What Happens When Your Most Uncomfortable Moment Goes Viral?
Author Lorrie Moore once said, “A short story is a love affair, a novel is a marriage.” With Sunday Shorts, OprahMag.com invites you to join our own love affair with short fiction by reading original stories from some of our favorite writers.
Over five novels and a short story collection, Curtis Sittenfeld has, with a mix of compassion and irony, mined the casual cruelties of the elite for comic gold. Her female characters often have hilariously warped senses of themselves and the world. Jill, the protagonist of “White Women LOL,” is no different; when she’s caught on camera in a confrontation construed as racist, her notion of her own “wokeness” is called into question. What ensues is a narrative that very much speaks to our current cultural moment and how racial tensions play out over social media.
"WHITE WOMEN LOL"
Kiwi the Shih Tzu gets loose on the Thursday before the schools in the district let out for winter break. This means everyone knows, in a way they might not if he got loose after break had started. Regardless, everyone knows Kiwi. He weighs maybe twelve pounds, and the plentiful white fur around his face accentuates his dark eyes and dark little nose. (Do dogs have faces? Jill isn’t sure.) But Kiwi is both yippy and cute, and, though Jill—who is not particularly a dog lover—has never sought to pet him, he’s the only dog at the elementary school dropoff whose name she knows.
Aside from his cuteness, there are probably two other reasons Kiwi is a school celebrity: The first is that he belongs to the Johnson family, and Vanessa Johnson herself is something of a celebrity. She’s an anchor on Channel 8 evening news, is widely agreed to be the most beautiful mother at Hardale East Elementary School, is black, and lives in the tree-lined, large-house-filled neighborhood adjacent to the school, which allows her to bring Kiwi on a leash when she walks with her children to school in the morning; meanwhile, almost all of the school’s other black families, whose children account for under ten percent of the student body, live miles to the north, and ride the bus to campus. The second reason for Kiwi’s celebrity is that, for kids, including Jill’s own son and daughter, Shih Tzu is fun to say.
The way Kiwi escapes is that the Johnsons’ housecleaner, who has been working for them on a weekly basis for years, carries a bag of garbage outside to the trash bin, leaves the back door open, and doesn’t securely close the storm door. Apparently, while the housecleaner is despondent, Vanessa Johnson doesn’t blame her; Kiwi is wily, and such a thing could have happened on anyone’s watch. But, as Jill hears from her best friend Amy, whose other best friend is Vanessa, it isn’t the first time the housecleaner has let this happen. However, in the other instances, Kiwi didn’t make it out of the backyard.
It’s from Amy that Jill learns about Kiwi. At 9 p.m. Thursday, Amy texts her Kiwi has been missing since noon!
This is the first text Amy has sent Jill in weeks, and Jill immediately replies, Oh no what happened?
Amy explains the situation, and Jill expresses concern, which she does feel, though perhaps not as much as an actual dog lover would and not a concern totally separate from her own concerns about her strained friendship with Amy and her—Jill’s—recently tarnished standing in the community. Jill initially thinks she’s learning about a dog’s imminent death rather than its escape; she thinks she’s feeling a conclusive sorrow rather than the agitated hope of the unresolved. Their neighborhood is a grid of quiet, stately residential avenues bound by significantly busier streets. Additionally, in their part of the Midwest, a cold front is expected for the weekend and the temperature will likely fall to the single digits.
Jill and Amy engage in a thirteen-text volley, and the last text between them, from Jill, is Wow I feel so bad, keep me posted
She refrains from adding:
Does everyone at school hate me?
Is it too soon for me to come back to dropoff?
Are we still friends?
Almost three weeks prior, Amy’s husband Rick hosted her fortieth birthday party in the elegantly appointed back room of a trendy downtown restaurant. There was a fireplace, a bar, and many high round tables where guests could congregate first for drinks and then for the buffet dinner. Instead of flowers, there were willow branches and white lights.
