We slip out of our homes after the men have left in their yellow hard hats and luminous vests, their charcoal suits and purple striped ties, their sky-blue uniforms, their faded T-shirts and backward baseball caps. We slip out of the empty, echoing apartments, houses, spare rooms to meet in the hostile heat of the afternoon sun. Some of us meet in crowded, public places, places fluorescent and buzzing and smelling of food. Some of us meet in parks, gathering under the branching shade of trees far older than us, trees that we tell ourselves have seen it all, that will bear witness to this too.
There are men in these places, of course. There are men everywhere.
That is why we meet in groups no larger than six. We find that in groups of six or less, we are assumed to be women who lunch, women who shop, women who book club. Women men glance at for no longer than it takes to dismiss us as harmless, trivial, not a threat.
▴ ▴ ▴
The money has been coming for ten months now. One thousand dollars each month, materializing in our bank accounts as if out of thin air.
Not all of us had bank accounts. Those who didn’t received letters in the mail, sealed and stamped like pay slips for jobs we did not do. At first we ignored them, for we were not in the habit of receiving important mail. We were not in the habit of receiving important anything. Eventually our husbands opened them, unable to keep their fingers from the perforated lines begging to be torn.
“Universal basic income,” the men read. “Negative tax credit. Twelve thousand dollars a year.”
Perhaps some of us, watching the men mouth these words, observe the unsightly hairs peeking out from nasal passages and regretfully recall a time when we would not have noticed such a thing. Perhaps others, those of us who would wait the longest before coming to the meetings, notice a squint, a tightening of the jaw, a squeezing of the fist. Paper crumpling just slightly between damp thumb and forefinger. We steel ourselves, draw our soft parts in, put our armor on. We get ready for the violence.
▴ ▴ ▴
For a long time, we do not believe that the money is really ours. Even after the bank accounts are opened in our names, even after we are given matte navy plastic rectangles that fit into the space in our wallets where we once kept our driver’s licenses, library cards, PTA registrations, even after that one afternoon when we go to the nearest ATM in sunglasses and hats, after we key in our PINs and request sixty dollars, sixty dollars because it seems a reasonable amount of money to receive for free, an amount that would buy a week of groceries. Even after the ATM spits out the crisp ten-dollar bills and we slip them into our wallets, furtively, as if we have stolen something, even then, we still do not believe it.
For we do not deserve the money, we think. What have we done? Only ironed and folded and listened and forced our faces into interested smiles, only made ourselves smaller and others bigger, only softened our voices to amplify those who could already be heard. You are not paid a thousand dollars a month to take up as little space as possible, to shrink and retract and scrape, to pull in the sagging corners of yourself so as to be easy on the eye. So we let the money sit in our accounts, the numbers ticking up month after month. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand. We do not take out any of it, but check diligently at the start of each month and sure enough, it is there.
The knowledge of the money changes us. We begin reading the news again, sneaking old papers from toilet floors and salon tables. We dust off certificates, licenses, diplomas from bygone eras, hold them up in the clear light of our living rooms. We take our clothes off in front of mirrors and look, really look. We tuck our thin hair behind our oddly shaped ears that classmates once made fun of, square our lopsided shoulders and balance our weight between firmly planted feet. We see that in spite of everything the world has told us, taken from us, we are still here.
That is when we realize that there must be more of us out there. We feel a sudden something thrumming through our veins, a shot of electricity that propels us to our phones, our computers, our writing pads. In front of our devices we pause. What will we say? We are not the revolutionary sort. We are not trying to take a stand or change the world or even change our lives. So we settle on asking if others are receiving the money too. We ask if it is really ours, making sure to sound cavalier, slightly bemused, uninvested.
But the others respond immediately. “Yes,” we say. “We are receiving it too.”
▴ ▴ ▴
We start meeting in secret. First in pairs, then threes, then fours fives sixes. The first few times we meet, it is awkward. Some of us know each other, for that is how the groups have formed, but others are friends of friends, acquaintances of acquaintances, or strangers from the Internet. We stick close to the one or two of us that we do know, mutter introductions to the others. We wonder what we are doing here, feel foolish about the whole thing.
