered sofa and video games and a turtle. The sensation she experienced each time she saw him there—him!—living like this and turning into this new and different person, was as strong as a flare-up of a chronic illness.

  Since the breakup, Greer had had occasional relationships and hookups that were mostly decent, and once or twice excruciating. She sometimes met someone for after-work drinks at the kind of bar where everyone was young and worked for progressive startups, or for culture websites with names like Topsoil. By age twenty-six Greer had finally developed a lasting look. The blue streak in her hair had been rinsed away a few years earlier, replaced by highlights, but her eager, sometimes sexy nerdiness remained, and it had become fully stylish. Chunky eyeglasses were in. She wore those glasses, and often a short skirt and bright tights and little black boots, whether to show up at work or attend a Loci event or go out for drinks in a cluster at night.

  Sometimes the drinking people gathered on the Skillet, a former lighthouse/party boat moored on the Hudson, downtown. The surface shifted beneath her feet as she drank and shouted and flirted. Since becoming single, Greer had forced herself to get good at flirting. The men she met all seemed to say they were “several years out of Wesleyan.” Their beds were never made, or else made poorly, when she climbed into them. No one yet had the time or inclination to take care of themselves, and it was unclear when that would ever begin.

  Two months before the LA summit, on board the Skillet, Ben Prochnauer from the office had opened himself to Greer like some kind of obstinate flower. They stood close together, the way he had once stood with Marcella Boxman—she who was long gone from Loci, on to be a Social Innovation Fellow at Cambridge—and he spoke urgently to her.

  “So. Do you ever think of me that way?” he asked.

  “‘That way’?” Greer stood back and looked at him. They had been working together for so long. In the early years he had flirted with her, but it had seemed like little more than a reflex. Now, with no warning, he was genuinely hitting on her. His face had the glinting optimism of a found coin. Greer slept with him that night on the futon in his studio apartment in Fort Greene. The surprise hookup was the sort of event that the two people in question suspect they will look back on one day with vague, sentimental affection, overlooking the sadness that had gotten them there.

  * * *

  • • •

  When it was time for her to go onstage that day in LA, Greer walked out, miked and lightly quivering, her vision darting around in the darkness as if she were a goldfish who’d been poured into a new bowl, while outside the bowl loomed a thousand invisible women. Nearby on the stage stood the sign-language interpreter, patiently waiting. The room stayed quiet, with just the occasional obligatory and somehow recognizably female cough, followed by scrabbling in a purse for a lozenge, which was unwrapped in a quick sequence of rustles.

  “Please forgive me if I seem a bit freaked out at the moment,” Greer began. “Most of the speeches I give are in my head.” There was warm laughter. “I wouldn’t be here,” she said, “if it weren’t for Faith Frank.” Applause. “She is the best, and she wanted me to come in her place. I know you’d rather hear her speak, but you’ve got me. So! Faith Frank hired me, originally, based on nothing. She took me in and she taught me things, and more than that she gave me permission. I think that’s what the people who change our lives always do. They give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don’t feel we’re allowed to be.

  “Many of you here in this room—can we actually call this a room? It’s more like a landmass—probably had someone like that, didn’t you?” There was affirmative murmuring. “Someone who gave you permission. Someone who saw you and heard you. Heard your voice. We’re all really lucky to have had that.”

  Then Greer introduced Lupe, speaking of her hardship and bravery, and how proud Loci was to have helped her and the rest of the young women. “Now, starting over after a traumatic time,” Greer said, “she’s been connected with her own mentor. A woman in her country who is teaching her everything she knows.”

  Lupe appeared onstage and took her place beside Greer. She took out a little folded piece of paper on which was the Spanish version of the words that Greer had written for her. Lupe smoothed down the page and giggled in her lovely
way; the crowd, in response, was warm and understanding.

