Chapter 34
“Hey, everyone!” Reena sang out. “I’m usually not big on this kind of thing, but I just wanted to share with my community that I was unfortunately involved in the recent round of consulting layoffs and am now looking for a new opportunity.”
I was sitting at the kitchen table when her video popped up on my feed.
As she went on about the state of the economy, I wondered vaguely if she’d gotten Botox.
She looked like a stereotype of a modern woman: poreless and lip-lined and shrill.
She must have layered a filter onto this video.
Her skin was too beige, her teeth were too white.
Her positivity was so obviously fraudulent that I felt a pinprick of empathy for her.
Poor stupid Reena. She was older, but none the wiser. She had no one to blame but herself.
“… so if anyone has any leads, please let me know! I’m based in New York right now, but I would happily relocate to the West Coast for the perfect fit.”
How embarrassing for her. How desperate. Flaunting her failures online like this. Pretending she was totally fine with how her life was turning out, when she so obviously wanted to step into the bathroom, shut the door behind her, and scream into a—
I paused.
Reena and I were not alike.
No. Definitely not.
What she was doing, practically begging people for attention and money, was totally debasing, a complete humiliation, and what I was doing was—
I set the phone down on the counter. Smiled at my children.
In retrospect, it feels like divine coordination that the day Reena announced she had lost the one job she’d always wanted was the day I finally got hired, so to speak, for mine.
Reena and I were both twenty-six years old that morning.
I had three thousand followers and was nine months pregnant with baby number four.
Clementine was sitting quietly at the other end of the kitchen table, drawing.
Her brothers were playing on a blanket spread out on the kitchen floor, Samuel holding two plastic building blocks and occasionally clashing them together, baby Stetson lying on his tummy and craning his head up from time to time like an old, wizened lizard.
Then Caleb threw open the door, letting in a rush of spring air. “Come quick!”
I sighed. “What happened this time?”
We were on our fifth and sixth dairy cow. Caleb had recently become convinced they would live longer in pairs.
“It’s not that,” he huffed. “It’s—and we—and you—”
“Lord, Caleb. Take a breath. You’ll terrify the children.”
“Just come to the barn.”
I told Clementine, “Watch your siblings until I come back.”
“No, Mama,” she said immediately. “I want to come.”
“Next time,” I assured her as I slipped my shoes on.
Caleb walked quickly down the sloping hill, saying occasionally over his shoulder, “Hurry!”
“I’m going as fast as I can,” I snapped as I waddle-huffed after him. Our little girl, Jessa, was due any day now.
I hadn’t been to the barn in over a week, and I was happy to see the inside looked clean.
At the far end of the stalls, an older Mexican man was sweeping the floors.
Another one was brushing a massive brown and white horse.
As Caleb marched quickly down the hallway toward his office, which was in a former supply room, I said, “Caleb, whose horse is that?”
“Ours,” he said. “I got him the other day.”
“You got a horse?”
“No time! Hurry!”
I turned into Caleb’s office and stopped short.
“Oh, Caleb—you didn’t.” The room was the size of a supply closet—it probably had been a supply closet—but it was now literally covered in the kind of technology I associated with teenage boys.
Three big computer monitors were crowded onto a small desk shoved into the corner; Caleb was now sitting in front of the desk, hurriedly clearing off the other chair to make space for me.
“Quick,” he said, “sit, before the segment is over.”
I sat down, still taking in my surroundings with a queasy pit in my stomach. An image popped into my head: Caleb, inviting one of the workers to his office for a “business conversation,” trying to look stern amid all his fancy gadgets.
“This guy has been talking about your account for like ten minutes now,” Caleb said.
I followed Caleb’s gaze to the middle computer monitor, where a livestream was taking place.
On one half of the screen, a heavyset man with a large beard was sitting in front of an industrial-size microphone.
On the other half of the screen was—me. Smiling. Superimposed on his screen.
