Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 11

There were four hundred people at our wedding, which was hosted at Caleb’s parents’ estate in California the summer after my first year of college. I wore a strapless gown with a pearl necklace. Caleb wore a navy suit. We stood beneath the shade of an olive tree as the pastor said the magic words I’d been waiting to hear my whole life: I now declare you man and wife. The audience rose to their feet in a breathtaking ovation. The pastor’s final words, his prophecy of our future, disappeared beneath the waves of applause. Caleb grabbed me and twirled me and dipped me low, so my hair was brushing the ground. Then he whispered in my ear, “I can’t wait to taste you.”

At the reception, a twelve-person band was playing a famous song by Cher, and I was sitting in one of the chairs at the main dining table, drinking a glass of water, enjoying a moment alone after so many rounds of small talk with balding, Botoxed billionaire donors— Vote Mills! —when my sister dropped into the chair next to me and said, “I think I might be pregnant.”

She was twenty-one years old that night, wearing an emerald chiffon bridesmaid dress that Amelia had picked out. The dress had looked beautiful in the catalog but had the unfortunate effect of making my sister—who was generally understood to be the prettier of the two of us—look like an unappreciated vegetable. She and Bryce had married several months earlier, with a backyard reception at his parents’ house. She had cried all day long, insisting they were tears of happiness. Bryce had passed out shirtless on the lawn well before nightfall.

She amended her statement now: “I took two tests, and they’re both positive. So I’m most likely pregnant.”

“Well.” I set my empty glass down. “I’m so happy for you.”

She sighed. “I just wish Bryce wasn’t so drunk right now.”

I tried to channel the patience of my mother. “Isn’t Bryce always drunk?”

She didn’t reply, just looked longingly out at the dance floor, where Bryce was headbanging wildly, his tie fashioned like a hippie headband on his forehead. He mimed an electric guitar, then dropped to his knees and licked the length of the invisible neck. “He’s been so temperamental lately.”

Temperamental, I thought, was a particularly dignified way to describe a man who had, earlier that day, screamingly accused the concierge of the four-star hotel where they were staying (courtesy of the Mills family) of rifling through his varsity football high school duffel bag to steal the Visa gift card from his wallet.

“Go tell him,” I said, suddenly desperate for both of them to be gone. “Tell him you’re pregnant right now!”

“You’re right. That’d make him so happy, don’t you think?”

“Of course it would! A child is always a gift.”

Then my husband— my husband! —walked up in his immaculately tailored suit, and all the bad feelings fell away.

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Caleb began, but I had already jumped up and taken his hand.

It was midnight when we left the reception. We were staying in the carriage house on the opposite side of the estate. In one moment, we were stumbling through the open door, kissing and pulling at buttons, and the next moment, we were naked on the bed, frozen in Grecian poses of despair.

Both of us were virgins. I could see now that Caleb’s comment to me earlier at the altar had not been, as I originally thought, an indication of pure erotic instinct, but rather an act of deep courage, a last-ditch Hail Mary effort to summon his own sexual prowess into the world before he faced the most intimidating vision of his life: his wife’s naked body.

Caleb’s hand hovered over my breast, then pressed firmly, hands spread wide like a catcher’s mitt. Both of us let out a noise, a pairing of grunts. He’d never seen an adult woman’s body, he told me that night. (I would later learn this was technically a lie—that his mother had a tendency to take baths with her sons well into their early adolescence; that he’d gone to third base with a second cousin at a family reunion.)

In an effort for momentum, I reached down and wrapped my hand around his penis. So this was what it felt like. Soft, like lamb’s skin, but—honestly? About 50 percent less inflated than I expected. Caleb let out another grunt and rocked his hips against me. I was equal parts nauseated and aroused. I could feel his heartbeat pulsing in my grip. Caleb’s eyes were closed, his mouth parted in a grim expression of pleasure. “Maybe,” he muttered, “you could, you know…”

A thread of irritation stitched itself in my chest. “No, Caleb, I don’t know.”

“Well, you could spit into your hand, or maybe, kinda use your mouth, you know, to—”

“Nope!” I cried out. “No thank you. Let’s just do it the normal way, please.”

He sighed and opened his eyes.

It took several minutes for him to maneuver halfway inside me. It helped that I was wet. It didn’t help that he was about as hard as half-risen dough. I couldn’t believe it. All my life, I’d been imagining a sausage or a cucumber; something to fill me completely. I had not been prepared for sex to feel and to look like Caleb’s penis did, which was fine in girth and length but lacked the fortitude to enter me of its own accord. I felt like I needed to throw a dish towel over his penis and wait an hour to let it rise.

The silver lining of Caleb’s softness was that losing my virginity didn’t hurt. It felt more like a sponge was moving near my stomach; like someone was very gently cleaning me from the inside out. “I love you,” I whispered as he breathed heavily in my ear. “I love you, God, I love you, God—”

Caleb met his first missionary ejaculation with abject panic. “Oh holy shit,” he gasped. “What the hell?”

A year later, the spring of my sophomore year, I was walking to a review class for an upcoming final when I ran into Reena for the first time in a long while. The poor thing was not doing well. I was living off campus by then, in an apartment that Caleb’s parents had rented for us, so it spoke to just how big of a story this was that I’d overheard it in the hallways to begin with: the boy Reena had been seeing had unprotected anal sex with someone else. In response to that, Reena needed to get an AIDS test and had been so infuriated by her own humiliation that she retaliated by giving a blow job to his brother, a high school student who’d been visiting for the weekend, and in response to that, her crush had called her a fat ugly whore in the middle of a packed dance floor. Lord have mercy on their souls. Now she looked awful, bloated and sweaty and hungover, like a human beer can. She was smoking a cigarette outside the building I needed to enter. When she saw me, her mouth actually fell open. “Natalie. My God.”

