That day another one of Laurie’s friends had gone crazy. This made three in the last two years which to Laurie seemed like a lot.

She had been taking a walk around the convent near her home, drawing stunted comfort from its roughhewn statuary (St Francis, lambs, white plaster Mary everywhere) and brooding on the ‘loneliness epidemic’ plus her marriage when Eileen’s text pinged in her pocket. Can you talk now? I need to talk.

Laurie was not Catholic; she was a retired English professor with chaotic and half-formed spiritual ideas, most of which came to her while she lay awake and terrified at 4 a.m. Still, the convent – spacious, enchantingly wooded, with multiple walking paths – was her place of respite in her new ‘forever home’, a decaying still-beautiful town that was mysterious and closed to her. She and her husband had moved there right before the pandemic, and they had made few friends. Eileen, a self-described rogue RN/pelvic-floor therapist whom they’d met at a yard party, was one of them. The woman had extra social allure because, in addition to being a nurse/pelvic-floor etc., she was an amateur actress who’d had a brief off-off-Broadway moment in NYC and who still did occasional community theater. And so Laurie pulled herself from her trance before beautiful decay to respond.

‘Hi hi hi!’ cried her new pal. ‘Are you alone? Can you talk for a sec? Something’s really going on with me! It’s not something I’d share with everybody. But I really need to talk about this and I feel like you’ll understand –’

‘Thank you,’ said Laurie.

‘– because of the situation in your marriage. Which is kind of like mine. Anyway, I’ve been having a thing with this guy. It’s, or rather it was mostly very heady, like, totally online – but it’s the most mind-blowing sex I’ve ever had. We met at a Zoom theater workshop he ran last year, he’s a director and a playwright and we had this incredible chemistry. After the workshop was over, he messaged me to say that he felt so struck by my intuitive understanding of character that he wondered if he could discuss and develop his work with me. We were texting every week, then every other day, it became very emotional, and we, we –’

The ribbon of her voice poured off its spool with alarming speed as she described vertiginous bonding on increasingly powerful erotic levels: Zoom workshop exercises that spontaneously exploded into chthonic sexual role playing, multi-layered virtual fucking that ended with her sobbing or dancing around her room to Stevie Nicks. Which was great, but then it got weird. He got her involved with an online site dedicated to dominance and submission and supervised her there in increasingly disturbing fantasies involving very young girls, role plays which were meant to be healing but –

‘Wait,’ said Laurie. ‘How did he supervise you?’

‘He, you know, texted me suggestions, blah blah. But before I say more, I need to ask, do you know something about this already?’ Emphatically, Laurie said she did not know about this! And so Eileen explained that ‘this’ was the director/playwright’s baroque revenge when Eileen started to say no, to assert the reality of her marriage. He had somehow hooked up with a board member and diva of the local community theater (‘I’m going to call her “Jen”’) who had also participated in his workshop. Eileen had intuited that something was going on because of the way Jen had begun to avoid her eyes in public; eventually she realized that the director had turned her erstwhile friend so totally against her that she had become a vicious enemy, not only talking shit all over town but also using multiple online personae to spread virtual crap too. In fact she and the director had found the time to create multiple false sites essentially portraying Eileen as a groomer, presenting the transformative role play as real-life sickness for all the world to see.

Laurie listened with oh-no-not-again dismay. A few months back a former colleague from the city (Cara) had shared a story of fantastical persecution in which she was being undermined in the English department by assholes who, newly empowered by the anti-DEI bloodbath, had spread rumors about her incompetence, hinting that she had only been hired to appease the old regime’s BS. Which unfortunately did not sound paranoid – until Cara expanded the story to declare that these people had not only blackballed her in the department, they had not only smeared her university-wide; they had done it on a national level where they were trying to make it impossible for her to publish. Hundreds of people were involved she said and it wasn’t only coming from anti-DEI pricks; she had no allies among her fellow queers because of some inconsequential thing she’d once put in an email about needing to be ‘a warrior’ on behalf of young girls who were ‘cutting their breasts off ’ in order to transition – a pure terror response to being female in Cara’s opinion. ‘I don’t even remember that email,’ one of her erstwhile allies had said when Cara confronted them. ‘I just don’t like you.’

