“I’m sorry,” he says.

Before he leaves the porch to plod back to his mail truck, I close and open my eyes, three times, as he did.

“We’ll talk another time,” he says. It’s only a whisper. And then he goes.

Off to my right, a door slams, its tinny aluminum double tapping on the frame. Olivia King, hidden by a paisley umbrella, emerges from the shelter of her porch. The scarf around her head is plain pink silk, or polyester. It gives her the air of a grandmother, although Olivia is at least a decade younger than I am. She checks the skies, puts a hand out, and closes the umbrella.

She does not take off the scarf before stepping from the porch and folding herself into the front seat of her car. Weekday mornings are the only times Olivia drives anymore; if her church were closer, she’d walk.

In this moment, Olivia seems small, almost shrunken, a house mouse scuttling from one refuge to another, fearful of what might lie in wait along her trajectory. She’s what Jackie would have called a Kool-Aid head, content with her place in the hierarchy: God, man, woman. Olivia had drunk up the poison, every last drop.

My own repertoire of religious doctrine is shit, which is how I like it. But when Steven first came home with his reading from that AP course—an innocent-sounding title, Fundamentals of Modern Christian Philosophy, blazoned on the cover, innocuous blue lettering on a white background—I leafed through the book after dinner.

“Pretty lame, isn’t it?” Steven said on his second trip to the kitchen’s snack cabinet.

“They’re mainstreaming this next year? That’s what you said, right?” I asked. My eyes didn’t stray from the page, a chapter titled “In Search of a Natural Order in the Modern Family.” The chapter, like all the others, was preceded by a biblical quote; this one, from Corinthians, informed the reader that “The head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.”

Fantastic.

Further along, chapter twenty-seven began with this nugget from the book of Titus: “Be teachers of good things; teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands.” The gist of the text was a call to arms of sorts, a reaching out to older generations of women.

There were chapters on feminism and its insidious deconstruction of Judeo-Christian values (as well as manhood), advice for men on their roles in husbanding and parenting, guidance for children on respecting their elders. Every page screamed extreme-right fundamentalism.

I slammed the book shut. “Tell me this isn’t the only required reading.”

“That’s the book,” Steven said after he downed a mason jar of milk and refilled it halfway.