“Noah,” Mary says sharply before I can respond. “You don’t speak to your mother like that.”
“But she’s useless,” he cries. His face is all red now. He looks despondent. “She’s so bad at being a mother!”
“Noah. Enough!” Mary looks like she’s on the verge of slapping him.
I touch her shoulder and say, “Really, it’s fine. I’m fine.” To Noah, I say gently, “Do you want to help me bake some bread?”
“No!” he cries. “That’s women’s work!”
Mary steps toward Noah, either to reproach him or offer comfort, but he backs away from her reach. He’s even more upset now.Tears are falling down his face. “You’re allstupid women!” he shouts, and then he runs down the porch stairs and down to the barn.
“Let him be,” Mary says.
Hours later, when dinner is ready, Mary walks down to the barn. She reemerges with Noah in her arms, curled up so that he looks much smaller than he actually is. He’s covered in hay and fast asleep. I stand by the kitchen sink, watching through the window as she slowly carries him up to the house.
The sun is setting. The men have not come home yet.
36
THE iPHONE STANDI’d bought from Amazon was crap. It was meant to stand firm on any surface, a collapsible tripod with a wiry neck like an octopus leg, designed to twist and swirl so you could take a picture from any angle. An ideal accessory for any serious influencer, the brand packaging informed me, except the plastic nubs keeping the tripod stable were too nubby, and the octopus leg wasn’t grippy enough to hold my phone in place, and so each time I finally positioned it perfectly, my phone would clatter loudly to the floor when I started to chop the first carrot. If I wanted it to stay put, I had to wedge it into place with two cookbooks on either side. Usually that did the trick.
It was five-thirty in the morning. I’d been up for two hours already. I’d blown out my hair and then plaited it into a carefully messy, obscenely voluminous braid. I’d spent twenty-five minutes putting on my makeup; I’d recently mastered a YouTube tutorial on how to achieve a Nakedly Gorgeous complexion. As I chopped the vegetables, I kept my expression blankly pleasant, reminded myself not to turn my body toward the cutting board, and focused all my energy on breathing. These were hard-won lessons. In my first attempt at a cooking video, weeks earlier, I’d recorded about seven hours’ worth of bread content before realizing my face looked pinched and sour. I could practically hear Ashley Ann’s cloying whine:Not very likable, Natalie! Try again!
It had been just over three months since that bearded man featured my account on his show. We now had a million followers.Whoosh.The shift in growth had been so steep that it actually felt like the air at Yesteryear Ranch was now thinner than it was before. Like we physically rose in elevation from all the eyeballs on ourlittle corner of the universe.
Why me?
This was the question that rang through my mind each morning when I woke up and prepared to face down an audience the size of a small nation; when I realized they wanted video content in addition to images; when I learned that my video content was nowhere near up to snuff; when I put the children to bed and then stayed up until three in the morning reading tutorials about how to get it right; when I spent hours scrolling through the internet, looking for a recipe to crib; when I reminded myself again and again that failure was not an option.Why me?
Well. It was like Doug said: a good politician doesn’t change his policies, just the messaging.
A good influencer doesn’t change herself, just the packaging. And while Tammy Lane and Cassidy and Ashley Ann and Robin and all those other idiot women hadn’t understood the key to perfect packaging, the bearded man certainly had. The day he did that livestream, he offered a crash course in marketing that was literally priceless: he taught me how to market myself, and as a double whammy, he taught the audience how to love me.
Which made me think of something I’d read long ago, back in college, the night after my date with Caleb at the Italian restaurant. The cold glasses of water, that truffle pasta. The strangest flavor I’d ever encountered. Terrible yet mouthwatering. “Trust me,” Caleb had said, when I noted my confusion aloud. “You’ll develop a taste for it, and then you’ll be obsessed.” Back in my dorm room that night, I went online and learned about the pigs who were trained to seek out those delicacies in the wild. The smell was so intoxicating to them, it nearly drove them mad.
People aren’t so different from pigs, apparently. Once they learna rotten thing can be eaten, they will eat it, and then they will become addicted to it. They will let it drive them mad.
That bearded man? He was the first person to smell the rot of our farm and label it a delicacy. Those homesteading folks over at Yesteryear Ranch, with the tired young mother and the grinning doltish cowboy? They were, as it turned out, not rotten at all, but a perfectly fermented vision of America.
Delicious,the bearded man announced, and everyone else rushed toward me with their forks.
Why does she talk like that?
seriously tho when does this woman sleeepppppp
i am so obsessed with you
i can’t believe so many people are buying the crap this woman is selling
I wish my life was half as perfect as hers!!!!!!
The goal of an influencer is not to be lovable, and it is not to be unbearable. The goal is to be both at once. In other words: addicting.
That was just the first of many lessons I’d learned since the day I went viral. Another lesson? The Angry Women, as Caleb had dubbed them, were overworked and underpaid. This, I had learned after many nights of sleepless demographic research, in which I would click through hundreds of accounts that followed me, noting where they lived, what they posted about, who they claimed to be. What I had learned: nearly all these women had crappy jobs and snotty kids and loser husbands. Alternatively, they were single and whiny and depressed. Either way: these women wanted their content to be every bit as mindless and pleasurable as their lives were not. These women wanted—no, theyneeded—perfection from me. After all, the tighter the stitching, the more soothing it is to pick apart at the seams.
At the same time, the Angry Woman claimed to wanthonesty,or at least a working illusion of it. Which meant, in practice: a perfect woman making a perfect meal and occasionally spilling a little flour along the way,oopsie!;a doting mother approaching a baker’s dozen of children smiling with blissful exhaustion as her daughter dragged a finger through a bowl of frosting,so darling;a patient wife rolling her eyes with bottomless adoration for the man who tracked dirt onto the freshly washed floors, who beat her or chastised her or spoke over her until she trailed off into silence.Me-ow! Hubby!
seriously do her kids ever complain