‘And that was just the start,’ said Eileen. ‘There was this other woman on the dom/sub site, like, kind of famous in the theater world – older but still beautiful and incredibly seductive, I mean emotionally; we started messaging and I kind of fell in love with her. And he knew that, and so he went to use her as a weapon. He basically replaced me with her, except that they’re using the work I did with him – she’s basically stealing the characters I created with him, this rich, famous woman is stealing from me! After pretending to be my friend and even –’

Laurie turned off the main walkway and took a narrow path down into the landscaped convent grounds, past wood-cut Stations of the Cross nailed to a series of quietly triumphant trees leading to a stony rise; a stone female acolyte stood with face uplifted in joyful prayer before a stone crypt built into the earth, half hidden like a child’s secret. She seated herself on a bench, rested her phone on her thigh and gazed beyond the grounds at the gentle swells of wooded earth, subsiding toward a distant flash of river . . .

‘It’s just insane!’ cried Eileen. ‘But honestly I don’t care about the big star. Because she is evil and I think it’s going to all blow up on her. It’s just a matter of time. I’m more upset about Jen partly because she can do more immediate damage and also because I don’t think she’s really responsible for this. She isn’t that strong or that malicious and frankly – even though she’s the star of Brickbat Theater and a member of the board, she’s always seemed kind of lacking a center. Some people need to be at the center exactly because they lack a center. And he’s a total, I mean total dom. But he wouldn’t scare her because he comes on like a good Daddy – that’s how he gets in. Acting very protective, very moral, always asks permission, blah blah. I could see him totally controlling her mind. I think he is, actually. I can see it on her face. He’s making her do this.’

‘Wait,’ said Laurie. ‘How do you think he’s doing that?’

‘I can’t describe it! But I can sense it, you know what I mean? You must’ve seen relationships like that?’

‘No,’ said Laurie. ‘Not really. Not actual mind control.’

‘I forgot, you don’t really go online,’ said Eileen. ‘That’s a different zone. It’s a world of psyche, people are exchanging on an energetic level at high speed – boundary-dissolving happens quickly. That’s what makes it so exciting. And also dangerous. Things happen that wouldn’t happen in real life. I went places with this guy I’d never go with someone in real life. It alters you. It infiltrates you.’

Laurie remembered the time she’d first met Eileen at the yard party, how bright and big-spirited she was – artlessly so in her gauzy flower-print dress. She was youthful and bare-limbed in late middle-age, a natural redhead with an unstable voice and the voluble hands of a silent film star. They’d exchanged numbers and, days later, Laurie and her husband were traveling to the more upscale side of the river to attend a party hosted by Eileen and her husband on the spacious screened porch of their elegant A-frame house. It had been a charming candlelit evening. Eileen proved skilled at drawing people out and then linking them, orchestrating conversations in tandem with the esoteric movements of her long, nimble fingers, half hidden in her lap. The other guests were themselves relatively new to the area yet already involved in food banks and town hall meetings; they told stories of contested real estate, and who was vying for what, of local eccentrics nearly coming to blows over the fate of an old baseball field and, of course, the local theater. In the candlelight, shadows of aged trees stirred and silently signaled on the one bare wall; out the back window, a boat moved heavily down the river, linking this small social intimacy to the vast impersonal world. Laurie and her husband had been heartened to feel that they could find a home in this place.

As if she’d sensed the residual warmth of Laurie’s memory, Eileen’s tone shifted. ‘I realize this must sound crazy,’ she said convivially. ‘Do you think it sounds crazy?’

‘I don’t really know,’ said Laurie. And she didn’t. She thought of her old friend Sugar, a writer who had gotten a menacing dirty voicemail from a complete stranger (‘Your pussy stinks! You deserve to be kicked and punched! You’re a satan walking this earth and you deserve to die horribly!’), which Sugar thought she had summoned via an inner monologue with a dark ‘unintegrated part’ that her therapist was helping her work with. When Laurie had asked if she was afraid, Sugar had said no, not really. Because people ‘just do this now, they make death threats. It’s normal.’

Which was true. Politicians got death threats, lawyers and judges and jurors got death threats, people expressing opinions or making jokes online got death threats – even the president made death threats. And sometimes, it wasn’t just threats. People killed senators, judges, podcasters and schoolchildren; they killed their neighbors over lawn disputes and yard signs and unruly pets and facial expressions. Citizens were shot in the streets by masked men paid by the government. That part was new; people had always killed neighbors etc. But who knew, maybe even that would soon be normal.

