Yesteryear #2
Then her gaze flickers past me to the kitchen window. She whispers, “What is that thing?”
“That’s a car.” Caleb clears his throat, and all three of us turn to look at him. “You’ve seen it before,” he adds. “You were young.”
A memory, fluttering past: me and Caleb, in the early days of the experiment, explaining the game to toddler Mary.
That was how we talked about it then. A game, an experiment, just a fun little trial!
It was gradual. Sometimes deliberate and sometimes instinctual.
Like checkers. Like chess. Cowboys and Indians.
Barbie Dreamhouse, but backward. We’re going to pretend it’s the olden days, sweetie pie.
The pioneer days! Just play-pretend! Just a summer activity.
Just a creative way for the family to bond over traditional values while we hid from the outside world and figured out a plan.
Just, just, just. There was a greater plan, I swear.
But at some point over the years—I really can’t remember when—the hiding became the plan. The beginning and the end.
But the clothes—were they the beginning or the end? It was the winter I gave birth to Mary. I spent my breastfeeding hours ordering piles and piles of pioneer reenactment outfits on my phone. I got them shipped to the ranch. 100 percent cotton, the labels read. Hand-dyed for lasting use!
Labels. I haven’t thought about those clothing labels in years. They’ve long since been ripped out, and all that clothing has since been hemmed and patched within an inch of its life. Authentic, now. It really does look authentic.
Another memory, alive and twitching in my hand: “It’s fun,” I would say angrily at night, scrubbing furiously at some stupid iron pan while my children whined for a trip to Target, a weekend ride to a rodeo, anything to get out of the house, and Caleb stared wildly into the fire, his eyes alive and dead at the same time.
They didn’t yet realize that those days were over for good.
“This is fun,” I would shout at them in the darkness. “Don’t you realize we’re having fun?”
The children left when Clementine turned sixteen. A month earlier, we had finally sold our car, the last piece of modernity we’d been holding on to. Time to live off the land, kiddos!
Clementine must have known what was coming. She took the kids one morning for a walk and they never came back. She knew those woods so well. Better than anyone. It would’ve been easy for her to find her way out.
Suddenly Caleb and I were parents of an only child, a little girl.
That is, of course, until we had more.
For what it is worth: I do not recommend giving birth in the pioneer days.
“The girls,” I say, thinking of Jessa and Junebug. “Are the girls okay?”
“In some way or another,” Clementine says evenly. “The girls aren’t doing well. But they’re alive. And the boys—well. The boys are here.”
I don’t know what to say to that. There are whole universes inside that response, but every firing neuron in my brain is hissing and sparking against the idea of inquiring further.
So I say nothing, and Clementine, who is watching me carefully now, lets out a huff of breath and smiles an angry smile.
Like she had made a bet with herself seconds earlier and is disappointed to learn she has won.
“Where do you live?” Caleb asks Clementine, and she shrugs and says simply, “Nearby. All of us live nearby.”
And now I am thinking of something my mother said in my early parenting days, back when Clementine was just a little thing: They watch every move you make. It’s true. For decades now, my children have been watching me. They’re the only ones who never stopped.
Clementine turns to look at me. Her attention is almost unbearable.
“Tell me,” she says. “What did you say to Mary? Where did you say we all went?”
Mary is watching me now, a careful frown on her face. Like she is remembering something for the first time in a very long time. Remembering what we said.
Dead. We told her they were dead. Gone to heaven. She was so young. A toddler. Milky mouth, moldable brain. It was easy. She barely understood what we were saying, and soon—thank you, Mother, for the inspiration—we didn’t say they were dead, but simply that they were no longer with us.
They were dead, and then they were gone, and then they were not discussed at all, and soon we moved through each day as if they had never been here to begin with.
Children are amazingly flexible creatures.
They can move through the centuries, adjust to new living conditions, transport themselves into new realities with surprising ease.
She was so flexible, our little Mary, so capable of adjusting to this new life, where she was not the youngest sibling but the oldest, not the child of a famous woman but the child of a homestead family in the nineteenth century.
Good girl, I would say on the days she didn’t cry, or scream, or glance wildly around at the empty house like she was surrounded by ghosts. Look how grown-up you are.
