Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 16

At first Caleb argued that he didn’t need a job.

“We have money,” he said. “What’s the rush?”

He would go to graduate school in a year, he said. Or the year after that. Or we could travel. Let’s take the baby to Rome! We could feed each other handmade raviolis at some patio table tucked away on some cobblestoned alleyway while Clementine slept peacefully in one of our laps. He would get a job eventually —finance, maybe, or law; he could teach, or own some business; he’d always been fascinated by the world of day traders, or maybe he could open a bar!—but there was no need to rush into it. Why not enjoy this special period of our lives, newlyweds with a newlyborn?

By the end of this argument, which was delivered to me at least a dozen times, my teeth would be so clenched that my jaw felt wired shut, and I would have to take several long breaths before I could reply, as coolly as possible, that the idea of taking our one-month-old to Europe made me want to stick my head into an oven and turn up the burners.

“Fine,” he would say easily. “No Europe. No travel. Let’s buy that farm!”

At which point I would shake my head and say in exasperation, “Do you know how much work a farm is? I can’t do that with a newborn!”

“I think it would be fun. We could get some chickens and cows. I’ve always wanted to ride a horse!”

“We’re not buying a farm right now, Caleb.”

“Okay, then let’s buy a house. Settle down. Grow some roots.”

“Buy a house where ?”

He gestured out the kitchen window. “How about here?”

I imagined buying a house on my mother’s street. Caleb’s father would undoubtedly give us the money for it. We could pay cash. Our expenses would be negligible. And each day, as all the husbands drove home to their families, at least one man would glance over at our house, where the car would already be parked, the football game already on, and slowly, the word would get around: the new couple in town were a shameful pair.

You had to hand it to my husband, this fairy-tale fever dream of a man-child I’d married: he’d offered the only vision of the future that felt more damning to me than the one of us carrying a screaming infant around Italy.

It was hard to keep my cool during these conversations; hard, even, to think straight when I felt a desperation so overpowering it verged on self-harm. My husband’s lack of ambition was astounding, quite literally hard for me to comprehend. I’d never known a man who didn’t want to work. Then again, I’d never known a rich man. Was this what happened when you were born into such wealth and preestablished power? Or was this the only clear way in which my husband, the father of my child, was special?

“People don’t just work for money,” I tried. “They do it to create meaning in their lives. To establish order. ”

At this, he smiled wide, revealing his yellower-than-I-remembered teeth. “Why can’t I stay home and help you with the baby?”

Because your idea of helping with the baby is saying “Awww, isn’t she cute?” I thought but didn’t say. Because you aren’t even remotely helpful with the baby, you can’t clip her nails or apply her diaper cream or give her a bottle in the dark without causing her to wake up, and because I don’t need you to be a nanny, I need you to do the things I cannot do and be the things I cannot be. I need you to get a job, dear husband. I need you to be a man.

“Because it’s not healthy to do nothing!” I screeched instead.

These conversations always ended in some relatively agreeable place, where Caleb would promise to look around online for something that might fit. And then five days would pass, and I would ask him how it was going, and he would give me a blankly shameful look, the look of a dog who’d briefly forgotten they weren’t meant to piss inside, and then I would have to walk into the bathroom, shut the door, lock it, turn on the shower and the bathroom faucet, and scream into one of my mother’s lovingly embroidered hand towels. God bless this house!

And then one afternoon Caleb came home with the weekly grocery haul and a new yoga mat. “For exercise,” he said, when my mother asked nervously what he planned to do with it.

“Ah!” she said. “Of course.” But she kept glancing at it with a look of genuine terror, like it might just become a murder weapon if she didn’t keep tabs on it. Eventually after dinner, she picked up the yoga mat and disappeared down the hallway. When she came back, the yoga mat was gone. She caught my eye and winked.

But my husband had other plans. The next day he wandered around the house, whistling absently, opening drawers and closet doors until he found the mat rolled up behind the umbrella stand. He took the mat, stepped outside, rolled it out in the driveway, and dropped to his stomach in the early morning sun. I watched through the kitchen window, stricken, as a seemingly infinite line of cars rolled past us on their morning commute, a long procession of men in suits glancing out with suspicion at the young father frozen in downward-facing dog on a Tuesday at 8 a.m.

This was it: the moment I lost my patience. So I did what any good Christian woman would do when she can no longer bear to do nothing: I went to my mother in tears, and she instructed me to call his mother in tears, and then his mother called him in a hurricane of humiliation and fury.

