The New Order

by Karen E. Bender

They dropped her off at her home, which was still standing, walls, shrubbery intact. Her daughter was walking quickly, breathless, behind Carol’s mother. She wanted something. What was her mother going to show her? A knife? No. A condom? No. A phone. Mary Grace behind her, face red, trying to grab it back.

  “What is going—” Carol started.

  “God have mercy,” said her mother.

  She pressed Mary Grace’s phone into Carol’s hand. There was her daughter’s Twitter feed.

  Will anyone talk to me? #boredoutmymind #lonelygirl

  “Read the next,” said her mother.

  After the shower #nakedcutie #it’scometothis #givemea towelordon’t

  There was her daughter, gleaming from the shower. There were her daughter’s breasts, round, the nipples, gleaming from the shower. Not her face; she had cropped that out.

  Three hundred retweets, 789 likes.

  Carol’s throat tightened, as though she were drowning.

  “Jackson said it was cute so I said he could retweet me.”

  The phone radiated heat in her palm.

  “Help!” Carol yelled. Fingers shaking, she deleted the tweet, the account. The Twitter handle was @MG2587, which sounded, she hoped, like anyone. She hoped the breasts could not be traced to Mary Grace. Was the offending tweet gone now? Where was it? She stood, pressing keys on the phone, trying to think.

  “I’m popular!” said Mary Grace, astonishingly upbeat. “Three hundred retweets!”

  Carol stared at her. “What?” she asked.

  Mary Grace shrugged.

  “You care about how many votes,” she said.

  “That is different,” she said. “That is for the future of the United States.” She paused. “Who told you to do this?”

  “A lot of people do it.” She paused. “Give me my phone.”

  “No,” Carol said.

  “It’s my phone!”

  “Nope, mine now.” She gripped the phone; it made a soft, living sound in her palm, like a cow.

  “I need it! People know me now—”

  “Know you? As what? What about your reputation? Your future, Mary Grace? Do you think about that?”

  Mary Grace was staring at her, unblinking.

  “Do you ever think of me?” Carol asked.

  “Your future isn’t mine,” said Mary Grace, crisply. “You made us move and you made me go to this stupid-ass school—”

  “It wasn’t me—”

  “Where everyone knows each other and now—” Mary Grace stood, lifting her chin, trembling. “Now they know me,” said Mary Grace, and ran out the front door.

  Carol rushed out to follow her. The street was empty. The limo was gone. Mary Grace was running. Carol wanted to call after her, but she did not want her neighbors to hear her sad, hoarse voice in the air. Her throat burned. The lawn was brittle, dying under her feet.

  She texted Ted.

  Hi hon. MG tweeted naked photos of her body. 300 people retweeted.

  There was no response for seventeen minutes, then

  Is this a joke?

  No. I deleted them!

  Ur joking.

  Ted. Its under control

  Shit.

  They’re gone. I think. I pressd delet. I took her phone away

  Where r they now

  Idk

  Did you delet

  I deleted and deleted

  lll smack her ass.

  Wait. I’m in a campaign.

  The phone was silent for a few minutes.

  Nothing happened he texted.

  What?

  She didnt tweet it stop.

  Ted?

  Stop making this crap up shes good

  What

  Stop it stop it stop

  Her head hurt. Perhaps he was right. It was not true! There were no naked tweeted photos! But she had seen them. She had seen those breasts on that tiny screen. Now perhaps thousands had seen her child’s breasts. What did this do to a person? A candidate? The mere thought of these strangers looking at Mary Grace in this way made Carol feel as though she could feel the cold through her shoes on the sidewalk.

  Ted

  Ted

  She gripped the phone, her hand trembling, and called him. But he had turned off his phone.

