I’d made a similar plea years earlier, in Chicago, hoping to sidestep Cayta’s demand that I sell or take the bus home. By now I knew better than to request—or endorse—breaks to reflect. And I knew we couldn’t have one of our number roaming the woods, smudged and confused, shedding shadows on Zendik. A dozen heads, mine among them, wagged in censure.
Taridon, battle-ready in leather chaps, flashed Adam a scorching glance. “Look, man, don’t fuck around. You’re in or you’re out. That’s it.”
Adam broke. His face crumpled, as if Taridon had triggered controlled demolition. “I think I want to go,” he said, tears wetting his cheeks.
The next morning he left for California, armed with his thumb and Zendik’s shove-off: $21 plus a lift to Bluefield and passage to Knoxville by bus.
His leaving lightened him, which made it seem right—even as it cast me into a romantic wasteland: the remaining Zendik men were attached, unattracted, or unattractive, and our flight to the hinterlands had all but stanched the flow of new blood.
Would I ever enjoy sex again? Revel in touch?
A week later, Arol summoned the girl and guy sellers back to West Virginia—this time for an audience with her.
From an armchair commanding the living room, she addressed the dozen of us looking up to her from a half ring on the rug.
“I want you guys to know I’m sick of being treated like an authority figure. It’s not who I am. It’s not fair to me.” Her flaming gaze swept our faces in a merciless arc. “It has to stop.”
I nodded. We nodded. I searched my past for times when my peers and I, or I alone, had forced power on Arol.
No stories leaped forth to back her charge.
She pressed on.
“It’s gonna be a big change, all of us under one roof. I’m gonna be seeing a lot more of you guys day-to-day, and I’m gonna be saying what I see in the moment, same as I always have with whoever’s in close.”
The house had four bedrooms and three baths. Arol and her intimates would sleep in beds in the second-floor master suite, which included a bathroom, while the rest of us would roll out quilts and sleeping bags each night in the living room and the other three bedrooms (all on the ground floor) and share the other two baths. Descending the stairs in the morning, Arol would enter the mesh of common spaces—kitchen, living room, dining room—at the heart of the new Farm. As in North Carolina, every season would be open season—but here, she’d have the whole herd at close range.
She leaned forward, knees propping her elbows. “I’m not sure everybody’s ready for that kind of intensity. So I’m looking at renting a house in town for whoever can’t handle it.” She squinted at us, as if scanning for aura shifts. “What do you think? Do you want me to do that?”
I suspect that if anyone had said yes, she would have waited a day or two, then shamed the fainthearted off the Farm.
I, for one, was ready. I imagined the coming hail of input as a hard but bracing rain speeding my purification. And I dreamed that uniting under one roof would free us from the hierarchy haunting the hardscape of the Farm in North Carolina—that the quake of the move would level us, where snipping our wristbands had failed.
But not even a quake can change a story before the story is ready to change.
A few days later, as I was prepping food for yet another selling trip, Shure burst through the pantry door in North Carolina, her face flushed, her breath quick. She’d hurried over from the Addition, where she’d been on the phone with Karma, who was with Arol in West Virginia.
“Arol kicked everyone out of the kitchen. She said we’re barbarians and we’ll ruin it if it stays communal. Plus, she needs a calm place to make food that can heal her, ’cause food’s not just food for her; it’s medicine postcancer.”
Guilt drew blood to my ears and cheeks. Surely I, too, had failed at kitchen care during my stints in West Virginia. Also, I grieved our loss. I’d miss those glossy cupboards and gleaming appliances. That dazzling sunshine.
Shure rushed on. “So we’ll use that other kitchen—the one in the basement, where the wife used to can.”
I winced. Yes, that other kitchen. The ugly stepchild. Drably clad and starved of sun. Bathed in harsh fluorescence.
“It’ll work. You’ll get used to it.”
I nodded. Before long I’d cease to notice the windowless gloom.
I would never adjust to the pounding anxiety of tiptoeing up to what could have been a throne room. Or the dis-ease of owing deference to those above me.
At least, on occasion, I could drink.
At socials in North Carolina, we’d been free to let loose, pair off, disperse from the Farmhouse or dining hall to additional houses and outbuildings. Arol, a light drinker turned teetotaler by cancer, usually showed briefly, if at all. Drinking brought relief.
But on a Saturday night in mid-September, when we gathered under our one and only roof for two beers each, Arol surprised me by taking an armchair in the living room, at the heart of the party.
After sitting back for an hour, she demanded that we gather ’round her. A frown pinched her mouth.
“You guys don’t know how to use alcohol,” she said. “The reason to drink—the reason to poison your body with that shit—is so you can ditch your inhibitions and get real. But this whole evening—and I’ve been listening—I have not heard even one funky, honest conversation. It’s all gossip and who’s fucking who, and I’m sick of it. You guys need to grow up. Get some class. Get curious about each other. Treat booze as a tool for revolution.”
As she ranted on, I grew restless, and the beer lured me toward a shocking thought: I wish she’d shut up. Time to get real—got it. So why not release us—while we still had a buzz—to try?
I dared not voice this thought or fully own it. Yet I could not unthink it. Lurking inside me, it awaited a surrogate target.
One morning a week later, a target appeared.
In North Carolina, I’d started most days with a trip to the outhouse, followed by goat-milking or kitchen chores. I’d had my own space, with a bed and storage for my stuff. In West Virginia, I woke, stowed my bedroll in a shared closet, and ducked across the hall to stake out the bathroom in quest of a turn on the toilet. I no longer milked goats; Arol had decreed that only those who loved them should tend them, and I saw no love in my habit of yanking laggard nannies by a rope around their necks. Also, I’d recently been stripped of my kitchen duties.
That meant I had to clean—alongside the other women with nothing more pressing to do.
As part of a changing team with no set schedule, I faced daily stress over when to begin: if Arol caught me at rest after breakfast, she might charge me with sloth; if I started alone, she might curse me for escaping into work.
After washing my oatmeal bowl on Thursday, September 23, I felt my usual tension mount toward paralysis. Feigning purpose, I retreated from the living room to the basement kitchen, grabbed a glass of water, and huddled at the island. If only I could vanish for a moment. Go unseen. I stared into the water and sipped.
A mug touched down on the island’s far side, steered by a pair of hands with clean fingernails, neatly filed.
I knew those fingernails.
“What’s up, Hels?” Cayta chirped. In nearly five years at Zendik, I hadn’t changed my name—but I was still trying.
I looked up, meaning to fake a doing-just-fine smile. My lips resisted. I shrugged and looked back down.
Unfazed, she chirped again. “What the fuck’s your problem?”
I shook my head. Studied her mug. Shrank from her eyes on my skin, my skull. Cased my brain for a sound I could make. Before I found one, she broke in.
“You better get over it, whatever it is, ’cause getting pissed isn’t gonna fix things and you’re gonna have to take responsibility for yourself someday.”