A Special Place for Women

by Laura Hankin

  “You cold?” Vy asked. She took out a thermos and unscrewed the top. Steam rose from it. “I brewed some tea,” she said, and held it out to me. “Here.” I took a swallow of that too, then recoiled at its bitterness. Vy noticed the look on my face. “It’s good for you,” she said. “All natural.”

  “Mm,” I said, and took another sip, then handed it back to her.

  Vy lit the fire, and the kindling began to catch. As the larger logs caught too and the women finished setting up, we all gathered in our circle. Again, we linked hands, and again, we began to breathe in long, slow inhales all at the same time. It reminded me of warm-ups we did in an acting class I took freshman year of college. Pretty soon, if we kept following that theater class trajectory, we’d be reciting tongue twisters for diction, and making out with each other.

  “Sisters,” Margot said. Or maybe “intoned” was the right word for the way she spoke, her husky voice resonant. “Summer is over. The harvest has been gathered and it is time to plant new seeds. Let us plant them now and pledge to care for one another’s.” Margot walked around the circle, handing each of us an herb that Caroline had selected for us, an herb that was supposed to represent what we were hoping to have success with. Caroline had assigned me rosemary, for creativity.

  One by one, we played our starring role in the ritual. Iris held up her handful of mint. “I plant the seeds for my book’s success.”

  “Let them grow tall and full,” we chanted as she knelt to the ground and buried the herb in the dirt in front of her.

  When it came to me, I said my piece about planting the seeds for my writing. The women gazed at me, their faces shining and supportive, and I knew that my true success would mean their downfall. For a moment, it was the strangest thing, but I almost wanted to cry. The smoke from the fire was clouding my head. My stomach rumbled again. The dirt under my feet had been cold and scratchy ever since I’d kicked my shoes off, but as I pushed the herb into the ground, the earth was soft, comforting even, against my fingers, and I was sad to take my hand out.

  Margot’s smile, when it came time for her, was hooded, faraway. “I plant the seeds to make real change again,” she said.

  “Let them grow tall and full.”

  Together, we each took a small sprig of basil and planted it for Caroline in absentia, chanting for the success of Women Who Lead.

  “Now, we seal our spell,” Margot said. “And toast to the future.” Vy took out another bottle—more red wine—and passed it around the circle. This time, everyone was less hesitant with their swallows, though Iris held the bottle to her lips for only a second. She disapproved of it, still.

  When we’d drained the bottle, some of the women began to pull at their robes, as if ready to move on to the dancing and the celebration. But Margot stopped them. “One more ritual,” she said. She knelt down and took something out of her bag: a round, red fruit that she held in the firelight. “A pomegranate,” she said.

  Everyone besides Margot and Vy looked confused. Caroline’s agenda hadn’t included anything about a pomegranate.

  “In Greek mythology,” Margot continued, still locked into her ceremonial focus, her shadow tall as the trees, “Persephone ate its seeds in the Underworld, the land where the spirits lived after death. Tonight, when the veil between worlds is thin, we eat its seeds to connect with the spirits of those we’ve lost.”

  “Hold on,” Iris said. “We’re not going to summon them, are we?”

  Margot hesitated, then shook her head. “We’ll just send them a message. Ask them for protection, if you want. Remind them of your love.” She held the pomegranate up, then dug her finger into its skin. Red juice seeped out, and I flashed back to my first ceremony: the knife in the base of my thumb, the red spilling from my hand. A full-body shiver passed through me.

  Margot closed her eyes and took in a deep breath, thinking—I assumed—of her mother. Then she tore the fruit open and held it to her mouth. A trickle of juice—scarlet, the color richer than it should have been in the darkness—traced its way down her throat as she tilted her head back. She straightened up, her eyes glittering, and handed the fruit on to the next person.

  I was feeling strange, light-headed, almost a little drunk, and I looked around the circle to see if anyone else’s eyes were too bright. Something glowed at the edge of my vision and I narrowed my eyes to bring it into focus: a patch of mushrooms at the edge of the clearing. They seemed to glow in the firelight, their white tops pulsing. A suspicion hit me.

  “Vy,” I whispered, leaning over to her as the women passed the pomegranate down the circle.

  “What?”

  “Was that normal tea, the stuff you gave me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, did you put something in it?”

  Vy stared at me, one pale eyebrow traveling very slowly up her forehead and back down again. Then she gave me the strangest look—I think it was supposed to be a mischievous smile but it came out like a grimace?—and turned back to the circle, accepting the pomegranate from Tara for her own bite. The other women looked on, their eyes blinking in slow motion.

  I’d never done a drug besides pot because I was generally a wuss, present circumstances excluded. But I’d written an article for Quill once about people getting high and going to see bad movies, and I’d read up extensively on all sorts of drugs for research. Shrooms had a bitter taste. They were often brewed into tea, and they distorted things—textures, colors, emotions.

  Had Vy laced the tea with fucking shrooms? That unreadable, potentially sociopathic asshole. But there was nothing I could do about it now except go with it. And if I were going on a trip, at least it wasn’t a bad one. No nightmare panic. The fire, the women, my own hands in front of me—everything just looked more beautiful.

