“Well, there you go.”
“I need something to do with myself. Something compelling,” Zee said. “My whole time growing up, while you were reading all those books by Jane Eyre—”
“Jane Austen!”
“Yes, that’s what I meant. While you were doing that, I was out protesting.”
“You could go out protesting now,” said Greer.
“I’d love to. I’m just too tired when I get home. My job has weird hours.” Zee sighed. “I wish I worked with you at the foundation. It would be like going to work and being political all in one. I even like saying it: ‘the foundation.’”
“Well, it’s not all that great,” said Greer. “You know that I’m basically an assistant.”
“I doubt it,” said Zee. “Anyway, it’s a lot better than what I’m doing.”
Greer had originally tried to get her a job at Loci; she’d given Faith the letter Zee wrote, but it hadn’t done any good. “No worries,” Zee had said to Greer, which was an expression she and Greer both hated, so it was spoken by her ironically. Young, thin, uninteresting-looking women standing behind the counter in boutiques singsonged this phrase in response to just about anything: “Nuclear holocaust?” “No worries!” The expression was absurd, because everyone knew that everyone had legitimate worries all the time. How could you not have worries, particularly if you were a recent college graduate entering the world at this fragile moment? The US economy had been saved from falling into a hell pit, but by the end of 2010 it was still precarious.
Being needed was something that Zee wanted too. Being needed or loved; one of these or both. Preferably both! They weren’t the same, but they occupied related territory. Love would happen to her too, or maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe her life would never settle, would never gel, either professionally or in terms of love. Still: no worries!
The letter Zee had written to Faith Frank and given to Greer in a bar in Brooklyn had begun:
Dear Ms. Frank,
I am sending this to you courtesy of the hand-delivery service of Ms. Greer Kadetsky, who is my great friend from college. In Greer, you could not have a better, smarter, or more quietly diligent person working for you. She is super-focused and organized and well-read. Me, I’m different.
Then Zee had gone on to write a little bit about herself, moving quickly through the highlights of her political involvement, talking about how energized she was about various feminist issues and gay rights, including marriage equality, which was going to be the next Roe v. Wade. The letter was short, and she ended by telling Faith that as the child of two judges—“not kidding!” she wrote—she had grown up watching her parents interpret the law, while she herself was detained following an animal rights demonstration outside Van Metre Furs in sixth grade.
It had been clear to Zee, early on, that her parents, being judges, tended to judge everything in their midst. That might have included all the children in the family, but the Eisenstat boys were spared some of the scrutiny because their mother had gotten it into her head early on that boys could not be tamed, so there was no point in even trying. The Hon. Wendy Eisenstat and the Hon. Richard Eisenstat let Alex and Harry have the run of the neighborhood until long past the hour when most kids had gone off to math tutors or Torah study or bassoon lessons or lacrosse.
Alex and Harry, a year and a half apart in age, neither of them a good student or nimble with the Hebrew alphabet or particularly musical or athletic, liked to ride their skateboards up and down the smooth, wide surface of Heather Lane, where the Eisenstats lived in a $3.5 million Tudor with a pool and a greenhouse and a lawn that went on and on until it became indistinguishable from that of the Tudor next door.
The Eisenstats’ judgment—mostly Judge Wendy’s—fell on Zee, although she wasn’t Zee yet, not in the beginning. She was still Franny then, Franny Eisenstat, because when her parents fell in love, up in New Haven when both of them were at Yale Law, Richard Eisenstat had said to Wendy Niederman, who sat beside him in Procedure, “One thing you should know about me is that I am a J. D. Salinger fanatic.”
“J. D., as in ‘Juris Doctor’ Salinger?” she said.
“You’re funny.”
“I try.”
“Ask me any Salinger trivia,” he said. “Anything about the Glass family, even about the most obscure members of the family, the ones no one’s heard of, like Walt and Waker.”
To which Wendy had crowed, “Walt and Waker Glass! I can’t believe you know who they are. I actually love Salinger too.” Not long after that, when they were spending all their days and nights with each other, essentially living together already without calling it that, Richard had gone into a used-book store in New Haven and extravagantly bought Wendy a jacketed, only slightly foxed first edition of Franny and Zooey. So it wasn’t really much of a surprise when, after having two boys who were not named for anyone in particular, her parents recalled the sentimentality of that early date—the moment when Richard had pressed the gift-wrapped book into Wendy’s hands, and she had taken off the wrapping paper and seen the white cover with the very recognizable font, and then touched it emotionally against her chest, because this man knew what she liked. They recalled this moment, after their daughter’s birth, and so they named the small sack of pink and floral-smelling skin Franny. For a while it was a good name for her, a perfect name.
But when Franny Eisenstat grew older, the name felt to her frilly and inessential, and she had no connection to it. That pink sack of Franny no longer existed. She was now someone who wanted absolute control over her image—and wanted to be seen as angular, confusing, an exciting human puzzle. At her bat mitzvah, she felt shame at being ensconced in the green dress for which her mother had taken her shopping at Saks, under pressure. All the other women at the bat mitzvah seemed comfortable in the dress-up clothes of regular womanhood. Women like Linda Mariani, Judge Wendy’s blond and busty law clerk, who often staggered into the Eisenstat house on heels, carrying an armload of files piled so high that they covered her face. At the synagogue Linda’s dress was canary-yellow and it pulled taut across her chest, straining the stretchy material.
“Congratulations, Franny,” said Linda that day, and during the obligatory hug it almost seemed as if the pressure made Linda release a very female perfume, the way a sofa cushion, when sat on, lets out air.
After the ceremony, the adults went into one side of a long ballroom, and the kids went into the other, and an accordion door closed between the two. There was a karaoke machine on the kids’ side, and everyone wanted a turn. Because they were thirteen and it was 2001, gay jokes were the height of hilarity, and everyone tried to turn all the karaoke songs into puns or double entendres about being gay. There on the orange-and-gold, floating-trumpet-patterned carpeting, two girls began to sing a song by some ancient brother-sister duo from the 1970s called Donny and Marie, with new lyrics, holding microphones that had been in stands from some already-forgotten bat or bar mitzvah or wedding from the previous weekend.
One girl sang, “I’m a little bit homo . . .”