17

I BEGAN JOINING THE WOMEN OF THE BOHEMIAN CLUB in some of their routines. When they were not perfecting their chosen crafts—sculpting or weaving or baking—they performed spiraling yoga contortions and cooked elaborate meals according to their confounding wellness philosophies, which made more sense the less I thought about them. They described themselves as mostly vegan, except for local eggs and raw butter and animals one slaughters personally and the tubs of Father M gelatin powders. “Nothing better for the skin and hair. We make an exception,” explained Mia, who seemed to be everywhere I was. It was as if I weren’t allowed to be left alone.

“We create our own reality,” lectured Father M Sunday after Sunday. “Everything that happens is caused by your thoughts.” This was exactly the opposite of what my psychiatrists—there have been many over the years—told me. Each went to great pains over weeks, months, sometimes years to assure me, to convince me, that it had not been my wish that caused the accident of my parents. And now I was living in Bellinas with a community whose main philosophy was a validation of my worst fears. After my admonishment in front of the club, yet another kind of stripping down, I felt oddly closer to the group, more open to them. Meeker. Another tactic, I can see, after some reflection.

I was so desperate that I even began expecting positive changes after Manny’s—Father M’s, that is—lectures. I waited and waited to feel better. Most of all, after Guy’s advances, I wanted things to be different. But nothing changed. I did not feel different than before, only different from everyone else. I have always felt that way, though, if I am confessing everything. When did I start feeling different from everyone around me? The first child psychiatrist to chide my magical ideation would have said when my parents died.

Was moving to Bellinas a case of the very thing Manny preached? I had attracted, or possibly created, an environment that encouraged me to understand that the disasters in my life actually were my fault. My thoughts had created it all. Everything was my fault. Large and small. Guy’s resistance to having a family. His appearing to change his mind. The wildfires on the other side of the hills, for that matter. I could smell the smoke more and more, but never saw them burning.

“It’s something from your past lives,” Manny said knowingly during one of these Sunday sessions when I tried, inarticulately, to explain the feeling and the dizziness and nausea that kept me company in the bungalow. Manny was always telling us who we were in our past lives. According to Father M, excuse my slip of the tongue, I had been a pioneer, whatever that means, a queen, a thief, a witch burned at the stake. If only he knew! And a prophetess who lived on a mountain and warned of a coming war. How cruel Apollo’s curse of Cassandra always seemed to me. But, then again, necessary for the unfolding of history? Perhaps there was no curse at all. By some accounts, snakes whispered the future into her ears.

During these Sunday sessions, earthenware mugs of fragrant tea were filled and refilled until I felt drunk with beautiful certainties. The air would become a blend of smoky fir, bluest eucalyptus, and the salty threads of seaweed that looped in ribbons and tangles on the shore. I felt like I could do anything. I was the whole universe. I was powerful. I was an artist. These truths came in the steady voice of Father M, and here were the moments, between cups of fragrant tea and vague compliments, when I felt perhaps my wariness of him was unfounded. The feeling of universal connection—like at the hot springs—replaced my hesitation to join in.

The men never drank Mia’s tisanes, made from herbs and plants ostensibly to fortify fertility, that most attractive quality of their beautiful wives. Instead, the men drank beer and wine made locally, crafted with intention, etc., etc. Stacks of abalone shells glittered from every corner of the kitchen as we gorged ourselves on its salty-sweetness alongside the other elaborate dishes Mia prepared. After dinners, we habitually moved from the table and onto cushions across the floor that appeared and surrounded their wood-burning stove, behind which the nude portrait of Mia watched.

If he were not in the mood to channel glimpses of our former lives, Father M asked us to divulge something, to share a hardship about ourselves. Unable to stop myself, in a move so unlike me that I mistook it for growth, I confessed my fears along with the other members. That I would write nothing of value, create no art, never be good enough at anything. And the women brushed the worries from my hair.

