“You’re not too far away from turning thirty! And this is your life?”
“Maybe it so happens that I like my life this way.”
Sarah groaned. She shoved her hands into her hair and started tugging, a gesture Bethie recognized from the night her father had died. “I wanted everything for you,” she said through her tears. “Everything.” She looked up, eyes streaming, mascara running in muddy tracks down her cheeks. “What did I do? Where did I go wrong?”
Bethie bit her lip.
“Your father died. That was hard, I know. It was hard for all of us. But I got through it, and Jo got through it, and you . . .” Sarah shook her head, as if her despair had reached a level beyond words.
Bethie kept her eyes straight ahead, looking at the front door. Sarah would stop talking eventually. Bethie would go inside. She’d take a long, hot shower. She’d sleep. Things would look better in the morning.
“And that boy, in college, and the rock show, and . . .” Sarah waved her hand in a shooing gesture that Bethie supposed was meant to represent her abortion. “I told myself, She’s been hurt. Give her time. But it’s been years.” Sarah’s voice cracked. “Is this what you want? Is this all you’ll ever be?”
“I don’t know, Ma.” Bethie hadn’t meant to say anything, but it felt as if some invisible force was wrenching the words out of her. Her throat was tight, and her eyes were full of tears, and all she wanted to do was to go backward, to unspool time, to erase her abortion, her rape, Uncle Mel’s hands, her father’s death. She wanted to go back to Adath Israel and be that pretty, smiling little girl onstage. She wanted to stand with her sister and her mother beside her, to feel her father’s hands, warm and steady on her shoulders; to hear his voice saying, My little girl was fantastic. “I really don’t know.”
* * *
Sarah left her at the bus station. Instead of kissing her, she’d simply nodded when Bethie said “Goodbye.” The I-love-you was the three folded twenty-dollar bills she’d pressed into Bethie’s hand before Bethie climbed out of the car.
Bethie bought a ticket to New York City. When she got to Port Authority thirty-six hours later, she made her way out of the bus station and began walking downtown. An hour later, she’d found a club she’d remembered, a place where she’d once heard Phil Ochs. That night, a band called Television was making something that did not even sound like music. Bethie withstood an angry blast of cacophonous guitar as the lead singer—if you could even call him that—shrieked into the microphone. How had things changed so much? she wondered. How had so much time gone by, without her even noticing? How had she gotten so old? In the grotty ladies’ room, she’d watched a woman with a mop of bleached-blond hair and tattered fishnet stockings loop a length of rubber tubing around her bicep while she held a loaded syringe clamped between her teeth, the way a pirate might have held a dagger. Pirates made her think of Dev, and thinking of Dev made her angry, and suddenly the woman was glaring at her.
“What the fuck are you staring at?” the woman had snarled, and Bethie had turned away, catching sight of her own face in the mirror. Her skin was pale, her lips were chapped, and her eyes looked haunted. She had forty-eight dollars in her pocket, and no idea where to go next.
She’d walked out of the club, ears ringing from the noise, and found a spot on a bench in Washington Square Park. There she’d sat, holding Jo’s backpack against her chest, trying to decide what to do next, when she heard a woman’s voice, almost in her ear.
“Hey, little sister.”
Bethie’s heart jumped. She remembered the twin bed in the house on Alhambra Street, with Jo in it beside her. Princess Bethie was locked in the tippy-top of the tall stone tower, with thorns all the way down, and nothing but a stale loaf of bread and one tin cup of water. She remembered the way she had leaned toward her sister, fingers hooked into the side of her mattress, her heart beating fast in the darkness, saying Tell me how it ends.
She turned. A woman was perched on the bench, her feet where Bethie was sitting and her bottom on top of the rail. She was tall, flat-chested, and slender, with wide-set eyes and dark-brown hair. Her long legs were encased in velvet jeans, and she wore a floppy, wide-brimmed black velvet hat.
“I’m Ronnie,” said the woman, and pulled a joint out of her pocket. “Do you mind?”
Bethie shook her head.
“Were you here for the show?” Ronnie asked. She passed Bethie the joint. Bethie took a hit. Good stuff. Not as good as Dev’s had been, but not bad.
“I heard Phil Ochs down here. A long, long time ago,” Bethie said.
Ronnie was looking at Bethie, her eyes intent. Bethie turned away. When she turned back, Ronnie was still looking.
“Didn’t anyone tell you that it’s rude to stare?” Bethie snapped.
