Closeter

by Emma Moore

A plastic plaque on the door labeled Workshopping Space #3 welcomed me to our first team meeting. The Latinx employee resource group had just strung colorful perforated construction paper around in honor of the Day of the Dead, a nice visual break from the stained gray carpet and brown L-shaped couches. I would hesitate to use the word “couch,” actually, because couches have armrests and these lacked even that small comfort. There were minimalist baby pink posters on the wall telling us to Manifest Your Destiny and Girlboss That Sh*t; quaint reminders of millennial working culture of years past, destroyed by a pandemic and burgeoning self-awareness.

Seven other women sat around the conference table, staring at their MacBook Airs, scrolling solitarily. When I joined them, the woman at the head of the table, an alert red-head with no light behind her eyes, sort of like a neglected terrarium lizard, snapped her head around to look at me. We have many of these within the agency; I identified her as the account supervisor. Her eyes flicked down to her screen, blinked, then zoomed back in on my face.

“And are you our copywriter?” she asked, pointing a pen in my direction. I said I was. She nodded and typed something. I hoped she wasn’t making notes about me and my face, even as I was eyeing her silly little bobby hair. She turned her laptop around so I could see her screen. It was our contract for the project, divided out into sections and subsections. In a table titled Points of Contact was a line reserved for me, including my email and job description. She had spelled my name as “Johannah.” I erased it and typed the correct spelling. She squinted at it, cocked her head to the side, then nodded.

The kick-off started with her, Marina, giving us an overview of what was expected of us as a “creative and empowered team” as we worked on an app with heavy subject matter. The client was a start-up in Boston, run by a supergroup of female Ivy League grads. They were young and excited to make a change within the online therapeutic space, I was told.

I noticed Marina kept referring to the brand as something that sounded like “clothes tear,” which would be kind of offensive, I thought, so I raised my hand and asked what exactly the app we were building would be called. She pulled up a lavender logo in bubble font. It was called “Closeter”, as in someone who shoves people into closets or maybe just builds them, but she told me it was pronounced like “Close-ter”, as a nod to a “cloister,” as in the place where nuns hang out (“a safe space for women”), but spelled with the term “close” to represent therapist-patient intimacy and to evoke the phrase “close to her.” This explanation made me picture a group of nuns surrounding me in a football huddle, menacingly chanting affirmations at me in a walled-off courtyard. I told her, as the writer, I would have to suggest to the client that this was a ridiculous and confusing name. Marina just shrugged and said we could talk about it at a later date. We did not.

Our agency was being outsourced to design Closeter from the ground up and run the initial marketing campaign. The app intended to take all of the user's personal romantic history through an opening survey. It needed your gender, age, number of romantic partners, and the kinds of abuse you endured at their hands or it couldn’t match you with the right therapist. From there, the user would be prompted to begin a free trial (7 days, before recurring automatic billing of $59.99 per month) and given a list of “matched” therapists. Your new therapist can chat with you via text or set up a FaceTime call, all through the app. No medical insurance required.

After the meeting, Marina asked me to hang back. She wore a gashing frown. “Dan mentioned you can relate to the material?” she asked. I nodded and tried to give her an equally sympathetic face.

“Well, let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.” A tiny hand rested on my shoulder, pat pat. “I’m available to help you research or if you just need someone to talk to.” I said that I’d be fine without her research assistance, all things considered, but that I would reach out if I felt things were too heavy.

***

At the next Closeter meeting, we met the clients; two late-20s women who emanated Marc Jacobs perfume through the conference room TV. Alisa and Emilie were their names. Alisa wore an Adidas hoodie, while Emilie wore a basic striped t-shirt, probably from Madewell or Aritzia. Casual expensive clothes for casual expensive girls. They had a project manager on the call with them, a former nurse named Patricia. I couldn’t tell what she was wearing because her Zoom background blended with her top, lending the impression that she was speaking to us as a disembodied head on a beach. They said they were excited to work with us.

Patricia covered the fonts and colors we were allowed to use with our designer, then forwarded me a writing style guide. I could use emojis, she said. In fact, I was encouraged to use them.

“Can I use the fist one?” I asked. Patricia thought this was funny. Marina’s gelled nails dug into the table as we snorted and giggled. Alisa spoke up and suggested that, actually, we could nix the emojis.

We moved on to discussing SEO keywords for the website. Ella pulled up a list that contained a lot of words I heard from friends when my relationship ended: “Gaslight,” “trauma,” “love bombing,” “trigger” for short-tail; “signs of narcissistic abuse,” “getting over domestic abuse,” “how to break up with my abusive husband” for long-tail. I had no idea how I was supposed to weave these words into a website that consisted of one page and a button to download an app. My teeth were rapidly grinding, front to back.

