Total pages in book: 103
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94181 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 471(@200wpm)___ 377(@250wpm)___ 314(@300wpm)
And just like that, the conversation shifted to margins and manufacturing costs and distribution channels, and I could breathe again. Except that the warmth between my legs hadn’t gone away. And except that, somewhere beneath the embarrassment, the careful typing, and the memory of Kevin’s earnest, ineffectual hands, a question had lodged itself in a part of my mind I didn’t want to examine.
What would it feel like, the question whispered, to need… that? To need it as badly as Karen clearly did? To need it so badly that I have to ask a… a man?
I deleted the line I’d just typed—it was gibberish anyway—and started a new one, my fingers shaking so slightly that I was sure no one could see it.
No one except perhaps Penelope, whose gaze I could still feel resting on me like a hand on the back of my neck.
That meeting was the worst one I had to sit through in my first two months at Selecta. Or almost the worst. The days that followed blurred into a rhythm I hadn’t expected to settle into so quickly. I arrived each morning at eight-fifteen, logged into my workstation, reviewed Penelope’s calendar, prepared the conference room packets, and attended meetings. So many meetings.
Most of them were about the New Modesty Authority—the NMA, as everyone in the department called it with the easy familiarity of an acronym they’d been using for years. I learned quickly that Penelope’s role as Director of New Modesty Program Integration meant she sat at the intersection of nearly every NMA initiative Selecta had its fingers in, and since I was Penelope’s assistant, I sat there too, laptop open, fingers moving, recording everything in meticulous notes I would later organize into summaries she rarely read but always expected to be flawless.
The paddling happened in my seventh week.
I didn’t see it. I heard about it the way you hear about a car accident on a highway you drive every day—secondhand, in lowered voices, with that particular mix of horror and fascination that people adopt when they want you to know they disapprove of something they can’t stop talking about.
It seemed her name was Trina. She worked two floors down in data entry, and from what I gathered from the whispered conversation I overheard between two women in the restroom, she’d missed a filing deadline three times in a row. Her supervisor had issued two formal warnings. The third time, Trina had been escorted to the discipline room in human resources.
“She came back to her desk an hour later,” one of the women said, reapplying lipstick with a steady hand. “Couldn’t sit down properly for the rest of the afternoon. Said it wasn’t that bad, but her eyes were all red.”
“Well,” said the other woman, adjusting her collar, “she knew the policy.”
They’d left without noticing me in the stall, and I’d stood there for a long time with my hand on the lock, my heart hammering, telling myself that Trina had missed three deadlines. That I would never miss three deadlines. That the paddle on the wall in HR—the stark white one with the Selecta logo that I’d glimpsed through an open door my first week and then immediately looked away from—had nothing to do with me.
But the meetings were worse than the paddling story, in a way, because the paddling was a single event I could file away as an aberration, while the meetings felt relentless and cumulative, and each one deposited another thin layer of information over my understanding of the world I’d walked into.
I learned, for instance, that birthrates in NMA-subsidized communities were up eleven percent year over year. A man named Gerald from the analytics division presented this data at a Tuesday morning briefing with the satisfaction of someone reporting excellent weather. The slide showed a map of the country dotted with small blue circles—New Modesty towns, each one representing a community where Selecta’s programs had been fully implemented—and beside each circle, a number trending upward.
“This tracks with our modeling,” Gerald said. “The combination of structured courtship, reduced female workforce participation, and the intimacy tools we’re putting in these households is doing exactly what we projected. These women are having more children, they’re having them younger, and the household satisfaction metrics are through the roof.”
I wrote birthrates up 11%—structured courtship—intimacy tools and tried not to think about what intimacy tools meant in the context of everything I’d already learned.
At the same meeting, Gerald showed energy-efficiency data. The NMA communities, it turned out, were consuming significantly less energy per household than comparable non-program communities. Gerald attributed this to ‘enhanced household compliance structures,’ which I eventually understood to mean that wives in these communities did what their husbands told them to do, including turning off lights, lowering thermostats, and hanging laundry rather than using dryers.