Interstitial #3
“And do what?” He was holding his big strong hands like a supplicant. His hands, so brown when she met him, had taken on an
urban pallor. It was January, and outside the apartment window the trees were bare and stark, the winter sky a pale white-gray.
“Be my plaything? Station yourself in bed on satin sheets with a cocktail when I get home from work?” She was kidding, obviously.
They preferred organic cotton sheets, for one thing.
For another, she was still pumping four times a day.
A nightly cocktail was not in the cards.
And, finally and most important, Austin did not want to be a plaything.
He’d been working with his hands nearly as long as he’d been able to count his own fingers.
Austin did not want to sit idle. Austin wanted to work.
Then, through a connection from a friend of an uncle, he heard about a dairy farm for sale in Vermont. “Let’s just look at
it,” he said to Natalie. “We’ll just look.”
“I have equity,” she said. “What if we go public? I can’t imagine walking away from that.”
“We’re not walking away from anything,” he said. “We’ll just look.” He fixed his baby browns on her, and she couldn’t say
no. The next weekend they packed up Evangeline and drove the nearly three and a half hours to Shaftsbury. They walked the
farm with Evangeline facing out in the BabyBjorn, pointing at the cows.
In the hotel room in Bennington they talked long into the night while Evangeline slept. Natalie came to realize that if they
didn’t take this chance Austin would one day want to move back to Montana—and then what? She couldn’t imagine being so far
from her family, from the East Coast, from the beach house, from the ocean.
By the time they went to sleep themselves, they had a new life plan. That Monday, they put together an offer, subsidized by
Austin’s parents, who agreed to help them buy the farm with the understanding that Austin and Natalie would run it without
additional help from them. On Tuesday, when Natalie was back in her office, the offer was accepted. Forty Holsteins, a farmhouse,
a milking barn that would need renovation. Hillside Haven. Natalie set up a meeting with her manager and gave her notice.
Austin was so happy on the farm! He never complained about the early hours or the physical labor.
He called the cows “the Ladies” and treated them with respect and reverence.
He rarely needed an alarm; his body acclimated to the cows’ schedule, as it had once done in Montana.
They hired two local farmhands. Austin mended fences; he repaired the homogenizer when it broke; he sanitized the teat cups.
He befriended the cranky old-timers in town, the ones who thought Natalie and Austin were city kids playing at farming.
He proved them wrong the night the neighbor’s heifer was in labor with a breech calf, the phone lines went down because of a storm, and he helped deliver the calf.
The Hansons had just moved to Hillside Haven when the pandemic hit. They felt removed from what they saw on the news. On the
Sisterhood group chat, Leah talked about spending all day on Zoom calls for work. Kayla’s toddler was going crazy in their
San Francisco apartment. Amber, still working in a lab, barely took her mask off. Rachel and Mark had left Manhattan to move
in with Rachel’s parents in Connecticut; they worked for a Broadway producer, and of course the theaters were dark.
I’m spending all my time on Instagram watching sourdough bread videos, texted Rachel to the Sisterhood.
I made my own buttermilk, texted Natalie.
Leah weighed in with Ha ha, but Natalie actually had made her own buttermilk.
By summer she was pregnant with Scarlett. With her main jobs being caring for Evangeline, helping on the farm, and being pregnant,
she threw herself into domestic life. She started an Instagram account: @hillsidemaven.
I feel like with every cake you bake you’re betraying the Sisterhood, texted Amber. Ha ha.
Three other members gave it the exclamation points that mean we agree!
The Hansons applied for and received their organic certification.
They added ten more head of cattle. Natalie fell in love with it all: the meditative beauty of the early mornings, the intense clarity of the night sky, where every constellation she had heard of was visible.
She fell in love with the cows’ quirks and personalities, learning which ones were placid and forgiving and which were feisty or standoffish.
She loved the paths they wore in the grass as they moved to and from the milking barn.
She loved the way each day followed a rhythm and each year did too, with a portion of the Ladies always pregnant or calving and another portion “drying off”—resting from milking before giving birth.
She loved the lined Carhartt pants and the muck boots and even the farm smells, which were so pronounced they had a texture.
