by Meg Wolitzer
“You really think this is just about them?” said Faith. “Don’t you think I’ve had to make compromises before? My whole working life has been about compromise. Even back at Bloomer. I didn’t have access to real money until Loci, so I’d never seen it on a big scale. But it happens. All the people who work for good causes will tell you this. For every dollar that’s donated to women’s health in the developing world, for instance, ten cents is pocketed by some corrupt person, and another ten cents no one has any idea what happens to it. Everyone knows, when they start out, that the donation is really only eighty cents. But everyone calls it a dollar because it’s what’s done.”
“And that’s acceptable to you?”
Faith took a second. “I always weigh it,” she said. “Like with Ecuador. I’m ashamed of what happened. But those young women are free and presumably out of danger. I have to weigh that too, don’t I? That’s what it’s about, this life. The weighing.”
Greer hadn’t known this about Faith, and she hadn’t known that Faith was considered gullible. Because despite working for her, she had never asked Faith much about herself. She hadn’t thought she was allowed; she hadn’t thought it was her place. She hadn’t plaintively asked her, “What’s it about, this life?” To which Faith would’ve answered, “The weighing.”
“I still sort of can’t believe you’re okay with staying at Loci, given what they did upstairs,” said Greer.
“Well, I’m seventy-one years old and I take Fosamax for bone density—or lack of it—and I have a stiff neck half the time despite my addiction to cheap Chinese massages, or maybe because of it. I may need to scale back, but I’m not going to start over. The reason I asked you to give that speech is that I was exhausted. I need to be protective of myself, not run around like I used to do when I was your age.” Quickly, Faith added, “But that’s not the only reason I asked you. You deserved it. You needed something big. Something real, that would remind you of why you wanted to work here to begin with.” She paused. “And you came through.” Greer felt a familiar prickle of gratification that could arise so easily in the presence of Faith Frank. “But I am genuinely sorry you went up onstage in LA, now that I know the circumstances,” Faith said.
“You say you can’t go anywhere new, but there might be a better situation,” said Greer.
Faith tipped her head down slightly, and her scalp was revealed in a series of crazy, broken pink lightning bolts. The foils made the faintest sound, like tinsel. “No,” she said. “I told you, there isn’t. And even if there is, I’m not going to start looking. It’s my choice,” she added. “And I get to decide.” She said this with equal emphasis on each word, as if reciting a line from something, but Greer had no idea what.
“Well, I have to believe in what I’m doing,” Greer said.
“And I hope you’ll keep believing. Now that you’ve told me what you’ve learned, you can help me keep a tighter leash on them upstairs. I could use a partner in that.” Faith paused, looking at her fully. “Will you be that?”
Greer had the unrelated thought that if there were a fire in this salon right now, Faith Frank would have to run out into the street with all the other women, and everyone would see her looking like this, and they would all be so confused. Faith Frank, famous, glamorous feminist, is apparently as gray-haired and fragile and bony as anyone, and as mortal, and as compromised.
Faith’s assistant Deena Mayhew appeared then, coming around the bend into the screened-off area. “Here you are,” she said. “You almost done?”
Faith, suddenly cool and regular, as if she and Greer had been discussing nothing of consequence, squinted at the timer. “I can’t read that without my reading glasses, sadly. Greer, can you?”
“Seventeen minutes,” Greer said dully.
“Okay, good,” said Deena. “Then we get you back to the office, Faith, and Bonnie preps you for the taping.”
Right, Greer remembered, Faith was going on Screengrab later.
“There are several talking points from the pre-interview,” said Deena. “And it’s such great exposure at this moment, because of the mentor program.” She smiled at Greer and added, “I’m still hearing such good things about LA.”
Greer looked across at Faith. “You’re talking about Ecuador later on Screengrab?”
“Possibly. Among other topics.”
“I brought the bullet points if you want to have a look,” said Deena. Then, again to Greer, “Sorry, but can I just borrow her for a minute? Tight quarters! Give us a few, then we’ll all head back to the office.”
Greer stepped to the side, allowing Deena to move closer to Faith, and together the two of them looked over a file, Faith squinting and murmuring, and Deena gesturing with animation. Greer stayed back, leaning against the counter where combs hung in a bottle of blue water, suspended and preserved like specimens. She imagined picking up the heavy jar with both hands and hurling it at the wall.
When it was time for Faith to get rinsed and shampooed and dried, Greer stood stiffly while Deena spoke into her phone, letting the voice-recognition function spit out its errors that would need to be manually corrected. “Look at this,” Deena said to Greer, holding up her phone and showing her a comical mistake. “The phrase I actually said was ‘fat shaming,’ which was translated as ‘Fetch, Amy!’” Finally Faith returned to them, exquisite. Her hair gleamed, her boots made her tall, and the three of them strode out through the Jeremy Ingersoll Salon, past the row of other clients, all rich, all women, though none in need of a VIP screen.
Women, women, women, all of them sitting patiently in their vulnerability and vanity, sitting there as women did. Because even though you might care about the plight of women in the world, you still wanted to look like yourself, as Faith had said.