How easy it was on those evenings to let go of my guilt and shame and replace them with bursts of joy and love. Cool fingertips massaging my scalp and jaw and neck as I was offered more and more fragrant tea, while Father M lectured. You’ve given all of that to us now, you know? Stop thinking and just feel with your body. Sometimes the words of Mia replaced his in these trances. Let him take on your burdens. And the relief was instant. I told of embarrassments. Personal shames, parental scars. One by one, they all did. Except Father M. Then he would tell us that our bodies were made from comet dust and starlight. The calcium in our teeth had rained down to earth from supernovas in the Milky Way. We were entitled to riches and dreams and miracles. Everything made perfect sense. Everything was lit with an inner fire I could only mistake for happiness. The curling steam from the fragrant tea glowed phosphorescent, and I could practically see fingers curling in purple and green soothing and massaging away my fears. I felt the galaxies of possibility on my tongue down into my heart and lower still.

The next week would begin again. Any disagreements or tiresome interactions between me and my husband, I pushed aside for the sake of peace. Bound by our catharsis, by the secrets we knew about one another, but only half remembered by morning, I did feel part of their community. More than that, it was fun to feel a sense of sisterhood. Once the fog lifted and the bells were chiming, the clear blue of regret replaced the fog. But what did I regret? There were always blurry patches from those nights. Leaving the house before dawn on early Monday mornings, I noticed the words on the door Manny had bought from his ancestor’s original club. “Unwelcome are the webs of spiders.” As Anna Nováková says, beware the winds that carry the invisible threads of spiders.

Movies were watched by all at the Rose Manor or at homes on the Mesa, but I avoided these, claiming the need for solitude to write. Guy always joined in. He joined in everything. Surfing, movie-watching, who knows what else. The women and their golden children seemed always to travel together, walking the trails in flowing finery that left hints of delicate jasmine and heady ambergris along the headlands. The habits picked up over the course of a lifetime are difficult to break. Safety in numbers, even in Bellinas.

“How long did it take for you to feel like you belonged here?” I asked my new friend one day, between the claps and sighs of her loom.

I found it easiest to talk to Aster and often found myself at her house, enjoying an afternoon alone with her, before the other women joined us or we joined them. I bounced her perfect baby as she wove yards of beautiful, bright cloth. Up and down went the beams of the loom’s castle. The sun came through her large window, and its rays lit up every twist and fiber across the strings of the warp as it was pulled up and down. With every tip of her foot on the pedals, hundreds of threads lifted into trellising lattices, and she threw her shuttle across, between the taut lines. It was like watching a spider at work. The whooshing and soft clapping were soothing after my restless nights. I could see why it put the baby to sleep.

“Still feeling a bit blue? Blue Tansy,” she said, laughing. “I think I have some of your essence around here somewhere. We bottle flower essences in the spring. You’re going to love it here by then. It’s only been a few weeks. Just give it some time,” she said as she pushed the wooden shuttle across her warp with a whoosh of uncoiling wool.

“I hope so. I can’t tell if things are improving between me and Guy,” I confessed. “He seems happy here, especially with the men and the book project they go on about. And with the club. He loves that, but I’m not so sure. I can’t seem to forget the way Manny talked to me, in front of everyone . . .”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Everyone’s been an example at least once. Honestly, Tansy, you should feel better about yourself. We wouldn’t have invited you if we didn’t want you around.” She tssked as she spoke. Whatever my reservations, I wore the same airy dresses, too, by then. There was something else that wouldn’t leave me alone. The winds raised my doubts and pressed my worries into my skin every night, but I was not ready to understand.

“All the empowerment stuff is a lot about sex. Have you noticed? Manny is always touching us, or talking about the power in a woman’s body.”

“Everything is about sex, Tansy,” she said, her words more hurried than usual. No one could tell me that the lines of her warp did not shiver as they lifted, even for the most fleeting instant. That her foot did not hitch ever so slightly pressing the pedal. That the long, smooth shuttle did not veer off course as she threw it across the lines of her warp, leaving a trail of thread more loosely caught in the fabric’s pattern. What was remembered in her hands at that moment? The price of her perfect life, I suspect. Whatever it was, its effects are captured forever in a single imperfect line of weft.