  Finally, Lupe began to read aloud, slowly and carefully. Then Greer read the same words in English. “I speak today for myself and the others who were there in Ecuador when we had the bad experience. We left our homes, and it was not what they said it would be. We were afraid. They wouldn’t let us leave.” Back and forth they went, conveying the emotional story about how Lupe had been living a bleak life that did not seem like it would ever get better. Lupe looked so frightened and upset as she recalled what had happened to her that Greer felt that way too, just as she had felt when she wrote those lunchtime speeches. She reached out instinctively and took Lupe’s hand, holding it as Faith had once held hers. In her high school Spanish she whispered to Lupe to take her time, to not worry about a thing. The audience would wait. They weren’t going anywhere. So Lupe took her time, and finally, together, going back and forth, she and Greer got to the part about how she and everyone else had been rescued, and taken away from the neighborhood in Guayaquil where they had all been forced to live. And then, once she was resettled, how an older woman had come to see her and invited her to learn some new skills. Lupe had agreed to go; together they went to a building where there were computers, and people who taught English. “I am learning,” Lupe said in English, and the audience clapped. There was also a room in the building filled with sample equipment to make textiles. Lupe was shown how to use a hand loom, and also how to knit. Her mentor had sat with her in the corner by the window and showed her some different stitches. “I have gotten good at this. Later,” said Lupe, “we want to form a women’s textile co-op.” Her short statement was done; Lupe had gotten through it. Greer put her arms around her, and the applause began.

  Later, Greer would find out that a few different women had been holding up their iPhones to record the speech. If the twenty-first century taught you anything, it was that your words belonged to everyone, even if they actually didn’t. It wasn’t that the moment had been that special, but for the people in the room it was. “You had to be there,” women would probably say to one another, after showing the clip to friends. An earnest moment between two women onstage at a feminist summit was not much of a big deal. It didn’t go viral, unlike the speech given later that same day by the female action star. The women at the summit had all stood at the beginning and end of that one, celebrating the Australian heroine from Gravitus 2: The Awakening, which had become so huge. In a now stupidly famous scene in the movie, her character, Lake Stratton, had said to a gang of corporate supervillains and their henchmen after being mocked by them for being female, “It’s true: I may not be in possession of balls.” Beat. “So I borrowed a couple.” And just then two enormous wrecking balls swung through the window of the skyscraper office where the standoff was taking place, instantly killing the villains.

  What mattered about that movie was not its content, which was puerile. It seemed that in order for a female to have a huge cultural moment, it helped if she had a not overtly feminine name and was a hot, front-loaded, violent wench. What mattered, really, was that the movie had taken in $335 million, and maybe in the future, movie studios would develop more films with female stars.

  Greer’s moment onstage with Lupe wasn’t like that. It was smaller, and fleeting, but the applause went on for a very long time. Afterward, out in the lobby, a cluster of women surrounded the two of them, encircling them with enthusiasm and questions. “I loved what you had to say about how there are people who give us permission,” one woman said to Greer. “I know what you mean, because I had exactly that experience.”

  Across the way, a middle-aged woman approached Lupe and pulled something from a bag. “This is for you,” the woman said, and she pressed upon Lupe a lump of white wool and a pair of needles, to which was attached the beginnings of some sweater or blanket. “I’m a knitter too,” said the woman in a too-loud voice, as though that would help Lupe understand. “But I’d like you to have it.”

  Lupe took the needles and wool, but Greer didn’t know what happened next, for she was carried off on one wave of women, while Lupe was carried off on another.

  One woman said to Greer, “My person wasn’t a teacher, she was a neighbor. Mrs. Palmieri. I took care of her cat sometimes when she went away. She would invite me in when she was home, and we’d talk about cooking. She gave me a lot of advice.”

  “Mine,” said another woman, “was actually my grandfather. An amazing person. He was a tail gunner in the Korean War.”

  After the event was over, Greer said to Lupe, “You were so wonderful. They really loved you.” The young woman looked shyly away; was she pleased or just self-conscious? It was hard to tell. Greer remembered something that Faith had said during her speech in the Ryland Chapel. She had told them that if they said what they believed, then not everyone would like them, or love them. “If it’s any consolation at all,” Faith had said, “I love you.”