  In the limo that afternoon, she watched the cars through the dark glass. She often wondered who was inside of them, where they were going, and also, of course, what the drivers and passengers thought of her. But now, as the limo passed them, she had a new impulse—to duck. Someone was going to attack her. This idea was so clear and logical it was as though she recognized herself in a mirror. Someone was going to attack her. She was not afraid when she had this idea; instead, she felt, oddly, a pure and comforting relief. Her fear, somehow, made her safe. Her fear felt logical—it soothed her. She was afraid of the others in the cars around her, the others whom she could not see. Some drivers in these cars would roll down the windows and start shooting at her, some of them would kidnap her children, some of them would sleep with her husband; her mouth was dry as the limo shot into the light draining from the world.

  She did not tell the advisors about the naked tweets. She tapped her phone, searching for them on the netherworlds of the Internet, tried to find them on Twitter, but they had fled to some other unreachable realm. If she searched under #nakedshower (shielding her phone carefully with her hand, obviously, so the advisors wouldn’t see), there were numerous other teens, an astonishing number, but not, thank god, Mary Grace. She saw the expanse of naked teens and she began to shake, the sheer volume of nakedness and the hands grabbing and retweeting, as though they were touching Mary Grace, they were pushing Angel away from them on the playground, they were the world grabbing at her children, grabbing at her, throwing all of them away.

  The advisors, for all their constant phone gazing, didn’t know. Their ignorance was both a relief and somehow troubling. Carol waited for the advisors to know, for this journey to end. The road stretched on, flat, to nowhere, to shame that was more terrifying than death. She wanted to win, she wanted to win.

  She turned off her phone.

  Peyton looked at her.

  “Massoud’s ahead in your county,” he said. “Help us.”

  She closed her eyes.

  “He said he sleeps with dogs,” Carol said.

  He had said this at a debate, a light, offhand comment. “In our house, we sleep with our dog.” What question had he been responding to? He had probably been advised to say something personal, light, to be warmer. She knew what he had really meant—that the dog slept at the foot of his bed. Or even in his bed, as theirs did.

  She saw them look at each other.

  “I don’t know,” said Harris, rubbing his large bald head, “will they get it?”

  “It’s true,” she said, sitting up, and finally, she thought, this would win it. She wanted to slap them, finally, to rouse them to action, whatever it took, for this felt correct, and they were looking at her, the aides, with, she thought, a new and deeper respect.

  “It’ll work,” Peyton said.

  The crowds at her feet, the lights in her eyes, the roar of the cheering.

  A photo that Ted texted to the family: his team, atop a manufactured hill, guns lifted, all shouting. They were in a field in Jacksonville. They had won something.

  What?

  Second place Statewide Tournament!

  Why not first?

  He did not answer this text. She was just asking.

  Ted came home tired from the tournament the next day. He held his gun tenderly. His arm was covered in red welts.

  “What happened?” she asked, touching it; he flinched.

  “Surprise attack,” he said. “Didn’t see them coming.”

  “Who,” she said.

  He looked away.

  The rest of his skin was paler, dim. He stood up, stretched, and she could not look at the welts, red and raised. Why
had he not been able to move faster? She was engulfed by a deep embarrassment by that, by her own slide toward age, by the sense they were hurtling, with great speed, toward nothing.

  “Don’t worry, hon,” she said, trying to sound upbeat, “I’m going to win.”

  The advisors were eager for her to bring up the comment about the dogs. Get it into the airspace! Now! She was attending another luncheon. She watched him, Mr. Massoud, during the Q and A. He was on target that day, leaning into those facts, the crowd cheering his responses more than hers; she heard the roar of applause, for him. That enthusiasm washed over her, a chill tide. The TV camera lights made the room look hazy, not quite real.

  “Character is important in a candidate for Senate. What do you think of your opponent’s moral character?”

  “Oh, Mr. Massoud. I wish him well. Certainly we don’t agree on many issues. Though I did hear,” she said. She blinked and peered into the camera’s starlight. “I did hear that he sleeps with his dog.”

  Some light laughter. She paused.