“Don’t you ever think about your old life? About your old name?”

“No,” she said briskly and without looking at me. For the first and only time, she seemed annoyed with me. The soft clapping of wood and wool stopped as she leaned over to pick at the slightly uneven line she’d just thrown.

“In some places, the weavers would put in a flaw so as not to offend God,” I said. She looked at me as if I were levitating on a broomstick, before shaking her head, as if the notion of imperfection were an absurd idea. She took the baby from my arms and kissed the top of her head. “Maybe I’ll let you focus,” I offered, but she seemed not to notice. As I shut the door behind me, she remained fixed over her tiny mistake at the loom, holding the baby to her cheek. Even though I felt terrible—guilty—for upsetting Aster, I arrived home feeling sure that all was not as it seemed in Bellinas. That I was not wrong to feel out of place, and that my body was doing what it could to alert me to dangers my mind wanted to ignore.

I apologized, of course, the very next day, but I stopped spending the afternoon hours with Aster, or any of the other women. I thought I would miss her baby most of all, but she was not mine, I reminded myself. Every day brought a new tint to my loneliness, like the daily rainbows. In my marriage. In missing friendships. In my childlessness. The uneasiness brought by the nightly winds that battered the walls and windows became the most reliable part of my routine. The foreboding that came with them and the sleepless nights spent grasping at things I almost remembered. Then the morning would come, and I had to carry the gray heaviness of sleeplessness with me. I had never suffered insomnia before, for all my anxiety. I counted to seven hundred one night as Guy twitched and drooled on the pillow beside me. I did not want him to see me struggling in his perfect community. It was too beautiful here to be unhappy, I reminded myself every morning, not remembering, among other things, that beauty is nature’s most dangerous deception.

Group days at the beach I could manage. The ocean water was frigid, and I had not forgotten the warning of our honeymoon brochure. Never turn your back to the ocean. I refused to go in above my ankles, which I could tell bothered Guy. He always disparaged my caution, thinking me unadventurous. The proverbial ball and chain, I suppose, burdensome and dull. Mia—ever gracious, unavoidable Mia!—would stay with me on the beach and comb my hair with her long fingers. She described art projects she was thinking about starting, often having to do with crystals or the zodiac, and the propositions one of her many agents or managers had put forth, even though she was supposed to be retired, as well as “off the grid,” as the club liked to say.

“How is your writing going, Tansy? Guy tells us you’re very talented,” she said one August afternoon on the beach, as she smoothed the tangles out of my hair with a comb carved from redwood with abalone inlay. In the space of a month since we had arrived as residents in Bellinas, it had grown much longer than usual, several inches, in fact, past my shoulders, where it had stopped at midsummer. The frizzy waves I hardly bothered with were now long, tight curls, just like my mother’s, though full of knots and snarls, and nearly long enough to cover my breasts. When I had asked Guy if he thought this abnormally fast growth strange, he’d practically gloated. “All the healthy living and fresh air.”

“I don’t know about that,” I answered Mia. “I’ve really only written captions and restaurant listings for the magazine.”

“That’s not what Guy says. He’s very proud of you, you know.”

“I don’t know. In college, I wrote a few things here and there. I studied the Classics. I fell in love with the idea of people so long ago sitting around and hearing the same stories. I learned Latin and Ancient Greek, most of which I’ve completely forgotten, but I won a prize for my thesis. My professors expected me to be a scholar.”

“I could see you as a professor,” she chirped, and I found myself momentarily pleased with her imagining me as an academic. “But I can see you here, too,” she continued, and I felt close to her for the first time. Seen or understood, I suppose. “You still seem uneasy here. Aster tells me things are a little rocky between you and Guy.”

There were no secrets from Mia. The wind brought her any gossip withheld by her acolytes. Not to mention the informers around town.

