“And number two, I don’t—she has a right to be angry with me. She does.”
“Okay, that’s fair, but so what? Circumstances change.”
“If I tell her what happened, it’s like the scene in a bad movie when you find out that the unlikable antagonist watched her parents drown when she was a kid or something, and that explains why she’s such an asshole, and doesn’t everything seem so different now.”
“No. It’s not like that at all.”
“Plus I don’t want to draw a connection in her mind between the thing with her and this thing,” Jen said.
“I don’t think she would.”
“I would, if I were her,” Jen said. “She might even think I was blaming her—”
“That’s irrational,” Jim broke in, and caught himself. “No, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t say irrational. I don’t mean to invalidate anything you’re feeling. But trust me, she would never think that.”
“Why not? One thing happened and then another thing happened.”
“Sure, honey, and I just ate a sandwich and now I’m going to teach my kids some Greek myths. That doesn’t mean my sandwich wrote the Greek myths.”
“I think she would connect the two things,” Jen said. A theatrical singsong was creeping into her voice. She knew now that she was performing, saying things for effect, reveling in the novelty and miserable thrill of her predicament. “It certainly makes for a tidy narrative,” she said, the words syncopated. Tidy narrative swooped up and down on the scale, hitting middle C on the first syllable of narrative. “Cause and effect.”
“Okay, enough,” Jim said. “This is absurd. This is not a fucking narrative, Jennifer. It’s not an input-output model. What happened is not your fff—you know what, fuck this. Fuck your narrative.”
Jen felt a guilty satisfaction, a bilious tickle of delight, at the controlled explosion she had detonated on the other end of the line. She wondered if the kick could overcome the shame sufficiently to produce its own modest endorphin rush.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry. You’re going to be okay. I have to go to my next class, okay? I love you.”
Jen could hear Jim hesitating before he hung up the phone. “You should get your artwork back from her,” he said. “From Pam.”
“There’s a lot of things I should do,” Jen said.
Tuesday, 9.30 a.m.
Jen and Franny were still asleep in bed when her cell phone rang.
“Hey, Jen, how are ya?” It was Sunny on speaker.
“Oh, hey, Sunny.” Jen’s lips stuck gummily together.
“Listen, hon, it’s nine-thirty. When can we expect you?”
“Wait, what?” Jen wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and sat up. Franny sat up, too, arching her back. “I talked to Karina yesterday and told her I needed to take a sick day.”
“Right, hon, but that was yesterday. What about today?” Sunny’s voice was now muffled and small, balled up in paper, as if she’d turned away from the speaker to fish for something in her handbag.
“Sick days, plural,” Jen said.
Sunny said nothing.
“I’m—I’m entitled to them?” Jen asked.
“Entitled, ha! Don’t I know it,” Sunny said, her voice big and clear again. “Jen, babe, we neeeeed you here. We’re depending on you. Leora’s gonna fa-reek ow-oot if she doesn’t have her team intact, kiddo.”
Jen’s teeth began chattering against the phone. She held it slightly away from her. “I talked to Karina yesterday—”
“I know, hon, I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine what you’re going through.”
Jen dropped the phone on the bed and picked it up again. “So Karina told—and Karina said—”
“Jen, honey, Karina asked me to call you.”
“Okay,” Jen said. “Okay. Um, okay. What I was going to say was, I talked to her yesterday and thought we—we had an understanding.”
“We do understand, honey, but we’ve got a launch! We can’t afford to lose another day—”
“You understand?” Jen said. “That’s funny, a second ago you said you couldn’t possibly imagine.”
“Hey, now, hold up, girl, don’t take this out on me. Channel that sorrow, channel that womanly power and passion, but don’t wield it against someone who’s on your side. Use it for good.”
Jen looked around the bedroom and logged the items in it. This was a technique taught in the mindfulness seminar that was compulsory for all new LIFt staffers. When feeling upset or impulsive, the instructor explained from her lotus-pose perch atop the conference-room table, you should take sixty to ninety seconds to take stock of the physical reality surrounding you. The goal, the teacher said, was to “hit a mental reset button,” in order to make friendly everyday objects feel realer and more immediate than whatever source of anxiety might be flooding your frontal lobes at that instant.
