Vox

All my words ricochet in my head as I listen, emerge from my throat in a heavy, meaningless sigh. And all I can think about are Jackie’s last words to me.

Think about what you need to do to stay free.

Well, doing more than fuck all might have been a good place to start.

“I had no idea,” she said.

“No idea about what?”

“These numbers.” She pointed to one of the charts, now being televised with a prepared voice-over of Baby Blue’s voice. She had moved on from rape and was reciting statistics on antidepressant usage. “Jeez. One in six? That’s awful.”

No one in the studio audience was paying attention to Jackie’s claims of skewed statistics, of the correlation-causation fallacy, of the fact that of course no one was taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in 1960, because they didn’t exist.

That was how it started. Three women with a stack of pie charts and people like Olivia.

Instead of standing next to Patrick, or even at the far end of the family line, bookending our kids, I’m fifth. After my husband, after Steven, after the eleven-year-old twins. And Sonia has made me smaller than everyone except for her. I manage a forced smile and take her into my arms, pressing her head against me so she can’t see the tears that are welling up, that I won’t be able to contain.

[...]

And so here we are. Me, my daughter, and the wrist counters that keep us in line. I wonder what Jackie would have to say about it. Probably something like Good work, Jean. You gassed up the car and drove it straight into hell. Enjoy the burn.

[...] I’m thinking I did a crackerjack job on the behavioral part, conditioning Sonia with bribes of cookies and marshmallows to keep her words unspoken. Someone should take away my mothering license.

I keep reminding myself it isn’t my fault. I didn’t vote for Myers.

I didn’t vote at all, actually.

And here’s Jackie’s voice again, telling me what an acquiescent shit I am.

What would Jackie do? Speed after him? Probably. Spit back? Likely. What’s on my mind, though, is what Patrick would do: absolutely nothing.

He’d sigh and shake his head at the barbarism, and then he’d clean up the mess of phlegm and forget about Mr. Midlife Crisis. And Lorenzo? Lorenzo would beat the living shit out of the bastard.

“Someone should shut that woman up,” Olivia says. “Permanently.”

Oh, Olivia, I think, what the hell did you expect?

When I first started experiments with lab animals, I had one golden rule: don’t name them. In other words, don’t think of them as pets; don’t think of them as anything other than a way to get from point A to point B. Think of them as test tubes or Petri dishes or microscope slides, nothing more than innate vehicles to fill and observe. While I hold each tiny mouse for Lorenzo to inject with a potion that will either cure it or kill it, all I can think of is the names I’ve given them:

Jackie. Lin. Jean.

A million years ago—it was only twenty, but it feels like a million, it feels like tens of millions, like all the lifetimes of the entire world—Jackie asked me what I would do to stay free. Last night, over a kitchen counter that seems as distant as that Georgetown apartment, I asked Patrick if he would do anything, if he would kill.

Right now, with a half-baked formula on the table and Reverend Carl scolding Steven on the television, I put all the questions together and come up with a single answer.

Yes, I would do anything. I would kill.

The woman who thinks these words doesn’t sound like me at all.

Or maybe she does.

Imagine, Jeanie, she wrote. Twenty-five percent in the Senate and the House. Twenty-five! You should come back and get in on it.

Maybe next year, I wrote back. And I meant it.

For now, though, Jackie has my financial and moral support. I’m not ready to get into politics, not just yet.

All my words ricochet in my head as I listen, emerge from my throat in a heavy, meaningless sigh. And all I can think about are Jackie’s last words to me.

Think about what you need to do to stay free.

Well, doing more than fuck all might have been a good place to start.

“I had no idea,” she said.

“No idea about what?”

“These numbers.” She pointed to one of the charts, now being televised with a prepared voice-over of Baby Blue’s voice. She had moved on from rape and was reciting statistics on antidepressant usage. “Jeez. One in six? That’s awful.”

No one in the studio audience was paying attention to Jackie’s claims of skewed statistics, of the correlation-causation fallacy, of the fact that of course no one was taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors in 1960, because they didn’t exist.

That was how it started. Three women with a stack of pie charts and people like Olivia.

Instead of standing next to Patrick, or even at the far end of the family line, bookending our kids, I’m fifth. After my husband, after Steven, after the eleven-year-old twins. And Sonia has made me smaller than everyone except for her. I manage a forced smile and take her into my arms, pressing her head against me so she can’t see the tears that are welling up, that I won’t be able to contain.

[...]

And so here we are. Me, my daughter, and the wrist counters that keep us in line. I wonder what Jackie would have to say about it. Probably something like Good work, Jean. You gassed up the car and drove it straight into hell. Enjoy the burn.

[...] I’m thinking I did a crackerjack job on the behavioral part, conditioning Sonia with bribes of cookies and marshmallows to keep her words unspoken. Someone should take away my mothering license.

I keep reminding myself it isn’t my fault. I didn’t vote for Myers.

I didn’t vote at all, actually.

And here’s Jackie’s voice again, telling me what an acquiescent shit I am.

What would Jackie do? Speed after him? Probably. Spit back? Likely. What’s on my mind, though, is what Patrick would do: absolutely nothing.

He’d sigh and shake his head at the barbarism, and then he’d clean up the mess of phlegm and forget about Mr. Midlife Crisis. And Lorenzo? Lorenzo would beat the living shit out of the bastard.

“Someone should shut that woman up,” Olivia says. “Permanently.”

Oh, Olivia, I think, what the hell did you expect?

When I first started experiments with lab animals, I had one golden rule: don’t name them. In other words, don’t think of them as pets; don’t think of them as anything other than a way to get from point A to point B. Think of them as test tubes or Petri dishes or microscope slides, nothing more than innate vehicles to fill and observe. While I hold each tiny mouse for Lorenzo to inject with a potion that will either cure it or kill it, all I can think of is the names I’ve given them:

Jackie. Lin. Jean.

A million years ago—it was only twenty, but it feels like a million, it feels like tens of millions, like all the lifetimes of the entire world—Jackie asked me what I would do to stay free. Last night, over a kitchen counter that seems as distant as that Georgetown apartment, I asked Patrick if he would do anything, if he would kill.

Right now, with a half-baked formula on the table and Reverend Carl scolding Steven on the television, I put all the questions together and come up with a single answer.

Yes, I would do anything. I would kill.

The woman who thinks these words doesn’t sound like me at all.

Or maybe she does.

Imagine, Jeanie, she wrote. Twenty-five percent in the Senate and the House. Twenty-five! You should come back and get in on it.

Maybe next year, I wrote back. And I meant it.

For now, though, Jackie has my financial and moral support. I’m not ready to get into politics, not just yet.