by Roxane Gay
“I’m tied down,” Charlie said, “by my parents’ expectations. You just get to do whatever you want.” Charlie worked at a law firm. He was rarely able to do what he wanted. “With you,” he said, “I feel the rope around me slacken.” By now, I knew he was subtly trying to sleep with me, and maybe always had been. We’d watch movies on the couch, and we’d start on opposite ends, and when the movie finished, he’d be right up against me, like we were two blocks getting ready to build.
“You’re so brave,” he said one night, after we’d eaten SpaghettiOs from a can. We were sitting at my small Formica kitchen table, and he kept dipping his head toward me, like he was trying to close the gap between our mouths. It’s not that I didn’t want to. The shape of his lips told me it would be good, and though I hadn’t kissed that many people, I’d kissed enough to know shape mattered. It was the lie that kept me from pressing my lips to his.
“I haven’t been honest about my parents,” I said.
“Oh?” he said. “You can tell me anything. Anything they did to you—”
“I’m not as brave or as cynical as you think.” Then I told him the whole story of the bet with my father.
“Well, you should go home and see them,” he said.
“But then I’d lose.”
“Who cares?” he shouted, and smacked the table. And maybe he was right. But I did care. I hated to lose. What’s more, I hated to disappoint my father.
“I’ll go with you,” he said.
We took the train. “Remember when we met?” he asked. And of course I did. This time, he talked about his job at the law firm as we rode out of LA, buildings flipping by like cards in a deck. He hated his job.
“Then quit it,” I said. It was a simple answer, and I said it simply. He looked like he wanted to kiss me, and this time I let him, or I kissed him, and he let me. It was one of those kisses that felt equal—where you’re giving as much as you take. Also, I was right about how the shape of his mouth would feel, and happy that I’d read my body correctly. There was pleasure in knowing what you wanted and acting accordingly. It was a different kind of freedom.
We kissed for most of the train ride, so that by the time we arrived at my stop, I felt dizzy and short of breath, as though I’d run the whole way. Once we reached the platform, we took an Uber to my house, debating the entire time whether or not I should have told my parents I was coming—prepared my dad at least. I had decided not to; I wanted to catch them off guard. Charlie thought I should have told them. He thought it would have been more considerate. “Consideration?” I scoffed. “I’ve already outgrown it.”
When we drove up the familiar street toward my cul-de-sac, I didn’t realize I was nervous until I felt my insides twist up. Still, the neighborhood looked like you might expect it to—neat, prim, safe.
“Why are you nervous?” Charlie asked. “To see them?”
“No,” I said. “Nervous to lose the bet.” More so, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d so blatantly gone against my father’s wishes, if I ever had before.
“Is this it?” the driver asked, looking at his GPS again, and then at the empty lot. The curb was still painted with the numbers of my address, but the land was filled with grass and dandelions and other unnameable weeds.
“This can’t be right,” I said.
I saw a glimmer of something in the empty lot. Where were my parents? My brother? From afar, the something shone in the sun like a tin can. When I came upon it, though, I saw that it was an exact replica of the house I grew up in, just tiny, a little smaller than a toaster. I got down on my knees, then lowered my body to the ground as though I were preparing to do push-ups. “Hello!” I shouted through the windows. I flicked open the front door with my fingernail. “Hello?” The tiny curtains blew with my breath. The mailbox I remembered from my childhood was still there—sponge-painted red, a task I had completed when I was in elementary school—only teeny now.
I thought I heard something coming from inside the tiny house: a tiny, high-pitched voice. I saw my tiny father in the tiny foyer, shaking his head at me.
“I told you not to come,” he said. “You didn’t listen!”
Charlie was behind me. “What is it?” he asked. “What’s that little box?”
“My house,” I said. The way he stood, the shadow he produced made it difficult to see anything else. “Back up,” I said.
“I didn’t want you to see us like this,” my father said. My mother appeared alongside him.
“It’s OK,” I told him, “don’t worry.” Still lying flat, I talked to my parents through the tiny doorway, and told them a few details about my life, mostly about junior college and waitressing and Charlie. My mother was trying not to cry. I could see her red hair, like the tip of a match now.