The sun was shining. Jen watched the curtain drifting in the window—off-white on purchase, now a dusky yellow. She counted the watercolor-textured peacocks on the bedspread. She tugged absently at the fitted sheet, puckered in its perpetual slow-motion efforts to unpeel itself from the mattress. She cataloged the books on Jim’s side of the bed—Astors, astrophysics, Aztecs—and the stacks of art catalogs and sketchbooks on her side. She logged Franny, purring on the bed beside her. Franny generally preferred not to be crowded, but she didn’t wriggle as Jen pulled her close and pressed her face into her fur. The phone slipped from between Jen’s ear and shoulder and dropped to the bed again.
“Jen? Are you there?”
Jen stroked Franny’s fur where her tears had dampened it and picked up the phone. “Sunny,” Jen said, “are you seriously telling me I have to come in today?”
“I’m not your keeper!” Sunny said. “I’m not the boss of you. You’re the boss of you. I’m telling you what’s what. I am providing you with information.”
Tuesday, 3.30 p.m.
“Jen!”
Slowly, methodically, Jen stood up from her desk and turned to see Karina across the floor of the LIFt offices. Karina made a tossing motion over her shoulder: a big beckoning arc. As Jen began to walk toward her, Karina turned her back and returned to her office.
Jen halted. She turned, walked back to her desk, and sat down, the chair wheezing under the impact. She held her fists in her lap and waited.
Her phone rang. Karina’s extension. “Did you get lost?” Karina asked.
“No,” Jen said.
“Well, then, get over here, kiddo, I’m dying to see you.”
Jen slammed the phone down and stalked across the floor to Karina’s office. Her limbs were stiff and heavy. Her face felt sunburned. Everything hurt.
“How are you?” Karina was asking.
“Fine, fine,” Jen said. “So—”
“Sit, please, hon, and shut the door,” Karina said.
Jen shut the door but remained standing. “So we have the first passes on the edits on the videos—”
“That’s good. But I wasn’t asking how are the edits. I was asking how are you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Feeling okay physically?”
“Yup.”
“And what about emotionally?”
“Yup.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yup. Yeah. Yes.”
“Oh, honey, I wish I weren’t out of tissues.”
Jen swiped the back of her hand across one cheekbone, then the other. “No, I’m okay, I just—I don’t want to talk about it, if that’s—I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Well, you don’t have to talk about it with little old me. But you shouldn’t keep it bottled up. Forgive me for asking, but is there a licensed professional you’ve been in contact with?”
Jen could feel her tears hitting her blouse. She stared at the cluster of framed photographs on Karina’s desk. Karina with Leora, blurred at a cocktail party, their eyes rabid red
in the camera’s pop. Karina with her tousle-haired, bespectacled husband on some beach. Karina with her son and daughter when they were babies, toddlers, preschoolers. “I’m okay,” Jen said. “I appreciate your concern.”
“What I can’t—” Karina paused. She looked up toward the ceiling, as if for celestial counsel, and then spoke very slowly. “What I can’t…put my finger on…” she said, “is why…well, given that this was unplanned…why you are so upset.”
Jen kept looking at the photographs. Karina’s son had his father’s features and his mother’s coloring; her daughter had the inverse. “I guess that is strange, isn’t it,” Jen said to the photographs. Her mind busied itself projecting their faces, tracing the projections, painting the traces.
“Strange? No, that’s not the word I would use,” Karina said. “I just don’t understand, and I want to, because I care about you. We all do. We’re all thinking about you right now.”
The beachy highlights in Karina’s daughter’s hair might be tricky to mix—too much white would turn them to toothpaste, but too much yellow would bleach them chlorine green.
“I have the edits,” Jen said to the photographs, “and I’d love to know if you want to watch them or if we can go ahead and finish up with them.”
“Of course,” Karina said. “You want all of this to be over with.”
