The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  Greer, age thirty-one now, had been giving talks around the country on her Outside Voices tour. She visited women’s prisons and corporations and colleges and libraries, and she went to public schools where little girls crammed into gyms, and she told them, “Use your outside voices!” They looked nervously toward their teachers, who stood against the walls. “It’s okay,” the teachers mouthed, and the little girls screamed and shouted, tentatively at first, then with full throat.

  Outside Voices was frequently criticized, of course. It did not speak for all women, Greer was told. Many women, most women, were so, so much farther outside of privilege and access than Greer Kadetsky was now. Still, she heard from women and girls from around the country, who wrote candid, tender, excited notes to Greer on her website and on the Outside Voices message board, telling her what the book had meant to them. There was talk of an Outside Voices Foundation, but nothing concrete. The book had encouraged women to stay strong and loud. And certainly staying strong and loud was urgent.

  A few years earlier, back at the start of the big terribleness, before she was living with Cory and before Emilia was born, having been freed from Loci, Greer had gone to the Women’s March in DC. She’d marched with a group of half a million, and had felt vigorous, chapped-cheeked, elated. Endorphins were sprung into the bloodstream like balloons into the open sky. The high lasted the whole four and a half hours home on a boiling-hot coach bus and for weeks to come, part endorphin rush, part despair. She had been seeing Cory every weekend either in Brooklyn or up in Macopee, where he still lived as he helped his mother sell the house and resettle, and during that time Greer worked at a coffee bar, inhaling steam and foam and cinnamon—“I have cinnamon lung,” she’d said to Zee—and all the while at night, in her free time, she worked on her book.

  But there were moments now when Greer, falling into a funk of exhaustion or boredom at the prospect of repeating the mantras of her book over and over, wondered whether her book, despite its success, was a little ridiculous. After all, you could use your outside voice and scream your head off, but sometimes it didn’t seem as if the screaming was being heard.

  Tonight, on this wet, slick and cold night, the publisher, Karen Nordquist, was throwing this party in her showplace of a home, which had a living room with double-height ceilings and a wall of books with a ladder. At some point earlier, Karen had climbed the ladder to give a toast to Greer. Everyone looked nervously up at her as she headed for the top still holding her martini, but she was fearless. And when she stood up there looking down at the room, she said, a little drunkenly, “Wow, I can see the parts in everyone’s hair. Very neat.” There was laughter. “I can see how much you all care about personal grooming. But more to the point I can see how much you all care about this amazing book, this phenomenon, Outside Voices. And so do I. Greer, we love you!”

  From down below, Greer said, fatuously, “And I love all of you too.” But then she looked around and felt overcome. It wasn’t by love, though of course she did love several people in this room—Cory was here, holding Emilia, and there were good friends all around—but this was something else. She was struck by the way everyone was looking toward her with expectation. People wanted one another to do something. They wanted someone to say the thing that they could then take into themselves and transform into something else. A word might land in a certain way; or maybe not even a word. Maybe a gesture, or a moment of listening. This platform, Greer’s book that tried hard and was encouraging and bracing, was not, she knew, original or brilliant; this platform was definitely imperfect. And Greer wasn’t a firebrand. She could never be that.

  “I’m going to keep this brief,” she said, and she saw some people in the room look relieved. No one ever wanted a writer to go on and on at her own book party. “We’re here tonight in this strange time. This long, strange time. Every new thing that shocks us is just that, a shock. But not really a surprise. The success of this book in the middle of this time,” Greer said, “has been confusing. But also welcome. Though of course my poor eardrums are suffering. This morning I did a school visit with a group of third-graders, and those girls have pipes. I’m still in pain!” There was laughter. “I’ve never been loud,” said Greer. “You know that by now. Oh, you know everything about me by now.” Then she said, “I’m going to read just a tiny amount from the book. An amuse-bouche.” She picked up the book with its bright cover with the now-recognizable image of the open mouth, and read for exactly one minute and forty seconds, and then she was finished. They all clapped, then they returned to their worried conversations and their drinking. Greer’s face was hot, lit, as it always was from public speaking, even now.