  Could that have been true? Yes, Greer thought, it probably had been, because right now she felt a kind of love for Lupe Izurieta. And Greer knew Lupe as little as Faith had known everyone in that chapel.

  After the building had cleared, Greer and Lupe went back to their rooms in the hotel, which were connected by a door that they didn’t open at first. Greer lay down on the king-sized bed and Skyped with Ben back in New York. He had slept over twice in the last week; their relationship had no propulsion, but it felt physically relieving, his body pleasurably heavy on her like a weighted blanket, his hands and mouth resourceful and in motion. “I think they liked it,” she said to him now. He came close to the screen, the camera giving him a fisheye-lens convexity that made her think about Skyping with Cory over the years: at Princeton, with his messy room behind him, and in the Philippines in the middle of the night, while afternoon blazed in America. Ben’s face on-screen was still not entirely familiar, though they had slept together a number of times.

  “Great job,” Ben said. “I watched the live feed with Faith and a couple of people from upstairs,” he said. “We all thought you were great. And it was very emotional, that moment with the girl.”

  A text appeared from Faith a little later.

  NAILED IT! THANK YOU AGAIN.

  YOU ARE THE BEST.

  XX

  FF

  A little while later Greer quietly knocked on the door that separated her room from Lupe’s. She used her high school Spanish to ask whether Lupe wanted to get an Uber with her and go into LA for dinner. There was a long pause, and maybe Lupe’s response was one of dread; maybe she would’ve preferred to be alone tonight. “Or we could stay in,” Greer quickly added. Then the bolt was slid, the door opened, and the two of them stood looking at each other. “But I mean we should celebrate,” she said. “You were amazing out there.” Lupe had done something today that she had never done in her life: gone onstage and spoken before an audience.

  Lupe nodded, unsmiling.

  “Is it okay if I come in?”

  “Okay.” Greer entered the room, which looked barely occupied. A little orange suitcase was splayed open on a table, revealing the small collection of clothes and belongings that had made the trip here from so far away. Greer wanted to tell her to occupy more space, to drape her modest things around the room, to ask for more, and in so doing to become more. But you couldn’t make someone be that way, especially after a lifetime of poverty and then a year of trauma. The world had failed her. Now it was turning. Don’t be dispirited, Greer wanted to say, but that would have been demanding, not listening.

  They ordered dinner from the menu; that was an ordeal. Who knew what Lupe thought she was getting? Then, when it arrived, they ate it while watching a pay-TV movie about the hostile colonization of the Andromeda Galaxy—a plot so removed from both of their real lives that it was an equalizer, neither more nor less comprehensible to either of them.

  Greer sensed, at some point, that maybe she was staying too long. Lupe looked sl
eepy. Would she actually be able to sleep tonight in this strange bed? What did she think of all this? If Greer had been asked, she would have sat in the desk chair and waited for Lupe to fall asleep. She was suddenly so protective of her. They’d been onstage together, and now, somehow, she was hers.

  The next morning the two of them flew back to New York together. On the plane, as she had done during the flight to LA, Lupe sat very still and obviously afraid. During a period of turbulence, Greer saw that she was crossing herself repeatedly. On the floor at Lupe’s feet was her purse, and protruding from the top was a froth of white wool and two copper needles, the spontaneous gift from that woman in the crowd. Knitting was supposed to calm you down. Greer gestured toward the wool, but Lupe shook her head and just stared miserably at the seat in front of her for most of the trip. She went home to Ecuador a day later.

  Greer spent the weekend at Ben’s place, where she lay with him on his opened futon, idly playing around on her laptop while he idly played around on his. Sometimes one of them would slam his or her laptop shut, and the other one would follow, the laptops making a decisive sound like two car doors closing, a big part of foreplay these days. On Sunday morning, Ben slept while Greer went through the emails that had collected overnight. As she sifted through them she saw one from Kim Russo, who used to work for the COO at ShraderCapital until she’d left a few months earlier to work for a solar energy company.

  Hi Greer,