(proper fit between subject and style)
Jen’s story came out in the Eye three days before the V-Day celebration we were supposed to host at Raghurst. There was talk of relocating the party, but none of the other Women’s Center members who lived close to campus had enough space for that many women. We thought Steph’s being in the hospital was a legitimate enough excuse all on its own to cancel the party, but on Marie-Jeanne and Charla’s next visit Steph begged them to go ahead with it. She told them it was important that our individual failings didn’t undermine the more significant groundswell happening on campus.
V-Day was Valentine’s Day changed by the Women’s Center to Vagina Day. The idea was to subvert the commercially driven, heteronormative mandate by making the holiday into a celebration of women’s bodies and women’s relationships with one another.
The boys next door had somehow convinced Marie-Jeanne to invite them too. Marie-Jeanne waited to break it to Dyann until Dyann got home from the library a couple of hours before the start time.
“We’re not having any men,” Dyann insisted, fists to hips in front of the patio doors. “The women expect us to offer them sanctuary after everything that’s happened. This is supposed to be about women being in their bodies, not parading their bodies in front of men.”
“I told them that,” Marie-Jeanne said. “They have promised to behave.”
The tension grew when Charla, whose job it was to script an indoor version of the circle we’d performed for the Meditrinalia back in October, called to say she had a last-minute thing to attend and would be late to the party.
“It’s a date, with a man.” Dyann banged the dishes in the sink. “And she won’t come out and say it because she knows it’s a fucking pathetic thing to do at Imbolc.”
In the old calendar, Imbolc marked the start of spring, midway between the Winter Solstice and the Equinox. In Ireland it was the Feast of St. Brigid.
“I am so sick of all her so-called sex-positive feminism bullshit,” Dyann said.
I crossed my arms and leaned against the kitchen doorway. “Surely sex can be positive, though,” I said, knowing it was a goad.
She knew it was a goad, too, and grinned and lobbed the dish towel so it hit me in the chest. But she still couldn’t resist a retort, though she put on a self-parodying bulldyke voice: “Not when it’s with a man. Not when it’s probes and orifices.”
“Listen, I’ll take care of Imbolc,” I said. I had a library book on Wiccan spirituality up in my room. “You guys get the booze and stuff for the party, and I’ll make us a ritual.
“Not a full circle,” I warned Dyann, who’d followed me into the hall to start instructing me, “just something ad-libbed, over dinner, before everyone arrives. All right?”
“Okay.” Dyann said. She stood a moment looking at me, and then turned back to the kitchen. “Fine. Good.”
In fact we were already more than a week late for Imbolc because of Steph, and also because of Dyann’s confession. The morning after Jen Swinburn’s visit to Raghurst, Dyann had decided to come clean on all fronts. She’d made an appointment with the Dean of Student Life and told him the whole story. He had suspended her on the spot. There would be a disciplinary hearing, he told her, and she would almost certainly be expelled for violation of the Student Code of Non-Academic Conduct.
Next Dyann got Officer McCrae’s number from me and was picked up in a cruiser and taken to the police station to make a statement. We wondered whether she would be arrested and held, jailed even, but she was home again an hour later. There likely would be charges, she told us, but McCrae said it could take ages. “She was pissed,” Dyann said grimly. “She delivered a massive lecture about Sheri Asselin, and how I’d squandered the community’s will to act on years of complaints against frat houses.”
Jen Swinburn had been angry, too, when she’d come upstairs from Charla’s room after talking to Dyann. “She’s delusional,” she’d fumed. “She wants to come off as some kind of feminist folk hero. Like she’s Gloria Steinem infiltrating the Playboy Mansion or something.”
“Well, I can sort of see the comparison,” Charla had said, trying to be loyal. “Speaking truth to power? Like Antigone, maybe?”
“Steinem didn’t drug people’s drinks,” Jen said. “She didn’t break the law.”
For our Imbolc dinner I made a vegetable soup using sweet potatoes, onions, a turnip—whatever I could find in the fridge. I raided Charla’s spice shelf and added anise and cloves for spiritual clarity. I walked over to the strip mall and bought a fresh loaf of grainy bread. Everything else I needed—the dish of salt, the mirror, the black candles—was still stashed in the bathroom cupboard from the last time.
