Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 18

There comes a point in every marriage when a woman realizes that the man she married is a freak. This is inevitable. It cannot be avoided. The only real question in the matter is what type of freak your husband will be—meaning: if you are lucky, you will find out your husband is preternaturally into vintage children’s train sets, and you will not find out that your husband pays high school cheerleaders for sex. That is the best we homemakers can hope for in this life: a man whose freakishness is not unspeakably violent or technically illegal, and therefore is something we are able to bear.

This is what my mother told me on our daily phone calls in those first few weeks of my time at the Mills estate, whenever I mentioned my husband’s particular behaviors: his refusal to get a job, his adolescent mewlings at his parents when they were simply trying to be nice. I would tell my mother about these moments while pushing Clementine in a stroller down the long, tree-lined driveway, and she would listen patiently before reminding me that it was a woman’s job to encourage her husband to be normal.

“The problem, Mother,” I would say at this point, “is that he isn’t trying. ”

“Well,” she would reply. “I’m sure he will soon.”

And then the phone conversation would drift off in a quiet deflation of mutual uncertainty.

I had hoped Caleb’s parents would whip him into shape upon arrival—that Doug might offer some sort of ho-hum rallying cry for the tenets of traditional masculinity, or that Amelia might grab her son’s wrist and squeeze tightly, telling him in as few words as possible not to embarrass the family. But so far they’d done nothing of the sort. They’d barely said anything to him at all, had only reprimanded him mildly whenever he slouched through the kitchen in sweatpants in the early afternoon.

We’d been here for weeks— weeks! —and nothing had improved. If anything, it had gotten worse. Caleb now spent all his time in our bedroom, the glow of his computer screen turning his face an unworldly blue while he played video games, or read niche culture blogs, or watched porn.

Yes. Porn.

This, I hadn’t told my mother: One afternoon, I walked into our bedroom to find Caleb’s laptop open at his desk. I glanced over to our bathroom door and saw it firmly shut tight, a band of yellow light by the floor. I walked over to his desk, hoping to find the browser open to a job listing. Instead, I found a grotesque still of a couple, naked and frozen mid-thrust. Before my brain short-circuited, I noted the long line of tabs open at the top of the browser— Husband + wife (REAL COUPLE) fuck passionately for one whole hour; Intense kissing leads to squirting orgasm!!!!; Amateur couple have hot intimate fuck session (lots of pussy licking) —then I stepped forward and slammed the laptop screen shut.

My wagon was hitched to a sex pervert.

Then one night, the moment I was waiting and hoping and praying for finally arrived.

It was evening. Late October. We’d been at the Mills estate for a month. I was on my way to the laundry room when I came across Amelia and Doug sitting beneath the dim light of the island pendants, a bottle of white wine sweating on the counter between them. Doug was about to leave for a week in DC. A black rolling suitcase lay by his feet like a family dog. His tie, lipstick red, was loose around his neck. It was a casual scene, somewhat nostalgic. Like a Norman Rockwell painting: a nightcap between a traveling salesman and his homemaker wife. But something about their expectant faces unnerved me—I hadn’t expected to catch either of their gazes so quickly, nor had I expected those gazes to hold such quiet urgency—and suddenly I felt destabilized, like I was floating through the half second when dream tips over into nightmare. The moment when you realize an intervention is taking place, and the person it’s meant for is you.

“Natalie,” Amelia said. “Could we chat for a moment?”

“Of course,” I said, though my heart sank. Clementine was just starting to sleep through the night, which meant that I was just starting to sleep through the night. But nothing threatened my nine o’clock bedtime more than Amelia with a bottle of Pinot Grigio.

“You know how much we love having you here…,” Amelia said, a bit breathily. It was clearly a beginning, a first half to a sentence she’d already rehearsed in full, and yet she paused unnaturally here, like a teleprompter was frozen. She looked helplessly at Doug.

“Natalie,” Doug said. “Can we have an honest conversation?” He gave me a congenial, we’re-all-friends-here kind of look. Sitting there in his starched white shirt, with an American flag pin fastened neatly on the breast pocket, I could suddenly see him perfectly at a campaign stop in West Virginia, sitting down in a booth filled with coal miners, ordering a round of pints for the table, giving some hearty speech comprised entirely of one- and two-syllable words, closing with some rowdy punch line about God, family, and beer.

“It’s about Caleb,” he said.

“Oh?”

“When he told us he was engaged,” Amelia added, “we were so thrilled. We thought it was just the thing to… help him, but it wasn’t, or it didn’t, I suppose…”

“We thought a wife and a baby might make him grow up,” Doug said. “Help him become a man. But we were wrong.” He swirled his glass around, aerating it, his eyes on me.

A shriek of fear whistled through me. All this time that I’d been hoping Caleb’s parents would fix their son, they were hoping the same of me—and all the time I’d been wondering why they weren’t doing more, they were wondering the same of me.

“We want to help you, of course,” Doug said. “We’re a family now.”

“Absolutely.” Amelia reached for her glass of wine. “Teamwork.” She was very drunk.

My spirit buckled softly. I whispered, “I don’t know what to do.”

“Well, first things first: we’ve got to find Caleb a job, of course. A good, respectable job—but one he can actually handle.” Doug paused meaningfully, and in the silence I considered all the jobs Doug had probably gotten for his son over the years that hadn’t worked out. “Business school would’ve been ideal, a nice little time waster, if he hadn’t screwed up the interview.”