But then one of us cuts straight to the chase. Her name is Joo Lee. She is tall and skinny and her hair hangs in a triangular bob flanking pale bone-sharp cheeks. We think this makes her look mean, but when she speaks her voice is loud and low, bubbling with laughter. It is the kind of voice that we warm to instantly.
“So,” Joo Lee says. “I guess the thousand-dollar question is, what are we going to do with it?”
We shift uncomfortably. That is not why we are here, we protest in our heads. We are here to Figure It Out. Figure the situation out, though we do not know exactly what that entails. But certainly not to do anything. For what could we do?
“I say we form a commune,” Joo Lee says. “You can’t live on your own on a thousand dollars a month, the rent alone would eat up most of it. But if we pool our resources, rent a house somewhere in a smaller town, buy a secondhand car to share between us, well, then.”
It is so absurd that we shoot sideways glances at each other, suppressing our smiles to be polite. We do not want Joo Lee to feel like we are laughing at her, for we like her. We like her very much.
“Do you have children?”
A shadow comes over Joo Lee’s face, drapes itself like a thin clammy napkin over her sharp features.
“No,” she says, quietly. “I do not.”
We glare at the asker. Way to go, we say with our eyes, way to make Joo Lee sad. All she was trying to do was help. But can you believe it, the asker keeps going.
“I’m just saying. My baby girl, she’s only four months old. I could never leave her with—with him.”
We feel bad. The asker’s name is Clarissa. Like her name would suggest, she has porcelain skin and wide brown eyes that are good at making us feel bad. She wears a ruffled white blouse and from the way it falls over her slim torso, it appears to be 100 percent silk. Her shoulders are rounded and graceful beneath the sheer fabric and we wish our shoulders looked like that too.
But Clarissa, like Joo Lee, like us, has her problems. Baby girl and beautiful clothes and graceful shoulders aside, Clarissa is here. Clarissa cannot leave her daughter with him, which makes her one of us.
Besides, she has a point. There is no way we are running off to live in a commune. We have children too, and even if we don’t, what would we do there? What is a commune anyway? Joo Lee means well, but she is kind of missing the point.
We struggle with what exactly the point is. Discussing what to do with the money seems too daring right now, too impossible, so we stick to the mechanics of it. We find that it is the same for all of us, that it is one thousand dollars each month, no strings attached. None of us has tried to spend it yet, but some have withdrawn the money, kept it in biscuit tins and hidden socks, secured with elasticated hair ties. It works, they say. You can really take it out. It’s real money. Real cash. Hundred dollar bills you can touch and smell.
The rest of us lean in, place our chins in the cups of our palms. We look at each other in wonder.
▴ ▴ ▴
As the weeks go by, we do not get any closer to talking about the money. Instead, we talk about the other reason we are here: the men.
The men are variously tall, short, muscular, toothpick-thin, charming, arrogant, squinty-eyed, pale as chicks or brown as stained walnut. Postmen, bureaucrats, builders, lawyers, busboys, tax accountants. The men are sweet, we insist, they want what is best for us. They love us dearly. They never mean it, they simply do not know their own strength. Strength of words, of deeds, of fists.
What we have in common is that we all loved them too. Love them. It is not that we do not love them now, but the topic at hand is the past.
We fell for them across counters and cash registers, through open car windows and under dripping roofs while sheltering from the rain. We fell for them in darkened cinemas, when the strength of their hands gripping ours spoke of comfort and nothing more, when our fear was straightforward and directed at monsters on screen. We fell for them in crowded restaurants, candlelit or otherwise, when the buzz of strangers’ conversations and the waiter’s indulgent smile held the promise of an entire world, an entire life.
We did not marry for money. We married for love, pure and simple, even as doubts darkened the corners of our minds. We made choices. Ivory or cream, V-necked or off-shoulder, A-line or sheath. Our friends came, our families too, gathered there on that day filled with smiles and tears and hugs and confetti. At the altar, we stared at the men through the haze of our veils and wondered what exactly was being sacrificed. When they kissed us—for it is they who could now kiss their brides—their teeth knocked ours and it hurt our brains. We thought it sweet that they were so enthusiastic.
