A People's Future of the United States
Page 37
Miriam stopped the car in front of the post office, watching as the truck turned the corner, heading for the address she had given to the driver.
Nan shot her a curious look. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I just thought it might be nice to walk the rest of the way.” Miriam turned off the engine, smiling a little. “I’m pretty sure the owners of the post office won’t have us towed.”
“Probably not,” agreed Nan.
They got out of the car together. The air was dry and sweet with the smell of sawdust and distant corn. Hand in hand, they walked down the road, turned the corner, and looked at the house they had chosen as their own. The rest of the collective had given them first pick, because they’d been the ones to find the town and because it was well known that they wanted to have children eventually, which meant that extra space would hopefully become necessary. It was small by the standards of the place where they’d been living, just three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a sitting room barely big enough to qualify for the name. There was no dining room. They’d eat on the back porch, or on the couch in front of the television, or in the common room behind the post office. It would make a good social center.
The children of Harmony—the ones whose parents were uprooting them and carrying them to the middle of nowhere, and the ones who had yet to be conceived, much less born—would grow up in the pockets of their neighbors, running up one side of the town and down the other. They would grow up safe and wild and surrounded by love.
In that moment, neither Miriam nor Nan could have thought of anything better.
The moving truck was already parked in front of their house, the men carting boxes and pieces of furniture inside. Everything was marked and labeled as clearly as possible; while there would definitely be errors, all they could do by getting involved at this stage would make things worse. So Miriam and Nan stood where they were and watched the future getting started, until Miriam’s phone buzzed with an incoming text.
She pulled it out and glanced at the screen. “Dave and Nathan just hit town. They’re heading for their place, but their moving truck isn’t going to arrive until tomorrow. Do we want to have dinner?”
“No one has a working kitchen yet.”
“In anticipation of exactly that situation, Dave packed four coolers into the backseat before they left Fresno. He promises a feast.”
Dave was a French chef whose grilled cheese sandwiches were better than most people’s attempts at gourmet cooking. Nan bumped her shoulder against Miriam’s and grinned.
“All you had to say was Dave packed. We’re in. Unless you wanted to start unpacking already?”
“We can’t have sex until we put the bed together, and I don’t want to do that with strangers in the house. So this is the best option for saying hello to our new town. Think you can find the box with the wine?”
“I’m on it,” said Nan, and trotted toward the house. Miriam watched her go.
Over the next few days, she knew, more and more cars would be arriving, accompanied by more and more moving trucks. The town’s single diner would be brought online, and Dave—as one of the few residents not employed by a large company that liked remote workers—would start getting it into shape. Nathan made more than enough to support them both, but everyone had committed to buying groceries for the diner and helping to pay for its upkeep. They were leaving behind wide worlds of takeout food and gourmet cuisine. Paying for their own private chef seemed like the best available compromise.
Over the next few days, the world would change. Right now it was time to celebrate the transformation.
Nathan and Dave had laid claim to the house connected to the diner, which only made sense. All the windows had been replaced prior to their arrival, and the only work left to do was painting and some repair on the porch. The four of them sat in front of the diner, eating their picnic off paper plates and drinking their wine out of delicate stemware—because, Nathan said, “all good things should be toasted, and so should all terrible ideas, and this could go either way.”
That night, Miriam and Nan lay curled in the center of their own bed, in their own home, in their own town, and everything was perfect, and everything was terrifying. Nan kissed the corner of Miriam’s mouth, tasting the blend of minty toothpaste and sweet white wine.
“Is this it?” she asked softly. “Is this the right thing?”
“A little late for that, don’t you think? We bought it. Pretty sure the people we bought it from aren’t going to take it back.”
Nan kissed her again. “I mean is it the right thing for us to run away to the middle of nowhere instead of staying where we were and fighting to make people understand and accept us. I feel like we’re retreating.”
“It’s not retreating to go where people will treat you like you matter.” Miriam pushed herself up onto one elbow. “It’s not retreating to let yourself be happy. We’re not cutting ourselves off from the world. We’re still working, still traveling, still going to stay involved with politics and making things better. Hell, the fact that we’re here is going to bring life to the local economy—it’s creating a local economy—and drop a big blue spot in the middle of an even bigger red splash. We’re not under any obligation to stand around and let people kick us for not being exactly like them. And if someone shows up who isn’t exactly like us but wants a place to go, we’ll let them in. We’ll welcome them home.”
“Really?” asked Nan.
“Really,” said Miriam, and kissed her, and conversation stopped, at least for a little while.
* * *
—
A week later, two-thirds of the houses in town were occupied. The diner was open; the general store was preparing to open; the post office was undergoing final inspections. The solar arrays were busily converting sunlight into power and power into weather that kept away the worst ravages of the local climate. The ethics of weather manipulation aside, without it, global climate change would have long since dried them all out and blown them all away.
