In the car that morning, before they’d dropped Alice at the train station, they were silent for so long. Adam finally had said, “I hope she gets the help she needs,” and they had all agreed with vigorous nods and yes, yesses, but no one offered anything specific, or had any idea what this really meant.
“Do you think,” Ji Sun said from the front seat, nearly a whisper. “Do you think we . . . stopped something?” She wore sunglasses, but Alice could feel that she was on the verge of tears. “If we hadn’t gone by the door, I mean. Do you think.”
“No,” Lainey had said. “No!”
No one said anything but no. No, no, no. Of course not. It was a mistake. Laurent had leaned in and kissed Margaret, and she hadn’t pulled away fast enough. One of them could always be counted on to provide the party line, rehearsing it now as though they knew they’d be repeating it for the rest of their lives.
The tan man beside Alice was unwrapping a piece of gum now, his elbow poking into her ribs. His cologne was so like a teenager’s that she thought again of Laurent, tried to call up his face as she’d seen it in person, not let it be replaced by the photograph that blazed there, from the wedding, his missing tooth.
She dug for her bag beneath the seat just as they took off. The movement made her feel much worse, though somehow she didn’t realize she’d thrown up until she heard her seatmates’ reactions.
“Ugh, fuck! What the fuck!” The man in the window seat lurched away from her, and she vomited again. Even with her head between her knees, she could hear him smacking his gum.
“Oh, no! You okay? You okay there? Ma’am! Ma’am!” The man in the aisle called for the attendant, who came, bearing a belated air sickness bag.
She heard a voice on the PA ask whether there was a doctor on board.
“I’m a doctor,” Alice said. It was the first time she’d been aboard a flight where this question was asked—a rite of passage. “I’m a doctor!”
“Yeah, right,” the tan man muttered. “What are you, twelve?” He reached over her to take a towel from the attendant. “I’m going to need to move seats.”
“This is a completely full flight, sir, but we will do our best to completely clean the area.”
They bickered and Alice tuned them out, traded her sack of vomit for a cup of ice.
Even though it was too early for morning sickness, part of Alice thrilled at the sick on her hands, took it for confirmation that no, she was not a child, she was grown, competent, pregnant—on her way to becoming the most nonchild thing you could be: someone’s mother.
Chapter 33
Back in New York three weeks after they’d fled Connecticut, Lainey was on her way downtown to meet Isaac, a friend from college, for lunch. He’d invited her to have an “exploratory chat,” as he put it, about how she might help “tell the story” of his fintech start-up, a portmanteau Lainey had to google after getting his message. He wrote that he remembered her being a “really good writer” in college, and Lainey’s cheeks reddened to think how many times she’d opened her email in the week since he sent it, just to reread that line.
She clung to the compliment now, telling herself that she needed to make some money at some point, that maybe she could do some good with it, if she made enough, and that anything would be better than another year at the ticket-sales office, now as supervisor, shepherding other would-be playwrights and actors into the drudgery of days spent as middlemen, as removed from Broadway as they would be if they’d stayed in Kansas or wherever else they came from.
Isaac had suggested the location. Lainey didn’t spend much time below Tribeca, and had never even heard of Zuccotti Park before that day, hadn’t read about the buildup to the protest that she watched now, as hundreds of people streamed down the middle of the street, chanting: Whose streets? Our streets! Whose streets? Our streets!
She felt so distant from the version of herself who had chanted in the street every chance she got, but the signs and the shouts, the energy, transported her to sophomore year at Quincy-Hawthorn and she could feel herself shouting Against our will about the war, knowing in her bones then and now that the words were meant for other things, too. She began to chant. Whose streets? Our streets!
This was the reason she’d felt the small lift of hope at Isaac’s email, the sensation of it being meant to be. It was meant to be, to lead her here, not to lunch with Isaac—Isaac was mere collateral to her destiny—but to this protest, coordinated over months by activists whose toil was to Lainey now a parade that stopped her from going to a lunch where she’d finally be forced to learn what a hedge fund did, and have a salad so good that she might consider writing copy that hoodwinked others into learning what hedge funds did, too, so that she could go on eating such spectacular croutons.
Instead, she followed a papier-mâché globe thrust skyward by two women with broad shoulders and buzz cuts.
“Can I join?” she shouted, knowing she already had.
“Hell yes!” said one. “Right on!” said the other.
Lainey unbuttoned her silk blouse down to the black camisole beneath it, shook her hair, dyed pitch black, loose from its low bun. She wore the same black poly-blend pants that she’d worn to every job interview since college, but they were garish now, like a sausage casing printed with the word Sellout. At least she’d elected to wear her leather jacket, thinking Isaac would respond to it, familiar enough with founders to know they fancied themselves iconoclasts, badasses. Her pants itched, and she considered darting across the street to Century 21 for a good pair of snug black jeans, distressed denim, she thought, as she felt a thunk on the back of her head.
A man dressed as Rich Uncle Pennybags had struck her inadvertently with his sign, CORPORATOCRACY IS A GLOBAL MONOPOLY. GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL.