After the weddings, the enthusiasm morphed and grew, becoming something else altogether. It became a glass brought down hard on a marble countertop, hard enough to crack its reinforced base. It became the volume turned all the way up on the TV. It became raised voices and raised palms and eventually, raised fists.
We stroke our soft warm forearms as we listen to each other. At last we lift our skirts and roll our sleeves, to reveal purple blooms on calves or thighs or biceps. The shapes are different, but the hurt is all the same.
▴ ▴ ▴
Several weeks later, Joo Lee brings up the commune again. This time we are silent. We tilt our heads to stare at the ceiling, not because we are avoiding Joo Lee’s gaze, but because we are thinking.
“Look,” Joo Lee says, brandishing her phone.
We gather around, six heads circling the cracked glass screen.
“You should get that fixed,” Priya says. “You can get shards stuck in your face.”
Priya is a lawyer and hence extremely sensible. Was a lawyer, we correct ourselves, for she gave up her job years ago to raise her twin boys. In the pictures she shows us, the boys are sixteen, lanky and strong as horses, with broad foreheads shiny and nut-colored, smooth like oiled mahogany. The boys will leave for college soon, possibly early, for they are gifted and driven, just like their parents. Priya does not know what she will do when they leave. She does not want to be alone with the boys’ father. That is what she calls him—the father. As if she were his daughter and not his wife.
Joo Lee waves Priya’s advice away with the cracked iPhone. “If I get it fixed it will just get broken again. Now look!”
We look. It is a house. Joo Lee thumbs through the images. Six bedrooms, three bathrooms, two family rooms, dried-out swimming pool. Shed. An overgrown garden with moldy patio furniture strewn under wild trees. The bedrooms boast carpet the color of a rotting peach and yellowing wallpaper, the bathrooms are fitted out in hospital-pink plastic and black grout turquoise tile. The shed does not have a door.
“Best of all, it’s only twenty-five hundred a month,” Joo Lee exclaims. “We’d have over three thousand left for food, car, everything else.”
“Everything else?” we ask.
“Well, I’ve been doing some thinking. Leaving is one thing. A good thing, given our circumstances, a thing we could not do without the money.” She pauses. Dark shadows gather in pools beneath her collarbones. We notice she is wearing long sleeves again, and gloves, even though it is summer. “But what if we could do even more?”
Her eyes glow with excitement, her voice is warm caramel, drawing us in. We allow ourselves to believe her for a moment.
“Like what?” we ask.
She points to the picture of the garden. “Like, we could grow vegetables and sell them at the farmer’s market. Or make crafts, or hold workshops and talks about, I don’t know, we’ll think of something. And this”—she thumbs to the image of the second family room—“wouldn’t this make the perfect office? We could run the operations out of here. Buy computers and desks and rolling reclining chairs.”
We are silent again. We like Joo Lee, but it is naive. Joo Lee is young, we realize for the first time. The sharp nose and perpetual frown disguise her baby-soft skin, her crease-free eyes.
“I’m sorry, Joo Lee, I just don’t see this happening,” Priya says gently, in that neutral, kind way she has honed from years of living in a house of three men.
We watch the clammy napkin expression come down over Joo Lee’s face again. She opens her mouth to protest, but before she can speak, Clarissa cuts in.
“Could we—could we have children there? In the house?”
We blink. Children would surely be contrary to the life of freedom and productive leisure that Joo Lee envisions on the commune. Children are surely part of the life to be left behind.
But Joo Lee is nodding slowly, then vigorously. “We could!” she says, all positive and bubbly again. “We absolutely could, Clarissa. And—” She pauses, squints. “Haven’t children been getting money too?”
They have. Children get half of what adults do, five hundred a month.
Today Clarissa is wearing a sleeveless black top with a collar buttoned all the way up to her chin. We marvel at the tawny elegant length of her arms, but we wonder what she is hiding beneath the collar.
Joo Lee places her hand on Clarissa’s denim-covered knee. She looks Clarissa in the eye, her fixed gaze making all of us feel safe and powerful at once, and says: “Even without the five hundred a month, we can have children there. Of course we can. We can have whatever we want.”