About four dozen people were in attendance, the majority of them Hardale East Elementary School parents. Jill drank two glasses of wine and participated in several enjoyable conversations: one with Joanna Thomas and Wendy Upson about whether Mrs. Pogue, who was all of their daughters’ first grade teacher, was pregnant; one with Sarah O’Dell about what percent reprehensible Ivanka Trump was (Jill said 99%, Sarah said 200%); and one with Stewart Nowacki about the candy- cane-patterned pants he was wearing. Stewart Nowacki was Jill’s go-to for harmless married flirtation, and when she’d learned that he was also her friend Rose’s go-to for harmless married flirtation, it had enhanced rather than diminished her own flirtation with him because then she and Rose could jokily compare notes as well as speculate about whether Stewart and his wife Megan still had sex. Jill didn’t speak to Vanessa Johnson, though she did end up at the bar at the same time as Vanessa’s husband Bobby; as was often the case at such gatherings, Vanessa and Bobby were the only black people present. Jill and Bobby warmly exclaimed about how hard it was to believe that the busy month of December had arrived already.
The birthday cake was exceptional: hazelnut-almond topped with dark chocolate ganache and white chocolate truffles. The party was just winding down, with a third or so of the guests having departed, when Jill emerged from the restroom and noticed a table of five people who hadn’t been there when she’d entered the restroom. They were black.
They were black, and they were stylish: two women and three men, all probably a little younger than Amy and Jill. One woman wore a floral silk blouse with a maroon background, and the other wore a black shrug over a beige camisole. Of the men, one wore a coat and tie, one a coat without a tie, and the third an orange cravat.
They weren’t Amy’s friends—they weren’t guests—because Jill would have known them if they were. It was impossible that Amy would have friends close enough for inclusion at her birthday party whom Jill had never met. Jill also knew they weren’t Amy’s guests because they weren’t mingling. And did she know because they were black?Sure, of course—also that.
She approached their table. In the time since, she has vacillated between attempting to recreate her own mindset and to permanently erase it from her memory. She thinks she was trying harder than usual—harder than she would have with a group of white people—to seem friendly and diplomatic. Though her first words to the group were not recorded, what she had said was “I realize this might not be obvious, but there’s a private party going on in this room. A birthday party.”
The two women and three men looked at her with varying degrees of amusement and irritation. Jill added, “You’re not friends of Vanessa and Bobby, are you?”
After a pause, the woman in the floral blouse said, “No. We’re not friends of Vanessa and Bobby.”
“If you wouldn’t mind taking your drinks to the main room,” Jill said, and, though she was unaware of it in the moment, the recording had started, “I think that would be best.”
With undisguised contempt, the man wearing the cravat said, “Oh, really? Is that what you think?”
“I’m not trying to be—” For the first time, Jill faltered. “It’s my friend Amy’s birthday, and her husband rented this room. That’s all.”
The woman in the blouse said, also contemptuously, “Do you feel unsafe? Are you going to call the cops?”
“Am I going to call the cops?” Jill was repeating these words, she is certain, in bewilderment at the escalation. But she concedes that, in the video, if one is inclined toward such an interpretation, her tone might come off as more contemplative. “This isn’t—” she began, but expressing herself had, abruptly, become very challenging. She said, “This isn’t political. I just think you’d all be more comfortable in the other room.”
“Bless your heart,” the man in the cravat said. “Bless your heart for not making this political.”
One of the other two men, the one not wearing a tie, said, “Your friend’s party is over. The room was rented until ten o’clock.” He held out his left arm, and on his wrist was a steel and white gold watch, which was, as it happened, the same watch worn by Jill’s husband Ken. The time displayed was ten-twenty.
In a mocking voice, the woman in the blouse said, “Sorry!” And, with fake cheer, the man in the cravat said, “So that’s why they’re letting in the Negro riffraff!”
“That’s not at all what I meant,” Jill said.
One of the men hadn’t spoken, and one of the women hadn’t, either; the woman was the one using her phone to record the encounter, as Jill subsequently deduced from the angle of the camera. The man with the watch said, “Just like you, we’re trying to enjoy an evening out. Could you leave us alone?” His voice contained no note of sarcasm, and later Jill wished she had taken her cue from him.
Instead, she folded her arms and sighed, and even she must admit that, in the video, the sigh is peevish, not compassionate or repentant. But the man in the cravat and the woman in the blouse were being so rude! Over a sincere misunderstanding! Jill said, “Well, I didn’t realize what time it was.”
The woman in the blouse laughed mirthlessly. This is where the recording ends.
