I paused, looked around. Pretended to be confused, when really I was thinking,Oh, Jesus Christ. Not you.
Vanessa and I had gone to high school together. She’d been on the track team too but had made varsity only her senior year, so we hadn’t spent much time together. She was in nursing scrubs now, standing by two overflowing shopping carts, her preteen daughter glowering behind her with the same expression of profound disappointment that Vanessa had worn at every track meet. I glanced at the cart closest to me. Disposable razors, disposable tissue boxes, a half dozen slices of chemical-bloated ham wrapped in three layers of plastic. I could practically smell the stink of the landfill where all this stuff, all these products designed to be trash, would end up a month from now. Then I looked back at Vanessa, who was now frowning at me with the same sour expression as her daughter, andmy heart softened with nostalgia.Poor thing.She’d never won a race in her life.
“It’s so good to see you!” I said. “It’s been, what—a decade?”
She sniffed, looked at my empty cart. “I didn’t know you came to Target.”
“Of course I do. I’m human, aren’t I?” I turned my grin to her daughter. “And who is this?”
Vanessa looked at her own daughter with a strange expression, like she was trying to see what she looked like through my eyes. “This is Zoe.”
Zoe looked to be a few years younger than Clementine. If she recognized her own name, she didn’t show it. She just stared at me, her expression a springboard of tight misery.
“And those ones, I’m guessing, are yours?”
I followed Vanessa’s gaze to see Clementine crouched in the aisle ahead, flipping through a picture book while the little girls peered eagerly over her shoulder. A flush of pleasure ran through me, stronger than any artificial sugar high. “Yes. Those are my girls. The oldest is Clementine, and the younger ones are Jessa and Junebug.”
When I turned back to Vanessa, she was smirking. When was the last time I’d seen a grown woman smirk? “You know, I really admire your commitment to the olden days with those names.”
My smile shrank by an inch.Here we go.
Vanessa had grown up in a strict, devout family, much stricter and more devout than my own, but she’d since emancipated herself from her parents, and now liked to write long-winded diatribes about herterrible upbringingvia Facebook statuses that garnered, on average, three to five likes a pop. Vanessa wanted the world to know she was modern, now. She’d changed. She ate organic! (Except when she got her groceries at Target, apparently!) Self-proclaimed progressive women like Vanessa were chemically addicted to hating women like me. I knew that. I knew this woman got embarrassingly drunk at family parties and pulled up my Instagram page, showing anyone stupid enough to walk past thatshe knew this woman personally,she knew her in high school,before launching into some recycled slur of a speech about how all traditional people are idiots, all religious people are idiots, all people who choose to live a different lifestyle than hers are idiots, idiots, idiots, when what she really wanted to say wasI am so nauseatingly jealous of this woman I used to know that I think it might actually kill me.
Women like Vanessa, with their expensive latex foreheads and theirI’m with herbumper stickers? They didn’t know what they wanted. They couldn’t possess a truly principled stance even if someone injected it straight into their faces. Lord knows they couldn’t take responsibility for their own lives, so they blamed their unhappiness on me. The dumb, ignorant, backward-thinking tradwife. Never mind the fact that I graduated in the top three of my high school. Never mind that I got straight A’s at Harvard, studying global religious history while Vanessa ping-ponged her way through the rooms of the club rugby house at Michigan. (Yes, I’ll admit: I checked in on her Instagram from time to time, too.) Never mind the fact that I lived my lifeactually adheringto all the principles they loved to virtue blast on Instagram.Eat local! Support small businesses!Reduce waste!
The Angry Women could say what they wanted, but facts were facts. I was a woman of principles. A womandefinedby principles. No amount of money in the world could’ve gotten me to take a nibble of the cancerous ham in that Tetris-packed cart. No amount of smooth-brained social acceptance could’ve gotten me to name my daughter something so toothlessly trendy—something that so desperately shoutedpickme—as Zoe.
Cunt.
Sorry, Lord. My anger was getting the best of me, these days. It was a problem that needed to be fixed, and I planned—I really did!—to fix it. If I’d had a little more time, I swear I would’ve fixed it.
“It’s wonderful to see you,” I said smoothly. “You should bring the kids over to the farm sometime!” I peered down at Vanessa’ssullen ogre of a daughter. “I bet you’d love to see where ham comes from, wouldn’t you?”
Vanessa let out a tiny moan. As intimate and shameful as an accidental fart in mixed company. Her face turned a bright shade of pink. I knew it was the kind of threaded offer that would catch in her molars. She would know the offer was half-hearted but still consider the possibility anyways, because Vanessa probably wanted to see my picturesque little farm in person more than she wanted anything else in her life. The chickens,my ladies.The big red barn, which photographed so beautifully in any kind of light. The gardens, oh, the gardens! The pseudo-erotic fantasy of us baking my signature lemon zest cake together, the two of us laughing at some stupid thing, our children playing peaceably together in the background. None of it would ever happen, and yet: the idea of that impossible day would sit there, growing bacteria in the back of her throat, for the next week or month or year. A profoundly humiliating desire, as strong and confusing and animal as the ones that inspired her to watch lesbian porn on low volume while her husband was sleeping next to her. (She was definitely the kind of woman who watched lesbian porn on low volume while her husband was sleeping next to her.)
Grind away, Vanessa,I thought, smiling beatifically.Go ahead. Give yourself a migraine thinking about me.A notion so pleasurable it was worth the guilt that came wrapped up inside it, like a penny candy. She would think about my famous little farm for a year, and then she would bite the bullet and order one of my branded Dutch oven sets ($250, made in Taiwan), and she would mail it to a friend’s house, one whose name I didn’t recognize, so that I never found out that she personally gave me money. That’s how much this woman hated me. That’s how much she hated herself.
“Say you’ll come sometime,” I said one last time, smiling wide. “Please, just say it.”
“Thanks,” Vanessa said shortly. “I will.” She looked like she’d swallowed a bottle of Advil. I beamed in reply.
We said a few more pointless things, long enough for Vanessa to take a few more obvious glances at my body (noticing, no doubt, that the skirt hanging loose around my hips was the very same one I’d worn in school a decade earlier) and long enough for me to pointedly ignore her body altogether (do I even have to say it?). We said goodbye. As I turned the corner with my girls, Vanessa threw a middle finger at my back. I didn’tseeher do it, but I felt her do it. I swear I did. And who could blame her? I had the life she always wanted, the life shestillwanted but could no longer admit. Vanessa was liberated, sure—but I was happy. And it was such a shame, wasn’t it? The way some women so willingly compromised every ounce of themselves in the name of building a life for themselves that they didn’t enjoy.
I passed Vanessa once more at the checkout line and gave a cheerful wave, but she didn’t see me. She was bickering with her daughter over something in the cart. By this point, I’d regained my composure and felt nothing but pity for her again.
What do your friends think of your success online?
“They’re happy for me. Why wouldn’t they be?”
Pity. I pitied her.
But also:fuck her.
Sorry, Lord, but really, fuckher—
By the time we reached the car, it was dark out and I was practically spitting with fury. Vanessa, thatbitch,was undoubtedly going to run home to post about me in one of those stupid snarky online forums—bet you didn’t think someone like Natalie would shop atTarget!!!—and then I would have to suffer a whole week ofonline commentary,and Shannon! The nerve! The absolute unbelievable nerve of that spoiled uneducated morally bankrupt little son of a—
Breathe, Natalie. Just breathe.
