Commune of Women (11 page)

“What are you doing now?” she’ll ask.

“I’m on my hands and knees in the bathroom, scrubbing the crack between the toilet and the linoleum with a toothbrush,” Holly will say.

Heddi can see her there in her lime green sweat pants, her mop of frowsy red hair held out of her face by the headset that holds the phone so her hands are free to work, the antenna seeming to grow out of her left ear like a little antler.

Meanwhile, Heddi reclines on her seafoam green leather couch, propped up on the cushions she had made last year from mill ends of Scalamandré silk the color of a cold May ocean. The sun streams through French windows onto her antique Chinese rugs and the indigo glows in a kind of sexual incandescence from the stroking of the rays.

“That’s great, Hol,” Heddi will say.

So, now it’s a shock to walk into her living room and see what has happened. The floor is still spotless, stretching out before her like a highly waxed desert. The two recliners in turquoise vinyl are still at perfect 30-degree angles to the big-screen TV. The
faux-bois
Formica coffee table still holds this month’s issues of
Field and Stream
and
Sunset
at perfect right angles to the edges.

It’s to the windows that Heddi’s eyes leap in astonishment. There, just as Holly had told her through her tears yesterday, is the proof that her marriage has just taken a perfect 180-degree turn for the worse.

“You won’t believe it,” she gasps, snuffling. “He went to the pastor and the pastor agreed with him. They both think I’m possessed by an evil spirit...or maybe the Devil Himself. I’m not sure. So...so...” her voice fades into helpless weeping.

“So...
what
, Holly?” Heddi asks, trying to sound gentle and to urge her on at the same time.

Holly takes a deep breath. “So, the pastor blessed some oil for Roscoe. And then Roscoe came home and used the anointed oil to make crosses on every single window in the house!” Her voice rises to a pointy little squeak and then cascades into further weeping.

There is a considerable silence, while Heddi’s mind adjusts to accommodate this new input.

“Just how
big
are these crosses, Hol?” she finally asks, trying to encompass the magnitude of this event.

“They cover the whole damn window!” Holly shrieks. “Top to bottom! Side to side! Every one of them. And I just washed them all yesterday!”

There’s another long silence. “I see,” Heddi says, finally.

But it is clear to her now that she did
not
see.

“Well, Hol...maybe you can retaliate,” she says, trying to make light of it. Sometimes, she can humor Holly into laughter, right through her tears. “What would freak Roscoe out, as much as he’s freaked you out?”

Holly snuffles. “If I wrote
666
right over his damn crosses,” she answers promptly. “In blood.”

“In
menstrual
blood!” Heddi yelps, really getting into this fantasy.

“Yeah! In
menstrual
blood!” Holly chimes. And somehow, through the tears, she manages a giggle and before they hang up they’re howling histrionically enough to raise the Devil, imagining all the things they could do to subvert the Little Temple of Living Misogyny and send its congregation, en masse, to its knees, praying for deliverance from liberated women.

So now, Heddi’s looking at the windows and her knees are feeling weak. The midday sun is streaming through, baking a mooshed-up mess of blood and oil onto the glass. It looks like a chicken was butchered on there.

She tiptoes out of the room, goes down the hall to the bathroom. She looks in the wastebasket. Sure enough – Holly’s on her period.

Heddi feels a little dizzy. She heads to the guest room, thinking she’ll lie down.

Blaaghh!

There’s blood and oil there, too, but not quite so dried out because it’s the shady side of the house.

She pulls the blinds and lies down. Bit by bit, she fluffs out the wadded scraps of memory and tries to piece them together into a coherent whole.

“So what kicked all this off?” she asks Holly during a lull in their commotion.

“Oh...” Holly puffs. “It was that class I’m taking. Women’s Spirituality. He picked up my textbook and read a few pages. It was the part where the Hebrew god Yahweh speaks through the prophets and tells them to destroy the goddess and cut down her pillars and groves.

“He made some remark, and I said that I thought we’d be better off if we still worshipped the goddess – and he just went ballistic! I mean, it was worse than when I said I thought Jesse Jackson would make a good president. He just went crazy. And then, he went to see the pastor.”

