The Last Housewife (30)

JAMIE: Who hasn’t?

SHAY: He looked like Don Draper.

JAMIE: Right. I can see how that would make an impression.

SHAY: I had no idea how Rachel had come from a man like that. I felt sorry for him, actually, that he had such a strange, antisocial daughter. He and Rachel didn’t hug or even touch. I remember that, because I thought it was strange he was more affectionate with us than with her. But then I realized it must be because he knew how she was, and he was being respectful. I was fascinated by that. A good father.

He said something like, “Since you’re Rachel’s friends, I’d like you to be my friends, too. Why don’t you call me Don?”

I’d had adults ask a lot of things of me, but I’d never had one want to be my friend, like we were equals. It felt glamorous. And he ordered everything on the menu. I’m serious. We had three servers all to ourselves, and he ordered oysters and steaks and raw fish, all these things I’d never tried. He gave Clem a hard time for being vegan, joked it was unnatural, but he ordered every vegetable on the menu just for her. And so much wine, bottle after bottle. He knew a lot about it. I mean, he could have said anything and it would have sounded right to me, because I knew nothing about wine. But he was very self-assured. Worldly. And he kept pouring and pouring. That night was the farthest I’d ever felt from Heller, Texas. I was a junior at Whitney, so I’d been in New York for years, but it was the first time I felt like a real city girl.

JAMIE: Sounds opulent.

SHAY: Don was so charming. He wanted to know everything about us: our majors, where we came from, what we wanted to do after college, what we did and didn’t like about Whitney. He said Rachel gushed about us, so he knew he had to meet us. That raised all of our eyebrows, and then obviously made me feel guilty that we’d been bad-mouthing her while she’d been saying nice things about us.

Then Don said something unexpected. He told us that ever since Rachel started at Whitney, they’d been talking about what it was like to be a young woman on a college campus in this day and age. How her professors treated her, what they taught, how the other students acted, the resources the school provided. He said he’d grown concerned something was lacking, and that was another reason he’d wanted to meet us.

Clem said, “Really? Like what?” Her tone was skeptical. From time to time, we met people, usually men, who dragged Whitney for being too liberal or too feminist or too…female, I guess. Clem had no patience for it. I remember her eyeing her plate, and I’m sure she was thinking, great, if Rachel’s dad turns out to be a tool, I’m going to have to stop eating this forty-dollar vegetable lasagna. I was too busy being surprised Rachel had conversations of substance with anyone.

But Don said, “I’m worried they’re not empowering women the way they should.”

That hooked us. He could tell, because he said, “The college claims it’s progressive, which is great, but are they actually teaching you to own your power as women? From everything I can gather, the college’s brand of feminism is to teach young women how to ape men. Rachel took this business class, and all the things her professor taught them made a good leader were essentially male CEO stereotypes: you’re supposed to be loud, dominant, ruthless. I was saying to Rachel, ‘Are you really supposed to deny who you are to be considered successful?’ And that’s just one example. I think it’s a shame. You’re the ones who have the opportunity to course correct after all these years, and they’re only indoctrinating you into thinking you need to be something that doesn’t come naturally. That’s a recipe for self-loathing if I’ve ever heard one. Rachel sure feels it.”

Clem, Laurel, and I looked at each other, totally surprised. We’d been talking about the exact same thing in our suite a week or so back, how it felt like the rules for who we could be, and what we could enjoy as feminist women, were so rigid and fiercely monitored. Laurel had this theater professor who kept telling her she had to speak up in class, even though she was the costume person and shy. One day the professor told Laurel that she was setting women back a hundred years by being so meek. Clem’s soccer coach made fun of her for reading a romance novel she saw in her duffel bag and said something like, “What’s that fluff? I thought Whitney was for smart girls.” And I’d always known, since the day I showed up on campus, that I couldn’t tell anyone at Whitney I’d been in pageants. There were so many things you weren’t allowed to do if you wanted to be the right kind of girl. Being a woman at Whitney came with as many rules as being a woman in East Texas.

But it was surreal to hear Don say these things. No man had ever talked like that to me.

So I said, “I completely agree with you.” And I could tell that made him happy.

He said, “Well, I wanted to meet you to see Rachel’s influences. And to check up on you, of course. I’ve come to care about you, you know, vicariously through Rachel. I can tell you’re good girls.”

That made Laurel blush.

Don said, “At the risk of sounding like a pretentious asshole—or worse, like one of your professors—I’ve done a lot of research on self-actualization. I’ve been trying to figure out why people in the past seemed so much more connected to the world and at peace with themselves, unlike all this modern angst and alienation. And I’ll tell you something: Aristotle was every bit the genius they say he was. He wrote extensively about men and women—what they needed to be happy, how they were alike and different. And he celebrated those differences. It’s a shame how far adrift we’ve come from all that wealth of knowledge, under the guise of progress.”