Wayward Read online

  One after the other, the women spoke, repeating the same lines of disbelief and resilience. As the icebreaker moved around, it stopped at a stout, sixtyish woman with gray braids hanging behind each ear. She sat in front of the two young women. Why would someone over the age of ten wear braids? An almost ostentatious display of not caring about her appearance. Why didn’t Sam admire it, then? She didn’t, though, the dull gray, coarse-looking yet thin hair repulsed her, which made Sam feel like a traitor, an age traitor. The gray-braided woman looked back at the younger women and smiled, deferring, and the rest of the room waited for them to introduce themselves. The young women made eye contact with each other and then looked down. The one with the buzz cut looked up at the rest of the women and frowned. Then she spoke, her voice shaky with emotion (which Sam could identify as fury, specifically, this despite the fact that her voice went up at the ends of her sentences as if she were asking questions. What is that called? Uptalk?).

  “Look, I’m Larisa and this is Emma (?). We are from Ithaca (?). And I have to be honest with you all, I’m feeling pretty angry (?). At all the white women that voted for him (?).” This girl was, of course, as white as one can be, her skin made almost bluish and translucent by her platinum hair. Then Emma (black hair with cobalt streak) spoke, her voice low and somewhat adjacent to a hiss. “We had no idea this meeting would be so full of cis, straight, white, privileged women. You have a lot to answer for.” It was funny to Sam that she didn’t include “old” in her list of adjectives, or “middle-aged,” but Sam understood that age was really the crux of it, nevertheless.

  There were some awkward, audible exhales of disbelief. The hostess shook her balayaged head and held up her hand as if to quiet everyone. “You must know that none of us voted for him. That is why we are all here. We are as upset about him as you are.” But the young, beautiful women shook their heads. Then Larisa pointed an emphatic index finger at the hostess.

  “It was white women over forty (?), who voted for him, who put him over the top (?).” Over forty! The crux! The crux ansata!

  “That is awful, shameful, but what about the much bigger majority of men who voted for him? Are they not to bear some blame?”

  “All I know is that people our age, queer people, people of color—we didn’t elect him (?).” And with a curt, frowny nod to each other, Sam watched as they lifted their lithe, elegant, plant-powered, bike-muscled bodies practically clanking with hidden piercings and scooted out of the house in a veil of righteous disgust. The remaining women exchanged shocked and outraged expressions.

  “Un-fucking-believable,” the hostess said. A person whose face Sam couldn’t see suggested that the two women probably voted for Jill Stein and were actually to blame. Sam didn’t speak, but something surprising came to her:

  She agreed with the young women. In a way. Not that the women in the room were responsible for the election, exactly. But she agreed with how these young women looked at these middle-aged women. Although Sam was one of the middle-aged women, she too hated the smug entitlement that seemed manifested in their silvery haircuts, their Eileen Fisher linen pants, their expensive, ergonomic shoes. They reeked of status quo collusion, safely protected from it all. But it was worse than that. Sam hated their lumpish midsections and their aged necks, which she knew was awful, unfair. She slipped into these bouts of midlife misogyny sometimes. She did not feel solidarity just because they were all women; she felt estranged from them. At the gym she felt it when she saw the intense fifty-year-olds, yoga mats tucked under bony muscled arms, their faces lined and unmade-up, unsmiling and hard. Bikrami Bitches, she thought. Also the stupid pantsuits of the losing candidate, the ubiquitous highlights in the hair, the discreet eyeliner on the upper lash line, the scolding disposition, the postsexual benign vibe of her style and how she held herself. Ick, no. She understood why the world despised comfortable older white women. And age was the point—even if they didn’t vote for him, they had been around long enough that the horrible state of things was partly on them, it was. Sam didn’t want to garden or drink white wine or have anything to do with these women. Somehow, the disdain, the hate felt irresistible and also allowable, because, after all, she was one of them. She knew that wasn’t quite right, that it was a problem, a mean reduction. And, after all, who is really safe? But she felt it all the same. Alienated from the well-off old women and the obnoxious young women. Plus, of course, all the men of all ages. Ha.

  She didn’t attend any more WWWers meetings after that. But Facebook kindly suggested some other local groups. One was CNY Crones, which was a “closed” group. When she applied to join—because who doesn’t want to join something “closed” and exclusive?—she was sent these questions by the “admin”:

  Name two ways you have resisted youth-culture hegemony?

  That was boring, and probably a lie. Give us two real ways you have resisted youth culture, and make it good.

  What offends you?

  And what have you done to offend others?

  Rage much?

  She responded in this way:

  None of your business

  Fuck you

  Everything. Nothing.

