Break in Case of Emergency (2 page)

“Do you want to talk about it?” Daisy asked when Jen returned to her desk.

Jen flopped theatrically into the chair behind her desk. “Wait, I have no idea why I just did that,” she said. “I've been sitting for
days.
” She stood up, then sat down again, more daintily.

“We don't have to talk about it if you don't want to,” Daisy said. “You only infiltrated a board meeting.”

Daisy was flipping through a perfect-bound, magazinelike tome titled
Fur-Lined Teacup: Animals • Fashion • Feminism.
The cover depicted, against a white backdrop, an impassive Russian blue cat in a trilby.

“I infiltrated nothing—they just needed someone to take notes,” Jen said. “And it would be my honor to talk about it. Leora broke her toe paragliding in Turks and Caicos, which her guru told her was a metaphor for a fundamental incompatibility between her
jingmai
and her
luomai,
so when the nail falls off her toe she has to wear it in a titanium locket around her neck until Mercury enters Virgo. Karina was at a party with the Russian billionaire who is building the cyborg clone of himself, and he asked her what she was going to bequeath to her brain in her will and she said ‘fish oil,' and then he asked her out on a date. Donna bought a tapestry in Siem Reap and had it made into a pantsuit. Sunny has a new pizza stone.”

Daisy tore out a page from
Fur-Lined Teacup
and handed it to Jen. It depicted a llama lounging in a square gazebo, reading a book.

“Is that llama wearing bifocals?” Jen asked, rubbing her fingers along the creamy, textured paper stock.

“Are they all still talking about the financial apocalypse?” Daisy asked.

“Of course,” Jen said, handing the page back to Daisy. “All anyone ever does is talk about the financial apocalypse. Sunny is putting some money into gold. Leora said she's still considering letting a couple of her house staff go because of the financial apocalypse.”

“Do you think she'll let us go because of the financial apocalypse?” Daisy asked, picking up a pair of scissors.

“Not if we keep looking busy,” Jen said, watching as Daisy cut a careful silhouette around the bookish llama's ears.

Before LIFt, Jen had worked as a communications officer at the revered Federloss Family Foundation, which focused on women's reproductive health initiatives in developing countries. When the foundation was blindsided by the compound effects of the economic crisis and significant investments impaled on Bernard Madoff's Ponzi schemes, Jen couldn't help but admire the balletic elegance of its subsequent budgetary adjustments, which absorbed the trauma by eliminating only positions, not the future budgets of pending initiatives. Midwife training schemes and prenatal-care pilot programs would go forward untouched. Jen's dental coverage and pretax deferred savings program would not.

“I always thought that if I ever got laid off I would at least enjoy a degree of purgative moral outrage,” Jen said to her husband, Jim, on the day in January she was let go. She was calling him from the street just outside the foundation's dowdy offices in the East Thirties, one unmittened hand clasping her woolen coat to her unscarfed throat, the other clasping her phone to her unhatted ear. “I always thought there would be tears and recriminations. Rending of garments. But these layoffs are judicious and correct. I would have absolutely laid me off.”

“It kind of takes all the fun out of it,” Jim said.

Jen turned her face into the wind and squinted at the street, naked trees standing mournful watch over blackened geodes of day-old slush and stalled, sagging cars. “There's no one anywhere,” she said. “Everyone's gone home. Does anyone live here anymore?”

Despite her statements to the contrary, Jen would have absolutely not laid herself off, because her salary was a rounding error, an irrelevant scrawl of marginalia in any organization's bookkeeping. Just the rent on Jen and Jim's two-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Jim taught fifth grade at a local public school, was equivalent to well over half of her monthly take-home pay. The apartment had been advertised as being located within the historic boundaries of Ditmas Park, home to a smorgasbord of Victorian and Queen Anne and neo-Tudor and Colonial Revival detached houses in various states of grandeur and disrepair, but you could not have found a single Spanish tile roof or Ionic column or stone lion guardsman on Jen and Jim's block, not a balustrade nor a gabled dormer nor a single oriel window, just a hulking quadrant of hundred-unit brick boxes whose signature architectural flourishes were the air-conditioning units—replete with company logo—installed beneath each window, which gave the reiterative impression that these buildings were not family residences at all but instead warehouses-cum-marketing experiments in service of
FEDDERS AIR CONDITIONING
.