Jen kept her head down as she walked back to her desk, one cupped hand held faux-pensively to her philtrum to conceal any redness or swelling until she flumped back into her chair. Daisy knocked gently on their shared cubicle wall, and Jen knocked reassuringly back.
whatDaisyknew: ARE YOU OK
jenski1848: No. But yes.
Daisy replied by attaching a .jpg file of a dachshund puppy enfolded in a hamburger bun.
jenski1848: Thanks, D. You’re a good friend.
Daisy did not reply.
A Lot Going On
“Dad emailed to say how upset you were that I hadn’t called in a while,” Jen was saying to her mother. “I’m really sorry.”
“What?” Jen’s mom asked, twisting the word out to three syllables, phlegmy with incredulity. “I never said that. Your father, for goodness’ sake!” Jen’s mom sighed and regained her composure.
“Well, in any case, I’m sorry, Mom.”
“You have a lot going on.”
“No, it’s not that—I just—haven’t been feeling well.”
“Oh? Are you eating right? Exercising?”
“I—no, I guess I haven’t been doing those things as much as I should.”
“You should see a doctor,” Jen’s mom said. “There’s not a whole lot your old mom can do for you if you’re not taking care of yourself. Go talk to a doctor.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” Jen said.
Dolly
Jen was at work, leaving a voicemail for Jim.
“In the dream, I’m in a simple Lutheran church, everything’s wood; hard, cold pews; hard, cold everything, but lots of leg room. You’re on the aisle and I’m sitting beside you. I know you’re you, but you don’t look like you; you look like Max von Sydow in Through a Glass Darkly. On my lap, sitting up like a regular person, is the embalmed and neatly dressed corpse of a middle-aged English woman named Dolly. Everyone else in the pews also has an embalmed corpse on their lap, except you. There’s a small, shuffling group of mourners that stops by each pew to pay their respects to the deceased. One of them is Dolly’s dad. Dolly’s dad leans over to see his daughter, kind of awkwardly bent over you. He’s wrecked, just totally destroyed by this whole ritual, but he’s trying his best to put on a good face, and the result is that he’s doing this kind of high-pitched, hooting-crying thing, and he keeps saying in his posh British accent, ‘Goodbye, Dolly, goodbye, we love you, Dolly, bye-bye, now, Dolly, that’s our girl, Dolly, goodbye.’ Over and over. Dolly’s mother stands by his side, silent, just watching Dolly with this fathomless expression. I keep apologizing to you for how difficult this is, and you are silent. As the mourners are dispersing, I notice that Dolly is picking at her face. I say ‘No, no, Dolly, don’t do that, sweetheart.’ I turn her toward me—now I’m cradling her—and she’s scratching and pulling really hard. Her skin is breaking and bleeding. I try to pull her hands away, but she’s too strong for me. Then I think, What does it matter if she picks her face? She’s dead. That was the end of the dream.”
Jen pushed the button to listen to her message, then pushed the button to erase the voicemail from Jim’s inbox, then hung up.
Who Speaks That Language?
The online launch of the Leora Infinitas Foundation and its “web channel,” known as LIFe Lines, proceeded as scheduled. (“Website seems stale to me, and blog seems so limiting,” Leora, or maybe Donna, wrote in Leora’s Welcome Letter to readers. “Web channel feels like a network that is also a conduit—a sticky-sweet yet liberating web of endless possibilities.”) Also publishing on schedule was LIFe Lines’s flagship video suite, “Overcoming Adversity.” (Six segments, edited down from seven.) LIFt’s kickoff campaign, the interactive Total Transformation Challenge (TTC), likewise launched on time, and by the end of day one had attracted 1,137 entries—each of which contained seven vows toward improvement in the assigned areas of Mind, Body, Spirit, Space, Earth, Mission, and Heart. Altogether the launch was an unqualified success insofar as it was not a total disaster, a dichotomy captured on the morning of day one, when Sunny rushed over to Jen and asked her if they could unlaunch the site.
“That would be like un-born-ing a baby,” Daisy said.
“Um, inappropriate, Daisy,” Sunny said, looking at Jen.
“Un-birthing a baby, I guess,” Daisy said.