When the clients signed off, we were supposed to break and come back to discuss the logistics of building the app with our development team. I didn’t need to be there, but they weren’t paying me to do anything else. I decided to take an extended trip to the bathroom to look at my phone.

On my way, I passed by the sign that said “Mother’s Room.” There wasn’t supposed to be an apostrophe there, but there was. I thought it was fun to imagine that it belonged to one gigantic uber-mom who could feed you and rock you to sleep during your break. Taken by this image, I decided that day to pop my head into Mother’s Room to see what all the fuss was about.

A very small woman sat on a plastic chair chewing on a granola bar. Beside the solitary chair, there was a folded-up changing table and a sideboard that probably contained wipes and mysterious baby things if I were to look through the drawers. I closed the door behind me, then regretted it. Now it was just me and this woman here, Mother and I. I was intruding.

“Do you want one?” she asked. She opened a lunch bag by her feet and pulled out a wrapped bar, promising Peanut Butter Protein. I told her I absolutely would like one, thank you very much. I sat down on the carpeted floor across from her and pulled out my phone. I could scroll here much more comfortably than the toilet, at least.

“I’m Mae, by the way,” she said. “I think I’ve seen you around, didn’t you fill in on SpunkMusic a few months ago?”

“That’s me. Joanna.” I strained my hand forward and we did a quick little shake with the tips of our fingers.

She looked me over for a second; not in a rude way, but she was trying to get a read on me. I understood her immediately, so I looked back at my phone. Her jean vest and long floral skirt told me she really loved This American Life in the early 2000s. I suspected mid-40s, with a husband who gardens and two kids in high school that she cooks organic meals for. The barrette in her hair screamed anti-vaxxer, but you never know with NPR listeners. They could really go either way.

“I saw you guys in the Workshopping Space talking to that new app client,” she said. “Is that not kind of depressing?”

“I don’t love it.” I shrugged. “I mean, it’s kind of stupid. The biggest bit I have to do is this survey for people who sign up for the thing. Just, like, ask them what their boyfriends or husbands did to them. I don’t know how their therapist matching algorithm works. It seems bullshit to me. Probably just data-mining a bunch of sad women, for all we know.”

“Sounds in poor taste.”

I agreed. Maybe she was Mother, here to reassure me that I’m not being cynical.

“And, not to pry, but didn’t someone on that team just recently get out of something like that?”

With a sentence, a massive brain power outage. All thoughts of good will dropped away instantly. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt myself lean back slightly, my eyes averted to the smiling koalas on the changing table in the corner. Suddenly, an animal scream from somewhere deep in my cerebrum: Deny.

“Uh, no. I don’t know who you’d be talking about.”

“Hmm. I could’ve sworn I heard something about someone in your group having gone through…something. A couple of the other designers were talking about it this morning. I guess I don’t know if it’s true, but it would be terrible if it was true, putting a woman like that on an account for abuse victims. Insensitive, at least.”

As the blood began rushing back through my body, I felt a morbid curiosity take over. It seemed like this woman genuinely didn’t suspect that she was talking about me. Or, if she did, she didn’t care enough to stop talking about it.

“Did they say what kind of, you know, situation?” I asked. I decided to play extra dumb. “Sorry, maybe that’s prying!” I gave a nervous giggle and rolled my eyes. I’m just interested in the latest office gossip!

She bobbed her head vehemently, eager to divulge more information. She’d been wanting to tell someone about this all day, it was all over her face. “Apparently her boyfriend threw her down the stairs of their home. She had to be hospitalized and everything. I just can’t remember who would’ve been on leave for a couple of weeks, or it would be so obvious who it is.” She popped the rest of her protein bar into her mouth. “If you figure out who it is, message me. We could see about getting her a care package through HR, poor thing.”

“We don’t have to do that,” I laughed. She gave me an odd look, so I clarified. “It probably isn’t something she wants to draw attention to, you know? It’s not like it’s even really your business.” Fuck. “Our business.”

A muscle under her eye twitched and she let out a nervous giggle. “Maybe! Sorry if that isn’t something you wanted to talk about,” she said. “It’s probably not appropriate work conversation.” I had given it away. I was stricken with shame, unable to continue this interaction any further. I got up to make my exit, throwing the rest of the granola bar away in the diaper disposal bin. “Thanks again for the bar,” I told her, even though I no longer meant it. She nodded, said something about really not wanting to offend me, and can we start over?

I said no, thanks, and left Mother’s Room forever.

***

hey i have some things i’d like to chat about with you tomorrow! let me know if that works with your schedule.

I looked at it, then deleted it. HR required more formality than a lower-case Slack message.

