(prophecy of evil)
I hadn’t invited Mike over for Halloween but he showed up anyway, just as I was scooping the last of the candy into the swollen pillowcases of three preteen zombie brides. Mike was dressed as some sort of desert pilgrim—a bedsheet toga, sandals, and a tall walking stick adorned with what Mike confirmed was a hank of human hair. “It’s Spartacus’s—you know that guy Steve?” he said, and I remembered a quiet brother with a ponytail. “They pinned him down. We got all kinds of costumes out of it. Pits made himself a goatee, even.”
“Gross.”
Mike chuckled. “Yes, it’s utterly foul.” He slipped his arms around me. “Look at that: We go together,” he said.
“How? I’m a fortune-teller.” I’d tied a scarf around my head and borrowed a long floral skirt from Charla. The skirt had little bells sewn along the hem.
“Well, we’re both nomads, right? I’m Carlos Castaneda.”
Shrill screams came from next door. An ashen-faced boy vaulted the hedge onto our driveway, and his friends followed, jeering at him.
I told Mike about the horror tableau Jake and Wheeler had rigged up in their tree. Jake sat in a lawn chair wearing a blood-spattered hockey mask and holding an air rifle in his lap. Whenever a kid came up the walk he’d yell, “Look out behind you!” He’d fire the rifle, and Wheeler would “fall” from the bottom branch with a plastic axe in his hands and an enormous bloody hole shot through his chest. They’d practiced all afternoon with a noose and a climbing harness but hadn’t been able to get the lynching realistic-looking enough. Shooting was the next best thing.
Charla and Steph joined us on the porch amid the clamor of our door-bells. “At least keep the snaps fastened until you’re out on the water,” Steph was saying. “They won’t even let you on the boat like that.”
The last of the trick-or-treating boys froze on the steps, his eyes goggling. He stepped back, tripping a little in his haste to escape, and Charla snickered. I turned and saw that she’d donned her Medusa costume. Her hair was teased and curled into a wild thicket throughout which the snakes were artfully intertwined. She wore low-slung black leather pants and knee-high boots, but she was naked from the waist up. She’d painted targets—concentric rings of red, green, and orange—around her nipples. Her breasts were full, round, and white. A stripy bruise across her ribs seemed only to emphasize the virgin purity of her skin.
“What’s your vote, Karen,” Charla said, “vest or no vest?” She turned a circle, hands on hips, revealing another, smaller bruise below her shoulder blade.
“Karen, tell her she can’t not wear the vest,” said Steph.
Charla threaded her arms into a leather biker vest with silver snaps. “It’s more provocative,” she argued, tilting her cleavage forward to demonstrate. “Plus it defeats the whole point. The Gorgon is supposed to shock, not entice.”
“Did you show Dyann?” I said.
Charla grinned. “She’s beside herself. ‘It’s not a display of power if you’re wearing it with men around,’ blah blah blah. The poor thing. Be nice to her, will you?”
“I’m Mike,” Mike said from behind me.
I jumped. I’d momentarily forgotten him. “Guys, this is Mike. This is Steph and Charla.”
“Hi, Mike,” they said politely.
Steph lit a cigarette. “You know what Freud says, right? It’s not actually Medusa’s head at all. It’s the sight of her pussy that turns men to stone. It’s the shock of castration. Being confronted with that possibility. Her head, the snakes—it’s just a symbolic displacement, like an image in a dream.”
I eyed Mike as my roommates debated the subject a few minutes longer. He seemed impressed by Steph’s brains, nodding a little at each point she made. He kept his eyes off Charla. He had wrapped his arm around my waist when I introduced him, and he kept it there even when I bent to retrieve the empty candy bowl from the steps.
A self-righteous heatpressure built under my ribs. It was one thing to shut me out of their plans, to use me to get at the frat; it was quite another to stand out here half-naked dazzling poor Mike Morton with their psychosexual pyrotechnics.
“Did you know these two were at the S&M party the other night?” I heard myself say.
“What?” Mike said.
“Steph and Charla were at the S&M party,” I said, and this time the words found a home in my mouth. “Dyann and Marie-Jeanne too. Weren’t they, you guys?”
Steph, red-faced, pulled deep on her cigarette and looked off over the hedge. Charla looked from me to Mike and back again with wide dark eyes.
“Too bad we missed you,” Mike said. “We had an awards thing to go to.” He flicked my shoulder in mock-sternness. “Did you invite them and then forget?”