By late Friday afternoon—the last day of school before winter break, more than 24 hours after Kiwi’s escape—fliers blanket the neighborhood. There is one on the lamp post outside Jill’s family’s house, which Jill spies from her living room window and, though she’s still mostly hiding indoors almost three weeks after Amy’s birthday party, she walks out to examine it.
In big letters at the top, the flier says LOST DOG, then there’s a phone number, then there’s a large color photo of Kiwi looking particularly adorable, his tongue hanging out, then in smaller print it says: Our beloved Kiwi has been missing since 12/21. Please call if you see him!! He loves dog treats, especially Doggy Did brand turkey liver flavor and might approach if you shake a container of them. Call any time day or night!!!
Already, Jill has received a mass email from Vanessa containing all the same information, with the additional hopeful tidbit (this is how Jill realizes that they are not exactly on a canine death watch) that Kiwi was spotted early this morning in a yard on Goodridge Lane, though he ran away when the person tried to read his tags, and the additional factual tidbit that live traps are being set up at three locations. The email, which was forwarded to Jill four other times after she received it from Vanessa (Jill takes it as a positive sign that she still makes her acquaintances’ forwarding cut), ended with an appeal to repost or at least reply to Vanessa’s posts about Kiwi on Facebook and Nextdoor so as to make them appear more prominently in people’s feeds.
As Jill re-enters her house, she can hear the competing sounds of her children’s iPads in the kitchen; her daughter, who is six, is watching Youtube videos of a tween singer, and her son, who is ten, is watching Youtube videos of other kids playing video games. She would repost Vanessa’s Facebook posts, Jill thinks, if she were still on Facebook. But almost three weeks ago, she deleted her account.
It was the man with the cravat—it turned out his name was Ronald William Fitzsimmons IV, and he was a curator at the contemporary art museum—who posted the video on Facebook the day after Amy’s party. His comment read Committed the crime of drinking $16 cocktails while black last night…white women LOL.
By the time Jill learned of the post, the video had been up for two hours, been viewed 937 times, and shared 201. The responses included:
- Ronald so sorry you had to endure this, that woman is idiotic garbage
- White privilege is a hell of a drug
- Internet, do your thing, let’s find out who Vodka Vicky is
There was a long comment that started, As a white woman who has been doing a lot of soul-searching lately… and the rest was so tedious that, even under the circumstances, Jill skimmed it. There was a GIF of a fair-haired white man blinking (posted by a black man) and another GIF of a cartoon rat shaking his finger in disapproval (posted by a black woman) and another GIF of a baby spitting out what looked like pureed peas in abject disgust (posted by a white woman).
In response to the exhortation to find out who the woman was, there was a comment from Joanna Thomas, one of the people with whom Jill had speculated about whether their daughters’ teacher was pregnant. I was at this party and I know this woman, Joanna had written. She is not a bad person and it’s sad to me we live in such divisive times.
Under Joanna’s comment, another mother from Hardale East Elementary School, a woman Jill knew in passing, had written, Your silence will not protect you, Joanna. Obviously, that’s Jill Gershin.
The woman had tagged Jill, which was how she found Ronald William Fitzsimmons IV’s original post and also, presumably, how strangers began to denounce her directly by tagging her when they shared the video. The first message began Lady you should of minded your own damn business… The second, which was where she stopped, said in its entirety Ha ha Vodka Vicky, did you buy that dress at Talbots?
On Saturday morning, Jill’s alarm goes off at six-thirty, an hour later than she sets it during the week; ever since the incident, she’s preferred to get her workouts in while her neighbors are sleeping. It’s still mostly dark, and a not terrible thirty-eight degrees, when she leaves the house, running west on Vista Boulevard. In her earbuds, she listens to an economics podcast; prior to the incident, she usually streamed pop mixes, but is she still allowed to listen to Rihanna and Beyoncé?
Jill has been jogging for twenty minutes, and the sky is more light than dark, when, shockingly, she sees Kiwi. Kiwi! Out of nowhere! So small and white-furred, and so surprisingly fast. He’s fifteen feet away? By this point, Jill is on Tyler Drive, which is a half-mile loop off Vista Boulevard. Kiwi is scampering across the sprawling front yard of a sprawling brick colonial house. Within seconds, he’s forty feet away. Jill is filled with adrenaline. What should her strategy be?
