It was surprising to my mother that I wouldn’t want to go to the honors program at our state university. Surprising, more generally speaking, that I would want to venture outward into the world, when the world so clearly had lost its way. Out in the coastal cities, nuclear families were an endangered species. Children ran barefoot in the streets while their fathers philandered in third-floor walk-ups and their mothers smoked crack on the stoops. Some women didn’t know they were women anymore. Some men didn’t know they were men. The birth rate was plummeting. Humanity was self-immolating. The white race was going extinct.
These were the prayers my mother sent to the Lord each night while I packed for school down the hall:Keep her safe, Lord. Lead herfrom temptation. Deliver her from evil. In the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit—
At the airport, my mother and sister hugged me goodbye.
“Don’t do cocaine,” my sister, Abigail, said fearfully. She was two years older than me, with a heart-shaped face, wide Bambi eyes, and a crumb of a diamond ring on her finger. She was engaged to her high school sweetheart, a pimple-faced corn dog of a young man with a bad temper. Bryce. Together they were enrolled at the local community college. Abigail had no intentions of ever leaving our hometown, or of reading a book that was written by someone whose name was not Paul or David or John.
“Remember, Nattie,” my mother said, “justrememberto be kind.” Her expression was bright with piousness, almost oily with it. She kept glancing around at the other Idaho families in the ticketing area, nearly all of whom were dressed like us, in long prairie dresses with hair braided down their backs, and nearly all of whom were larger than us by a factor of two or three. Nearby, a woman led a line of eight children to the baggage drop, a fat stack of passports in her hands, an expression of beatific exhaustion on her face. My mother watched them pass, her face almost naked with regret. In our community, a family with only two children was suspiciously small. The opposite of blessed. Well, what could you do?Her husband was no longer with us.
“Everyone believes in something,” she said, still watching the family. “You can reach anyone if you show them kindness.”
“I know, Mother.”
Her attention snapped back to me. “I’m serious, Nattie.Be nice.”
I swallowed a hiss. I didn’t want to fight, but it was a low blow for her to end the goodbye onthis,the greatest shame of both of our lives: I was not, and had never been, a very social girl. I was polite and well-mannered, I was reliable and hardworking and clever—concerningly so,my mother would say to women at church, when she thought I couldn’t hear—but extroverted? Not so much. Friends? Technically none to speak of.
“It’s not going to be a problem,” I said. I meant it, though not in the way I knew she would take it. This was, secretly, why I was going to Boston: I was going to a school and a city where intellect would matter much more than beinglikable.Bostonians, as far as I could tell from what I’d read at our desktop computer back home, were famously smart and famously uninterested in pleasantries. That kind of world was undoubtedly the one where I belonged.
I hugged my sister and mother one more time, then I gathered my bags and marched forward to the security line. As I inched along, I felt an urge to turn around and wave to my family one more time. But then I thought of Gomorrah, of what happens to women who look over their shoulders at the world they leave behind.
… the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah … Thus He overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in thecities—and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.
Don’t look back, don’t look back.
What happened to the women in the Bible who looked forward, though? What about them?
I couldn’t remember, but there was something about the notion that felt instinctively wrong to me. It sniffed of greed and felt worryingly close to witchcraft.
Do not turn to mediums or necromancers; do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them …
Best not to take the risk. And so I found a seat at my departure gate and stared pointedly at the carpet, determined not to look forward or backward until the flight attendants called for my group number and the rest of my life began.
3
After Caleb and Ibought the farm, we met with several architects and contractors to discuss a renovation. Most of them scratched their heads at our demands. The house on the property was from the late 1800s but had been fully renovated just a few years ago. The windows were new, the appliances were new, the roof and the light fixtures and the floors were new. And now we wanted to renovate it … again?
“You do realize this will cost half a million,” the first architect said.
“You do realize the resale value will be cut in half,” the first contractor said.
“Are you both completely insane?” the second, third, and fourth architects said.
“I want it to feel like stepping into a time machine,” I kept repeating in every meeting. “I want it to feelauthentic.” (“Authentic towhat?” one of the architects asked.) Then I would add the five most important words in any business meeting: “Money is not a concern.”
The sixth man we spoke with was the one we decided to work with. He didn’t try to talk us out of any of our plans, nor did he raise his eyebrows when I listed my requests: I wanted the dishwasher and microwave and all modern kitchen appliances to be hidden from view; I wanted a claw-foot tub absolutely dripping in naturallight; I wanted wide-plank floors that felt like they’d been ripped straight out of theMayflowerherself. I wanted all the aesthetics of the olden times and all the amenities of modernity, and I wanted this seemingly irreconcilable set of desires to be somehow reconciled via a series of impeccable design decisions. As I spoke, this contractor, an older man who’d worked for decades in the area, took notes prodigiously. At each of my requests, he would nod and say in a quiet monotone, “We can certainly do that, ma’am.”
Right before the meeting ended, the contractor looked at me with a totally straight face and said, “Will you be wanting indoor toilets, ma’am, or would you prefer an outhouse?”
I laughed stiffly. “Indoor toilets are fine.”
“Great.” He shut his notebook and looked at us. “Let’s build you two a time machine.”
Welcome to the time machine.
I’m lying beneath the covers of that god-awful quilt, curled in the fetal position. I have no idea what time it is. I’ve woken from what felt less like a nap and more like anesthetized surgery. My left eye socket is pulsing in a steady throb. The skin on my palms, forearms, and legs stings horribly. My feet don’t hurt so much as they feel unnervingly warm, swollen with blood. My brain, too, is ringing and spinning in a way that makes me wonder if I have a concussion.
Wake up, Natalie.