It felt good to be doing something specific. I’d been skipping class the last four or five days, avoiding campus altogether and walking to the T-Cam as soon as it opened at eleven a.m. The first time I brought a book and sat alone in Raghurst’s usual booth. But after a couple of hours, when I went up to the bar for my third pint, Stan pointed out that I hadn’t looked down at the page once but had been staring into space. “You know the place is empty, right?” he said. “I keep looking over to see who it is you’re watching. It’s like there’s a hologram on the pool table or something.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I haven’t been sleeping well.” In fact I hadn’t been able to sleep at all since the gold car. Night was a waste. A void.
“So’s I’m not creeped out, why don’t you just come sit up here at the bar,” Stan suggested. And after that I didn’t bother with the pretense of schoolwork. I just waited on the sidewalk outside the T-Cam until it opened for the day, and then I sat on a bar stool and drank and talked to Stan.
At six o’clock there was a knock, and I opened the door to see Wheeler, Stick, Jake, and Josh on our porch. “Get Dyann,” Stick said. “We want her to admit us personally.”
I tried to keep a straight face when I fetched Dyann, but she said, “Oh, great. What now? What did they do this time?”
“We come as you asked us,” Stick announced with great formality. They were in drag, all four of them: miniskirts, frilly tops, makeup, junk-store jewelry. Stick wore stiletto boots and had a pair of sequined fairy wings strapped to his bare shoulders.
There was a moment of silence. Look how Wheeler shifts from left foot to right, how Josh drags a finger under his lower lip in case his lipstick has bled. They look like banished prophets waiting to be struck blind.
“And we come bearing gifts,” added Stick. He opened his palm and held out his trump card: a beribboned plastic baggie containing generous portions of grass, pills, and foil-wrapped hash brownies.
“Hm,” said Dyann. She looked at me and bit her lip. “What do you think?”
“Me?” I was so surprised that Dyann wanted my opinion that I suddenly found myself thinking hard about Imbolc, about whether the presence of cross-dressing skateboarders would jeopardize the integrity of the ritual. O, but look how they shift from foot to foot, how they hold forth their open hands! They are chastened prophets begging admittance at the city gates. “As long as they’re women they’re safe, I think,” I said.
Dyann sighed. “Okay,” she told them, “but your lives are in your own hands.”
I served the brownies around first, as soon as the music was turned off and they’d all brought their drinks to the table.
“Drink the cedar water next,” I told them. I’d filled glasses with one of Charla’s infusions.
“I hate cedar water,” Stick whined, but they all drank it down, fast, to get on to their wine. We became surprisingly easy around the table together, chatting about nothing and nibbling on olives and dried fruits I’d dug out of the pantry for appetizers.
Dyann squirmed as I lit the candles. I had written out the invocation on a separate piece of paper in tidier handwriting than my usual, because I knew she’d need to participate to feel comfortable. I handed it to her now and switched off the dining room light.
She leaned forward to read it in the candles’ glow. “Here is light, in this winter’s darkness. Here is life in this winter’s deadness. These women gather”—Jake tittered, and Wheeler shushed him—”to share the bounty offered by thrift and cunning, by wisdom and togetherness.”
“Solidarity,” I interrupted. That was the word I’d searched for an hour ago and not found. “Togetherness” was too touchy-feely.
“Wisdom and solidarity,” said Dyann. Again that alien feeling came over me, that Dyann was deferring to me, that she was following my script.
“Now we eat the soup,” I said, and ladled it out into the bowls.
The phone rang. Marie-Jeanne picked it up in the kitchen and told me it was Mike calling.
“Tell him no,” I said. “No matter what, it’s no.” I hadn’t spoken to Mike since the ride to the hospital. Had that really been only a week ago? Between the daytime drinking and the nighttime sleeplessness, I’d completely lost track.
Marie-Jeanne came back to the table. “He said to tell you he met someone. He wants to make sure there are no hard feelings.”
“Good ol’ Chet Morton,” I sighed.
“Wasn’t that a character in The Hardy Boys?” Josh said.
