“I wonder who decided to turn the heat way down,” Zee said to the young bearded slam poet with whom she shared her corner of the hallway. “Schenck or DeVillers.”
“DeVillers, for sure,” he said.
“I’m thinking Schenck. There’s a kind of Schenckian coldness to this place.”
He laughed; they often tried to amuse each other in this way, because it helped to pass the time. Then there was silence for a long stretch, as all the paralegals typed with cold fingers on cold keys. If you had your eyes closed and suddenly came upon the sound of all that typing, you might not know what it was, for it almost had a rusticated, babbling-brook quality to it, the way so many elements of technology did, as if to trick people into believing that they hadn’t actually given up everything they’d ever loved about the natural world in exchange for the meager glow of a backlit screen.
Though Zee disliked working there, at least it was a relief not to have a job where she had to dress like a robot monkey woman, but instead could wear a slightly neater version of her usual clothes. Throughout her life, intermittently fearing her parents’ eventual deaths, the only positive aspect about that inevitability was that finally there would be no one on earth who would say to her, “Would it kill you to wear a skirt?”
In the skirts she had worn over time, for them, the plaid kilt and the Indian-print cotton, the slit leg and the ruffly peasant midthigh, the transgressive crotch-high micromini and the long dark sedate one she called First Violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, she had felt nearly deranged with falseness, as though the clothes would at any moment fall away from her in an act of gender deciduousness, leaving her naked and exposed.
Once, home at her parents’ house during the long winter break in college, Zee had sent a series of postcards to Greer up in Massachusetts, with the caption “Would it kill you to wear a skirt?” (Greer, of course, actually liked wearing skirts, and wore them all the time, even when it wasn’t required. Also, Cory had said Greer looked very hot in them.)
On the first postcard, Zee drew a woman wearing a skirt and tripping over the hem, causing her to fall off the edge of a cliff.
The second postcard showed a woman lying in a pool of blood, the fabric of her skirt patterned in sharp little knives.
And the last postcard showed another woman wearing a skirt and collapsing in a heap. Beside an arrow pointing to the skirt was the caption “Stella McCartney’s Most Unpopular Design, the Poison-Lined Mini.”
It wasn’t that Zee imagined herself to be male; she just disliked some of the trappings of femaleness. At her bat mitzvah, under duress, she had worn a green minidress with enormous white wildflowers on it, and a pair of airless tights, and all she had wanted to do the whole day was swap the dress for jeans, or at the very least pull off her tights and run around bare-legged. They encased her legs in such a way that Zee knew she could not go through life in tights, the way her mother did; though in her mother’s case she really could have gone bare-legged, given all that robe. No one would ever have noticed.
At the law firm, Zee herself was noticed; one person who noticed her was a first-year associate, a toned and thin-lipped recent graduate of Georgetown Law who was of no real interest to Zee, though she did smell intriguingly like fresh-cut grass. But Zee didn’t want to get involved with anyone now. It would have been too hard to do that while living in Scarsdale. “I’m not in the closet,” she’d explained to Greer when they first met at Ryland, but she wasn’t comfortable introducing anyone to her parents. And anyway, she wasn’t sure she would want that person to see her posters of the Spice Girls and the endangered baby chinchillas.
Animal rights, and then being a vegetarian, had started on a class trip to a petting zoo. Zee had squatted among the baby chicks with down floating in the air around her like pollen. The chick sounds were soft yet insistent and seemed to have more in common with insect life than animal life. But when Zee held a little quivering packet of chick between her palms, she was suddenly goony with love.
The next day she checked an oversized book of animal photos out of the Scarsdale Public Library, and late that night, sitting in bed with the book open in her lap, Zee began to look at color pictures of baby chicks and otters and fauns. There among the most darling photos in the world appeared one that was incongruous and startling and absolutely terrible: a photo of a baby seal in a trap, its mouth open in pure-form pain. The seal’s eyes made a direct appeal to Zee Eisenstat, who found herself first shocked and crying, and then churning at the injustice. These animals were life, she thought, her mouth going tight; they were life, and more than that they were souls, and because of that, she had to do something.
When Zee’s parents were out playing tennis with another two-judge couple, Zee sat at her desktop computer posting on an animal rights message board under the embarrassing handle Me&myanimalpals. Soon she received several responses. DANNYSGRANDMA wrote back to Me&myanimalpals with advice on how to get started “in the animal rights community.” Vikingfan22 wrote to ask if by any chance she lived in the Twin Cities, because, if so, maybe they could meet for “a couple of cold ones.” No one knew she was an eleven-year-old girl, and her anonymity gave her courage. She was a baby chick but not a baby chick. Like everyone else on those message boards, she was impelled by the sense of something tender being destroyed.
Later on, Zee’s MySpace page was thickly spread with adamant statements about animal rights and shocking photos of animal cruelty, as well as a few shots of puppies and kittens frolicking (other people’s puppies and kittens; her mother was allergic), in order to even things out. She constantly posted pictures, and in high school she spent a few Saturdays standing in a parking lot picketing outside a local fur store. But by then she had also branched out broadly into the world of humans and how they kept one another down.
All kinds of social justice movements stirred her and she found herself a dervish of activity online and in the world. At college, handing out leaflets against the war in Iraq, she’d try hard to imagine herself in Karbala, instead of inert Ryland. She went in the direction of what drew her, and as a result her grades were poor, just as they’d been in high school. Her math SAT score had been so low, and the essay she had to write apparently so unreadable, that her guidance counselor had stared at the printout from the Educational Testing Service for a long time, tapping his pen and frowning, before thinking of how possibly to advise her about college choices.
Though Zee knew she would always be political, and would eventually become one of those feisty old women, those coots, protesting whatever futuristic cause needed her voice—pollution caused by jet-pack fuel emissions; equality for the robot population—sometimes you were not a political being but merely a sexual one. In this version of herself she regarded the hot first-year associate at Schenck, DeVillers and decided against pursuing her, or letting herself be pursued. Zee was in a moment of flux, as she thought of it. This was her life now, but it wasn’t really her life. There had to be something else ahead, something better and more engaging, like what Greer had, working at Loci and living on her own in Brooklyn and being committed to Cory.
Zee’s erratic work hours sometimes allowed her to sleep late, and when she woke up it was just her in the big house. Sometimes, if she wasn’t needed at Schenck, DeVillers until later in the day, she even watched afternoon talk shows, but these depressed her. “I think,” she’d said to Greer on the phone recently, “daytime talk shows are a plot to keep women dumb and passive. Whenever I watch one of them, I feel my brain matter disintegrating. Today the topic was ‘My Son Is a Gang Member.’”
“So don’t watch it.”
“But it was so interesting!”