Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 3

I was seventeen years old when I left my family for the first time. I was going to college in Boston. Harvard University. Remember what I said about being disciplined? Yeah. By the time I was twelve, I was practically running my weekly Sunday school lessons while the actual teacher—some neighborhood dad who reeked of booze and liked to hit on the girls in the confirmation class above us—slept off his hangover in the back. Sharp as a tack, my father used to say about me. Be careful, or you might get pricked. And then he would laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

That’s all I remember about my father. He died when I was ten. At least that’s what my mother told my sister and me to say when we moved to our new town in the southwestern corner of Idaho, four hours away from where we’d grown up. Tell the teachers your father is no longer with us. You had to give it to her with that rhetorical sleight of hand: she wasn’t lying, she hadn’t committed a sin, he was—technically!—no longer with us. With that phrase, my teachers would come to their own conclusions, and the conclusion would not be that Eliza Heller’s husband had fled the state with a woman from his local bowling league.

Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality…

Even at a young age, my mother’s logic checked out to me. Daddy’s dead. So sad! May he rest in peace, amen. My father was the kind of man who called a woman smart only when it worked as a beer-soaked punch line for his friends at a party. I’d be lying if I said I missed him, but I did what my mother said, because this was the world I was born into: a world where good Christian women moonlighted as crisis managers for their good Christian men. The rules were laid out at Church service and Sunday school and over the dinner table each night: the job of a woman was threefold. Be a mother, be a wife, and keep the household clean. Oh—and don’t forget to smile !

And so I came of age in a small mountain town, no grandparents or cousins to speak of, with a single mother who steadfastly refused the best efforts of other women in church to set her up on dates, since she was technically already married. By day, she was a secretary at a local law firm. By night, she crocheted baby sweaters, socks, and hats for the women in our neighborhood. Since the families in our church popped out five to nine children on average, business was always booming. The bills were always paid on time. My mother’s carpal tunnel syndrome flared up monthly, but the pain, she said, was worth it for such a good American childhood. Even so, we were not the kind of household that could afford worldly luxuries like tuition —which is why, when the full-ride offer came in the mail, there was nothing my mother could say except, “Oh my.”

It was surprising to my mother that I wouldn’t want to go to the honors program at our state university. Surprising, more generally speaking, that I would want to venture outward into the world, when the world so clearly had lost its way. Out in the coastal cities, nuclear families were an endangered species. Children ran barefoot in the streets while their fathers philandered in third-floor walk-ups and their mothers smoked crack on the stoops. Some women didn’t know they were women anymore. Some men didn’t know they were men. The birth rate was plummeting. Humanity was self-immolating. The white race was going extinct.

These were the prayers my mother sent to the Lord each night while I packed for school down the hall: Keep her safe, Lord. Lead her from temptation. Deliver her from evil. In the name of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit—

At the airport, my mother and sister hugged me goodbye.

“Don’t do cocaine,” my sister, Abigail, said fearfully. She was two years older than me, with a heart-shaped face, wide Bambi eyes, and a crumb of a diamond ring on her finger. She was engaged to her high school sweetheart, a pimple-faced corn dog of a young man with a bad temper. Bryce. Together they were enrolled at the local community college. Abigail had no intentions of ever leaving our hometown, or of reading a book that was written by someone whose name was not Paul or David or John.

“Remember, Nattie,” my mother said, “just remember to be kind.” Her expression was bright with piousness, almost oily with it. She kept glancing around at the other Idaho families in the ticketing area, nearly all of whom were dressed like us, in long prairie dresses with hair braided down their backs, and nearly all of whom were larger than us by a factor of two or three. Nearby, a woman led a line of eight children to the baggage drop, a fat stack of passports in her hands, an expression of beatific exhaustion on her face. My mother watched them pass, her face almost naked with regret. In our community, a family with only two children was suspiciously small. The opposite of blessed. Well, what could you do? Her husband was no longer with us.

“Everyone believes in something,” she said, still watching the family. “You can reach anyone if you show them kindness.”

“I know, Mother.”

Her attention snapped back to me. “I’m serious, Nattie. Be nice. ”

I swallowed a hiss. I didn’t want to fight, but it was a low blow for her to end the goodbye on this, the greatest shame of both of our lives: I was not, and had never been, a very social girl. I was polite and well-mannered, I was reliable and hardworking and clever— concerningly so, my mother would say to women at church, when she thought I couldn’t hear—but extroverted? Not so much. Friends? Technically none to speak of.

“It’s not going to be a problem,” I said. I meant it, though not in the way I knew she would take it. This was, secretly, why I was going to Boston: I was going to a school and a city where intellect would matter much more than being likable. Bostonians, as far as I could tell from what I’d read at our desktop computer back home, were famously smart and famously uninterested in pleasantries. That kind of world was undoubtedly the one where I belonged.

I hugged my sister and mother one more time, then I gathered my bags and marched forward to the security line. As I inched along, I felt an urge to turn around and wave to my family one more time. But then I thought of Gomorrah, of what happens to women who look over their shoulders at the world they leave behind.

…the Lord rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah…Thus He overthrew those cities and the entire plain, destroying all those living in the cities—and also the vegetation in the land. But Lot’s wife looked back, and she became a pillar of salt.

Don’t look back, don’t look back.

What happened to the women in the Bible who looked forward, though? What about them?

I couldn’t remember, but there was something about the notion that felt instinctively wrong to me. It sniffed of greed and felt worryingly close to witchcraft.

Do not turn to mediums or necromancers; do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them…

Best not to take the risk. And so I found a seat at my departure gate and stared pointedly at the carpet, determined not to look forward or backward until the flight attendants called for my group number and the rest of my life began.