The New Order

by Karen E. Bender

  There is the sound of a crow, in the darkness, cawing.

  None of these mothers talked about him before the election. No one put bumper stickers on their cars. Everyone here was very quiet about it. But you suspected. And you know who voted for whom from reports from the children, who listen to everything.

  These are good mothers. You think of all of the ordinary activities you have done with these mothers over the years. All the playgrounds you have visited with them, all the hallways you sat in as you waited for dance classes to end, all the teachers you complained about, all the girls sleeping over at one house or another, the caramelness between mothers, the warmth connecting you and them as all of you tried to figure out how to be good mothers.

  The car doors start to open.

  Their children jump out first, just visible in the darkness, carrying their rolled-up sleeping bags to pack on the bus. Their children are eager for an adventure; their innocence makes them seem sugary, candied. They do not know how the world has changed. Then the mothers step out, slamming the car doors. First, the shadows of their bodies, opening the backs of the cars, lifting out duffel bags. You can’t quite tell who is who in the darkness. The headlights beam bright swaths of light that make it hard, at first, to see their faces.

  You are very still, watching. Other cars whisk by on the road, traveling somewhere. The moon is a hard bright nickel in the sky.

  The mothers begin to speak. Their voices ring in the chill air.

  How are you?

  Are they ready?

  She couldn’t sleep last night.

  So excited.

  How many granola bars did you bring?

  Did you bring raincoats?

  The night is silvery with mist. A couple of mothers walk toward you, smiling. Their footsteps crunch on the asphalt. It is not a new sound, though every sound now feels violent against the air. One mother wears a red velour sweatshirt. Another wears a puffy jacket and is rubbing her hands together in the cold. They walk through the world as though it is still the world. Their innocence is a sort of violence and makes you want to look away. Their feet touch the ground; their faces become visible as they get closer. You look at them in disbelief. Then they are standing beside you.

  Is she excited for the trip?

  I didn’t know what to pack.

  Do you think they’ll be cold?

  I packed extra socks so they won’t be cold.

  Do you think they’ll sleep? I don’t think I’ll sleep!

  We can ask the teacher to make them call us.

  Do you think they have Benadryl in the first-aid kit? I brought Benadryl for the first-aid kit.

  They stand in the darkness, their children climbing onto the bus. The mothers are afraid, but for the wrong thing. Everyone stands together. You see their breath flash, white, into the air. You see one unzip her child’s backpack to check that the water bottle is inside. You see another rummage through her purse to find one more granola bar. You watch them talk, waiting for a sign that will tell you why they did what they did. You watch their hands, the way they cut through space carelessly, you hear them laugh. You listen to their laughter; it seems like it is coming from far away, from another nation. But, still, they laugh. You watch their eyes and their faces and they are just eyes and faces.

  They resemble the mothers they had been, and laugh and touch one another gently on the arm, and they voted for him.

  They look exactly the same.

  That is why you cannot forgive them.

  Mrs. America

  The election was close and she wanted to win, she wanted to win, and now, in the limo, there was the green scent of the campaign advisors’ aftershave—the sultry, ruined odor of gangsters—and now, also the sour odor of fear. The TV screen, the bright square, droning constantly, in the black vinyl seat. The men, only men, taking the constant pulse of her popularity—shouting out, at random moments, the progress: “Two points up in Bladen County!” or “Spike in New Brunswick!” The win seemed a distant, abstract goal, but they all agreed they could reach it, and that her win of the seat in North Carolina would allow their party to take control of the Senate, the nation. They all agreed: this was good. The limo was where she lived now, more than anywhere, as she was driven from one church or banquet hall or multipurpose room to another, where she stepped out of the dim car to the sunlight, and to sudden, shocking applause.

  She had never ridden in a limo before this but she was becoming accustomed to it, the unnaturally silent ride over the highways, the sounds of everyday life existing in a distant realm—they were not necessary here. The constant driving, the frantic, unknown schedules, elicited in her a sensation—not passivity, which was not her state, but more a sense that her future did not belong to her. The consultants claimed to understand everything about her appeal, and for months now, since they decided that the people were calling for her, they wanted someone like her to represent them. She stood in front of church groups and told audiences that she had been called to this, that Jesus had called her to this role, which felt special enough; but more, she loved the fact that the campaign staff had confirmed her glorious suspicion: that she was destined to be a senator, that someone had seen something significant in her.

  There was one person in the way of her triumph. Mr. Massoud, the thin-shouldered accountant, a state senator from Cary—a man whose parents came here from Beirut, who had caramel skin and black hair. Somehow, he was drawing larger crowds than she was now.

  “He’s ahead,” said Peyton, the gloomy number cruncher from DC, who always gave the impression of being damp. “Two points in Chapel Hill, five around Asheville. Three in Durham. He could win.”

  “Neck and neck in New Hanover County,” said Harris, a wriggly man who never seemed to wear a seatbelt and was usually shuffling wildly through thick, mysterious files, looking for answers. “What can we throw at him? Affairs, money-laundering, what?”