For every detail of her life we snatched away, we added a new one to fill the vacuum.
I taught her how to make soap, how to bake biscuits, how to snap at children when they don’t do their jobs.
I made up fake recipes for bullshit tonics.
I gave her brothers, and a sister, and so much work to do.
And Caleb? He told them stories about faraway battles, cowboys and savages, good and evil.
“Prepare for battles,” he would say. “Civil war is coming.”
Together, we taught our children how to pretend.
And do you know what? If I had been as flexible as Mary, everything would’ve turned out fine. But I was not flexible, and over those years those years those years those years those years those years—
Pause, Natalie. Take a deep breath. Try again.
Over those years my brain began to whine and smoke from the pressure, until finally it snapped in half like a twig.
There really was no other option.
You believe me, don’t you? That there was no other option?
Doug was on board with the idea, and then he wasn’t.
He couldn’t believe we sold the car. Came to visit one day and saw Caleb digging a hole for an outhouse.
Said we had lost our fucking minds. But by then, it was too late.
The hole we had dug—too big. And so he reversed slowly down the hill and never visited us again.
And my mother—we weren’t speaking much by then. By the time she realized what was happening—she was—and we were—
“It happened slowly,” I say. “The transition. The—believing. It happened so slowly, and then—”
And then?
What then, Natalie?
“And then I found out I was pregnant again, and everything changed, and I realized I had to leave.”
There’s a long silence in the room.
“I couldn’t, I can’t, give birth in this place again,” I add firmly, looking around at everyone. “The last time …” I trail off, suddenly sick.
The last time. The last time with Maeve. Was. Terrible.
“Oh, Mom.” Clementine sighs.
“Are you saying—” Caleb shakes his head. “Are you saying you think you’re pregnant, Natalie?”
“I’m saying I am pregnant,” I say. “And I need to—well, I need to get rid of it.” I pause, letting the full weight of their shock sink in.
They must both be so shocked, hearing their mother talk openly about the need for an abortion.
How modern of me. See, darling? Look at this old dog with her new trick!
“I know it’s awful. But I just—well—I need to get rid of it.
And soon. I must be twelve weeks along by now. ”
“Mom,” Clementine says, “you’re fifty years old. You’re not pregnant.”
Now it’s my turn to fall silent. Come again?
“It was unbelievable that we could have Maeve,” Caleb mutters softly. “And that was ten years ago.”
Yes. Right. Sorry! So many compartments in my mind, so many mirrors of myself grinning back at me, it’s hard to keep track of—I can’t always find my—
Maeve, sweet thing, is ten years old. Yes.
That’s right. That sweet girl, my little shadow, is—how would a modern woman say it?
My daughter has learning deficiencies. My daughter is developmentally challenged.
My daughter was born blue in the face, not breathing for minutes, and my husband is not a midwife, and I am not a doctor, and so we wasted precious time screaming at one another, a dead child on the floor between us, until eight-year-old Mary thought to breathe into her little sister’s mouth.
“I will not give birth here again,” I say a second time.
“You’re not pregnant, Mother,” Clementine says. “You’re going through menopause.”
There’s another long pause. Then Mary says hesitatingly, “What’s menopause?”
Someday you won’t be able to have children.
That was what my mother said of menopause when I asked her about it as a young woman.
At the time, the thought panicked me, made me sick with fear, and so she reassured me that this time of decay was a long way away for me; that I had plenty of time to have plenty of babies. A whole life ahead of you.
Well. Here I am, on the other side of a whole life.
When I was a child, and I was forced to imagine a world where an adult woman couldn’t have children, I felt a terrible heaviness in my chest, a crushing sadness.
But now that I’m here, I feel very light.
Like a weight that settled onto my shoulders as a child has finally, decades later, been lifted.
Welcome to the afterlife.
I drop into a seat at the table. No baby, no pregnancy, never again will I give birth in this world. What is that feeling, bubbling up in my throat?
Laughter. I really want to laugh.
But laughter would be inappropriate, because Clementine is asking her father about the food now. “Do you actually grow any of your own food? Or are you just as bad at farming as you always were?”
He glares at her. “You’ve become hateful,” he says. “A spiteful woman.”