  See 1–3

  Fuck yeah

  She “got in,” but she suspected it was only a formality. It was kind of a silly group, with a lot of posts about embracing your wrinkles, though only sort of (“learning to love my neck wattles, haha, scarves!”), and refusing to get plastic surgery on principle, but with posters often still obsessing—albeit through protesting and professing the opposite—over how they looked. Sam reached the breaking point when she saw this:

  Delia West

  I know you all will flame me for this, but I am newly divorced and 55. I lost a lot of weight recently (combo of boot camp, barre, fasting). I really have trouble with being naked with my post childbirth stretched stomach skin (post = twenty years later lol). The skin is like a kangaroo pouch. No amount of exercise or diet will fix it. I hate the way it looks. I can’t live with it, I can’t make it work, it repulses me. Not for male approval, but for my own self-esteem, I am considering a tummy tuck. Here is my question: Can a crone spend money on looking good? I say she can. Isn’t it empowering to decide what you want to look like?

  Susan Healy

  Uh, no. If what you want to look like coincides with what the culture says you should look like, you might want to *interrogate* it.

  Jill Blanchard

  I disagree. I think you decide for yourself, that is the whole point.

  Liza Winters

  You do you, Delia.

  Sam so hated that expression. Something arose in her, an almost thrilling desire to post something nasty to Liza Winters. Whoever she was. But then the desire passed. Inexplicably, Sam read on. (But it was explicable, she knew that as things escalated, she would feel a little touristic thrill. A posting meltdown was coming, and to a lurker, it was a lurid yet irresistible entertainment.)

  Antonia Luciano

  I think “crone” is whatever you need it to be. I won’t judge you.

  Michelle Delcort

  You are inspiring me, Delia. I might get one myself.

  Liza Winters

  What about cool sculpting? Less invasive and not technically surgery.

  Susan Healy

  Seriously, you are all on board for this? What about the money? Aren’t there more useful things you can spend money on?

  Michelle Delcort

  I am reporting you for money-shaming!

  *Admin

  That actually is not a thing. Money-shaming.

  Laci Cortez

  I say burn this backsliding bitch at the stake. I mean, I am out.

  Sam didn’t post a comment, but she “liked” Laci’s comment. It was the only one that seemed truly “crone-
ish” to her. They friended each other, and after perusing Laci’s page, her “likes” and groups, Sam ended up, or she found herself (because the path to the point is never clear in retrospect and also never-ending), invited to join a series of odd groups. Women-only, mostly, but also niche groups: Surviving the Anthropocene, which Sam discovered was a prepper group but on the political left, preparing for the climate apocalypse. The suggested Canning, Fermentation, and Preserving seemed to exist at the Venn diagram crossover of far right and far left, because if you are prepping for a racial Armageddon, a federal crackdown, or an environmental disaster and the consequent social meltdown, you will need a significant stockpile of preserved food. Although Sam did not can or preserve, she applied to join. Her admission to this group led her to myriad homesteading groups: urban homesteading (posts about the legalities of keeping chickens in a city and how to grow a vertical garden on your fire escape); off-the-grid (coed) homesteading groups focused on practical, Whole Earth Catalog–type skills from Morse code communications and well digging to sundial timekeeping, osmosis water purification, and first aid; and a plethora of (women-only) anti-tech homesteaders dedicated to living as if it were the past, with a specific cutoff date, such as 1912 or 1860 (interesting year choice on that). As far as Sam could tell, these tech restrictions involved a lot of posts about sewing denim, mastering hand-cranked washing machines, and the challenges of butter churning and molding, as well as many posts detailing the satisfaction and empowerment of “hands-on housekeeping,” or HOH. Yet somehow living as a 1912 woman or as an 1860 woman involved being on Facebook a lot. Sam wanted to post a damning quote about the suffocations of housework from Elizabeth Cady Stanton or the Feminine Mystique, or just simply post, “Chosen drudgery is a form of feminist slumming” or “Out of the house and onto the ramparts, bitches!” but why pick a fight? Women join the groups to be with others who agree with them, to get tips, to post pics, to support their life choices. So what? But something about Facebook brought out truly juvenile impulses, which Sam had to actively repress.

  It got worse. The ye olde homemaker groups led Sam, predictably, to some of the Quiverfull groups, explicitly anti-feminist and pro-huge families, because the Bible apparently has a metaphor about babies as arrows in a quiver. Since most of the participants were proselytizers (we need more and more quivers full of baby Christians), it was an open, even welcoming group. Sam didn’t join, but she wasted a lot of time lurking and digging into the Quiver posts and comments. She learned that they were largely inspired by a book called Mothering Is God’s Career for You: My Journey from Lonely Businesswoman to Happy Mommy. Sam thought of ordering it and “hate-reading” it, but then she thought, No. There was a bit of bad faith in smugly ridiculing these poor people. Posts tended toward selfies of rosacea-faced long-haired women in old-style prairie dresses and lots of pregnancy crowdsourcing about progesterone and wild yams. So what, if that is what they believe? Laughing at them was a shabby use of her time, but she knew part of what made Facebook—and the internet, really—addicting was simultaneously indulging your own obsessions while mocking (deriding, denouncing even) the obsessions of others from the safety of your screen. It was hard to resist, and indulging this impulse—even silently to yourself—made everything worse, made you worse, she was sure of it.

