The Female Persuasion

by Meg Wolitzer

  While this was happening, the high hair of the first half of the decade precipitously came down. Faith intentionally dropped a full can of Aqua Net hairspray into the bathroom garbage pail, where it began to hiss and unload its pressurized contents. For years her hair was full and floaty. By 1968 she and Annie Silvestri, still roommates, wore jeans and Indian-print shirts instead of the modified stewardess dresses they’d been wearing for so long.

  At the antiwar meetings Faith attended, at first she had mostly sat and listened. Some of the men who spoke were unusually articulate. Faith, when she spoke, was perceived as smart and articulate too, but the men felt free to cut in and interrupt her. She tried to talk about abortion reform, but they weren’t interested. “You can’t compare it with Vietnam, where people are actually dying,” someone said one night, cutting her off.

  “Women are dying here,” said Faith, and people started shouting at her.

  Another woman cried out, in Faith’s defense, “Let her talk!” but Faith was shut down anyway, and finally she stopped trying.

  As Faith was walking out of the meeting, the woman who had yelled out on her behalf came over and said, “Doesn’t this make you so furious sometimes?”

  “It does! I’m Faith, by the way.”

  “Well, hello, Faith, I’m Evelyn. Listen, I’m getting together this weekend with some women, and we drink hard and let loose, and you will definitely get your say. You should come.”

  So Faith went with Evelyn Pangborn to a long dark apartment in upper Manhattan, where a group of women sat around drinking and smoking, and when they weren’t being dead serious and full of rage, they were also very witty. They argued and plotted; a few of them said they were part of a group that was planning to disrupt the Miss America pageant in the fall. Several of them had already been arrested for acts of civil disobedience. Some were part of ad hoc radical groups that had splintered off from the antiwar groups. A black woman said, “I can’t tell you how often I go to a meeting and get treated with condescension and hostility.” There was a young suburban mother at the meeting who complained that her husband was indifferent to her exhaustion.

  “I just feel that motherhood has me right where it wants me,” this woman said. “And then I hate myself for feeling so cold and angry and unmaternal.”

  “Oh, I hate myself for feeling a thousand different ways,” said someone else. “I am a temple of self-hatred.”

  “Why are we so hard on ourselves?” asked someone with great plaintiveness. Faith thought, it’s not that I’m so hard on myself exactly, it’s that I’ve learned to adopt the views of men as if they were my own. When Harry the trumpeter back in Vegas had told Faith that her nose was big, she’d taken in that opinion. When men filled a room with their voices and insisted to her that abortion was a middle-class, second-tier concern, she’d tried to defend her point, but had been overrun.

  Faith began telling the women about accompanying her friend for an abortion in Las Vegas. “We had to wear blindfolds, and we drove around and around. And when she almost bled to death, one of the nurses treated her like a criminal. I think that as long as we keep our blindfolds on, you know, literally and figuratively, then we’re really—to use a word that’s relevant here—in trouble.”

  “We can’t have men making our decisions anymore,” someone else said. “What I do with my body, and how I choose to spend my time—all of it is my decision. I get to decide.”

  “That sounds like song lyrics,” said the woman whose apartment this was. “I . . . get . . . to . . . de-cide.”

  “I . . . get . . . to . . . de-cide,” they all jokingly sang along with her, this diverse group of women with frizzed-out hair and sloganed T-shirts, or secretarial suits, or soft and durable housewife-wear, or expensive designer trappings. Faith thought that she didn’t have to like them all, but she also recognized that they were in it together—“it” being the way it was for them. For women. The way it had been for centuries. The stuck place. She sang along with them, her voice coming out in a loud quaver. But it didn’t matter that you quavered; it only mattered that you made yourself heard.

  Afterward, out on the street heading for the train, the young mother said to Faith, “You’re a very good speaker! Very passionate in a quiet, appealing way. We all liked listening to you. You’re sort of hypnotic. Has anyone ever told you that?”

  “No,” said Faith with a laugh. “I promise you, no one ever has. Nor will they ever again.” It was a compliment that both pleased and affected her, and suddenly she flickered on the image of herself standing onstage at the nightclub at the Sands. Standing still on that dark stage, imagining she was appearing in front of an enormous audience.

  The woman was named Shirley Pepper, and she said that before her baby was born she had worked at Life magazine, and that she hoped to return to work as soon as she could get decent child care. “That’s another critical issue in this goddamn country,” said Shirley. “No access to cheap, good child care.” Later, Shirley Pepper, by then back in publishing, was the one to come up with the idea for Bloomer magazine. “There are things we can do that Ms. isn’t going to be interested in,” she said. “We can be a little rougher around the edges.” There had been small publications for women circulating for some time; there was a desire for more of this. The women’s movement had by then fully taken off, and Faith had gotten involved. Back in August of 1970 she had marched in an enormous crowd down Fifth Avenue. The three demands that day had been for free abortion on demand, 24-hour childcare, and equal opportunity in employment and education. Later, she couldn’t remember what was written on the sign she carried. One of those three things? All of them? She had felt the outrage, the thrill. It was in the air that day, and of course then it was everywhere. There was talk of misogyny. Patriarchy. The myth of the vaginal orgasm.