“How are you?” I asked. I wanted to reach out and stroke the top of her head with the pad of my finger.
“OK,” she said. Her voice was soft, a faint whistle, and I had to lean close to hear it. “Dad and I are seeing a couples’ therapist,” she told me, and I wondered if the therapist was also miniature. My dad turned away, embarrassed.
“That’s great,” I said. “And James likes boarding school?”
“Loves it,” my dad said, brightening again. “You should see him now. We hardly recognize him.”
I looked around for Charlie, wanting him to get down on his knees at my parents’ tiny door and introduce himself. But no, he was waiting in the car, giving us our privacy. From where I crouched, he also looked smaller. I thought this was a funny thing, the way the past and the future could both shrink down to a manageable size, like a pill to be swallowed, or the head of a match.
Curtis Sittenfeld
The Prairie Wife
from The New Yorker
The understanding is that, after Casey’s iPhone alarm goes off at 6:15 a.m., Kirsten wakes the boys, nudges them to get dressed, and herds them downstairs, all while Casey is showering. The four of them eat breakfast as a family, deal with teeth-brushing and backpacks, and Casey, who is the principal of the middle school in the same district as the elementary school Jack and Ian attend, drives the boys to drop-off. Kirsten then takes her shower in the newly quiet house before leaving for work.
The reality is that, at 6:17, as soon as Casey shuts the bathroom door, Kirsten grabs her own iPhone from her nightstand and looks at Lucy Headrick’s Twitter feed. Clearly, Kirsten is not alone: Lucy has 3.1 million followers. (She follows a mere 533 accounts, many of which belong to fellow-celebrities.) Almost all of Lucy’s vast social-media empire, which of course is an extension of her life-style-brand empire (whatever the fuck a life-style brand is), drives Kirsten crazy. Its content is fake and pandering and boring and repetitive—how many times will Lucy post variations on the same recipe for buttermilk biscuits?—and Kirsten devours all of it, every day: Facebook and Instagram, Tumblr and Pinterest, the blog, the vlog, the TV show. Every night, Kirsten swears that she won’t devote another minute to Lucy, and every day she squanders hours. The reason that things go wrong so early in the morning, she has realized, is this: she’s pretty sure Twitter is the only place where real, actual Lucy is posting, Lucy whom Kirsten once knew. Lucy has insomnia, and, while all the other posts on all the other sites might be written by Lucy’s minions, Kirsten is certain that it was Lucy herself who, at 1:22 a.m., wrote, “Watching Splash on cable, oops I forgot to name one of my daughters Madison!” Or, at 3:14 a.m., accompanied by a photo of an organic candy bar: “Hmm could habit of eating chocolate in middle of night be part of reason I can’t sleep LOL!”
Morning, therefore, is when there’s new, genuine Lucy sustenance. So how can Kirsten resist? And then the day is Lucy-contaminated already, and there’s little incentive for Kirsten not to keep polluting it for the sixteen hours until she goes to bed with the bull-shitty folksiness in Lucy’s life: the acquisition of an Alpine goat, the canning of green beans, the baby shower that Lucy is planning for her young friend Jocelyn, who lives on a neighboring
farm.
As it happens, Lucy has written (or “written”? Right? There’s no way) a memoir, with recipes—Dishin’ with the Prairie Wife—that is being published today, so Kirsten’s latest vow is that she’ll buy the book (she tried to reserve it from the library and learned that she was 305th in line), read it, and then be done with Lucy. Completely. Forever.