  The Quiverfull people led to other fundy Christian groups, many closed (Sam was not interested in joining, but she felt compelled to read the public descriptions, parsing for dog-whistle subtext like they were society-in-decline word puzzles). On Instagram, Sam, to her surprise, also discovered a subculture of nonreligious groups dedicated to nostalgic ideas of womanhood via recovery of obsolete women’s hand arts. Aesthetic fundamentalists, these women were drawn (in a sometimes ironic but also in a genuine and obsessive way) to hobbies in outmoded, old-fashioned “female” folk crafts: extreme pie making with stunt designs made of dough, pyrograph wood burning of boxes and wall plaques, macramé but also loom weaving, theorem painting of still lifes on velvet, daguerreotype copperplate photography, and Moravian-style wax star folding. Other groups went in for home arts but in more artisanal directions than the folk crafts women, with steam punk–looking excursions in beakers, copper stills, and bell jars, making hand-cultured vinegars and ciders but also shrubs, wassails, tonics, and bitters, which could be used to cure colds and doubled as craft cocktail ingredients. A further subset of these had a religious bent, albeit Wiccan and New Agey, with bespoke homespun potions, poultices, and other herbal remediations for illnesses, as well as plasters and pastes made from grinding seeds and oils by hand with a mortar. That led her to Twitter and back to Facebook, to wildly out-of-proportion, aggro throwdowns between various vegan groups and carnivore groups, omnivores and fasters. Diet had apparently become the major battlefield for all the dispossessed (i.e., all of us). There was something quaintly nineteenth-century American about it all: the focus on health, the zealotry, the desire for perfection, and the hot breath of impending Armageddon.

  She clicked, she tapped, she followed, she liked. A few groups she joined, and always she lurked.

  At some point after they were joined in declared “friend”-ship, Laci direct-messaged Sam and referred her to a secret group that was local. It was called Hardcore Hags, Harridans, and Harpies, and the description said it was a resistance group for women over fifty. A more extreme version of the crone group, it addressed things like perimenopausal, menopausal, and postmenopausal states and body (not beauty) strategies. Sort of an anti-Goop? Sam asked. u could say that, Laci messaged, and then added a string of stupid emojis. Sam joined, and by joining she got to know Laci, who also was active under the name Earl the Girl on Twitter and various other places that Sam was not that interested in. They started texting each other using the “safer” Signal app, which Laci/Earl insisted on. Sam discovered that the “Earl” moniker came from Laci’s secret male identity, a sort of nom de homme that she used to impersonate a bro to “recon” incel and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) boards on Reddit, 4chan, 8chan, and Gab (apparently some horrendous right-wing social platform). This Sam discovered when Laci called her one day.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Earl.”

  “Oh.”

  “Laci.”

  “Yeah, hi.”

  “Calls are the only truly secure way to talk,” she said. “You aren’t recording this, right?”

  “Uh, how do you even do that? And why?”

  “Never mind. I had to ask. Would you like to meet up IRL? I mean, off-book, F2F?”

  “What is F2F?”

  “Face. To face. We are all pledging to communicate—and operate—F2F, off-book, as much as possible.”

  Sam wasn’t sure who “we” was, but she wanted to meet Laci in person. “Sure.”

  * * *

  —

  A few weeks before the inaugural, amid various discussions and plans for a women’s protest beyond the march, they met at an empty diner in the city’s Northside neighborhood. It was while waiting for Laci that Sam felt the first twinge of pleasure about what seemed counter to her life in the suburbs. She still thought of it as something she could tell Matt about at dinner, something she would make a joke about, just as she made jokes about the people who came into Loomis House. But she never did tell Matt about Laci/Earl.

  A woman peered intently at her. This turned out to be Laci. To meet people in real life after meeting them on social media was always going to be slightly disappointing. Earl the Girl, a witty and fierce commenter online, was entirely ordinary in person. What did Sam expect? Sam hated her own shallowness, but she always wanted beauty on some level, or maybe a significance to the ugly, a deliberateness that indicated a sense of control. Laci’s hair was undyed (good), but a coarse gray and blond that just looked dull, weirdly matted and nesty. She was in variously pocketed knee-length khaki shorts, despite it being January. Her oversized T-shirt said “Resist.” Good god. The overall f
eel was sloppy and beige. Sam—lately kind of a slob herself—felt ashamed for being so harsh. She wanted to admire Laci’s person, wanted her look to match her wit. Maybe her frumpiness was a form of resistance, rebellion? Sam tried to see it that way. She knew that she shouldn’t always need to be seduced.

  After they ordered awful but at least hot coffee and warm pie, Laci (again) explained her Twitter handle, @EarlTheGirl.

  “Yeah, you told me,” Sam said.

  “It’s a little joke because ‘Earl’ is also my seemingly male avatar when I rove the incel subreddits, lurk the pickup boards, troll the sad, self-pitying MGTOW posts.”

  “Why do you want to look at that stuff ?”

  “I don’t know, honestly. I’m fascinated by them, by it. I mean, it’s awful, of course. I want to know what men are really like.”

  “Some men.”

  “I want to see the male perspective.”

  “We are fucking living in the male perspective,” Sam laughed.

  “I mean, what they truly think and say when no women are around.” Laci spoke through a mouthful of pie and ice cream.