The Stolen Gospels (5 page)

Chapter 5

The omissions of recorded history are substantial, and sometimes the process of recovering lost information takes surprising turns.

—Report of the Commission on the She-Apostles

As they entered the house, the woman introduced herself as Su-Su Florida, a real estate agent. “Do you live near here?” she asked Camilla.

“Across Lake Washington—in Seattle.”

The woman’s brow wrinkled and she gazed down her nose, as if she considered the Vales interlopers from an inferior social class. “Oh,” she said, and hurried down the hallway.

Camilla and a hesitant Lori followed. The teenager absorbed everything around her. She sensed something very peculiar here, but was unable to identify it. Her stomach was turning over.

Incense burned on William and Mary side tables, which had Christian objects arranged on them, including Rosary beads and angel candle holders. A small painting of Jesus Christ adorned one wall of the entry, and across from that a large painting of St. Joan of Arc depicted her in a suit of armor, leading the soldiers of the French Dauphin, Charles VII, into battle.

The visitors entered a tastefully decorated living room, featuring deep cushion Queen Anne chairs, a Chippendale sofa, and a Goddard desk. A large painting of the crucified Jesus hung over the fireplace. Women were moving furniture out of the way, with a short but muscular black woman of around forty directing the work. She wore a loose-fitting white gauze dress with dangling bracelets of oversized black beads, and an unusual necklace: a gold cross with the lower portion of it shaped like a sword blade. Her hair was braided, clasped on one side by a wood and leather barrette. From the lobes of her ears hung large gold earrings, and glittering golden boots covered her feet.

“Welcome to my associate’s home, everyone,” she said, in a soft Southern drawl. “I’m Dixie Lou Jackson, the surprise speaker.” In her hands she held the statuette of a woman.

A murmur of excitement passed through the room, but Lori didn’t know why. “She’s second in command of the UWW,” Camilla said, “an umbrella organization for this goddess circle and others like it around the world.”

This still didn’t provide much information to Lori. The UWW? She’d never heard of it. Apprehensively, she stared at Jackson, and held gazes with her for a moment. Dixie Lou gave her a hard glare, but only her eyes were unfriendly. The rest of her face smiled.

Lori felt a sick queasiness in the pit of her stomach.

The teenager glanced to her left at an Early American side table where a large
Bible
lay, with pink tabs sticking from the pages. Beside that lay an open notebook with the handwritten heading, “Quotes Detrimental to Women,” and beneath that were biblical references. She noted one, Genesis 3:16: “And thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.”

She had read passages from the
Bible
and even liked them, but didn’t recall seeing that quotation or the others that were entered on the pages of the notebook. They made her think.

Flipping pages, she found an especially intriguing entry: “Jesus did not say that women are to be subordinate.” It had no attribution, so maybe it was the finding of one of the women in this house.

Her mother tugged at her arm. “Come on Lori. They’re getting ready for the meeting.”

Dixie Lou directed the attendees to sit on the floor in a circle. One of them was an elderly blind woman, guided by a German Shepherd dog. Lori overheard the woman saying the animal used to be a police dog.

On the floor at the center of the group, a round piece of dark-stained oak was placed, upon the surface of which Jackson arranged candle holders of glass, pottery and pewter that depicted female themes, including little girls, mothers with babies, and female angels and goddesses. In the middle of the candle arrangement she placed the statuette of the woman, which Lori now noticed held a tiny weapon in her upturned palms, a sword that looked like a modified Christian cross—matching the one hanging from the neck of the hostess.

Su-Su Florida and a dark woman in a sari (she might have been East Indian) lit the candles. The electric lights were dimmed low, giving the room an eerie, funereal appearance. A shiver coursed Lori’s spine. The women found their places and sat quietly. Camilla did the same, and forced Lori to do so as well, despite her protestations. Through a window she could see a large saffron moon hanging low over the city of Seattle and its brightly-lit high-rises that cast glittering reflections on the lake.

The discontented teenager set her purse on the floor beside her, and folded her arms across her chest. She tried to analyze her feelings. Angry with her mother, she didn’t want to be here. A dark, disturbing sensation of danger crept over her, and a growing curiosity about these eccentric women, which she struggled to fight off. Part of her wanted to disrupt their meeting and get herself tossed out.

