Commune of Women (18 page)

On that brief visit, in her devastated, barely-embodied state, the growl of the sea was tonic. It reminded her that eternal verities underpin this transient life. People have come and gone – in this house, this town, this continent, this world – for who knows how many generations?

Her aunt lived richly, deliciously, at
Quatre Vents
. Now she’s gone. Her daughter, with her silly little social existence as cheerleader, perennial dieter and heartless cell-phone gossip, is gone. Her hollowed-out marriage, like a puff pastry
sans
filling, is gone.

And half of Ondine’s life is gone.

On the first night at
Quatre Vents
, she dreamed that she has ten minutes to dress because she’s expected to be the head of a parade in a wonderful costume. She can’t find her shoes – other women had borrowed them...

“My other selves, Heddi? That southern California social fixture? That soccer mom? That loveless, dutiful wife?”

Heddi just stares at her with fathomless, sibylline eyes that say she’s listening with her entire being.

...and when she opens the bottom drawer of her dresser where she keeps her fancy things – embroidered Spanish shawls, antique
huipils
, hand-woven
rebozos
– it’s empty.

The shock is profound. In a panic, she opens the next drawer. It’s empty, too!

Quickly, she opens the third drawer, the next to the top, and – Oh! Sweet relief! – it’s stuffed full of the most marvelous fabrics. Not one but three
rebozos
, each more fabulous than the last, in bright cadmium yellow with intricately woven designs in rich colors. And at the bottom of the drawer is an ankle-length skirt of sky blue
ikat
, woven with hazy white clouds.

She shakes the skirt out, expecting it to be too wrinkled to wear, but it ripples down invitingly, without a flaw. She feels a strong desire to slip it on.

But still, she dithers, making excuses. The parade has probably started by now. But in her mind’s eye, she can see people still milling about, sorting themselves into parade formation. There will be no parking in town – even though she’d planned to walk. And she has no right to head the parade – this, in spite of her vision of herself, carrying a towering silk banner embroidered with strange symbols, that billows in the wind, with skirts flying and shawls swirling about her.

Most alarming is the radiance of her face. Her absolute presence in the moment. Her joy...

What right has she – the killer mom – to such prominence, immanence and abandon?

She awakened delirious with indecision: to rush out and head the parade or to shrink back, cop out and become anonymous? The decision isn’t so easy as the waking, rational mind might think.

But those two empty drawers! The first half of her life gone, emptied out!

And that third drawer so full of riches – all those beautiful adornments so ready to leap into the fray, to whip like bright flags in the winds of life.

If they’d been common clothing, the decision would have been simpler. But these were vestments; the sacred garb of the Feminine, created by the most skilled hands – woven by Isis or Athena Herself, maybe.

Surely, she couldn’t face the shame of keeping such treasures hidden, could she?

Tante Collette was right: she’s lost her soul and now it is her burden – she can scarcely imagine it might also be her delight – to retrieve it.

The morning after the dream, the weather turns frigid. It’s February and a heavy gray sky lours over the bare orchard. Ondine digs Tante Collette’s ankle-length black mink out of the fur vault in the basement, along with its matching Tatar hat. She twines a long scarf of slubbed Thai silk, sea green iridescing to peacock blue, around her throat, buttons the coat from top to bottom and goes out.

The western garden door groans on its hinges and exudes a smell of mold, as she follows the path toward the shore. She reminds herself to oil both wood and metal when warm weather comes. The grass of the orchard is bent under heavy dew, wetting her boots as if it were wiping its tears there, protesting its neglect.

Over the crest of the hill the low bushes begin, with their pale, leathery leaves and twisted black branches. She stumbles downhill toward the sea over coarse bunches of bleached grass. Wind whips up the slope, magnifying the roar of the agitated surf below. Dry seedpods, like blackened string beans, rattle ominously on the bushes. The entire scene is dramatic, Shakespearean, filled with the shamanic intensity of Macbeth’s witches.

She imagines the southern California beach today, with people in shorts and tee shirts, the sun shining, and the smells of hotdogs grilling and cocoa butter sunscreen overpowering the ocean’s salt. While here she is, skittering down toward the icy Atlantic, wearing fur. She feels the rightness of that in her cold bones.

