Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A Novel by Caro Claire Burke - 7

Every Monday evening, my mother called the dormitory phone line at seven on the dot to ask me how the week had been. How my social life was going. Had I met any French girls? What about Irish ones? Were there any—deep breath here—Jewish or Muslim girls in the building? Did they pray in front of me? Did they smell like me, or was the odor different?

My mother had given birth to my sister when she was eighteen, then me when she was twenty. College hadn’t been a consideration. Worldly travels were not an option. The farthest she had ever traveled was to Arizona for a wedding. At the airport, her anxiety about my decision to go to college had been palpable, but now—perhaps because she’d never had the opportunity to do so herself, or perhaps as a means of redirecting her anxieties about her daughter living so far away—she talked nonstop about how exciting it was for me to be there. I can’t imagine how many interesting people you’ll meet!

In response, for the first time in my life, I lied to my mother. I told her it was exactly as she was picturing it, because I thought she’d have a nervous breakdown if I told her the truth.

No, college was not the intellectual oasis I had hoped it would be. There were no lecture hall sparring matches of the likes of Socrates and Plato, no passionate debates over free will and creation and the divine, intellectual light of man. Nor, though, was it Gomorrah, as my sister and mother had worried it would be. Or at least: not as they might have imagined it to be. Rather, I’d found myself in a highly claustrophobic holding tank for rich kids. An artificially intelligent Eden: a warm, incubated landscape designed to keep the worst kids in America safe and warm and well-fed until they matured past the urge to peck each other’s eyes out.

At first, I thought my roommate troubles would be my biggest challenge, but Reena hadn’t brought anyone home since that first night, and then school began, and the true nightmare revealed itself to me. In the first several weeks, I sat frozen in the front row of each class while brash, marble-mouthed kids from Chicago and Los Angeles and Darien talked loudly from the back row. The boys complained about power hegemonies and overseas military interventions, waving their uncalloused palms, even their fingernails unnervingly clean. As for the girls, they proclaimed their horror at the wage gap between the sexes, and while I first thought a shocking number of them had the same medical issue, I soon realized their fingers and hands and forearms were all tie-dyed a grim shade of orange from the fake tanner that passed through our dorm hallways like a spiritual totem.

On weeknights, the girls in my hall piled into one room and drank Smirnoff Vodka mixed with zero-calorie grapefruit juice while they complained about their parents, their boarding schools, their high school boyfriends. No one was grateful to be here. As far as I could see, no one was grateful for anything at all. They all planned to be wives and mothers, and yet they absolutely hated men and kids. They talked about nuclear families the same way they talked about the nuclear bomb. It was a destructive, sexist, militaristic, heteronormative force designed to ruin the world. Literally, they would add for emphasis, at the end of every statement they made that could not possibly work in any literal sense. Lit-tral-ly. When they talked about stay-at-home mothers—specifically about their stay-at-home-mothers—their eyes didn’t go misty with gratitude. Instead, they argued bravely that old-school femininity was a scourge. Any woman who chose to stay in the home instead of working in the world was complicit. Any woman who identified as a homemaker was both a victim and a perpetrator.

“Of what?” I made the mistake of asking once, in the beginning.

The girls exchanged a series of looks. The Amish girl has spoken! Then Reena—who, over the early days of school, had been visibly disappointed to realize she wasn’t going to climb as high up on the social ladder as she had clearly planned to, and who obviously found me at least partially responsible for this fact—cleared her throat and said tiredly, “The patriarchy, Natalie.”

Duh.

Someone always had a sister who’d left her job to take care of the kids because the daycare costs compared to her salary didn’t check out. Someone always had a cousin whose nipples and sleep schedule and sex life were being destroyed by breastfeeding. Someone always had a mother who was actively drinking herself to death in the suburbs while the father played 52 Pickup with some restaurant hostess in the city. One night, one of the girls said (I kid you not, I quote her verbatim), “I really want to get an elective C-section because then the baby’s head won’t be all lumpy when it comes out.” On another night, Reena told everyone about what happened the first night of school, about the horrible night she’d spent with that boy. He was a predator, she insisted. He gave off major rape vibes. He’d skull-fucked her, she said— she could barely breathe! —and then he’d pressured her into sex, and everyone should write his name down, they should remember it and never go home with him, because men like him could not, could never, be trusted.

I sat on the opposite bunk bed, mute with horror, while she went on. I was already aware that these young women enjoyed blurring the line between fact and fiction— nuclear families were destructive? C-sections desirable? Pray tell, ladies, in what world? —but here, now, was a glaring journalistic error, a false insurance claim about a hit-and-run that never happened, and I was the only witness.

Be nice, my mother warned.

I stared into the cup of sparkling water in my lap.

Each night, after two or three hours of this kind of group discussion, the girls would say good night, and I would slowly put my nightgown on, feeling lightheaded and a little bit sick. It felt like I was being waterboarded to death by modernity. As I got into bed—my fingers shaking so hard I could barely pull back my sheets—it was my mother my mind groped blindly toward, like a dying plant twisting itself into contortions toward the light. I thought of the aprons she hand-embroidered for my sister and me, our names in perfect pink cursive across the breast pocket, and I bit my tongue until it bled. An excruciating thing to admit: I missed being around women who were nice.

