She smiled a brief, encouraging smile at them, and that was it; Greer folded, she was taken in completely, taken up, wanting more of this forever. Faith had made her little joke about loving them, but as Greer listened to Faith, what she herself felt seemed closely related to falling in love. Greer knew all about falling in love—the way discovering Cory had shaken her around, messed with her cells. This was like that, but without the physical desire. The sensation wasn’t sexual, but the word love still seemed relevant here; love, which pollinated the air around Faith Frank.
Surely other people here felt it too, didn’t they? And even if they’d been in a teenage stupor for years, staring at themselves in every reflective surface, frowning at their image as they popped a pimple with a little splat of greenish milk against glass, and railing to friends about their dumbass parents, or being forced to come to the chapel on this night despite being the kind of people Faith had described, who blithely went around saying they weren’t feminists, now a revelatory gong had been struck inside them. It vibrated and vibrated, and seemed like it would never stop, for here was this new, formidable person, speaking in such an exciting way about their place in the looming, disturbing world. Making them want to be more than they were.
Faith said, “Okay, well, I think I’ve just about run out of things to tell you. I’m going to be quiet now and give the rest of you a chance to talk. Thank you so much for listening.”
The room erupted with appreciative clapping, as loud as if an object had been dropped into a pan of hot oil from a great height. Greer immediately began clapping “like a maniac,” as she would say to Cory. She wanted to clap as loud as anyone in that room.
Someone in the back called out, “FAITH, YOU ROCK!” and someone else shouted, “EFFING AWESOME BOOTS!” which made Faith Frank laugh. Of course she had a great laugh. The head went back and the mouth opened, the gullet exposed as if she were a sleek and elegant seal about to swallow a fish.
The chapel was warmed a few degrees by human heat and excitement, and it smelled even more strongly of people and their wet jackets. The whole place was ripening. Faith looked out over the crowd, and hands went up.
There was a dull, boilerplate question: “Do you have a message for the young people of today?” and then a hokey question that required Faith to assemble her dream dinner party: “You can invite anyone,” said the questioner. “No restrictions on what country they’re from, or what century. So who would you choose?” Greer remembered later that Faith had chosen Amelia Bloomer, the namesake of her magazine; and the hot young singer Opus, who had recently played the Super Bowl halftime show; also, the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi; the aviatrix Bessie Coleman, who was the first African-American woman to hold a pilot’s license; Dorothy Parker; both Hepburns, Audrey and Katharine, “Because I like their style,” she said; and all four Beatles. And finally, “To liven things up, let’s throw in a couple of ardent anti-feminists,” said Faith. “Although I might be tempted to spit in their food.”
It all blew by quickly because Greer had been distracted at the time, thinking that if she herself threw a dinner party, the main person she would want to invite was Faith Frank. She suddenly imagined Faith sitting comfortably in the Woolley first-floor lounge in her cool, tall boots, eating a bowl of instant ramen that Greer and Zee would have prepared for her in the microwave.
A decrepit professor in the history department with skin like crumpled tracing paper asked such a narrow question (“Ms. Frank, I’m reminded of a little-known statute from the bad old days . . .”) that it could be of interest only to him. The audience grew restive and bored; people hunched down over their phones, or poked each other and whispered, or actually began chatting openly.
The dean cut his question short, saying, “Perhaps you can ask Ms. Frank about this afterward. But I think we should move along now, in the interest of time. Let’s have one more question, people, and please make it a good one.”
Greer’s hand flew right up, her whole arm shaking slightly, but still she kept it in the air, perilously. She wasn’t going to ask a question, exactly—only the vaguest approximation of one. She felt as though she had to establish contact with Faith Frank before it was too late. She’d thought it would be enough just to come here tonight and hear a lecture given by this admired and determined woman, and maybe feel cheered up by it after the whole rotten Darren Tinzler experience, but she couldn’t let the night end yet, couldn’t let Faith Frank get back into her town car and be driven back through the gates and away from here.
Then, beside her in the pew, Zee’s arm went up too. Of course she had a real question, a political one; she probably even had follow-ups. Faith nodded her head in their direction. At first it was unclear which of them she was calling on. Greer tried to read Faith’s gaze—the female gaze, she thought with giddiness. But then she saw Faith seem to zero in on her, specifically her, Greer; and Greer looked quizzically at Zee, making sure she was reading this right. Zee gave her a quick, affirmative nod, as if to say: Yes. This is yours. Zee even smiled, wanting Greer to have it.
So Greer stood. It was sickening to be the only one standing, but what could she do? “Ms. Frank?” she said, her voice coming out like a tiny lamb-bleat in this sacred space. “Hello.”
“Hello.”
“There’s something I want to ask you.”
“Duh,” she heard a nearby girl quietly mutter. “That’s why you raised your hand.”
Greer took a breath, ignoring this. “What are we supposed to do?” she asked. Then she stopped right there, unsure of what to say next. Faith Frank patiently waited.
When it was apparent that Greer wasn’t going to say anything else, Faith said, gently, “Do about what, exactly?”
“About the way it is,” Greer pushed on. “The way it feels. Things like misogyny, which seems to be everywhere, kind of wallpapering the world, you know what I mean? It’s still acceptable in the twenty-first century, and why is that?”
“I’m sorry. Can you speak up?” asked Faith, and this request further mortified Greer, who could not really speak up, even now. She thought it was possible she would faint; Zee watched her, concerned.
Greer held on to the lip of curved wood on the pew in front of her. “Misogyny?” she said again, a little louder, but her intonation lifted the word uncertainly at the last syllable. She despised it when her voice did this. She had recently read about the phenomenon of girls lifting the ends of their sentences, as if unsure whether what they were saying was a statement or a question. Uptalking, it was called. I don’t want to be an uptalker! she thought. That kind of talking makes me sound foolish. But it was always so much easier to turn a statement into a question, because in the end you could backpedal and say you were only asking, and then you wouldn’t have to endure the shame of being wrong. Greer remembered lifting the edges of an imaginary skirt and curtsying at Darren Tinzler, because he’d been looming over her, tipping his cap, and she hadn’t known what else to do. If you were female and insecure, apparently you sometimes lifted words at the ends of sentences, and you even occasionally lifted nonexistent garments.
She was careful now, knowing that if she rattled on for too long about misogyny, people’s heads would drop down to their chests and they would all go zzzzz. You needed to jazz things up when talking about a topic like this; you needed to be a dynamic, electric messenger, the way Faith Frank was.