Daisy was on Facebook playing Socialist Revolution, where she’d just been appointed the mayor of the Politburo Standing Commission on Internal Affairs. Jen had her earbuds in to watch a video of Leora’s recent interview with British socialite and “roving entertainment correspondent” Suzy Coxswain, who had made recurring appearances on Father of Invention as Fiona, Trudy’s ribald Cockney friend.
Suzy Coxswain: LIFt Foundation—it kind of sounds like makeup, haha!
Leora Infinitas: Well, it’s not the LIFt Foundation—it’s just LIFt. Foundation is the F in LIFt.
Suzy Coxswain: Too bad, haha! I could use a bit of a lift, haha. Feeling a bit jowly.
Leora Infinitas: You are beautiful, Suzy, inside and out.
Suzy Coxswain: Oh, bless.
Leora Infinitas: And that’s the message of LIFt. If that sounds cheesy, well, call me cheesy! What’s wrong with being a little cheesy, anyway—what are we so afraid of?
Suzy Coxswain: Well—
Leora Infinitas: You know, Suzy, I think a lot about the word integration. Because women can feel torn in so many different directions. Maybe a woman is grappling with not liking what she sees in the mirror in the morning. And maybe she’s having problems with a friend, or some kind of a conflict at work. And maybe she just saw something on the news about the, you know, the humanitarian crisis in Somalia, and feeling so helpless because she wants to do something, but she doesn’t know what.
Suzy Coxswain: She just doesn’t know! Not even where to start!
Leora Infinitas: Right. All of these things are important. We can’t rank them. What we can do is, number one, integrate them, and number two, start a conversation about them with other women. That’s what LIFt is about. You have children, of course, Suzy?
Suzy Coxswain: Do I! Three boys, still holding out for that girl, haha.
Leora Infinitas: Okay, so motherhood is a fundamental strength that we somehow twist into a fundamental conflict: Am I a woman first or a mother first? Well, my answer is yes. What comes first, home or work or the world outside my window? My answer is yes. How does being a mother influence my ethics? My answer is yes. How do I put my children first and put the children of the developing world first, too? My answer is yes.
Suzy Coxswain: Well, sure, but okay, playing devil’s advocate for a moment—your kids are your kids. They’re yours; they’re different, haha.
Leora Infinitas: I don’t see them as so different. And I don’t see other women as so different from you and me, Suzy. I think if we come together we can be everybody’s mother. I know that sounds so presumptuous!
“Daisy,” Jen said without removing her earbuds.
“Hang on, I’ve been denounced as a Trotskyite,” Daisy said.
“I think you need to see this,” Jen said.
“Am I bothering you ladies?”
Jen turned in her seat to see Karina standing inches away, shrugging emphatically into a lightweight trench coat. “Karina, hi!” Jen exclaimed at a high pitch. She pawed at the buds in her ears, swatting them to the floor. As she reached over to pick them up, the wheels of her chair rolled over the cord, trapping the earbuds on the carpet. Jen paused for a second, doubled over, then hoisted her ass off the seat, pushed up at the bottom of the seat with her left hand until the wheels left the carpet, and grabbed the buds with her right hand. Jen moved to sit up again, but again the cord went taut before she was fully upright, this time because it had wound itself around the stem of the chair. Jen folded the buds in her lap and looked up at Karina from this slightly hunched position.
“How many kulaks do you think are left in that village, Comrade Daisy?” Karina was asking in the tone of a saucy conspirator, leaning jauntily against the stack of empty filing cabinets that loomed behind Jen’s desk.
Daisy looked over her shoulder, nodded at Karina, and turned back to her computer screen.
Karina winked at Jen and mouthed Love her!, rolling her eyes and lashing her tongue across her front teeth on Love. Jen wondered if Karina was being sarcastic or sincere, and also if Karina herself knew.
“Sorry for stalking you with all the emails!” Jen said. She hoped her temporary hunchback scanned as warm, inviting body language—a plant leaning toward light.
Karina cocked her head and clucked neutrally. “Hey, can’t knock persistence.”
“So, what I was thinking—” Jen started.
