a door slams, its tinny aluminum double tapping on the frame. Olivia King, hidden by a paisley umbrella, emerges from the shelter of her porch. The scarf around her head is plain pink silk, or polyester. It gives her the air of a grandmother, although Olivia is at least a decade younger than I am. She checks the skies, puts a hand out, and closes the umbrella.
She does not take off the scarf before stepping from the porch and folding herself into the front seat of her car. Weekday mornings are the only times Olivia drives anymore; if her church were closer, she’d walk.
In this moment, Olivia seems small, almost shrunken, a house mouse scuttling from one refuge to another, fearful of what might lie in wait along her trajectory. She’s what Jackie would have called a Kool-Aid head, content with her place in the hierarchy: God, man, woman. Olivia had drunk up the poison, every last drop.
My own repertoire of religious doctrine is shit, which is how I like it. But when Steven first came home with his reading from that AP course—an innocent-sounding title, Fundamentals of Modern Christian Philosophy, blazoned on the cover, innocuous blue lettering on a white background—I leafed through the book after dinner.
“Pretty lame, isn’t it?” Steven said on his second trip to the kitchen’s snack cabinet.
“They’re mainstreaming this next year? That’s what you said, right?” I asked. My eyes didn’t stray from the page, a chapter titled “In Search of a Natural Order in the Modern Family.” The chapter, like all the others, was preceded by a biblical quote; this one, from Corinthians, informed the reader that “The head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.”
Fantastic.
Further along, chapter twenty-seven began with this nugget from the book of Titus: “Be teachers of good things; teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands.” The gist of the text was a call to arms of sorts, a reaching out to older generations of women.
There were chapters on feminism and its insidious deconstruction of Judeo-Christian values (as well as manhood), advice for men on their roles in husbanding and parenting, guidance for children on respecting their elders. Every page screamed extreme-right fundamentalism.
I slammed the book shut. “Tell me this isn’t the only required reading.”
“That’s the book,” Steven said after he downed a mason jar of milk and refilled it halfway.
“So the point of this class is, what? Highlighting the pitfalls of conservative Christianity?”
He stared at me blankly, as if I’d just asked the question in Greek. “I don’t know. The teacher’s cool. And she makes some good points. You know, like about how hard it is on kids when both their parents work, how we’ve gotten to this place where people forget about simple things.”
I put the milk back into the fridge. “How about you save some of this for your brothers’ breakfast? And what simple things?” A slide show played in my head: women gardening, women canning peaches, women embroidering pillowcases by candlelight. Shakers abstaining themselves out of existence.
“Like, well, gardening and cooking and stuff like that. Instead of running around working dumb jobs.”
“You think I should garden and cook more? You think the work I do is less important than—I don’t know—crafts?”
“Not you, Mom. Other women. The ones who just wanna get out of the house and have some kind of identity.” He picked up the book and kissed me goodnight. “Anyway, it’s just a stupid class.”
“I wish you’d drop it,” I said.
“No way, José. I need the AP credits for college.”
“Why? So you can major in modern Christian thought?”
“No. So I can get into college.”
And that was how they did it. Sneaking in a course here, a club there. Anything to lure kids with promises of increasing their competitiveness.
Such a simple thing, really.
The president’s wife is next to him on the screen, a few steps back and to his right, her blond hair covered by a delicate mauve scarf that matches her dress and sets off her eyes.
I don’t know why I turn on the television. By the time I’ve reheated my coffee, the rain has started beating a steady, wet rhythm again, so I don’t much feel like going out. Also, it’s safer here at home, by myself. No temptation to speak.
She’s a beauty, the first lady. Almost a reincarnation of Jackie O, only fair and blue-eyed instead of dark. I remember her from before she married, when she decorated the pages of Vogue and Elle, almost always modeling low-cut and high-cropped swimwear or lingerie, smiling out from the magazines as if to say, Go ahead. Touch me.
Now, watching her stand placidly behind her husband, I’m struck by the change. A metamorphosis, really. She appears shorter, but maybe that’s because of a footwear choice. The president is not very tall, and one supposes there’s an aesthetic issue at play, as if the photographers decided to even out their frames, smoothing the peaks and valleys of their subjects.
Who am I kidding?
She’s never smiling anymore, never wearing anything that falls less than three inches below her knees or that’s cut lower than just at the bottom of that concavity on her throat, the one I can never remember the name of. Supra-something notch. Her sleeves are unfailingly three-quarters length, like today, and the counter on her left wrist matches her dress exactly. It looks like a piece of antique jewelry, a gift from a great-grandmother.
The first lady is supposed to be our model, a pure woman, steadfast at her husband’s side in all things, at all times.
Of course, she’s at his side only during public events. When the cameras click off and the microphones are muted, Anna Myers, née Johansson, is promptly escorted back to her home by a trio of armed Secret Service agents. This is never filmed, but Patrick has been in attendance at more than one of the president’s appearances.
The trio stays with her night and day.
In other times, this constant supervision of the first lady would be accepted as routine security for her protection. The truth, however, is in Anna Myers’ blue eyes; they have the vacant, lusterless quality of a woman who now sees the world in shades of gray.
There was a girl in my dorm, five doors down on the left, who had Anna’s eyes. It seemed the muscles around them never moved, never contracted and stretched to match the smile she wore when we asked if she was okay, if she felt better this morning, if she wanted to talk. I remember when we found her body, eyes open and dull, like country wells or puddles of spilled coffee. If you want to know what depression looks like, all you need to do is look into a depressed person’s eyes.
Strange how I can remember the dead girl’s eyes but not her name.
Anna Myers lives in a prison with rose gardens and marble bathrooms and two-thousand-thread-count sheets on the bed. Patrick told me about her, after one of his visits as a favor to President Myers, about how the Secret Service men check Anna’s bathroom twice a day, how they search her bed for objects that might have migrated unseen from the kitchen, how they hold her prescription meds and dole out pills one at a time. There are no liquor bottles in Anna’s home, no locks on the doors except for those of the storage cupboard where the housekeeping supplies are. Nothing in her house is made of glass.
I switch the channel.
We still have cable, more than one hundred choices of sports, garden shows, cooking demos, home restoration, cartoons for the children, some movies. All the movies are PG—no horror, a smattering of light comedy, those four-hour epics about Moses and Jesus. Then there are the other channels,