The Red Word

Sarah Henstra

• Publisher: Black Cat
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780802126559
• eBook ISBN: 9780802188823
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

"A timely, telling look at rape culture on campus, Sarah Henstra's The Red Word boldly goes to the places where memoir can't but fiction can."—PopSugar
As her sophomore year begins, Karen enters into the back-to-school revelry—particularly at a fraternity called GBC. When she wakes up one morning on the lawn of Raghurst, a house of radical feminists, she gets a crash course in the state of feminist activism on campus. GBC is notorious, she learns, nicknamed "Gang Bang Central" and a prominent contributor to a list of date rapists compiled by female students. Despite continuing to party there and dating one of the brothers, Karen is equally seduced by the intellectual stimulation and indomitable spirit of the Raghurst women, who surprise her by wanting her as a housemate and recruiting her into the upper-level class of a charismatic feminist mythology scholar they all adore. As Karen finds herself caught between two increasingly polarized camps, ringleader housemate Dyann believes she has hit on the perfect way to expose and bring down the fraternity as a symbol of rape culture—but the war between the houses will exact a terrible price.
Named One of the Best New Books of the Month by Harper's Bazaar, PopSugar, Bitch, Fast Company, and Read It Forward
"The smartest, most provocative novel I've read in a long time. Sarah Henstra dives headlong into some murky, turbulent waters—gender politics, campus sexual assault, complicity, moral responsibility—and emerges with a book that's as shocking as it is essential." —Tom Perrotta, New York Times-bestselling author
"Will get you fuming, laughing, cheering, and most of all, thinking."—Cosmopolitan

BOOK II:

ANTISTROPHE

(counter-circling)

18. DICAEOLOGIA

(making excuses)

I wander to the photography conference’s Happy Hour Meet & Greet in the hotel atrium. Hibiscus and other tropical plants are arranged in a two-story pyramid in the center of the room. Just inside the door a woman I know from Toronto named Nicola Zwitter leaps upon my arm and steers me directly to the bar.

“Margarita, right?” she says.

“Wow. Good memory,” I say.

“You didn’t come to the CMA awards,” she says. “We Canadians should be sticking together, don’t you think?”

“I’m not a member of the …” I’ve already forgotten the acronym she used.

She frowns. “The Canadian Magazine Association. Seriously? Karen, you should be. There’s way too many writers at those things, not nearly enough art people.”

Nicola has recently been hired as art director for a new publishing imprint that specializes in home design and cookbooks. “Chalet,” they’re calling it. I offer my congratulations and ask her what titles she’s working on.

“Something called Slow Home,” she says. “You know slow food? Well, it’s a whole home movement now.”

“Sounds right on trend.”

Nicola wrinkles her nose, and I wonder if I’ve offended her. I miss Greg. He’s way better than I am at small talk. He remembers details about people, like the names of their dogs and how many kids they have. When Greg came to these parties with me he always knew exactly what to say to someone like Nicola Zwitter to make her believe I was the nicest, most authentic person in the entire world of photography.

I feel as if his absence suddenly shows on me somehow, as if a wound has started to bleed. And sure enough, Nicola says, “Is Greg in town with you?”

“Greg’s in Geneva,” I say.

“Right, he took that job. How’s the long-distance thing going?”

“Well, he’s there for good, I’m afraid.”

Nicola’s face composes itself for sympathy. A throaty hum revs up as she thinks of what to say.

Now why did I go and share that information with this woman? I’ve alarmed myself. To compensate for it I close my eyes in a slow blink and say, “It’s for the best, for both of us.”

The bartender hands us our drinks, and Nicola raises hers and shrugs. “My marriage went down the crapper ages ago. The divorce just came through in July. Here’s to starting over, right?”

She leads me to a bistro table surrounded by a jowly woman with dark-rimmed glasses, a tall, handsome man in jeans and a white shirt, and an older man with a red bandanna handkerchief spilling from the pocket of his tweed blazer. “Joan, David, Douglas. This is Karen Huls,” Nicola says. She touches the older man’s sleeve. “Karen, this is Douglas Reeve. He’s the king of our little Chalet fiefdom.”

“Hi,” I say. Douglas Reeve is CEO at Nicola’s new publishing house. I remember reading something about how he’s sworn never to retire, and how this bullheadedness has resulted in a plutocracy, or has made the glass ceiling worse for the women in the senior ranks, or something like that. We shake hands, Joan, David, Douglas, and me.