‘So here’s an example of what I mean by mind control,’ said Eileen. ‘You’ll totally get this, basically everybody got this.’ And she proceeded to raise the topic of a months-old controversy about a revered, recently deceased writer (‘M’) who had been exposed as enabling the abuse of her young daughter, or ignoring it, or, on the other hand, as being the erotically helpless victim of the man who did it, depending on your point of view. People were flinging previously beloved books into the garbage or even flinging them into the street and then running over them until they were pulped. Other people were enraged at those people for judging, especially for judging the complex and actually sacred intersection of motherhood and erotic love, the place of ultimate instinctual blur. Other people thought only art should matter and that you should just keep reading the books regardless of your feelings which shouldn’t count.

‘It’s obvious that this man was controlling her mind to the point that she could not protect her daughter,’ said Eileen. ‘She was just so vulnerable to him. Which is why I think people are so furious at her. People are just so uncomfortable with vulnerability!’

‘That’s ridiculous!’ said Laurie. ‘She was a powerful woman, she wielded influence globally, she blew people’s minds!’

‘That’s exactly why people could not forgive her for being vulnerable. They hated it that this powerful lady genius cared about sex so much, that she was in thrall, that she actually admitted she needed sex to do her art – like, how dare a mom be like that? The abuse happened years before she found out about it, she couldn’t do anything at that point and she was old by then, if she had left him where could she get what she needed?’

‘Excuse me, that’s not vulnerable, that’s ruthless. I see no reason to believe he was making her do or not do anything she didn’t want. If you want to talk about vulnerable, I’d say the little girl was the one who –’

‘Yes. She was even more vulnerable. But he was the one who abused the child, not M. Really, it’s so sad, for everybody. And you’re right, young girls are always the ones who wind up paying the price.’

‘Actually, old women pay at least as much. And they don’t even look good doing it either.’

Eileen laughed, a bit hysterically.

‘I think people are furious at her because she was the rare old woman who didn’t pay a price,’ said Laurie. ‘She bested a beautiful young rival – that would be her daughter – and she kept hold of the sexy scumbag and got famous while the poor kid got shoved aside by everybody! She won!’

Eileen laughed a lot, hysterically.

Then they went back to the horrible director, the big star and the hapless treachery of ‘Jen’.

‘I feel sorry for her,’ she said. ‘But I think it’s time for me to defend myself. I’ve finally told Brickbat’s director what’s been going on, and I think he’s going to intervene.’

I really hope you didn’t actually do that, thought Laurie.

As they got off the phone, Eileen said, ‘I love you. I’m so glad I have you to talk to.’ Laurie said, ‘Me too.’ Then she put her phone in her pocket and thought Why are my friends crazy? What does that say about me? Why do my husband and I love each other but we have sex with other people?

She gazed at the flashing river, at a stand of trees under which sheltered Mary blessed a circle of beseeching children. It was undeniable: the whole world was crazy. But maybe these particular friends were particularly crazy because – like her – they’d never had children. Perhaps this explained why her marriage was weird? What would it have been like if they’d had kids? She didn’t want to go there, but it had become hard not to. All at once, hordes of important businesspeople, powerful politicians and inexhaustible influencers were saying that a birthrate collapse had put humanity at risk of extinction, and it was the fault of spoiled, despicable women who were not doing their part. If they were married it was their husbands’ fault too. These opinions pounded down near-daily and sometimes Laurie imagined herself trying to push them back with her hands as she paced around her house arguing with invisible hectoring natalists.

‘I know most people want children, need children. Children are great! I love children! But some people are different, some people are just built a little different. The aggregate dominates of course! But life is more interesting when there’s room for those on the margins. Think of the wonderful poems and stories written by the childless, I mean childfree! Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Flannery O’Connor!’

‘Those women are to be pitied,’ intoned the invisible opposition. ‘They were tragically ill, their contribution came out of lack.’

‘Everyone contributes what they can! What if you’ve got bad genes, what if there was no love in your family, what if you were abused as a child and your mother didn’t protect you, what if she actually didn’t like you and so you don’t have normal maternal patterning? Isn’t it better for the world if you don’t produce more people with that coding? And instead –’

‘What you describe is, again, tragic. But people with stories of abuse far worse than that have transformed their history with selfless parenting. If you can’t do that then – get out of the way! Women past child-bearing years who exist in sterile partnerships are selfishly hoarding a resource: a sixty-year-old man can father children and should not be taken up by an old woman. The only role for an old woman is to care for children – data proves that is the sole reason for superior female longevity.’

Absolutely: Old women pay at least as much. And what do they get for it?

Peripheral motion disturbed, then alerted her; the nuns were coming down the path, conversing. The younger of them – she was about thirty – spoke intently, her face focused as if some wonderful problem had just yielded itself to her. The older woman – at least sixty – listened patiently, mouth gently frowning, eyes scanning a universe invisible to Laurie; a place of refuge or complexity or both.

