Break in Case of Emergency

by Jessica Winter

  Sunny fled the room in tears. Karina’s eyes were full and her nose was red, and both hands clamped a lock of hair to her jugular like a cluster of funereal lilies. Donna’s lips and bangles murmured and trembled in prayer. The row of toothpaste smiles and shiny, shiny hair fidgeted as one. Daisy was texting.

  “What is your excuse?” Leora repeated. “Now, I’m going to keep asking this of myself. But now we need to ask it of ourselves. We need to ask it of LIFt and as LIFt, as one voice—many, many voices in one. This woman—this incredible woman—posed a challenge to me. She didn’t know it, but she did. And this challenge is one I cherish and one I want to pay forward. I want to gift us with a challenge. A challenge to the mind, the body, the spirit. A challenge to look at yourself, and ask yourself, What can I change?”

  Sunny had returned to the room and sat down again, puffy-eyed and hiccupping. “That’s right,” she said, her voice a watery tapioca. “That’s right.”

  “And so,” Leora said.

  Sunny blew her nose and chuckled to herself. Karina reached over and patted Donna on the hand. Donna held three fingers tenderly to her lips as she looked up at Karina, her bangles collapsing in a cathartic heap against the crook of her arm.

  “Love,” Donna jangled. “Love.”

  “Now,” Leora said after a contemplative pause, “all of you may be asking yourselves: What does all of this mean in practice?”

  Jen opened her notebook.

  “It means speaking with a louder voice that carries across the seven continents.”

  “Yay-yuh, we even want the damn penguins to be singing our song!” Sunny said.

  Jen began drawing a singing penguin.

  “It means we’ll be launching and offering support to a slate of exciting new programs around the world,” Leora continued.

  Jen turned the page and took her first note of the meeting: New programs:

  “It means we’ll be pushing harder than ever, more creatively than ever, to find the best, most effective, most innovative ways of helping women help themselves, all over the world.”

  Jen took her second note: Who was L.I.’s inspirational lady? Name/country/program?

  “It means we’ll be ramping up our communications efforts.”

  Jen’s hand and pen dangled over the page.

  “It means having a clear and unified message,” Leora continued.

  Jen turned back to her singing penguin. Its lower beak, Jen decided, would quaver with vibrato.

  “It means sending that message through the best channels, led by a remarkable team of—ah—ah—Julie?”

  The women in the room looked around at one another.

  “Julie,” Leora said. “Is Julie here?”

  One of the penguins’ implausibly long and dexterous wings, Jen decided, would be clapped soulfully to one ear of its studio headphones.

  The social-media intern smiled shyly and raised her hand, wiggling her fingers. “Hi, everyone,” she said. “My name is Jules, actually—”

  Jen looked up as she realized Leora’s mistake, and cushion-laughed. “Oh, sorry, I think you mean—”

  “Leora,” Donna intoned, “can we talk about messaging for a moment?”

  “So let’s talk about messaging for a moment,” Leora said, without looking at Donna. “Just as I was challenged, I want to engage and challenge all our compatriots around the world. Our fellow women deserve to have a new clarity, a new purpose—a new challenge.”

  Jen shut her notebook and looked out the window.

  “We will call it TTC: Total Transformation Challenge,” Leora said.

  “T-T-C,” Donna said. “No more half-measures.”

  “Spiritually comprehensive,” Leora said.

  “Holistic,” Donna said.

  “Catchy!” Sunny said.

  “A challenge to the mind, the body, the spirit,” Leora said.

  “The idea, and stop me if I’m wrong, Leora,” Karina said, raking and twisting her hair, “is to issue a challenge to all LIFt allies across the country—allies across the world, really—to set themselves a goal in each of these three categories, and they can log their progress on our website. So for one of us, maybe Mind is learning Arabic, Body is setting aside forty-five minutes per day for meditation or yoga, and Spirit is—hmm, what would be a good example of Spirit, Leora?”

  Karina’s upward-management skills were so impeccable that Jen couldn’t tell if Karina was strategically infantilizing herself before Leora or if she honestly couldn’t come up with an example.

  “Not three categories, though,” Leora said sternly. “Seven. We should have seven. Seven has prana.”

