Sometimes the drinking people gathered on the Skillet, a former lighthouse/party boat moored on the Hudson, downtown. The surface shifted beneath her feet as she drank and shouted and flirted. Since becoming single, Greer had forced herself to get good at flirting. The men she met all seemed to say they were “several years out of Wesleyan.” Their beds were never made, or else made poorly, when she climbed into them. No one yet had the time or inclination to take care of themselves, and it was unclear when that would ever begin.
Two months before the LA summit, on board the Skillet, Ben Prochnauer from the office had opened himself to Greer like some kind of obstinate flower. They stood close together, the way he had once stood with Marcella Boxman—she who was long gone from Loci, on to be a Social Innovation Fellow at Cambridge—and he spoke urgently to her.
“So. Do you ever think of me that way?” he asked.
“‘That way’?” Greer stood back and looked at him. They had been working together for so long. In the early years he had flirted with her, but it had seemed like little more than a reflex. Now, with no warning, he was genuinely hitting on her. His face had the glinting optimism of a found coin. Greer slept with him that night on the futon in his studio apartment in Fort Greene. The surprise hookup was the sort of event that the two people in question suspect they will look back on one day with vague, sentimental affection, overlooking the sadness that had gotten them there.
* * *
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When it was time for her to go onstage that day in LA, Greer walked out, miked and lightly quivering, her vision darting around in the darkness as if she were a goldfish who’d been poured into a new bowl, while outside the bowl loomed a thousand invisible women. Nearby on the stage stood the sign-language interpreter, patiently waiting. The room stayed quiet, with just the occasional obligatory and somehow recognizably female cough, followed by scrabbling in a purse for a lozenge, which was unwrapped in a quick sequence of rustles.
“Please forgive me if I seem a bit freaked out at the moment,” Greer began. “Most of the speeches I give are in my head.” There was warm laughter. “I wouldn’t be here,” she said, “if it weren’t for Faith Frank.” Applause. “She is the best, and she wanted me to come in her place. I know you’d rather hear her speak, but you’ve got me. So! Faith Frank hired me, originally, based on nothing. She took me in and she taught me things, and more than that she gave me permission. I think that’s what the people who change our lives always do. They give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don’t feel we’re allowed to be.
“Many of you here in this room—can we actually call this a room? It’s more like a landmass—probably had someone like that, didn’t you?” There was affirmative murmuring. “Someone who gave you permission. Someone who saw you and heard you. Heard your voice. We’re all really lucky to have had that.”
Then Greer introduced Lupe, speaking of her hardship and bravery, and how proud Loci was to have helped her and the rest of the young women. “Now, starting over after a traumatic time,” Greer said, “she’s been connected with her own mentor. A woman in her country who is teaching her everything she knows.”
Lupe appeared onstage and took her place beside Greer. She took out a little folded piece of paper on which was the Spanish version of the words that Greer had written for her. Lupe smoothed down the page and giggled in her lovely way; the crowd, in response, was warm and understanding.
Finally, Lupe began to read aloud, slowly and carefully. Then Greer read the same words in English. “I speak today for myself and the others who were there in Ecuador when we had the bad experience. We left our homes, and it was not what they said it would be. We were afraid. They wouldn’t let us leave.” Back and forth they went, conveying the emotional story about how Lupe had been living a bleak life that did not seem like it would ever get better. Lupe looked so frightened and upset as she recalled what had happened to her that Greer felt that way too, just as she had felt when she wrote those lunchtime speeches. She reached out instinctively and took Lupe’s hand, holding it as Faith had once held hers. In her high school Spanish she whispered to Lupe to take her time, to not worry about a thing. The audience would wait. They weren’t going anywhere. So Lupe took her time, and finally, together, going back and forth, she and Greer got to the part about how she and everyone else had been rescued, and taken away from the neighborhood in Guayaquil where they had all been forced to live. And then, once she was resettled, how an older woman had come to see her and invited her to learn some new skills. Lupe had agreed to go; together they went to a building where there were computers, and people who taught English. “I am learning,” Lupe said in English, and the audience clapped. There was also a room in the building filled with sample equipment to make textiles. Lupe was shown how to use a hand loom, and also how to knit. Her mentor had sat with her in the corner by the window and showed her some different stitches. “I have gotten good at this. Later,” said Lupe, “we want to form a women’s textile co-op.” Her short statement was done; Lupe had gotten through it. Greer put her arms around her, and the applause began.
Later, Greer would find out that a few different women had been holding up their iPhones to record the speech. If the twenty-first century taught you anything, it was that your words belonged to everyone, even if they actually didn’t. It wasn’t that the moment had been that special, but for the people in the room it was. “You had to be there,” women would probably say to one another, after showing the clip to friends. An earnest moment between two women onstage at a feminist summit was not much of a big deal. It didn’t go viral, unlike the speech given later that same day by the female action star. The women at the summit had all stood at the beginning and end of that one, celebrating the Australian heroine from Gravitus 2: The Awakening, which had become so huge. In a now stupidly famous scene in the movie, her character, Lake Stratton, had said to a gang of corporate supervillains and their henchmen after being mocked by them for being female, “It’s true: I may not be in possession of balls.” Beat. “So I borrowed a couple.” And just then two enormous wrecking balls swung through the window of the skyscraper office where the standoff was taking place, instantly killing the villains.
What mattered about that movie was not its content, which was puerile. It seemed that in order for a female to have a huge cultural moment, it helped if she had a not overtly feminine name and was a hot, front-loaded, violent wench. What mattered, really, was that the movie had taken in $335 million, and maybe in the future, movie studios would develop more films with female stars.
Greer’s moment onstage with Lupe wasn’t like that. It was smaller, and fleeting, but the applause went on for a very long time. Afterward, out in the lobby, a cluster of women surrounded the two of them, encircling them with enthusiasm and questions. “I loved what you had to say about how there are people who give us permission,” one woman said to Greer. “I know what you mean, because I had exactly that experience.”
Across the way, a middle-aged woman approached Lupe and pulled something from a bag. “This is for you,” the woman said, and she pressed upon Lupe a lump of white wool and a pair of needles, to which was attached the beginnings of some sweater or blanket. “I’m a knitter too,” said the woman in a too-loud voice, as though that would help Lupe understand. “But I’d like you to have it.”
Lupe took the needles and wool, but Greer didn’t know what happened next, for she was carried off on one wave of women, while Lupe was carried off on another.
One woman said to Greer, “My person wasn’t a teacher, she was a neighbor. Mrs. Palmieri. I took care of her cat sometimes when she went away. She would invite me in when she was home, and we’d talk about cooking. She gave me a lot of advice.”