The memoir has been “embargoed”—as if Lucy is, like, Henry Kissinger—and, to promote it, Lucy traveled yesterday from her farm in Missouri to Los Angeles. (As she told Twitter, “BUMMM-PEE flyin over the mountains!!”) Today, she will appear on a hugely popular TV talk show on which she has been a guest more than once. Among last night’s tweets, posted while Kirsten was sleeping, was the following: “Omigosh you guys I’m so nervous + excited for Mariana!!! Wonder what she will ask . . .” The pseudo-nervousness, along with the “Omigosh”—never “Omigod,” or even “OMG”—galls Kirsten. Twenty years ago, Lucy swore like a normal person; but the Lucy of now, Kirsten thinks, resembles Casey, who, when their sons were younger, respectfully asked Kirsten to stop cursing in front of them. Indeed, the Lucy of now—beloved by evangelicals, homeschooler of her three daughters, wife of a man she refers to as the Stud in Overalls, who is a deacon in their church—uses such substitutes as “Jiminy Crickets!” and “Fudge Nuggets!” Once, while making a custard on-air, Lucy dropped a bit of eggshell into the mix and exclaimed, “Shnookerdookies!” Kirsten assumed that it was staged, or maybe not originally staged but definitely not edited out when it could have been. This made Kirsten feel such rage at Lucy that it was almost like lust.
Kirsten sees that, last night, Lucy, as she usually does, replied to a few dozen tweets sent to her by nobodies: Nicole in Seattle, who has thirty-one followers; Tara in Jacksonville, who’s a mom of two awesome boys. (Aren’t we all? Kirsten thinks.) Most of the fans’ tweets say some variation of “You’re so great!” or “It’s my birthday pretty please wish me a happy birthday?!” Most of Lucy’s responses say some variation of “Thank you for the kind words!” or “Happy Birthday!” Kirsten has never tweeted at Lucy; in fact, Kirsten has never tweeted. Her Twitter handle is not her name but “Minneap” plus the last three digits of her zip code, and, instead of uploading a photo of herself, she’s kept the generic egg avatar. She has three followers, all of whom appear to be bots.
Through the bathroom door, Kirsten can hear the shower running, and the minute that Casey turns it off—by this point, Kirsten is, as she also does daily, reading an article about how smartphones are destroying people’s ability to concentrate—she springs from bed, flicking on light switches in the master bedroom, the hall, and the boys’ rooms. When Casey appears, wet hair combed, completely dressed, and finds Ian still under the covers and Kirsten standing by his bureau, Kirsten frowns and says that both boys seem really tired this morning. Casey nods somberly, even though it’s what Kirsten says every morning. Is Casey clueless, inordinately patient, or both?
At breakfast, Jack, who is six, asks, “Do doctors ever get sick?”
“Of course,” Casey says. “Everyone gets sick.”
While packing the boys’ lunches, Kirsten says to Ian, who is nine, “I’m giving you Oreos again today, but you need to eat your cucumber slices, and if they’re still in your lunchbox when you come home you don’t get Oreos tomorrow.”
She kisses the three of them goodbye, and as soon as the door closes, even before she climbs the stairs, Kirsten knows that she’s going to get herself off using the handheld showerhead. She doesn’t consider getting herself off using the handheld showerhead morally problematic, but it presents two logistical complications, the first of which is that, the more often she does it, the more difficult it is for Casey to bring her to orgasm on the occasions when they’re feeling ambitious enough to have sex. The second complication is that it makes her late for work. If Kirsten leaves the house at 7:45, she has a fifteen-minute drive; if she leaves at or after 7:55, the drive is twice as long. But, seriously, what else is she supposed to do with her Lucy rage?
Kirsten’s commute is when she really focuses on whether she has the power to destroy Lucy Headrick’s life. Yes, the question hums in the background at other moments, like when Kirsten is at the grocery store and sees a cooking magazine with Lucy on the cover—it’s just so fucking weird how famous Lucy is—but it’s in the car that Kirsten thinks through, in a realistic way, which steps she’d take. She’s figured out where she could leak the news, and narrowed it down to two gossip websites, both based in Manhattan; she’s even found the “Got tips?” link on one. If she met somebody who worked for such a site, and if the person promised she could remain anonymous, it would be tempting. But, living in Minneapolis, Kirsten will never meet anyone who works for a Manhattan gossip website.