“Kiwi!” she cries just as the dog disappears around the side of the house. Jill darts over the frost-covered grass, tracking Kiwi’s path onto the driveway, under a porte cochere supported by Ionic columns, and into the backyard, which features a brick terrace and no sign of Kiwi. This is crushing. Jill doesn’t know who lives here. Should she knock on their door? It’s just after seven. If only she’d procured a container of turkey liver treats!
She turns in a circle, scanning the backyard, just in case. The grass beyond the terrace abuts a wooded area of a dozen or so acres—Tyler Drive is the fanciest street in the neighborhood, with a stone arch marking its only entrance—and Jill assumes Kiwi is somewhere in there. She pulls her phone from the thigh pocket of her leggings and, with trembling fingers, texts Amy, Just saw Kiwi!!! On Tyler drive. What’s Vanessa number? Couldn’t catch him ynfortunateky
Amy takes seven minutes to respond. By then, Jill has started to feel weird about her presence in a stranger’s backyard, so she returns to the street, and, still confused about a course of action, continues jogging.
Amy’s first text is a blue bubble containing Vanessa’s contact information. Her second is Great!! Her third reads U know about change of plan? Kiwi runs away whenever people see him.Her fourth text is a screenshot of a Facebook post from Vanessa. Update on our precious pup: The animal rescue experts are telling us he’s now “in flight mode” so if you see him, it’s VERY likely he will run away from you. You have 2 choices, 1 is do the opposite of what I said before (smh) - Don’t chase him, don’t call his name, don’t do anything except call me or Bobby ASAP. Choice 2 is - Lay down on the ground acting like you’re hurt, moan and whimper, get in fetal position, and he might come over to “help” you. This doesn’t sound crazy at all, right? Thank you friends <3
Jill stops jogging to read the post twice. She texts back, Yikes. Then she texts Vanessa about the sighting—It’s Jill Gershin, I saw Kiwi less than 10 min ago at 27 Tyler Drive but he ran northwest—and Vanessa texts back, Oh wow many thanks Jill! Bobby and I are about to go looking so we will start there. She includes the emoji that Jill thinks of as either praying hands or gratitude, though maybe it’s both.
Amy does not reply.
A few years earlier, in order to be more present with her family, Jill had turned off her push notifications for Facebook. Thus, it had been her friend Rose—the one with whom Jill shared the harmless crush on Stewart Nowacki—who, semi-inadvertently, alerted Jill to the video. Around 3 p.m. that Sunday, the day after the birthday party, Rose texted, Jill I think that thing on FB is so unfair to you. Hope you’re hanging in there. Immediately, uneasiness flared up in Jill, or maybe it was more that a bad feeling had been coursing through her body since the birthday party and it was then that it coalesced. Jill texted back Um…what thing on FB? But she checked without waiting for Rose’s reply.
She watched the video and read the comments while perched on a small antique rocking chair in an alcove of the upstairs hallway, a piece of furniture it was possible that no member of her family had ever used; she’d received Rose’s text on her way to the master bedroom to grab a basket of dirty laundry. Sitting on the rocker, Jill wondered if she might faint. This was horrifying. It was horrifying in several different ways. Did the video really show what it purported to show? Would she be fired from her job? (She was a senior project manager at the corporate headquarters of a chain of regional supermarkets.) Were her children now in danger? Did her family need to move to a different state?
She texted Amy, Can u call me?
When Amy didn’t call within forty seconds, Jill went to find Ken, who was in the kitchen boiling water for a priming solution for the beer he brewed at home. Ken did not have a Facebook account or otherwise participate in social media and tended, as a point of pride, to feign incomprehension about its vernacular. In this instance, however, perhaps due to Jill’s agitation, he did not showily request a definition of terms. “This is the kind of thing that could end up on ‘Good Morning America,’” Jill said.
As they watched the video together, she again felt that she might faint. On second viewing, she knew she didn’t come off well. But surely she didn’t come off as officially racist, like those white people in Target or at delis yelling at immigrants for wearing turbans or speaking Spanish. Did she?
She said to Ken, “How bad do you think it is?”
Mildly, he said, “If you thought they were crashing Amy’s party, it would have been better to ask the restaurant manager to talk to them.”
“Yes, obviously,” Jill snapped. “Should I time travel back to last night and do that instead?”