Jesus, this protest was custom made for her, she was the angel of Occupy Wall Street, thwacked in the head just as she’d considered making yet another offering at the altar of capitalism. She might have course corrected on her own, not ducked out of a protest against income inequality to purchase overpriced even at discount (but at what cost!) distressed denim made by underpaid, also distressed, women somewhere in the distant, balmy, inconceivable “Global South.” But now, goose egg forming on the back of her skull, she knew she was meant to be in this group, stand with these people, fight against the creep for consumption at any cost in her country and in her own heart.
She texted Isaac: Thank you so much, but I can’t make today after all. I can’t be part of the global corporatocracy that is bankrupting our nation and planet, even if it is via yr “innovative platform.” Her phone autocorrected corporatocracy to “corporate racy” two times before she deleted the line, thinking she really didn’t know enough about Isaac’s start-up to take this all out on him. She wrote instead, It’s just not right (for me). Drinks soon? Xx L
* * *
• • •
Three days later, Adam and Ji Sun watched Lainey on CNN. She looked filthy, righteous, glorious. Her irises may as well have had lightning bolts down the center. Signs bloomed behind her: WE THE PEOPLE, PUT THE PLANET FIRST, WE ARE THE 1%.
“This cannot stand. This simply cannot stand! What does it mean that one percent of the people in this country control nearly half of its wealth? At what cost to our planet this rapacious capitalism? To what end? We are out here asking the world to take notice, to join us. We are here on behalf of the planet, and the ninety-nine percent.”
“Jesus, she sounds. . . . She sounds like Walker,” Ji Sun said, and her shoulders shuddered, an automatic response now to his name. “But, you know—good.” Ji Sun hadn’t thought of Walker’s lectures for so long, of the way she’d felt about him before everything that happened. How he’d lit her up with questions, made her feel like she could change the world.
“Yeah,” Adam said. “She’s got that same kind of charisma. Where you want to listen no matter what they really say.�
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“You don’t believe in what she’s saying?”
“No, I do. Of course I do,” he said. “I just mean. Look at her. She could say anything. I’d buy it.”
Ji Sun watched as he turned back toward the screen, eyes shining, dazzled. Lainey, in her leather jacket, hair matted, eyeliner thickly smeared, looked like she had come from the future to warn them. And everyone was listening. Though Occupy took every opportunity to emphasize that they were a leaderless movement, for tonight Lainey was the mouthpiece, her face the star on every screen.
“So she’s . . . living there now? In the encampment?” Ji Sun asked.
“Yeah, I brought her down a tent on the first day.”
“Guess the prospect of finally moving in with you drove her to tent city instead.” Ji Sun pointed at the screen, tents clustered, the long yellow OCCUPY WALL STREET banners wrapped around one corner of the sunken park like caution tape at a crime scene.
“Ha-ha,” Adam said, but she could see he was sensitive. “I don’t know, maybe we won’t move in together until we’re married. We’re old fashioned that way.” He batted his eyelashes in a way meant to be silly, but that felt nearly hostile in its beauty.
“Adam.” She thought to tell him not to flirt, not to bat his eyelashes anywhere near her. She had a boyfriend, Roman, and her crush on Adam was more an old habit now than a preoccupation. But with just the two of them there, and Lainey away on her mission to save the world, Ji Sun gave in to the comfort she took in longing for him.
A text came in from Alice: Are you watching this? Go, Lainey! Tell ’em!
Margaret replied: We are the 99%!!!
Are we though? Ji Sun thought to write but didn’t. Only she was probably technically part of the 1 percent, but none of them would ever find themselves living in a tent because they truly had no other options.
None had talked to or seen Margaret in person since leaving Connecticut, but they traded texts on their group chain as if nothing had happened.
Ji Sun typed: Or we’re the 1% FOR the 99%
Lolololol Margaret responded.
Ji Sun tossed her phone on the couch.
“Should we have done something?” Ji Sun asked. “About what Margaret did?”
Adam lowered the volume on the television, the program now back in a studio where pundits were speculating as to how soon the protestors would be evicted from the park.
“Lainey said she’s in therapy,” Adam said.
“I know,” Ji Sun said. “But. Well, I worry sometimes.”
“About?” Adam asked.
“All of it. How troubled she must be. How Laurent feels. How he might feel when he’s older.”
“Is this about Alexa?” Adam asked.
Asked directly like this, Ji Sun began to cry.
“I don’t think it’s the same,” Adam said. They sat on the huge new sectional sofa she’d ordered when she thought Lainey was about to move out, taking along her few pieces of furniture. The space was crowded now, but the couch so expansive it seemed Adam was in another room. He stood up and moved closer, put his arm around her.
“Why not?” Ji Sun asked, and accepted the handkerchief he handed her, dug out of an inner pocket of his blazer.
“A kiss is different. And he initiated it.”
“I think he didn’t,” she said. “I don’t believe it. Or I’m not sure.” Ji Sun hadn’t even said this to her friends, and saying it to Adam felt more loaded somehow, as though she were filing a formal complaint.