When she reaches the beach, the roar of the sea obliterates all other sound. The ocean is whipped by wind into ice green tunnels fringed in foam. Wind lifts the foam, rolling it in airy balls across the beach until it snags in the grass.

A balloon of it skates along the gale and smacks into her face. Immediately, it begins to disintegrate, its tiny bubbles popping deliciously against her skin. When she licks her lips, she tastes salt and minerals that feed an utterly primal hunger she didn’t even know she possessed.

Heddi would say that the beach is liminal space: “In dreams, the beach holds contents emerging from or disappearing into the unconscious.” This, one day as Ondine sat in Heddi’s office, gazing blankly at wavelets of light that lapped across the ceiling and east wall, refractions off the afternoon ocean.

So here in France, it’s an appropriate place for a stroll, given Ondine’s soulless, semi-vaporous state. Maybe a rogue wave will come and simply sweep her into the obliteration of the unconscious; or a serpentine leviathan of the deep arise, bearing as a gift the Pearl of Wisdom in its hoary jaws.

As she struggles up the beach against the wind, a gull is hanging in air, breasting the gale. Positioned directly over the tide line, he strokes his wings, seeming to advance, only to be pushed back by powerful currents of air. He bobs forward and backward by inches.

Ondine stands watching him for some minutes. At any moment, she expects, he will disappear into those vast spaces only birds can inhabit.

Instead, he hangs suspended.

She is overcome with the desire for him to do something; to exert some kernelled energy and soar off over the ocean, or to tilt and fold his wings and wheel inland booted by the wind. But this endless exertion accomplishing nothing annoys her. What the hell is he doing
?
What does he hope to accomplish?

She picks up a round sea cobble and hurls it at him. Of course, it misses.

She shouts at him, “You stupid bird! Move, for God’s sake!” And she lobs another stone.

He’s sublimely indifferent to her existence. He stares unblinkingly out to sea. He flaps and is blown back. He bobs above the waves, going nowhere.

“God damn you!” Ondine screams, scooping up a fistful of wet sand and hurling it with all her force. It blows back into her eyes and she hops around in supreme irritation, rubbing her eyes and brushing her face with damp gloves, shrieking.

“God damn you, you stupid, stupid bird! You useless, indecisive piece of shit! You weak, helpless goddamned piece of garbage. God damn you!
God damn you!
” She wipes away strands of spittle with her suede glove. Tears hot as lava gush down her icy cheeks. “God damn you to Hell!”

And she turns and runs for the house. She doesn’t even need Heddi’s decree, “Projection!” She knows it well enough on her own.

She’s halfway up the slope to the orchard when she remembers Heddi also saying, “The bird’s a symbol of the spirit. Like, when the dove of the Holy Spirit comes and hovers over Jesus at His baptism.”

When she gets back to the west garden door, she can’t get it open. The latch is rusted and simply refuses to lift. She struggles ineptly and vainly for a while, like some well-attired Lear locked out of his own castle.

She exerts all her strength in one last attempt to rattle the door loose. It doesn’t budge. The
temenos
is doing its job, expelling the unclean and unready.

In complete humiliation, she has to march down the road in ankle-length black mink to find a locksmith. She’s sure they’re
still
talking about
that
epiphany in the village.

“The memory of country people is long,” Tante Collette used to say – in which case, they must also still remember the fairytale wedding Tante Collette gave her at
Quatre Vents
.

It’s been over twenty years since that afternoon saturated with such joy and sureness, when Ondine wed Richard under the trees of that garden. Then, they were in full leaf and heavy with fruit; apples, pears, apricots, cherries and peaches, each in its separate state of ripening. Their mingled fragrance was luscious in the warm air of early summer. Birds dipped and chattered. Roses and honeysuckle twined their scents with the marvelous foods being presented at the long, linen-clad tables beneath the trees.

She had thought herself so adult that day, so gracious, so the Lady deigning to stoop to guests – little knowing that her own state of ripening was close to rock-hard green.

