Then she turns away from us to busy herself with dinner work. From where I sit, I can see just the shape of her hands. They’re shaking. She curls them into fists and presses them hard against the counter.
Something is wrong.
I turn to Maeve. “I’m going to help Mary with the mushrooms for a few minutes.” I leave Maeve at the table and approach Mary. “So,” I say. “How was your walk?”
“Fine.” She’s pulling mushrooms out of her bag, sending little clumps of dirt flying.
“Your face, Mary,” I say quietly. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Andyou’vebeen sewing hats for chickens,” she spits back. “Looks like we’ve both had a strange day.”
“I’m just trying to—”
“Maeve,” she calls over her shoulder, “will you go get a pail of water? We need to scrub these mushrooms clean.”
Maeve hops off her chair and trots away on her errand, and soon Mary and I are alone. She turns to face me. She’s breathing hard, unable to look me in the face. “I came across an animal, okay? In a trap. A mink, I think. It was—struggling. In pain.”
“Did you save it?”
“Of course not,” she mutters. “It was practically dead. If the trapdoesn’t kill it, the temperature will.” A tear rolls down her cheek, and she wipes it roughly away. “It was upsetting. That’s all.”
She looks the picture of an overwhelmed, tired, teenage girl. I feel the dim flicker of a maternal urge. I should hold her. I should pull her head beneath my own chin and stroke her hair and say,There, there.
Then I remember: Mary is the one who stitched my leg back together. The girl has an iron stomach. Nerves of steel. And I’m to believe she would become a puddle of tears over some mangled woodland creature?
I say carefully, almost experimentally: “I don’t believe you.”
Mary’s breathing grows still.
“You’re lying to me. Aren’t you?”
She says nothing.
“Mary.What happened in those woods?”
At that moment, Maeve walks through the door, carrying a full pail of water to us, sloshing a little on the floor in the process. “Thank you, Maevie,” Mary says. She takes the pail and sets it on the counter. Begins to wash the mushrooms.
“Mary,” I try again, but she shrugs me away and snaps, “Can you please get out of my way, Natalie?”
I step back, and then back again. She’s never called me Natalie before. For a moment, we look at each other, a mirror of fear.
Then the boys barrel through the front door and a commotion ensues—Noah shouting about imaginary battles,pow pow pow,Abel telling him the grip on his imaginary shotgun is all off, Old Caleb setting his hat onto the hook and asking what’s for dinner—and Mary slips away into the chaos. She doesn’t look at me for the rest of the night.
32
The social media marketing coursewas run by an influencer called Tammy Lane. She was a mother based in Salt Lake City with fifty thousand followers online who promised to teach us how to start making six figures a month on Instagram alone. It was advertised as a six-week intensive course (in smaller font on the sign-up page:onehour-long Zoom call a week!) and cost $1,500. By my estimates of how many women were in the introductory Zoom call, it was safe to say Tammy had made her monthly quota.
In the first Zoom meeting, I expected to see a computer screen filled with women like the ones I’d gone to college with, smart and savvy and violently progressive. Instead, the Zoom opened to reveal a gallery of women who looked like me. This was the first time I realized that the business of influence was not a secular calling. Nearly everyone had a little cross necklace glistening on their chest, except for one curly-haired woman from New Jersey, Rachel Weissman, who looked increasingly distressed in the opening minutes of the call until finally she turned her video off.
We prayed at the opening and the closing of each meeting. In the module, dozens of versions of myself stared back at me, with usernames like JesusMomma andOGOrganic. I couldn’t tell if the women were older than me or younger, but I could immediately see what kind of communities they came from. I saw it in their presentation, in the way they laughed and frowned and cried on cue.I saw it in the way they talked about their families in the sixty-second window when they were meant to offer brief introductory bios about themselves.Hi, everyone, I’m Natalie Heller Mills. Mother of three, with a fourth on the way! My husband, Caleb, runs our family farm, which we lovingly call YesteryearRanch. We sell milk, cheeses, and organic exotic vegetables. But that’s enough about me! What about you?
“I want you all to beso proud of yourselvesfor signing up today,” Tammy said at the opening of the call. “By showing up for this call today, you’ve taken the biggest step of your journey: the first one.” She paused to let the gravity of the situation really land.
Tammy was the kind of woman who screameddebutante.She was taking the call from her immaculate kitchen. Each time she spoke, she shifted the laptop a little bit so that a new part of the room was highlighted. The eight-burner stovetop; the two stainless-steel dishwashers. The sparkling countertops, the rows of mason jars containing neat little piles of powder, ranging in color from terra-cotta brown to cocaine white. At times, she would lean in toward the laptop screen, blocking out the background entirely, her poreless face beaming out at us like a lunar eclipse. “The hardest thing a mother will ever do is to put herself first. Am I right? Raise your hand, ladies, if you haven’t put yourself first inyears.”
A hundred hands shot into the air. I thought,This is unbearably corny, but I should put my hand up, too, just to play along.Then I realized my hand was already raised. Tammy was good.
According to Tammy, the most powerful force on the planet was the power of the Divine Christian Feminine (trademark pending!). We were limitless resources; theoriginalEnergizer Bunnies. All we needed to do to achieve our wildest dreams was tochannelour own infinite store of energy. “If you are yourtrue,authentic self, then the sales will happen effortlessly,” she said confidently while she clicked through a clearly homemade PowerPoint presentation. The slides sped quickly along and seemed only loosely connected to what Tammy was saying. A stock picture of a blond woman twirling in a field of flowers; a screenshot of a bank account with a balance of$80,000; a cartoon pyramid rendering of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs with a frowny-faced lady stick figure standing at the bottom.
