Is it a choice, if there’s only one option?
Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.
I leaned across the table and pressed my hand over His.
Sorry, I mean his. Caleb’s. And at my touch, he let out a great gasp of air, and I realized he’d been holding his breath. Waiting for me to decide.
On the third date, we discussed marriage.
On the fourth date, Caleb stood stock-still as I leaned forward and pressed my lips, just barely, to his. I felt his heartbeat vibrating through my mouth. The kiss was dry. It lasted for a second. As I pulled away, I found myself imagining his tongue, the size of it. A shiver ran through me.
Caleb touched my arm. “You have goose bumps.” He looked awestruck that he was capable of having that effect on me.
I didn’t know what to say. I felt the heat rising off my face like steam. I’d never understood what it felt like towant.I stepped forward and pressed my face into Caleb’s chest, suddenly desperate to feel compression against my skin. He wrapped his arms around me and we stood there like that for a while, both of us breathing hard. Then I felt something long and firm pressed against my thigh, and I stepped quickly back.
The weekend of our engagement, Caleb’s parents flew into the city to celebrate and paid for my mother to fly in, too. Caleb’s father rented out the back room of a four-star steak house in Back Bay. I wore a white dress made of a crepe linen fabric. Caleb’s mother had bought it for me and shipped it to my dorm room. She had also encouraged me over the phone to invite friends to the party, and I had tactfully declined, citing my interest in making this a family affair.
“You look like Jackie Kennedy,” my mother whispered whenshe saw me at the restaurant. She was wearing a simple navy shift dress, a pattern she’d sewn herself, and was gazing at the fabric of my dress with an expression of nervous awe. “Let me see that ring.”
I held out my hand, so proud that it felt like my head was going to lift off my neck and bob around by the ceiling. “It’s an antique,” I said as my mother turned my finger this way, then that way, letting the diamond catch the light. She looked as thunderstruck by the display as I felt by it. “It’s just over four carats.”
“Natalie,” my mother breathed. “It’s huge.”
“I know,” I said, matching her tone. “I told Caleb it was way too big.”
She gave me a look of approval. That was the way women operated in my community: if you wanted to be a wealthy Christian woman and maintain good standing, you needed to publicly disavow your luxuries in order to maintain possession of them. It was a strange tug-and-pull I’d borne witness to my entire life. The only surprise was that it was finally happening to me. I was becoming the kind of woman other women were jealous of. Each time I looked at the ring, I felt an intoxicating combination of embarrassment and glee. It was a rich, decadent piece of jewelry. If I looked at it for too long, I started to feel sick. It was too much, it was a shameful display of wealth, I should give it back and demand we find something smaller, and also: I’d launch a holy war before I parted with it.
As for Caleb, he insisted it was a perfect diamond for a woman like me. I was a flawless woman, he said. A timeless piece of decoration.
The engagement party was filled with Caleb’s family’s friends, as well as some major donors to Doug’s current senatorial campaign. (What I would learn quickly: Doug wasalwaysbuilding toward, in the middle of, or conducting a postmortem on a campaign.) For most of the evening, I sat in a booth with my mother while Caleb and his older brothers and his father, Doug, schmoozed through the crowd, bray-laughing and backslapping. I’d already lost track of which brother was which, they looked so much alike.The tech one,I thought firmly, staring at David—or was it Henry? No,Johnwasthe finance one, yes, Henry was the tech one, and George and Jack were the political advisers—
Amelia floated quietly behind the men, smiling brightly in their shadow, occasionally tugging at her pink Chanel skirt and blazer set like some Special-Edition Presidential Barbie. When I first met her earlier that night, she told me in a soft, fluttery falsetto tocall her Mama.I had thought her teeth were so white they almost looked purple. Then I saw how much wine she drank, and I realized they were actually just purple.
I watched my mother watch Amelia across the room. I knew we were thinking the same thing. Then my mother turned and looked at me. A silent conversation unfolded.
This is what you want, then?
She seemed genuinely surprised. She didn’t know Caleb or his family yet, but she’d seen enough to understand what was happening here. When she had talked about my future, it had always beenNatalie the professor, Natalie the academic.Of course, the assumption of children and homemaking was always there, too, hovering in the white space between all those hypothetical careers. My mother, a breadwinner herself, was lopsidedly progressive in that way: she didn’t believe in divorce, but she did genuinely believe her smartest daughter would have it all: a good job and a good family, in Jesus’s name, amen.
If you marry this man,she said to me now with her blinking eyes,you will become his smiling shadow.
A year ago, I wouldn’t have wanted that. But the last six months had changed me. I blinked back an answer.I thought I wanted the world, Mama. But I’ve seen the world now, and I want no part in it.
At the other end of the room, Caleb’s father clinked his glass. “Can the happy couple make their way to the stage?”
The crowd parted like the Red Sea before me. I didn’t hesitate.
9
It’s nighttime.I’m slouched on a wobbly, ancient, bullshit chair in the corner of this wobbly, ancient, bullshit kitchen, holding a big hunk of ice wrapped in a dish towel to my eye. Yes, my eye. Remember when my face was the problem, mere hours ago? Remember when the worst thing that had happened to me was getting slapped?
Well. Well, well, well.
I never thought I would look back fondly on a knockout.
My foot—Lord, myfoot—is bandaged and elevated on a chair opposite me. I’ve passed out twice now: once from the pain of the needle piercing the muscle, and once when I woke up halfway through and saw what my stitched skin looked like. Now even looking at the tightly wrapped bandage makes me whimper with grief.
The pain. How to describe it? I’ll be brave and say it has dulled to a roar. It feels like my body has depleted a month’s worth of energy from the mere translation of so many nerve signals screamingEMERGENCYto my brain.