▴ ▴ ▴
The next few weeks, we do not talk about the house, not directly at least. Instead we spend our time brainstorming. Brainstorming is what Joo Lee calls it, the vestiges of her previous life as a project manager at a disruptive tech firm, before the miscarriage and depression and a hairline fracture in the jaw disrupted her career.
We think of large thundery brains, filling the sky with their slimy pink-gray curves, shooting lightning down upon the scorched earth.
We are a storm of brains. It turns out that between us, in our little group of six alone, we have degrees and diplomas which certify us to: practice law, repair pipework, make French patisserie, give financial advice, file tax returns on behalf of others, scuba dive up to forty meters in depth, drive trucks, decorate interiors, run clinical psychiatry trials, manipulate datasets, pour concrete, teach high school biology, sell real estate.
We come up with ideas for things we can sell on the Internet: handmade jewelry, colorful slime, organic produce. We consider professional services: law firm, accounting firm, tutoring center. We think about nonprofit work. The house could double as a shelter for troubled youth, drug addicts, the homeless. Battered women, we quip, but then turn serious, fast.
“A shelter for women,” we say. We do not say battered again. There is nothing battered about us.
The shelter would be financed with our pooled one-thousand-a-month and everything else, all the other projects. Produce from the garden. Baked goods from the kitchen. Project management skills from Joo Lee, cooking from Clarissa, legal advice from Priya, counseling from Opal, house repairs from Li Ying, tech support from Beatrice.
A shelter, a refuge, a home. We look at ourselves in wonder.
▴ ▴ ▴
We are worried. Joo Lee has not shown up to the meetings in two weeks. We rang her home number once, but he picked up, even though it was the middle of the afternoon and he should have been at work. Joo Lee’s cell phone goes straight to voicemail.
“Maybe she’s finally sent it in to get the screen fixed,” Priya suggests, but her voice is neither convinced nor convincing.
In Joo Lee’s absence, the meetings take on an awkward tone. Our plans for the house stall, we seem unable to think of answers to even the simplest problems. For example. The landlord requires proof of income three times the amount of rent. Real income, he says, none of this government handout crap. He wants proof that it will continue, that this isn’t just some governor’s short-lived populist bid.
This sends us into a downward spiral. We start wondering if we can even prove it to ourselves. If, perhaps, the money is a practical joke, played on us by politicians who are inevitably mostly male. We start thinking again about how we do not deserve the money anyway.
“Come on guys,” Clarissa says. “Let’s think positive. Let’s think about the shelter, about our children.”
But we only stare at her gloomily. What does Clarissa know anyway, with her perfect skin and expensive clothes and BMW that she arrives in each time but parks several blocks away so we will not see?
“What?” Clarissa says. “It’s not my fault Joo Lee isn’t here.”
What does a thousand dollars a month even mean to Clarissa? Not what it means to the rest of us, that’s for sure.
▴ ▴ ▴
The men have started asking questions.
“There is something different about you,” they say. They look at us closely. Stare into our eyes with searching gazes and we feel something stir in our chests, something that makes our palms damp and our breath short. We feel ourselves being looked at, really looked at, for the first time in years.
What do the men see? Do they see the women they first glimpsed at the far end of an office one distant winter morning, the women they fell over themselves to speak to? Do they see us at eighteen, freshmen checking out stacks of books in college libraries, giddy with ambition? Do they see us at eight, running our own businesses of make-believe bakeries and doctor’s offices and clothing stores?
Do they see us planning to leave?
We think about what our lives will be if we stay. It is not so bad, after all. At least the men love us. There are women who are not loved at all; these are the women we pity. Our men simply do not know how to express their love. And they work so hard, put food on the table for us and our babies, keep the electricity on, that it is quite understandable that they can get tired sometimes. When one is tired one is irritable. We know the feeling, we understand our men.
The men bring their hands toward our faces and we flinch. But all they do is thumb the loose hair out of our eyes, their warm skin rough against our tender cheeks.
