The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky

by Jana Casale

  “I understand,” he said, and nodded solemnly.

  “I hope you do because I mean it. I mean it more than anything I’ve ever meant in my entire life.”

  A month later they were engaged. She was happy about it, but it took a long time for him to earn back her trust. He apologized constantly and told her all the time how happy he was with the engagement and what an idiot he’d been, freaking out like that. She never really looked back on that time in their relationship with anything but anger, but as far as the ring was concerned she loved it. It was something she’d picked out. In her mind it represented everything she would and wouldn’t do for their love. It was hers in a way that was strong and striking and so completely her own.

  “You picked it out?” Anne said. “Wouldn’t you rather it have been a surprise?”

  “Not all surprises are good,” she said. “And besides, I know what I want.”

  Six months later they were moving back to Boston. Her ankles finally healed once they were home. It was the hills after all.

  PART 4

  CHAPTER 33

  Wedding

  She and John settled into a two-bedroom apartment in Harvard Square. He’d found a job at a local start-up. She began doing some after-school tutoring and started the process to reapply for grad school. They’d both agreed that they wanted the wedding to be fairly soon after the engagement. John felt especially strongly.

  “I just feel so terrible about the engagement,” he’d say. “I really just want to be married.”

  Leda began planning for an early spring wedding. For the most part she was stumped by the interest so many women had in wedding planning. How could one manage to fawn over napkins? Where was the joy in embossed lettering?

  And even worse was the hatefully competitive nature many women seemed to adopt for the eight months of their lives when chiffon would become a common word in their lexicon. For entertainment purposes she frequented an online forum called Weddingbee, where women would come to subtly rip each other apart using acronyms and smiley face emoticons.

  “Does anyone’s FI watch porn? I found a bunch of porn on my FI’s computer and it’s really disturbing me,” one woman asked.

  “Nope. FI thinks it’s gross ” was one response.

  “My SO does watch porn but only porn with women that look like me ? It used to bother me but now I just feel pretty proud that he’s still so turned on by me ” another woman wrote.

  There were tons of threads about engagement rings, including one where a woman complained that her SO only gave her a .5 carat ring, saying how she’d really been hoping for something bigger. A bunch of women responded and went crazy that anyone would dare insinuate that there was a diamond size (particularly their own) that could be considered small.

  “I have a .2 carat ring and it’s super big! A .5 is HUGE. I love my ring ,” one woman commented. Leda imagined that this woman had seen this post and had had a pretty miserable day walking around with her .2 carat diamond ring. Maybe she didn’t even wear it all day. Maybe she took it off and put it away just to stop staring at the reminder that her husband is a failure and her life is a sham, Leda thought. Why, ladies? Why, why so crazy?

  On one post a woman had asked whether size matters, and the amount of women who willingly stepped forward to needlessly defend their husband’s tiny penis was astounding.

  “My husband has a smaller penis, but I don’t care. It works great for me because I’m small myself .”

  “My SO is VERY below average, but I love it!”

  “I’ve always been super tight so FI is just perfect for me. Big penises hurt. I’m perfectly happy, no complaints at all .”

  Does being married mean you have to pretend that every facet of your life is endlessly enjoyable, including your husband’s small penis? Why can’t these women say, “My husband has a small penis, but that doesn’t change my self-worth. Sure, I wish he had a bigger penis, but I still matter. You may have a husband with a bigger penis, and this is something I wish I had, but it doesn’t take away from all the amazing things in my own life.”

  At around the time of reading the penis post, Leda had decided that she and John should have a smaller wedding. Part of the decision was most probably related to their engagement going so horribly wrong, but realistically she never would have wanted a big wedding. It felt strange to perform this intimate ritual in front of other people.

  “It’s like everyone is watching us have sex or something,” she’d remarked to John. “All along we’ve had these milestones in our relationship that have been private, and now all of a sudden the most important one my estranged aunt is going to be witness to?”

  The funny thing about being engaged was that she’d expected most of her girlfriends to be happy and excited for her, but it actually wasn’t like that at all. Many of them were still single and had little to no interest in discussing wedding plans. Leda tried to be sensitive to it, but it was disheartening. Anne was the worst. She didn’t even want to answer the phone after the engagement.

  “I have to organize my garage,” she texted. “I’ll call in an hour, but I’ll only have fifteen minutes to talk because I really need to go through my Easter decorations.”

  After that their texting sort of dropped off. Leda wasn’t sure who to ask to be her maid of honor.

  “I’ve come to the realization that I hate all of my friends,” she told John.

  “What about Elle?”

  “She’s worse than Anne! I hear from her once every, like, three months.”

  “Then just don’t have a maid of honor.”

  “But I have to.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a thing you have to do.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Everyone.”

  “But you just said you hate everyone.”

  “Yeah, but I still care what they think.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She asked Anne to be her maid of honor.

  Despite all her misgivings, and her disinterest in color-coordinated table settings, Leda did really want a wedding. She too could get caught up in it. Dress shopping proved to be one of the best things ever, and the months leading up to the wedding she’d keep a picture of herself in her dress open on her computer just to admire how linear she looked.