  They gazed at the photo on their phones—Mr. Massoud, his arms stretched around his wife, two daughters, and a son.

  He was thin, the sharp thinness of someone who strained, constantly, toward dreary logic. She had been surprised when she met him in person, his skin darker than in his campaign photos, which had apparently been doctored so that he appeared lighter. He did not have the dizzyingly bright smiles of the white Southern men who usually ran for these positions, but a more contained expression, not a smile, which unnerved her—where was the smile? What did people think when he did not smile?—but a set gaze into the horizon, as though he believed that he was supposed to win.

  “Would you trust this guy flying a plane?” said Harris, gleefully. “No. Not in Bladen County. So would you trust him with our government?”

  “Keep going.”

  “Where was he born? Beirut?”

  “No, Raleigh. His parents had a restaurant there.”

  They sat around, disappointed.

  “I was in Beirut once,” said Harris, who sometimes seemed wistful. “A conference. Great beaches—”

  “Why the hell would they move from Beirut to Raleigh?”

  “He’s going to announce a fatwa.”

  “The guy’s not Muslim. He belongs to First Presbyterian. His father went on missions back to the Middle East.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Isn’t helping us in this case.”

  “Help us out, Mrs. America,” said Harris. “Remember what he said. At the debates. Backstage.”

  She was, they said, America. She watched the television commercial they broadcast about her, which showed her walking through a pine forest, hands thrust into the pockets of a denim jacket, her face turned up to the light filtering through the trees’ long arms. The editing made her appear to be a great leader. It confirmed a private idea she had about herself, a sense of her immense goodness. Finally, others understood it too. Other times, she stared at the ad, shocked to see herself wandering through the forest, and wondered if she won if she woul
d feel like the woman in the advertisement. If she won, she wondered if she would be freed, lifted off the bruised surface of human life, if she would herself be somehow godlike, if she would be able to walk on air.

  Now as she was driven through the state, she got texts from the advisors, texts from her mother, and texts from the children. Now ages seventeen, thirteen, ten, eight. How did she raise four children while doing all of this? And seeming so down-to-earth? People asked her. How.

  “Casseroles!” was what they told her to say. The crowd always laughed. But she was aware of the dragon dankness in their breath. How did she stand up on that stage in those tailored shirts, how did she manage to climb out of the fear and drudgery that boxed them all in? Because she did. There was the thrill of triumph as she stood over them, their damp fingers gripping the stage as though they were holding on to the edge of a ship.

  She could (if she was that sort of person) step on them.

  How.

  She did not tell the audience about the “how”—they could not know how she resembled them. She did not tell them about the mornings inside the rental they moved to after the office supply business failed, after they had gone bankrupt. The smell in the kitchen of Pop-Tarts, of fear. Her mother, after her father left, moved into Carol’s house, mourning her old life, yes, at first unable to pour her own coffee or make her bed; her son Adam, then five, born with Down’s and nicknamed Angel, bringing bags of Skittles to school to hand to the other students so they would not run away from him; her daughter, Mary Grace, thirteen, running out the door in crop tops, already in a race with her friends to reveal the most skin, Harrison and Eli engineering physical battles over the mere fact that the other existed. Carol microwaved rubbery waffles for them and fled. Carol headed out to her job as a manager at Home Depot, working for the same company that destroyed them, her husband, Ted, waking up in the morning, making the calls that weren’t answered, and turning for solace to local paintball leagues, large men, former military, who darted behind large vinyl beanbags clutching plastic armament, shooting paint at each other, shouting, and then staggering off the dusty field, exhausted by the fact that they had stumbled off the fake battlefield alive.

  The limo floated past gray fields that grew sweet potatoes, towns scattered around Walmarts, the boxy outlet stores near Wilson, the broken barns on worn-out farms, the furry green stands of pine, blue mist in the mountains.

  When she looked out the window, she sometimes thought of how she had risen to this new stature. It began three years ago—sitting in Adam’s kindergarten, where the children shunned him, and he asked a child to pray with him, and the teacher smiled and said, “No prayer allowed here.” That was what she said. Carol got a bike lock from her car and chained herself to the school fence, declaring she would remain there until prayer was permitted. She made the local news and rose on the tide of that to City Council, to county commissioner; the meetings became crowded as citizens, both for and against, came to voice their concerns. She wanted to stomp on them all, to crush them flat with her foot, and thus she wanted this: she wanted prayer in schools and marriage only between a man and a woman and life for unborn babies. She loved listening to her voice when she made these proclamations, and the arguments involving God were a relief, truly, for she did not have to remember facts. No one could argue with God.

  So she stood onstage, in the suits they bought for her—for the fund-raisers, the dinners in dark rooms with low-lit chandeliers, the nice donors. She shook so many hands. The suits were composed of a material she had never worn before, a silk blend that was so smooth it seemed she was wearing sheets of light.

  During the debates, she sometimes looked at Mr. Massoud across the stage and wondered what he, too, was not saying about his family. Mr. Massoud spoke of his father and his waking up at five a.m. to prepare food for his restaurant, the Southern Oasis, in Raleigh. He spoke of the public universities that he attended. He said he was America.

