I kept telling myself that it was just a matter of time until we could breathe more easily—already, she was a different child from the one I’d picked up off the lawn just a few months back, and soon she would look different again. But until then, being in public made me feel panicky.
If there was any safe place for me, it was GenFem, where my secret was already being held without judgment. Where I was seen as a “future leader,” not despite what I’d done but because of it.
Maybe Iona was right, I thought, and I’d abandoned the very community that I needed the most. Maybe it would be good to remind myself of the support system that had validated my choices, to recommit myself to the Method, the movement, to Dr. Cindy Medina and a future as a Mentor.
Eleven days later, I was in Ojai.
32
THEY CUT MY HAIR on the very first night.
We had assembled for dinner in the great hall of the main lodge, a cavernous room with spiderwebs drifting from the beams overhead and nails in the wood paneling where decades of Christian summer camp photos once hung. The table where I sat was pitted and scarred with children’s initials, hard coins of gum embedded in its underside.
There were nearly two dozen women on the retreat with me, mostly strangers but also a few upper-level Neos that I knew from the Santa Barbara center. One of the latter was Ruth, a mother of four in her late fifties whose husband had dumped her for a Peloton instructor. She had proceeded to gain sixty pounds in a year, a rebuke to her husband and his hardbody girlfriend, which of course just made her more miserable. Since Ruth joined GenFem, Dr. Cindy had given Ruth Sufferance after Sufferance, almost all of them calorie restrictions, in order to teach her self-control. She’d lost much of the weight, but this state of semipermanent starvation had a somewhat detrimental effect on Ruth’s mood. As we sat there, listening to a parade of Mentors tell us about the retreat’s activities, Ruth grumbled under her breath to me.
“No massages, huh? No hot tub? Not even yoga. Some retreat.”
“There’s daily morning exercise,” I offered helpfully. “But I don’t think it’s that kind of retreat. They never said it was. It’s mostly about workshops and learning, not relaxation.”
“Sure isn’t. Did you see that pool? It’s got a foot of dirt at the bottom. ‘State-of-the-art headquarters,’ my ass. I wonder if they actually have a plan to upgrade this dump. God knows they have the money.” She adjusted the neckline of the dress they’d given us to wear during our time at the retreat: white for Level Eight, red for Level Nine, yellow for Level Ten Mentors. “And what’s up with this shroud we have to wear? I think it’s giving me hives.”
I liked the dress, frankly. It reminded me of what the bohemian moms in Santa Barbara wore when they shopped for oat milk at Lassens: shapeless sacks that weren’t in the least bit sexy. It made me feel invisible. “A uniform helps eliminate distractions from the learning of the weekend,” I said. “No one’s going to be judging anyone else.”
“Yeah, I heard the same lecture,” she snapped.
I shifted my chair a few inches away from Ruth. I didn’t want her discontent to taint my optimism. Despite my initial trepidation about coming, I was feeling strangely light, almost buoyant. Iona was right—it did feel good to be released from Charlotte for a few days, and to remember what my own priorities were. Not that I wasn’t experiencing pangs of longing—for the damp heft of her rear, her pancake-sweet breath in my face—but something had lifted off me since I drove away from Santa Barbara. Gone was the boulder of anxiety, the bilious pit in my stomach, the fog of guilt. I felt strangely safe here behind the compound’s high iron gates. Off the grid. Forgotten. Untouchable.
I couldn’t even call my parents to ask about Charlotte if I’d wanted to: A Mentor had taken away my cellphone when I checked in at the front office of the lodge that morning. “It’s a Sufferance, to break you of your addiction to outside validation and constant connection,” she’d said as she wrestled the phone from my hand. I could hear my text messages pinging, a sound that filled me with Pavlovian panic—What if something’s wrong with Charlotte?—but she shook her head and smiled reassuringly. “Don’t worry—just give me your passcode and we can monitor it for you and let you know if there are any emergencies that need to be addressed back home. In a way, it’s not a Sufferance at all. We’re simply taking the responsibility off you. That’s what makes it a retreat!”
She turned and tucked the cellphone into the top drawer of a file cabinet. Before she slid the drawer closed, I caught a glimpse of a row of alphabetized file folders, fat with paper, each with a name carefully inked on the top. I wondered if there was a folder with my name on it.
Now Ruth and I consumed our dinner in semi-silence—a scoop of chickpea stew with rice for me, a smaller scoop with no rice for her—and once our plates were cleared, someone clapped for our attention at the front of the room. I looked up to see Roni—the Mentor I knew from the Santa Barbara office—standing on the speaker’s platform, holding up a pair of electric hair clippers. Dr. Cindy stood behind her, hands folded behind her back, looking out calmly at her assembled followers. Behind her, a pink banner read GIVE UP CONTROL IN ORDER TO TAKE CONTROL.
The women in the dining hall went quiet, looking around at one another with alarmed expressions, even though we had all suspected this was coming. I kept my eyes on Roni, the corners of my mouth tugging artificially upward, because I wanted to please the Mentors with my openness to the GenFem vision. Anyway, why not agree to an extreme haircut? There were so many bigger things to be concerned about.
“Vanity is weakness,” Roni began. “It means you care too much what other people think of you. Why else do we spend so much time—hours upon hours every week—fussing over our hair? All the time wasted on blowouts and flat irons and weaves, thousands spent on cuts and color, all to meet some arbitrary beauty standards set by whom? Men, typically. It’s just another way of distracting us, preventing us from taking charge.” Roni’s head was already shaved short—and had been for as long as I’d known her—revealing a shapely skull, Grace Jones regal. But not all of us had her bone structure. I cast my eyes over to take in Ruth, with her soft chin and an expensive dye job that concealed her gray roots. Her lip wobbled; she blinked at the far wall, refusing eye contact with me.
Roni continued. “And at GenFem do we care what people think of us?”
“No…” I added my own voice to the tentative chorus. Someone tittered nervously.
She turned the clippers on with a dramatic buzz. “I’m sorry, but that wasn’t very convincing. Do we care what other people think of us? Do we care about what other people think about what we do, or how we look, or whether we’re quote-unquote feminine?”
This time, the response reverberated off the walls of the dining hall, rattling the cutlery in the glass jars on the tables. The two fortysomething women in front of me shouted with an urgency that bordered on hysteria. “NO! We don’t care!”
I found that I was half-standing, eager to show my enthusiasm, to prove my lack of concern to this dazzling woman. My eyes met Dr. Cindy’s, and she tilted her chin in a nod of approval, her lips twitching into a smile, and my heart filled with joy. This is where I belong. How could I forget that?
“So you see?” Roni continued. “By temporarily ceding control to GenFem and letting us shave your heads, you’re actually proving your own control over your self-worth. Your best shot at finding yourself comes when you truly don’t care what outside people think. That’s why we rid ourselves of Toxics, that’s why we focus on tightening our own community so that we can grow within it. The haircut is just a sign of your commitment to our beautiful future together.” Roni looked around the room with an encouraging smile. “So then, who’s first?”
* * *