“Sorry,” said Ronnie, sounding unapologetic. “I’m a healer. An intuitive.” Bethie kept her face blank, but inside, she was rolling her eyes. She’d run the same game on unsuspecting guys all over the world. Give me your hand, she’d tell them, in the dim corner of some club or bar. I can read palms. She’d trace the lines on their palm with one fingertip, murmuring nonsense about their love or their health or their heart line while gazing deep into their eyes, sometimes while delicately removing their wallets from their pockets.
Ronnie must have missed Bethie’s scorn, because she was still talking. “Sometimes I get senses about the people I meet. And I’m getting a very strong feeling that you’re in a lot of pain. Psychic pain,” she clarified, touching her spread palm to her heart.
Part of Bethie wanted to tell the woman to fuck off and go find another bench. Part of her wanted to ask for more details about this particular scam, because it had to be a scam, and figure out if she could use it herself. And part of her, a not-insignificant part, wanted to say, Yes, I’m in pain. Can you make it stop hurting?
“I feel like there’s another presence around you. It’s female,” Ronnie continued. “Someone you’ve hurt.”
Bethie rolled her eyes—for real this time. Now she’ll say it’s my unborn baby, because she probably guessed I had an abortion. These days, who hasn’t?
“Not a baby,” Ronnie said, surprising Bethie. She adjusted the brim of her hat, the better to consider Bethie with her wide eyes. “Someone young. Our age. A friend? Maybe a sister? There are regrets around the relationship. Things unsaid.”
Bethie was so startled that she couldn’t speak. Jo, she thought. Except I tried to tell her . . .
“Things unheard, maybe,” Ronnie continued. Bethie felt her mouth start to fall open. She closed it fast. “Tell you what,” said Ronnie. “Do you live around here?”
“I’m traveling,” Bethie said, and left it at that.
“I live in Atlanta,” Ronnie said. “Me and a bunch of other women. We’re kind of a collective. A family of intention.” She looked at Bethie expectantly, probably waiting for Bethie to ask what that meant, but Bethie just nodded. “We’ve got a great big garden.” Ronnie extended the joint, its lit end glowing. “Grow a little bit of this, too.” Bethie remembered the farm she’d visited back in college, somewhere near Pittsburgh. There’d been a little boy named Sky. He’d peed on Marjorie Bronfman’s foot. The memory made Bethie smile, and Ronnie smiled with her and got to her feet. “I’m a trained hypnotist,” she said. “We do this thing . . . well. I’ll tell you about it on the way down. Sometimes it helps people get to the root of their pain and get better. You interested?” Bethie was all set to tell her no, that she was fine right here in New York City, but there was something about her, about the way she’d looked, or what she’d said about pain, or maybe just how she’d mentioned a garden, that made Bethie change her mind.
“Sure,” she said, standing up and sliding her backpack’s worn straps over her shoulders. “Why not.”
* * *
Six nights later, Bethie found herself naked, curled on her side in the fetal position, tucked in a nest of pillows and blankets on the living-room floor of a farmhouse outs
ide of Atlanta, in front of a tunnel of pink pillows arranged to represent a vaginal canal, preparing to reenact her own birth. Of all the ridiculous things she’d done in her life—and God knows, there had been plenty—this so-called rebirthing surely was the dumbest, she thought, as Ronnie began rubbing her shoulder and speaking in a low, soothing voice. There were women all around her with their hands on her arm, her hip, her leg, even her foot. Ronnie had begun by counting backward from ten, urging Bethie to take deep breaths, in and out, more and more slowly each time. She had taken Bethie through some of the childhood memories Bethie had described over the past few days: her first day of school, the day she’d learned to ride a bike and had steered straight into the Steins’ mailbox because she’d been concentrating so hard on keeping her balance. She’d told Ronnie about her triumph as Queen Esther, the time she’d fallen while roller-skating and chipped her tooth, and the stories Jo used to tell her at night. She hadn’t told Ronnie how she’d been molested by her uncle, or raped by a pack of strangers. She didn’t mention her pregnancy, or her abortion, or how sometimes she felt as if she’d stolen her sister’s life.
“You’re in a crib, lying on your back,” Ronnie intoned. “You can see the bars of the crib to the side, and a face. Someone’s smiling at you! Can you tell us who it is?”
“My mom.” Bethie took care to keep her own voice slow and dreamy. “She’s got red lipstick.”
“What’s she saying?”