Ken shrugged. “Don’t viral videos blow over in a day or two?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “This is my first time starring in one.” When Ken didn’t respond, she added, “Are you worried about our family’s safety?”
Still mildly, he said, “In what sense?”
“Forget it.” She went back upstairs, texting Amy as she climbed the steps. Are u around? Really need to talk. Kind of freaking out.
When Amy still hadn’t responded within half an hour, Jill texted, Where are u? Is everything ok? An hour later, she texted, Seriously I’m getting worried.
Amy called her just after eight p.m., following a five-hour stretch in which Jill had not left the house. Instead of accompanying Ken and their daughter to their son’s basketball game, Jill had stayed in, and rather than meeting her family for dinner afterward at the pizza place they often went on Sundays, Jill had had the pizza delivered to their house. When Jill answered Amy’s call, she said, “Thank God. Where have you been all day?”
Amy sighed. “Yeah, this really sucks.”
“So you’ve seen it?”
“Yes,” Amy said. “I’ve seen it.”
“I mean, when people go looking for evidence of something, of course they’ll find it.”
“Well, it’s not like they had to look that hard.”
Jill was shocked. “Wait,” she said. “Do you think I’m some kind of white supremacist?”
“I think the whole thing is just awkward and embarrassing.” Jill assumed Amy meant embarrassing to Jill, until Amy added, “I wish you hadn’t mentioned that it was my birthday.”
For several hours, Jill had been imagining that, in her best friend capacity, Amy would say something wise and comforting and, ideally, exculpatory. To encounter the opposite from Amy was far more upsetting than from Ken.
“It also might have been nice to have a heads-up that it happened,” Amy was saying.
“I had no idea they were recording it,” Jill said. “I didn’t know it would have an afterlife. Honestly, I thought I was doing you a favor. If one of the bathroom stalls had run out of toilet paper and I’d seen a roll nearby, I’d have replaced it myself instead of bothering you at your own party.”
“You might want to give some thought to that comparison,” Amy said. “Black people and a roll of toilet paper—that’s really problematic.”
Jill considered pointing out that, as problematicness went, until the previous year, Amy had referred to the black students who were bused to Hardale East Elementary School as “deseg kids,” as in desegregation. Amy had attended Hardale East in the 1980s, and that was the term she’d grown up with; Jill, who had grown up in a different city, delicately said one day, “I think these days we call them transfer students.”
On the phone, Jill said, “Have you talked to Vanessa about the video?”
“Yes,” Amy said.
“And?”
“What do you want me to say? It’s not a good look.”
“Was she extra offended?”
“Well, it’s weird for her because she knows you.”
“You don’t think she’ll bring it up on the news, do you?”
“If you’re stressing, call her.” Amy sighed again. “I can’t believe that all the people I didn’t invite know about my party now.”
The Johnson family—Vanessa, Bobby, and their twin seven-year-old sons—were supposed to fly to Sarasota for Christmas with Bobby’s extended family. They were supposed to leave Saturday morning, December twenty-third, but they delayed their departure; apparently, the boys are inconsolable. Bobby and the twins did fly out Sunday morning—Kiwi has now been missing for three days—and Vanessa has stayed behind in the hope of catching Kiwi in time for them all to be together on Christmas day.
Jill learns this when she runs into her neighbor Eileen on Sunday afternoon at a pet products megastore, where Jill has gone to buy Doggy Did brand turkey liver treats and finds Eileen doing the same. Other dog treats are sold at her usual grocery store, Jill discovered, but not the Doggy Did turkey liver kind. Jill isn’t even sure that the recommendation to shake a treats container at Kiwi stands, but she dreamed last night that she caught Kiwi, and what if the dream was a premonition? When she awakened, it seemed imperative she do something. Also, the predicted temperature plunge has occurred, and now it’s ten degrees outside.
Jill additionally learns from Eileen that a fox was caught yesterday in one of the three live traps set for Kiwi, then the fox was freed; and that, as enticement, the traps contain hot dogs and Vanessa Johnson’s pajamas.
“How’s Vanessa holding up?” Jill asks.
“I heard she hasn’t slept since Thursday.”
“Is it because she doesn’t have any pajamas to wear?” Jill says.
Does Eileen not laugh because she doesn’t think it’s funny or because of Jill’s status as a pariah? “Because she’s so worried,” Eileen says.
“Right,” Jill says. “Of course.”