“Karen is a crackerjack photographer,” Nicola tells them. “Her macros are phenomenal. Do you remember that piece in Food and Drink with the prosciutto? That was Karen.”

The others clearly don’t remember the Food and Drink piece, but Nicola is undaunted. She’s got her hand on David’s sleeve now. “Karen, tell them the lemon story.” She laughs, then starts talking again before I can say anything: “So we’re shooting a two-page spread, the whole table, right? The intern takes a bag of lemons and dumps it upside down in this bowl without looking twice.”

I set my drink down and, wiping the condensation off my fingers, I am distracted by the note in my blazer pocket. Through all of the conference sessions today I’ve been distracted by this note. It’s from Dyann Brooks-Morriss. It was delivered to my hotel room. A handwritten note: Dear Karen, I’m in town for Steph. Will I see you at the memorial? Love, DBM. PS: Good Luck tomorrow.

I’ve been rereading the note all day. Could it really be her? I can’t imagine her stooping to such conventionalities: Dear Karen, and Love. There is a softness, a tentative tone, in the question Will I see you? There is a generosity in Good Luck. But then there is the arrogance of signing only initials after fifteen years without contact. Can I still call it arrogance, though, if I knew at once whose initials they were?

Of everyone at Raghurst I missed Dyann the most, and for longest. After everything fell apart—when I returned to campus the following fall, and Dyann was gone—I went mad with grief for her, mad with missing her. I would have walked off the earth to find her that year. I would throw my heart at her feet all over again.

I wrench my attention back to Nicola when I hear her say my name: “Karen’s all the way across the room setting up the shot, but suddenly she’s dragged the whole tripod right up next to this bowl, and she’s snapping like crazy. Yelling at the assistants to find her other lens.”

“I didn’t yell,” I say.

“Everyone is standing around wondering what in the hell is going on with the photographer.”

“Nobody was standing around. The table hadn’t even been styled yet.”

“So what were you doing?” David asks me.

Nicola leans into him playfully. “What she was doing was, she’s shooting a moldy lemon. There’s one lemon in the bowl that’s totally covered in mold. The rest of us are all like, Eww, throw that out, and meanwhile Karen for whatever reason is going apeshit over it with her camera.”

“And did you end up using it?” Douglas’s voice is too soft for the chattery space of the party. I have to lean in and ask him to repeat himself. When he touches his hearing aid before saying it again, I realize he’s compensating for deafness by trying not to talk like a person who is hard of hearing. “Did you use the shot in the story?”

I smile at him. “Can you imagine? Charcuterie and moldy citrus.”

David puts an inch of space between his arm and Nicola’s. He raises his glass. “To artistic compromise!”

“I’m not a diva on set, I swear,” I tell them. “It was just for a side project of mine.” It was one of my darks, that photograph of the lemons. That bright dimpled peel doing exactly what is expected of it. Then that shock of gray-green fur.

“You’re right, I am not selling you very well,” Nicola says. “Karen is fantastic. We will definitely want to work with her.”

I lift my glass to theirs and take a sip of my margarita. I suddenly feel sorry for Nicola. It’s easy for me to live without someone. I’m used to it. Even with Greg I spent most of my time behind my camera or alone at my desk. But Nicola. Her divorce explains the extremely aerobicized condition of her ass and thighs in that tight dress she’s wearing. The ultra-blond hair, the layers of makeup she never used to wear. Poor Nicola Zwitter is, as they say, on the prowl.

“I can’t wait to see your portfolio, my dear.” Douglas smiles, gives a little sigh, and looks off across the atrium. He probably isn’t all that anxious to see my portfolio. He’s probably seen it all so often that he can barely stand it anymore. A hundred thousand country loaves on maple bread boards. A hundred thousand matelassé bedspreads with piled-up pillows. All the tired old fantasies entering through the eye and benumbing the veins.

I touch the note in my pocket again and—O Bruce. How his hair used to stick up over his right ear. How that ear would be flushed a deep red and hot to the touch, so that when I met him in the bathroom I would know he’d slept on that side.

One night Mike’s pills kept up an itchy, humming pressure under my scalp. When Bruce slipped up behind me I was drumming my forehead with all ten of my fingertips to counteract the feeling. “My brain is twitching,” I complained. “Picture it in there. It’s kicking like a wild stallion.”

He rested his chin atop my head and waggled his eyebrows at me in the mirror. “What color?”

