Break in Case of Emergency Read Free

Easter Island statue perched in a motorized wheelchair who had spent much of Jen and Jim’s move-in weekend pounding her own ceiling with a broom handle in protest.
    The building’s architectural quirks struck Jen as most problematic on late Saturday evenings, when the upstairs neighbors’ ungulate children repaired to their grandparents’ house and their parents would celebrate their reprieve with a thumping multiroom sexual odyssey—what Jim called their “weekly all-hands meeting”—often scored to
Buena Vista Social Club
or, on at least one harrowing occasion, Raffi’s
Singable Songs for the Very Young,
whose material provided a ready template for marching band–style refrains that the neighbors synced with recognizably percussive motions.
    FIVE! LITTLE! SPECKLED! FROGS!
    SAT! ON A! SPECKLED! LOG!
    EATING! THE MOST! DELICIOUS! BUGS!
    Then, occasionally, what sounded like a lamp would
chank
to the floor or a bedside table would
whomp
over on its side, followed by the scrabbling of either a small dog’s or a large cat’s paws as it fled for safety to another room.
    “Should we tell them?” Jen asked Jim late one night as they lay in bed, eyes wide in the dark, as the woman upstairs improvised a bellowing descant to her husband’s rapid Raffian melody. “It’s like they’re invading their own privacy.”
    ONE! JUMPED! INTO! THE POOL!
    WHERE! IT! WAS NICE! AND COOL!
    THEN! THERE WERE FOUR GREEN SPECKLED FROGS
    “I’m just glad they’re happy,” Jim said. Their downstairs neighbor broomed her ceiling, just once, as if in warning.
    After the end of her Federloss job, Jen might have assumed that she and Jim would be giving their neighbors more opportunities to invade their privacy now that she was unencumbered by the everyday stresses and timesucks of gainful employment. But Jen and Jim convened fewer all-hands meetings during her enforced sabbatical, for no reason that either could have pinpointed, save perhaps for a sheepishness that floated around the post-layoff Jen like a twilight cloud of gnats. She began too many emails—even to Meg, even to Pam—with “I know you must be totally busy, but I just wondered…” She thanked friends too profusely—even Meg, even Pam—when they met for coffee or a drink, and Jen always insisted on paying. She avoided parties, because she’d “have nothing to say.”
    “I just find it hard to do small talk if I can’t account for my time,” Jen said to Meg on the phone.
    “Right,” Meg replied, “because there’s always a velvet rope and a horde of squealing fans around the guy at the party who wants to talk about
his job.
”
    Jen kept an Excel spreadsheet on her elderly laptop titled REAL JOBS AND OTHER JOBS . At first, tapping through fingerless gloves at a kitchen table made dizzy on its oak-finish-and-particleboard haunches by the humidity swings of too many New York City summers, Jen applied for only REAL JOBS : grantwriting, speechwriting, communications work for any worthy cause she could find. But as the winter grew colder and bleaker, she put in for more and more OTHER JOBS . She applied to write copy for the Feminist Porn Collective, but belatedly discovered that she would be paid mainly in feminist porn. She landed an interview to be the research assistant to an elderly romance novelist and semireclusive candle-wax heiress, only to find out ex post facto that the novelist had employed a total of six research assistants over forty years, and each was a white male with a poetry MFA and/or a direct or family connection to Phillips Exeter Academy. She drafted a few speeches for a third-party mayoral candidate whose campaign platform included the abolishment of both private schools and gender designations on government forms. She acted as writing tutor to the sixteen-year-old son of a well-known entertainment lawyer, until she refused to help him forge a Vyvanse prescription, whereupon the teen told his mother (untruthfully) that Jen had