His face crinkled with worry, his eyes narrowed.
“Really?” Adam asked. “Are you—do you think it’s possible you could be misreading the situation? Not that—”
“You weren’t there! You didn’t see what we saw.”
“No, I know, you’re right.” His hand was still on her back. “I just mean, the, your guilt about Alexa, is it coming in here? It is not your fault what happened with her, Ji Sun.”
“You mean that she killed herself?” Her voice came out nearly a shout. “Why do we always talk around it, or ignore it? What happened with Alexa, the thing with Alexa—we don’t even have the courage to say suicide.”
“Okay,” Adam said. “Alexa’s suicide was not your fault. You are not to blame for Alexa’s suicide.”
Ji Sun was sobbing now, with the relief of having unburdened herself, and the undercurrent of fear that she might have witnessed something again, even smaller, even misinterpreted, that would later fester inside someone, be or contribute to the trauma that made them want to not be alive. She couldn’t let that happen. She would talk to Margaret. She would find out the truth.
Chapter 34
They were all surprised by how quickly the coverage of Occupy Wall Street took on a tone of mockery. They expected it from late-night shows, but mainstream news programs could barely contain their disdain for the movement’s representatives they hosted in their studios, clothespins all but pinned to their upturned noses.
Lainey said as much to one of the Comedy Central correspondents who came to the park to do a segment satirizing the protestors.
“Laugh all you want, and it’s easy to do. There are as many fools among us as there are anywhere. But what we’re saying has merit, and we have momentum. Occupy Wall Street is in over sixty cities around the world already. Even banks would recognize growth like that, no?” She shot a mercenary smile straight at the camera and crossed her arms over her chest.
The show hadn’t used the clip, but a producer forwarded it to a friend, who included it in a segment on a morning talk show, and it proliferated, solidifying Lainey as a star in the press caucus, the go-to girl to take down anyone with a microphone and an agenda.
A week later, she came home to shower and change clothes before a scheduled appearance on The View.
She came in the door funk first. Ji Sun was out of town, but Adam waited for her at the small kitchen island with his laptop and takeout from her favorite Thai place. Lainey dropped her tote bag beside the door and he applauded.
“It’s our anticapitalist crusader! Home from the front lines!”
She laughed, and went to him.
“Hoooooo boy,” he said, and fanned his nose.
“It’s that bad? It is that bad.” She didn’t need to sniff her pits; people had inched away from her on the train.
“I don’t care,” he said. “I love you. I love your stink.”
They kissed and had sex before she showered, and he came to the shower with her, so they could fool around some more. She thought, as she watched dirt pool at her ankles, if he could fuck her like this, when she could barely tolerate her own stench, she should find some way to better treasure him.
When they got out of the shower, she said, “Let’s get married.”
He stood behind her in the mirror, and she spoke to his reflection, his damp, curled hair making him look messier than he had before he’d gotten in the shower. She wound a towel into a terry cloth turban, loosed it again, and held it at her crown like a veil. “Let’s go to the courthouse tomorrow. After the interview, before I go back.”
“You’re going back? For how long?”
“Of course I am,” she said. “As long as it takes.”
“As long as it takes . . . to what? Like, what is winning with this?”
“What is this, interview prep?”
“No. It’s just, I miss you. And I worry about you. It’s not safe.”
“So, marry me.”
“We don’t have wedding bands.” They did have a wedding license, secured during one of their earlier, aborted planning sessions.
“So what. We’ll get tattoos!” She’d wanted a reason to get one.
In college, she’d backed out at the last minute from a scheduled appointment to get Quod Me Nutrit Destruit tattooed between her shoulder blades, the tattoo Angelina Jolie had on
her lower abdomen. She didn’t want people to think she was just some crazed fan, though she did admire and relate to Jolie, her intensity, her refusal to get anything less but the absolute most she possibly could from her spectacular, careening life. A vial of her husband’s blood around her neck! Lainey considered getting a version in Vietnamese instead of Latin, but she felt like a fraud using Babel Fish for the translation, and the reluctance she felt to ask anyone pointed to the greater discomfort she imagined down the line, at having to explain herself, this aspect of her identity, over and over, prove to people she didn’t even want looking at her that she wasn’t some drunk, tacky white girl who’d pointed to the first non-English phrase she’d seen in a book.
“God, Lainey, a courthouse wedding and tattoos? My grandmothers will both disown me.”
“Okay, no tattoos, and we have a party this summer wherever your parents want.”
“Wow. All right. Yes. Why not? Of course. Hell yes!” He looked so eager there, in the mirror, and she turned around to hug him, stand in the warmth of their two clean bodies, snug together, safe.
Margaret was their witness, along with Adam’s friend Evan. Ji Sun was in Belgium and Alice in Boston, and even though Lainey hadn’t seen Margaret since Connecticut, she had to have one of her roommates there. When she’d asked via group text, Margaret had responded right away, said she was scheduled to work but that her bosses would understand. She’d written:
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