But there were moments now when Greer, falling into a funk of exhaustion or boredom at the prospect of repeating the mantras of her book over and over, wondered whether her book, despite its success, was a little ridiculous. After all, you could use your outside voice and scream your head off, but sometimes it didn’t seem as if the screaming was being heard.
Tonight, on this wet, slick and cold night, the publisher, Karen Nordquist, was throwing this party in her showplace of a home, which had a living room with double-height ceilings and a wall of books with a ladder. At some point earlier, Karen had climbed the ladder to give a toast to Greer. Everyone looked nervously up at her as she headed for the top still holding her martini, but she was fearless. And when she stood up there looking down at the room, she said, a little drunkenly, “Wow, I can see the parts in everyone’s hair. Very neat.” There was laughter. “I can see how much you all care about personal grooming. But more to the point I can see how much you all care about this amazing book, this phenomenon, Outside Voices. And so do I. Greer, we love you!”
From down below, Greer said, fatuously, “And I love all of you too.” But then she looked around and felt overcome. It wasn’t by love, though of course she did love several people in this room—Cory was here, holding Emilia, and there were good friends all around—but this was something else. She was struck by the way everyone was looking toward her with expectation. People wanted one another to do something. They wanted someone to say the thing that they could then take into themselves and transform into something else. A word might land in a certain way; or maybe not even a word. Maybe a gesture, or a moment of listening. This platform, Greer’s book that tried hard and was encouraging and bracing, was not, she knew, original or brilliant; this platform was definitely imperfect. And Greer wasn’t a firebrand. She could never be that.
“I’m going to keep this brief,” she said, and she saw some people in the room look relieved. No one ever wanted a writer to go on and on at her own book party. “We’re here tonight in this strange time. This long, strange time. Every new thing that shocks us is just that, a shock. But not really a surprise. The success of this book in the middle of this time,” Greer said, “has been confusing. But also welcome. Though of course my poor eardrums are suffering. This morning I did a school visit with a group of third-graders, and those girls have pipes. I’m still in pain!” There was laughter. “I’ve never been loud,” said Greer. “You know that by now. Oh, you know everything about me by now.” Then she said, “I’m going to read just a tiny amount from the book. An amuse-bouche.” She picked up the book with its bright cover with the now-recognizable image of the open mouth, and read for exactly one minute and forty seconds, and then she was finished. They all clapped, then they returned to their worried conversations and their drinking. Greer’s face was hot, lit, as it always was from public speaking, even now.
Cory came over, Emilia wrapped around his neck, though her eyes looked a little wild. At fifteen months of age she should not have been awake this late, but why not; her mother had been on the bestseller list for one full year. Emilia had stomped around in circles all night, nearly deranged. Earlier, she’d gotten two steps up the ladder before her babysitter snatched her by the collar and hauled her in. Now that babysitter, Kay Chung, who was sixteen and a high school student who lived with her family in Sheepshead Bay, stood on Cory’s other side with her hand on Emilia’s head. Kay was small and fireplug-fierce, in a bulky Nordic sweater and a little skirt. Greer had hired her on the recommendation of a friend, but Kay turned out to be not only wonderful with the baby, but also wonderful more generally. Kay was, as she described herself without irony or amusement, radical in most of her views, but she warned that that didn’t mean they conformed to any one orthodoxy.
“So what are you saying, exactly?” Greer had asked her late on a Saturday night. She and Cory had just returned from a dinner party. They were standing in the front hallway of the brownstone where they now lived, waiting for a car service to come take the babysitter home.
“I’m a skeptical person, I guess,” said Kay. Pressed, she tried to describe what she meant. “I want you to know I think you’re great, Greer. I totally do. My friends and I have all read your book and they’re impressed that I sit for you,” she said benevolently. “We should all definitely assert ourselves more in the world, that’s totally true. But I look at everything that women did and said in recent history, and somehow we still got to a caveman moment. And our responses to it just aren’t enough, because the structures are still in place, right?”
She wasn’t asking Greer a question, but just wanted to make a point. Kay was always organizing at her school, getting involved in assemblies and mini-marches and what she called “Twitter fires,” in which she took a scorched-earth tone and never apologized. She and her friends didn’t care about figureheads, she said dismissively, leaders of a cause, like in the past. These figures weren’t necessary, and they weren’t even real. “We don’t need to put people on a pedestal,” she said. “Everyone can lead. Everyone can jump in.”
She offered these opinions as if they were entirely new; the pleasure and excitement in her voice were stirring. Greer could have said to her, “Yes, I know all about this. Faith said that women said the same thing back in the seventies,” but that wouldn’t have been kind.
There shouldn’t be a hierarchy, Kay explained, because that always led to someone being kept down, and there had been enough of that throughout history, and no one needed it anymore, and it assumed that the white, cisgender, binary view of everything was the correct one, the only one, when in fact it wasn’t. We’re done with that for good, she said. And anyway, Kay went on in a chatty voice of amazing confidence, it wasn’t so much about people as it was about ideas.
Greer didn’t know what to say in response to the babysitter’s soliloquy except to repeat some of what she had already said in the book, taking a tone of encouragement and rage; “encou-rage-ment,” she’d called it. Since Kay had been babysitting for Emilia on weekends, Greer had given her every item related to Outside Voices: the hardcover, the workbook, the desk calendar, and, Cory said, the snack food. Also, Kay often said, “If you have anything for me to read . . .” and Greer and Cory gave her books, lots of them, novels and collections of essays, and even some of their old college texts, heavily underlined, plus the book that Greer had borrowed from Professor Malick and forgotten to return. Greer had never made sense of that book, but Kay had said it was very interesting and even really funny to read those outdated ways of thinking.
“Our babysitter is smarter than we are,” Greer liked to say to people. “Much. I’m telling you, she’s going to go far.” But the problem was that the babysitter could not be babied, could not be swaddled and comforted by Outside Voices. The small triumph of having a well-meaning feminist rallying cry on the bestseller list did not seem to help this girl, who knew she had a real future but was afraid that everything would be repeatedly smashed to pieces.
Now it was time to leave the publisher’s party in Greer’s honor, though the party would continue on without her. The older people left and the younger ones stayed. Greer and Cory offered Kay a ride home, but she said no thanks, did they mind if she stayed a little longer? The babysitter had gotten to know a couple of the interns. She quickly kissed the top of Emilia’s head, said, “Bye, bunny girl,” then returned to the pack of interns, who pulled her in.
“I am so sick of the expression ‘outside voices,’” Greer said to Cory in the car heading home.