The fit women's conference

far from the men and the babies

You don't need to be fit. That doesn't really come into the weekend, which is centered around a giant slab of wood that we fill with an ever-replenishing array of cheese and nuts. You do need to be invited. I'm a little on the outer, connected to the group by a spoke, and the only person who doesn't live in Colorado. I was folded in by my friend P., who is reliably the kind of person you can text just “ugh Matthew McConaughey” mid-workday and within minutes receive the reply: “god I know.” She has an important job working with a bunch of self-serious LinkedIn headshots, but also knows what it was to see Radiohead live. On a different planet that put a market cap on wit and emotional intelligence, she’d be a billionaire.

P. has convened us in a small, sun-bleached mountain town the name of which translates from Spanish to "the departing" or "the taking off." It's perfect! We are, if not all ladies, certainly not-men. We want to leave our partners and children and go somewhere to just be. We call it a "girls' weekend" only because that is the easiest explanation for it. Actually, I plan on tossing off the boobs and the mother-self as soon as we get there. 

The last time I met with some of these people was for P.'s hens' weekend out in Joshua Tree, when Japhy was four months old. I had to pump every few hours the entire time I was there, even when we were out hiking in the desert. It felt like I could reconstitute him right there with the milk I was siphoning out among the boulders. Pump until he appeared in my lap. That was before the great pandem, when escape became more of a focus, let's say.

Katha Pollitt wrote a chapter in her 2007 book Learning To Drive called "After The Men Are Dead," about the fact that, statistically speaking, women outlive their male partners by quite a bit. How rude, she writes, that we spend half our lives trying to please and understand these men, only for them to die out: "Most of the women I know have spent solid years in a state of low-level exasperation with men, their own and men in general. How infuriating of men to just pick themselves up and slam the door like that, after all this time, while we are still trying to fix them."

A buddy has a full plan with her friend for what they'll do after their husbands are gone: they have eyes on some real estate in Florida. It will be an eternal wine o’clock. Imagine the living room full of HomeGoods decor, but also nods toward Satanism.

*

The house we've rented sits on a small plot of land mown into the corner of a larger farm. Two horses live in the paddock and droop their heads over the back fence, looking at us from under long eyelashes. "Do not feed the horses," says the set of instructions from the owner. That feels like wishful thinking: we are a corral of Eves with an enormous fruit bowl of organic Fuji apples freshly picked from Vitamin Cottage. Our rubber Birkenstocks pad back and forth between the kitchen door and the back fence where the friendly heads wait, beyond which the Sawatch Range hangs like a holy textile from the sky.

On the first night, we go to an outdoor patio facing the pedestrian mall to have a pre-dinner drink. I'm talking to M. and J. when J. turns her head and lifts her spare hand in a casual wave toward a giraffe on a bicycle. The giraffe returns her wave as it pedals by. There is a beat where we clutch our beers, watching it disappear. J. has progressed astoundingly fast through a series of impressive career moves to being on a sailboat for much of the year. She conquered all of land and has moved onto the sea.

"Do you know him?" asks M. "I don't!" says J. "I don't even know why I waved, it just happened!" Possibility has opened up. The men are gone and it is just us and the giraffes.

At dinner, the table fills with share-salads and share-appetizers. "We will be needing more chips, if that's possible," advises the self-appointed leader to the waiter in advance. Everyone compliments everyone else's choice of drink, contributes too much for the bill, the moon rises behind our heads while the sky is still lit pinky-purple for the sunset, framing us all in a Tarot card. Everyone has smart and interesting things to say. No one wishes to advance arguments that reality TV is actually a sophisticated critique of society. Mostly they don’t know what I’m talking about if I bring up any sort of internet rubbish. This is so great, we say with aggression gripping our forks in our right hands to spear the sprouts. We made it here.