“For me to stop crying.” Not that Bethie could actually remember what her mother might have said to her when she was a baby, but that sounded right. It was important that the women believe that she was buying this crap. Bethie’s plan was to use the farm as kind of a way station, a place to rest, gather her strength, figure out her next move. The women of the community, Wren and Danielle and Kari, Jodi and Jill and a woman who called herself Rose of Sharon, welcomed Bethie when she tumbled out of Ronnie’s car. That first night, they’d let her take a long soak in the farmhouse’s single bathtub. “We make our own bath salts and soaps,” Ronnie said, offering her a sampling, so Bethie had bathed like a queen, with orange-blossom scented bath oil in the water, a lemon-and-sugar scrub for her heels and elbows, and a loofah to slough the travel dirt off her legs and her feet. They gave her a sleeping bag and a place on the braided rag rug on the living-room floor, and three vegetarian meals a day, and Ronnie told Bethie the story of how a nice Jewish girl from Massachusetts ended up in Atlanta. Ronnie had been in college, and she’d gotten a chance to be an exchange student at Spelman College, a historically black women’s college. “My parents told me to concentrate on my studies, and not get in trouble. Which is why it took me a month, instead of ten minutes, to work up my nerve to go to the SNCC office.” Bethie smiled politely, while inwardly she was thinking, Ugh. Another crusading do-gooder, like her sister. “They asked if I could type. That was how it started. I typed. I documented. I wrote down the stories of the voters getting registered, and I wrote press releases to get the word out when activists got arrested, and I wrote for the SNCC newspaper.” Ronnie had gotten arrested herself. Laughing, she told Bethie the story of teaching her fellow SNCC members the hora while they were in jail. “Wow,” Bethie managed. For years, Ronnie had been involved with the Movement. “Civil rights. Women’s rights. Protesting the war in Vietnam.” In between all of that, she’d gathered her “family of choice” around her, the women she called her sisters, fellow activists who stayed at this farmhouse, just outside the Atlanta city limits.
“You’re welcome to stay. All we ask,” said Ronnie, with a twinkling smile, “is that you help out with the harvest.” Bethie got the impression that donors sent money to support Ronnie and the others in their work. In addition, the women of Blue Hill Farm ran a pick-your-own business. Families would drive off the highway and pay for the privilege of gathering their own strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, and even green beans and pole beans. They put their money in a coffee can (Bethie carefully noted where those cans were stored), and the women would direct them to the correct rows, to give them the cardboard containers, and to mind the supplies of the jams and jellies, soaps and scrubs and lotions that were also for sale.
At night, they’d cook vegetarian dinners (lots of salads, with fresh-picked or pickled vegetables; lots of tofu curries and black beans and lentils). They kept chickens in a coop out back, so there were always eggs, the yolks a yellow so deep it was almost orange. Bethie wasn’t crazy about the fields—too hot, too buggy. But, after so long on the road, eating at restaurants, or fast food, or meals assembled from vending machines, she liked being back in a kitchen. She mastered the temperamental oven and made desserts, whipping egg whites into stiff peaks, creaming butter and sugar, sliding greased tins into the oven. She made pound cake, angel-food cake, marigold cake, and banana bread studded with walnuts, and the women praised her, saying that her treats were the most delicious things they’d ever tasted. “Like my mother’s,” said shy Danielle, who could barely look anyone in the eye. “Better than my mother’s,” said Jodi.
When dinner was over and the dessert plates had been cleared, the women would head outside. They would spread blankets on the grass and light joints and talk. Consciousness-raising, Ronnie called it, but to Bethie it was just a grown-up version of the once-upon-a-time stories Jo had told her when they were little girls. They would always start off with a question: When was the first time you remember being treated differently because you were a girl? What would your mother’s life have been like if she’d had the opportunities that we do? If you could tell men one thing about what it’s like to be a woman, what would you say? They’d go around in a circle, telling stories, and Bethie heard revelations that were as bad as, or worse than, anything she had to share. Danielle’s father had beaten her bloody after he’d caught her in bed with a female high school classmate. Jodi’s stepbrother had raped her from the time she was eight until the time she was fourteen and he left for college. Talia’s mom had caught Talia rubbing herself on her stuffed bear’s nose when she was four and had taken the toy away, doused it in the lighter fluid they kept by the barbecue, and burned it in front of the weeping, terrified little girl.
Bethie listened, volunteering nothing. She did not talk about her rape, although she was not the only woman in the house who’d been raped. She did not tell the story of her abortion, even though at least four other women had had abortions of their own, in settings that ranged from a pristine clinic in Puerto Rico to a bloodstained kitchen table in the Bronx. She listened and tried not to be moved by what she heard, or identify with the women she’d vowed to treat as targets. It wasn’t easy. Not with Ronnie squeezing her hand and calling her Little Sister, or shy Danielle leaving a beribboned sachet of dried lavender on her sleeping bag, or when Jill said her butterscotch cake tasted like heaven.
