The lights dimmed, and the scrim behind Jennifer glowed neon yellow on a black background. One word shone behind her, not a real word, but real enough that you could guess its meaning.
Femlandia.
Nick, back from the kitchen with a craft beer he said was a steal at six bucks a bottle, translated it in his own way. “Freaks. Welcome to Camp Dyke-orama!”
“Nick. Really?” I said. But I laughed along with him.
“Think of it like Disneyland for women,” Jennifer said from the stage. “A place for us—no more men, no more inequality, no more hatriarchy. Just us girls.”
“What do you say, babe? Want to leave me and set up house in Femlandia with the double-X set?”
“I’d rather eat dirt,” I said.
Nick smacked his lips. “I can almost taste the kale smoothies now.” He took a swig of his beer and winced. “Mm, mm, mm. Tasty.”
“Cut it out, Nick,” I said when he did it again. But I didn’t mean it. Nick was good to me, better than any other guy I’d dated. To begin with, he wasn’t treading water in a credit-card-debt hole. Or, like the last man I’d lived with, not even bothering to tread, just sinking, pulling me down with him. Can I borrow some money, Miranda? Just for a few days, Miranda. Promise I’ll pay you back with interest, Miranda.
Not that the four-bedroom house with its granite-and-stainless-steel gourmet kitchen or the twin BMWs in the garage or the spur-of-the-moment trips to New Orleans and Paris and Spain and Fiji changed my mother’s mind. To Win Somers, every man was a bastard, beginning with her father and ending with mine.
“You can’t trust ’em any farther than you can throw ’em,” she said. Over and over and over.
And now this. Femlandia. Some crap-ass colony out in the sticks of Virginia, where women and girls could live in bliss without hairy, whore-mongering men. Jennifer’s description sounded like hell. The pictures were worse: a dozen log cabins, a cluster of old-fashioned water pumps, a toolshed that looked put together with the leftovers from Home Depot. Women tugging weeds from a patch of brassicas, women pumping water, women repairing generators, women splitting logs and piling up cords of wood for winter fuel.
It all sounded like Disneyland if your idea of Disneyland was running around scrubbing clothes on a wooden board.
“Self-sufficiency,” Jennifer said. She laughed a little. “Or I guess we could call it ‘self-sufficienSHE.’”
The crowd roared. I wondered at the time if it was canned.
It’s a thing I don’t wonder anymore, not nineteen years later, not when fifteen states in the union have their own Femlandias and another ten are in the pipeline. I’ve no idea where my mother is, but her legacy lives on.
Three
We had a joke once about the three Safeways in town. In the first one, the Social Safeway, you were guaranteed to bump into someone you knew, usually in the frozen section near the petite peas. Then there was the Unsafe Safeway, the place where most of the ground beef teetered on the brink of being out of date and the cauliflower heads sported an interesting variety of brown. Nick’s favorite wordsmithing, though, was the Soviet Safeway—the supermarket that always, always had run out of whatever you needed. Bread crumbs. Worcestershire sauce. Lettuce.
“What’s today? Odd or even, Emma?” I’ve completely lost track. The last time we trekked to Safeway, it was an even day and the place was closed.
“Odd, thank God.”
Well, thank someone. “Let’s go,” I say, locking the front door and starting down the porch steps.
Half of the houses on our street are already shut up tight as a virgin, either foreclosed on or abandoned. The Italians up the street, the ones who’d worked for the World Bank before it ran out of money, left three months ago for Europe. I guess they saw the early signs, but I don’t know what they expect to find in Rome. Liz and Mary, the two nurses at 234, moved into a camp for medical staff at Sibley Hospital. Liz said they won’t be paid much this year, but at least they’ve got steady work and a place to stay and jobs to come back to when things settle down. If you believe the papers, there’s tons of work, especially in the emergency rooms.
The house I hate looking at is Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan’s, the big, boxy Queen Anne two doors down from us. All their roses have a withered, witch-broom look about them now that Margie Sullivan moved out. I couldn’t blame her. Who would want to cook in a kitchen after finding her husband’s brain splatter on the appliances? Nothing against suicide—I’ve thought of that escape myself—but you really need to put that shit where it belongs. In a seldom-used office. A guest bedroom. The cellar.
Or in a valley in western North Carolina.
Emma and I walk past it without speaking.
Some of the houses are fine, for now, although the number of fine ones seems to be half of what it was last week. Sweet air blows from the dryer outtake at the Connells’ place, a sign they’re still above water, afloat enough to keep the appliances going and buy fabric softener sheets. It’s also a sign they have a twenty-kilowatt generator and they’re still able to feed it natural gas. Nora Connell’s curtains shift to the right as we walk by and then fall to the left just as quickly, which is fine with me. A closed window is a hell of a lot better than listening to Nora scream at us about what a mess my husband made, how she hopes he rots in hell, how a good, eternal roasting would be exactly what he deserves.
It’s an eye-for-an-eye mentality, I guess. Nick burned the majority of our neighbors and friends, so why wouldn’t they wish him the same treatment?
“You think Safeway will be as crowded as last time?” Emma says when we turn the corner onto the main road, leaving Nora and her evil eye behind us.
“Probably,” I say. Probably worse.
“Think we’ll find any vegetables this week? I mean, that don’t come in a can?”
“Maybe some potatoes. We can bake them tonight if the gas is still on.” I don’t hold out a ton of hope for anything else. Two weeks before, just days after the president made his speech announcing the bankruptcy ruling, the shelves looked like they had suffered a mild pre-blizzard run. Milk and bread aisles took the hardest hit, but the produce stayed on the shelves. Last week was a different story: bananas ripened to black, bruised apples and pears, limp lettuce. The cabbages were okay, though. And those indestructible tomatoes bred to withstand lousy transport conditions. I don’t know what we might find in week three, but I’m sure the prices will have inched up again.
While we walk Arlington Road, Emma keeps her head down. The locked shop doors with their Absolutely No Credit signs are depressing. You can still buy things at a few places, but nothing opens until early afternoon, and then only for a few hours at a time when the police walk their beats. Nothing is open at night anymore, for all kinds of reasons. And now, nothing is open at all.
“I miss the library,” Emma says when we pass the building.
“You miss Jason Griffith,” I say.
“No. Not that much.”
Well. This is new. Jason was all but a permanent fixture in our house for a year and a half. I kept waiting for the shiny diamond ring to show up on Emma’s finger, even if they are only sixteen.
“Does he fall into the sonofabitch camp, too?”