I laughed and felt anger knuckling, sharp and surprising, under my rib cage. The hash was already nosing its way into my bloodstream. It was time to break the bread. I held the loaf aloft and squinted at the notes beside my plate: “We tear this bread, and share it amongst us, in memory of other bodies broken and lost.” There was the Catholic Communion, of course, but my book had explained that the breaking of bread went back much further than the Corpus Christi, back to Dionysus and Osiris and to endless indigenous variants about flayed and dismembered gods.
I’d decided to stick with the Greek idea: “Bread is life: the fruit of last summer’s harvest and the promise of springtime resurrection. Broken and shared, it also means sparagmos, the rending and scattering, the destroying in order to seed the new.”
I tried to rip the loaf of bread in half, but it was tougher than I thought, too fat for me to get a solid grip. I swung it over to Marie-Jeanne beside me, and we each took one end.
“Sparagmos!” Marie-Jeanne pronounced, in the manner of a toast. She dug her fingernails in, sheared off the loaf’s heel, and bit into it. In the moment between biting and chewing there was a flicker of Marie-Jeanne’s anorexic ghost peering from its bonecage.
We passed the bread around, each tearing off our own piece and saying, “Sparagmos.” Dyann succumbed to a fit of uncharacteristic giggling when Wheeler’s bread landed in his half-finished soup.
“Dude, I think you still have to eat it,” Stick told him, and Wheeler fished out the bread and took a careful, conscientious bite. They were taking it seriously, the ritual. They all were.
The hash spread itself into a gritty layer under my skin, like sandpaper. I became nervous about the next portion of the ritual. “We take our shirts off now,” I instructed. “We need bare skin.”
I’d imagined bras, but Dyann wasn’t wearing one. Her nipples were dark brown, with large areolas.
“Nice,” Jake said, and the others shushed him. Josh wore a lacy pink bandeau under his blouse. Stick had only his wings, and the others stayed in their bikini tops to maintain appearances.
“You can choose the back or the chest,” I explained. “We face each other, recite the words, and slap three times. Open hands.” I splayed my fingers to demonstrate. My thoughts were racing forward, though, whipped up and spurred on by the drug. Jostling and vying through the narrow passages, they ran together, neck and neck.
Dyann’s laughter bubbled through her words. “Wait, we’re slapping each other now?”
The boys caught the laughter up and swallowed it; it came back to their vivid lips doubled, tripled, quadrupled. “Why are we slapping each other, Karen?”
My thoughts came all at once, leaping on one another’s backs. “Kittens are taught with blows—oh, you guys, don’t you wish we were all lions? You’re struck: You can be struck by insight, struck by a thought. Did you know that at the onset of her first period a Jewish girl used to be slapped by her mother?”
We sat shirtless, laughing. Marie-Jeanne poured more wine, and Stick lit a joint and passed it around the table. I missed Charla and Steph. I was embarrassed by my loose words and the loosening of whatever logic had held the ceremony together. It was silly, what I’d planned. It was as dumb as the frat boys’ drunken pileups. Dumber, because it took itself too seriously.
But after a few minutes Dyann sobered. “Give me what you wrote,” she said. “Let’s see.” She spent some moments deciphering my penmanship, then said, “No, this is good, actually. This fits with Imbolc’s theme of purification, and—what else is it?” Again, she looked at me, looked to me, for the information, and this time I felt a flash of irritation, anger almost, at her subservience. “Purification, initiation, dedication, right?” she said.
I didn’t know which of my thoughts might break through the gate next, so I just nodded.
Dyann stood up and circled to my chair. She read out what I’d written: “Here we enact the punishing gestures of initiation. Here we purge evil and open ourselves to insight.
“Stand up,” she ordered, and when I did she slapped me, hard, in the face.
Without thinking, I slapped her back with equal force.
“Oh, mon dieu,” Marie-Jeanne said.
Stick turned to Wheeler and, with both hands, slapped his friend’s shoulders once, twice. Then he dealt a loud blow across his cheek.
“Ow! Fuck, man!” And Wheeler slapped him back.
There were still a few other items on my Imbolc agenda, but they fell away in the general hilarity of the slapping. After we cleared the dishes, Stick doled out MDMA pills, Josh served as DJ, and we all danced. At one point some of us paraded next door to try out the climbing wall the boys had built in their living room in place of the half-pipe. I remember straddling someone’s shoulders, reaching for one of the top holds—and when we returned, Raghurst was humid, clamorous, packed with bodies. The guests were all girls, just like we’d planned.