Not Ditmas Park, as Jim took to calling their immediate area, was home to a Ditmas Avenue but not to a park or parklike domain, a source of perverse delight to Jim.

“The name itself is a broken promise,” Jim had said, “and thus it's an honest and forthright guarantee of all the broken promises that Not Ditmas Park can offer its citizens in terms of amenities, community spirit, and educational opportunity. The name tells a meta-lie in service of a greater truth.”

“It's smart to get in on the ground floor of an emerging district,” the real estate agent had said. “Or, in this case, the
fourth
floor. You guys are ahead of the curve!”

“We don't really need the second bedroom,” Jen had told the real estate agent. “But, you know, we're married now, and—”

“And
aspirations,
” said the real estate agent with a wink. “You're young!”

“We're not that young,” Jen said.

Their closest subway station stood atop a perpetually dripping overground train line, where the fronts included a dollar store, a liquor store, and a “development corporation”; the indignities of time, weather, and pigeon droppings had chiseled the development corporation's fabric awning into a trompe l'oeil of corrugated tin. What Jen and Jim guessed to be an exposed sewer pipe snaked past one end of the hoarding fence around the train tracks. Behind the plaza sat a mysterious brick-and-concrete hut that evoked an armored-car repair depot near Checkpoint Charlie. The annihilating climate of Eastern Bloc filthy-slipshod brutalism was encapsulated in their nearest post office, which looked and smelled like it had been excavated from the rubble of a gas main explosion, replete with broken metal locks hanging from its doors and service windows, as if smashed in haste to rescue trapped survivors.

Jen and Jim lived within cardboard-thin walls and floors and ceilings unencumbered by insulation, all echoing beams and sound-conducting metal. If you pushed back a chair or Franny the cat batted your keys off the coffee table, the downstairs neighbors heard it. If you coughed or flushed a toilet, your upstairs neighbors heard it. To play recorded music with a bass line was a premeditated act of revenge. Residents who rarely met one another's eyes in the elevator or vestibule would register displeasure with their neighbors' squeaky hinges and furniture-rattling footfalls by leaving cans of WD-40 and fuzzy bedroom slippers on one another's welcome mats, offerings shot through with the sinister supplication of a cat dropping a headless field mouse on the back porch. Jen and Jim gingerly maneuvered around on their toes at all times to avert the wrath of their downstairs neighbor, a replica in pallid flesh-folds of an Easter Island statue perched in a motorized wheelchair who had spent much of Jen and Jim's move-in weekend pounding her own ceiling with a broom handle in protest.

The building's architectural quirks struck Jen as most problematic on late Saturday evenings, when the upstairs neighbors' ungulate children repaired to their grandparents' house and their parents would celebrate their reprieve with a thumping multiroom sexual odyssey—what Jim called their “weekly all-hands meeting”—often scored to
Buena Vista Social Club
or, on at least one harrowing occasion, Raffi's
Singable Songs for the Very Young,
whose material provided a ready template for marching band–style refrains that the neighbors synced with recognizably percussive motions.

Then, occasionally, what sounded like a lamp would
chank
to the floor or a bedside table would
whomp
over on its side, followed by the scrabbling of either a small dog's or a large cat's paws as it fled for safety to another room.

“Should we tell them?” Jen asked Jim late one night as they lay in bed, eyes wide in the dark, as the woman upstairs improvised a bellowing descant to her husband's rapid Raffian melody. “It's like they're invading their own privacy.”

“I'm just glad they're happy,” Jim said. Their downstairs neighbor broomed her ceiling, just once, as if in warning.