Heddi gets up from the bed and goes in search of Holly’s textbook. There it is, stowed fastidiously in the little bookcase by her desk in the corner of the master bedroom. She opens it at random. Neatly underlined in yellow highlighter, she reads:

Archeological evidence suggests that ancient goddess-worshipping societies were egalitarian and non-aggressive, the latter being inferred from an almost total absence of weapons at these sites. The monotheistic sky-god cultures that overran these earlier civilizations, however, were almost universally patriarchal, hierarchical, and dedicated to the arts of war. The subjugation of women, accomplished by rape, destruction of material goddess culture, and laws limiting women’s rights, was justified by the fact that the male godhead was the model of superiority, in which first the king and the priesthood, and then all other males, partook.

Heddi closes the book and returns it to its shelf, thinking about the day Holly called, bursting with the amazement of her discovery:
God used to be a woman!
Heddi always has the women in her Jungian study groups read Neumann and Gimbutas, so these things are old hat for her, but Holly was so excited!

That realization seems to have played an important part in unwinding the skein of Holly’s very conventional, very married life and setting her on the apostate road of feminism. Holly couldn’t wait to join a consciousness-raising group and to share in the empowerment that was going on there.

This semester, she was beginning to see her role from new eyes – so new that Roscoe thought they might be someone else’s; someone Satanic.

Heddi thinks about Rosebud, lifts the shade and peeks out at the yard through the hideous smear of blood and oil; the goddess and the patriarchs, going
mano à mano
across the sliding aluminum windows.

“Holly, honey, the party’s getting rough!” she mutters, dropping the shade.

That night, Heddi goes out under the night sky, all milky with moonlight and wispy clouds, and calls for Rosebud. Not that she actually expects her to respond, but she gave her word to try. The geese honk in response, down at the pond beyond the front lawn. In the dim light, she can see Snodgrass, the big white Chinese goose, rise up from the banks and spread phosphorescent wings as he throws his head back and
squonks
his answer. But no Rosebud.

Heddi goes back into the house, locks the door and sets the alarm for the night. In the guest room, she throws back the covers, changes into her PJ’s and crawls into bed feeling a trifle undone by the day’s revelations. The last thing she remembers is the quiet
shush
of the central air coming on and the gentle blast of cooling breeze from the vent above her.

Suddenly, she sits straight up in bed. She knows from the leadenness of her body that hours of deep slumber have transpired.

What’s she hearing? What’s going on?

Groggily, she listens and identifies the sound. The geese are in a tumult down at the pond! There is honking and shrieking enough to raise the dead!

Rosebud! The wolf, hungry after her release from the kennel and its regular feeding times, must be stalking the geese! Heddi leaps from bed and dashes down the dark hall into the living room. With blind fingers, she gropes for the lock on the front door, throws it open and rushes onto the lawn shouting, “Rosebud! Don’t you
dare
touch those geese!
Ro-o-o-sebud!
”

The cold dew on the grass is showering her bare feet. The night has turned chilly and she wraps her arms around herself. Off toward the pond, she thinks she sees a vague, silvery tracer, leaping toward the orange grove. The geese squawk indignantly but the urgency of their alarm seems to have diminished.

She goes back into the house.
3:17
, she notes, on the digital readout glowing eerily beneath the invisible TV. She gropes her way into the hall, heading back to the guest room.

Suddenly, she’s engulfed in sound! Sirens are going off somewhere in the ceiling over her head. An alarm making a whooping noise is blasting from somewhere in the living room.

The noise is deafening! She covers her ears and sinks to the floor, trying to shield herself. For a moment, she thinks that she has lost her mind; that she’s finally having that acid flashback her friends warned her about back in 1969.

A brilliant, dead-white strobe light is illuminating the scene, surreally showing her Holly and Roscoe in their wedding photos, framed on the hall wall, now darkness, and then again, Holly and Roscoe, looking too young, and then darkness again.

A disembodied male voice, like God’s over the black wastes of Chaos, cries out, “Identify yourself! Identify yourself!”

What can she say to this existential request?

“Female hominid, of Planet Earth?”

“Lone woman, unarmed?”

“Renegade Daughter of Eve?”

“What the fuck is going
on?
” she shrieks, instead.

The implacable voice demands again, “Identify yourself! Identify yourself!”