It grew quiet in the house except for a little whimper from the guide dog, which stood stiffly across the circle from Lori, looking in her direction. Dixie Lou held what looked like a black plastic remote control for a VR-TV set. She pressed a button, and dulcet, ethereal piano music seeped into the room. After a minute, the music faded.

Glancing at her watch, Dixie Lou asked, “Shall we begin now?” She gazed at Lori, who sat cross-legged beside her mother.

The attention disturbed Lori, and she looked away. On a side table across the room, she noticed pots of herbal tea and ceramic mugs. She smelled something acrid, like the residue of marijuana smoke on clothing, and wished she could get to the stash in her own purse in order to relax her nerves. She thought the source of the odor might be a middle-aged woman near her who wore a cotton dress with a batik print and a bead necklace. An overage hippie by all appearances, she was the type Lori’s friends derisively referred to as “granola,” based upon a common food they were said to favor.

Lori considered teasing her mother, telling her there was a marijuana aroma in the room, but Dixie Lou distracted her by pressing the transmitter and saying, “ Unless someone objects, we’re recording this.”

No one spoke up.

In a corner of the room, the red light on a holo-recorder blinked on.

Dixie Lou spoke for several minutes about a women’s issue that bored Lori, since she didn’t care much about such matters. Why should she? Adults didn’t understand the problems she was going through as a young woman, so why should she pay attention to their concerns? She’d rather be with her friends when they gathered at a waterfront park in the middle of the night, or at their pool hall and bowling alley hangouts. She missed Jeremy, a boy she’d met at a party the week before, and with whom she’d grown close in only a few days. She thought he was cute, and liked his hip way of talking and the tiny pearl earrings he wore on both ears.

Most of all she missed her best friend, Alicia Koppel. For more than two years they’d been inseparable, and had shared the endless problems of growing up. Now she needed Alicia more than ever, but couldn’t reach her.

In memory she heard Alicia’s voice, saying in street slang, “
Hey dopegirl, you high-flyin’?
”

Then Lori noticed the dog had come around behind her and was sniffing at her purse, whimpering again. It had been a police dog.

No!
Lori thought.
Get away from me
!

The dog pawed the purse, and Lori pulled the bag away, holding it on her lap.

“Bobo was the top drug-sniffer in the department,” the blind woman said.

Thinking fast, Lori said, “I had some food in my purse today, and he probably smells it.” She nudged the animal away, and reluctantly it returned to its master.

The “granola” woman—despite the aroma around her—appeared to be of no interest to the dog.

Without looking, Lori knew her mother was staring at her, and the teenager felt her face burning. Maybe she could get to the bathroom and flush the stuff down the toilet.

Dixie Lou asked everyone to hold hands, which Lori refused to do, and instead she kept her arms folded across her chest. Jackson uttered a strange prayer to an entity she called “She-God,” which she described as “all-powerful” and “the hope for womankind.” Then she asked those in attendance to identify themselves by name and occupation.

She-God
? Comparative Religion was one of the few classes Lori had enjoyed in high school (and she’d done well in it), but she’d never heard of a deity by that name. She wanted to tell herself it was just another absurdity in a long line of ridiculous things in her mother’s life. But Lori wasn’t so certain this time.

One by one the attendees identified themselves, with Camilla going first, providing a bland description of her secretarial job for the Fort Lawton Army base in Seattle, in a civilian secretarial pool. The participants moved around the circle away from Lori, and a wiry woman with dark hair said she owned an herbal pharmacy in the suburbs, with exotic ingredients imported from all over the world. The sari-adorned woman, with a pinched face and tiny eyes, spoke of a She-God temple—whatever that was—in her backyard, and said she sold handmade religious paraphernalia. Su-Su Florida made a pathetic, thinly veiled sales pitch for her high-earth orbital excursion agency, and another woman said she was a family counselor.

When Lori’s turn came, last among the visitors, she announced in a firm voice, “I’m a hopeless cigarette junkie.”

“Lori!” her mother whispered, as embarrassment reddened her face.

Then Lori proceeded to light a cigarette, fending off her mother as she did so.