Just get through this, Bethie told herself as she lay on her side on the living-room rug. They’d lit a fire in the fireplace to bring the room to body temperature, and the air was stifling. Talia had wanted to smear the pillow-fort vagina with Vaseline, so that it would really be authentic. Luckily, Danielle, who did most of the collective’s laundry, had talked her out of it. Bethie could taste sweat on her lips and feel it trickling down her back, between her breasts.
“You’re drifting further and further back in time now, back to a time before time even began for you,” Ronnie said. “You are an embryonic life-form, growing and developing, but not yet aware of yourself as a person. Still, you exist. You exist here, in this warm, fluid, safe environment, completely aware of the sounds around you.”
Someone pressed Play on the cassette player. The booming sound of a heartbeat filled the room. Bethie tried not to giggle.
“You are completely fulfilled, completely at ease. You have no wants, no hunger, no thirst, no desires. All of your needs are met. You are supported, safe, protected,” Ronnie said.
Unexpectedly, Bethie felt tears spring to her eyes. Supported, safe, protected. When
was the last time she’d felt that way?
“Nothing can hurt you. Nothing can harm you. But you feel constrained in this safe environment. You instinctively know that it is time to move on. I invite you to come forward in time,” Ronnie said. “Come forward to the moment of your birth. Feel the beginning of this ending as you move toward the light, ready to be born.”
Bethie found that she was shaking her head. She didn’t want to move, she didn’t want to leave. She didn’t want to leave her safe haven and enter the bright, cold world.
“What do you feel?” Ronnie asked.
“Abandoned,” Bethie whispered. The word was out of her mouth before she knew she was going to say it, and she was back in Uncle Mel’s Cadillac, cruising past the house on Alhambra Street, where there was no car in her driveway. She was back in Newport, with a strange boy’s hand on her wrist, and the boy was saying Lie down, lie down, stop crying, shut up, you know you want it.
“Breathe,” said Ronnie. Bethie was trembling. She could feel hands on her shoulders, her hip, her thigh. The sound of her heart beating thundered through the room. Her hair was damp with sweat and her face was wet with tears. They were driving past the house, and the windows were dark, dark, dark. No one was home. No one was coming to save her.
“Bethie.” Ronnie’s voice was kind but stern. “It’s time.” Strong hands pulled her toward the pink pillow tunnel. Bethie struggled, shaking her head, squeezing her eyes shut. “Bethie,” said Ronnie. “Be here with us, now. Whatever it is that’s holding you back, that’s keeping you stuck, it’s in the past. It has no power to hurt you. Come be with your sisters. Come be free.”
Bethie opened her mouth, intending to say This is hot buttered bullshit. Part of her could hear how ridiculous this all sounded; could see, clearly, the silliness of a naked adult woman preparing to wriggle through a pillow fort. But instead of a sarcastic denunciation, what came out of her mouth was a sob, and when she tried to speak she found that all she could do was cry harder. Snot ran out of her nose, and tears streamed down her face and rolled off her chin onto the rug. She wept, crying harder and harder, making horrible, guttural noises, as the women touched her bare arms and shoulders and stroked her hair and Danielle leaned down to hug her, whispering, “Shh, shh.” Bethie was crying for everything that had been done to her, and everything she’d done; for every hurt she’d suffered and every hurt she’d inflicted. For her mother, who’d spent her life wrapped in a shrunken, tight-fitting shroud of unhappiness, her life limited by a handful of options and her lack of a man by her side. For her sister, whose wings she had clipped. For herself, for the bright-eyed, pretty thirteen-year-old she’d been, the girl who had dreamed of the spotlight, the girl who’d found the courage to say Uncle Mel’s hugging me too long, a girl whose mother hadn’t wanted, or been able, to hear what she meant and whose big sister hadn’t been there to save her. The young woman who’d been raped, knocked up, and made to feel like nothing. Bethie wrapped her arms around her knees, rocking and crying, her damp hair sticking to her wet cheeks, and when Ronnie said, “It’s time,” she pushed herself forward, wriggling along the floor through the tight press of the pillows, before she came sprawling out onto the floor, into the light, laughing and crying as the women patted her and clapped their approval, telling her how well she’d done, how proud they were. Maybe I’ll stay, Bethie decided. Maybe I’ll get stronger here. Maybe I’ll figure out how to stop hurting. Maybe I can figure out how to fix what can be fixed.
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