  “I couldn’t quite believe it. He said he, well, sleeps with his dog,” she said again, and this time she added the slight outraged emphasis on sleep so that they would know that she did not, in fact, mean sleep. This time the laughter lifted, hesitantly, then stopped.

  “No more questions!” said Harris, clapping. “Let’s hear it for Carol. Our next senator in the great state of North Carolina.”

  He grasped her by the elbow. “Beautiful,” he whispered. Inside the limo, there were high fives. She said he slept with dogs. Her eyelids felt like rubber; she blinked. This was what he had said. She had thought nothing when he first said it. But she found herself open to the suspicion she had introduced. This would work. Why could it not be true? She heard their laughter; they had all agreed on something. She craved that agreement, that affirmation that she and the audience were alike. She felt that a part unknown to her had been liberated. She wanted to weep with relief at escaping an unnamed prison. She would never, like her mother, sit alone in the darkness. She would stride through the world and feel the bushes crunch under her feet.

  In the limo, they monitored the news. The regional news outlets picked up her comments with glee, running the video of her saying it that night. The national news grabbed it, too, running it on TV and online. She was trending on Twitter, with different hashtags: #conservativelies, #tellitlikeitis, #whatdoesCarolsleepwith, #fansofCarol, #thedogsvote, #Carolisabitch, #Forrest2016. She had become a ghost, a joke; she could not keep track of the comments about her, the terrible cartoons that equated her with a dog, the memes that made her so ugly, but she was all anyone was talking about, and she hovered over the nation like something else—a cloud.

  Then she was home.

  When Carol walked into her house, she wondered if her presence on national television would make her family treat her in a new way. She stepped into the living room and waited. No one came to greet her. She opened the door to see her mother hunched in front of the television, the cool light blazing on her face. Her mother did not even notice Carol in the room; she was entranced, staring at the TV, watching her there instead.

  Carol waited. “Hello,” she said.

  “Here you are,” her mother said, blinking.

  Then Carol saw her daughter coming toward her. Her blonde hair now cut short, in a wedge shape, a platinum color found nowhere on earth but on furious young people’s heads.

  “What happened to your hair?”

  “Tanya helped me. Isn’t it cool?”

  Carol reached forward to touch it; Mary Grace stood still. Her hair was dry, the consistency of a broom.

  “You ruined your hair,” said Carol.

  Mary Grace recoiled. “Why don’t you just say it looks nice!” she said.

  “I’m telling you the truth,” said Carol, crisply.

  “Well,” said Mary Grace. “How nice.” Her gaze was sharp, as though she was trying to locate something under Carol’s skin. “I heard what you said about that man,” she said.

  “We are in a campaign,” said Carol.

  “Jackson said what you said about that guy was stupid,” said Mary Grace, haughtily. “Sick.”

  Mary Grace stood, very still, balancing on a piece of ice.

  “Jackson?” Carol said slowly. “With the ring in his nose? The one who didn’t want to pray?”

  “He’s in my bio class,” said Mary Grace.

  Carol was afraid of her daughter’s stare. “I am on national television,” said Carol.

  When her daughter looked at her, her face was heavy. “I know,” she said.

  What did Mary Grace know? Did she know of Carol’s troubled dreams, in which Jesus kissed her, a real kiss, as though they were married, and she woke up wanting more? Did she know of the times she texted Ted and it seemed he had vanished into the air? Did she know how some nights Carol could not sleep, wishing she could hold her children, and sometimes they did not enter her mind at all? Or did she know the dream in which Carol was lying on a highway, unable to scream, as a truck carrying baskets of lemons rolled over her with its enormous tires, crushing every bone? What did she know? This comment stuck in her mind as the limo floated across the state. The team picked Carol up the next morning, the inside of the limo sugary and warm with the scent of cinnamon buns. The advisors erupted into shouts as the advisors looked at the polling results. “They love you in Duplin County. Damn, they love you in Durham, no shit!”