  Cory came over, Emilia wrapped around his neck, though her eyes looked a little wild. At fifteen months of age she should not have been awake this late, but why not; her mother had been on the bestseller list for one full year. Emilia had stomped around in circles all night, nearly deranged. Earlier, she’d gotten two steps up the ladder before her babysitter snatched her by the collar and hauled her in. Now that babysitter, Kay Chung, who was sixteen and a high school student who lived with her family in Sheepshead Bay, stood on Cory’s other side with her hand on Emilia’s head. Kay was small and fireplug-fierce, in a bulky Nordic sweater and a little skirt. Greer had hired her on the recommendation of a friend, but Kay turned out to be not only wonderful with the baby, but also wonderful more generally. Kay was, as she described herself without irony or amusement, radical in most of her views, but she warned that that didn’t mean they conformed to any one orthodoxy.

  “So what are you saying, exactly?” Greer had asked her late on a Saturday night. She and Cory had just returned from a dinner party. They were standing in the front hallway of the brownstone where they now lived, waiting for a car service to come take the babysitter home.

  “I’m a skeptical person, I guess,” said Kay. Pressed, she tried to describe what she meant. “I want you to know I think you’re great, Greer. I totally do. My friends and I have all read your book and they’re impressed that I sit for you,” she said benevolently. “We should all definitely assert ourselves more in the world, that’s totally true. But I look at everything that women did and said in recent history, and somehow we still got to a caveman moment. And our responses to it just aren’t enough, because the structures are still in place, right?”

  She wasn’t asking Greer a question, but just wanted to make a point. Kay was always organizing at her school, getting involved in assemblies and mini-marches and what she called “Twitter fires,” in which she took a scorched-earth tone and never apologized. She and her friends didn’t care about figureheads, she said dismissively, leaders of a cause, like in the past. These figures weren’t necessary, and they weren’t even real. “We don’t need to put people on a pedestal,” she said. “Everyone can lead. Everyone can jump in.”

  She offered these opinions as if they were entirely new; the pleasure and excitement in her voice were stirring. Greer could have said to her, “Yes, I know all about this. Faith said that women said the same thing back in the seventies,” but that wouldn’t have been kind.

  There shouldn’t be a hierarchy, Kay explained, because that always led to someone being kept down, and there had been enough of that throughout history, and no one needed it anymore, and it assumed that the white, cisgender, binary view of everything was the correct one, the only one, when in fact it wasn’t. We’re done with that for good, she said. And anyway, Kay went on in a chatty voice of amazing confidence, it wasn’t so much about people as it was about ideas.

  Greer didn’t know what to say in response to the babysitter’s soliloquy except to repeat some of what she had already said in the book, taking a tone of encouragement and rage; “encou-rage-ment,” she’d called it. Since Kay had been babysitting for Emilia on weekends, Greer had given her every item related to Outside Voices: the hardcover, the workbook, the desk calendar, and, Cory said, the snack food. Also, Kay
often said, “If you have anything for me to read . . .” and Greer and Cory gave her books, lots of them, novels and collections of essays, and even some of their old college texts, heavily underlined, plus the book that Greer had borrowed from Professor Malick and forgotten to return. Greer had never made sense of that book, but Kay had said it was very interesting and even really funny to read those outdated ways of thinking.

  “Our babysitter is smarter than we are,” Greer liked to say to people. “Much. I’m telling you, she’s going to go far.” But the problem was that the babysitter could not be babied, could not be swaddled and comforted by Outside Voices. The small triumph of having a well-meaning feminist rallying cry on the bestseller list did not seem to help this girl, who knew she had a real future but was afraid that everything would be repeatedly smashed to pieces.

  Now it was time to leave the publisher’s party in Greer’s honor, though the party would continue on without her. The older people left and the younger ones stayed. Greer and Cory offered Kay a ride home, but she said no thanks, did they mind if she stayed a little longer? The babysitter had gotten to know a couple of the interns. She quickly kissed the top of Emilia’s head, said, “Bye, bunny girl,” then returned to the pack of interns, who pulled her in.