  “Seven, it definitely needs to be seven,” Karina said, performing a remonstrative once-over of the rest of the group.

  “Mind, body, spirit,” Leora said. “What else?”

  “Soul,” Donna said.

  “What is soul?” Daisy asked, looking up from her phone.

  “Soul is where you come from and where you’re aspiring to go,” Donna said.

  “But what’s the difference between soul and spirit?” Jen asked.

  Sunny made a wet noise that may have involved her uvula. “Jen, why so pedantic?” she said.

  “Soul and spirit seem too close to me,” Leora said.

  “You’re right, Leora,” Sunny said quickly.

  “Another one could be relationships,” Daisy said.

  “The heart,” Donna corrected her.

  “Okay, the heart,” Daisy said. “Another one could be space.”

  “Outer space?” Karina asked, smiling warmly at Daisy.

  “No, like, home,” Daisy said, without returning the smile. “At home. Home space.”

  “That’s five,” Sunny said.

  “The planet,” Karina said. “Our bond of mutual respect with the environment, with Mother Earth.”

  “Yes and yes,” Leora said.

  “Ooh, one to go!” Sunny said. “So that’s earth, plus mind, body, spirit, heart, space…” She was counting on her fingers.

  “It’s funny,” Karina said, pulling her fingers through her hair from the scalp, as if coaxing new brainstorms from her follicles. “I never cared about the environment before I had kids. I mean, why would I? I’ll be dead.”

  “Toe tally,” Sunny said.

  “Work could be the last category,” Jen said. “Our keep. How we earn a living—is it fulfilling, is it integrated with the rest of our life, does it meet our creative needs, our spiritual needs, and—and our material needs.” She tried to make eye contact with Leora, who was abruptly transfixed by the gigantic diamond cluster perched on her finger.

  “Hm,” Karina said. “I don’t know. I feel like our community would be turning to us to get away from the daily grind.”

  “ ‘Material needs’ seems off-message to me,” Sunny said.

  “Materialism,” Karina said. “Not a good look.”

  “It’s a question,” Donna said, “of vocation versus avocation. Our community thirsts for avocation.”

  Jen was mesmerized by Leora’s being mesmerized by her ring.

  “Jen?” Karina asked.

  “Oh—” Jen started.

  “The mission,” Donna said. “That’s a category.”

  “Isn’t the whole thing the mission, though?” Jen asked. “This would be like a mission within a mission.”

  Leora held her bedazzled hand up in the direction of the closest floor lamp and squinted. “The mission,” she said. “I’d say we’ve got one.”

  “Woot!” Sunny said, bouncing in her seat.

  “Total Transformation Challenge,” Leora reiterated. “TTC. It’s a rallying cry. It’s a movement. It’s a social media—thing. TTC. It’s what will be on every woman’s lips across the world. We have the power to make it part of our lingua franca. A new phenomenon that we will have created and given to the world, out of gratitude. Say it with me: T-T-C.”

  “Like Aretha Franklin’s ‘TCB,’ ” said Sunny. “Taking care o’ b
iz-ness!”

  “Like BYOB or NIMBY,” Petra said. “I mean, not in terms of meaning, just in terms of everyone knowing what they mean—”

  “Like OPP,” Daisy said.

  Leora dipped her chin in confirmation. “Make it so,” she said. “We launch October first.”

  A Teachable Moment

  “So, I love the Total Transformation Challenge idea. Needless to say!”

  Jen was standing in the doorway to Karina’s office. During her tenure at LIFt, she had not yet sat down on Karina’s couch, and rarely placed her entire body past the doorframe.

  “So great, right?” Karina replied. “Really gives us that focus we’ve been talking about. And I love how aggressive the launch date is. I think everyone is really pumped about this.”

  Daisy had a Post-it on which she kept a running list of Karina’s verbs of enthusiasm.

  pumped

  psyched

  jazzed

  amped

  stoked

  Then Daisy started making up her own, and kept a list of those, too.

  stacked

  oomphed

  spanched

  hoinked

  plurged

  quorched

  Daisy stuck the Post-it on one of the Shetland ponies on her cubicle wall, just beneath the pony’s cardigan collar.