I opened up my email. Hi Julie! I have some things to chat with you about whenever you have a moment tomorrow. Have been feeling uncomfortable with some conversation–

Backspace, backspace. “Uncomfortable” wasn’t what I felt. I had been violated, in a way, hadn’t I? Wasn’t everyone talking about me, my whole dumb incident, an awful thing? I closed my laptop altogether. Goose trotted up to the couch where I laid, silently asking to be fed.

As I poured his food and took him for a walk around the block, I thought more about my situation. The outdoor air calmed me, making it seem less like an HR problem and more like an immovable curiosity of the human condition. If someone at work had been embroiled in an unsavory divorce battle with their ex, I’d be talking about it. I love drama. My coworkers couldn’t be begrudged for sharing my story when I had done the exact thing hundreds of times with their personal secrets. I figured it was worse to be a hypocrite than to have people feel sorry for you.

I called Manager Dan when I got back inside to see if he had told anyone recently. He hadn’t. Just Marina, because I was working on Closeter and it seemed important that she knew, in the event I randomly started crying or something. I wasn’t going to, but I appreciated the thought.

“Just so you know, if Marina did talk about you to other people at the agency, I would consider that pretty fucked up,” he clarified.

“Thank you, Danny boy. So would I.”

“Are you going to tell HR?”

“No, because I don’t think there’s really anything they can do if the box has already been opened, y’know?” I said. “And then it might just fall back on you, even though you’re not the one that did anything wrong, just because you gave them permission to put me on this account in the first place.”

“You don’t have to be on Closter if you don’t want to, you do realize this?” he asked. I said I did understand, but that I felt I had to see it through. If it wasn’t me, it would be someone who didn’t care. That might just make me feel worse. Before hanging up, Dan said it was brave, what I was doing. “It could help lots of women like you!” I disagreed.

I sat at home with Goose that night, his jowls slipping a viscous slobber out onto my sweatpants while I told him about the app and the rumors and the bad feelings. He has naturally round and tearful bulldog eyes, so he comes off as a really good listener. He licked my hand in sympathy as I trapped myself in an anger spiral, explicating on how insane it was that I even had to deal with this in the first place. It’s not like I asked to be in a relationship that ruined my life. Why is he still following me, even in my workplace? How is that fair?

***

“I really think you should consider it. It could be an opportunity for healing.”

That was what Dan said when he pitched the project to me. He knew what had happened, he even took in Goose while I was laid up with my concussion and wasn’t supposed to look at my phone, let alone take care of a dog. Dan is one of those people that wears his own terrier dog in a BabyBjörn to the grocery store and dresses him in bow ties. I find it very sweet. Goose loved his stay with Dan and his husband, but didn’t like the bow tie they sent him home with. No one at the agency knows that Dan and I hang out outside of work, and they will never know, but I tell everyone who works with us that he’s a good person, someone who can be trusted.

He had an uncontrollable urge to help me in any way he could once he knew I was a battered woman. That was how he said it: “battered woman.” He sent me articles like “10 Signs You’re Dealing With Trauma” and “How to Heal From Spousal Abuse.” I explained to him that I was only “battered” the one time and we weren’t even married.

“I don’t like the term,” I said. “It reminds me of fish and chips. If anything, that’s exaggerating how bad it is. I wasn’t fileted and fried. That’s worse, even. It was a little trip. Just, you know, an intentional one.”

We were sitting on my couch the day he brought Goose back over, when I was allowed to see light again. Goose had on his bow tie and a leg cast from our fall. He was happy to see me and I was happy to see him. I didn’t want to talk about what happened, I wanted to lay on the floor with my dog, but Dan wouldn’t drop it.

“Well, it wasn’t a little trip,” he said. He picked at a hangnail, considering his words. Dan has a debilitating fear of offending people. I could see a small bead of sweat forming at his brow. “Doesn’t it… make you mad? That someone just decided to hurt you for no good reason?”

“I don’t think I am, like, this ‘battered’ and ‘abused’ woman.” I used air quotes very liberally. “Because it was just something that happened when we were having an argument. Like, it wasn’t consistent, you know?”

“Sure, it wasn’t consistent, but he did try to kill you.”

I couldn’t refute that. He sent me two more articles when he got home.

***

Our first round of work was presented twelve days later. I had already seen my word—the quiz, the syrupy language of HR-friendly condolences I employed throughout the app’s pages—in action in our internal team review. I suppose I had assumed I’d feel something, seeing it come together, but I hadn’t. If I didn’t think about it too hard, which I usually don’t when it comes to my job, it could have been any project.

The clients were back on the screen, sans Patricia, still representing the latest from Nordstrom Rack. The cotton textures made me yearn for the smell of an iron on wrinkled clothes, the petrichor of wet steam hissing on a white shirt. Marina was struggling to full-screen a PowerPoint she’d put together containing a highlight reel of the work we’d completed.