They kiss us, and we undress in front of them for the first time in months. The men’s hands are gentle today. We let them run their fingers through our hair, feel pleased that we washed it only just yesterday. We hope the men think we smell nice. We hope they do not notice the creases that have formed on our loose bellies, the fine black hairs on our legs that we have not had time to shave.
When they take their clothes off too, we see that in spite of their hair loss and thickening middles, they are still young, and in their own way, beautiful. The men are full of possibilities, of energy, of things that we are not. The weight of the men’s chests on ours is not suffocating. No, it is comforting and warm, seductive in its solidity. Stay, it says, and you will be safe.
▴ ▴ ▴
Clarissa says: “I’ve put a deposit down on the house.” She tugs at the neckline of her top, a turtleneck sweater again, despite the late summer heat that leaves the creases of our knees and elbows sticky.
“What do you mean?” we ask.
“The landlord said he’d waive the proof of income requirement if I paid for three months in advance. So I did,” she says.
“But that’s almost all your savings from the past ten months,” Priya says. We nod emphatically. “But—we’re not ready yet. We haven’t figured anything out.”
“I know.” Clarissa crosses her arms, hugs herself as if she is cold.
“Is everything okay?” we ask cautiously, gingerly.
“No,” Clarissa says. “Everything is not okay.” Then she looks at her knees for a long time.
▴ ▴ ▴
We have managed to contact Joo Lee. Priya went to her house with cupcakes, pretending to be collecting money for a charity drive.
When Joo Lee opened the door, she was wearing sunglasses. Priya kept the bright impersonal smile on her face, shook the tray of frosted cupcakes and went on loudly about the local community center bake sale.
Priya couldn’t see Joo Lee’s eyes, but she heard the tremor in her voice, saw the way she clung to the doorframe. Joo Lee showed no sign of recognition. She told Priya loudly that they had already donated to the bake sale and asked her to please not bother them any further.
“She’s lost weight,” Priya tells us. “Her fingers are bone thin, her nails yellowing and chipped.”
“Did you see him?” we ask.
“No,” Priya says. “But I know he was there. I could feel him listening.”
We fall silent. We think of Joo Lee wearing sunglasses indoors, locked inside her own living room.
We have so much to tell Joo Lee. In the time she has been gone, we have done a lot of brainstorming. She would be proud of our color-coded cooking rosters, our draft mission statement for the shelter, our research on which vegetables are easiest to grow. At home, we have packed discreet bags with only the bare minimums, so as not to arouse suspicion. A toothbrush, treasured mementos, changes of underwear. Everything else can be bought or made, once we get to the house. We are meant to move in a week from today. But how can we move without Joo Lee?
We think of the men. How they loved us so, stifled us, shackled us, broke us with love. How even though we did not marry the men for money, the money became everything anyway. How they made it so that we slowly owned nothing of our own, and since we owned nothing, felt we deserved nothing.
How the money each month changed that. How we changed that for each other. How Joo Lee changed that for us.
When we look up at each other, we see that our eyes are blazing with the same fire, and we know what we must do.
▴ ▴ ▴
A week later, we slip out of our homes after the men have left in their yellow hard hats and luminous vests, their charcoal suits and purple striped ties, their sky-blue uniforms, their faded T-shirts and backward baseball caps. We slip out of the empty, echoing apartments, houses, spare rooms to meet in the hostile heat of the afternoon sun.
This time we do not meet in our usual place. Instead, we meet in front of Joo Lee’s house. The dry grass on the lawn crunches beneath our feet, the backs of our necks prickle with sunburn. We carry tote bags stuffed with clothes and toiletries. We joke that we look like we are going grocery shopping.
There are five of us, six including Joo Lee. Only one of him, so we think we can manage. But just in case, we have tucked away in our pockets: penknives, pepper spray, a bone-inlaid letter opener. Clarissa carries her baby around her back in a sling, and for a moment, standing there on Joo Lee’s lawn backlit by the blazing sun, she has the silhouette of an Amazonian warrior riding into battle.
We lift our fists and steel our knuckles. The house is waiting: a shelter, a refuge, a home. We knock on the door.