Helen Zuman - Mating in Captivity - A Memoir

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.”

With that, she slapped her story on me—diagnosis plus prescription—without so much as pausing to check my symptoms. Rage surged in my chest. Fuck her. Fuck this stupid island. Why the fuck had I fled here ?

I thrust my fist up and gave her the finger.

This was my first gesture of protest at Zendik. It could have triggered others.

But she, stirring cream into her tea, didn’t see it.

MINUTES AFTER I’D TUCKED my finger back into my fist and quit the island for the living room, Arol opened fire: “Helen’s not sure she should be here,” she declared to whoever could hear. “ That’s why she’s so uptight.”

I hadn’t been eyeing the highway. But my recent selling stats, like Adam’s mediocre total at Projekt Revolution, showed I’d lost heart: a few times in the past month, I’d made just $88. Maybe, sensing the cracks in my story, she’d shifted me on her balance sheet from asset to liability and chosen to purge me.

Expulsion had its benefits: a boost in pride for survivors, plus a reminder that Arol prized our service, not our selves. She would remove those who failed.

I told myself I welcomed Arol’s help; with my doubt exposed, I could gouge it out. The next morning, departing the Farm with Cayta, Mar, and Toba for a new scene—Virginia Beach—I vowed to kick butt and cleanse the taint of all those eighty-eights.

On Friday evening, as dusk descended, a cop threatened to arrest me if I kept selling. I’d been caught on film breaking the law.

First I cursed myself for drawing the cop. What the fuck’s wrong with me? How’d I vibe into that? Then I committed thought crime: Maybe we’ll all get popped and have to go home and it won’t be only my fault. Finally I shifted toward the storefronts, counting on their awnings and knots of patrons to shield me, as I stealth-sold, from the eyes fixed to every street sign.

If only I could dodge Cayta’s eyes.

Sure enough, when she saw me, she pounced. Why hadn’t I gotten “on” yet? Scrambling to hide my thought crime, I flung up a cover about feeling competitive. She shredded it. “Why don’t you focus on what you want , instead of what’s wrong with you? Can’t you relax and have some fucking fun ?”

By “what you want,” she meant “your sales goals.” But I drew a burst of nerve from a slant interpretation: What if, instead of fighting my defects, I embraced my pleasure drive and let it guide me?

I rushed a couple in pressed slacks and got them to stop for my pitch. “We want a revolution for a beautiful world where we’re totally honest and do what we love and no one has to wreck the earth to make money.”

“We, we, we!” the man said. “What about you ? What do you want?”

Normally I would have repeated the same speech, swapping “I” for “we.” But this time I risked honesty. “I’m sick of being afraid,” I said, checking to make sure Cayta couldn’t hear. “I wanna be free to think and say and do what I want without someone coming down on me.”