  Shirley had gotten to know many women activists over the years, and she brought in some of them to help start the magazine. She indefatigably rounded up investors—an arduous and painstaking task—with the help of her willing husband, who worked for IBM. Faith was brought in to be part of the magazine because of her calmly pleasing speaking style, as well as her ability to listen and her willingness to work. But probably also because of that indescribable thing about Faith—how you didn’t really know her, but you just wanted to be around her.

  The early days of Bloomer included wild-eyed all-nighters at the Houston Street offices, reached by the ominously slow and constantly breaking elevator, which had been inspected many times over by one Milton Santiago, who had signed off on its functionality again and again in the same familiar, slanted hand. “Milton Santiago, you are a disgrace to the elevator inspection industry,” the women said. “Milton Santiago, if you were Millie Santiago, this shit would get done!” They laughed and worked in the open space with the tall, dusty windows, secure in their mission, as well as in the inevitability of their plans and ideas. Frustration and rage at the injustice that women experienced all over America and the world lived side by side with bake-sale optimism about everything that could be done to wipe it out.

  “I’ll be your Sherpa,” Faith had once told a cluster of other editors and young assistants as she led them down five flights of stairs in darkness after a late-night closing, the elevator once again predictably broken. “Come on, everyone!” she called, flicking open a Zippo lighter. That night the flame gave the women’s faces in those close quarters the stuttering light-and-dark appearance of people in a Flemish painting, all eye-gleam and contrapuntal shadow and rose cheek and curved hand—if, in fact, the Flemish artists had ever painted groups of women together without men.

  They followed her, laughing and stumbling a little, holding on to one another in the narrow stairwell, someone’s hand on someone else’s shoulder or hip, all that jutting female convexity contained in a single, steeply pitched corridor. They planned future issues as they descended the stairs, feeling certain that their enterprise would
last as long as the earth itself. The women were flushed with happiness, made greater because it was a communal flush. At the bottom there were easy hugs among friends in the way that women did, and that men wouldn’t do for at least another twenty-five years.

  And soon they were all petitioning, going to Washington and to panel discussions and raucous events, making bang-on-a-can-loud noise. “Bra-burning,” journalists wrote about the women’s movement, though bra-burning wasn’t actually a thing. In retrospect, Faith thought that some of what had happened during this time looked a little absurd, but she was reminded by older activists that the vanguard had to be extreme so that the more moderate people could take up the cause and be accepted. Faith was often exhausted in those years, falling asleep in someone else’s lap in the hallway of a municipal building. She had a soft shoulder bag made out of different pieces of patchwork fabric, and she took it with her everywhere. At first it contained leaflets, cigarettes, chocolate, policy papers, phone numbers, though later on it also held baby bottles and loose diaper pins.

  But before all of that had happened—before Bloomer, before Faith Frank became Faith Frank—still on the very first night, after the evening in the apartment in upper Manhattan full of women who had something to say, Faith excitedly returned to her own apartment in the Village. Annie Silvestri, who had remained her roommate over all these years, was rolling up her hair with orange juice cans and getting ready for bed, but Faith was in an excited mood and wanted to talk about what had happened that evening.

  “I told them about your abortion,” she said.

  Annie turned around. “What? You did?”

  “Well, I didn’t use your name or say who you were, of course. But I told them about it to make a point. We need to make a point. A lot of points.”

  “Oh for God’s sake, Faith, I don’t want to make a point,” Annie said.

  “I understand, but there are other women out there who’ve been through the same experience. We need to talk about it.”

  “‘We’?”

  “Yes, we. Women are already doing this. I want to help them. Everybody’s been there for civil rights and stopping the war. For years everyone has been out there. We need to be out there like that for legal abortion. Why don’t you want to be part of it so that other women don’t have to go through what you did? I don’t understand.”

  “That’s the difference between us,” Annie said. “I’ve been through enough, and I don’t feel the need to figure it out or talk about it. It happened to me, Faith, not to you. It happened to me, and it was really horrible, and I have spent a lot of time trying to separate myself from that night when I hemorrhaged and was treated like dirt. You can say we need abortion reform, and you want to be part of it, and good for you, but I never want to talk about that experience ever again, and I am not kidding you. So if you’re going to keep being my roommate, if we’re going to keep living here together, that’s one of the ground rules.”

  They shared the apartment for a few more months, though their friendship had changed. Neither of them talked about the change, and when they were both home at the same time they came together for a shared meal, often a quick TV dinner, but the conversation kept to new boundaries. Faith was propelled almost exclusively by political work, and Annie, who had begun dating a law student, was quietly reading up on everything he was studying, at first so they could have something to talk about, but then because it interested her too. She found she had a preternatural skill for reading and comprehending legal language.

