Yesteryear #4
The filming for Natural Dinner ran late.
All throughout the house, moods went sour.
Shannon and I started bickering over how to do the overhead filming, and then our bickering wasted ten precious minutes of afternoon light, causing us to rush, which then led to further bickering, then the older kids’ homeschooling lesson ended fifteen minutes earlier than usual because Nanny Louise apparently didn’t feel like providing a comprehensive education for the day, and all of a sudden the kitchen was filled with incessant whining, the boys arguing with Clementine about what to play before dinner, and the nannies—who were, the agency had assured us, the absolute cream of the crop, but sometimes made me feel like I was paying full-time prices for part-time work—were just sitting there on the couch scrolling on their phones while a world war was waged over the tiny Scottie dog game piece in the Monopoly set.
(The only board game allowed in our house, by explicit demand of my father-in-law.
It was important, Doug said, for children to learn the value of a free market as soon as possible.)
The nannies. Oh, the nannies! They tended to veer toward uselessness during this time of the day.
From Nanny Aimee, I expected as much. She was a dumb girl from Los Angeles with a perfectly symmetrical face, capable of keeping the kids alive, and not much else.
But from Nanny Louise, who was five years older than Nanny Aimee and had a master’s degree in education, I expected more. She was like family to us.
Did you just say your nannies are like family?
Silence.
I’m sure you can understand that there’s a long and controversial history of white women calling the people who worked for them “family.”
Longer pause. Soft, knowing smile.
No. That’s not right.
Soft, unknowing smile.
Better.
“Next question, please!”
“Ladies, can I speak with you for a moment?”
The nannies looked up from their phones.
“Clementine has been using someone’s phone unsupervised,” I said. “She asked me what a tradwife is today.”
“Well,” Nanny Aimee said, then paused.
I trained my smile on her. “What?”
“I mean.”
Another pause. She looked like a Muppet with a gummed-up jaw. I resisted the urge to step forward and work her mouth open myself.
“We’ll be more careful moving forward,” Nanny Louise said. She gave Nanny Aimee a sharp look, the visual equivalent of a kick beneath the table, and Nanny Aimee nodded. “Yep,” she said. “Won’t happen again.”
I took a deep breath, sighed my anger out. “Can you both handle dinner prep tonight? I was thinking about making a little trip to Target.”
In my periphery, Clementine perked up.
Right on cue.
It was a rare gift of decadence, when I took the girls with me to the Super Target thirty minutes away.
At the Starbucks inside the store, Clementine ordered a Frappuccino with extra whipped cream, and I bit my lip about having so much caffeine and sugar this late in the day.
I got Jessa and Junebug each a cake pop and an apple juice, and then a nonfat decaf cappuccino with oat milk for myself.
I tried to limit these trips to once a month; usually Nanny Aimee went out to pick up our groceries for us.
But it was nice, even for me, to come here occasionally and float along beneath the mind-numbing fluorescence—though I will say it amazed me that so many people came here on a weekly basis.
Spending more than thirty minutes at Target made me feel like I was nursing a cavity.
As I pushed the cart slowly down the main aisle, the girls trotted forward and behind me in haphazard loops, hopping from distraction to delightful distraction.
The jewelry stands. The clothing racks. The shelves of body lotion in colorful packaging, tangerine and persimmon and bubblegum pink.
See how good the little things can feel, girls?
See how thrilling a sugar high can be if you choose it consciously, after so many days of careful—
“Natalie?”
I paused, looked around. Pretended to be confused, when really I was thinking, Oh, Jesus Christ. Not you.
Vanessa and I had gone to high school together.
She’d been on the track team too but had made varsity only her senior year, so we hadn’t spent much time together.
She was in nursing scrubs now, standing by two overflowing shopping carts, her preteen daughter glowering behind her with the same expression of profound disappointment that Vanessa had worn at every track meet.
