Chapter_2

Three months later

Rosie had hoped marrying Jordan would propel her forcefully into adulthood, giving her life new purpose and clarity. But she was disappointed to realize that her life was largely the same as it had been before the wedding. She was no closer to understanding what she wanted from it. She and Jordan still lived in their same two-bedroom apartment; they still streamed the reality TV show in which groups of men and women dated without being allowed to see one another. The contestants sat in separate rooms, professing their greatest personal tragedies and sexual kinks through a purple wall, until eventually, after a few weeks, some of the men picked women to propose to, having never seen their faces. The men and women always performed absolute certainty about their decisions. “You’re my hell yes,” one man said to a woman behind a wall.

“You’re my hell yes,” Jordan said to Rosie, kissing her cheek.

Rosie felt buoyed by his certainty.

Wedding gifts from Jordan’s mother—oversized monogrammed plates and napkins—cluttered their cabinets. She’d also slipped in a baby bib that read jumbo prawn, which Jordan thought was cute and Rosie thought was pushy. Rosie’s mother had left the wedding without saying goodbye, and when a card arrived a few days later, they stuck it in the freezer to neutralize its message: I shouldn’t have presumed I would be invited to speak...

They were both addicted to their phones. Jordan spent hours each week researching stocks and gadgets and playing word games against his colleagues, while Rosie scrolled through Instagram as soon as she woke up, during her commute, before bed, and occasionally in the middle of the night. Sometimes she would close Instagram and then immediately reopen it, as if possessed. The app intuited that she was married and had started serving her content about homemaking and design. She was highly susceptible to these ads and influencers and had quickly fallen into a pocket of Instagram devoted to rural life in upstate New York, which had led her to make a series of impulsive purchases, including an eighty-year-old sourdough starter.

Rosie’s boss, a meek and hateable man whom she and Alice referred to as “The Egg” because of the contours of his head, had recently stationed Rosie far away from Alice, so that now they only saw each other on lunch breaks. By the end of each day, Rosie’s ankles hurt; she could barely drum up the energy to make dinner. All she wanted was to sink into the couch and scroll on her phone.

On the few occasions that Jordan had suggested she look for a different job, Rosie insisted she believed in Rainbow Futures’ mission and that after all these years she was good at the work. She’d been promoted twice. What she didn’t say was that she’d tried to leave a few times. In her early twenties she’d taken an unpaid internship at a publishing house, hoping it would lead to more, but it hadn’t; she worked as a hostess at a Mediterranean restaurant that folded a month after she was hired; most recently, a year before meeting Jordan, she’d worked as a “Brand Ambassador” for a sunglasses company that turned out to be a pyramid scheme. Rainbow Futures was the first job offered to her out of college, and, for better or worse, it was always available. Searching for a new job would require her to locate some inner passion that she feared was absent.

Waking at a small hour one night, Rosie found her thoughts encircling a familiar fear: she wondered if she’d actually chosen her life, or if she’d simply taken the path of least resistance. She worried that there was no solid core to her identity—that she was the negative space of all the things she’d never done, the risks she’d never taken, the questions she’d never asked. This fear was part of why she’d accepted Jordan’s proposal after only nine months; she was desperate to say yes to something and let it take her somewhere new. Jordan snored lightly, a thin breathing strip over his nose. She picked up her phone, dimmed the screen, and opened Instagram, which eventually led her to an ad for a virtual yoga class called the Anxious Sleeper. She fumbled around the nightstand, looking for her credit card.

The yoga class met three times a week. The instructor was named Claudine and had an expensive-looking poodle mix named Alastair. Claudine’s yoga studio was inside a tree house. Every window opened onto vibrant leaves, birds flew by during the class, and the doodle snoozed in the corner of the frame.

“Pick a mantra, and stick with it for this practice,” Claudine instructed in the first class. “It could be as simple as ‘I am here.’ Here might be an emotional state or a literal place. Right now I am here, in Hudson, New York. But I am also here, feeling energized after a gorgeous hike in the beautiful Mohonk Preserve.”

Rosie scanned the expressions of everyone else in the class and found only earnestness. Both of Claudine’s examples of “being here” were about being in the Hudson Valley, and therefore they did not apply to Rosie. I am here, she thought, in an overpriced apartment where the walls are so thin I can hear a neighbor loading the dishwasher. She had positioned her laptop on the coffee table and sat cross-legged in front of it. She inhaled, searching for a mantra, trying desperately to tune out the sound of a trash truck reversing on Flatbush. What turned over in her head was a line from a Mary Oliver poem that she had seen the day before in the Instagram bio of a Hudson-based light fixture company: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? Rosie had typed the question in her Notes app.