Kirsten’s coworker Frank has volunteered to leak the news for her; indeed, he’s so eager that she fears he might do it without her blessing, except that he knows she knows he pads his expense reports when he travels. And it’s Frank’s joyous loathing of Lucy that reins in Kirsten’s own antipathy. Frank has never met the woman, so what reason does he have to hate her? Because she’s successful? This, in Kirsten’s opinion, isn’t sufficient. Kirsten hates Lucy Headrick because she’s a hypocrite.
In 1994, the summer after their freshman year in college, Kirsten and Lucy were counselors at a camp in northern Minnesota. It was coed, and Kirsten was assigned to the Redbirds cabin, girls age nine, while Lucy was with the Bluejays, age eleven. Back then, Lucy weighed probably twenty-five pounds more than she does now, had very short light-brown hair, and had affixed a triangle-shaped rainbow pin to her backpack. The first night, at the counselors’ orientation before the campers arrived, she said, “As a lesbian, one of my goals this summer is to make sure all the kids feel comfortable being who they are.” Kirsten knew a few gay students at her Jesuit college, but not well, and Lucy was the first peer she’d heard use the word “lesbian” other than as a slur. Although Kirsten took a mild prurient interest in Lucy’s disclosure, she was mostly preoccupied with the hotness of a counselor named Sean, who was very tall and could play “Welcome to the Jungle” on the guitar. Sean never reciprocated Kirsten’s interest; instead, and this felt extra-insulting, he soon took up with the other counselor in the Redbirds cabin.
Kirsten became conscious of Lucy’s crush on her without paying much attention to it. Having given the subject a great deal of thought since, Kirsten now believes that she was inattentive partly because of her vague discomfort and partly because she was busy wondering if Sean and Renee would break up and, if they did, how she, Kirsten, would make her move.
Lucy often approached Kirsten, chattily, at all-camp events or when the counselors drank and played cards at night in the mess hall, and, more than once, she tried to initiate deep conversations Kirsten had no interest in. (“Do you believe in soulmates?” or “Do you usually have more regrets about things you’ve done or things you haven’t done?”) When Kirsten and Lucy ran into each other on the fourth-to-last night of camp, on the path behind the arts-and-crafts shed, when they were both drunk, it was maybe not as random or spontaneous as it seemed, at least on Lucy’s part. Kirsten had never kissed a girl, though she’d had sex with one boy in high school and another in college, and she’s wondered if she’d have kissed just about anyone she ran into behind the shed. She was nineteen, it was August, she was drunk, and she felt like taking off her clothes. That it all seemed especially hot with Lucy didn’t strike her then as that meaningful. They hooked up in the dark, on a ratty red couch, in a room that smelled like the kiln and tempera paint. Kirsten was definitely aware of the variables of there being more than one set of boobs smashed together and the peculiarly untroubling absence of an erection, but there were things she heard later about two girls—about how soft the female body was and how good another girl smelled—that seemed to her like nonsense. She and Lucy rolled around a lot, and jammed their fingers up inside each other, and, though both of them had probably swum in the lake that
day, neither was freshly showered. There really wasn’t much in the way of softness or fragrant scents about the encounter. What she liked was how close they could be, almost fused, with nothing between them.
The next morning, while Kirsten was standing by the orange-juice dispenser in the mess hall, Lucy approached her, set a hand on her forearm, and said, softly, “Hey.”
Kirsten, who was intensely hungover and sleep-deprived, recoiled, and she saw Lucy see her recoil. Under her breath, in a hiss, Kirsten said, “I’m not gay.”
If Lucy had done anything other than laugh lightheartedly, that might have halted things. But Lucy’s willingness to act as if neither their hookup nor Kirsten’s homophobia were a big deal—it made it seem O.K. to keep going. The whole whatever-it-was was so clearly short-lived, so arbitrary.
During the next five nights—the counselors stayed an extra forty-eight hours to clean the grounds after the kids went home—Kirsten and Lucy were naked together a lot. The second night was both the first time someone went down on Kirsten and the first time she had an orgasm; the orgasm part happened more than once. She was less drunk than the night before, and at one point, while Lucy was lapping away at her, she thought that, all things considered, it was good that it was happening with a girl first, because then when a guy went down on her, when it mattered, Kirsten would know what she was doing.