  “I am so sick of the expression ‘outside voices,’” Greer said to Cory in the car heading home.

  “You’re the one who unleashed it on the world.”

  She leaned against him, in close quarters because the car seat took up a lot of space. Emilia had already closed her eyes, her sweaty head craned at a bad angle. The car bumped along the quiet streets and headed over the bridge. Almost immediately when they crossed into Brooklyn there was construction. There was always construction. Their brownstone was in Carroll Gardens; they had lived there since the book sale, which was followed immediately by international sales. Cory and Greer had money, suddenly, and it shocked them both and made them both uncomfortable. They had been about to renovate the brownstone when Cory had the idea that they should leave it alone; it was already livable enough, and maybe what they should do with their money instead was give a large monthly stipend to Cory’s mother and Greer’s parents, who could really use it. And once they did that, it was easy and natural to give away more of their money to people they weren’t related to. Neither of them knew how long the money would last; it wouldn’t self-replenish forever. Greer had had one bestseller; she wasn’t the manager of a hedge fund, and maybe there would never be another bestseller, but at least they had done what they could.

  SoulFinder, when it was finally released, had not become a financial success, though it still occupied a small, respected place in the world of indie video games, more of a sleeper than anything else. The people who had played it were passionate about it. Cory’s next game was being planned now, and the same investor had already committed. Cory had thought about going into microfinance all these years after he was supposed to, but the process had changed and he wasn’t up to speed on any of that, and money was always tricky, and he worried that he might screw it up. He hadn’t professionally “landed,” and who knew if he would, but it wasn’t an emergency that he hadn’t. Cory was working, and engaged by work; and he also did a lot around the house, cooking homemade fish fingers for Emilia and vegetarian dishes for Greer, and being in charge of the master schedule. He had it in his mind that he would teach Emilia Portuguese. He had even bought her a DVD of Portuguese children’s songs and rhymes. And while the DVD made him think of his mother, up in Fall River now and doing very well, it also made him think of his father, in Lisbon; or maybe he had been thinking of his father to begin with, and that was why he had bought the DVD online. Cory had said that he wanted to go to Portugal at some point to see his father, despite what he had done. To see him and then take the family sightseeing, though the trip would wait until Emilia was old enough to get something out of it.

  At home after the party they dropped Emilia into her crib, and she didn’t stir. There would be no need tonight for stories, or water, or the motorized light fixture that threw dancing shapes on the ceiling, or more stories, or more water. Greer saw, on her phone, that Zee had texted from Chicago. “I sent you a link,” Zee wrote. “Call me. I want to experience your reaction in real time.”

  So Greer sat in the den and called Zee on the phone; the two of them sat before their separate laptops, and Greer clicked on the link that led to a video, taken on a shaky cell phone. The setting was vaguely tropical. First a balding, thickish man opened the door of a garden apartment. As soon as the door opened, a bucket of wet garbage was flung in his face, and the camera swerved hard to show the garbage thrower, a young woman who began to scream. “You piece of garbage, you deserve a lot worse than this,” she shouted, and the man, covered in garbage in the doorway of his own home, seemed shocked at first, and said, “Whoa, whoa, what the fuck,” but then within seconds he was laughing and exuberant. “That’s right,” he said to her, peeling garbage from the side of his face. “Keep throwing it at me, this is assault, keep it coming.”

  Greer paused the video, froze it in place. “Wait, why am I watching this?” she asked.

  “Put it on full-screen,” said Zee.