She was not fired from her job. But when she returned to work after the incident, she was summoned to a meeting with her boss, the director of human resources, and the assistant general counsel, and told that she was being suspended with pay until January second, while an investigation determined whether she’d violated company policy by engaging in “racial misconduct.” Although Jill wasn’t sure she should be signing anything without a lawyer of her own, she did so, agreeing to the terms, which included no media contact—an unnecessary stipulation. The entire meeting was an out-of-body experience; the director of human resources was named Suzanne, and, for God’s sake, when Suzanne had been pregnant, Jill had given her her own maternity clothes. Also, perhaps not coincidentally, Suzanne and Jill were Facebook friends.
During the two hours Jill was at work that day, three colleagues said something to her. A white man named Bruce said as they waited for an elevator, “They sure have gotten entitled, haven’t they?” Jill was horrified and changed the subject. A white woman named Peg said as Jill returned to her office, as if this were a compliment, “Jill, you’re famous!” Jill was horrified and fake-smiled. And another white woman named Helen stopped by Jill’s office and said, “My church has started hosting a monthly dialogue between the races. I met an African-American grandma named Mother Bernice at one of them, and she’s not angry at all. She’s not about assigning blame. She’s all about love, and she’s become like a family member to me. I want to invite you to the next dialogue.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Jill said.
There were, in Jill’s sixty-person division, two black employees, one named Sheila and one named Paul. She did not work closely with either of them, and neither of them said anything to her.
After the HR meeting, she managed to make it to her car before bursting into tears, and, after a few minutes, she pulled herself together enough to call Ken.
“Suspended withpay?” he said. “Not without.”
“Yes,” Jill said. “With.”
“Well, hey,” he said. “You get an extra month of vacation.”
At home in her kitchen, Jill does not think Ken is paying attention as she unloads her bags from the grocery store and the pet product store, but when she sets the clear cylinder of dog treats on the counter, he says in a wry tone, “Wow.”
Jill says nothing.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” he says, “but you do know that even if you’re the one who catches Kiwi, it doesn’t offset what happened at Amy’s birthday, right?”
Jill still says nothing.
“It’s interesting how Kiwi has mobilized people,” Ken says. “If our neighbors paid a fraction of the attention they’re giving a dog to inequities in public education, what could be achieved?”
“You know what?” Jill says. “Maybe if you joined Facebook, you could find a like-minded community who’d be interested in discussing this topic.”
In the end, the video seemed to have gone local-viral more than viral-viral. It did not end up on “Good Morning America,” or even on the local news—not on Channel 8 with Vanessa nor on the other stations—and strangers did not come to Jill’s house to condemn her.
But at dinner, on that Monday after Ronald William Fitzsimmons IV posted the video, Jill’s daughter, Becca, who was in first grade, said, “Mommy, why don’t you like people with brown skin?”
Jill and Becca were seated on one side of the kitchen table, and Ken and their son Josh, who was in fourth grade, were on the other. Jill made frantic eye contact with Ken. She swallowed her bite of the meatloaf she’d had abundant time to make that day after being sent home from the office and said, “Of course I don’t not like people with brown skin. People who are Jewish like us know that it’s very important to speak out against all forms of prejudice.”
“Then why did you yell at them?” Becca said.
“I didn’t,” Jill said. “There was a misunderstanding.”
“Did a teacher say something to you or did a student?” Ken asked Becca.
Josh said, “Mom, why are they calling you Vodka Vicky when your name is Jill?”
That morning, instead of Jill walking with the children the two blocks to school dropoff, Ken had driven them, and in the weeks after, he continued to do so. Instead of lingering at dropoff, as was Jill’s habit, he’d drive onto work without emerging from the car to chat with the other neighborhood parents—mostly mothers, some holding coffee or dog leashes, congregating outside for a few minutes before the ones with jobs went to work and the ones without jobs went to do Jill didn’t really know what. This was how and where Jill had made Kiwi’s acquaintance.
At the end of the day, Ken also was now the one to get the children from aftercare. Because of Jill’s job suspension, aftercare was not currently necessary, but she decided it was best for the children to maintain their routine.
It’s bitterly cold on Christmas morning. During her run, Jill turns from Vista Boulevard onto Tyler Drive and sees Vanessa squatting by an empty cage just behind the stone arch. This is the fourth day of Kiwi’s absconsion.
