She didn’t even blink. Should I not have said “flushable”? Should I not have said “women”? Should I have said “people”? “Women and people?” Women are people. All people are human beings. My pits were sweating, even though the room was cold. The fireplace behind us was a barren showpiece. All eyes—dark eyes and light eyes, lined eyes and nude eyes, and eyes framed by false lashes—were on me, begging me to make this moment with our elder less excruciatingly awkward. I remembered when Evan wanted 50 percent equity and how Maren had laughed like a cold dead fish and said, You must be shitting me, and Evan saying, Hey, this is a negotiation, and Maren saying, Last I checked you didn’t have the authority of a vagina, and Evan looking to me, all casual, saying, Are you sure this is the cunt you want to be going into business with? How I said, Yes, this is the cunt I choose, and he said, I just want you both to be sure. This is the easy part. It doesn’t get any easier from here. We gave him 20 percent and the third seat on our board.
Finally, Arianna picked her mic back up. “Don’t speak,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said automatically.
“Stop apologizing, Devin,” she said, leaning in to squeeze one of my knees, before turning back to the adoring crowd. “This is a lesson for everybody. After you put out, you shut up. You put what you fucking want on the table, and then you sit quietly until they make their fucking counteroffer.”
I was afraid that if I said anything right then, I might start crying, so I put my mic in my lap and started a round of applause that, blessedly, everyone joined in on. Maren was standing at the back of the room near the doors, giving me a thumbs-up. I was overwhelmed at the amount of relief I felt seeing her there. She was still on my team. We were still a team.
“Wow, that was so powerful.” I took a deep breath. “Switching gears, maybe we can talk about what you’ve learned about balancing being a mom with being an entrepreneur.”
“I actually hate the word balance,” Arianna said. “I prefer blend.”
“Can you describe what that blend looks like?”
“I’m just speaking for myself, but for me, I have three kids. If you send me a Twitter DM, I might not have time to look at it until I’m pumping at the office. My assistant is at my house at six in the morning so we can do email while I hit the Peloton. The nanny has the day off on Sundays and for some reason it takes the kids forever to fall asleep—”
Maren was waving her phone at me broadly, like a flag. Stop, I mouthed.
Look, she mouthed back, gesturing at her phone, looking at the screen and back at me. I shook my head. I was not delivering that statement, not now. No way.
“—when I’m putting them to bed, so maybe I’ll be cuddling with them and reviewing an audit of our market segmentation on my tablet or something. My work is my life and my life is my work. And my kids are all of that and more.”
“That’s incredible,” I said, shuffling through my notes for a good follow-up. My question on the postpartum body dysmorphia she chronicled on Instagram didn’t seem appropriate. I could have asked her about her next venture with breast wipes, but I thought I should save that one for the end.
“What is something that makes you hopeful?” I asked.
“This. Women. Women speaking up. Women getting loud. Women talking to each other. Women saying, This really happened to me. Women sharing space to talk about times they failed, but also about the times they succeeded . . . Are we at time?”
She was looking at me and I was looking at her and that’s when I saw, over Arianna’s shoulder, the crowd. They seemed to appear everywhere at once: women dressed in all black, standing at the back and sides of the room. They were all wearing white sheet masks. The masks were one size fits all. On some women, they sagged around the chin. On others, they didn’t quite reach the hairline. No one had a nose. At first, that was the creepiest part of all—the complete lack of noses. Just a white flap to ventilate the nostrils. A gash in the mask for a mouth. They looked like burn victims.
They began to disperse throughout the crowd, carrying brightly colored bundles under their arms. I searched for Maren, but she was gone.
“It appears we have some S’Wipe samples for everyone,” I started to say, even while Arianna was shaking her head at me, concerned. The women in masks weren’t wearing Foundress-branded T-shirts. They weren’t staff. I reached for my phone, but it wasn’t even on me—it was in the closet. I felt like I had forgotten how to breathe.
“Melissa? Is Melissa here?” I was still gripping my mic. “I don’t mean Melissa. I mean Michelle! Security? Sorry, you guys, I think there’s been some slight miscommunication in the programming—”
“Hey, that’s my foot!” a woman yelled in the front row.
“Then move your fucking foot,” one of the creepy ghosts yelled back. A cyclone of gasps at the table. At the next table, two twentysomethings clutched their Kate Spade bags to their chests like armor. Something violent was about to happen. Somewhere, someone was crying. Maybe they had guns. Maybe this was the end of my life. A senseless mass murder of all the influencers they could find together in the same room. At least Maren and I would die together.
A masked woman walked directly toward me, one naked boob sticking defiantly out of her blouse, an actual baby attached to the nipple. I was cornered. I couldn’t run. I would have had to run right through them. There were at least thirty women, maybe forty. Some of the masks were starting to slip off and the protestors were frantically trying to keep them stuck on, even tilting their faces up at the ceiling so it almost looked like they were praying when they unrolled the pink and green beach towels, the beach towels from my own office, the beach towels that said “Believe Victims” and once their flags had unfurled, they began chanting the words.
You Must Change Your Life
Maren
According to the internet, I was right.
Does your friend only talk about her relationship at a very surface level, without going into detail about what it’s like when the two are alone together?
Is she attached to her phone when she’s away from him, just in case she might miss a message and risk his anger?
Does she seem apologetic for her partner’s behavior?
Does she make excuses on his behalf?
Devin was the bird in the wall, flapping her wings desperately as I tried to identify the source of her entrapment. How had I missed the signs for so long? Had she wanted me to notice? Were all her excuses for his behavior, her denial, cries for my help?
She was staring out the window of the cab, lost in her own movie, sniffling intermittently, while I googled what to do. I was taking her home. At least with me, she was safe.