Chapter 1
I guess it’s been a long time coming, really. For a while, the four of us have been getting spooked about the settling-down-with-one-person-forever thing. That’s why we moved to New York in the first place and leaped off the marriage-and-baby train. We refused to dull our fabulous edges to fit the Midwest’s archaic definition of a successful woman: married by twenty-five with two kids before thirty.
Our friends back in Michigan have been following that life plan (or death plan, more accurately) without questioning who made it or why. It sort of feels like watching blindfolded captives walk the plank. Except domestic life is way less exciting than jumping into an ocean full of piranhas. Maybe dissolving into nothingness is the better analogy.
No dissolving for the Redstockings. That’s what we call the four of us roommates. We named ourselves after the 1970s feminists who performed street theater with all these brilliant political messages about how they were caged by the patriarchy. They even crowned a sheep as Miss America to protest how society turns women into objects through beauty pageants. Talk about icons.
Every January, the four of us modern-day Redstockings re-sign our two-bedroom Brooklyn lease. For a fleeting moment, there was a fifth Redstocking who slept on the pullout couch, but she defected to be a tradwife instead. Four is a stronger number anyway.Sturdy and even. We’ve declared our apartment the global headquarters for the new wave of the Women’s Liberation Movement.
So the origins of the Anti-Marriage Pact go way back, but the thing that really solidifies it is the night I babysit for the Andersons. Yes, twenty-eight-year-old me babysitting on the Upper East Side on a Friday night. Such is the life of an up-and-coming playwright. Emphasis on the “and-coming” part as I haven’t sold any of my scripts yet, but that has less to do with my talent and more to do with the gatekeepers who run the show. Only 13 percent of Broadway plays are written by women, so the odds aren’t just stacked against me, they’re stacked on top of me, pressing my head down, eyes facing the pants of the old men who expect me to quite literally suck my way up.
It’s fine, though; I’m not freaking out about needing to make it big in my twenties. Do you see men putting that kind of pressure on themselves? Only women do it because of how we’re force-fed all these coded messages that say everything is downhill once we hit our thirties. That we’ve missed the boat and are no longer desirable and our biological clocks are expiring,tickticktick. And even if we do manage to have a successful geriatric pregnancy, well, there go any other dreams we might have because we’re supposed to spend every waking and sleeping minute being the perfect wife and the perfect mom, sacrificing our own needs and desires, wearing invisibility cloaks like badges of honor.
I’m not succumbing to that brainwashing. Someday I’ll make it big, but for now I’m just trying to have fun and scrape together enough money to pay my portion of the rent and walk into a thrift shop feeling rich.
Anyway, there I am babysitting in that swanky Park Avenue apartment and trying to wrestle the twins into bed. I’m so fed up with the whining and hair pulling that I let them stay on the couch chugging Dr Pepper and watching violent cartoons. I’m thinking I still have a while before Mr. and Mrs. Anderson come home,but they end up returning early. Apparently Mrs. Anderson had so much separation anxiety from her little demons that she insisted on boxing up their entrées and leaving the restaurant mid-meal.
Mr. Anderson doesn’t seem pleased about it. He scowls as he hands me two twenties for the short amount of time I was there. Pocketing the money fast before he realizes he overpaid me, I scurry out the door and ride the elevator twenty-two stories down to the ground floor, where I tip my imaginary top hat to the doorperson on my way out.
Taking the 4 train down to Union Square, I transfer to the L to take me back home to Bushwick. It’s the gritty part of Brooklyn with block-long street murals, converted warehouse coffee shops, and dive bars with delightfully mismatched vintage furniture.
These two mansprawlers are sitting next to me in the urine-and-pickle-scented subway car. They’re trying to crowd me out with their thighs, but I don’t let them. I spread my jeans wide and jam my knees into their legs to teach them the long-overdue lesson about what century we live in and the kinds of things women won’t tolerate anymore. The men scowl at me in that New York kind of way, but they seem to realize I’m not letting up, so they exhale these dramatic huffs and change seats. I congratulate myself because this is how equality comes about, one mansprawler victory at a time.
My cell service flits back in once we get to the other side of the East River, safely in Brooklyn territory. The shift in energy is palpable even underground. I’m free from the Manhattan clutter. Doing a quick Google search of Mrs. Anderson, I try to find out her backstory because it seems important somehow. After a couple false starts, I dig up some articles and photos of her before she was married.
Bonnie Beaumont was her name. She was an NYU film school grad and had an edgy bob like mine and a glimmer in her eyes like she’s thinking,Just watch.I get this pit in my stomach over how awoman like Bonnie with such an artsy, independent streak ended up evaporating into just another Wall Street housewife.
Bonnie Beaumont’s ghost haunts me even after I get off the train at Myrtle Avenue. Emerging into the hornless Bushwick air, I walk along the cracked sidewalks back to our place on Knickerbocker Avenue. It’s three or six blocks to get there; I never like to count if I don’t have to. It’s so constrictive to make the brain move in linear patterns like that.
