Emma is plugged into her iPhone as I count out the last of our cash. I sold my XX version the day our accounts were canceled—it was a smart move, and it’s kept food in the house. But I couldn’t take Emma’s, not once I suspected how deep this rabbit hole was going, and I counted on hocking my engagement ring. Unfortunately, I counted a little too long—by the time I worked up the courage to ask for a quote, no one had any cash left. As she bobs her head along to her music and wanders from room to room around the house, her shoulders a little straighter without the heavy pack she’ll be carrying when we return, I follow her. But only in body. In mind, I’m moving backward.
To the day I married Nick Reynolds. Or Nick the Dick, as my mother called him when she was in a good mood.
Mom didn’t come to the service, a ten-minute exchange of words in the circuit court with Nick in a black leather bomber jacket and black jeans, a dot-com entrepreneur’s version of a suit. The clerk stood behind a lectern as she recited and called out “Next!” before Nick had a chance to kiss me. So I guess Mom didn’t miss much.
“So you did it, Miranda,” Sal Rubio whispered when she signed her name on the forms next to Nick’s brother Pete’s scrawl. “You married the bad boy.”
“I guess she did,” Nick said, curling an arm around my waist. “And this bad boy’s gonna take care of her until the day she dies.” He planted a kiss on me outside the courthouse. “Who’s coming for drinks? On me.”
Sal tagged along, mostly, I think, because she felt sorry for me. She sure as shit didn’t feel anything for Nick. Two minutes after we got to the bar, Pete started putting the moves on her.
“I’m immune, honey,” Sal said, and dragged me off to the ladies’ room, that sanctuary for all things girl talk since we were in the first grade. “You happy, girl?”
“I’d be happier if my mother had showed up.”
“You know what I mean.” Sal puckered up in front of the mirror and ran a glossy red gash across her lips. It was her trademark color. The only problem with it was that the lipstick, combined with the gold band on her left fourth, acted like a magnet for any man on the lookout for a no-strings-attached fling. You could say it was counterproductive. “Me, I wouldn’t trust a man as far as I could throw him. Just don’t let him run everything, okay?”
I promised, and Sal kissed me full on the lips, an old habit.
“I gotta roll, Miranda. Date in an hour with Ingrid.” She tapped her phone, held it up, and snapped a selfie of us in the bathroom of the Barking Dog. It was my only wedding photo.
“Who’s Ingrid?”
“Tall, Swedish, and gorgeous,” she said, blowing a lock of red hair from her eyes. And with that mystery solved, she wiped the lipstick smear from my face and hustled out the door, boots clicking on the tile.
I spent the rest of my wedding afternoon listening to Nick and Pete hash out deployment plans for their latest app, something they called BearHug. It was supposed to guarantee double-digit returns in the stock market.
And for a long time, it did.
The wedding evening went better than the wedding afternoon. Once Nick tore himself away from his brother, he drove us into the city and treated me to the biggest steak I’d ever seen.
“Get used to it, babe,” he said when my eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. “I said I’d take care of you.”
My mouth waters just thinking about that steak, glistening with butter, charred on the outside, pink and perfect in the center. The baked potato on the side needed its own plate. A real meat-and-potatoes kind of person, you used to say when you were talking about someone simple, unpretentious, down-to-earth. The only people who have been eating steak for the past few months are anything but. I wonder if the president gets steak in whatever bunker he’s holed up in. Probably he does.
So we stuffed ourselves full of three courses and downed two bottles of Veuve Clicquot. “La Grande Dame,” Nick said, “just like my bride.” Then we drove home, got to business for the first time as husband and wife, and cozied up on the sofa with popcorn in time to see my mother on the television.
“Turn it off,” I said.
“Are you kidding? She’s a riot.” Nick held the remote out of reach, finally burying it under the cushion he was sitting on. “I mean, like, a certifiable riot.”
Mom was all of that.
Tonight she was on some stage in San Francisco—her excuse for not being there for me when I tied the knot—opining about all things Femdom. She didn’t seem to get that her group’s pet name was in the Urban Dictionary as a category of sadomasochistic female-domination porn.
Or maybe she did. Maybe that was the whole point.
Mom—Win Somers to every other human—had the crowd roaring. She needed to pause after every few words just to let the applause die down. When she spoke, she seemed to be glaring out of the screen, her eyes boring a hole into Nick.
He cuddled closer. “Man, she’s on fire tonight.”
If she were any more on fire, our house would have burned down.
“Do we have to watch this?” I said, pushing the popcorn away. By twenty-two, I’d had all the indoctrination into modern feminism a girl could take. Don’t get married. Don’t get pregnant. Don’t let a man anywhere near your money. Blah blah blah.
Nick ignored me.
“Some women,” Mom said, quieting the audience. The cameras cut away from her, showing a full house at whatever arena she’d picked for tonight’s show. “Some women still don’t get it. So let me say it again: We are living in a patriarchy.” Only she didn’t say “patriarchy”—she pronounced each syllable with a pregnant pause in between; it came out like pay-tree-ar-key. “And you know what, girls? All you have to do is switch that first letter to an H. What do you get then?” She raised her arms, a classic Win Somers gesture to get the crowd going, to stir them up into a froth of excitement. A frenzy. “What do you get then?”
The single word boomed from the set. Hatriarchy, the audience screamed.
“That’s right, girls. That’s what we get. And are we sick to death of it?”
YES. WE. ARE.
“How sick are we?”
SICK. TO. DEATH.
Nick laughed. I groaned. Mom was barely getting started.
She went through the usual warm-up, making sure everyone was hot and angry, what Mom called “spitting angry,” before trotting out her version of a Mini-Me.
I hated this part.
Jennifer Jones had a walk that was more like a goose step, and a voice as strident as a banshee’s. The only part of her that—if you squinted—looked remotely like me was her straight blond hair. With bangs. I always wondered whether my mother picked her for that or whether the haircut was an afterthought, a way to perfect the illusion.
But it was Jen’s eyes that got under your skin. They were deep set and large, and they always seemed to be looking directly at you, like one of those trick paintings where the subject holds its stare no matter where you are in the room. Tonight those eyes were looking at me, pulling me in, smiling as if they knew my secrets.
It was all far too creepy. When Nick got up to grab another beer, I made a lunge for the remote.
“Too slow, Miranda-o,” he sang out tauntingly. And off he went, taking the clicker with him, leaving me to watch my fucked-up doppelgänger take center stage.