  Annie married the law student, who got an academic position teaching undergraduates at Purdue. “We’re going to the Midwest, can you believe it?” Annie said. There were a few postcards back and forth in the beginning, and then silence, and nothing was heard of her again for a very long time. Faith continued to go to antiwar rallies, but now she became increasingly involved with abortion reform, attending smaller meetings—all women, everyone talking, but not at once. Along with the others, Faith was lifted onto the lightest but strongest breeze; she wondered if it was her own consciousness, or something entirely different. Whatever it was, it pulled her along.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the early months of Bloomer, after advertising had been tentatively secured for a few small, modest issues and there had been a flurry of initial press about the magazine, Faith and two other women went out to find advertisers for future issues. “If we don’t sell more ad space,” said Shirley, “we’re going to go under permanently in about a minute. We are an underdog. I think we’re going to really have to push ourselves here.”

  One morning in the summer of 1973, during a meeting at Nabisco, Faith, Shirley Pepper, and Evelyn Pangborn sat in a conference room with three men, pushing for an ad buy, giving their usual spiel. It didn’t go particularly well—it rarely did—for it was hard to convey why a massive corporation ought to advertise in this number-two magazine for women’s libbers that was likely to fail soon and become just a quirk, a footnote from this rolling time.

  The men at Nabisco said they would “see,” and that they would “think about it.” Finally one of them stood and said, “Thank you, ladies, we will put our noggins together and reach a decision.” They were more courteous than some—really, more courteous than most.

  On the way out of the meeting, one of the men looked at Faith and said, “Wait. I know you.”

  “Sorry?”

  He pulled her aside and she looked at him; he’d been coiled in a corner the whole time in his chair, a businessman in his midthirties, lean, tailored, sideburned, dark and attractive. Something about him registered in her now, but it was still unclear to her what it was.

  “Didn’t we meet a long time ago?” he asked quietly. “In Las Vegas? At the Swann?”

  She stared at him, shocked, and then it returned to her. He’d been the man who’d come to the casino one night with a woman, the man who had flirted with Faith and told her about how he worked in the field of . . . cookies and crackers, that was what he’d said.

  “How did you possibly remember me?” Faith asked him. “It’s been, what, seven or eight years. It’s sort of insane that you remember.”

  “I’m good that way. You warned me that the house would always win. I think you saved me from ruin, so thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. But also, I look totally different now. No uniform. And . . . my hair.”

  “Right, it was sort of vertical back then, I think. Do I look different to you?”

  She looked him over for an extended and pleasurable moment. He was much more stylish than his colleagues, less aggressively corporate, and leaner and younger. His dark hair was longer than it had been back in ’65, of course. He wore an expensive suit now that was cut well, and, she saw, no wedding ring. He smelled interesting, acidic.

  It would turn out that he was right, he was good that way; he remembered everything from every moment. But the catch was that he remembered it only if he was paying attention, which he didn’t always do.

  “Can we explore the question of that ad space a little more?” he asked. “I’m not sure any of my colleagues were convinced by your pitch. To tell you the truth, I’m pretty sure they weren’t.”

  “You mean just me? Or me and the others?”

  “Just you. One-on-one might accomplish more.”

  Of course, there was strong flirtation here again, as there had been in the casino; it wasn’t hidden, but was out in the open like his acidic fragrance, and didn’t supersede the truth of what he was saying. Faith and Shirley and Evelyn hadn’t been very successful selling ads so far; from here they were going off to talk to the people at Clairol, but it was obvious that their standard pitch wasn’t working very well.

  “I think it requires a longer conversation,” he said. “Dinner with me tonight? While it’s still fresh in our minds?”

  “Fresh in our minds,” she repeated pointlessly. He wan
ted to sleep with her, and she would have been ridiculously ignorant if she didn’t know it.

  She wasn’t going to sleep with the Nabisco executive, though his face was worth contemplation for some reason, and she could imagine the underlayer of his body beneath his clothing. It wasn’t just that she could imagine it; as soon as she imagined it, she realized that what mattered was that she was imagining it. But she couldn’t sleep with him. Let him think she might. That was a business transaction. She studied his face and then finally said, “Sure.”

  “Why does he want to discuss it further with you?” Shirley asked irritably as they stood hanging from straps on the IRT going back downtown.

  “I’ll draw you a diagram, Shirley,” murmured Evelyn.

  “I’m not going to sleep with him, for God’s sake,” said Faith. She didn’t tell them that she’d met him a long time ago, and that, freakishly, he had remembered that they’d met; and that, perhaps almost as freakishly, she had come to remember it too. “But sure, fine, I’ll have dinner with him, why not? I’ll make him listen to the magazine’s objectives.”

  “Maybe he’s a stealth women’s libber,” said Shirley, “and he wants to help us strategize. And if Faith can spin a magic web across his vision that enchants him and seals the deal, then that’s fine.”

  “Oh yes. I am full of enchantment,” Faith said mildly.

  “You are, actually,” said Evelyn. “You’re one of those people who other people enjoy. It’s a talent.”