Break in Case of Emergency by Jessica Winter Page B

proposal for a series of webinars “reintroducing busy women across the world to their neglected love affair with the REM cycle,” to be called Women’s Initiative for Sleep Hygiene (WISH). She proposed a proposal for a Skype-enabled encounter group session covering seven continents—“McMurdo Station, we haven’t forgotten you!” Sunny exclaimed—on “kicking our sex drives into top gear,” to be called Women Empowered to Love their Libido (WELL). This bounty of acronyms took a turn toward the demotic after Leora, having just served as grand marshal at a drag queen parade in Grand Rapids, Michigan, returned to the LIFt offices with an idea for a body-acceptance campaign, to be called the Women’s Endeavor for Realism and Kindness! (WERK!).
    “Have you ever suspected that you had a fake job at a fake organization, and you could be found out at any time?” Jen asked Jim.
    “If I ever did, a ten-year-old who hasn’t eaten breakfast at home in a year would kick me in the shins and snap me out of it,” Jim said.
    Karina would relay Leora’s ideas to Jen and Daisy, and Jen and Daisy would then spend many hours researching potential LIFt grantees doing work that overlapped with Leora’s acronym du jour and writing bulleted, footnoted summaries of each potential grantee and coming up with copy and branding and infographics and focus-grouping for the proposed projects, even though they knew that the acronyms were ends in themselves—game plans for a Game Over. Daisy, much more than Jen, reacted to Leora’s bounty of acronyms in a spirit of reciprocity. She ideated “a mosaic of learned spiritual responses to the existential question of why we are here” called the Women’s Ontology of Nurturing Karma (WONK) as well as a pan-global crafts-and-baked-goods bazaar called the Women’s Harvest of Outrageous Awesomeness (WHOA). Seizing the opportunity presented by one of Leora’s ever-more-infrequent office visits, Daisy walked right up to Leora outside the ladies’ room to pitch her acronyms—a bold, possibly unprecedented move by a non–board member, and one that Jen watched from across the office while gnawing on alternate thumbnails.
    “She’s nicer than everyone says,” Daisy later reported.
    Nonetheless, Leora had rejected WONK and WHOA on the spot, calling out WHOA in particular as “jejune.” Jen and Daisy didn’t know what
jejune
meant until they looked it up.
    “Maybe not knowing what
jejune
means is a symptom of being
jejune,
” Daisy said.
    Daisy later turned her attentions from acronyms to anagrams—spending the better part of one weekend crossing out the letters of LEORA INFINITAS FOUNDATION to create ADROIT FELON IS IN A FOUNTAIN —but not before designing and silkscreening T-shirts advertising Women in Crisis Constructing Acronyms (WICCA), illustrated with a kitten in a witch’s hat scrambling the letters on a Scrabble board.

Zen Rand
    Jen climbed off her paint-splattered stepladder, rotating her shoulder in its socket and stifling a mewl of pain. She had been standing atop the stepladder at the back of Pam’s studio for two hours straight, the elbow of her painting arm propped in her opposite palm, doing minutely detailed blending brushwork on a head-and-shoulders portrait of an enormous happy teen: floppy, rust-colored cowlick; glinting rectangle-smile full of braces; the color of his hoodie a spectacularly verdant marriage of cadmium yellow and ultramarine. Coaxing a person out of a driver’s license photo or a magazine clipping and onto the canvas, finding the fabric of its shadows and inventing its light, was scary and exciting. She loved the loamy certitude of unmixed oils, their textures of soil and blood tissue, and the sense of unthinking command and casual mastery she felt in mixing them. She loved the unalloyed physicality of tracing the final images’ outlines in graphite, of laying down the underpainting and base coats. But once she had found the shadows and the light