Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 15

As I limp slowly toward the chicken coop, Maeve’s small warm hand in mine, I can just barely feel the small little nub bouncing softly in the skirt pocket against my thigh.

On the outside, I think—I hope—I look calm.

On the inside, I’m screaming.

Maeve lets go of my hand and opens the wire entry to the coop, then runs over to the chickens, who bockbockbock at her in greeting. “Hello, ladies,” she says grandly. She turns around and looks at me with that little-girl expression I know so well, the look a child gives her mother when she wants approval. I weakly echo the same statement to the coop. “Hello, ladies.”

I really think I might throw up.

Maeve pets each chicken on the head as she passes. She has a name for each one of them. Teacup and Little Loaf and Missus Princess Sweater. Before I know it, she’s sitting cross-legged among the ladies, chatting happily to each of them like she’s at a tea party, the task of collecting their eggs forgotten for the time being.

I stand by the entrance, my hand in my pocket, the pebble held tightly in my fist, small and hard like a bullet.

Someone is watching me. I know it. In fact I don’t just know it—I feel it, too, deep in my gut. Every move I make is being logged somewhere, every action recorded, every word transcribed. There’s an artifice to this world, a subtle glimmer of surreality at the edges. It feels less like real life and more like an idea of real life, less like reality and more like a show—

A show.

A reality show?

I play back the last two days as if it were a pilot episode in reverse. The microphone, the clothing, the steel trap, the soap molds, the slap—

“Be extra nice to Mama today,” Maeve says sternly to the bobbing, idiot chicken heads like a little schoolteacher. “She has a big boo-boo. She isn’t feeling good.”

“What are you guys doing out there?” Mary is standing on the porch, calling over to us. “Hurry up already.”

“Coming,” Maeve calls in response, then stands up, wiping the dust from her dress.

What kind of reality show would allow a man to slap a woman? What kind of people would stand idly by while she stepped into a steel trap and nearly chopped off her own foot?

None, I tell myself while Maeve drops eggs one at a time into my basket, the little black nub hot in my fist.

Then I pause and consider it.

I’ve had a sweet tooth for reality television ever since my college days. I started watching a number of franchise shows in Boston and could never quite bring myself to stop. A dating show, a married-at-first-sight show, a strangers-living-together show. I’ve been watching these shows for a decade now, so I know there’s always some kind of scuffle in the penultimate episode of the season, some drunken slap fight to stoke bitter conversations at the reunion. Granted, those fights nearly always take place between members of the same sex—but still. There’s no denying that they’re getting scummier every year, the scenes slanting downward into more degrading and outlandish scenarios. At the outset—back in the days when I was sitting alone in the dorm rec room, the only person still in the building on a Friday night at ten—the reality dating shows were filled with cheerily idiotic women able to convince themselves to some degree of logic that the experience would be an enjoyable milestone in their lives. A decade later, no woman with two brain cells and a pulse could be able to convince herself of that fact. The new crowd of young women know the world that claims to love them so much actually wants nothing more than to bloodlet them slowly over time. To devour them alive. These girls aren’t disciplined or well-bred enough to choose a life path like the one I chose, the poor things, so they have to find another way to build currency. They have to whore themselves out. Smash the glass, get the cash, and run. Not an ideal path, but also not the stupidest by a long shot. The stupidest path is Reena’s path: accepting a job in an industry designed, filled, and run by men.

The truth is that whoring yourself out can take you pretty far, if you do it with intention. Look at Mary Magdalene. Now there is a woman who understood the assignment.

When I think about the most recent seasons of my favorite dating shows—how even the more upscale, family-friendly shows have started forcing the girls to give confessionals while groggy with sleep deprivation and cross-eyed from a steady gargling of mimosas for the better part of a day—I feel a strange, numbing sense of relief.

America hates women. What a comfort to remember.

It is, I decide, entirely possible that a reality show premiering in the next few years would allow a man to hit a woman and knock her out; equally possible that they would allow that same woman to wander through a minefield of archaic booby traps and nearly blow off her foot in the process. In fact—this really perks me up—it’s more than possible. It’s likely. Arguably inevitable. Practically necessary! The Angry Women, after all, are defined by their own infinite capacity for restlessness. If you want to keep them entertained, you must be willing to constantly raise the stakes.

Nothing too serious, I can see the producers saying to one another in some brightly lit conference room, over gold-flecked green juices and caviar-topped salads. Just one little knockout. Nothing that could actually hurt her—and besides, we’ll have the paramedics on-site in case anything goes awry! I watch them in my mind’s eye, hemming and hawing over the precise angle of the shot, the correct velocity of the slap, the precision of the metal trap clapping shut around my ankle. Hard enough to cause a blackout, soft enough to avoid brain damage. That’s the needle to thread here, boys. Oh—and we must make sure the trap has the right force to break the skin but not the bone. Otherwise we’ll need to airlift her out of there. I float overhead as they walk out of some production office in Culver City, clapping one another on the back for a job well done. Maybe this year we’ll get an Emmy. I follow them as they drive home in electric cars littered with pink bumper stickers— Save Our Oceans; Believe Women! —and I let out a long sigh of relief at the hypocrisy of modern coastal elites.

As for the vanished pregnancy?

I don’t like to think about it. Even now, as Maeve drops the last egg into the basket—this strangely fraudulent world so real, so crisp all around me, that it makes my brain flicker with discomfort—I have a hard time accepting the fact that I’m not pregnant.

In fact—yes, I would really like to stop thinking about that now.

I gaze out at the property. The barn. The fields beyond, long grass rolling in waves beneath the breeze.

You fuckers, you masochists, you wolves in sheep’s clothing: Where are you?

“This reality show blows,” I say aloud as Maeve tugs me back to the house. The wind whistles in reply.