It was grim. I’d gotten exactly what I wanted: a school where everyone was profoundly, jaw-droppingly unlikable. I could practically hear the Lord whispering in my ear: Be careful what you wish for, little lamb. You just might get it.

The situation was not tenable. But each time I filed a request to move to a single room in another dorm building, the request was denied.

“Are you in an unsafe situation?” my RA adviser asked one day. After my seventh formal request to move, she had paid me a visit while Reena was in class.

“Well,” I hedged. “Not physically, no, but spiritually?” I nodded vigorously. “Very much so.”

But she was already handing my request back to me. “I’m sorry, but they’re not going to approve this.”

And then one night, the Lord delivered in the most unexpected of ways.

It was a Thursday evening. Reena was getting ready to host another pregame in our room. Tonight was going to be a big night for Reena, I had gathered, through the conversations she had with other girls in front of me. She was going to hook up with a guy she’d been talking to for weeks. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Reena take her fourth shot of vodka in twenty minutes. Predator, I thought, from the safe cocoon of my bed. I’d long since given up the pretense of drinking at these events. I was in pajamas, under the covers, a textbook open in my lap.

A trio of girls arrived, looking nervously around at our empty dorm room. Undoubtedly they had thought more people would be here. “Are we early?”

“Ohmigod, hi!” Reena trilled, sailing past the awkwardness. “Come in, come in, come in, I was just pouring your drinks.”

Two of the girls lived in our hall and therefore had learned over the early weeks of school not to talk to me. That Catholic girl is weird! But one of the girls was from another dorm. “Hey,” she said. “Natalie, right?” When I looked at her, she added, “We’re in the same gender studies class.”

Reena frowned. “Isn’t that, like, a four-hundred-person lecture?”

“Well, yeah, but Natalie got into this intense debate with the professor the other day about biological differences. She had all these studies lined up in her arsenal, too, like bam, women are physically weaker, bam, men aren’t good at domestic chores because their eyesight is designed for predatorial work, bam, the female body is designed to nurture, and what do you think of that ? The professor was sooooo pissed,” the girl said, and laughed. “It was honestly hilarious.”

I didn’t say anything. I had thought that the professor had enjoyed that debate. A terribly lonely thought fell over me: everyone here, even the faculty, seemed to hate me.

“Whatever,” Reena said. “Natalie doesn’t care what other people think. Do you, Natalie?”

Reena had done this occasionally in the first few days of school, speak up vaguely on my behalf, but now she used me more frequently as a prop or a punch line for her own flailing social life. I was a dove, and she was an amateur magician, standing in front of an auditorium of mostly empty seats, groping around for my feathers in the depths of her big black hat.

“What other people think of me is none of my business,” I said quietly.

“God, Natalie.” Reena gave me a preening look as she poured more vodka into her cup. “You are so precious. Did your mother tell you to say that?”

A flower of heat bloomed in my chest as the girls laughed easily with each other. It was a flippant joke, Reena certainly didn’t expect me to respond—does the dove ever snap at the magician’s fingers?—which is probably why she seemed so startled when I said, “Just because you hate your mother doesn’t mean I have to hate mine.”

A silence filled the room. Reena set down the vodka handle. “I never said I hate my mother.” She looked at the girls. “When did I say I hate my mother?”

I returned my attention to my book.

“Seriously! I love my mother!”

“Of course you do,” one of the girls assured Reena, but it must not have worked to soothe her, because when Reena spoke again, her voice was laced with fury.

“Do you want to know what I think, Natalie?”

No, Reena, I don’t know what you think. In fact, I’m shocked to learn you have any interiority to speak of.

“I think that you think you’re better than all of us.”

I flipped the page.

“Are you even listening to me?”

Without looking up, I said, “Is that another rhetorical question? Or are you actually interested in hearing a different perspective on the world than your own?”

The girls behind her tittered in surprise. The Baptist girl thinks!

“You’re mean, Natalie,” Reena said. She was slurring a little bit, her tongue anesthetized from vodka. This conversation never would’ve happened if she wasn’t drunk. “You roll your eyes when we talk. You make little comments under your breath. You think we don’t notice, but we do. And you’re extra mean to me, you ignore half the things I say to you, and I think it’s because you’re jealous of me, because I have friends and a boyfriend”—even in this moment, I registered that this was a big stretch for her to make, a surprisingly brave or perhaps embarrassingly drunk one, especially in front of these girls—“and you, on the other hand, are all alone with your imaginary friends, Jesus and Mary and the holy fucking spirit.”

I stared at the page, my brain clicking softly as the girls laughed. I thought, for the millionth time that autumn, of my mother. What was she doing right now? Probably wiping down the countertops, putting away the leftovers from dinner. Humming one of the church hymns she always had stuck in her head. In my entire life, I’d never known my mother to hate anyone, but I felt certain she would hate these girls. At the very least, she’d be appalled to know what they spent their time thinking about. You’re wrong, Mama. Not everyone believes in something. At college, there are an astonishing number of people who believe in absolutely nothing at all.