  Vy handed the pomegranate to me and I tore open a new patch of skin. The seeds glistened, droplets of juice from the other women’s bites quivering on the fresh, untouched sections. Almost without realizing it, I put my fingers to my necklace, staining my skin beneath with the pomegranate juice. My mother’s face flashed into my mind. God, I wish you were here, I thought. Then I bit into the fruit, and the seeds burst in my mouth.

  Vy threw another log on the fire. Margot began to hum something that I didn’t recognize. Vy joined in, and their voices vibrated together, traveling through the air and into my body, where they made a strumming, a thrumming, inside of me.

  This time, I was the first to lift my robe off, my arms prickling in the cold as the others followed. I’d been clenching my shoulders for months, maybe even years, and they’d finally loosened.

  As the music grew around me—the gentle, throaty voices weaving with the crackle of the fire, the crickets chirping their own contributions, the rustle of the leaves our steady drumbeat—we all began to dance. And I didn’t lose myself in my own private world, going into my own body as if no one else existed. This time, Margot put her palm up in the air in front of me and I touched mine to hers. We stood there like that for a moment, and then we began to move, together, as if we knew exactly where the other one was going to turn.

  Then we were all dancing together, joining hands, breaking apart, circling. We were gliding and graceful, the fire beating hot on our naked backs. The fall wildflowers at the edge of the clearing—hearty, surviving stalks—opened and closed their petals in time with our breathing. We lay down in the dirt and made angels with our arms and my body was so full of sensation, my heart was so full of bliss.

  I understood that to be a woman in the world was to spend so much time trying to act the right way. Be loud enough, but not too loud. Stand up for yourself, but pleasantly. Beauty was everything, but you shouldn’t rely on your looks. Always, always I was trying to get it right, to find the balance, but here around this circle, naked but not sexualized, together we could flail and scream and open ourselves raw without worrying about anything els
e at all. We were powerful and free, and I felt like I had when I went skinny-dipping for the first time: I was moving through something larger than myself, but also I was a part of it, no barriers between us.

  Time slowed down and then sped up again. Margot handed Iris her lantern, and a few of the women made their way back toward the cabin for bed. Then Margot took my hand. “Come with me,” she said, and led me to the other side of the fire from where the remaining women danced.

  “Hi,” she said, and smiled at me.

  “Hi,” I said, and smiled back.

  She let go of my hand and moved her fingers very slowly until they rested on my necklace. “Your mother wants to talk to you.”

  FORTY-TWO

  What?” I asked as a roaring in my ears started, like ocean waves. “I don’t—”

  “You must have called her, and now she’s here,” Margot said. “I can’t stop it.”

  And then her eyes went unfocused for a moment, as if she were in a kind of trance. When they focused on me again, they were different. Instead of Margot’s appraising, languid gaze, her eyes looked out on me with pure love.

  “Jillian,” she said, and her voice was higher, still Margot’s voice but as if it had been mixed with a different one.

  “Margot,” I said, stepping back. “Do not fuck with me like this.”

  “My little skeptic,” she said, and leaned forward, her hair swinging toward my face. It didn’t smell like jasmine now. It smelled of smoke, yes, but also the faint scent of vanilla, like the perfume I’d given my mother as a present so many years ago. This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t happening. Oh God, how I wanted it to be happening.

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “It’s okay.” She reached out and touched my cheek gently. “Are you keeping your promise?”

  “I . . .” I said, my breath leaving me as if I’d been punched in the stomach. You have a gift for stories. I need you to promise me that you’re only going to use it for good. I stared into those wide, concerned eyes as they waited for my answer. “I’m trying,” I said when I could speak again. “I’m really trying to use it for good, but I don’t know.”

  All those times I thought I’d seen her in the man on the subway, the woman on the street, only to have her disappear—I’d felt so strongly in those brief seconds that there was more of her waiting for me. Always, I’d come back to my senses. She was gone, irrevocably gone, and I was never supposed to be able to talk to her again because that was just the way that the world worked, but now Margot was saying in that strange, un-Margot-like voice, “You’ll figure it out. You always do.”

  “I’m not sure about that this time,” I said.

  “I wish I could help you.” She shook her head. “But how’s our Raf doing?”

  “He’s—” I began, then cleared my throat. “You’d be really proud of him.”

  Margot gave me a look my mother had given me a million times before, one that managed to be both wry and empathetic at the same time. “You need to figure that out too, don’t you?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “I just want you to have a family,” she said, and I couldn’t stop a little laugh from escaping me.

  “Right, because my eggs are dying.”

  “Well, yes,” she said, with a slight smile. Then her face turned serious, searching again. “But it doesn’t have to be that kind of family.”

  A lump rose in my throat, and before I even knew what I was doing I had reached out and clasped both of her hands in mine. “Are you all right? Are you . . . warm? Sorry, that’s a stupid question—”

  “I’m warm. I just miss you.”

  “I miss you so much. All of the time.” My lip trembled, and I bit it, trying to swallow the tears. Big girls don’t cry.