“Daisy is right,” Jen said. “But let’s fix what we can.”
Some of the rationales for an unlaunch were sound. For example, two of LIFt’s newly announced grants, one to support teaching computer skills to girls in Colombia and one to support a girls’ entrepreneurship program in Rio de Janeiro, hadn’t actually been signed off by their underwriter, which was in both cases the Bluff Foundation.
Some of the rationales for the unlaunch seemed somewhat less sound, such as Leora’s reported dissatisfaction with the background color of the logo.
“We’re seeing plum when we’re really going for amethyst,” Sunny explained.
Part of the reason Leora may have been distracted from the finer details of her website launch was that she had spent much of September lining up off-the-record breakfast meetings in New York City and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., with small groups of female journalists convened for maximum hybrid vigor, from veteran foreign bureau chiefs to young feminist bloggers, in the chambers of downtown cafés and brasseries more frequently reserved for upmarket baby-shower brunches. In some cases, the breakfasts—which, as far as the public was concerned, never actually happened—resulted in positive coverage of LIFt and TTC where otherwise there would have been none; in other cases, they turned what would have been snarky or withering coverage into positive coverage or, at the very least, peaceably ribbing coverage. Babette Exley, proprietor of the influentially cruel blog Nastygram Ladyparts and undisclosed invitee to one of Leora’s undisclosed breakfasts, headlined her post on the launch I CAN’T TOTALLY HATE LEORA INFINITAS’ WELL-MEANING NEW LADYVENTURE, AS MUCH AS I WANT TO.
In a bittersweet twist, a lone note of inadvertent critique of the LIFt launch and the TTC campaign came from Ruby Stevens-Meisel, whose effectively anonymous public status and undetermined off-the-grid location ensured that her name, or rather her pseudonym, would be left off the breakfast invitations. It was Ruby Stevens-Meisel who first publicly acknowledged the unfortunate double life of the TTC acronym.
“Is the rebranding of TTC—the mutation of the yearning admission ‘Trying to Conceive’ into the gauntlet-throwing ‘Total Transformation Challenge’—a form of poetic license or fruitful coincidence?” Stevens-Meisel asked. “Even in launching an Internet venture, it is not Leora Infinitas’s responsibility to learn ever
y corner of Internet jargon and parlance. I doubt she knew about the dual meaning of TTC, which has become a rueful badge of belonging for the infertile community. But to acknowledge Leora’s blissful ignorance—not only of any darker recesses of the online experience in general, but also, specifically, of the private agony, shame, and frustration of infertility—is not necessarily to discount the strange serendipity at play here. What she is asking of women with the TTC campaign is what she has constantly asked of herself: to nourish and incubate a better version of oneself. She is asking her audience to conceive who they are and give birth to that woman, bring her squalling triumphantly into the world. She is merely the midwife, the humble attendant. Leora Infinitas is the doula of the self.”
TOTALLY TERRIBLY CONFUSED: LEEZA INFANZIA DOESN’T KNOW IT, BUT SHE JUST GOT EVERYBODY PREGNANT was Nastygram Ladyparts’ subsequent headline.
“You know, I have to be honest with you, I didn’t actually know about this coincidence,” a benevolent Leora said during one morning-show appearance, inclining toward the question as if it offered a fond embrace. “One of the really exciting things about this new adventure is learning about all this stuff and really getting in touch with the online community. I have so much to learn. I’ve always been here as a student as well as a teacher. It’s humbling. Luckily, it’s also a lot of fun.”
“It’s just such a huge oversight,” Sunny said at a staff meeting that same week.
“No, if we’d had proper oversight in place this wouldn’t have happened,” Donna corrected Sunny.
“That’s exactly what I’m saying!” Sunny said.
Jen looked at her phone.
Pamela Radden
Thursday, Oct 8 11:24 AM
To: Jen
Subject: Re: Hi
Dear Jen
I got your note and I appreciate it. Look everyone fucks up once in a while including me. There will come a time when I’m not angry about this and we can be friends again It might not even take that long I’ll get in touch with you then. I hope you can understand
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