There’s a dramatic beat as the record reaches the end of side one and the needle scrapes the silence like it’s agreeing with me.
“Just look around,” I say. “At all the women who’ve done the ‘right thing’ and settled down—which, by the way, just means settling. All this buildup to marriage and then—boom—it’s all downhill from there, watchingThe Bacheloron TV because you never go on dates anymore. Living vicariously through romance novels because you never get laid. And don’t get me started on the kids thing...”
“I think maybe you’re just stinging because of the whole Lilly situation,” Tara says gently. “But we knew she was always going to move back to Oregon and marry that boy she grew up with.”
“Did you see her wedding dress, though?” Jenni gushes now. “It’sstunning. She sent it in the group chat today.” She takes out her phone to show us. “Oh wait, maybe it wasn’t the group chat. It was just to me, I guess.”
My whole body winces. “I removed Lilly from the group chat,” I say. “Obviously. And please read the room, Jenni.”
Jenni sheepishly tucks her phone away. “My bad.”
“None of this is just about Lilly,” I go on. “Sure, maybe she’s the catalyst for the combustion, but the match was struck ages ago. Now it’s time we burn it all down.”
“Is this one of your bits?” Jenni asks, looking to the others for confirmation. “It is, right?”
“I don’t think so,” Tara whispers back.
“Of course it’s not a bit,” I say, pouncing onto the couch between Hal and Jenni. Hal hands me a beer because I guess I’ve already finished my first. “Think about it,” I go on. “The highest compliment that society bestows on a woman is that she’s selfless. A selfless wife, a selfless mother, a selfless friend. Self-less. A lack of self! How fucked up is that?”
“I think I heard that on a podcast,” Hal says. “How martyrdom is glorified.”
Hal is always listening to “enlightenment influencers,” as shecalls them, and then writing stand-out quotes in permanent marker on the ceiling of the Inn to help them stick.
“That’s how I felt,” Jenni says, voice hoarse like she’s just seen Bonnie’s ghost too. “Like I was going to lose myself by taking his name.”
Of the four of us, Jenni came closest to walking the plank. Two years back, she left her high school sweetheart before the wedding; she had a panic attack at her final dress fitting and ripped off the constrictive corset right there. She drove straight to New York with her bridal tiara still on and moved in with us that day. We were tempted to sell the tiara to buy some softer toilet paper, but we had Jenni smash it with a hammer instead. It was the catharsis she needed.
“And think about all our other friends back in college,” I say, because I’m really on a roll now. “Who swore we’d be that close forever, and then one by one they dropped off the face of the earth when they got married, like we were just the opening act.”
“You’re not the opening act for me,” Tara says. “You’re the main-stage performance.”
Hal and Jenni agree right away. Their assurances make me feel a tiny bit better but not much. My heart physically indents at the thought of ever losing them.
“I bet a lot of women have had this same exact conversation, though,” I say. “But then one by one they started to get hitched, and then the others got scared they were falling behind so they got hitched too. It’s a vicious cycle.”
“The whole thing is like some kind of twisted game theory, isn’t it?” Hal says. “No one wants to be the last single one standing.”
Hal’s right. That’s exactly what this marriage pressure is: twisted game theory.
“If people would just keep their friendships strong,” I say, “they wouldn’t need to latch onto spouses to keep from being lonely. They could lead thrilling romantic lives, perpetually high on loveor lust, and have the stability of their friendships to ground them. It’s the best of both worlds.”
“That’s what we do,” Jenni points out proudly.
“And very successfully,” Tara adds with a wink that hints at our delicious lifestyle.
“I don’t deny that,” I say. “I just don’t think we’d be the first women to have all these radical ideas of liberation and then end up as domestic prisoners, too trapped to even see the bars on their own cell.”
“Have you met us, though?” Tara asks. “We’re the most modern inventions ever to come out of the Midwest.”
“But at the end of the day, we’re still from the Midwest,” I say. “And our families expect things, society expects things. It’s programmed into us, always will be on some deep, dangerous level. It’s a case of our wild nature losing out to our tamed nurture.”
“I agree with Tara, though,” Jenni says. “We’re not the get-married-and-settle-down type. That’s how we ended up here, remember?”
Tara and I drove east first, right after college graduation. We were both set on becoming Broadway actors with our faces on taxi ads and our names lit up on Times Square billboards. That’s still in the cards for her, but I switched to playwriting after a few years of rejections got under my skin. It didn’t make me question my talent, just the industry’s ability to appreciate it. I hate sticking to a script. I’m much more about improvisation, but the casting directors rarely commended my creativity. So I started writing instead to give the actors more original dialogue and break free of all the recycled, clichéd plotlines. I’ve only written drafts and scraps so far, nothing phenomenal. But the genius is building, bubbling beneath the surface, ready to explode like a fucking volcano. I can feel it.
The year we turned twenty-five, Hal came out to her parents as bisexual, which was a complete mess, so there was no way she was going to tell them she actually didn’t like men at all except forusing them to get free drinks. Needing to get away, Hal visited us in New York and never left. She’s the entrepreneurial type, spilling over with billion-dollar ideas. The ideas usually come in the form of her venting about something being dysfunctional and then making PowerPoint pitch decks for all her future investors. She scrapes by on grants and scholarships she has a knack for winning.
Jenni joined us after Hal. She’s Korean American, the daughter of immigrants, and has been deep in the unlearning of all the pressures to “be successful” in the conventional sense. She’s a recovering management consultant who’s still figuring out what her dream is. I kind of envy it, how new the whole liberation thing is for her, but there are some perks to being an old pro at it too. I don’t feel guilty that I’m sinning or straying like Jenni does. Once you’ve been free long enough, you realize morals are all man-made, designed to keep women in our tiny little boxes so we don’t disrupt the status quo.
