Chapter 1 #2
Hal closes the laptop and sits up straighter on the couch. There are few things she likes better than a good rant. “What kind
of woman?”
“The kind who’s completely consumed by her offspring.” Fuming, I walk to the pathetically small fridge and scowl at a huge
wedding invite drooping under flimsy magnets. It’s from Lilly, that sellout who used to be our fifth. The mere sight of her
name makes me sick. The only thing more pretentious than a cursive L is a cluster of three cursive L’s.
I rummage through the mini fridge’s motley contents—coconut milk, wilting arugula, two mangled slices of buffalo tofu pizza
from Tony’s down the street. I locate a lone IPA, and even though there’s a bottle opener right there on the counter, I break
the beer open with my teeth because I like to feel my own power like that. Taking many gulps in one, I carry on. “The kind
of woman who forfeits herself to her husband and kids,” I elaborate.
Tara emerges from the bathroom in a scaly costume gown and lipstick the color of ripe papaya. Her gorgeous Afro is matted
down with a taming product. “But don’t you think you’re being kind of harsh?” she says. “Isn’t the whole point of feminism
that women can choose what they want to do? Some people are happy with the tradwife thing. It’s not for us to judge.”
“But that’s the thing,” I say. “I don’t believe any women actually are happy with that life; they just pretend to be. Or maybe they think they’re happy but only because they’ve forgotten what real happiness is, or they’ve never known it at all. But deep down,
they’re all aching for more. I just know it.”
There’s a dramatic beat as the record reaches the end of side one and the needle scrapes the silence like it’s agreeing with me.
“Just look around,” I say. “At all the women who’ve done the ‘right thing’ and settled down—which, by the way, just means
settling. All this buildup to marriage and then—boom—it’s all downhill from there, watching The Bachelor on TV because you never go on dates anymore. Living vicariously through romance novels because you never get laid. And don’t
get me started on the kids thing . . .”
“I think maybe you’re just stinging because of the whole Lilly situation,” Tara says gently. “But we knew she was always going
to move back to Oregon and marry that boy she grew up with.”
“Did you see her wedding dress, though?” Jenni gushes now. “It’s stunning. She sent it in the group chat today.” She takes out her phone to show us. “Oh wait, maybe it wasn’t the group chat. It was
just to me, I guess.”
My whole body winces. “I removed Lilly from the group chat,” I say. “Obviously. And please read the room, Jenni.”
Jenni sheepishly tucks her phone away. “My bad.”
“None of this is just about Lilly,” I go on. “Sure, maybe she’s the catalyst for the combustion, but the match was struck
ages ago. Now it’s time we burn it all down.”
“Is this one of your bits?” Jenni asks, looking to the others for confirmation. “It is, right?”
“I don’t think so,” Tara whispers back.
“Of course it’s not a bit,” I say, pouncing onto the couch between Hal and Jenni. Hal hands me a beer because I guess I’ve
already finished my first. “Think about it,” I go on. “The highest compliment that society bestows on a woman is that she’s
selfless. A selfless wife, a selfless mother, a selfless friend. Self-less. A lack of self! How fucked up is that?”
“I think I heard that on a podcast,” Hal says. “How martyrdom is glorified.”
Hal is always listening to “enlightenment influencers,” as she calls them, and then writing stand-out quotes in permanent marker on the ceiling of the Inn to help them stick.
“That’s how I felt,” Jenni says, voice hoarse like she’s just seen Bonnie’s ghost too. “Like I was going to lose myself by
taking his name.”
Of the four of us, Jenni came closest to walking the plank. Two years back, she left her high school sweetheart before the
wedding; she had a panic attack at her final dress fitting and ripped off the constrictive corset right there. She drove straight
to New York with her bridal tiara still on and moved in with us that day. We were tempted to sell the tiara to buy some softer
toilet paper, but we had Jenni smash it with a hammer instead. It was the catharsis she needed.
“And think about all our other friends back in college,” I say, because I’m really on a roll now. “Who swore we’d be that
close forever, and then one by one they dropped off the face of the earth when they got married, like we were just the opening
act.”