It popped up on the shared-screen square of our office TV. I could see all of us, the unflattering under-the-chin angles you get from such small laptops, the bright red muted icons next to our names. Next to us, our big purple baby, screenshot after screenshot of me inoffensively talking in circles around the frank realities of abuse. Alisa and Emilie leaned in toward their monitors, trying to get a good sniff of our work. They seemed to love the design, all of the heart stickers and glossy sheen the team put over everything.

“The user experience doesn’t feel real to me, though,” said Alisa. “There’s nothing here that says ‘We know what you’ve been through.’ It’s all too clinical. We don’t just want to know what happened to our clients, we want to know how it made them feel.”

Emilie nodded. “It’s lacking a tone of sympathy. Very ‘Give us your money.’”

I felt like laughing. Isn’t that what we were doing?

“Where exactly would you like to have more pathos here?” I asked. Good word. Professional. They’ll like that. And, indeed, they nodded approvingly.

“It would be nice to have some feeling questions sprinkled in,” said Emilie. “You know, ‘How did you feel after your partner's outbursts?’ or ‘How do you feel about seeking out therapy?’ And in the help-matching section of the app, we could move toward catharsis, you know? We were thinking about using the official term of ‘Listener,’ instead of therapist, for our counselors. You should play with that.”

“Those are great suggestions,” said Alisa. “I definitely feel a lack of familiarity with the subject material. Have you talked to anyone who has gone through abuse, Joanna?”

“I, uh, I guess I did,” I stammered. “I have, uh, some family members that have been through it so I…consulted them,” I bullshitted. My “battered woman” card was being declined. Better to make something up, anyway. Marina eyed me. I ignored her.

The clients’ whole demeanors changed, a switch from icy professionalism to over-the-top sympathy, voices changing from “podcast host” to “person whose job it is to swaddle animal babies in blankets.”

“That’s so horrible!” cried Emilie. “Did you ask how they felt about the app concept?”

Marina stepped in to cover my ass. “Let’s shift the focus away from Joanna’s personal life, please. Do you have any other feedback? We’ll make sure to incorporate more emotionality in round two.”

I could see sweat beading around her orange, bang-less hairline. For some reason, I think she might have cared about how this was making me feel? Or perhaps she’d noticed my face slowly turning white with cold fear.

“I’m surprised that your talks didn’t result in more empathetic copy, that’s all,” said Alisa. “We were looking for something more conversational, more peer-to-peer.”

“I mean…it’s not like I’m not a peer,” I responded. I was slipping. “I know what it’s like to be a woman in a bad relationship, believe it or not.”

Alisa suddenly made a sharp buzzing sound. “We don’t like to make those comparisons unless you’ve actually been in an abusive situation. It comes off as dismissive of other women’s experiences,” she said. “You understand, right?”

“This is what we mean,” added Emilie, with some frustration. “It doesn’t seem like you're sensitive to our audience's issues.”

“How are you so sure I can’t make that comparison?” I asked. “If you want a ‘I feel’ statement, well, I feel that this criticism has gone beyond my writing, which is what we’re here to critique. Not my personal experience and how it apparently prevented me from doing my job.”

I could tell I was getting too mouthy, a hunch confirmed by Marina’s bloodshot eyes. I waited for Emilie or Alisa to say something, but they seemed to realize that they’d overstepped. Emilie sheepishly suggested we move on to discussing the landing page.

I guess it would be better to let it go, but then why were my hands so tightly balled into fits, my stomach a sloshing pit of acid? They were talking about color, about whether this shade of purple was too close to a bruise, which would be offensive, or if having stars as decals might be more preferable than hearts. Didn’t stars appear above cartoon characters' heads when they got hit? But hearts were a sign of love, which could be triggering. And on and on.

On the screen, the landing page. “Experiencing gaslighting? Trauma got you down? Closeter can help you get through your domestic abuse.” It was so bad, so mindless. Hadn’t this happened to me? If I really cared, I’d let them know that this was all a scam, just something to further their careers. Maybe the pain wasn’t even real for me, or I’d care more.

“Joanna, did you hear?”

Marina had turned to me, her hand was on my arm. I looked into her eyes and they were no longer empty. Instead, I saw a kind of sorrow. Concern. Seconds passed before I realized her touch was gentle, her thumb repeating a small circle by my elbow.

“Are you able to rewrite those sections? They’ll have them highlighted by tomorrow afternoon.”

I looked at her, then at the screen. The clients were expectant.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s no problem.”

Emma Moore is a literary fiction writer based in Portland, OR. Her work is focused on the relationship between capital and morality, exposing the things we sacrifice to maintain our place in the economic world. She has also written arts and culture pieces for Little White Lies, Buzzkill Magazine, and the Portland Mercury.