In Sandra Newman's The Men, there is a blip in which all male humans simply disappear — from inside their camping tents, from their beds, from their cars. It's alarming, but needless to say, the women left behind do pretty well, organizing and caring for the girls and babies and, after all, with lesbianism there as an option. It's not the worst! "These women were a priesthood and a pack of merry hounds," writes Newman.

you know as much as me about this

*

The agenda in Salida is loose. There is a white-water rafting scene in town, so we yank up our pants and sit with our feet in the river to let time pass us by and, at one point, a dog in a canoe. We talk but also don't talk for a long stretch, until we have created room inside ourselves for more food. The pedestrian mall has some artisans, buskers, people with stalls. There is a guy in a tie-dye t-shirt selling rocks in little white boxes on a trestle table. He tells us he mined "about 85%" of the rocks himself, in a dig over in New Mexico. The stones look the same as the geodes and quartz nuggets that you see in the shops, but they're a bit dustier and somehow much more expensive. "How much for this pink one?" I ask, thinking of my kids. "Thirty," he says. "You see how it's shaped like an ear? That's extra magical, it means it has strong powers." I nod and look for a less powerful stone to take home to Scout. But each one is curiously potent! And expensive.

Each day after we return from town, we drift toward the horses. Hello, you, we say, how you doing lovely? Inside, there are fourteen varieties of ethical wine to choose from and the decor is crystals, midcentury sofas, and rugs from a nearby pueblo. There are tubes of sunscreen on every surface and all the beds have been neatly made. I take a brief break from the coffee-table-sized charcuterie board to talk to my children — Scout is crying in the FaceTime box. An intrusion! She has floated after me and casts a flickering shadow on the ground. My child, leave me out here in the land beyond time to ponder buying some pastel pants.

"I suspect that these are possibly not my own thoughts, but instead are the thoughts of the owl-baby, superimposed on mine," thinks Tiny in Claire Oshetsky's Chouette. Pregnancy, and then motherhood, convince Tiny that her baby is Other, an owl-baby who will not fit into the existing world. The baby warps her view. Tiny will have to sacrifice her life and partner to help raise her owl-baby the right way, she thinks. She'll end up out in the woods. That’s the instinct, to go further out until the tube mascara flakes and falls off and you begin to see in the dark.

In Marian Engel's Bear, the book about the woman who fucks a bear, a summer on a Canadian island is an escape, Lou’s girls' weekend, more or less: "There was something aggressive in her that always went too far. She had thrown a marcasite egg at her lover's window once, a green egg she particularly valued. She had stayed in this house too long. She had fucked the Director. She had let her breasts hang out before Homer. She had gone too far. No doubt if she had children she would neglect them." 

So she escapes! She throws on the fur. She sunbathes and chops wood and reads books. All the things that are a problem about Lou are not so when she is with the bear.

*

We are walking to get margaritas at Las Camelinas when a man stops one of us and asks, "Is there a fit women's conference in town? I keep seeing you people all over the place." 

It must be the athletic pants — the air of REI-co-op-core and off-brand leggings. K. drops a “no” behind her as she continues walking, his question not altering her path. He’s not real at this point; only we are. This is not a statement of heteropessimism, just a fact of our viewpoint, which is fixed to an imminent bowl of guacamole.

A local who is friends with one of us joins — a classic Colorado mountain chick. I know this type from when I lived in Summit County; funny, hard as shit, ready to drive over boulders on the way to her off-grid cabin and bend brush into loaves of bread and sword-fight with coyotes. There are so many of here out there, but I never see them in TV shows. She’s the stone that completes the circle. We have one drink, two, more chips, pour some salt on usssss, grind us and sprinkle us over the rim of the summits.

She recommends some hikes for the final day, in-roads to the mountains. That is the general direction. We start on the side of the highway and wind back and forth across a creek heading into the crotch of the mountains. We are partway up when I see it. My dog’s exact butt. It’s a blue heeler, trotting about with the same happy face, the same silky black spots, the same stumpy legs, as Coogee, who of course came from roughly this area. The dog returns to its owner, and I have to speak up. “Your dog looks just like my dog,” I explain, pulling up photos of him on my phone and swiping to the identical haunches.

The dog’s owner is maybe late 60s, or even 70s, a hard woman camping alone by the creek, just her and the dog. She talks about the three dogs she has had through life, and how each felt like it was the perfect dog for that time. A life in dogs.