“All I can tell you is that we—the board, the staff, the whole team—we are in major brainstorm-and-research mode right now,” Karina said. “Lightning and thunder, fire and brimstone, category-five brainstorms. And research. And I’ve gotta say”—Karina pulled her bottom lip down from clenched teeth and looked sidelong with bugged-out eyes, as if she were being groped against her will—“Leora does naahht seem too happy with how we’ve been stormin’ her brain so far.”
“Oh, wow, okay, we can fix that,” Jen said, nodding rapidly, bugging out her eyes in mirroring solidarity. Karina looked over Jen’s stooped shoulder, and Jen wondered if Leora and Suzy were still bantering silently on the screen behind her. “Any specifics on what Leora isn’t happy with?” Jen asked, maneuvering her chair slightly with the aim of using her own bent head to block her computer screen from Karina’s view. “Does she want ideas about messaging for our programs, or messaging ideas for the website itself—should I prioritize one over the other?”
“I really don’t see why we need to exclude,” said Karina, her gaze still trained over Jen’s shoulder. “She just wants more ideas, more research. The more the merrier.”
“Right, of course, but what about all the ideas and research I’ve—we’ve submitted so far?” Jen asked, bobbing and weaving her head slightly in an attempt to cover more of the screen space behind her.
“Nobody’s knocking your work, Jen,” Karina said. “It’s not about that, okay?”
“Oh, no, I wasn’t saying that—sorry, I’m not being clear. I guess if I knew which ideas and research Leora liked and disliked so far—whether or not the research and ideas were mine!—then I would know how to proceed from here,” Jen said. “I mean, she’s so busy, maybe she hasn’t even gotten to them yet, which would be totally understandable, obviously—”
“Your work is good,” Karina said. “Like anything else, there’s stuff that really sparkles and stuff that could be better.”
“Right, okay, thanks, that’s good to hear,” Jen said. “What could be better?”
“Well, I’m not a mind reader—you’d have to ask Leora,” Karina said.
“That would be great, actually—I can ask Sunny to set up some time.”
“Naahht too sure she’d have the bandwidth for something like that right now,” Karina said. “Though I can certainly try to bring it up with her.”
“You know,” Jen said, “it’s crazy, but Leora and I still haven’t even met!” The second this fell out, Jen realized the error she had made.
Karina nodded pensively. “You know, I’m curious. If you are asked for three ideas on how to message a LIFt concept, do you come up with ten ideas, and present what you think are the best three? Or do you only come up with three ideas and just present those?”
“Oh, gosh, I don’t know. It depends.”
“Interesting. So sometimes you’re just presenting the first things that pop into your head? Kinda seat-of-the-pants?”
“Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that. There’s probably always a whittling process.”
“Interesting. But then there’s the question of how you determine the best three out of ten. How do you know that you’re not hiding your brightest light under a bushel? Do you trust us to see the ideas you want to hide?”
“Oh, it’s not about hiding—it’s always different.” Jen sat up straight, still holding the earbud cord, severing it with a muffled pop. “You know, I’m sorry to harp on this”—Jen laughed right here, as she often did with Karina, and Jen always imagined these laughs as having mass and taking up space, but plush mass, deferential mass, a comfy cushion to soften any demand or contradictory opinion—“but it would be so amazing, just in terms of time management, to have a little bit of feedback on all the work I’ve done so far. I mean, if that’s possible. I completely understand if—”
“I’m giving you feedback right now,” Karina said.
“Of course, but—”
“Here’s your feedback in a nutshell: More, more, more!” Karina said. “How’s that for a vote of confidence? Just assume that there’s an insatiable appetite for your ideas and your efforts right now. What you have to remember around messaging is that this is a collaboration.”
“Oh, sure, I know—wait, what does that mean?”
“It means that we don’t hunker down in our hidey-holes guarding our turf. We’re all in this together, sharing ideas, bouncing ideas off one another. Collaboration and sharing.”
“I didn’t—”
“I’ve gotta run, Jen,” Karina said, turning to leave and waggling her fingers over her shoulder. “Gotta tend to the spawn.”
Jen cushion-laughed. “Oh, for sure, you’ve gotta do that!”