‘What about nuns?’ she thought at her invisible scolds. ‘They don’t have children and yet they . . .’

‘. . . hide from life,’ came the curt reply. ‘And they don’t even look good doing it.’

But actually the nuns did look pretty good. They rode bikes all over the neighborhood, they played basketball on the convent court, they gardened and joked around. Laurie and her husband smiled to see bands of them riding down the street with pleasureful energy, their habits tied up around their ankles. How robust they were in this realm of ancient words and fairy-tale statues grounded in the earth, Mother Mary with her open arms; a whole system that held them in place.

In Laurie’s mind, the imp of the perverse dancingly appeared, obscuring Mary and her sisters with another remembered story of obscene license and abuse: a young woman who’d worked as a live-in servant for a fanatically beloved but sexually abusive male writer had taken a selfie after he’d (for the umpteenth time) ass-raped her and made her eat her own shit. She’d posted the image on Instagram, pouting at her device, looking baffled, helpless and very adorable. Which prompted Laurie’s friend Sugar to post somewhere that she thought the picture undermined the accusation because it made it seem like the girl was in love with herself as an ass victim. ‘It’s like feel my ass pain,’ she wrote.

Which maybe explains the death threat? Laurie thought but didn’t say.

Also thought and unsaid: she got why the girl posted the picture. It reminded her of herself as a teen, writing funny feisty journal accounts of miserable, actually degrading things that had happened to her; adorable pictures made of words.

No old woman could console herself with such an image, not even one made of words; it could just not be made to look good. And at least old women didn’t get abused like that so much – well, but sometimes they did. The perverted writer had b-fucked his sixty-something housekeeper too – who had actually been willing, in spite of being married.

My God, no wonder young people didn’t want to have sex anymore! The adults, even moms and old people were running after them with their pants down, sixty-five-year-old women were roaming sex sites and then writing about their experiences for respected news outlets, elderly couples – like her! – had open relationships. On the one hand it was great, an assertion of life force in fierce rebellion against its own limitations. On the other . . .

The nuns smiled and greeted her as they passed, their faces pale and voices foreign in the absence of makeup or contemporary social cadence. She didn’t know these particular women, but there was a nun with whom she’d had some powerful conversations. (Sister Ava: humorous mouth, exalted eyes, skewed gray glasses, one scratched lens.) They had met one day on the broad concrete path surrounding the convent itself and had, with remarkable speed, gone from the weather to Jesus – whether or not he was literally the son of God or more like a complex human vector for divine love – and Mary, a spirit of comfort and forgiveness to whom Laurie sometimes appealed in sort-of prayer.

On another pathway meeting, Laurie had broached the subject of adultery. She had admitted to fear of demonic influence entering her in the form of intense love-hunger, a terrible childish voice that woke her late at night and spoke from her mouth while her husband lay asleep; high, frightened and strange, it begged a nameless someone for love (please love me, why don’t you love me?), love that she could not experience with her husband for reasons she did not understand.

‘And do you think you can get this love from someone else, from another man?’ asked Sr Ava.

Laurie hesitated and answered, ‘Yes. Yes, I can.’

The nun stopped and turned to face her. ‘Is that the truth?’

‘At first,’ Laurie replied. ‘And then –’ Something scalding, a bright blinding force rising inside her, like a ligature cutting off everything but furious, faceless instinct; chaotic sub-emotive need slamming through her body in response to his body, words coming from her that she could not recall. Joy, terror; terror-joy: the forgiving tenderness of his chest, his arms, his hands.

‘I would like us to pray together,’ said the nun. And she reached for Laurie’s hand.

Then one day she came home and found that she could not be with her husband; even though they were in the same room, she could not fully be with him. Nor could she be with the lover, not really; she could only endure the memory of his force and transitory tenderness, moving in and out of her in subsiding waves. She was more alone than she would be if she were actually alone. The pain of it was stunning.

When the incantation was done, the nun gave her the name and number of an exorcist a couple of towns over – ‘just to chat’ – and invited her to Mass. ‘When you feel the presence of evil, I encourage you to sing. Say the name of Jesus and sing – demons hate it when you sing.’ ‘Actually,’ said Laurie, ‘they might enjoy my singing, it is pretty awful.’ Sr Ava laughed and said, ‘Then just say the name of Jesus; declare that he is Lord.’ She’d walked away singing confidently.