All around the circle, the women glared at the rebellious teenager and whispered to each other. Even the blind woman seemed to be looking at her disapprovingly, with eerie white, sightless eyes.

“Lori, give me that cigarette!” her mother insisted, in full voice.

With a slight smile, Dixie Lou picked up the statuette and approached the errant girl. She knelt down, face-to-face with Lori. The teenager blew a puff of pink, scented smoke in the woman’s face, as her mother groaned in displeasure.

“I’m sorry she’s being like this,” Camilla said. “Perhaps we should leave. She didn’t want to come tonight. I’ve been having trouble with her.”

“What brand of cigarette is that?” Dixie Lou inquired of Lori, in the calmest of tones.

“Pink Paradise.”

“I’ve told her a thousand times not to smoke,” Camilla said. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do with this girl.”

“Regular or light?” Dixie Lou asked, still focused on Lori.

With a perplexed expression, the girl replied, “Regular.”

“My favorite. May I have a drag?”

Before Lori could reply, the woman had the cigarette in her hand and was inhaling deeply from it.

“But let’s do this afterward, okay?” Dixie Lou said. She dropped the cigarette into a flower vase, where it fizzled out in water. “We’ll smoke and have a nice little chat, OK, Lori? So you’re a hopeless addict, eh?”

“Yeah. I’d have my lips sewn onto a giant cigarette if I could.”

“You’re awful, Lori,” her mother said. “You used to be such a nice girl. Always respectful and a good student. I don’t know what’s come over you.”

“You do have quite an imagination,” Dixie Lou Jackson said to the girl. “Maybe it’ll make you famous someday.”

Lori considered lighting a second cigarette, but resisted the urge. Instead she took a deep breath and stared back into the woman’s dark brown, impenetrable eyes, a gaze that bored into her.

“A most interesting young woman,” Dixie Lou observed, at long last. “An old soul, I suspect, despite the clever subterfuge she’s putting on for us.”

Lori squirmed. She felt warm, uncomfortable, didn’t like this woman for some reason, and it had nothing to do with the fact that she was black. Lori knew a lot of street people, of many races, and made no superficial judgments about them—not based upon skin color or any other aspect of their appearance.

An old soul? Maybe she’s right. And maybe I don’t like the way she looks too closely at me.

Dixie Lou’s cimmerian eyes glistened. “We’re here this evening to discuss women’s issues, Lori. And it’s about time, too. For thousands of years people have been talking too much about men’s issues, and the world has suffered for it. Have you ever noticed that most women are less violent than men, less aggressive, less destructive? Women are even better drivers, so they get lower insurance rates.”

Lori didn’t respond.
What kind of weird talk is this
? she thought.

Dixie Lou continued: “If we’re so much better than men, why do you suppose we haven’t been more important throughout history?”

Lori shrugged. She felt perspiration on her upper lip, wiped the moisture off.

“Because men are physically stronger,” Camilla suggested. “Because they—bully us, dominate us.”

“Precisely,” Dixie Lou said, “because we’ve been pushed, slugged, slapped, stabbed, beaten, raped, and shot for thousands of years. But I’m here to tell you we won’t be treated that way anymore.”

Lori didn’t respond, but her mother and others murmured assent.

“Remember, Lori,” Dixie Lou said, “you can do anything if you set your mind to it. You can accomplish
anything
.”

“We’re just as good as men are!” a woman exclaimed.

“Better!” Dixie Lou shouted.

A murmur of assent passed around the circle, which consisted of fourteen women and Lori.

“Do you know who this is?” Dixie Lou asked, pointing to the statuette of the woman.

Lori shook her head, smelled the burning wax of the candles.

“It’s She-God, representing all women since time immemorial. We’ll discuss what She’s holding later this evening.”

Momentarily, Lori focused on the tiny sword. Again, she wiped perspiration from her upper lip.

Returning to her original place, Dixie Lou spoke briefly about herself. Without elaboration, she said she was an executive, and that she had not led a goddess circle for a long time. And she asked, “Why do you suppose we’re all here?”

Lori saw blank faces looking back at the group leader.

“To feel better about ourselves,” Su-Su said. “We’ve been pounded down by the system.”