“I know.”
“I can’t believe ShraderCapital. I mean, I can,” Faith said. “They often cut corners. But this one is its own pay grade.” Greer felt a chemical swoon of relief. Her anxiety shifted, became something almost a little exciting. Faith hadn’t known. Greer hadn’t thought there was any way she had known, but still. And more than that, Faith was angry, and Greer was angry along with her. The two of them stewed together, betrayed by the people upstairs. “I’ve been called gullible, you know,” said Faith. “It’s a reasonable criticism. To think I could be in business with these people, and that it would never be a problem.”
They sat in the shared gloom of their intimacy. But then Faith reached out to brace herself against the counter and swiveled her chair so that she was facing Greer directly, no longer looking at her in the mirror. And then she said, “But I guess I don’t understand what you thought you were going to accomplish, rushing in here and telling me this news.”
Greer blinked, suddenly flooded and undefended, confused. Her face, naturally, heated up. “Well,” she said stiffly, “I thought I was just telling you the truth.”
“Fine. So here we are surrounded by the truth.”
“You sound like you’re angry with me,” Greer said. “Don’t be angry with me, Faith. It isn’t my fault.” Faith didn’t say anything, but just kept looking at her. “I assume we’ll want to do something now,” Greer said after a moment.
“There’s no next move here, Greer.”
“Yes there is. There could be.”
“Such as?”
“We could break with ShraderCapital,” she tried, though she hadn’t thought ahead and was just riffing now. And as she riffed, she was still distracted by the idea that Faith was angry with her. That made no sense. She needed to calm Faith down now, because they had both been wronged, and Faith needed to understand that. Suddenly Greer imagined herself and Faith with two hobo sticks, two bindles, leaving Loci and heading out onto a dark road.
“Break with them. Yes, but that’s shortsighted,” Faith said. “Where else am I going to get money to spread the word about the plight of women everywhere? Do you want to give me millions of dollars, Greer?”
“No—”
“And it’s not like we could join up with anyone else.” Faith’s voice was picking up speed now. “I’ve been doing this kind of thing since the year of the flood. I have my ways, and I have my limitations, as everyone will tell you. There are other, newer foundations that have a far more progressive agenda. And I admire them. They are connecting with what’s happening right this minute. If you go to most campuses now, you’d better be thoughtful about gender pronouns. I’ve tried to incorporate as much as I can to stay on top of what’s happening out there. And to stay relevant too. But most places just don’t have the money we do, so they scrounge around. They’re always fighting for equality, doing it the way they’re doing it, and I’m doing it the way I’m doing it.” She took a breath. “You take what you can get. Doing good and taking money don’t go together well. I have known this for all of my adult life. The wheels always need grease.”
This was a kind of speech, Greer realized, and once she understood that, it made sense, and she felt that she didn’t have to say much except to ask the occasional question, to rebut the occasional point. “But you just accept it?” Greer asked finally.
“No, I do not ‘just accept it.’ I try to keep an eye on what I can, while being fully aware that I can’t keep my eye on everything. The fraudulence of the mentor program in Ecuador disgusts me. And it makes me very angry. But mostly, you know what? Mostly it depresses me. And it reminds me of what you have to do if you’re trying to get something done in the world and your cause is women. Because look, if four years ago I’d said no, Emmett, I refuse to touch your money, you know where I’d be right now? Sitting at home learning ikebana.”
“I’m sorry, what’s ikebana?”
“The Japanese art of flower arranging. That is where I’d be. I would not get to introduce thousands of people to the plight of the Yazidi women of Iraq. I would not be bringing in women who were denied abortions after being raped by their fathers. God, listen to me: I don’t even know why I always put in that detail—the fathers. It should be enough just to say women who were denied abortions. That’s the point. It’s their bodies, their lives, despite what the senator from Indiana will tell you.
“I know the things people say about our foundation. That our tickets cost too much, and that we mostly get wealthy white people to come hear our lectures. ‘Rich white ladies,’ they say, which is insulting. You know we’re always trying to bring in more diverse audiences and bring down costs. But I’ve had to adjust my expectations about what we do, and I’ve also had to perform the song and dance that they’ve been demanding upstairs. The celebrity speakers. The fancy food, which my son makes fun of. And the feminist psychic, Ms. Andromeda, with her ridiculous predictions.
“But in order to get a women’s foundation to really take off, Greer—because even the phrase ‘women’s foundation’ makes most people tune out—sometimes you have to throw in a psychic.”
“So what’s the alternative to leaving?” Greer asked. “We just go back to work and act like this didn’t happen?”
Greer thought of Faith in the Ryland Chapel, up at the pulpit, with her dark, curling head of hair and her tall sexy gray boots, and the encouragement that she gave to everyone in that room. And then the special encouragement that she gave afterward to Greer. Faith had helped her and taken an interest in her, and had put her to work, and for a long time the work had felt like it mattered. Once, a year earlier, Beverly Cox, the shoe factory worker who had spoken up about the wage inequality and harassment she and her fellow female employees had endured, had come hurrying up to Greer on a street in midtown in winter and said, “Wait, I know you. You helped me write my first speech.” She turned to the other people she was with, all of them visiting from upstate and bundled in thick winter coats, and said, “You remember I told you about her?” Her friends nodded. “I never thought I could speak in front of people,” Beverly said to Greer. “I never thought anyone would want to listen. But you did,” and she’d hugged her, and her friends had taken photos with their phones. “For posterity,” Beverly said, and she gave Greer a handout about a union event she was speaking at up in Oneonta the following week.
Faith had brought Greer toward all of this. Her connection to these women had done something for both her and them. She thought of Lupe, but not with sentimentality, only with pain, and she knew that if they were to see each other on the street, Lupe would not be happy to see her. Perhaps Lupe would say something in Spanish, something that was well beyond Greer’s comprehension.
But they would never see each other on the street. There was no street. Lupe was back in Ecuador. What was she doing? What would happen to her? Maybe she was still adrift, lost. Where was she living? What was she actually doing with her days? She would never be part of a women’s textile co-op; that much Greer knew.