Charlotte, delighted to see her toys, toddled over to a play kitchen and began to cook herself a wooden meal, burbling to herself under her breath. I dug through her closet, sweeping aside the hangers where embroidered dresses with French labels hung in pristine array, until I found a pile of swimsuits. The location of my sister’s beach towels eluded me, so I took a stack of fluffy towels from the bathroom and shoved them in a tote bag that I found in a hallway closet.
At the far end of the hallway, the door to my sister’s bedroom stood half ajar. The room itself was dark, the blackout curtains drawn tight. I couldn’t resist. I pushed the door open and peered in, my toes sinking into the pale blue wall-to-wall carpeting. I could smell my sister in the air, a lingering must of sleep sweat and vanilla-scented deodorant. Despite the gloom I could see that her bed had been left unmade, a satin robe abandoned on the floor. Stepping inside the room felt unbearably intimate: If Elli wouldn’t have wanted me to let myself into her house, she definitely wouldn’t want me in her bedroom. I wavered on the threshold.
But there was something sitting on the table next to my sister’s side of the bed: a black binder, thick with documents, bristling with sticky notes. Was it divorce papers? Financial statements? Had my sister decided to go back to school? Curiosity got the better of me. I stepped into the room and picked up the binder. Despite the dim light I could see that the cover was embossed with a single word in gold: GenFem.
I took the binder out into the light of the hallway and flipped through it. It was full of worksheets, like a college student’s study binder. The printouts had titles like “Conquering Fear Structures” and “Emotional Control Systems” and “Powershifting P-A Relationships” and “Excising Toxicity.” The typeface was small, paragraph after paragraph of dense text, followed by pages of empty lines for notes. Some of the printouts had diagrams, rivers of arrows flowing from one stick figure to the next. I could make no sense of any of it at a glance, but clearly my sister knew what it all meant. Each page had been carefully inked up in my sister’s neat cursive, salient phrases highlighted, edges carefully marked with stickies.
So this was what Alice had been talking about. GenFem was some kind of self-help group. A little culty, yes; then again, so were most self-help groups. I glanced at some of the phrases that my sister had highlighted: If it’s not painful it means that you’re taking the easy route. Growth hurts. Ignore the pain. And: You can have a redo, all it takes is reinvention. And: You can’t wait for someone else to give you the things you desire most. You must take them for yourself.
This last line gave me pause. Something about it felt off, utterly unlike the Elli I knew. She didn’t “take” the things that she desired; that was the kind of selfishness I’d embraced, but that had always been anathema to her. Then again, maybe that was exactly why Elli felt that she needed this kind of a lesson plan. She’d never been strong on agency. Still, something about these sentiments struck me as stringent, clinical, cold. Was my sister really trying to reinvent herself? Why would she even want to do that? She was so perfect already.
If it’s not painful it means that you’re taking the easy route…Ignore the pain. A mandate to ignore your instincts. Which, when your instincts were wrong (as mine so often had been), was excellent advice. But what about when your instincts were warning you that something was wrong? If you set yourself on fire, the pain is the first thing that alerts you to potential damage.
As I flipped through the pages, a printed Excel spreadsheet slipped out from between two pages and fell to the floor. I picked it up and studied it. It was a list of prices:
Level One—$3,000
Reenactment 10-Story Series—$5,000
Weekend PSS Workshop—$4,500
Level Two—$5,000
Individual with Dr. Cindy—$4,250
The spreadsheet went on and on, most of the items on it neatly ticked off and highlighted in yellow. I skimmed it, all the way to the bottom of the list, where there was a sum total: $112,475.00.
I stared at this figure. It seemed impossible. Had my sister really just spent six figures on a self-help regimen? Putting aside the sheer luxury of that—Elli had that much money just sitting around?—there was something strongly not right about a group that charged that much for advice. I felt a sharp twist at my sternum. Culty. The neighbor’s word gripped me tighter now, less benign, more poisonous. What was this group?
Charlotte was barreling down the hallway at me from her bedroom, her eyes wild, a plastic Disney princess tiara in one hand and a matching wand in the other. She lifted these over her head, triumphant. “Tweasure!” she shouted. “Bewy tweasure now!”
I shoved the spreadsheet back in the binder, but not before my eye drifted back to the last item on the list.
Upper-Level Ojai Retreat—$12,500.
So that’s where my sister was: a GenFem retreat of some sort. Knowing this should have made me feel better. Instead, an amorphous unease pressed down, a black blot threading through my mind. I knew, without being able to say why, that something was terribly wrong.
* * *
—
That night, after we’d wrestled Charlotte into bed, I looked up GenFem on my phone. The organization’s website was reassuringly normal—slick and professional, with modern fonts and a gray, gold, and pink color palette. Inspiration—Transformation—Reclamation, it read. Lose “Yourself” and Find Your “Self” with GenFem’s Personal Success Method. I had no idea what this meant, but apparently the “system” involved sitting in circles with other women and laughing, doing stretches against a sunset backdrop, typing soberly on laptops while talking on the phone. The women in the photos—and they were all women, though in a wide variety of ages and ethnicities—had a roseate glow to them, as if lit by God herself.
They didn’t look like any cult members I’d ever seen. Nor did the woman on the site’s founder page—Dr. Cindy Medina, PhD, LMFT, CHT—bear any resemblance to a cult leader. She was probably mid-fifties, and looked attractive and well groomed—I sensed she’d had some work done around her chin and eyes—with her hair in a smart graying bob and a gold silk scarf tossed around her neck. She wore wire-rimmed glasses that she peered over with a cryptic, all-knowing smile. There were photos of her standing next to Hillary Clinton and Greta Thunberg, her name listed on the roster of international women’s conferences in Dubai and Iceland. I skimmed her biography: Dr. Cindy Medina, a world-renowned clinical psychologist and motivational speaker, developed the GenFem Method to empower women to achieve their best selves, free of the structures that have thwarted their achievements.
So my sister had felt thwarted. I wondered what “structure” was thwarting her, and then I wondered whether that structure had been me.
I clicked through the rest of the website, looking for information about GenFem’s Ojai retreat. The organization’s contact page had four addresses on it—centers in Santa Barbara, Sausalito, Toronto, and New Jersey—but nothing in Ojai; although I did find mention of a private healing retreat in the Topatopa Mountains on a page titled “Advantages of Becoming a Senior-Level Member.” (Other advantages: round-the-clock life Mentors, one-on-one Reenactment sessions, and a customized GenFem license plate holder.)
I dialed the phone number of the Santa Barbara center but it went straight to voicemail. “Hi, I’m trying to locate my sister. Her name’s Elli Hart, and she’s apparently at your retreat in Ojai. I’m wondering if you could call me back with some information about how to get in touch with her there.” I left my phone number and hung up. I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be getting a call back anytime soon.
This accomplished, I went back out to the living room and confronted my parents where they sat watching The Bachelorette. “Did you know that Elli had joined some sort of self-help group?”
My mother muted the show and gave my father a sidelong glance. “GenFem?”
“You know it?”
My mother shook her head. “Not really. She mentioned it a few times. She invited me to come to a meeting with her once but, you know, I’m already stretched so thin.” She waved a hand, her wrist thick with clattering energy beads.