Because I’d been avoiding campus, I hadn’t been constantly reminded of my newfound fame. But now I was being congratulated again for standing my ground against the fraternity. I was hugged. I was told it was courage like mine that would win the war on rape. News of Dyann’s role in things was spreading, but not fast enough to shake this crowd from its belief that I was still the victim and Bruce Comfort was still the perpetrator. Dyann may have muddied the waters but she hadn’t stemmed the tide.
The only party guest more popular than me was Ms. Dentata, our Viking-helmeted mannequin. She was lifted by the women and passed around and danced with and kissed. It wasn’t only the party’s V-Day theme; it was St. Brigid’s Day, too—someone had said you were supposed to make a sacred doll and parade it from house to house in the village. You were supposed to bring it food and invite it into your bed for luck.
Marie-Jeanne told me that Charla had returned, so I went downstairs to see her. She was in her bower smoking a joint. She wore her red geisha dress. Her bare legs shone marble-white.
“Nice shirt,” she said.
I looked down. I was still topless; I’d forgotten my shirt at the dining table and had failed to notice my nakedness all evening. More and more of the women upstairs were getting naked, in fact. Our Imbolc hijinks had set the tone for the evening, for the newcomers as they trickled in. The neighbor boys in their frilly outfits were starting to look grossly overdressed.
Charla beckoned me under the canopy, and I flopped down next to her. The bass thumped down through the ceiling, causing the fabric to quiver overhead. I remembered the tree-planting camp next to a nickel mine where the machines ran through the night, a subsonic pulse that kept extinguishing the pilot light on our propane showers. My tent had trembled. The whole week of that contract, every night, I’d dreamt of quicksand: of sinking and of being swallowed.
“How was your date?” I asked.
Charla laughed. “Is that what Dyann told you guys? That I was on a date? Oh, poor Dyann!”
“She was mad you missed Imbolc.”
“Well, I had an appointment. I was looking at a condo.”
I blinked at her. I was looking at a condo. I’d never heard anyone my age say that sentence before. I wasn’t even sure I knew what a condo was. Shag carpeting came to mind.
“My brother wants to invest,” she explained, “and I want to get the hell out of this house. So it’s win-win.”
I rolled over and clutched both her arms. Don’t go, I planned to say. I was going to say, Charla, I’d miss you.
But instead what came out was, “Charla, I miss Bruce Comfort.” And at the words my heart wriggled like a pup from my arms and bounded from the bed.
“The frat boy?” she said. “For real?”
“I really like him,” I whispered. My heart yapped interruptively, turning circles on her rug.
She moved onto her side to face me and curled her knees up, against my ribs. There was a little line between her eyebrows.
“I liked him from the start. I like him more and more.” Yapyap-yap. Surely Charla could feel my heartbeat through her kneecaps. I waited for her to pull them away.
She blinked. She didn’t pull away. She said, “It feels like freedom, doesn’t it, in your body. It’s terrifying, freedom. If you want it you have to go way out there on a limb, all alone.”
“I’m not alone; I’m in the bower, with you.”
“Yes, you are.” She reached out and stroked my hair away from my cheek.
A few minutes or maybe more passed in the warm racket of our companionship and shared understanding. Desires as dense as melons swelled in my chest and sent their furred vines down between my legs. I arose from the bower laden with desires, hobbled with them.
“Did you know that Helen of Troy married Achilles in the afterlife?” I asked her.
“I thought it was Paris she was hot for,” Charla said. “That’s what started the whole war.”
“Maybe he wasn’t divine enough, in the long run. Apparently Poseidon made them their own island and everything.”
“So, are you going to call him?”
“Who?”
“Bruce Comfort,” she said.
“To come here? That would be pearls before swine.” That wasn’t the right expression, though. It was hard to think with the swollengold thought Bruce, Bruce, Bruce suffusing my body. I tried again: “Dogs, I mean. It would be like throwing him to the dogs.”
Charla was laughing at me. “You’re not obliged to stay at this party, you know, Karen. You are allowed to leave this house.”
“It’s late, though.”
“Yes. And you might need some clothing.”