“Congrats, by the way,” Charla said, “on your awards.”
In the end she left for her Halloween cruise party wearing the vest unsnapped, flapping open.
“Do you have a little time for me?” Mike whispered after we jangled in through the door.
“Right now?”
“In that skirt, with you on top. I’m not even wearing boxers—I shall merely lift my robes.” He pushed against me, making me feel his erection.
We climbed the stairs to my room. I’d hung my four best tree-planting photos above my desk, but Mike didn’t notice them. He lay back on my bed and rolled on a rubber, and I was lubricated just enough to wriggle down onto it without pain. “You’re only horny because of Medusa,” I accused him.
He shook his head, eyes closed. “That kind of display doesn’t do it for me. It’s so crass, like a bush tribe or something. Like something in heat.” “Heat” came out in a grunt.
I laughed. He’d come so fast. It was so easy.
We kissed awhile, and then Mike said that Bruce was picking him up in a minute to go out with the others.
“Where?” He hadn’t nagged me at all about coming out with him for Halloween, I realized.
“Some peeler bar. Don’t worry, though, I’ve already found what I was after tonight.” He strummed his fingers at his crotch, making the toga wiggle and leap.
“You’ve fulfilled your desert quest,” I said.
“I achieved my higher self.”
“You met your spirit animal.”
“I was one with the universe!” He laughed. Mike loved it when we chimed in together in a joke like this. He liked telling me things, too—sharing something he’d seen or read or done, and hearing me respond—but he was happiest at these moments of consensus between us, when each of us augmented and complemented the statement of the other. It was a very specific type of interaction. I wondered if my own conversational preferences were obvious to him too, and what they might be.
I saw Mike to the door just as the car pulled up to the curb. I couldn’t see Bruce in the driver’s seat, and he didn’t get out of the car. After they were gone I wandered over to where I could hear the boys still fooling around in the tree. Josh’s voice had joined Jake’s in the upper branches, and their argument about how to untangle the rappelling ropes was muted by the papercrumple of dry leaves drifting from the shaken limbs.
Wheeler sprawled in the grass, sipping from a test-tube shooter while Stick filled the rest of the rack from a beaker.
“The chem labs must spend half their budget on replacing those things,” I said, thinking of Mike’s potions cabinet in the GBC kitchen, similarly stocked.
“Want one? They’re actually not bad,” Wheeler said.
“Told you,” Stick said. “You just have to get past the name and it’s quite pleasant.”
I sat beside Stick and tipped back my tube. Cherry brandy. “Ew, it tastes like high school,” I said.
They laughed and laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“It’s Menarche,” Wheeler said. “I swear, that’s the official name. Menarche! I followed a recipe and everything.”
“Mm, yummy yummy.” I drank another test tube just to impress them.
Stick dug in his pocket. “Hold out your hand,” he said, and gave me a quarter.
“What’s this for?”
“I’m crossing your palm with silver. I want my fortune told.”
I’d spent the better part of that afternoon on my bed with Uncovering the Secrets of the Tarot from the library. Stick was the only one who’d asked for a fortune. It made me suddenly, fiercely fond of him. “For a quarter you only get one card,” I said.
We sat cross-legged on the bristly brown lawn, knees touching, and he shuffled the deck as I instructed him. His lips moved and his eyelids fluttered as he visualized his Central Query.
“Tell the cards your full name.”
“Simon Alistair Pinkney the Second,” he intoned.
I shushed Wheeler’s snorting laughter and fanned out the cards. Stick chose the Moon. “Wow,” I said, “you’ve been drinking too much Menarche.”
“Be serious,” he said. His face was serious.
“Okay, well, the Moon card stands for emotions, the stuff below the surface. You’re following a dark road without knowing where it leads. The dog and the wolf there are the flip sides of your subconscious: the tame and the wild selves. You are struggling with insecurity and fear. Self-doubt.”
“Ha,” Wheeler said. “No wonder you’re so overconfident at Magic. You’re, like, compensating.”
“I’m not overconfident. I’m just plain confident, from kicking your ass all the time.”
“Oops. Wait,” I said. Stick had laid the Moon card on his knee facing me. I’d forgotten that that meant I was supposed to reverse the reading. “It’s not fear, actually. It’s the overcoming of fears. You’ve got access to the treasures of the pool here.” I pointed to the water with the crayfish crawling out. “And your intuition is deep and trustworthy.”