  “It’s okay,” she said, and traced the corner of my eye, where a tear was threatening to spill out. “You can. You should.”

  With that, the floodgates burst open. I wept in an all-consuming way like I hadn’t in forever, maybe not since I was a child. Sounds escaped me, gasping, wretched sounds over which I had no control, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I sank onto the ground, onto the cold dirt.

  Margot wrapped her arms around me and began to cry too. I clutched her tightly, and our bodies shuddered and heaved against each other for a long time. Maybe minutes. Maybe hours. When my sobs ran out and we grew still, I wiped my nose and took a sniff in. I couldn’t smell vanilla anymore. Whatever had just happened, it was over.

  The strange expression on Margot’s face drained away. She wiped her nose too, her tear-streaked cheeks, and blinked a few times as if she were waking up. My head was heavy, but the rest of my body had grown lighter. I was devastated that it was done and so grateful that it had happened at all.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Margot gave me a small, sad smile. “I’ve never been able to do that with my mother. She won’t come. But maybe next Samhain, you can help me.”

  “I can try,” I said, my voice rusty from the tears. Margot leaned forward and brushed her lips against my cheek, so lightly I barely felt it. Then she looked up at the sky, stood, and pulled me to my feet.

  “Come on,” she said. “We only have a little time.” She grabbed our robes and we ran through the woods, barefoot, thrashing through low-hanging branches, scrambling over rocks. As we ran, a strange thought hit me: I wanted to tell Raf what had happened, how I’d been able to talk to my mother again, to tell him how she’d asked about him. I shook that thought off and kept running. The ground before us rose in an incline and we climbed it, emerged through a grove of trees onto a ridge as the sky began to lighten around us. We sat on the grass, panting softly, as the others who had stayed up came through the trees behind us. We all wrapped our robes around ourselves like blankets and watched the sunrise. Pinks and oranges streaked across the sky. The only sounds were the rustle of a breeze in the leaves and our own awed breathing.

  I realized then that I hadn’t tried very hard to talk to anyone about Nicole Woo-Martin because I wanted to believe that they couldn’t have hurt her. They’d only ever wanted to build her up, not bring her down. Maybe too they weren’t as elitist as I’d thought. Margot had figured out that I wasn’t rich, that I wasn’t even close. That’s why she’d found me a free apartment. And still, I was here beside them, worthy of their love.

  As the morning light caught in Margot’s hair and brightened Vy’s face, I didn’t want to betray them anymore. I didn’t want to write about this night, to try and make sense of it. I didn’t want to lose this beautiful, precious place, where things were magic and I belonged.

  FORTY-THREE

  We all slept until the afternoon. When I woke up, my feet ached. I turned my heel over to reveal scratches and bruises from the night before. I had a splinter that I didn’t remember getting. I pulled it out with my fingernails.

  The smell of coffee and butter drew me to the kitchen, where I found Tara, frying up potatoes at the stovetop while Iris and Ophelia sat at the table drinking coffee as if their lives depended on it. Tara shoveled some of the potatoes onto a plate and handed it to me.

  “Thank you,” I said. “God, do shrooms make you ravenous the morning after? ’Cause I am starving.”

  “Shrooms?” Tara asked.

  “From Vy’s tea.” Tara gave me a blank look. At the table, Iris’s back stiffened. Oops. “Did she not pass it around to everyone?”

  “Apparently not,” Iris said.

  “I’m not mad or anything that she did it,” I said, and it was true, even though I should have been livid. “It was a really wonderful night.”

  “Sounds like next time she should share with us all,” Tara said.

  We ate in the living room, sitting on the couches and the pillows, our feet tangling together under plush quilts, recovering and relaxing. My mother and I used to veg out on our couch together all the time, in tho
se couple of years that I’d taken care of her. We’d spent multiple afternoons a week under the blankets cupping huge mugs of tea, gossiping about everything like middle school girls. My mother had always been so busy when I was growing up, trying to earn enough to support a family as a single mother, so our leisurely afternoons together were the one unexpected upside to her illness.

  Now I had a kind of warmth like that again, as we moaned about our aching calves and told each other stories. Iris sat, lost in thought, by the window, every so often exchanging looks with Nina. But the rest of us passed one another snacks and laughed until finally, regretfully, we knew it was time to go home.

  * * *

  • • •

  In the van, Iris’s sports car zipping ahead of us, our phones all dinged at once. We’d driven back into service, and we had a new e-mail from Caroline.

  Feeling much better today, she’d written to the group, and cannot wait to hear about your trip! Let’s all meet at the clubhouse when you arrive back in the city so you can fill me in? Let me know your ETA. There might be people around, so use the back entrance, obviously.

  We sped toward the West Village, a new camaraderie among the three of us. Margot and I sang along to Vy’s yowly Icelandic music, making up lyrics, and she pretended that it didn’t bother her. I felt a sudden, deep surge of tenderness for her and her unapologetic weirdness.

  “I thought you hated me for the longest time,” I said to Vy, who gave a kind of harrumphing noise in response.

  “Oh!” Margot said. “Why?’

  “Basically the first thing she ever said to me was that I was a seagull who was afraid of the ocean.”