After the end of her Federloss job, Jen might have assumed that she and Jim would be giving their neighbors more opportunities to invade their privacy now that she was unencumbered by the everyday stresses and timesucks of gainful employment. But Jen and Jim convened fewer all-hands meetings during her enforced sabbatical, for no reason that either could have pinpointed, save perhaps for a sheepishness that floated around the post-layoff Jen like a twilight cloud of gnats. She began too many emails—even to Meg, even to Pam—with “I know you must be totally busy, but I just wondered…” She thanked friends too profusely—even Meg, even Pam—when they met for coffee or a drink, and Jen always insisted on paying. She avoided parties, because she'd “have nothing to say.”

“I just find it hard to do small talk if I can't account for my time,” Jen said to Meg on the phone.

“Right,” Meg replied, “because there's always a velvet rope and a horde of squealing fans around the guy at the party who wants to talk about
his job.
”

Jen kept an Excel spreadsheet on her elderly laptop titled
REAL JOBS AND OTHER JOBS
. At first, tapping through fingerless gloves at a kitchen table made dizzy on its oak-finish-and-particleboard haunches by the humidity swings of too many New York City summers, Jen applied for only
REAL JOBS
: grantwriting, speechwriting, communications work for any worthy cause she could find. But as the winter grew colder and bleaker, she put in for more and more
OTHER JOBS
. She applied to write copy for the Feminist Porn Collective, but belatedly discovered that she would be paid mainly in feminist porn. She landed an interview to be the research assistant to an elderly romance novelist and semireclusive candle-wax heiress, only to find out ex post facto that the novelist had employed a total of six research assistants over forty years, and each was a white male with a poetry MFA and/or a direct or family connection to Phillips Exeter Academy. She drafted a few speeches for a third-party mayoral candidate whose campaign platform included the abolishment of both private schools and gender designations on government forms. She acted as writing tutor to the sixteen-year-old son of a well-known entertainment lawyer, until she refused to help him forge a Vyvanse prescription, whereupon the teen told his mother (untruthfully) that Jen had absconded with his Modafinil prescription. Jen did not disclose to her charge that she herself had a prescription for a similar cognitive enhancer, Animexa, which she renewed at increasingly irregular intervals following the loss of her blue-chip Federloss Foundation health insurance.

“You live in a fake neighborhood,” the sixteen-year-old had informed Jen one day.

“Ditmas Park?” Jen replied. “It's real. I've been there.”

“You live,” the sixteen-year-old said, “in a real estate agent's neologism.”

This bothered Jen, mostly because the decision to live in a real estate agent's neologism had originally been a marker of grown-up prudence and long-term thinking: The mindful marrieds enter their thirties, conserve their resources, steadily pay down their student loans, live well within their means, reserve space for a hypothetical tiny future boarder.

“Feather your nest,” the real estate agent had said.

Now, even living in a real estate agent's neologism seemed like a grim necessity bordering on presumptuous overreach, regardless of the scuffed thirdhand furniture, the chewed gum–like residue constantly and mysteriously accumulating between the kitchen tiles, the canoe-sized kitchen separated by a cheap flapping strip of countertop from the deluxe canoe–sized living room, the dry rot in the windowsills, the closet doors eight inches too narrow for their frames. Even Franny the cat seemed like a luxury, all those unmonetized hours logged napping and grooming.

Jen began writing down every single purchase she made in her notebook. With the same fountain pen, she also drew a picture of each item. Her student loan debit was represented one month by a graduation cap, another month by the hand-forged wrought-iron gate her college class had walked through on commencement day. Cat-food purchases were represented by drawings of Franny in various states of odalisque repose. Jen made stippled pencil drawings of toothpaste tubes and physics-defying stacks of little tissue packets from the pharmacy and curlicuing cornucopias from modest grocery runs.

The first entry in Jen's notebook was the price of the notebook. Inside the open notebook, Jen drew a picture of the open notebook, then another inside that one and another, collapsing infinitely into the center.