  “Right, focus, totally,” Jen was saying. “Just checking—what relationship does TTC have with our existing international programs?”

  Karina smiled. “Absolutely none!” she said. “Do you have a problem with that?”

  “No, of course not, sorry!” Jen said, mirroring Karina’s smile.

  “Is that all?” Karina asked.

  “Well, actually, there’s one other thing, so sorry to keep you,” Jen said. “So I know that Leora is really attuned to acronyms and catchy abbreviations and stuff, which is great—I love the internal rhyme of TTC, by the way! But anyway, I just wanted to point out that this particular acronym, TTC—well, we have some competition for that slot.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Karina said.

  Jen nodded encouragingly.

  “And?” Karina asked.

  “Oh! Sorry. Well, I just know this because I have friends who are new moms or, you know, trying to become new moms—and what am I saying, you’re a mom, so maybe you know this! But anyway—TTC is online shorthand, apologies if I’m stating the obvious, for ‘trying to conceive.’ ”

  “Mm-hmm,” Karina said.

  “So, I just know from looking at parenting blogs and stuff for inspiration for our site—so from doing that, I learned that women identify as TTC if they’re asking for advice on fertility issues. And TTC is often a category or a keyword on those sites—a subtopic? I’m sure the audience for those sites would possibly sometimes overlap with ours?” Jen swallowed. An inlet of saliva kept rising under her tongue.

  “Mm-hmm,” Karina said.

  “So you could see how it could be confusing?” Jen’s spine was folding forward. She pressed one hip and shoulder against Karina’s doorframe.

  “Confusing,” Karina said, and pressed her lips together.

  “Yeah, like if we’re talking to our audience about TTC, they might think we’re saying something else, like, ‘Hey, go make some babies!’ ”

  Jen attempted a cushion-laugh, but the saliva made the laughter gurgle and drown, and a dying sound spurted out instead, like Bertha Mason cackling in Mr. Rochester’s attic.

  “Mm-hmm,” Karina said.

  “So, that’s all,” Jen said, exhaling. She swallowed again.

  “It’s interesting,” Karina said.

  “Yeah,” Jen said. She could sense her stomach slowly angling a battering ram into place, aimed in the vicinity of her epiglottis.

  “It’s interesting,” Karina said, “that you chose to bring this up now, here, with me. Not in front of the group, not in front of Leora, when we were all exploring these ideas together, as a team. That’s an interesting choice. In making that choice, what message are you sending, to me and, more important, to yourself?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Think about it.”

  Jen smiled as winningly as she could. She imagined herself in the maw of a trash compactor. One hand at her side reached up to grip Karina’s doorframe.

  “The only message I’m aware that I’m sending,” Jen said brightly, sweat pearling on her philtrum, “is that to many people—many women—TTC stands for ‘trying to conceive,’ which may confuse people if we decide it stands for Total Transformation Challenge.”

  Some of the contents of Jen’s stomach splashed upward, spraying the back of her esophagus. She coughed delicately into her free hand.

  “The message you’re sending, I would say,” Karina replied, “is that you don’t trust the give-and-take of the group dynamic, and that you’re insecure about sharing your ideas in mixed company.”

  Karina’s words stood in counterpoint to her confidential, just-us-girls tone—the tone of an old friend asking for advice over coffee. Jen wished she could record the conversation so that Pam could enlist one of her actors to lip-synch it.

  “So, instead of choosing trust, openness, and confidence, you’re falling back on their opposites,” Karina continued. “Which is ironic, isn’t it? Ironic because we’re encouraging women to push out of their comfort zones, to speak up for themselves, to think that their ideas actually have merit.”

  “Right,” Jen said. The corners of her mouth twitched and jerked. She estimated that she had forty to sixty seconds before her nose started oozing. “Right. Yes. I can see that.”

  “It’s interesting to think about,” Karina said. “Something to keep in mind—the importance of walk-the-walk, you know?”

  “Definitely. So—so I’ll go ahead and mention the TTC thing to Leora,” Jen said. “Better late than never.” Karina’s office tilted sideways. Jen bent her knees slightly to keep her balance, and they knocked together.

