I'll Be You(92)

Instead what I saw was barely a person at all, just skin over skull, my physical existence pared back to the absolute minimum. I wondered what Dr. Cindy planned to rebuild in her place. I wondered if stripping down so completely really would make it easier to grow back as a stronger, more in-control Eleanor. Someone who didn’t feel moral conflict and wasn’t racked with guilt. At that moment I felt so passive, contentedly sheep-like, waiting for GenFem to show me what my future held.

The cabins were outfitted with squeaky iron bunk beds, thin plastic mattresses, the shadows of crucifixes still visible on the walls. If it hadn’t been for the high-thread-count sheets on the lower bunks and the cheery succulent arrangements on each chipped side table, you wouldn’t have known that the compound was now being used as a retreat for grown women.

There were a half dozen bunk beds in my cabin but only three residents in the room—myself, Ruth, and a slight young Canadian-Korean girl named Suzy, whose commitment to the Method bordered on the fanatical. Nothing that Ruth or I did went without a comment by her, from the amount of toothpaste we put on our brushes (“You know toothpaste has calories, right? Did you count them in your Sufferance, Ruth?”) to our reluctance to turn out the lights promptly at ten p.m. (“Lack of sufficient sleep is just another reason that women fail to get ahead in the world”). I suspected that Suzy would be more than thrilled to report any of our misdeeds to the Mentors who were running the retreat.

Ruth was furious about her haircut. Roni had taken some pity on her, and her stubble was slightly longer than mine—in a few weeks, it would almost be a pixie cut—but the look was wildly unflattering on her, and she knew it. She stalked around the cabin, getting ready for bed, her pink eyes giving away her anger, though she refused to admit it. Certainly not in front of pious Suzy, who kept running her hands over her head and crying, “I love it so much! It’s so freeing!”

We went to bed in silence, Suzy flipping the light switch off at the appointed hour even though I was still smearing night cream on my face. Ten minutes later, I heard her snoring. I lay in the dark, listening to the oak trees whispering outside the cabin, telling one another their wind-secrets. The metal coils of the ancient bunk bed dug into my back. Cold night air seeped under the doorways, through the cracks in the windows. I thought of Charlotte in her crib, splayed in her footie pajamas, the shallow rasp of her night breath. I didn’t know how I was ever going to get to sleep.

That’s when I heard a voice, disembodied in the dark. It was Ruth, her low whisper echoing off the concrete floor.

“So, what do they have on you?” she asked.

At first I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “What do you mean?”

The only light in the room was coming through the transom windows, a yellow and sulfurous glow from the floodlights on the path. I saw Ruth roll over so that she was facing me on her side, only the whites of her eyes visible in the dark as she peered across the room toward me. “I mean, did they have you write out a confession?”

“You wrote one, too?”

“Everyone writes one eventually. That’s what gets you to Level Eight. You want to be in the inner sanctum, you need to fork over some collateral. Your biggest secret. It’s what keeps us in line, right? They would never call it blackmail, but that’s what it is, of course. They get the confession and then you’re beholden to them forever. I gave Dr. Cindy half my alimony settlement, called it a donation. So what was it you did? I bet they encouraged you to do whatever it was, didn’t they?”

In my stomach, the stew from dinner curdled and threatened to rise up again. I opened my mouth to confess, but the words didn’t come. “You first,” I managed.

“I paid someone to retake my daughter’s college entrance exams for her after she failed them the first time. It was my Mentor’s idea, actually. Shella. She said that Izzy—that’s my daughter—had also been traumatized by my husband’s betrayal of us, and it wasn’t fair that she should be punished for his transgressions. And Shella, she knew this girl, a kid in need who could use the cash…” Her voice trailed off. “Anyway, Izzy got into Swarthmore, and I never broke it to her how it really happened. But it was a stupid thing to do. If Izzy ever found out, or my husband—or, for God’s sake, Swarthmore—it would ruin my daughter’s entire life.” She was quiet for a minute as I digested all this, surprised but also a little relieved (it wasn’t just me!). “I should have just let Izzy fail. But honestly, it’s not like I hadn’t thought about cheating before. I thought about it all the time. Izzy never showed much academic aptitude, but I still wanted my kids to have a leg up on life, whatever it took. I just hadn’t done anything about it until GenFem encouraged it.”

Suzy let out a wet snort and we both went silent, listening to her rustle in her bunk. When she was still again, I whispered, “But Dr. Cindy would never actually show your confession to anyone, would she? Iona told me it’s just an exercise in letting go of the burden of a secret.”

Ruth’s laugh was a bitter bark. “She doesn’t have to, does she? She just needs you to be afraid that she will. It’s leverage, for the other things she wants out of you.”

Collateral. I thought of the six-figure check that I’d just written to GenFem, a third of my savings gone with the swipe of a pen. I want to make Dr. Cindy happy, I’d told myself when I signed the check. I believe in GenFem, and I want it to grow. This is my future. It’s just an investment. Now it felt as if a caul had dropped from my face, leaving me with unexpectedly clear vision. Another truth had been right there, if I had chosen to look for it. I just didn’t want to admit to myself that I was being blackmailed for my own criminal behavior.