I'll Be You(91)

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?”



* * *



—

Back in my cabin that night, I stared at myself in the rusting mirror that was clipped to the back of the door. The person who stared back at me was unrecognizable, not the winsome blond twin who once charmed TV audiences with her dimples, nor the pretty young coed who did her damnedest to make everyone forget that fact. I was not the sought-after florist or the respected community member or the devoted twin/daughter/wife, or even the emotionally conflicted new mother.