“You’re not the opening act for me,” Tara says. “You’re the main-stage performance.”
Hal and Jenni agree right away. Their assurances make me feel a tiny bit better but not much. My heart physically indents
at the thought of ever losing them.
“I bet a lot of women have had this same exact conversation, though,” I say. “But then one by one they started to get hitched,
and then the others got scared they were falling behind so they got hitched too. It’s a vicious cycle.”
“The whole thing is like some kind of twisted game theory, isn’t it?” Hal says. “No one wants to be the last single one standing.”
Hal’s right. That’s exactly what this marriage pressure is: twisted game theory.
“If people would just keep their friendships strong,” I say, “they wouldn’t need to latch onto spouses to keep from being lonely. They could lead thrilling romantic lives, perpetually high on love or lust, and have the stability of their friendships to ground them. It’s the best of both worlds.”
“That’s what we do,” Jenni points out proudly.
“And very successfully,” Tara adds with a wink that hints at our delicious lifestyle.
“I don’t deny that,” I say. “I just don’t think we’d be the first women to have all these radical ideas of liberation and
then end up as domestic prisoners, too trapped to even see the bars on their own cell.”
“Have you met us, though?” Tara asks. “We’re the most modern inventions ever to come out of the Midwest.”
“But at the end of the day, we’re still from the Midwest,” I say. “And our families expect things, society expects things.
It’s programmed into us, always will be on some deep, dangerous level. It’s a case of our wild nature losing out to our tamed
nurture.”
“I agree with Tara, though,” Jenni says. “We’re not the get-married-and-settle-down type. That’s how we ended up here, remember?”
Tara and I drove east first, right after college graduation. We were both set on becoming Broadway actors with our faces on
taxi ads and our names lit up on Times Square billboards. That’s still in the cards for her, but I switched to playwriting
after a few years of rejections got under my skin. It didn’t make me question my talent, just the industry’s ability to appreciate
it. I hate sticking to a script. I’m much more about improvisation, but the casting directors rarely commended my creativity.
So I started writing instead to give the actors more original dialogue and break free of all the recycled, clichéd plotlines.
I’ve only written drafts and scraps so far, nothing phenomenal. But the genius is building, bubbling beneath the surface,
ready to explode like a fucking volcano. I can feel it.
The year we turned twenty-five, Hal came out to her parents as bisexual, which was a complete mess, so there was no way she was going to tell them she actually didn’t like men at all except for using them to get free drinks.
Needing to get away, Hal visited us in New York and never left.
She’s the entrepreneurial type, spilling over with billion-dollar ideas.
The ideas usually come in the form of her venting about something being dysfunctional and then making PowerPoint pitch decks for all her future investors.
She scrapes by on grants and scholarships she has a knack for winning.
Jenni joined us after Hal. She’s Korean American, the daughter of immigrants, and has been deep in the unlearning of all the
pressures to “be successful” in the conventional sense. She’s a recovering management consultant who’s still figuring out
what her dream is. I kind of envy it, how new the whole liberation thing is for her, but there are some perks to being an
old pro at it too. I don’t feel guilty that I’m sinning or straying like Jenni does. Once you’ve been free long enough, you
realize morals are all man-made, designed to keep women in our tiny little boxes so we don’t disrupt the status quo.
Lilly was the last to join the Redstockings and the first to leave. We met her at a Bed-Stuy rave and she moved in the next
day. Turns out the rebel life was just another of her performative eras, a character she was cosplaying.
I’m worried Jenni might follow in Lilly’s footsteps, and maybe even Tara and Hal too. There’s no way I can let that happen.
“I think we should formalize our rejection of convention,” I tell the Redstockings now. “So we hold ourselves accountable
to independence and never ditch each other for a spouse.”
“What do you mean, formalize it?” Jenni asks, sounding wary, as if I’ve ever proposed a bad idea.
“We’ll make a pact,” I say, the idea hitting me hard in the head and soft in the heart, like all great things do. “To never
get married.”
My words soar through the air and somersault a few times just to show off how unshackled they are.