I was just past six months pregnant. She stared at my bump with a look that harkened a word I hadn’t thought of since childhood: gobsmacked. She looked absolutely gobsmacked.

“You’re glowing,” she said, with obvious disappointment.

I pointed at the cigarette in her fingers. “Do you mind?”

She stubbed out the cigarette, still eyeing me with abject surprise. I knew what she was thinking: I was twice as beautiful as I’d ever been. I’d never been ugly, per se, but there had always been a certain sharpness to my expression, a hawkishness to my gaze, that kept me from being outright attractive. At first I’d thought the pregnancy might have added some fat to my face, some much- needed softening. Eventually, though, I realized what it was that made me look so different: for the first time in my life, I was happy.

“I got married last summer,” I said. “To a man named Caleb Mills. He’s a senior. Do you know him?”

We smiled cagily at each other. “Of course I know him,” she said. “Well—I don’t know him, but I know of his dad. Obviously.” Her gaze reached my ring finger. “Congratulations.” Like she was swallowing a mouthful of blood.

“Where are you off to this summer?” I asked.

She stared longingly at the crushed cigarette by her boot. “An internship at McKinsey.”

It was exactly the kind of opportunity that girls like Reena said they wanted: competitive and respectful and well paid. And after all the time I’d spent online in those lonely months of my first semester—all those midnight hours poring through panicked chat threads and editorial screeds about the desperate plight of the uppity working woman—I knew exactly what would come next. As long as Reena didn’t screw up royally over the next few summers, she’d get a job offer from the firm after graduation, six figures right out of the gate. Living the dream! She would start working seventy or eighty hours a week, subsisting mostly on a diet of cocaine and Red Bull. Her coworkers would comprise a bullpen of male colleagues, men who screwed the small handful of women in the office nonstop, personally and professionally. From here on out, Reena’s life was going to be hard. She would have to work hard to get the job, and hard to keep it, and even harder to get promoted, and any promotion she received would lead only to more work, more responsibilities, more hours in the office, and in the meantime she would have to squeeze out a few free hours a week to do everything else: date, stay fit, buy groceries, see friends. If she was one of the lucky ones, she would keep receiving small little bumps to her salary—smaller, of course, than the bumps her male colleagues received, but no matter. No biggie! Reena would grow used to this quickly: the simple act of receiving less than she wanted at the same exact time she watched someone else receive more than she could have hoped for. She would spend her twenties feeling disappointment and labeling it gratitude, and then she would convince herself that this was a form of Buddhist enlightenment: be happy with what you have. This is what she would tell herself each time she was faced with the fact that she had once again received less money, less praise, and even a smaller portion of blow than her male coworkers. Don’t forget to say thank you! Little bumps, little bumps. During this time period of professional growth, Reena would also do her best to fall in love and get married, and if she managed that, then years later, when she finally got around to having kids, she would act utterly shocked when her doctor informed her she was a geriatric candidate, and it would be an uphill battle to get pregnant. If she was lucky (and from what I had seen, Reena had never been all that lucky), she’d have to do only one or two rounds of IVF, and there would be only a small handful of months where she found herself joking loudly about lighting money on fire while her husband jabbed at the fat of her ass with a needle (his mind starting to wander past his miserable aging wife to the fun young assistant in his office, the one who was easy and light and funny, the one who had started to look subconsciously to him like the appropriate age for a woman to become pregnant), and when the time came, when Reena finally gave birth, when she finally looked around and realized she’d made it—she was at the top of the mountain, she had it all! —the landscape would look like this: her husband no longer wanted to touch her, and her boss no longer wanted to promote her, and her childless friends no longer wanted to spend time with her, and her friends with children no longer had time to see her, and Reena, sweet precious Reena, would complain about none of it, not the disappearing husband or the flailing career or the crushing loneliness, not a word of it to anyone, because she would technically be one of the lucky ones—a flush retirement account and four months’ maternity leave, in Jesus’s name, amen—and in the world that Reena would soon inhabit, you don’t get to complain about those kinds of problems. You don’t get to complain about privilege.

It was clear Reena was dreading it, not just the internship but the rest of her own life. As if she’d been shot through by some fairy-tale curse. As if she wasn’t one of the most spoiled people on the planet, free to do whatever she wanted, if only she had the brains or the courage to consider any other path forward beyond the one that feminism, that nasty witch, had offered her. Silly, stupid Reena had bitten the poisoned apple, straight down to the core. Standing there that day, she looked so miserable at the prospect of her own empowered future that I nearly laughed out loud.

“Well,” I said brightly, “congratulations to you too, then! I know those internships are so hard to get.” I was practically choking on my satisfaction at this point. The euphoria of my victory was making my vision blur. I won, I won, I won! You stupid fucking bitch (sorry, Lord), I won!

“Well,” Reena said, “I guess I’ll see you around or something.”

“You won’t, actually!” I couldn’t resist. I just couldn’t. “I’ve decided to leave school. Caleb’s graduating this spring, and I can always finish up my degree online. We really want to spend some time in Paris before the baby comes. It’s a girl, by the way. Did I mention that? I’m having a girl.”

If I could’ve punctuated that sentence by socking Reena straight in her miserable little face, I would’ve. What perfect synchronicity that would have offered to our short, joyless relationship. Instead, I waved goodbye, making a point to really wiggle my fingers so the diamond caught the light, and then I slipped past her, the first angry woman in my life, and skipped forward into the future.