about the women you saw in the grocery store—to keep note writing inside the house. Then Sonia came in one morning, caught the lipsticked message she couldn’t read, and yelped, “Letters! Bad!”
I kept communication inside me from that point, only writing a few words to Patrick in the evenings after the kids were in bed, burning the paper scraps in a tin can. With Steven the way he is now, I don’t even risk that.
Patrick and the boys, out on the back porch close to my window, are swapping stories about school, politics, the news, while crickets buzz in the dark around our bungalow. They make so much noise, those boys and those crickets. Deafening.
All my words ricochet in my head as I listen, emerge from my throat in a heavy, meaningless sigh. And all I can think about are Jackie’s last words to me.
Think about what you need to do to stay free.
Well, doing more than fuck all might have been a good place to start.
None of this is Patrick’s fault. That’s what I tell myself tonight. He tried to speak up when the concept first bounced around the concave walls of a blue office in a white building on Pennsylvania Avenue. I know he did. The apology in his eyes is hard to miss, but speaking up has never been Patrick’s strong suit.
And Patrick wasn’t the man who showered votes on Sam Myers before the last election, the same man who promised even more votes the next time Myers ran. The man who, years ago, Jackie liked to call Saint Carl.
All the president had to do was listen, take instruction, and sign shit—a small price to pay for eight years as the most powerful man in the world. By the time he was elected, though, there wasn’t that much left to sign. Every devilish detail had already been seen to.
Somewhere along the line, what was known as the Bible Belt, that swath of Southern states where religion ruled, started expanding. It morphed from belt to corset, covering all but the country’s limbs—the democratic utopias of California, New England, the Pacific Northwest, DC, the southern jurisdictions of Texas and Florida—places so far on the blue end of the spectrum they seemed untouchable. But the corset turned into a full bodysuit, eventually reaching all the way to Hawaii.
And we never saw it coming.
Women like Jackie did. She even led a march of the ten-member Atheists for Anarchy group around campus, yelling out ludicrous prophecies like Alabama now, Vermont next! and Not your body—a PURE body! She didn’t give a shit that people laughed at her.
“You watch, Jeanie,” she told me. “Twenty-one women were in the Senate last year. Now we’ve got fifteen of our own in that fucking holy of holies.” She held up a hand and started ticking off fingers, one by one. “West Virginia. Not reelected. Tick. Iowa. Not reelected. Tick. North Dakota. Not reelected. Tick. Missouri, Minnesota, and Arkansas stepped down ‘for unknown reasons.’ Tick, tick, tick. That’s twenty-one percent down to fifteen percent representation in no time at all. And there’s word Nebraska and Wisconsin are leaning toward candidates with—and I quote—‘the country’s best interests in mind.’”
Before I could stop her, she ran the numbers for the House of Representatives. “Nineteen percent down to ten percent, and that’s only because of California, New York, and Florida.” Jackie paused to make sure I was still listening. “Texas? Gone. Ohio? Gone. All the Southern states? Gone with the fucking wind, that’s what. And you think it’s some kind of blip? I mean, we’re gonna be back in the early nineties after the next midterms. Cut the representation in half again, and we’re headed into the dark ages of 1970-something.”
“Honestly, Jacko. You’re getting hysterical about it.”
Her words flew at me like poisoned arrows. “Well, someone needs to be hysterical around here.”
The worst part of it all was that Jackie was wrong. We didn’t squeeze down from twenty percent female representation in Congress to five percent. Over the next fifteen years, we squeezed down to almost nothing.
By this last election, we reached even that unthinkable goal, and Jackie’s prediction of being back in the early nineties seemed solid—if one was referring to the early 1890s. Congress had all the diversity of a bowl of vanilla ice cream, and the two women who still held cabinet positions were quickly replaced with men who, in Jackie’s words, “had the country’s best interests in mind.”
The Bible Belt had expanded and spread and grown into an iron maiden.
What it needed, though, was an iron fist, an enforcement arm. Again, Jackie seemed clairvoyant.
“You wait, Jeanie,” she said as we smoked cheap clove cigarettes out the single window of our apartment. She pointed to five neat lines of undergraduates marching in lockstep. “See those ROTC kids?”
“Yeah,” I said, exhaling smoke out the window, Lysol can at the ready in case our landlady showed up. “So?”
“Fifteen percent is some flavor of Baptist. Twenty percent, Catholic—the Roman variety. Almost another fifth says it’s nondenominational Christian—whatever that means.” She tried a few smoke rings, watching them dance out the window.
“So? That leaves what? Almost half doing the agnostic dance.”
Jackie laughed. “Have you run out of brain room, Jeanie? I haven’t even mentioned the LDS people or the Methodists or the Lutherans or the Tioga River Christian Conference.”
“The Tioga what? How many of them are there?”
“One. I think he’s in the air force.”
My turn to laugh now. I choked on a long draw of clove smoke, stubbed it, and sprayed myself with Lysol. “So not a big deal.”
“He isn’t. But the other ones, yeah. It’s a religion-heavy organization.” Jackie leaned out the window to get a better look. “And it’s mostly men. Conservative men who love their God and their country.” She sighed. “Women, not so much.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, leaving her to burn the other lung with a second cigarette. “They don’t hate women.”
“You, kiddo, need to get out more. Which states do you think have the highest enlistment rates? Hint: they ain’t in fucking New England. They’re good old boys.”
“So what?” I was exasperating her, and I knew it, but I couldn’t see the connection Jackie was trying to make.
“So they’re conservative, that’s what. Mostly white. Mostly straight.” Jackie stubbed out the half-smoked clove, wrapped it in a plastic baggie, and faced me, arms crossed. “Who do you think is angriest right now? In our country, I mean.”
I shrugged. “African Americans?”
She made a buzzing noise, a sort of you’re-out-but-we’ve-got-some-lovely-consolation-prizes-backstage kind of a sound. “Guess again.”
“Gays?”
“No, you dope. The straight white dude. He’s angry as shit. He feels emasculated.”
“Honestly, Jacko.”
“Of