She loved the way each time a new calf was born it felt like a miracle, the head and front legs emerging in a dive position, then the rear legs, the big brown eyes, already open, already soulful.
She loved cooking in the kitchen, spending time she’d never had before, perfecting a loaf of bread or learning a new method
for braising meat. She loved Austin’s appetite for everything: food, sex, Heady Topper beer, the sky at 4 a.m. She, Natalie,
who had struggled through honors biology in high school, did not flinch when she watched her first bovine birth, did not flinch
when she assisted at her second. It was all so raw and beautiful. She watched the mother cow’s rough tongue go at the calf
to clean it off, watched the calf stand and nurse within the first two hours of birth. She loved the girl power at Hillside,
the way dairy farms are by nature ruled by the ladies.
#allgirlband, she tagged an Instagram photo of the cows grazing with stunning autumn foliage behind them. #girlsrule.
When her favorite cow, Daisy, gave birth in their second year, she captured that video.
Then Austin took one of Natalie herself, dressed in maternity overalls, her hair pulled back fetchingly in a red bandanna, milking Daisy for the first time after the calf had nursed.
She started sending videos to her family, and Mae told her she needed to get them on TikTok and Instagram.
She posted the videos to her account. Her followers grew. Scarlett was born. #motherhood.
The first time Natalie used the tradwife hashtag she did it ironically. Semi-ironically. Well, like a quarter ironically.
She had baked Austin a cake for his birthday, a three-layer German chocolate number. It took her hours, and it was perfect.
She put on an apron and made a video of herself with the cake. Yes, the apron would have been more helpful while she was baking,
but better late than never. She took a deep breath; she posted it.
Made my hubby a cake. #tradwife!
She curled her hair, put on a pretty dress, and used it again a couple of days later when she made strawberry jam. Tradwife as a hashtag, as a movement, was growing, and she threw herself into it headfirst. If she wasn’t going to be an executive
at a wearable-tech start-up in Boston, she was definitely, definitely going to be the most successful dairy farmer’s wife
the internet had seen.
She lost the baby weight a second time. She was offered the opportunity for sponsored posts, affiliate marketing, brand ambassadorships.
She was earning tens of thousands of dollars, then hundreds of thousands. Within a year, she was making more than the farm
was. They renovated the milking barn, brought in a decorator, bought that gorgeous baby-blue Viking. She kept cooking, baking,
posting, mothering. Theresa died; Caspian was born; Natalie’s empire grew. She had two hundred thousand followers, then three,
then four.
She researched curricula and applied to be approved for homeschooling by the State of Vermont Agency of Education. She took
photos of Evangeline reading a picture book and Scarlett writing her name in giant block letters on butcher paper she spread
out on the floor.
She pickled onions; she made her own granola. Eventually, she reached a million followers, then more.
Six months ago she hired a publicist, Bethany, who secured this article with New York Magazine, her first traditional media win. Her coming-out party, as it were.
Can this all be undone with one pull quote, a single caption?
She opens Instagram; she searches for tagged posts.
It’s like a car crash I can’t look away
Ladies, I hope you like driving in reverse. Girls like this set us back by 100 years.
If my husband said that about me I’d have the divorce papers drawn up so fast
WTF? Nice closet tho
She closes the app. She opens TikTok, where, oh god, it’s even worse. She pushes the phone away. There’s so much of worth
in the article, so many pretty pictures of the milking barn and the addition to the main barn she uses as a schoolroom, with
the vintage school desks and the bright white cubbies full of sharpened pencils and writing paper and coloring supplies. What
about the photo of the three kids standing next to their favorite cow, Gretchen, who has the best eyelashes of all the cows?
Why is nobody talking about Gretchen?
She tries to stay calm but the fury bubbles up. She pours more coffee, pulls the phone back toward her, and calls Austin.
He’ll be done with the morning milking by now, taking a breakfast break before he moves on to the rest of the day’s chores,
which will probably involves mending the fence by the south pasture. Nobody’s going to call Austin’s work ethic into question:
he’s the Energizer Bunny of Hillside Haven.