  John was also excited and each week brought her home a new bridal magazine. It was sweet and helped ease the still-lingering tension between them.

  “It’s the happiest day of your life,” she’d read in an article about losing arm fat for your wedding day, and she thought, Is it the happiest day? Maybe my happiest day is a day I’d hardly remember where I just felt like I was okay and that everything would work out. Maybe my happiest day was the only day I didn’t worry about arm fat.

  The other big concern was money. Spending an ungodly amount of money on a party for people, many of whom she didn’t care about, or even like, really, for that matter, couldn’t have felt more wasteful. At one point she had a mini panic attack over little glass swans she’d ordered to have placed on the tables next to the candles.

  “Would you like to have glass swans placed beside the candles?” the lady who handled the tables asked.

  “I guess so…yeah, that sounds nice, actually,” Leda said.

  Two weeks later she received a bill for $325. She called her mom crying.

  “Can you return them?” her mom asked.

  “Apparently I can’t. I can’t believe this,” she said between sobs.

  “Relax, honey, I’ll pay for them. It’s not that big of a deal. Besides, I’m sure they’ll look really pretty on the table. Don’t you think?”

  “I guess so,” she said between more sobs.

  The night before the wedding she and John stayed together at the hotel. She had refused to spend the night away from him, as wa
s custom.

  “It seems fucked-up,” she said when her mom suggested it. “It’s just as fucked-up as penis garb at bachelorette parties.” (Leda had declined to have a traditional bachelorette party even though Anne had offered to throw her one. “Take me to a nice place for drinks or we’re not having one. I do not want to wear a penis necklace. Saying goodbye to the prospect of more penises in my life is the best part of getting married.”)

  “This wedding is so stupid. We should have eloped,” she said as they lay side by side in the big decorative hotel bed. They could hear the couple next door to them having sex. As nice as the hotel was, the room smelled like bathroom. I love my dress but could the love of a dress really justify six months of dieting? she thought.

  The next morning she didn’t feel any better about it. John went to a separate room to get ready. His mom showed up early and said something bitchy about the weather. Anne was frantic because Dean wasn’t coming after all. The caterer called and said that there would be no mini bagels. Her dress was making her sweat and her hair didn’t come out exactly as she wanted it. Her heels pinched as she walked and her parents had to prop her up so she wouldn’t trip on her train. As she waited for her cue to walk down the aisle, she felt anxious and melancholy and her mind wouldn’t stop racing. But then the music started and the doors opened up and John saw her and it all went away. He started crying. Tears ran down his cheeks and he mouthed the words “You’re so beautiful” over and over as she walked toward him. It was the most wonderful feeling she’d ever felt before. She would never, ever forget the way he looked at her. He was a stranger she hadn’t known from anyone else, and now he was a man who loved her like this, like tears streaming down his face, like “You’re so beautiful” over and over.

  She couldn’t have known it then, but as she walked toward him she was aging. The first gray hair emerged from her scalp, small and thin right at the top of her head. A crease in her forehead from years and years of worry and wonder was silently visible. She was past the point of the march toward favorable aging; from that moment on she’d be lumpier and grayer, and the skin on her face would be looser and more and more wrinkled. She was getting old. She was twenty-six. She was more beautiful than she’d ever be. She was married. And it all felt like the happiest day of her life.

  CHAPTER 34

  Pregnancy

  After the wedding Leda felt a sense of euphoria she hadn’t thought could be possible from the signing of a legal document. She and John were married. It was a cozy feeling. It was them against the world in a way that was damning to everyone outside of their small, satisfied couplehood. Their life seemed settled and the uproar of the engagement was no longer present or pressing. Together they were peaceful and joyful and skated around through breakfasts and shallow silences that filled Sunday evenings. Her mom would call and Leda would answer, “Hello?” but it was sweet and unburdened and triumphant. These were the greatest “hellos” of her life. Now I know why people get married, she thought. Now I know that before marriage I was unhappy. This euphoria lasted three and a half weeks. It slowly drained away from the moment it began but subsequently came to a full stop the day she received her wedding photos and unrelentingly decided that in each and every single one of them her head looked small.

  “John, is my head small?”

  “What does that even mean?” John said.

  “It means just what you’d think it means. Do I have a small head?”

  “No, Leda, Jesus.”

  “But look at me here.” She clicked open the photo of herself standing against a lattice of grapevines. “Do you see how small my head looks? It makes my body look huge. I’m a freak.”

  “You’re insane,” John said, but she didn’t believe him. In the end she found three wedding photos out of the bunch that she thought least made her head look small and had them all framed.

  During this time Leda didn’t think about writing much. The same momentum that had led up to the wedding was redirected toward buying a house. It was to be expected. The natural progression, as it were, or so she felt in that moment. There was a shift in the foundation of her being. Now she was working toward a level of domesticity that would be as precious as that euphoria had been. Tutoring, which had formerly acted as a pincushion between phases in her life, became her focus. She no longer had a desire to reapply to grad school. It seemed silly in the context of window treatments and finished basements. She and John were saving up for a house and she would do her part. She took on as many hours as she could and often worked through weekends right into the new week with little sense of loss. Happiness seemed so blissfully achievable that she nearly felt unburdened by her lack of drive to be a writer. She was in control of her fate. And it was here, flittering in this rigid sense of self, that she suddenly and without warning wanted a baby.