So as not to startle Vanessa, Jill says her name when she’s still several feet away. When Vanessa looks up, she says, “Oh. Hi, Jill.” Vanessa stands.
It’s only when she gets closer that Jill realizes she has never before seen Vanessa without makeup. She’s seen her with TV makeup, when Vanessa attends school events directly after delivering the news, but Jill didn’t realize until now that Vanessa wears subtler makeup at morning dropoff. On this morning, Vanessa still looks beautiful—she has almond-shaped eyes, smooth skin, and long loosely curled hair over which she wears a red fleece hat—but she’s palpably weary and anxious. Steam emerges from both their mouths.
Jill says, “Did you decide not to go to Florida?”
“I’m headed to the airport after this,” Vanessa says. “I come back tomorrow at noon.”
“I can check the traps while you’re away. We don’t celebrate Christmas so I’m not busy.”
“Dave Duncan organized a Google doc with different shifts. I think it’s full, but if you tell him you’re available for backup, that’s great in case people forget. And Dave’s the one to call if Kiwi is in the cage—he’ll take Kiwi to his house. We’re not supposed to get him out of the cage outside because if he gets loose again, we’re really screwed.”
“Got it,” Jill says. Dave Duncan’s son is on the same basketball team as Jill’s son, and she considers Dave an asshole because of the way he yells from the sidelines at games. Does she need to revise this opinion?
“And I’ll be back in twenty-four hours.” Abruptly, Vanessa looks like she’s about to cry. In a breathless voice, she says, “Jill, there’s only one present I care about giving my kids this year.”
“I know,” Jill says. “We all want it for them.” When she steps forward and hugs Vanessa, there are easily eight layers of parka, fleece, and long underwear between them. Does Vanessa mind being hugged by the person in the video? Have the events of the last week buried the video? As a choked sob escapes from Vanessa, Jill thinks for the first time about why it is that they’re not really friends. The most obvious reason is that Vanessa is intimidatingly beautiful; also, doesn’t Vanessa’s friendship with Amy establish some minor rivalry between Vanessa and Jill? But does the latter explanation hold, when Jill and Amy share other friends? They’re still hugging when Jill says, “Maybe in the new year, we could have a drink some time. And hopefully celebrate Kiwi’s safe return.”
“I’d like that,” Vanessa says as they pull apart.
“The video from Amy’s birthday,” Jill adds. “I don’t know if you purposely didn’t mention it on TV or if it just wasn’t newsworthy, but it’s—that’s not who I really am.”
Vanessa’s expression changes. It changes from distraught and open to impatient and closed.
Jill says, “I mean, not that having a drink would be racial at all. It would just be like neighbors—”
Vanessa holds up one gloved hand. “Jill,” she says and shakes her head. “I don’t have the bandwidth now.”
Two years ago, after an unarmed black seventeen-year-old boy in their city was fatally shot by a white police officer (not to be confused with the unarmed black men and boys fatally shot by white police officers in other cities), Jill marched downtown while carrying a sign that said If you want peace, work for justice. Around that time, she made a donation to the NAACP. Well, she thought of making a donation to the NAACP. She can’t remember if she actually did. But if she didn’t, it was because it slipped her mind, not because she chose not to.
She knows the things white people aren’t supposed to say: Can I touch your hair? and I don’t see race or, even worse, I don’t care if a person is black or white or green or purple or polka-dotted. She would never say those things. She knows what a micro-aggression is. She knows what woke means. Even though she’s forty-one and lives in the Midwest, she knows what it means!
But also: After her cousin Maureen’s divorce from her terrible husband was finalized, Jill texted her Free at last, free at last, thank god almighty ur free at last.
Also also: One weekend last summer, Jill drove her children forty minutes to a state park to swim in a river she’d always heard was nice, and when they got to the beach, there were three other families there, all black, and Jill said to her kids, “Wait, don’t get out of the car,” and her son said, “Why?” and Jill said, “Just hold on, there’s something I need to check.” She group texted two friends: Have u ever been to Redbird State Park? Would u let your kids swim there? As she waited for responses, she Googled Redbird River clean, then Redbird River polluted, then Redbird safe to swim. It wasn’t that she didn’t want her children swimming with the other families, and it wasn’t that she was unacquainted with the fraught history of race and swimming. It was that could this be a Flint situation, where the water was dirty but no one in charge cared because it wasn’t supposed to affect white people? Her Google searches turned up various touristy descriptors: A beloved spot for fishing and canoeing, with gorgeous views. Then Amy texted, Never been but heard it’s awesome and Rose texted Ted and I were there a LONG time ago, before we had kids. Jill’s daughter said, “Why did we drive all the way here just to sit in the car?” and finally, Jill said, “Okay, you can swim.”