“You want to go full-on 4B movement like my cousins in Korea?” Jenni asks. “My parents would officially disown me.”
“I’m already there with decentering men and only dating women,” Hal chimes in. “Wouldn’t be hard.”
“Not full-on 4B,” I say. “We’re not banning men or sex, just marriage and confinement.”
“You’re deadass?” Hal asks, as Tara and Jenni exchange a look.
I’m kind of annoyed at how slow they’re all being to support an objectively brilliant proposition. I don’t say that last part
aloud, or maybe I do. The lines between my speech and my thoughts are blurry, and I like it like that, the constant state
of flow.
“But no pressure to join if you see yourself settling down with one of your admirers,” I shoot back at Hal.
Hal has one of those magnetic auras where she has a hard time picking up coffee without someone picking her up—or at least
trying to. The other person nearly always fails. It’s good fun to watch.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Hal says. “You know I can’t stay interested in someone for more than a few weeks, forget about a lifetime.
Just the thought makes me claustrophobic.” She shudders, as if trying to worm her way out of a hive of hornets before they
attack.
“But what about kids?” Jenni pipes up.
I say, “Well, what about them? I thought we’d agreed that they’re dream-sucking monsters with egregiously big carbon footprints
clogging up an overpopulated world.” I try not to sound too impatient. Jenni still needs some help as she adjusts to this
loose way of life. “Loose” is a positive quality around here. It means free. We don’t let men try to convince us that being
loose is a bad thing, a soiled thing. We’re too smart for that.
Jenni says she supposes I’m right, but she hasn’t ruled out adopting a child, maybe one that was found in a dumpster or something
equally grim. “There’s a nice social impact angle there, don’t you think?” she says.
We pause to consider it, or at least I pause to pretend to consider it, and Tara says maybe it could be alright if we raise one kid among the four of us. “We could trade shifts; it wouldn’t be that much work.”
It still doesn’t appeal to me, but I’m not going to lose all the good momentum over that one sticking point. I say we’ll revisit
that particular clause at a later time.
Then I ask everyone who’s in on the Anti-Marriage Pact to please raise their right fist or their left one, who cares, just
raise a fist nice and high.
The Redstockings look at me, then at each other.
Hal is first to raise her fist. Tara quickly follows.
Tara was shuffled through the foster system as a kid, and she still has abandonment issues. I can tell that this appeals to
her, a formalized commitment to stand by each other forever.
“It’s genius,” she says now.
“Genius,” Jenni repeats, fist in the air too, wavering ever so slightly.
“Of course it is,” I say. “The patriarchy stops with us.” I’m pleased with my persuasive ability. Maybe I should be a director
instead of a writer, not that the gatekeepers would let in a visionary like me. They’d be too threatened. “Rejecting marriage
is the least we can do to build on the work of the women who came before us. Now, time to take our vows.”
The lights flicker overhead. Our upstairs neighbor must’ve gotten in the shower, which somehow always has the effect of dimming
our electricity. It’s kind of spooky, and I feel more confident than ever that Bonnie Beaumont’s ghost has come to warn us
away from her fate.
I kick things off. “We, the Redstockings, vow to enter into an Anti-Marriage Pact.”
Hal and I make eye contact, and she takes over. “The four of us take each other to have and raise hell with from this day
forward,” Hal says, and our eyes dance at how she changed the words from the boring version we’ve heard at way too many weddings.
“For better or worse, sober or . . . let’s face it, mostly high.”
“To have and to hold . . . each other accountable,” Tara adds earnestly.
“I vow to love and honor you all the days of my life,” Jenni says. “Until a billionaire proposes—then I’m cashing out,” she
adds with a grin.
“Business proposals only,” Hal clarifies.
“Till death—or death by bridal shower games—do us part,” I close out.
We punch our fists in the air, 3D versions of the mural on our wall.
“Welcome to the resistance, bitches and witches,” I whisper happily. “Let the Friendship Soulmate Revolution begin.”
We sit back in the glow, slowly lowering our fists and breathing a collective sigh of relief that something as old-fashioned
as matrimony will never steal us from each other.