Things are not simple, in Sandra Newman’s telling. The Men reappear in graphic YouTube videos, zombified walking in circles, or across a river. For some women, the absence of The Men becomes its own defining principle: “Many spiritually minded women saw the vanished men as ascended bodhisattvas, and some even claimed to be guided by them or healed by their masculine interventions.” Eventually, the alternate world becomes untenable for all of them.

*

At the end of things, there have been no massages or spa treatments or turns through Rag & Bone. We have simply existed up in the place with 20 percent less oxygen for a few days, high enough not to have to define ourselves against any other kind of backdrop — Venus and Venus and Venus.

The last of the wine bottles chimes as it is dropped into the recycling, and the coffee carafe is cleaned to a sparkle. Our bags are full of alpaca wool and repurposed jewelry and stickers. Our cups are full, we sing at each other as we float down out of the mountains.

Snippets

*Scene: On the toilet*

Japhy: I am easily talented. I know all the shapes. A hexagon has six sides. Want to know how many corners?

How many?

Japhy: It’s… six.

Vury Good

Realizing that the place you think of as ~home~ is not necessarily the place your kid calls home is really a key part of the existential puzzle. You grew up somewhere, and that place is formative, but your kids only know the place where they are right now. A rare and special children’s book explores this little truth: This Is Not My Home, out this Tuesday, Jan. 24, from Little, Brown, Books for Young Readers. Written by Vivienne Chang, and illustrated by Eugenia Yeh, the story follows Lily from the moment her mum tells her that they are going to move (home) to Taiwan to look after Lily’s Ah Ma (grandmother). She goes through culture shock and takes in all the new relatives, new foods, new places to play, realizing you can have more than one home, as we all do. Really nice book.

Linky-dinks

For Literary Hub, I wrote about Hettie Judah’s book How Not To Exclude Artist Mothers (And Other Parents), which covers a range of thought, and is worth its weight in gold whatever your field, and whatever your state of mind! This came out of an earlier Kafka’s, for the savvy readers among you!

Early pandemic, I commissioned this piece from the amazing Claire Zulkey, publisher of Evil Witches, and still very much love what she described as a “comprehensive character sketch of the mournful maternal heart in 2020.”

“Ugly Cats and the Loneliness of Man”!!!! Ahh, this essay by Lauren Collee in LARB Quarterly. You need to read about Hildy.

Related to a man-free world, The Lonely Islands by Sarah Miller.

Kate Lindsey on making TikToks no one sees: “the more I’ve been writing about how social media has changed over the past few years—the transition from social media to performance media—the more I’ve become convinced that content created for essentially no one is a more authentic snapshot of the human experience than anything that ends up boosted by TikTok onto For You Pages”

Loved this piece from Amanda Montei on “paranoid reading” and the character of Libby (Lizzie Caplan) in the TV version of Fleishman Is in Trouble: “married people are always interviewing divorced people, trying to measure themselves against them, wondering if it’s better if they quit, whether their marriage is sick and doomed, whether all marriages are, or whether they are the exception— the one person who can ingest the toxic substance and be fine. It’s a kind of paranoid reading we do on the self—a suspicion we aim at ourselves. What’s wrong with us? Will we need help soon? Are we okay? Are we fucked?”

The original meaning of burnout.

Ty to P. for this old piece in The Stranger about hanging out with Modest Mouse and hating the man: “Isaac particularly, hates concrete. ‘Because people use it to build strip malls,’ he says, and strip malls are what Isaac loathes the most. Nevertheless, ‘the Vastness’ is one of his favorite places, and the spot where we’ll spend the remainder of our afternoon.”

I think Josh Gondelman is always so funny, and his new Substack of pep talks is pretty great: “My attitude towards me, on the other hand, is: It’s none of my business what I’m like. That’s for other people to deal with.”

Ted Goia: “This is a deep matter, and I won’t try to unlock all the nuances here. I will now simply share 14 tweets that capture the stale taste of life without a counterculture.”

Thank you for reading KAFKA’S BABY! <3 I’d be happy for you to share this post!