“Then go,” the older girl says, without even turning around.
My head is pounding quietly, a drumbeat reminder of what happened earlier this morning.A good wife doesn’t speak to her husband that way.I step outside onto the porch. The sudden brightness sends a high, arcing warning flare of pain through my skull, which momentarily lights up every thought I’ve ever had, and then just as quickly douses them in darkness. A breeze lifts my hair, cooling my neck. As my eyes adjust to the daylight and the pain recedes, I see that it’s autumn here. The leaves on the trees are a deep golden brown, and the faraway mountains are just barely snowcapped. By mid-November, they’ll be coated in white.
I stare at the mountains, my gaze slowly traveling back to the ranch, over the dips and rolls of thousands of acres of rugged Idaho wilderness, dotted by scrubs of sagebrush and not much else, until finally I reach the far fence line of the crumbling paddocks by the barn. A shabby show of an enclosure, nothing like my fences, which are painted every summer a blinding church-white.
Suddenly one of the boys—door threshold; shorter one;Noah!—walks out of the barn with a horse, guiding him to the paddocks. Our horse. Snickers. Beloved brown and white beast. Only—
No. Not our horse.
It feels like I’m looking at the world through an oil slick.
The horse’s patches are in a slightly different place. The stripe of white on this horse’s nose is wider than the one on Snickers’s, and there’s an extra white patch by his belly.
We should never have bought a horse to begin with. None of us were riders, and I kept telling Caleb to be reasonable, to think about it,to consider for one second how much work a horse would be,but Caleb insisted we would learn, he insisted it wasessential,back when he—back when we—
A sudden agoraphobia sweeps over me. The fields, the woods, the mountains. An infinite stretch of land.The Wild, Wild West.Gold rush. Cowboys and Indians. Mountains of dead buffalo.Manifest destiny!Smallpox blankets. Rifles and covered wagons and dust bowls and herds of mustangs and Area 51 and spaceships and aliens, less like Planet Earth and more like Planet Mars—
Suddenly I’m half walking, half jogging across the clearing to the outhouse. I throw open the door and step inside. The stench takes my breath away, but still, I shut the door tightly behind me. I feel like a child again, operating on dream logic: if I keep myself hidden beneath the covers, the monsters won’t see me.
Speaking of children and dream logic—silly, it couldn’t possibly work, but—well—what if it did?
Forgive me,Lord—I have to try.
After I’m finished peeing, I stand up straight, close my eyes, organize my thoughts, and click my heels together three times.
There’s no place like home.
There’s no place like home.
There’s no place like home.
I throw the door open and say, “Shit.”
6
Every Monday evening,my mother called the dormitory phone line at seven on the dot to ask me how the week had been. How my social life was going. Had I met any French girls? What about Irish ones? Were there any—deep breath here—Jewish or Muslim girls in the building? Did they pray in front of me? Did they smell like me, or was the odor different?
My mother had given birth to my sister when she was eighteen, then me when she was twenty. College hadn’t been a consideration. Worldly travels were not an option. The farthest she had ever traveled was to Arizona for a wedding. At the airport, her anxiety about my decision to go to college had been palpable, but now—perhaps because she’d never had the opportunity to do so herself, or perhaps as a means of redirecting her anxieties about her daughter living so far away—she talked nonstop about how exciting it was for me to be there.I can’t imagine how many interesting people you’ll meet!
In response, for the first time in my life, I lied to my mother. I told her it was exactly as she was picturing it, because I thought she’d have a nervous breakdown if I told her the truth.
No, college was not the intellectual oasis I had hoped it would be. There were no lecture hall sparring matches of the likes of Socrates and Plato, no passionate debates over free will and creation and the divine, intellectual light of man. Nor, though, was it Gomorrah,as my sister and mother had worried it would be. Or at least: not as they might have imagined it to be. Rather, I’d found myself in a highly claustrophobic holding tank for rich kids. An artificially intelligent Eden: a warm, incubated landscape designed to keep the worst kids in America safe and warm and well-fed until they matured past the urge to peck each other’s eyes out.
At first, I thought my roommate troubles would be my biggest challenge, but Reena hadn’t brought anyone home since that first night, and then school began, and the true nightmare revealed itself to me. In the first several weeks, I sat frozen in the front row of each class while brash, marble-mouthed kids from Chicago and Los Angeles and Darien talked loudly from the back row. The boys complained about power hegemonies and overseas military interventions, waving their uncalloused palms, even their fingernails unnervingly clean. As for the girls, they proclaimed their horror at the wage gap between the sexes, and while I first thought a shocking number of them had the same medical issue, I soon realized their fingers and hands and forearms were all tie-dyed a grim shade of orange from the fake tanner that passed through our dorm hallways like a spiritual totem.
On weeknights, the girls in my hall piled into one room and drank Smirnoff Vodka mixed with zero-calorie grapefruit juice while they complained about their parents, their boarding schools, their high school boyfriends. No one was grateful to be here. As far as I could see, no one was grateful for anything at all. They all planned to be wives and mothers, and yet they absolutely hated men and kids. They talked about nuclear families the same way they talked about the nuclear bomb. It was a destructive, sexist, militaristic, heteronormative force designed to ruin the world.Literally,they would add for emphasis, at the end of every statement they made that could not possibly work in any literal sense.Lit-tral-ly.When they talked about stay-at-home mothers—specifically abouttheirstay-at-home-mothers—their eyes didn’t go misty with gratitude. Instead, they argued bravely that old-school femininity was a scourge. Any woman who chose to stay in the home instead ofworking in the world was complicit. Any woman who identified as a homemaker was both a victim and a perpetrator.
“Of what?” I made the mistake of asking once, in the beginning.
The girls exchanged a series of looks.The Amish girl has spoken!Then Reena—who, over the early days of school, had been visibly disappointed to realize she wasn’t going to climb as high up on the social ladder as she had clearly planned to, and who obviously found me at least partially responsible for this fact—cleared her throat and said tiredly, “The patriarchy, Natalie.”
Duh.
Someone always had a sister who’d left her job to take care of the kids because the daycare costs compared to her salary didn’t check out. Someone always had a cousin whose nipples and sleep schedule and sex life were being destroyed by breastfeeding. Someone always had a mother who was actively drinking herself to death in the suburbs while the father played 52 Pickup with some restaurant hostess in the city. One night, one of the girls said (I kid you not, I quote her verbatim), “I really want to get an elective C-section because then the baby’s head won’t be all lumpy when it comes out.” On another night, Reena told everyone about what happened the first night of school, about the horrible night she’d spent with that boy. He was apredator,she insisted. He gave offmajor rape vibes.He’d skull-fucked her, she said—she could barelybreathe!—and then he’d pressured her into sex, and everyone should write his name down, they should remember it andnever go home with him,because men like him could not,could never,be trusted.
I sat on the opposite bunk bed, mute with horror, while she went on. I was already aware that these young women enjoyed blurring the line between fact and fiction—nuclear families were destructive?C-sectionsdesirable? Pray tell, ladies, in whatworld?—but here, now, was a glaring journalistic error, a false insurance claim about a hit-and-run that never happened, and I was the only witness.
Be nice,my mother warned.