  At first she hardly noticed it. There was just a mild strain that some part of herself was missing. She thought buying the house would soothe her (they’d found a three-bedroom in Belmont that was “a great location” and “just perfect”), but as they signed their mortgage papers and as she stacked mugs in her new kitchen cabinet the feeling didn’t wane. She felt continuously frantic and then one day it clicked, just like deciding her head was too small in all those wedding photos, just like a blooming rose opening to face the heavens. I want a baby, she thought.

  Never before in her life had she considered that this would be something she would want so young. She tried to talk herself out of it, to think of everything else that needed to get done, that should be done in her life before having children, but the need was so stark and burning that she almost had a hard time concentrating on anything else.

  “Would you like that order for here or to go?” the lady at the sandwich shop would say.

  Who cares about sandwiches? I want a baby, Leda would think to say back.

  Whenever she’d see mothers in shopping malls or second cousins posting pictures of their young children on Facebook, she’d feel an irrational pang of angry jealousy. You don’t deserve a baby. I deserve a baby. She put it aside and told herself she’d just have to hold on until her early thirties. HER EARLY THIRTIES had been a fantasied time in her mind when everything in her life would come together, and she’d be ready for all the many things that she knew she needed to be ready for at some point.

  “I want to be pregnant by the time I’m twenty-four,” Anne had said once.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want to be a young mom. I don’t want to be some old lady running after little kids.”

  “Well, I definitely don’t want kids until I’m, like, thirty-three at the earliest.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I don’t even want to get married before I’m thirty,” Leda had said before being married at twenty-six.

  In late August she came to an epiphany of sorts, a visceral clarity about her life and future, where all the momentum was leading and what it was she truly wanted. It was early afternoon, and she’d just finished tutoring and was waiting for John to pick her up. The day had been exceedingly hot. Originally she’d planned to just sit in the little nearby park to wait for him, but once standing outside, the blinding concrete walkway reflecting the humidity back at her, she knew that there was no way she’d last. She looked around. There was a café about a mile down the road, but it was too hot to even consider the walk. Across the street was a small chapel that always had its doors open.

  “Welcome all,” the sign out front read.

  Leda had seen the chapel many times. The boy she tutored had even mentioned it once.

  “Ricky goes to church,” he’d said.

  “Who is Ricky?”

  “The boy that mom watches on Wednesday nights when his mom is at work. He’s kind of my friend, only I don’t really like him that much.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, he goes to church across the street. He says Go
d is always watching us.”

  “Does he?”

  “Do you think God is always watching us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think he’s wrong. I think no one is watching.”

  Leda had only ever been to church a few times in her life, twice on Christmas Eve as just sort of a festive outing for the holiday and once for a friend’s wedding. Her family wasn’t religious at all. When she was very young, she told a girl at school that there was no God. The girl was so upset that she had to go home early.

  “Do you think God is a woman?” Leda had asked her mom when she was seven.

  “Of course God is a woman,” her mom answered.

  Her mom had never tried to instill any sense of atheism in her, really, but she did want her daughter to believe in what was empirically there. She wanted her to be someone who considered facts before all else, to build her life around reality. In retrospect Leda felt very grateful that her mom had instilled these kinds of values in her as a child. She felt free to believe whatever she wanted, and even now she questioned the validity of the idea that God would have a penis.

  Despite her misgivings about going into the chapel, she decided there really was no other option. It was just too hot out, and she figured if they had a welcome sign out front they wouldn’t hassle her if she went in and sat down.

  The chapel was built from a warm-colored adobe. It was a smaller structure with big, low arches in the Spanish style. Inside it was even tinier than it looked on the outside. There were only a few wooden pews and a short aisle leading to an elaborate golden altar. In front of the altar were some candles that had yet to be lit. No one was there. Leda sat down in the last row. She wasn’t sure what to do with her hands so she laid them across her lap. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back; it was so much cooler than it was outside. It was nice. She thought of her day. The boy she’d tutored. The way he’d snapped his fingers as he read My Side of the Mountain. She thought of summer and the impending fall. She also thought of California and how the hills just rolled on and on, vast and golden. She turned her head to the left and opened her eyes and there before her was a huge painting of Mary holding the baby Jesus. She hadn’t noticed it when she’d sat down, but now, looking at it in its massive scale compared with the rest of the chapel wall, she couldn’t believe she hadn’t. Mary was sitting upright. Her expression was stoic and soft looking down at her baby. The baby was round and angelic; above him was a bright ray of light. His expression was stoic but not soft. He was looking straight ahead, as if he were looking right at her. It was then that she felt the same familiar pang of jealousy she had so many times before, only this time it was stronger, this time it was irrational, this time it was as startling and reassuring as walking from the burning sun to the cooling shade. It was unavoidable, it was overpowering. She doesn’t deserve a baby. I deserve a baby.