“Don’t be embarrassed. Aster cares about you. No secrets between the girls, you know.” She smiled, and I forgave her and them. Perhaps I was overly sensitive, as Guy said. For all my suspicions and insecurities, I felt like I could rely on them in a way I couldn’t rely on Guy.

“Sometimes I feel like my education was all for nothing. Or all my old hopes for my life were for nothing. I don’t know. Guy used to say I needed more ambition. I used to be ambitious. I gave up a lot to have a life with him.” My fingers caught in a tangle as I spoke. “What about you? Is this how you thought your life would turn out?”

“I try not to expect anything, darling, but I do love the idea that I am co-creating my vision with the Universe. Thoughts create reality.”

It was hard to discern her expression; she wore large round sunglasses. I looked into the lenses for a second too long. “You don’t mind being so”—I stopped to search for the right word—“submissive to him? I would die if a nude portrait of me were hanging in our living room.”

“Honestly, it’s just easier to go along with whatever Manny wants.” She gave a small laugh and looked away.

“You really think that?”

“Maybe it’s from being in the spotlight, darling, but I have come to feel empowered within myself. Nothing my husband says or does can take that away. If I could give you some marriage advice, Tansy?” Her tone hardened just a bit, and she turned to address me.

“Why not? It seems like everyone else is.”

“Don’t worry. Nothing too hard. A woman once told me that the knots in your hair turn into knots in your life,” said Mia. Picking up the wooden comb again, she ran it across my scalp and down my back. The hair on my arms stood as she raked smooth the hair on my head. “Just go along with what he wants, and ignore whatever you don’t like,” she continued. “What we notice, we feed. Comb your hair every now and then, and I’ll bring you some rose quartz tomorrow. It’ll do you wonders.”

“Do you want kids, Mia?” I asked suddenly. There were five children among the women of their club. And at least a dozen more additional children at the Sunday meetings.

“Manny does, but you must know that by now,” she said, and I couldn’t help but notice her eyes flicker to the passel of blue-eyed babies suckling and cooing at their mothers on a quilt a few yards away. “I feel like I’m mother to the whole of Bellinas.”

“Maybe he can talk to Guy. I feel like he’s more in love with Bellinas than with me,” I said, looking down and sliding my fingers into the sand until both my hands were covered. I noticed that she hadn’t answered my question. “He told me we could start trying once we were here. Something’s wrong with me, I think. I should be happier. I know that’s what Guy thinks . . . Nothing’s like how I imagined it would be here.”

“Trust the divine timing of the universe, darling,” she said, waving to our husbands, who approached dripping seawater and holding bags of abalone. “I’m sure that it will happen for you. And sooner than you think.” She continued to slide the comb through my hair, and I let myself be comforted by her assurances.

So the days were passed in the illusion of productivity. Of gathering. Of making. Our creativity was praised by candlelight so profusely in the evenings that by the morning, we were satisfied enough in our abilities that there was no need to go to the trouble of finishing anything. I spent the day hearing that I was a writer, and so amassing any writing, much less any of worth or merit, was unnecessary. None of them worked, though they all talked openly of the projects they thought about doing. Music. Films. Paintings. Poetry. I could run my hand through the corkscrews of my hair from root to end for the first time in my life, when it was not braided and twisted into place by these aspiring artists and their muses, but I felt as knotted as the seaweed. Memories of what only my body remembered flashed and disappeared nightly between the gusts of wind. The wind knew everything.

From the window at my desk, I watched the surfers in their wetsuits as tiny black specks, knowing Guy to be among them. After some weeks, the high tide aligned with the three-o’clock rainbow over the town. Tall Douglas firs marked the eastern edge of the road, and another shadowy patch of cypress alongside leggy eucalyptus on the western side obscured the turn-off that so many travelers coming from the city missed. “Don’t go into the forest,” Mia had said, but the woods began to feel more alluring than the good town of Bellinas. There’s power in secrets only if they remain unsaid.