Her life had been wild and precious exactly once. For three weeks between her freshman and sophomore years of college, she’d farmed in the Italian Alps. She had no farming experience, and she didn’t speak Italian. It was her first time traveling outside the country. She had agreed to join her then roommate, an environmental studies major who loved party drugs and who, a week before their flight to Italy, pulled out of the plan to instead dry out in Ojai. So Rosie went alone. On the farm, she met another American, Zoe, who had dropped out of college to travel the world, moving from one farm to the next, eating and lodging in exchange for labor. Zoe taught Rosie how to push a gigantic broom along the concrete floor of the barn and hose thousands of gallons of water onto cow shit until it broke down and disappeared through the metal grates. When they were done with the cows, they moved on to the goats, who needed to be milked. Zoe showed Rosie how to pull the milk from their long, warm, velvety teats. They buried potatoes, spread hay, and led newborn calves to the rubber nipples of milk buckets. The grueling work had been worth it for the calm nights, which were crowded with stars, and when the cows settled in for the evening, their bells clanged gently. Before bed they ate fresh ricotta with honey. In the mornings they dipped mugs into a metal basin of fresh cream and added espresso. The nights were freezing, and sometimes Rosie found herself in Zoe’s arms. One night, Zoe turned in her sleep to face Rosie, their noses almost touching. Rosie was electrified with desire but too paralyzed to do anything about it, so she lay still, her pulse thrashing. The landscape was mysterious and dramatic; some days they woke up to a wall of fog. Other mornings, snow, after a day of thick heat. And then one morning Zoe announced she was leaving in the afternoon for another farm, somewhere in Patagonia, to either hunt or tame wild cattle. And Rosie, meanwhile, would be heading back to NYU.

She had been so hungry for that feeling of wonder that she convinced Jordan to return to the Alps for their honeymoon. She wanted him to feel the awe too, and for him to see the part of her that had traveled to a remote Italian farm on a whim. But the farm no longer existed, so they settled on a nearby town called Cogne, in the Aosta Valley. To Rosie’s disappointment, Cogne was jammed with wealthy, horribly dressed tourists. Jordan’s mother had surprised them by booking them a luxury suite at a boutique hotel. It was the nicest hotel room Rosie had ever stayed in, but she missed the farm’s bunkhouse, which smelled like cows. Instead of dipping their mugs into fresh cream each morning, she and Jordan drank overpriced cappuccinos, their view of the mountains obscured by tourist shops.

She moved through her sun salutations, repeating the mantra wild and precious, pausing at one point to plug in her laptop, which threatened to shut down.

That night, while she and Jordan lay in bed, she opened Instagram, dreading work the next day. She started scrolling through posts from upstate homebuilders and farmers. The algorithm led her to an account run by a farmer who posted the daily joys and struggles of raising sheep in the Catskill Mountains. Gigantic, fluffy, stoic dogs fended off coyotes. Twin lambs were born daily. Some struggled to gain weight, but they were cared for tirelessly by their mothers. Life on the farm was dictated by biological necessity and natural beauty, according to the captions. The mountains were strewn with fog. This was when she saw it: a photograph of a cast-iron vegetable peeler. Its matte black body was curved like a wishbone, the ends joined at the top by a sharp handmade blade. Entranced, she swiped through a carousel of images: the peeler in the palm of a strong, hardworking hand, each vein visible; the peeler creating a delicate ribbon from a carrot whose lateral roots were still attached; the peeler resting on a butcher block beside a wooden salad bowl, while many beautiful people gestured toward the food; a gentle-looking man with a beard, flannel shirt, and rippling forearms placing the peeler into a handwoven picnic basket; and finally, the image that made her realize she was looking at an advertisement: the peeler hanging from a shaker peg rail, its curves fully articulated like a ballerina’s pointe shoe.

She scrolled back to the man with the big forearms, which offered the best view of the peeler, and zoomed. But the tranquility she felt was interrupted by a stream of dirt bikes tearing down Flatbush Avenue. Their mufflers popped and screamed. She left her phone on the bed and shoved the window closed. “Why?” she said plaintively.

Turning around, she saw Jordan looking at her phone. “Is this a lumberjack?” he said.

Rosie got back into bed and took her phone from him. “Maybe.”

“Are you into that?”

“Into?”