  That was the power of excitement—it sealed you in. Carol thought about what her daughter had said. Usually this thought fluttered outside of the limo, a distant, troublesome idea. Sometimes she recalled her daughter’s bright, hard gaze. It was as if her daughter disliked the very sight of her, and understood something about her that was not good. When Carol had this thought, her skin started to burn. It was a low, crackling burning, right beneath the surface, and she wanted it to go away. She feared it might grow, it might consume her—she wanted it to stop.

  What made the burning stop was this: the advisors’ joyful cries when the polls went up. The excitement was better; it was solid, it was a grand, windowless mansion with silver walls; it made them all light and airy and they could fly and it sealed everything else out. She stared at the charts on the phones. Forrest: 49 percent, Massoud: 47 percent, 4 percent undecided. Forrest: 50 percent, Massoud: 48 percent, 2 percent undecided.

  At the next debate, Mr. Massoud approached her before they went onstage. They usually shook hands at the beginning of the debate and said something disparaging about the junk food backstage. This time he walked past the snack table, past the advisors, right to her.

  “Carol,” he said. He usually called her “County Commissioner Forrest”—which felt both courteous and demeaning. He looked particularly trim that evening, clad in a new navy suit, his glossy black hair parted on the side; he looked a bit handsome, a perception that she found alarming.

  “Retract the lie,” he asked.

  He was standing very straight, his arms crossed against his chest, looking at her with a cool paternal gaze; she resented that.

  “You did say you slept with your dog,” she said.

  “You let them believe this meant something else.” He stepped back. “Do you even understand what you said, Ms. Forrest?”

  “Don’t speak to me that way,” she said.

  “A boy threw a can at my daughter when she was walking to school,” he said. “He barked at her.”

  She saw, in the violet shadows under his eyes, that he had not been sleeping. She had spent many nights not sleeping either, she thought. The same thing happened to her son, she wanted to tell him, for a different reason.

  “What would you say to my child, Carol?” he asked, his voice steelier. “After the lie you told about her father?”

  She looked away from him, at the chairs for the audience.

  “I would tell her she is not a dog,” she said.

  That night when she opened the
door, she heard Ted and Mary Grace talking in the living room. Mary Grace was laughing, a sound she had not heard in some time. Ted looked up when Carol walked in. Mary Grace was clutching something; her fingers closed over it. A phone.

  “She needed a new phone,” he said. “One of my buddies on the team gave it to me cheap—”

  Carol watched Mary Grace gaze lovingly at the screen.

  “Come here,” Carol said, gesturing to Ted. They went into the kitchen.

  “What did you do?” she whispered.

  “I can’t see my girl crying—”

  “For god’s sake. She tweeted naked photos. Of herself.”

  His face twitched. “Stop it,” he said. “Where are they? Show me.”

  She looked at her own phone; she did not know where to begin searching for the pictures.

  “They were here,” she said, frightened. “They were here—”

  “I don’t see them,” he whispered.

  She stared at him. His eyes were like a baby’s, glazed and blue.

  “Daddy,” Mary Grace called from the other room, “thank you.”

  Ted nodded; he looked happy to be appreciated.

  “You’re welcome,” he said, staring right at Carol.

  With all the campaigning, she and Ted had not slept together in some weeks, and that night, he wanted to. She was mad because of the phone, but went along. There was the weight of his body on hers, and he felt heavier, from being fired upon or muscle or sadness, and he held her buttocks and moved into her swiftly, hard, as though he were trying to win an argument with someone else. Suddenly, she thought of Mr. Massoud, the way he gripped the lectern and spoke to the audience, to her, and she felt, with shame, that Mr. Massoud knew her better than anyone, that he listened to her more closely and with more respect, and she wanted to be up there again, speaking to him, convincing the audience that she was America. She closed her eyes but there was Mr. Massoud’s face, still, looking at her with his dark eyes, waiting for her to rebuff his statement, and she cried out, for she did not know what to say to him, how to answer anyone, as her husband rolled off her, while, in her own room, asleep, Mary Grace clutched the phone to her chest.