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“Typical service.”
“Do they always worship him like that?” It was strange. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen the way people could worship other people. My father’s women, the popular girls in school, my mother with my sister. But until then, I don’t think I’d ever witnessed it on such a large scale. I’d never seen it like that. “How do you get that many people to just do whatever you want when you just give them the answer?”
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sp; “The answer?”
I shake my head. It’s like he wasn’t listening at all. “Inducement.”
He keeps walking.
“It’s like he’s God himself or something. He’s so good.”
Tom halts rather abruptly. “It isn’t bad or good, Melanie. There’s no point in analyzing it.” His expression hardens. “It just is.”
“It’s all very interesting, if you ask me.”
Tom’s grip on my hand loosens, until he drops it all together. There’s a look in his eyes that I’d deleted from memory. “Well, I didn’t,” he says and he pulls his hand away.
It’s hard to believe I hadn’t known before Tom brought me here that this place existed. Upton Village. But then, why would I? You don’t get into a place like this without an invitation and like most of the finer things in life, it’s more about who you know than what you know. In this case, it’s better not to know too much. They say it takes a village, and that’s what they’ve created—an exclusive gated community just a few miles south of Austin
The church bought out the neighborhood eventually, save for a few holdouts. Gawkers, Tom called them. He said the church did things to try and force them out. Mostly it worked. He said it takes a special kind of person to stay where you’re not wanted.
It seems like more of a commune to me, but instead of residents who look like hippies, the people of Upton are perfect, beautiful. Picturesque. Unmistakable.
Our street in particular is a carefully crafted, immaculately maintained mishmash of Victorians, Craftsman, and Colonials which are made to look old but actually aren’t.
The streets are tree lined, mostly oaks, and I don’t know how else to describe my new living quarters other than to say, it is quite literally like stepping back in time. The sun is bright, the shadows dance between the mixture of light and shade that hardly has time to blanket the ground given the cool canopy of trees. The breeze always seems to carry with it the scent of barbecue smoke and homemade bread. Things here have an exact nature, even the flowerbeds are laid out in military precision.
Here the women don’t rattle on about schools, they’ve created their own. “They seem so insular,” I told Tom after I first moved in. “All anyone wants to talk about is some new cleaning product they tried, the latest extracurricular for little Johnny, or where they plan to ‘summer.’
That, he reminds me, is the opposite of insular.
One afternoon, the first week after he’d moved me in, Tom drove me around to show me what I had to look forward to when the baby came. He pointed out the baseball field, soccer fields, at least a handful of tennis courts, and the Olympic-sized swimming pool complete with three water slides. He told me not to worry about the pool being “small” as most people had their own. The playground alone was otherworldly. Swings, seesaws and slides, climbing walls, and a ropes course. All you need is a grocery store, and you’d never have to leave, I remarked.
Tom smiled and said, “That’s why they have delivery, dear.”
Speaking of delivery, that same week, most of the women who live in The Village (this is its nickname, I’m told) delivered what my husband called meals.
“We like to take care of our own,” each of the wives say, as though it has been scripted. Like the women, the meals, they’re all the same flavor. When I mention this to Tom, he says they’re casseroles. What did I expect?
He has a point. Like the women here, I found them to be very unoriginal.
They probably share recipes, he told me. I thought he was joking.
This was before I realized he wasn’t.
I felt terror rising. I felt like maybe I have judged things all wrong. “They don’t have cooks?”
“Some of them do,” he said. “But women in The Village take pride in caring for their families. Especially those who’ve been around a while.”
I felt my stomach drop.
Tom studied me for a second. “Don’t worry,” he promised. “It takes some getting used to. Human beings are selfish by nature. But…I’m sure you’ll fit in in no time.”
It felt like a dig.
“I don’t know what to do with myself,” I tell Tom one evening when I find myself waiting at the door for him to come home. “It just feels so remote living out here. Maybe we should get an apartment in the city. Start over.”