It had just been the Flint question, hadn’t it?
Also also also: Once on a work trip to Louisville, she rented a car at the airport. She had to wait in line for twenty minutes. She told the agent, who was a white man, that she wanted satellite radio, and the agent said it would be an extra $15 and Jill said that was a small price to pay for the pleasure of Beyoncé’s company and then she and the agent told each other their favorite Beyoncé songs. (Jill’s was “Crazy in Love,” and the agent’s was “Irreplaceable.”)
In the garage, she found the car, stowed her suitcase in its trunk and her purse on the passenger seat, and pulled into the line to exit. There was another wait, of about eight minutes, during which Jill fiddled with the radio and couldn’t get the satellite stations to work. When she pulled up to the booth to present her rental papers, she said to the attendant, who was a black woman, “I asked for satellite radio, but they didn’t give it to me.”
With a notable lack of sympathy, the woman said, “It doesn’t work in the garage.”
But it also didn’t work when Jill pulled out of the garage. She circled the entire airport and re-entered the rental car area. She bypassed the lanes where one was supposed to return cars, parked, and approached the booth on foot. She said to the same woman from before, “I really don’t think the satellite radio is activated in my car.”
“Go inside, and they’ll give you a different car.”
“Can’t you just make it work in the car I already have?” Jill said.
“You need to go inside,” the attendant said.
“I don’t want to go back inside,” Jill said. “I just waited in line for twenty minutes to get this car. And I specified that I wanted satellite radio.”
“Then call the 1-800 number in your rental agreement.”
“I don’t want to call a 1-800 number!” Jill shouted. “I want to be helped by a real human being!”
There was a silence, and then, in a withering tone, the attendant said, “Ma’am, I am a real human being.”
She and Jill looked at each other. The attendant wore a red polo shirt with the icon of the rental car company stitched into the fabric above her left breast; her hair was in cornrows, and she was probably about Jill’s age.
“Yes,” Jill said, “I realize that.”
Another silence ensued.
“Do you?” the woman asked.
Jill can’t figure out how to access Dave Duncan’s Google doc without contacting Dave Duncan himself, but she checks the live cages, all three of them, twice more on Christmas Day. She drives by them once before she and her family leave for the movie theater and once after dinner. The cages are all empty. According to Jill’s phone, the temperature has fallen to two degrees.
It’s on the morning of the twenty-sixth, around 7 a.m., while jogging, that she sees Kiwi again. He’s in a yard two doors down from the yard where she saw him before, on Tyler Drive. He’s sniffing the base of a tree. This time, Jill suppresses the impulse to call out his name. She stops running when she is still twenty-five feet away. She takes a step onto the wintry lawn closest to her and stands there for a few seconds, then, slowly, she drops to her knees. The ground is so cold! (This morning, the temperature is twelve degrees; she is wearing two pairs of leggings and, on her torso, long underwear, a fleece sweatshirt, and a thick jacket.)
She considers pulling out her phone and looking at the recommendations from Vanessa that Amy texted her, but Jill is pretty sure she remembers them: Act like you’re hurt. Whimper and moan.
She lowers her bottom against her heels then lies down on her left side, keeping her ear a few inches off the ground. If Kiwi is aware of her, he gives no sign of it. She whimpers, first briefly and quietly—experimentally—and it comes out sounding, of all things, sexual. She focuses on injecting pain into the whimper—genuine sorrow, real remorse. She grows louder. She draws her knees up, into the fetal position.
How, at Amy’s birthday party, did she know they didn’t belong there? How did she know? And would answering these questions be tolerable or intolerable? What would happen next?
In the winter dawn, she continues whimpering, and at last, Kiwi glances in her direction. He seems nonchalant, possibly disdainful. She whimpers again. She waits to see if he will try to help her or if she will have to help herself.
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