Out on the street two people walking together immediately recognized her, and Faith smiled at them as she always did. She hadn’t changed. Apparently it had always been about the weighing.
* * *
• • •
The office was buzzy when they returned, and Faith went on ahead while Greer hung back. She couldn’t sit down at her desk; she couldn’t go into the kitchen and get coffee and chat with people. There was nothing for her to do or say now. She just lurked. Ben, seeing her, came over and said, “Hey, where’d you go? I heard you were meeting with Faith outside the office. Planning a surprise party for me, I guess.”
“I don’t even know your birthday,” she said. This was true. She didn’t know his birthday, though they had worked together for more than four years. Surely she had known it at some point; there must have been cupcakes every year, or at least some years. But Ben hadn’t resonated in such a way that she needed to know, or thought to know, the day of his birth.
“You seem weird,” he said, but she didn’t reply. Up ahead, Faith was heading into her office. Greer followed, and behind her she could hear Ben say to one of the new staff, “Is something up? Do you know what’s going on?”
Greer sleepwalked to Faith’s door and knocked on the frame, though the door was never closed; the office was like a patient’s room in a hospital. If you needed access, you could have it. Already there was a cluster of people in the office. Faith, Iffat, Kara, Bonnie, Evelyn, Deena, and a young assistant named Casey, a recent hire. Greer in the doorway, her voice strangled, said, “Faith, can I talk to you?” Faith looked up and nodded and lifted her arm and waved her fingers to bring Greer over. Then everyone politely dispersed, going elsewhere in the large room to continue their conversations about whatever summit or mini-summit or idea for a speaker needed to be discussed.
“You’re really going on TV and discussing the mentor program?” she quietly asked Faith at the desk.
“Well, it was in the pre-interview. Mitch Michaelson might ask me about it.”
“You could cancel.” Greer looked around, making sure no one was listening. They weren’t.
“That would be unprofessional,” said Faith. “And there are other things I want to talk about and call attention to. It’s a good opportunity. We need press; we always do. You know that.”
“But it’s not just about getting press,” Greer said, even more quietly. “Come on, we do the work we do whether we get attention for it or not. We do it for women. You’ve always made a point of this.” Greer paused, picked at something on her sleeve, looked back up. “I didn’t understand, in the beginning, what we were doing here,” she said. “I just knew I wanted to do it. I gravitated toward working here. Toward working for you,” she added, her voice thickening. “But then it wasn’t just about you. It was about them. It’s still about them.” She was shaky, thinking that this sounded like a speech, and she hadn’t meant to give a speech, especially one that she hadn’t written down. Speeches needed to be crafted, edited, revised; this one wasn’t. “And now this place where we work, it isn’t for me anymore. So I can’t do it.”
“What can’t you do?”
“Stay at Loci. I can’t, Faith. It’s not right.” Faith still didn’t say anything, so Greer said, formally, “Okay, I’m going to go now.”
Faith was looking at her, taking her time. Greer thought, I am not going to wait or get her permission to go. I’m just going to go. But she stopped, briefly, picturing her cubicle with all the photos and cartoons she had tacked up above her desk. Over time they had curled and faded. Having quit, she would have to go and untack them one by one now, leaving behind a Morse code of tiny holes for the next person, signifying nothing. Greer had an unexpected image of Cory giving up everything in his life, just walking away from Armitage & Rist and all that had been carefully planned out for him.
Greer saw that everyone in the room was finally paying attention. They had stopped their conversations and were looking up, aware of the change around Faith’s desk. Even looking at Faith they could see it beneath the surface of her face, like underground fasciculation from some neurological storm. A storm was gathering. Oh shit, a storm was gathering in Faith Frank.
“Well, all right then,” said Faith as everyone watched. “I guess that’s it.”
“I guess it is.”
Greer experienced one of those bile squirts in the back of her throat, and she swallowed it down. It was as if her voice alone had quit her job, her voice had stepped up and made the executive decision and done all the speaking, while the rest of her had simply listened and watched. Was this what it meant to have a voice that wasn’t always an inside voice? It came out of you as if through your own personal loudspeaker. She wondered where the reward was for speaking up, where the catharsis was. Right now she just felt sick.
She had only made it to the door when Faith said, “It’s actually kind of funny, in a way.”
Greer turned around. “What is?”
“You make it sound like you care too much about what you do to stay here. That you care too much about women. About sticking up for them. Yet look at what you did all those years ago. To your best friend. I can’t remember her name.”
“What are you talking about?” Greer asked, though she didn’t really want to know.
“Your friend wanted to work here,” Faith said. “She gave you a letter to give me, and one night over drinks you told me about it, and you said that you didn’t want her to work here, right? So you never gave me the letter, and you lied to her and told her you did, didn’t you? And I suppose you were fine with that.”