  “Don’t worry about it, Jen,” Karina said. “You’ve entrusted me with this, and I think this is a teachable moment for both of us.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t want to add to your workload.” The words were old leaves in a drainpipe, clotted and slimy.

  “Absolutely sure.”

  Jen swallowed again. “Great, okay, then, thanks, Karina,” Jen said. On Great, she aimed for a middle C but landed on an F sharp. “And you know”—the first cold beads of sweat punctured Jen’s brow, but something compelled her onward—“the acronym thing might not be a big deal. It’s not like we’re calling it”—here Jen spaced the words out evenly, the better to drive the joke of the acronym straight into the carpet—I’m Very Fabulous, right?”

  Bertha Mason let loose a shrill cackle.

  “Ha, ha,” Karina said evenly.

  “Thanks, Karina!” Jen said again.

  Jen exited Karina’s doorframe in what she intended to look like ebullient hustle. She strode across the office with shoulders squared, passing behind a cubicle row of toothpaste smiles and shiny, shiny hair. She entered the bathroom and felt a passing gratitude that all the stall doors were open.

  Zero people here

  Log a zero in my ledger

  Thank you no one

  Thanks for no one

  Thanks for nothing

  In one swirling and possibly graceful figure eight, Jen slipped inside the handicap stall and shut the door and sank to her knees and yanked her hair back with one hand and leaned the opposite arm against the toilet and heaved, and again, and again. Of all the mistakes she’d made so far that day, her first mistake had been orange juice for breakfast.

  Wild Gifts

  jenski1848: Hellooo

  whatDaisyknew: AHOY AHOY

  jenski1848: I love that you’re listening to “Protect Ya Neck” at work.

  whatDaisyknew: SORRY I’LL TURN IT DOWN

  jenski1848: So Karina just told me that Leora wants to do a video series for the TTC launch called “When Bad Things Happen for Good Reasons.”
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  whatDaisyknew: EPISODE ONE: THE ARMENIAN GENOCIDE

  jenski1848: I think it’s more like “I was injecting heroin between my toes, then my toes fell off, then I opened a rehab clinic, then I used the proceeds from my rehab clinic to buy new bionic toes.”

  whatDaisyknew: TOE TALLY. HA HA SORRY THAT WAS JEJUNE

  jenski1848: Or, you know, a car accident brings two long-lost sisters together, or a near-death experience results in an epiphany, etc., etc.

  whatDaisyknew: EPISODE TWO: A WILD GIFT FROM THE JANJAWEED

  jenski1848: Can you give me a hand with this and put a call out, email people? Oh and we should probably avoid using the word “bad.” “Challenge” or “adversity” or “hurdle,” those work. “Journey.”

  whatDaisyknew: EPISODE THREE: LOOK AT ALL THE PRETTY PINK RIBBONS I CAN WEAR IN THE HAIR I DON’T HAVE BECAUSE OF THE CANCER

  jenski1848: Thanks, D.

  All-Media Motivational Thingy

  “It’s insane and depressing to me that you can’t get away even for a few days,” Meg was saying. “I don’t get it.”

  Meg was grinding spices with a mortar and pestle at her kitchen island while Jen and Millie sat on the floor near her feet, bent over large sheets of construction paper with crayons and markers. Millie was relying heavily on black, purple, and blue to create a thick, raging storm vortex. Jen was drawing an elephant using his trunk to pick from an apple tree.

  “Sucko,” Millie whispered to her drawing. “Sucko.”

  “Circle, yeah—you see, these apples are kind of circle-shaped,” Jen said. “An apple is round like a circle.”

  “Sucko,” Millie said, scrawling more furiously with her violet crayon.

  Together, the three of them plus Buzz, Meg’s doleful and red-bandannaed golden retriever, had been hiding from the early-August heat all Sunday afternoon among the cool off-whites and pearly grays of Meg’s central-air-conditioned loft. (Jen and Jim had a single air conditioner that turned their bedroom into a walk-in freezer if the bedroom door was closed and that had no discernible effect of any kind if the bedroom door was open. Jim was there now, in a hoodie and fingerless gloves, reading A Man Without Qualities underneath a blanket and Franny.)