My mother had always encouraged me to be a shining light for others. But I was certain that no level of illumination would save these women from the horror of themselves. If anything, they seemed to revel in the pitch-black aimlessness of their lives. They were proud of it. Happy to wander blindly forth into a lifetime of selfishness. It was deeply disturbing. Most disturbing of all was the fact that these lost, hateful girls thought someone like me should inherently be jealous of someone like them.

No fucking way.

(Sorry, Lord.)

“I’m not jealous of you, Reena,” I said. I closed my book on my finger to keep the page, then I looked at her. “If anything, I feel sorry for you, because you’re unintelligent and you lack creativity. But most of all, I feel sorry because a person like you will never know true wonder, not once in your life.”

Her mouth fell open. “You are such a bitch!”

“Well.” I tapped my finger lightly on the golden embroidered cross on the book cover. “I don’t concern myself with the opinions of whores.”

“ What did you just call me? ”

“You heard me.” I looked past Reena to her friends. “She lied, you know. That boy who went home with her the first night of school? He didn’t hurt her. Not even close. In fact, she asked him to have sex with her. She practically begged him, and now she’s telling everyone who will listen that he threatened her, when he did nothing of the sort. So if you ask me…” I shrugged. “She’s the real predator. Not him.”

There was an otherworldly noise, a shriek that split the world in two. In the single moment before my focus returned to Reena, her fingers were already in my hair.

Reena, poor thing, wouldn’t remember any of the details of that night. She would wake up the next morning in a shirt covered with vomit, her knuckles bruised, a note from the disciplinary committee taped to our door. As for me, I would remember it mostly as the night I learned an old saying was actually true: the Lord did work in mysterious ways. After months of requesting and being denied, I finally got approved to move into a single. As it turned out, all I’d needed was to get my roommate to punch me in the face.

The next day, I moved into a small single on the opposite side of campus. Clean and quiet and mine. Finally, I could wake up each morning and whisper my daily prayer of gratitude without worrying she would make fun of me. I could read quietly at night with a door firmly closed, rather than suffering the backward looks of pity from Reena’s friends while they came in and out to borrow makeup and clothing in preparation for their weekly excursion to the local frat house, where they would, if they were lucky, revel in ten to thirty minutes of verbal abuse with the object of their affections before he got bored and decided to finger someone else.

At night, while my new dorm neighbors laughed and screamed in one of the rooms down the hall, I stuffed a towel under the crack of the door. I did my homework, and then I did all my extra assignments, and then I sat at my desktop computer and scrolled through a series of low-fi internet forums, searching for answers to the questions that had sprung up since I arrived at college.

Why do modern women hate men so much?

Why do modern women hate kids so much?

Why do modern women hate themselves so much?

How can you have a full-time job and breastfeed at the same time?

Instead of answers, though, I only found stories, as well as more questions. Why is the anger getting worse? the modern women asked the forums. Why am I not ready for kids? Where does unhappiness come from? Why can’t I seem to remember what I was originally going to do with this college degree?

At the end of my first semester, I ran into a girl I’d met at orientation. She was the same year as me, and she belonged to a church group that served Christian students from schools all over the city. I’d gone once, at the very beginning of the semester. It had not been my cup of tea.

“You really should come to a meeting again,” she said. “We’ve got a great group of regulars.”

“It’s just not really my thing,” I said. This was, I thought, much nicer to say than the truth: The girls in your group are dumb as rocks, and the idea of sharing spiritual communion with them would probably feel like getting intellectually stoned to death.

Her expression faltered. “To be honest, Natalie, I’m worried about you. You don’t look so good.”

I smiled stiffly at this girl who’d only ever seen me in passing. “Excuse me?”

“Your hair is greasy, and you have these dark circles under your eyes. Are you eating? Sleeping? Do you want to talk sometime?”

It was the kind of pathologically invasive comment I was used to getting from my mother and the other women at church service back home; the kind of thing you would say to a stranger only if you’d been raised to believe that one woman’s failure to keep up appearances reflected poorly on all other women, too. Someone like Reena would’ve immediately told this girl that she was being rude and inappropriate and sexist. Fuck off! But neither of us was like Reena, and this girl knew it. Suddenly I was so homesick I burst into tears. Before long the girl was hugging me, saying, “There, there, I know,” as I snotted up her shirt.

The next week I started going to the church group. It was held in one of the basement rooms of the main library at Harvard. I sat with the dumb girls, I suffered their little snuffling moans and sighs of glory to God, and it was fine. At least the people in the group knew the sky was blue. At least they didn’t spit out mother like the word alone was a pregnancy contraction. At least they were friendly to me. I was still lonely, but now the loneliness felt manageable, like something I could survive.

Then, one cold winter evening in the early weeks of my second semester, I met Caleb.