I closed my eyes. “Gray. With white spots and a tangled yellow mane. He’s huge. Massive. The ground shudders when he gallops.”

“Does he go after the girl horses? The mares?” Bruce humped the small of my back in illustration.

“No. Light. He chases down light,” I said.

“A lighthorse.” He nodded, bouncing his chin on my skull as though it made perfect sense. “Hey, did you bring your camera? You should get a picture of us in the mirror like this.”

Pictures, though. Look at my pictures, perhaps especially the ones no one sees, those stylized still lifes with all their obsessive fussy detail that I call my “darks.” Sing of Dyann Brooks-Morriss, keeneyed war-lover, a searchlight for the truth! Dyann wanted the cleansing tide of blood. She wanted to rouse the world from its torpor. She thundered right down to the wellsprings of life, past them, down even further to stare unblinking into the murk of Tartarus. Meanwhile I tiptoe along the surface, taking pictures, looking at pictures. Looking at pictures and looking at pictures. Looking at all these pictures to avoid looking at that one.

19. KATEGORIA

(accusation)

“I’m driving you back there,” Steph said. The keys were already in her hand moments after I jangled through the front door of Raghurst.

They’d been sitting in the living room, Marie-Jeanne with a breakfast smoothie, Steph with papers spread all over the coffee table. If Steph hadn’t leapt to her feet when I walked in, I’d have wondered if I was completely insane, if I’d imagined the entire scene in the Black Bag the night before. “No way,” I said. “Not until somebody tells me what the hell is going on.”

“You saw for yourself, apparently,” Marie-Jeanne said.

“What I saw …” I couldn’t say what I’d seen. My mind dodged around it like repelling magnets. “Where is Dyann? Where’s Charla?”

“They’re fine; they’re sleeping. You need to go back there and make sure everyone is okay.” Steph pulled her sweatshirt over her head and handed it to me. “Here, you can wear this; it’ll look like you just popped home to change. Come on, let’s go.”

I planted my feet. “Who? Whom? Make sure whom is okay?”

Marie-Jeanne said, “A lot of those guys were mixing all kinds of drugs, alcohol. Do you know—are you sure they were all up and accounted for this morning?”

“No one in the hospital?” Steph added.

“No one was even awake yet,” I said. “I can call Mike and see, if you want.”

“Let’s go,” Steph said. “You can’t say a word to Mike. I mean it, Karen.” She steered me out the door. “This is really, really important, and we don’t have time to explain it all right now.”

* * *

Normally the pledges, at least, would be up by mid-morning after a party. They’d be collecting empties, opening windows, righting chairs, and wiping up spills in anticipation of the cleaning service. Someone would have gone out for groceries and cooked a big, hangover-busting breakfast of bacon and eggs, pancakes, real maple syrup—”real maple syrup” was actually listed somewhere in the house rules, apparently—and the smell of that, along with the prospect of Chet’s tequila sunrises, would draw the brothers into the kitchen in stumbling, half-soused groups of two and three.

I’d come to enjoy these feasts almost more than the parties themselves. All that prowling and stalking and strutting the night before and here they would gather in the morning, droopy and deflated. The puffed eyelids and rumpled hair—even the stale smells—reminded me of my younger brother. The boys scratched and mumbled, and they groaned when you touched their bare shoulders.

But today when Steph dropped me off it was quiet. The lone pledge I encountered in the hallway, little red-eyed Frodo, looked harried and ill. “Fuck if I know,” he snapped at me when I asked where everybody was. He hadn’t been able to rouse anyone to help him clean up, he complained, and nearly everybody had gotten sick at some point. I checked the backyard, but Bruce wasn’t there anymore.

Mike had gone back to bed too, so I crawled in next to him.

“I’m sick,” I reminded him when he reached for me. “I wasn’t on the schedule after all, thank God.”

We slept until noon. When we came downstairs again, two women in baby-blue aprons were steam-vacuuming the furniture. Batches of Hunch Punch had gone wrong before, Mike told me, and there were routine procedures for global vomiting. Ana’s Housekeeping Services was number six on GBC’s speed-dial.

Eventually everyone was awake again, showering in twos and threes so the hot water wouldn’t give out, mixing beer with tomato juice. Mike set up a station in the kitchen for his sunrises ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table of Contents
• Book I: Strophe
• Book II: Antistrophe
• Book III: Epode
• Acknowledgments
• Back Cover