Two weeks later, everything was running as smoothly as it could. There were glitches, of course—some of the plumbing didn’t work, the internet was spotty until the weather machines were recalibrated, the general store kept running out of milk, and no one wanted to do the shelving unless they absolutely had to—but the town was alive, the town was real, the town was thriving. They had taken their ball and gone all the way home, home to a place where no one cared, or judged, or pretended not to mind the way they lived and the way they loved while quietly whispering behind their hands.
Nan was sweeping the post-office porch, one eye on the clouds, when a green station wagon pulled up in front and people began spilling out. Four adults, all told, two men and two women, each wearing a doubled wedding ring, all of them looking nervously around. They walked to the front of the car, standing in a rough diamond form that made it clear they were a unit.
One of the women stepped forward. “Um, hi. Is there someone we could…talk to? We heard there might be some houses here available to rent.”
Sometimes the best part of taking your ball and going home is having the opportunity to define what home really means. Nan smiled and leaned her broom up against the wall.
“You can talk to me,” she said. “Welcome to Harmony. And, hopefully, welcome home.”
SEANAN MCGUIRE is the author of dozens of novels, hundreds of short stories, and multiple essays about the relevance of the X-Men to the modern world. She lives and works in the Pacific Northwest, where she shares her home with an ever-shifting array of unusual pets, enormous cats, creepy dolls, and books. So many books. When not writing, McGuire enjoys watching horror movies, talking about horror movies, making her friends take her to horror movies, and trying to convince people that horror movies are “the romantic comedy of the summer.” McGuire doesn’t sleep much.
NOW WAIT FOR THIS WEEK
THE TIME WE CELEBRATED BONNIE’S BIRTHDAY
We spent the last two hours of Bonnie’s birthday drinks talking about shitty men and didn’t think to apologize to Bonnie about it until after we got kicked out of the bar, long past closing time.
The bartender had tried to wait us out. Our group had become way too terrifying and annoying to approach. Our faces were red and our eyes were red and our auras or spirits or vibes or whatever were reddest of all. A dank, singed red that dimmed to black.
Although the bartender was extremely built, he wore his bounty of muscle like an old woman carrying too many grocery bags. He sighed and leaned against the bar and we ignored him.
Phyllida had been sketching on a napkin with meticulous and confident strokes. She seemed exactly like a real artist as long as you didn’t look at what she was drawing. “It needs a really long handle,” she said. “For leverage.” On the napkin was Phyllida herself, as a stick figure with scribbled hair like black hay, standing on a beach and holding an enormous fork. At the end of each fork tine, she added eight stick figures, who were being shoved helplessly into the surf.
“Ta da!” She pushed the napkin in front of us. “The drowning fork! For all your drowning-more-than-one-man-at-a-time needs. Eight men maximum. You don’t have to use all the tines. But it’s such a waste if you don’t.”
“Motherfucker, I’ll take fifty,” Devon said, slapping her wallet down onto the table.
We cackled, some of us actively trying to screech like evil witches because it was funnier, and the longer we cackled the more we just felt it was the exact right way to laugh—not laughing because everything was so joyous and unblemished but simply because you were all bitches in hell together, so why not laugh, why not understand that everything contains at least one tiny nugget of its opposite, why not find a socially acceptable way to shriek with rage in public?
After the bartender finally kicked us out, we lumped together on the sidewalk, awkward again. The spell was dead and our faces were melted candles. In our bodies the joy-poison had evaporated but the poison-poison had leached into our marrow. Most of us had work or class tomorrow, and worst of all, tomorrow was more than technically today.
Bonnie was the only one who looked alert. The birthday girl, she of the scary freezing blue wolf eyes. In everything else she conceded to softness and prettiness, but her eyelashes she painted black and jagged. Each individual lash each day—that was how you achieved the look. She took so freaking long in the bathroom, where the light was best.
“Sorry, Bonnie,” I said.
“It was pretty downer there at the end,” said Nina. “Sorry, I feel like it was my fault.”
“No, yeah, sorry I got so intense!” we somehow all managed to say as one.
“Shit, my wallet,” said Devon, and went back into the bar.
Meanwhile, nobody said, Haha, dang, isn’t it bad enough that rape and assault and abuse and harassment and boyfriends doing the emotional psychosexual whatever equivalent of sticking their beefy hand into your brain and wearing it like a baseball mitt or a puppet so they can just really move it around and infinity et cetera happens to so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so, so many of us, and we can’t even talk about it without having to apologize afterward?
Not that I had said much tonight! But of course I’d apologized too. Because even though Bonnie smiled and said she didn’t mind that her birthday drinks had been taken over by dark tales and infernal anti-man machines and despairing laughter, we knew she did. She liked it when things and people were happy, and when they weren’t it was as if they were being unhappy at her. To her. She was plenty sympathetic to a point, and past that she’d start to bristle and talk about wallowing and pessimism and—
“—you get back what you put in,” Bonnie said. “Just between you and me. I wouldn’t say this to the rest of the group, and of course I respect what they’ve been through, but there’s also such a thing as deciding to stop being a victim. Yes, remembering and talking about all the wrongs, that’s important for…healing, or some such. But you can’t stay on that same old subject and expect to be able to get anything new out of it.”