Interview. What interview? I bit down on my lip to keep my expression perfectly blank. I knew nothing of this business school plan. I wondered when the plan had formed, and when it had fallen apart. Doug was watching me closely now. Trying to see, no doubt, if I knew what he was talking about. “Well,” I said finally. “It wasn’t in God’s plan.”

Amelia tipped her glass toward me in a wobbly cheers. “A- men. Always been a dreamer, our Caleb. A gentle soul. He wrote a beautiful poem about the Garden of Eden when he was in grade school. I’m sure I still have it somewhere. Do you remember that poem, Dougie? How he rhymed Eve with believe ?”

“He could be perfect for politics someday,” Doug said, ignoring his wife entirely. “It’s actually one of the few positions of power where it benefits you to underthink. If you don’t think too hard, you never get rattled.”

“There was that one silly little debacle with the classroom rabbit,” Amelia went on, frowning mistily at no one. “But it was an accident. He didn’t mean to.”

“I imagine him as a state senator…”

“ …multiple eyewitnesses said the rabbit bit him first… ”

I said nothing. I was having a hard time processing so much information at once. My husband, a former poet, a future politician, a convicted rabbit killer, a presently unemployable man.

“We’d put the right advisers around him, of course,” Doug said, sensing my panic and diagnosing it incorrectly. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Right now, I think we should just get him a stable job, keep him busy and working, and then we figure out something from there.” Here, Doug gave me a smile that was at once condescending and encouraging, and for a moment I felt myself in that booth again, a pair of sweating beers between us. I was a coal miner, a warehouse worker, a union man, and he was the man who would save my job, feed my family, resurrect my town. Then I blinked and remembered who I was, and the room tilted a degree. I placed a hand on the counter to steady myself. “What are you asking me to do, exactly?”

“Well, Natalie: For all intents and purposes, you are the man in the family right now.” Big sharky grin. “I can get him a job, sure, but you’ve got to make him do it.” He paused, seemed to realize only then that I was standing while they were seated. “Would you like to get comfortable?”

I walked around the island and pulled out a stool, like the good little dog—I mean wife—that I was. Bark bark.

There was a vineyard down the road, apparently. Doug was good friends with the owner. There was a management position available for Caleb. Nothing special, but it would keep him busy all day long, and he would oversee the farmworkers on the property. If he got a job in business someday, he could technically describe this work as “management experience” on a bullet point, and if he opted for a political run, he could say he had experience working “alongside people from all walks of life.” If he got fired, well. No one would be the wiser.

As Doug went on, describing a position that basically amounted to vineyard janitor, I found myself nodding along like a bobblehead. It was the opposite of what I had hoped for, and still I heard myself say, as if Doug had popped a quarter into the back of my skull and cranked some hidden shaft: “What a perfect idea.”

When I came back upstairs with the laundry, Caleb was standing over the bassinet, staring down at our daughter in the darkness. I paused at the door threshold. Caleb gave me a thumbs-up, still asleep, and I sighed with relief. I set down the laundry by the bed and walked over to him.

“I wish there was a job for playing with babies,” Caleb whispered. “I’d be great at that.”

I didn’t say anything. The panic I’d felt earlier in the kitchen was gone now, replaced by a dull, sweet throbbing in my chest. He was good at playing with babies. He never grew bored or irritated with Clementine. He found her endlessly entertaining. In fact, that was the problem, wasn’t it? He had no desire to do anything else.

My husband wanted too little from his life. And me? I wanted too much.

Suddenly it was so obvious: Caleb should’ve been born a woman, and I should’ve been born a man. A sad sickness turned my stomach. We were equally broken in that way.

“Listen,” Caleb said quietly. “I know this hasn’t been easy. I just need to figure out what my purpose is. What I want to be. And I will, Natalie. I promise.”

I looked up at my husband in the darkness. Then a miracle took place: the beauty of His divine will broke over me. It felt like the childhood game the girls in class had played with one another, but never with me: Crack an egg on your head, let the yolk drip down—

I shivered, suddenly alive with His presence.

Marrying Caleb had not been a mistake, or an act of ignorance. No. Quite the contrary: it had been the beginning of a divine mission. We were put on this earth to teach each other how to be. To give each other purpose. I would help Caleb become a better man, and he would help me become a better woman. Through my example, Caleb would grow stronger, more ambitious, and through his example, I’d grow softer, more loving with our children. Like a balancing of liquids: he would take, and I would give, until we met each other in the middle. It would be the job of a lifetime for both of us. We were a match made in Hell—I mean heaven. I could see it now.

I tilted my face upward toward him in the darkness, and for the first time since the baby was born, we kissed with tongue. “Make love to me,” I whispered bravely. We tumbled backward into our bed and had breathless, missionary, mushy-penised sex. Afterward, in the darkness while Caleb snored beside me, I cried silent tears at the beauty of the Lord’s bounty.

The next day, midafternoon, I woke Clementine up from her nap and brought her to Caleb. “I’m busy right now,” he said, holding our daughter in the air between us like she was a leaking food delivery bag.

“Not for the next hour, you’re not. You’re taking our daughter for a walk.”

I stood in the doorway, waving merrily at my husband as he pushed the stroller down the driveway. When he was far enough away, I shut the door and crossed the house to Doug’s study.

“Tell your friend thanks, but no thanks,” I said to Doug, once he’d welcomed me in. “I’ll find Caleb something better.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. It’s my job, anyways. I’m his wife.” Then I added, before I lost my nerve, “You’re wrong about Caleb, you know. He’s not a man yet, but he will be.”

Doug let out a bark of surprised laughter. “It kind of sounds like you’re making a bet, Miss Natalie.”

I held out my hand. “May the best man win.”