Maybe the de-souling happened that very day, when she went away, proud and sure, with the handsome man she scarcely knew. Out of the Garden, so to speak. De-Edenized.

Or maybe it was more gradual. She remembers putting up a fight at various junctures along the way. Demanding a sitter for Kyle and Jackie four days a week, so she could finish her MFA. Refusing to iron Richard’s shirts as a nod to feminism. Squeezing in time while the kids were at school for dance and exercise classes that kept her figure trim, maintaining the illusion of her sylph-self.

What she could not have known, what is barely coming to awareness this moment, is that it was, from the instant the vows were spoken, a losing battle.

Whether in the frenzy of a Christmas-time shopping mall buying blitz, or during quiet nights in a lonely bed wondering where Richard was and what was keeping him so long, or in the ball-cap-on-backwards, hamper-lugging, interminable weekends of the children’s grade and high school soccer matches, her soul was quietly, step by stealthy step, stealing away.

Unlike the people of the village, she
cannot
remember. She feels lobotomized. When did her bright hopes for an intimate relationship with Richard first have a head-on crash with reality? When did she first realize that the mature companionship of equals she had envisioned was really just a charade of male dominance and female passivity
?

At first, she tried cajoling:
I love you
–
can’t we work this out?
Then, she fought it, calling it by name, railing against it – only to win herself a reputation as a ragging bitch. Then came withdrawal, at the point when she could no longer speak her disappointment. And finally, the glossy, well-portrayed, scooped-out facsimile of a happy, pampered wife.

She lay down inside like a suicide inviting inundation on a beach. She let the green waves of his icy neglect bury her, batter her against the rocks, stop her breath and drown her soul.

And she did it all effortlessly, in Italian sandals, silk gauze skirts and Dior tee shirts. It was no small feat, when she stops to think about it. Maybe she’s missed her calling in film or on the stage.

“
Heddi talks about my marriage to Richard as a regression. She says I was letting Richard act like an emotionally abusive father, while I played the docile little girl.

“I couldn’t disagree – what docile little girl would? It was just easier, that way...less stressful.”

Ondine’s eyes sweep the group, looking for the antsyness of boredom or the blank stare of withdrawal. All eyes are still on her, though, and it gives her the courage to continue.

Heddi isn’t impressed by that logic, at all: “You think living this way is
easy?
” They’re sitting in her office, with its tranquil ocean light off the afternoon Pacific.

“What else can I
do?
” Ondine flips her hands upwards and then drops them listlessly in her lap, a gesture of futility.

“There’s a kind of heroism,” Heddi says, “that comes through meeting the banal demands of everyday life – including standing up to a husband whose will to power seems overwhelming. If not for yourself, then for the children. What kind of role model are you for them? Do you want your son to abuse his future wife and children? Do you expect your daughter to endure an anti-erotic marriage of emotional compliance and cowardice?”

In truth, Ondine never really bought that argument. Kyle was always so out-going and friendly, she could never imagine him holding his future family as emotional hostages. She’d known, right from the first moment he stumped off on his solid little toddler’s legs bent on investigations pertaining to himself alone, that his life would go just fine.

And Jackie was always so...well, it’s hard for her to say it and not sound monstrously cold. She is – was – her daughter, after all, her own flesh and blood. But the child, right from the womb, was unnaturally passive. Sweet-natured, no trouble at all. But somehow limp. There was no fight in her at all.

Ondine came to think of her as the new genetic dispensation, bred especially for southern California, where fight-or-flight is more concerned with whether or not to skip school to go surfing than with battling saber-toothed tigers. She was born with her hand shaped to a cell phone. She was the easeful life, embodied. A domineering husband would scarcely have been a problem for her. She’d probably have welcomed never being called upon to make a decision regarding her own existence.

In the weeks after Jackie’s death, people complimented Ondine on her grace under pressure, her heroic stoicism. They sent emails saying things like, “Thank you for being a courageous example to us all.”

Only Heddi wasn’t fooled. “Where are you stuffing the grief?” she wanted to know.

And when Ondine replied, without a glimmer of self-awareness, “What grief?” Heddi just stared at her without a word.