  So Greer made the image fill the screen of her laptop, and then she came close to it so that her face was nearly pressed against his paused face. She studied the blandness, the lazy smile, the wide-spaced eyes, all of it somehow familiar, but still only mildly. When you thought about it, everything seemed familiar. Every story had its antecedents, and every person. The laughing, garbage-covered man and the woman in her fury, captured together on a residential street someplace where the weather was warm. They were familiar at first only in their familiarity, for you already knew this kind of story: the furious woman and the shrugging, indifferent man. Such stories were ancient; Greer had heard them told at Loci and on the road with Outside Voices, but she also knew of them from well before that. From reading Greek plays, from growing up as a girl. A critical piece of information was returning from a great and exhausting distance. Greer let it come toward her; she patiently waited for its arrival, observing the frozen face. Then she remembered.

  “Tinzler?” she said, her voice made thin with awe.

  “Yes.”

  “Darren Tinzler? No. Where did you find this? What is it?”

  “Someone sent it to Chloe Shanahan and she sent it to me,” said Zee. “Darren Tinzler runs a revenge porn website called BitchYouDeserveThis.com. He publishes footage and photos of women with a link to their Facebook profiles, and he makes them pay a huge fee to take them down. The fees go to some law firm in Chicago that doesn’t really exist. And this woman tried to sue but she couldn’t because his identity was hidden. And anyway the laws still suck. So she tracked him down, and she went to his door and threw garbage at him while her friend filmed the whole thing. The plan was that they would post it online, thinking that they would shame him, ruin him. But get this: Darren Tinzler retweeted it. He couldn’t be shamed or ruined. He just thought it was hilarious.”

  They were both stoppered into silence, considering all this. Greer and Zee had worn Darren Tinzler’s face on their T-shirts thirteen years earlier, had stared at him and his far-apart eyes. He looked similar now, except the face was wider, and the hair was mostly gone, and so was the baseball cap. Their T-shirt campaign had done nothing, and in the ladies’ room that night at college, Faith had warned them that if they hounded Darren Tinzler, “sympathy will redound to him,” but maybe she hadn’t been right. Maybe if they’d stayed with it, Greer thought, he would’ve eventually been asked to leave school, and he might have had a record that would’ve chased him for years. Maybe he would have been monitored and watched instead of going unchecked over time, doing whatever he liked.

  “It’s like we kept trying to use the same rules,” Greer said, “and these people kept saying to us, ‘Don’t you get it? I will not live by your rules.’” She took a breath. “They
always get to set the terms. I mean, they just come in and set them. They don’t ask, they just do it. It’s still true. I don’t want to keep repeating this forever. I don’t want to keep having to live in the buildings they make. And in the circles they draw. I know I’m being overly descriptive, but you get my point.”

  “You could call your next book The Circles They Draw.”

  “I don’t mean any of this in a bullshit way. I don’t mean it to just be words, or clever. I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out the Outside Voices Foundation, or even what it will be. It definitely can’t just be feeling good about ourselves even in adversity.”

  “I don’t know. Foundations? Is that the answer? Look at Loci.”

  “No, it couldn’t be like Loci,” said Greer. “That whole money thing. The climate is different now. And you could come help me figure it out.”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll solve all the problems.”

  “You have that grassroots experience from Chicago,” Greer said. “You’re so good at all that. Noelle could find a school here, couldn’t she? I know this sounds a little bit like, ‘Let’s put on a show.’ I don’t want it to be like that. I’m just saying if this ever turns into something, you could be part of it. And I owe you a job,” she said lightly.

  “No you don’t,” Zee said. “You really, really don’t.” She paused. “And anyway, Greer, I love my work.”

  “I know you do.”

  They were both quiet, thinking about Darren Tinzler. A man who degraded and threatened women made you want to do everything possible. Howl and scream; march; give a speech; call Congress around the clock; fall in love with someone decent; show a young woman that all is not lost, despite the evidence; change the way it feels to be a woman walking down a street at night anywhere in the world, or a girl coming out of a KwikStop in Macopee, Massachusetts, in daylight, holding an ice cream. She wouldn’t have to worry about her breasts, whether they would ever grow, or grow big enough. She wouldn’t have to think anything physical or sexual about herself at all unless she wanted to. She could dress the way she liked. She could feel capable and safe and free, which was what Faith Frank had always wanted for women.