I glanced at the cart closest to me. Disposable razors, disposable tissue boxes, a half dozen slices of chemical-bloated ham wrapped in three layers of plastic.
I could practically smell the stink of the landfill where all this stuff, all these products designed to be trash, would end up a month from now.
Then I looked back at Vanessa, who was now frowning at me with the same sour expression as her daughter, and my heart softened with nostalgia.
Poor thing. She’d never won a race in her life.
“It’s so good to see you!” I said. “It’s been, what—a decade?”
She sniffed, looked at my empty cart. “I didn’t know you came to Target.”
“Of course I do. I’m human, aren’t I?” I turned my grin to her daughter. “And who is this?”
Vanessa looked at her own daughter with a strange expression, like she was trying to see what she looked like through my eyes. “This is Zoe.”
Zoe looked to be a few years younger than Clementine. If she recognized her own name, she didn’t show it. She just stared at me, her expression a springboard of tight misery.
“And those ones, I’m guessing, are yours?”
I followed Vanessa’s gaze to see Clementine crouched in the aisle ahead, flipping through a picture book while the little girls peered eagerly over her shoulder.
A flush of pleasure ran through me, stronger than any artificial sugar high.
“Yes. Those are my girls. The oldest is Clementine, and the younger ones are Jessa and Junebug.”
When I turned back to Vanessa, she was smirking. When was the last time I’d seen a grown woman smirk? “You know, I really admire your commitment to the olden days with those names.”
My smile shrank by an inch. Here we go.
Vanessa had grown up in a strict, devout family, much stricter and more devout than my own, but she’d since emancipated herself from her parents, and now liked to write long-winded diatribes about her terrible upbringing via Facebook statuses that garnered, on average, three to five likes a pop.
Vanessa wanted the world to know she was modern, now.
She’d changed. She ate organic! (Except when she got her groceries at Target, apparently!) Self-proclaimed progressive women like Vanessa were chemically addicted to hating women like me.
I knew that. I knew this woman got embarrassingly drunk at family parties and pulled up my Instagram page, showing anyone stupid enough to walk past that she knew this woman personally, she knew her in high school, before launching into some recycled slur of a speech about how all traditional people are idiots, all religious people are idiots, all people who choose to live a different lifestyle than hers are idiots, idiots, idiots, when what she really wanted to say was I am so nauseatingly jealous of this woman I used to know that I think it might actually kill me.
Women like Vanessa, with their expensive latex foreheads and their I’m with her bumper stickers?
They didn’t know what they wanted. They couldn’t possess a truly principled stance even if someone injected it straight into their faces.
Lord knows they couldn’t take responsibility for their own lives, so they blamed their unhappiness on me.
The dumb, ignorant, backward-thinking tradwife.
Never mind the fact that I graduated in the top three of my high school.
Never mind that I got straight A’s at Harvard, studying global religious history while Vanessa ping-ponged her way through the rooms of the club rugby house at Michigan.
(Yes, I’ll admit: I checked in on her Instagram from time to time, too.) Never mind the fact that I lived my life actually adhering to all the principles they loved to virtue blast on Instagram.
Eat local! Support small businesses! Reduce waste!
The Angry Women could say what they wanted, but facts were facts.
I was a woman of principles. A woman defined by principles.
No amount of money in the world could’ve gotten me to take a nibble of the cancerous ham in that Tetris-packed cart.
No amount of smooth-brained social acceptance could’ve gotten me to name my daughter something so toothlessly trendy—something that so desperately shouted pick me—as Zoe.
Cunt.
Sorry, Lord. My anger was getting the best of me, these days. It was a problem that needed to be fixed, and I planned—I really did!—to fix it. If I’d had a little more time, I swear I would’ve fixed it.
“It’s wonderful to see you,” I said smoothly. “You should bring the kids over to the farm sometime!” I peered down at Vanessa’s sullen ogre of a daughter. “I bet you’d love to see where ham comes from, wouldn’t you?”