The journey to California was silent. Caleb drove the whole time. He was angry with me, obviously, but I think he was also shocked by what I had done. And do you know what? It was strangely gratifying to watch him sit there in the driver’s seat, grinding his teeth with anxiety, occasionally looking over at me and just as quickly looking away when he caught my eye. I’d spent the last month becoming slowly horrified by certain aspects of my husband’s character, traits that were emerging only long after the opportunity had passed for me to change my mind about picking him, so it felt like the inevitable next step for him to become equally horrified by me. I could practically watch his brain as it made slow, thoughtful jumps toward grand conclusions: Natalie, the perfectly agreeable wife, was capable of going behind his back and complaining to his mother. Natalie, the prim and faithful girl, was not afraid of snapping at her husband’s neck. Maybe even: Natalie was not as pretty as he remembered. (Was it just him, or was her face a bit more… angular, perhaps, than it had looked at their wedding? Had her chin always been so pointy? Had her eyes always been so lifeless, so cold?) Oh, what a shame, what an absolute shame. Poor Caleb had been conned, bamboozled, tricked! His young, beautiful, fertile wife had been so relaxed for the first year of marriage. So easygoing. So quiet! She hadn’t demanded a single thing. Now—cue the horror movie soundtrack in his head, dun dun dun! —she’d started to speak up. She’d started to make some demands.

As we drove through the flatlands in silence, I could practically hear our minds moaning in unison: It isn’t fair.

Six hours into the twelve-hour drive, Caleb cleared his throat and said, “I didn’t know that—”

“Volume,” I whispered in terror. I was practically sitting sideways in the passenger seat, glancing backward at the car seat every thirty seconds. Clementine was napping fitfully; each little squeak she let out made my back go rigid with fear. I glanced over at him, then whispered proddingly, at the volume I wanted him to match, “What didn’t you know?”

“That you were unhappy,” he said (to my relief, quite quietly). “I didn’t know. You didn’t tell me.”

I frowned. Happy —that wasn’t a word I had considered in this situation. “It’s not that I’m unhappy. I just want us to settle in, Caleb.”

“And so you called my mother.” This, the deadened quiet tone Caleb was using, was new. I felt like I was watching a pet perform a naughty trick I hadn’t taught them. A parakeet unraveling a toilet roll. Where did you learn that?

“You should have to tell me,” he said. “If you’re unhappy, you should be required to tell me that.”

“I’m not unhappy,” I said again. We were both staring at the long ribbon of highway ahead, barren salt flats all around us. In the corner of my eye, I clocked Caleb’s tight, double-handed grip on the wheel with an almost-academic interest. So this is what an angry husband looks like.

“You know,” Caleb said, “it’s really not that unusual to not know what you want to do with your life right out of college.”

“Of course it isn’t. But—”

“It’s not that unusual. Really, it isn’t.”

I didn’t reply. The clarification I had wanted to add— but ideally a man should have some purpose before he decides to bring another life into the world —now felt too combative.

“I just thought,” Caleb said. “I thought you would be—”

The silence stretched too long. “What? You thought I’d be what ?”

“Never mind.”

We didn’t speak again for the rest of the drive.

Caleb’s parents lived outside Napa Valley, on an old Spanish estate with twenty-four-hour surveillance and an active working vineyard. The property had been in their family for four generations. It was nearly as old as the family’s most precious heirloom: their history of political ambition. As we pulled onto the Mills estate driveway, a long and winding road buffeted by live oak trees—and beyond the oak trees: migrant workers, hundreds of them, sweating beneath the late afternoon sun—I breathed a sigh of relief. Thank you, Lord, for the Inheritance.

Doug and Amelia were waiting for us when we rolled up to the great circular entranceway, Doug in a button-down shirt rolled up at the elbows, Amelia in a collared shirtdress. Not a wrinkle between the two of them. Like a pair of vintage figurines, Mr. and Mrs. America positioned just so in front of the massive double-entrance oak doors. The car rolled to a stop, and they approached us with matching grins. Doug opened the passenger door for me, and I turned to him with the biggest, fakest smile I could muster.

“Look who made it!” Doug roared.

“Where’s my gorgeous little grandbaby?” Amelia exclaimed.

Clementine was half-awake when I opened the back-seat door. I unbuckled and pulled her out of the car seat with all the care and precision of a bomb-disarming expert. To my amazement, she performed perfectly for the moment, gazing up at her grandparents with a little twinkle in her usually miserable dark eyes. I stared down at my daughter with a new measure of respect.

“You sure can make a mean baby, Natalie,” Doug said.