Laurie had not been able to resist calling the exorcist who said he thought it sounded more like harassment than possession and who in any case couldn’t run a ritual on her if she wasn’t Catholic. He said it would be like trying to get rid of squirrels in the attic by installing a high-pitched electronic noise device; you’d just irritate them, and even if they left, they’d come back because the ‘holes in the house would still be there’. He urged her to beg God for forgiveness, to go to Mass and learn more about the faith.

And she did go, once. There was hardly anyone there and the priest spent half the sermon bitching about wokeness and lack of funding for the local dioceses. Laurie tried to focus on the other people in the pews, their unknown capacity for love, their will for it, their wish to humbly praise the vastness of . . . whatever this was that they were walking around in. But the priest made it hard to remember that.

Laurie got up off the bench and walked to the statue of Mary; she thought about kneeling among the statue children but considered how uncomfortable that would be, not to mention how kooky and theatrical it would seem if someone saw her. She simply clasped her hands before her and lowered her head. ‘Help,’ she thought. ‘Help.’

The thing about Eileen: you could talk about this stuff with her. Laurie had shared with her the conversation with Sr Ava which Eileen found interesting even if it was based on patriarchal shit which she hoped that Laurie did not believe.

‘I don’t know what I believe,’ said Laurie. ‘But I think there might be a reason that every culture in the whole fucking world believes in monogamy –’

‘Every culture does not believe in it. I think it’s only something like –’

‘– or at least some sanctimonious pretense of it. For women anyway.’

‘Exactly,’ said Eileen. ‘For women.’

‘And that thing that happens at night, maybe it actually is something evil, like a horror-movie monster-thing that’s getting in where I’m weak, that’s using me as a vehicle to get into the world and just go around eating –’

‘Oh stop,’ said Eileen. ‘You’ve hardly eaten at all, it’s just been this one guy! You’re not evil. You’re hurt. You’re not evil!’

‘I know I’m not,’ said Laurie. ‘But what if something bigger than me is –’

‘I don’t think it can do that unless you invite it in. I think the good in you is too strong for that, Laurie. And you’ve got such strong boundaries.’

Forgetting any appearance of kookiness or theatricality, Laurie went to the statue of Mary and put her arms around it. It was of course cold but its shape was gentle and curved. She held it and thought ‘Help me. Help Eileen. Help us walk through this. We’re not evil. We don’t deserve to be made crazy.’

And maybe they didn’t. But how in hell was Eileen, ‘rogue RN/pelvic-floor therapist’, in any position to declare who was good and who was not? She thought of the time her friend had drunkenly revealed the reason for her hinted outcast status: They’d been talking about social and professional backstabbing when she abruptly told the story: several elderly clients had come to her longing for sexual connection; when creams and patches plus pelvic-floor exercises had failed to work she’d referred them to a doctor who would inject estrogen pellets under the skin of their asses or abdomens. For a while everything was great, the women had inundated her with raving emojis describing hot sex with their husbands for the first time in decades! Then two of them started bleeding uncontrollably, and yet another developed some horrible thing involving her endometrial lining growing somewhere it shouldn’t be, there was possible cancer and a possible lawsuit – and they couldn’t take the damn pellets out.

It sounded horrible and frankly irresponsible but Laurie heard only the pain in her friend’s voice as she cried, ‘I was just trying to help! They wanted it so badly! And I did help some of them, I did!’ Eileen had put her face in her hands and begun to cry. ‘But nobody knows about them because they’re too embarrassed to talk about it!’ Laurie had put her arms around Eileen and stroked her hair and said, ‘Well I know. I know honey.’

But she didn’t know. She really did not know what to think about any of this. And still she had to walk through it. A lot of it.

Her phone pinged; it was her husband wanting to know when she was coming back and what she wanted for dinner. She typed What are the choices?

Orange and avocado salad plus bread. Pasta with tomatoes and basil.

Maybe something with beans? I don’t think we’re getting enough fiber. And then I think Eileen is crazy.

Why?

She was thinking about answering when she saw that a nun was standing on the path, watching her. On realizing that she had been noticed, the sister resumed walking, but slowly, still keeping her eye on Laurie – the stranger who was standing oddly close to the statue of the Virgin. Raising her hand in a static wave, Laurie moved away from Mary, respectfully skirting the prayerful children. The nun waved back.

She texted her husband I’ll tell you about it when I get home. I still like her. But she is crazy.

You realize you’re both crazy, right?

Ha ha she replied. See you soon. And she made her way back up the path.

Photograph by Suzie Howell, From, A Bowl of Tears to Drink