Caleb pressed the space bar and the volume blared through the speakers.
“—this is the kind of woman who is going to get our country back on track. None of that city-woman, equality-of-the-sexes bullshit. No. This is a wholesome, traditional Aryan wife.” He clicked through my Instagram pictures, creating a flipbook effect of me smiling all over this farm.
Me in front of the barn, me in front of a cake mixer, me sitting on the front porch, caressing my bump.
“Man, if more families in America acted like this family … think about it. Celebrating nuclear families instead of denigrating them. Cherishing the separate and equally valuable roles of man and wife instead of constantly challenging them. Eating local, working the land, and spreading good Christian values.” The bearded man laughed heartily.
“I’ve gotta say, I’m sold! We’re going to talk more about this after a quick break from our sponsors … ”
I disappeared from the screen, replaced by a stock image of three tubs of protein powder. As the man began to read from a prewritten script—“CardioChocoBoom is clinically guaranteed to increase your muscle mass by six hundred percent”—I turned to Caleb and said, “What’s happening?”
“This is one of the most popular daily talk shows online, Natalie. It’s a huge deal—and he found you thanks to me. You know how I have those internet friends?”
“Of course I do.” Internet buddies, my mother had repeated faithfully, in summation of his forty-minute rant. Man-o-sphere. That woman had the patience of an actual saint.
“Well, this guy is in one of them! I had no clue, because all the usernames in the forums are anonymous, but he was there! The whole time! Talking with me and the other guys like a totally regular person! Can you believe it?”
I glanced again at the bearded man, who looked like a totally regular person to me. “And you talked about me in your … forum?”
Caleb nodded vigorously. “I talked all about our ranch, and I shared a picture from your account. The eight-months-pregnant one?”
I nodded. That one had performed relatively well for my account. A few hundred likes, a handful of cheery, generic farming comments from other cheery, generic farming accounts. #pregnantmommalife
Caleb seemed aware that I wasn’t processing this information in the way that he would have liked me to, and so he said again, “Natalie, this is a huge deal. This guy has tens of millions of subscribers. I bet you’re getting hundreds of new followers right now.”
I pulled out my phone right as the bearded man returned from his ad break. “Now, like I was saying,” he said, but the rest of the sentence was lost to me, because I had just seen my follower count: ten thousand.
“What every man needs to do his job is a wife who can do her job. This, right here, this Natalie Heller Mills? That is a wife who does her job. I mean, look at her. Baking her own bread, milking their own cows, keeping their children healthy and safe and nurtured—”
I refreshed my account again: fifteen thousand followers.
“Look at how hard this woman works. Look how exhausted and beautiful she is. This, my friends, is the true American dream. Not that hamster wheel nightmare out in the cities. Don’t let the media fool you …”
I found my voice. “Caleb.”
He looked at me, and I handed him my phone. “Holy shit,” he whispered. Twenty thousand followers.
As Caleb refreshed—twenty-two—and refreshed again—twenty-four—and refreshed again—twenty-eight—I was just beginning to process what that man had said.
Exhausted and beautiful: Did I look exhausted?
And why was that a good thing? And had he said I bake all our bread from scratch?
I could count on one hand the number of times I’d done so in my life.
The picture I’d shared on my account of a sourdough loaf had been a loaf I’d picked up at the store.
He was talking, now, about my kitchen, saying I didn’t use microwaves because they were radioactive and caused cancer.
I thought of the microwave in our pantry, ugly, hidden from view, and said quietly, “I think there might have been a mistake, here.”
Over the next twenty-four hours, I would gain over three hundred thousand followers. I was so stunned by the number that it took me quite a bit longer to realize how many of them were angry.
This shit is so fake
Lol this woman looks miserable
Religious cult alert, ding ding ding!
This is not real life!
Over coffee the next day, Caleb and I scrolled through the comments silently. “Wow,” he said finally. “That’s a lot of angry women.”