The strobe light is making her nauseous. She begins to crawl along the hall wall, making for the front door. As she passes the doorway to the bathroom, a bell somewhere within the recesses of the linen closet begins to clang, adding its uproar to the siren and the over-sized Whoopee Cushion.

She is screaming now. “Shut up, goddam you! Shut the fuck up!” and crying because of the violence of this assault on her slumberous nervous system.

She’s almost to the front door when the whole thing suddenly stops. Silence descends utterly, and she experiences it with a kind of primordial awe – or maybe she’s just been rendered permanently deaf. She can’t be sure – until the telephone rings, a sound almost dulcet on her contused eardrums.

She gropes along the wall for the light switch but can’t locate it. She crawls across the cold linoleum toward the sound of the phone. Instead of picking up the receiver, she knocks it to the floor in a blind swipe, and then has to hunt for it.

“Hello?” she whispers into what she hopes is the right end of the thing. She is impressed that her voice seems to have regressed at least five decades in so short a time.

“Hello?” she says again, hoping to sound more authoritative. It comes out as an unintelligible rasp.

“Who
is
this?” a stern male voice demands.

“Who is
this?
” she counters, suddenly fired up. “Don’t you give me a hard time, you bastard! I’ve been through enough for one night without being harassed by some goddamn drill sergeant!”

“This is Delta Alarm Service. You have fifteen seconds to respond with the code word, or...”

“Or
what?
” she screams. “You’ll shoot to kill? Launch Cruise missiles against me? You motherfucker...”

And she bursts into tears, her most maddening trait. She never can carry out a complete fit of pique, but must dissolve into these un-
macha
sobs.

“Oh
shit!
” she howls, and throws herself onto the floor in a heap, cradling the phone to her cheek like a security blanket.

“You sound upset,” the voice says, not un-gently. “What happened?”

“The alarm happened,” Heddi whimpers between snotty hiccups. “I tried to go outside to rescue the geese from the wolf and I forgot the goddamned alarm.”

“Geese? A
wolf
was after the geese? Lady, there haven’t been wolves in this valley for over seventy-five years!”

“Okay. Okay. I confess. I was trying to rob the place and in the process of lugging out this two hundred pound turquoise vinyl recliner, I set off the alarm. Now are you satisfied?”

“Tell me about the wolf. Oh...as long as you don’t, by some chance, know the code word?”

“I do not.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Holly’s – the wife’s – the owner’s wife’s – stepmother. Dr. Heddi Merriweather.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Trying to catch the wolf.”

“You really insist on this wolf?”

“I do. Such things are not unheard of – even in modern times,” Heddi says stiffly, gathering her dignity about her. She’s aware that somewhere in the last several sentences, they have changed their tone from confrontation to banter.

She’s lying there on the cold linoleum of the living room floor in her pajamas in the 3:30 AM darkness, a failed wolf-catcher, needing to blow her nose and having a flirtation with the Delta Alarm Service switchboard guy.

What’s next?
she wonders. A flying saucer landing in the pasture? The imminent arrival of a marching band blasting John Philip Souza? The parking brake failing and her car slowly rolling backwards in the moonlight, down the driveway and into the pond? She has a brief epiphany concerning Life in Its Infinite Variety.

“My step-son-in-law has a wolf,” she says wearily. The fight and the flirt have suddenly left her. “It got out of its kennel. I’m trying to lure it back in again. That’s it. Nothing mysterious. Just a loose wolf and a forgotten alarm system. Period. End of report.”

“I see,” he says grudgingly.

Oh Mister,
Heddi thinks,
you ain’t seen nothin’ like what I’ve seen, these last few hours! You don’t SEE, at all!

In the morning she makes the decision, while still lying in bed half asleep, to leave. She can’t bear another day behind these grotesque windows. It’s obvious that she is never going to catch the wolf. She needs the solace of the creature comforts with which her home is so richly appointed. She wants out of this madhouse.

She doesn’t even take the time to make herself a cup of coffee because it’s just instant coffee bags, anyway, and no cream, just one-percent milk. The image of herself perched on cold turquoise vinyl sipping this ghastly ersatz concoction is what propels her from bed and into a flurry of bed-making and jamming toiletries and PJs into her overnight bag.