Fainting was a real possibility, Greer thought. She looked around helplessly; everyone in the room seemed scandalized but distant. No one could help her. Faith wasn’t wrong about what Greer had done to Zee; hearing it spoken aloud was terrible, and the act she described was inexcusable. But it was just so unfair, she thought, just so unnecessarily mean of Faith to say it, and yet she also thought that maybe there was always going to have been a moment like this one at the end, at least if Greer was ever going to be able to go off and do something on her own instead of being a perennial extra-credit-doer, a handmaiden, a good girl who thought that what she had for herself was enough. Good girls could go far, but they could rarely go the distance. They could rarely be great. Maybe Faith was giving this confrontation to her as a gift. But probably not. Faith’s anger had fastened itself on her at last; it had taken a long, long time, but here it was. Maybe Faith had a right to be angry. Greer was leaving her to deal with ShraderCapital on her own; Greer was saying to her: You deal with it, I can’t. And also, Greer was implicitly criticizing Faith for knowing what she knew and staying.
“What did you do with it, Greer?” Faith asked. “Did you throw that letter out? Did you read it? In any case, you decided not to give it to me, and not to tell the truth. Not a great move, I don’t think.”
Greer wasn’t going to faint. Instead, she ran.
PART FOUR
Outside Voices
TEN
When she first became interested in trauma, Zee Eisenstat had taken a course called Assessing the Nature of Emergency, and as the instructor described various scenarios, Zee filled her notebook with the hard scrawl of disaster. Everything she learned in that course, and much of what she went on to learn later at her job, was about the acute, terrible moments in other people’s lives. She was a crisis response counselor in Chicago, and had been working in the field since leaving Teach and Reach three and a half years earlier. First she’d gotten a degree in counseling, but even while she was in school she’d immediately been put to work. The worse the crisis, the more she could focus, somehow; Zee didn’t buckle or back away, like some people did at first.
Her work took her around the city. She would quietly appear at the door of people’s homes after something shocking had happened: a person had died by suicide; there had been a hostage situation; someone had had a sudden bout of psychosis. She was known to be uncommonly skilled at what she did: light-footed, unobtrusive, deeply useful. Once in a while, weeks or months after a trauma, she would hear from families. “You were like my own personal saint,” one man wrote her. “I didn’t know who you were, only that you suddenly showed up.” Another man wrote to say, “I sell snow tires, and I would like to give you a complimentary set.” Zee had become highly valued in the trauma community, and, as she’d proudly told Greer, she had been cited in the International Journal of Traumatology. “I know that doesn’t sound like a real journal, but it is.” That night, Greer had had a vegan cake delivered to Zee’s door in Chicago.
In fact Zee had received her certificate in traumatology, having completed several internships in the prosaic trenches of a social-service agency. The birth of her student Shara Pick’s baby had been the first trauma she had witnessed; Shara had dropped away, had never returned to school, and was apparently raising her child with her grandmother and her sisters. Repeated calls to her had gone unanswered. But the experience of that trauma still lived sharply in Zee, and she was drawn back to find other such experiences and offer help of some kind. Apparently they were everywhere, different kinds of them, all over the South Side and beyond. You did not subspecialize, at least not in the certificate-granting program in which Zee enrolled, and which the Judges Eisenstat had kindly agreed to pay for. You had to be a generalist when it came to terribleness.
The first case Zee was called in for during her training involved a nail bomb that had been sent in the mail to the New Approach Women’s Clinic, and which had detonated in the waiting room, blinding the temp receptionist, Barbara Vang. The late-day crowd had been sitting and waiting for their Pap smears, their very first pelvic exams, their abortions, their pregnancy tests. The package bomb was opened without much interest by the temp, her fingernail slipping under the edge of the Scotch tape that heavily crisscrossed the surface as she set up a phone appointment for a man who had felt a pea-sized lump below his nipple. Would the clinic see him, though he was a guy? Yes, she said, they would. She pulled the tape and her hands opened the paper, and the afternoon
waiting-room quiet was shockingly breached. When the crisis response counselors were hauled in, Zee was among them.
Her two leaders were Lourdes and Steve, older but not old, because probably not a lot of people could last into old age in trauma work. Both of them, she noted as they made for themselves and some of the witnesses a little yurt in the alley beside the clinic, possessed a composed and impressive calm.
Lourdes and Steve practiced a kind of listening that involved much more than simply paying attention with tilted head. Over time Zee would learn to do it too, but on that first day, in the ad hoc yurt with the weeping women who had been right there when Barbara Vang opened the package that exploded in her face, Zee just sat shallowly and respectfully listening, watching how her supervisors tried to ease traumatized people into a state in which they could bear to live. “We need to give them the equivalent of swaddling,” Lourdes had said. “We never increase their stress. We let them tell us how to treat them.”
Since then, there had been many improvised yurts, a whole tent city of trauma stations all over various parts of Chicago. By now Zee was a legitimate expert, and she ran her own trauma team and taught workshops for volunteers. She was doing an additional certificate program in a new post-traumatic stress method that involved guided imagery and special breathing. What made it manageable was that the traumas that filled her daily life were not her own, and so they were removed and at least a little distant.
But then Greer called. “I quit my job,” she said in a shaky voice, which was startling in and of itself, because to Greer, Faith Frank could do no wrong. But then, in tears, Greer went on to say, “It ended badly with Faith. A lot of shit went down.”