“Oh come on, you’re just flirting with him now. I question your authenticity.” Wheeler tried to tip Stick over and received a punch in return.
“I asked the cards about you, actually,” Stick told me. “Whether I have a shot.”
Underneath the smarmy pretend-longing on his face there was a layer of real longing. I billowed my skirt to dump the cards in the grass and put on a gypsy accent: “Never reveal your Central Query. Now you have jinxed your fortune!”
“Nah, I’m unjinxable.” He helped me gather the cards back into the box. “I have the treasures of the moon pool, remember.”
Dyann, Steph, and Marie-Jeanne had set up the VCR at the foot of Charla’s bower to watch Paris Is Burning.
“Go get yourself a glass and the other bottle of wine from the kitchen,” Steph said.
“And grab the Cheezies!” Dyann called up the stairs.
I squeezed in beside Marie-Jeanne. On the screen a black drag queen was putting on earrings. “What did I miss?”
“Nothing,” Marie-Jeanne said. “It’s a documentary.”
“I heard your boyfriend finally got to meet your roommates tonight,” Dyann said. “I heard you told him we were at their party.”
Her tone suggested I should consider apologizing for this. “Listen, you guys told me you wanted to do research at the frat house,” I said. “I thought you just wanted to see what goes on.”
“Well, we did see what goes on,” Steph said.
“It was an experiment, is all,” Marie-Jeanne said. “Like an anthropology experiment.”
“A Women’s Studies experiment,” Steph corrected her.
I said, “Why would you need an experiment, though? That room, that house. Those guys are completely predictable. They’re like bulls in a pasture or something. You don’t let a cow into the pasture without expecting some kind of mass mating.”
Dyann half sat up so she could see me over Steph. “Actually, your analogy doesn’t work. If I brought a cow into the barn, the bulls would tear each other apart. That’d happen with males of pretty much any species of animal during a rut.”
I thought of the brothers chanting, “Rut! Rut! Rut!” to the Nine Inch Nails song, hurling themselves atop each other. That aggressive group hug.
On-screen two drag queens were yelling at each other over loud dance music. The taller one snatched a feather boa from the shorter one’s shoulders.
If Dyann had been upset or unsettled yesterday, she’d certainly calmed down today. “Come on,” she pressed. “Haven’t you ever seen those videos of elk during mating season? They’ll attack cars, passing trains, anything that crosses their path on the way to the female. Those frat brothers, though. They sure weren’t in any kind of competition for Charla.”
My hands shook. I wanted, suddenly, to put them around Dyann’s throat. “Because you trussed her up for them like a piece of meat.”
Her dreadlocks leapt. She must have seen my rage but she kept her gaze steady on mine. “No, Karen,” she said. “They don’t compete for women. They don’t compete for sex. That’s the whole point. They fucking collude.“
O Dyann the serene, her tongue like a blade. Speaker of the last word.
In bed that night I thought of Charla in the backyard, not in her portable bower but topless, painted, lying in the grass. I pictured Bruce happening upon her lying there, discovering her. Easing his heavy golden body down onto her small white one.
I was pent up. I came with a shudder more painful than pleasurable and spent a few minutes chasing down additional orgasms to compensate. I fell asleep, finally, with the picture of Bruce and Charla still radiant in my mind.
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The women of Raghurst hold forth amongst themselves on the subject of the cinema:
Dyann: There are over twice as many men than women on movie screens, and yet women are involved in sex scenes twice as often as men. Hetero sex, of course. Think about that, Karen. You go see a hundred movies—
Karen: I know what the statistic means, Dyann.
Dyann: Why doesn’t it piss you off? Why doesn’t it stop you from spending your time on that drivel?
Steph: I have two rules, if I’m going to spend ninety minutes of my life on a movie. One: It has to have at least two women in it. Two: They have to have a conversation about something other than men.
Dyann: You got that from Dykes to Watch Out For, didn’t you? What’s crazy is how few movies pass the test.
Steph: Well, Virginia Woolf said it first, about books. She pointed out the lack of female friendships in novels before Austen. Women were only ever portrayed in their relation to men.
Karen: Okay, but what about watching movies for pleasure? For simple nostalgia? I go to the theater for an escape, mostly. Just to enjoy it.
Dyann: Pleasure is political, Karen. Enjoying something is a political act.
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