I descend the stairs to the front door of our apartment, and yes, I meandescend, notascend, because we live on the garden level, which is just a New York aphorism for basement—how quaint. The Dunge Inn, we call our place. It’s a punny nod to how the only windows are these grilled slivers at the very top of the walls, too high for any of us to see out of and too skinny for rapists to crawl through, though who knows these days with the rise of Ozempic. We’re not as safe as we used to be.
Less enlightened people—our families, for instance—say we’re too old to be living like this: four adults squished into a cellar and sleeping in bunk beds. But their judgment only makes us double down on our decision to stay. If they don’t like it, we know we must be doing something right. It’s a pretty good litmus test. What some people see as a decrepit dungeon, we see as the mecca of freedom, and that just shows what a difference perspective makes. Maybe I’m not right all the time, but I’m right about this.
We’re designing our lives from scratch, lives that are free of all societal expectations, and that kind of thing requires sacrifice. I wouldn’t be happy in a spacious penthouse, not if it meant grinding it out in a soul-crunching office job. The other Redstockings feel the same; that’s why we’re soulmates. We’ve known we were ever since we met in Western Michigan University’s Gender Studies class that Professor Riley called the most progressive syllabus ever to sneak into the Midwest.
Our bright and irreverent energy is splashed all over the Inn.We painted the walls a yellow and turquoise base coat and then layered on the Redstockings’ logo from 1969—a red fist thrust in the air with the female gender sign encasing it, only we added the nonbinary sign too because it allows more room for evolution.
We keep adding more designs to the walls the longer we live here. The homemade art makes up for the lack of natural light, and the colorful ambience is worth losing our security deposit over, though we’ll put up a sublime fight if our landlord denies it from us when we move out—not that we’re thinking about moving out anytime soon. We’re going to live in the Inn for many years to come, and then once we’ve established ourselves as cultural icons, we’ll move somewhere exotic together. Ibiza or maybe just California, wherever the whim blows.
Hal is sprawled out on the striped slipcovered couch watching a show on her laptop. Jenni’s in the kitchenette, wringing out lacy underwear under the lurchy tap water. The closest laundromat is too close to justify driving to, so we always walk but regret it afterward. On the trek back, we end up tossing out half our clothes just to lighten the load. That’s why we’ve taken to washing most of our clothes in the sink with dish soap. Laundry detergent is an environmentally evil, overpriced scam anyway.
Classic rock ricochets out from our thirdhand turntable. It’s a Stevie Nicks record tonight. Tara’s singing along from the bathroom, slaying every note. She always does best when it doesn’t count for anything, when she’s not convincing herself that she’s not good enough.
The Inn smells vaguely of weed, like it has fully seeped into the ceiling cracks and leaky pipes. I notice it today only because I haven’t been smoking much lately—not because I’m trying to reform myself or anything; I just got bored of it like I get bored of everything and everyone except the Redstockings. They’re sort of my one steady fixture. Knowing they’re always there for me lets me swing up and down and off the rails in every other part of my life. It’s a good gig.
On nights like tonight, I’m especially thankful to come home to them.
“That’s it,” I say upon entering the apartment. I fling off my high-top sneakers and stuff my oversized coat into the closet rather than trying to find a hanger in the haystack. “Promise me you’ll never let me turn intothatkind of woman.”
Hal closes the laptop and sits up straighter on the couch. There are few things she likes better than a good rant. “What kind of woman?”
“The kind who’s completely consumed by her offspring.” Fuming, I walk to the pathetically small fridge and scowl at a huge wedding invite drooping under flimsy magnets. It’s from Lilly, that sellout who used to be our fifth. The mere sight of her name makes me sick. The only thing more pretentious than a cursiveLis a cluster of three cursiveL’s.
I rummage through the mini fridge’s motley contents—coconut milk, wilting arugula, two mangled slices of buffalo tofu pizza from Tony’s down the street. I locate a lone IPA, and even though there’s a bottle opener right there on the counter, I break the beer open with my teeth because I like to feel my own power like that. Taking many gulps in one, I carry on. “The kind of woman who forfeits herself to her husband and kids,” I elaborate.
Tara emerges from the bathroom in a scaly costume gown and lipstick the color of ripe papaya. Her gorgeous Afro is matted down with a taming product. “But don’t you think you’re being kind of harsh?” she says. “Isn’t the whole point of feminism that women can choose what they want to do? Some people are happy with the tradwife thing. It’s not for us to judge.”
“But that’s the thing,” I say. “I don’t believe any women actuallyarehappy with that life; they just pretend to be. Or maybe theythinkthey’re happy but only because they’ve forgotten what real happiness is, or they’ve never known it at all. But deep down, they’re all aching for more. I just know it.”
