—
Women came and went from GenFem over the early months that I was there. Some—like the Pilates friend who brought me in the first place—were just dipping their toes, with no intention of jumping in fully. I quickly learned to recognize these women by the way their eyes never quite met mine, how they shifted back on their heels when they talked, as if preparing to run out the door. The other women, the ones who stuck with the Method, were Neos, working their way through the levels. Once you reached Level Ten, you could apply to become a Mentor, a full-time GenFem career. Mentors were identifiable by the pink scarves at their necks and the look of serene confidence in their faces. There were three Mentors at the center in Santa Barbara—a Black woman named Roni, who sold real estate; an artist named Shella, known for her enormous statues of women assembled from unconventional materials; and a formidable lesbian ex-lawyer named Iona, who was my assigned Mentor.
Dr. Cindy would come and go, jetting across the country to visit the other centers, giving lectures at foreign universities, and visiting with world leaders. (A photo of her shaking Malala’s hand was hung by the doorway.) Word was she owned a stunning Spanish estate in the hills of Montecito, but no one had ever seen it.
When she was in town, I could book special one-on-one sessions with her; they cost extra, but they were always worth it. Dr. Cindy gave off a sizzle of authority, as if she saw and understood everything in the world with just a glance. She seemed so sure, where I was not. When I was with her in that velvet Reenactment room it felt like I was so close to seeing things clearly, the entirety of my past and my future, the meaning of life itself. All I needed to do was squint just a little harder (or buy a Reenactment ten-pack series) and I’d get it, just like Dr. Cindy did. Maybe then, I’d know what to do to be happy, how to steer my ship toward achievable goals.
The higher-level Neos vanished on occasion. They’d be there one day, their faces flush with some secret that they wouldn’t divulge, their eyes damp and wild, then the following week, they’d be gone. A Mentor would inform us that they’d gone to recruit for a center in Toronto or New Jersey, but those of us in the lower levels sometimes speculated that they’d checked into the retreat. The retreat was invitation-only, held at the secret GenFem compound in Ojai, and you couldn’t tell who had been because they weren’t allowed to tell you that they’d gone. But we could always guess because of the haircuts. When they rematerialized, luminous with suppressed secrets, their heads were almost always shaved, like warrior queens.
* * *
—
Chuck didn’t much like GenFem. He didn’t like that I was no longer spending my evenings with him, watching ESPN and laugh-track comedies. Instead I was spending them at workshops or doing Reenactments with my Mentor. When he arrived home from work, I was no longer busy cooking us dinner, but deep in GenFem matrix worksheets that diagrammed all the things standing in the way of my success. While I studied he would bang around the kitchen, huffing into the cupboards, asking aloud why no one had bothered to go grocery shopping that week.
GenFem didn’t much like Chuck, either.
“Make him cook his own dinner,” Iona scoffed when I told her that Chuck thought I was spending too much time at the center. A sinewy blonde ten years my senior—her opinions as sharp as her cheekbones—Iona had been with GenFem since Dr. Cindy started the movement, three years earlier. She used to be a cutthroat corporate lawyer but she gave up her partnership to work at the center full-time as a Mentor, and she told me she’d never been so happy and fulfilled. (Under Dr. Cindy’s mentoring, she’d also left her controlling ex-wife and the beachfront mansion they’d occupied together.) I was starting to fantasize about closing my florist shop and working full-time as a GenFem Mentor, too, once I hit Level Ten. After all, my business was barely subsisting, which Dr. Cindy said was part of my pattern of resigning myself to being second best: less interesting than my sister, less successful than my husband.
“Your husband’s behavior is pure patriarchal laziness,” Iona continued. “He’s got you at his beck and call. You shouldn’t tolerate it.”
“But he makes so much more money than me and works such long hours.” I knew how weak this sounded, that this would get me a Sufferance, but I was not strong enough to think otherwise yet. “And I’m usually done with work in time to make dinner, but he never is. Someone has to cook so it kind of makes sense that it would be my job, right?”
“Do you like cooking dinner?”
A worm curled inside me, a tight squirming coil. “Not really.”
Iona fixed me with a dark stare. “So he gets everything he likes and you get nothing you like. Sounds similar to the logic that is keeping you from getting your baby, too. Because a kid might be too much hassle for him, he’s afraid he might not love a kid that isn’t his biological spawn, and his feelings are more important than yours.”
I nodded mutely, seeing the connection.
“That’s what we call Devaluation. I think you need a Sufferance until you remember your own self-worth. Let’s say, three days of sleeping outside on your pool chaise. No blankets.”
It was December by then, with chilly nights, and Chuck thought I was insane, plus I ended up with a terrible cold; but I didn’t mind. Sufferances made me feel empowered and disciplined, as if I were a soldier that had pushed past the pain and won a battle. Sufferances made everything else seem achievable, which Dr. Cindy said was the whole point.
After that conversation with Iona I never again openly questioned my value relative to Chuck. Instead, just before Christmas, with Iona’s coaching, I gave him an ultimatum: Since we couldn’t make a baby on our own, we would instead adopt a baby. He needed to suck it up, stop balking, and start the process with me or else…I didn’t finish the sentence, didn’t want to threaten to throw him out, although that’s what Iona had told me might be necessary. I still thought we might be able to resolve our problems, start a family, get a fresh start now that I had GenFem propping me up.
We sat across the dinner table from each other, a platter of cold salmon between us. I watched Chuck push individual grains of rice into a symmetrical row, his gaze fixed on his plate so that he wouldn’t have to meet my eyes. “Having a kid is something we both have to be really enthusiastic about, don’t you think?” He spoke so softly I had to lean in to hear him; I felt an unwelcome surge of empathy at how broken he suddenly sounded. “And the idea of adoption…I just can’t help but feel ambivalent. I don’t want a kid. I want our kid. Yours and mine. No one else’s.”
The smell of fish brine and capers was making me queasy. “But we can just start the process. It’s so long, I’m sure you’ll come around. It’s just a mental block, an irrational fear. There are therapists you could talk to, to work through this…”
Chuck looked up at me then, baffled. “We haven’t even had sex since last July,” he said. “We are barely even speaking. I think we need to fix our issues before we bring an adopted kid into the mix, don’t you?”
“I am fixing my issues,” I responded.
He looked at the pink tissue by my hand, the broken capillaries around my nostrils from where I’d blown my nose a thousand times that day. The cold I’d caught from sleeping outside wasn’t going away, and I was having persistent nosebleeds. I’d shed twelve pounds since I started GenFem. Some of it was from the Sufferances, but some was just because I was so busy—with meetings and worksheets and Reenactments—that I didn’t have time to eat.