We were walking back to the apartment together. I decided to not respond. Facing the prospect of arguing with Bonnie was like, you were starving and in front of you was a long, long table full of cakes. But if you ate even one bite, then you’d have to eat all of the cakes, the whole goddamn table of them.
That was just how Bonnie was. She would not ever change. She was always how you expected her to be, which wasn’t really something we’d take as a compliment for ourselves, but it could be pleasant to know someone else like that.
Besides, she could be a great friend in the classical sense. Back when I’d been going through a hard time, she had invited me to be her roommate in her giant apartment, even though she had no need of a roommate, and only charged me a tiny bit of rent. In return for her generosity, I did not discuss this hard time with her in any amount of detail.
The street was busy, lots of bars, lots of people out, so in some ways you were more generally unsafe but the unsafety was thinned and spread out. The block was like a Halloween parade where everyone wore their costumes on the inside—slavering B.O. werewolves, droopy amnesiac ghosts, vampires coldly intent on doing it.
The next morning, we woke up depleted and dried out and dire. Those of us who were close friends texted each other, Was I okay??? and unfailingly responded, You were great!!! (Which was a double lie: No one had been okay. And no one had been in any state to accurately judge.)
As for what we had talked about at the end of Bonnie’s birthday drinks, we psychically decided to never bring it up with each other again and to forget that we ever knew about:
—the time a man, a doctor at the college campus clinic, was feeling our heartbeat and/but cupped our boob and lifted it once, subtle and unmistakable—
—the time a man had followed us onto a subway car to expound on our beauty and ignoring his request for our phone number caused his perspective to immediately flip as if by evil magic, and he darted from slimy kindness to incendiary outrage, shouting directly in our face like it was the next best thing to hitting us but who knew, any moment he could start doing the best thing, and meanwhile everyone on the subway car made like they were in fucking Derry, Maine, and looked straight ahead—
—the time a man secretly removed his condom during sex—
—the times we didn’t want to but we did—
—the times we didn’t want it that way but we did it that way—
—the times we wanted only some of it but we did all of it
—and so on.
THE TIME BONNIE WAS DREAMING
There we were at the bar. Too many people who didn’t all know each other as well as they should crowding a corner table. We looked like a bunch of different species of birds eating something off the sidewalk together. Big birds, little birds, beauties and sad sacks, pecking away at invisible crumbs without touching or fighting or acknowledging their shared plane of existence, like their eyes couldn’t even see each other—only the food.
In this situation, Bonnie was the food. Bonnie was having birthday drinks and she had gathered us here to sheepishly celebrate, since she’d reached the age where if you called yourself old, some people wouldn’t correct you and some people would get mildly offended.
Bonnie was late, as usual. She was chronically late and never apologized for it, maybe because she always looked super awesome, and truly she did, so she imagined that that was a fair exchange for the lateness, even for us.
While we waited, a few of us started discussing the list. Some time ago, a list had been released online of not-famous men who had done bad things to women, mostly of a sexual nature. Some men at the table started shifting in their seats, as if fidgeting done just ri
ght could teleport you to a distant land in which you felt not so implicated. Or they sat there like Easter Island heads, with equally as much to say about shitty men.
The door crashed open and Bonnie ran through the bar, stopping short at our table. Her makeup had sweated off into patchy plum and black smears under her eyes. Her hair was stringy and stuck to her cheeks. She did not look super awesome, but sometimes we looked like that and it wasn’t such a big deal so we weren’t going to make it one. Perhaps we could ask about it later, once we were all safely drunk.
“Happy birthday!” we said.
“Is today your real birthday?” someone said, as they stood to hug her. Bonnie accepted the hug but gave nothing in return, her arms wilted by her sides. She didn’t answer at first. She was busy peering around at all the wrong things, the ceiling and the bartender and the drinks on the table and our feet, like this was one of those kid puzzles where you had to spot the differences between two similar pictures. Her gaze was weird, fractured. She wouldn’t look at us.
“Bonnie?”
“My birthday,” she said too loud. “Yeah. My birthday. First of the month. Rabbit, rabbit.”
“I think you’re supposed to say ‘Rabbit, rabbit’ first thing in the morning, like the second you wake up,” said Nina. “Otherwise you don’t get the good luck.”
Scott said, “Jesus, is it already next month?”
“I know, right?” someone said.
“I didn’t mean that it was next month. I meant today is the start of a new month. Which is this month.”
“Yes. I got that.”
Bonnie listened along, as we all did whether or not we wanted to since the bar was so quiet you couldn’t even grant the mercy of pretending not to hear. Then she lifted her palm. “HOLD THE MOTHERFUCK ON,” she roared. “Stop messing with me. Stop lying. I’ve been saying it all day; this shit is not funny. My birthday was last week and we all know it. You guys even did that conversation again. Like I could ever forget such a stupid-ass dumb-ass fucking conversation!”