“Yeah,” Jordan said. “You know, like, into.” He used two fingers to zoom in on the bearded man’s face. “Are you into this guy?”

Rosie laughed. “What if I am?” She had been more interested in the peeler than the man holding it, but now she considered him.

“I could probably have a beard like that in a few years. Can you wait that long?”

Jordan never seemed to get jealous in a serious way, and Rosie liked that about him. He didn’t mind hearing about her ex-boyfriends, and he was unbothered by the stories she told him about men hitting on her while she canvassed. She turned to him. “That reminds me. Alice said the other day that you have big-dick energy.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s, like, a particular kind of swagger you have when you have a big dick and everyone can tell.”

“And I have it?”

“According to Alice.”

Jordan played up his outrage. “What about according to you?”

Rosie laughed. “Yeah,” she said. “I do think so.”

“So it’s like self-confidence? Because I think I’m a completely average size. Like six inches? I’ve never measured.”

“This is exactly what I’m talking about. It’s not about literal size; it’s about how you carry yourself. You’re cool with yourself. It’s hot.”

“Yeah? Honestly, I wouldn’t want to be any bigger.” He reached over and moved his hand up Rosie’s thigh. She set down her phone on the side table. His lips were warm against her neck. “Are you on the pill?” he said. He knew Rosie was on the pill. She took her cue to play out his fantasy—one in which they had no protection but threw caution to the wind, the heat of the moment too powerful to ignore. “No,” she said. “We have to be really careful.”

“I’ll try,” Jordan said, unbuttoning his shirt. “I can’t make any promises.”

Rosie lifted her tank top over her head, and Jordan cupped her breasts, bringing his mouth beneath her jaw. Rosie thought of new ways to fuel Jordan’s fantasy, which she did not share, though she liked that she could turn him on so easily. “Should I run out and get a condom? I really don’t want to—”

“No, no,” he said. “Let’s just—”

She felt everything at once—his weight on her, his lips, the pressure of him inside her. His stubble scratched against her neck. She liked that. She felt completely pliable. Then came the image of Jordan holding the ax; she pictured him splitting wood until he became so overheated that he had to pull his smudged T-shirt over his head. Her chin trembled. She could see that he was close now too, and attended to his fantasy. “Pull out,” she whispered.

“I know I should...”

“You’re going to get me pregnant. We can’t—”

“Admit you want it,” Jordan said.

“I want it,” Rosie agreed, pulling him against her.

He got up quickly afterward and made his way into the bathroom while Rosie lay in bed, twirling a lock of her hair. Earlier in their relationship, the real-life consequences of an unplanned pregnancy were clear. But now that they were married, Rosie knew she should invent new stakes to keep the danger alive. Maybe she should play the part of a one-night stand. Or a lusty colleague on a business trip. It was no secret that Jordan was ready to have a baby. After they got engaged, he’d told her that all she needed to do was say the word. Rosie could feel the ambient pressure of his desire intensifying as the days passed. He was suddenly interested in how old his co-workers’ wives had been when they’d had their first babies. He reached for her hand whenever they walked past a playground. Since the wedding, she’d been bracing herself for his suggestion that she go off the pill, and she politely tolerated his desire for her to be excited by any young child that crossed their line of sight.

He dropped back into bed and wrapped an arm around her. She reached behind her and touched his face.

“Good for you?” he asked.

“It’s always good,” Rosie said. This was true, even if her own fantasy—that Jordan, a lumberjack, had his way with her in the woods—was never the one they enacted.

“Hey, family friend,” Jordan said sleepily. “Turn off the lights.”

It was dawn when Rosie woke again. Her mouth was dry. She would have to be out the door a few hours later for her shift. She filled a glass of water at the kitchen sink and couldn’t resist checking on the sourdough that was midway through its rise on the kitchen counter. In the dim, fuzzy light, she found the humidity sensor Jordan had bought for her birthday. Seventy percent. Perfect. She lifted the cloth. It was beautiful, like a moon. She pressed her finger into the dough and the dough bounced back, as if it were performing for her.

Back in bed, she opened her phone. Instagram showed her exactly what she wanted to see: the peeler in the middle of an elegant dinner table. It was a barn dinner, the doors open wide to the mountains. A group of friends ate vegetables they’d raised from seed and harvested that day. They were a tightly knit, chosen family. They were happy, purposeful, and satisfied. It was a Japanese company, and Rosie wasn’t sure how much the peeler cost in US dollars, but she didn’t care; she would pay anything.