  But the women whose hands she grasped, the women who rushed to the podium after she spoke—they thought she was America. There was a tide of them now, lining up—busloads of housewives from Pender, from Bladen County. The campaign organized the buses, ordered cupcakes from Walmart, which she never ate, but the voters did. Cupcakes iced with the letter C. The women all resembled her own mother, and smelled like her—hands with the odor of cookie dough hand sanitizer. She wiped her own hands off with Purell thoroughly after.

  Carol did not tell them that three years ago, her father had driven off with one suitcase, two of his best suits, and the coffeemaker. He sent a postcard that he was happy working at a car dealership in Thousand Oaks, and had found his true love with a junior assistant there.

  After her father drove off, finally, her mother collapsed. One afternoon, Carol came by her house and found her in the dark. Her mother was sitting on the floor of her bedroom. In her stillness, the position of her legs, she looked like an enormous doll. Her mother’s unhappiness was like a coffin sealing them in. “Stand up,” Carol said. She touched her mother’s arm; she could feel the allure of that failure, the desire to crawl into her mother’s clothes; she had a premonition of her own death, of absolute failure inside her cells. She could not bear this. She could not. This was how she would ensure her difference from that: she would win.

  Carol sat in the backseat of the limo, skimming facts the campaign managers thought she should know. Her managers kept close track of her schedule, and she was not always aware of where they were taking her. The campaign scheduled a stop at a local mall. As the limo slowed, she looked out the tinted windows to see the entrance of the mall, and saw her daughter with some other teenagers. They stood at the curb by a wrinkled, dull Honda. They were large as horses, and their hair was as bright as Easter eggs—one girl’s hair was dyed magenta and another had hair that was turquoise blue. One of the boys had a ring in his nose like a bull. She saw the boy/bull put his hand on Mary Grace’s shoulder. They were about to get into the car.

  “Hold on,” she told the driver.

  Carol set down the file she was studying—polls that affirmed voters’ desire for her to be tough on crime and to support unregulated gun ownership—and stepped out of the car. She hesitated and walked, crisply, in her gleaming fund-raiser pumps, to the group of young people on the sidewalk. Mary Grace’s face reddened. Carol was not sure how to approach them now, as a candidate for national office, so she held out her hand.

  “I’m Mary Grace’s mother.” She paused and added, “I’m running for Senate.”

  The group froze.

  “Hello, ma’am,” said the boy who resembled the bull.

  “Let’s go!” said Mary Grace.

  They were staring at her, and not with awe.

  “Where are you going?” asked Carol.

  “To a movie,” said one, and the others softly laughed.

  “A movie of me,” the one with the turquoise hair said, in a somewhat chilling way.

  “Can we just go,” said Mary Grace.

  The bull-boy took a small step toward her. “Mrs. Forrest,” said the bull-boy, crossing his arms demurely, but looking pained. “I don’t want to pray in school.”

  “Jackson, like you do anything in school,” a girl crowed.

  “Not to no one,” he said, and, horrifyingly, winked at her.

  The boy slipped into the car with the others and it zoomed away. Carol watched it turn the corner. Why had her daughter looked at her as though she were an ant? Why were the teenagers so tall? The inside of her palms felt like ice. She had the sense that the car was running over her, crushing her bones, even as it was simply heading out of the parking lot. She wanted to duck back into the limo, for she just wanted to sit there, in darkness, but she sensed some of the other shoppers staring at it. They recognized her, expecting a smile. Expecting her. Peyton stood beside her, holding a clipboard.

  “What was that?” asked Peyton.

  “Children,” she said.

  When
Carol returned home from the trail, she knocked on the door of her daughter’s room. The door was always locked. She stood for a few minutes, waiting for the girl to answer. It felt like begging. Whenever Carol asked her anything, her daughter took it as an affront. Even if Carol asked in a nice way. Who were these friends? What was she doing in her room? Why did that boy have a ring in his nose? The questions were like a drill sliding off a smooth slab of granite. She could always detect the girl’s infant face lurking inside her current features, which seemed a terrible, relentless joke.

  Mary Grace was skilled at not answering questions, was deft at running out of the house when Carol pressed her, saying, Fine. Later. The debates became sharp, sometimes, Massoud’s voice ringing through the auditoriums, restating her comments in ways that were wrong, wrong, but she never trembled when she debated him. Gripping the lectern in an auditorium, she never trembled as she did when Mary Grace looked at her with her large blue eyes and ran away from her.

  A few days later, there was a text from her mother:

  Trouble with Mary Grace. Come home.

  Carol grabbed hold of the door handle of the limo and yanked it.

  “What are you doing?” asked Harris.

  “Something happened,” she said.

  “Two hundred women, eager to donate, are at the Women of Fayetteville luncheon . . .” Peyton quickly sat up.

  She was a desired commodity now, which meant that for a brief moment, she had power.

  “I’ll go back later. Drive me home.”