Before I could reply, Amelia lifted Clementine out of my arms. “That’s a darling little girl, yes, ma’am.” Then she looked up at me, her face a veneer of hostess perfection. Pink-painted lips, eyebrows plucked into a perfect bridge. “You must be exhausted, Natalie. Let’s get you a cold glass of water, then I’ll have Maria make you a cappuccino. You’ll love Maria. She’s an absolute godsend.”

(As it would turn out, I would never actually get to know Maria at all. The employees at the Mills estate were trained to be discreet, which meant that they optimized their work schedules such that they were practically invisible to me throughout the day.)

Caleb slammed the car door shut. The three of us looked over at him.

“Hello, Mother,” he said formally. “Hello, Father.”

Caleb walked around the car and stood there, arms limp by his sides as Doug gave him a bear hug. He stared blankly at me over his father’s shoulder, as if to say, Are you happy now?

But Caleb’s parents seemed unbothered by his gloom. As we walked inside, I fell a few steps behind the three of them and watched as Doug and Amelia talked at him simultaneously, his mother relaying the latest gossip with the neighbors while his father brayed about how lazy the new garden workers were.

“—couldn’t honestly understand why she would send little Richard to a boarding school at such a young age—”

“—caught ’em napping at lunch time, snoring, can you believe it—?”

I could practically see Caleb wilting with each step he took farther into the house. He looked like a houseplant getting tortured with a hair dryer.

“You’ve had such a long drive,” Amelia said to us. She was holding Clementine in the practiced crook of one arm. “Why don’t we get Luiz to take your bags upstairs?”

She rested a tentative hand on Caleb’s shoulder. He shrugged it off and said, “I can carry my own bags.”

“Not a problem,” she replied smoothly. “In the meantime—can I get you both something to drink? A seltzer or a coffee?”

Doug chimed in. “Pint of beer?”

Caleb’s face was a crumple of fury, but still he muttered, “A glass of milk would be nice.”

My expression was frozen in a debutante scream. Milk. My husband wanted milk. Beneath the artificial delight was a curdling feeling, a distinctly unsettling sense that I had unknowingly married and been impregnated by a toddler.

At the exact moment my mask fell, my father-in-law glanced over at me. His gaze was every bit as curious as his son’s was hostile. I could practically hear what he was thinking: Why did you marry my son?

How to answer that question.

Natalie’s like a border collie, my mother used to say to the other women at church. She needs a project, otherwise she starts chewing the cabinet corners.

Are you saying my son is a project? I imagined Doug saying.

No, I imagined my mother replying. I’m saying he’s the cabinet corner.

The Mills estate was large and sparse and cold. The hallways were so wide they felt academic in nature—a far cry from the corridors, which snaked alongside the hallways, no wider than three feet, to be used exclusively by Maria and Luiz and all the other godsends who worked at the estate. Each room was painted in earth tones and contained about three fewer pieces of furniture than the space called for. Amelia claimed that clutter gave her anxiety. She also claimed that too much company at once (another form of clutter, I supposed) gave her anxiety, which meant we would only ever see Caleb’s brothers and their families at holidays, for a few days at a time—and even then, nearly everyone but us would retire in the evenings to one of the nearby four-star hotels, though there were more than enough rooms to house everyone at the estate. Another left turn in my marriage: I’d thought I was marrying into a big, boisterous American family, but I would never actually get to know Caleb’s brothers, nor their wives or children, and they would never take an interest in me. Years into our marriage, I would learn accidentally over a New Year’s celebration that the four other families went on vacations together, and this was when I realized that the strangely pungent anxiety radiating from the Mills family was not a universal stink, but rather one that was exclusively associated with Caleb and his mother. After that, on the rare occasion all the families were together, I would watch how the four older brothers instinctually grouped themselves away from Caleb, showing their backs to him like puppies crowding out a sick runt, and I would wonder if this animal dynamic had happened the night of my engagement party. Then, like a one-two punch, I would remember a strange, small detail of our wedding: Caleb hadn’t had a best man. His brothers had sat in the front row with all the other guests.

On that first day, though, none of this was immediately clear to me. I carried Clementine into the bedroom where we would be staying. It was Caleb’s childhood bedroom, Amelia said, but it might as well have been a suite at the Ritz-Carlton, it was so decadent and anonymous.

“Welcome home,” I whispered to my daughter, once the door was shut and we were alone. I gave her a hopeful smile. She began to cry.

Reena was entering her junior year of college soon. That was what I thought about while I held my wailing child in my arms. This week—maybe today, even—marked the beginning of the fall semester. Back to class, I thought distantly.

I would never complete my degree.