The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories

by Connie Willis

  “If she comes,” Viola said.

  “I told her one o’clock,” Mother said, sitting dawn at the near end. “So we’d have a chance to plan our strategy before she gets here. I talked to Carol Chen—”

  “Her daughter nearly joined the Cyclists last year,” I explained to Bysshe and Viola.

  “She said they had a family gathering, like this, and simply talked to her daughter, and she decided she didn’t want to be a Cyclist after all.” She looked around the table. “So I thought we’d do the same thing with Perdita. I think we should start by explaining the significance of the Liberation and the days of dark oppression that preceded it—”

  “I think,” Viola interrupted, “we should try to talk her into just going off the ammenerol for a few months instead of having the shunt removed. If she comes. Which she won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Would you? I mean, it’s like the Inquisition. Her sitting here while all of us ‘explain’ at her. Perdita may be crazy, but she’s not stupid.”

  “It’s hardly the Inquisition,” Mother said. She looked anxiously past me toward the door. “I’m sure Perdita—” She stopped, stood up, and plunged off suddenly through the asparagus.

  I turned around, half expecting Perdita with light-up lips or a full-body tattoo, but I couldn’t see through the leaves. I pushed at the branches.

  “Is it Perdita?” Viola said, leaning forward.

  I peered around the mulberry bush. “Oh, my God,” I said.

  It was my mother-in-law, wearing a black abayah and a silk yarmulke. She swept toward us through a pumpkin patch, robes billowing and eyes flashing. Mother hurried in her wake of trampled radishes, looking daggers at me.

  I turned them on Viola. “It’s your Grandmother Karen,” I said accusingly. “You told me you didn’t get through to her.”

  “I didn’t,” she said. “Twidge, sit up straight. And put your slate down.”

  There was an ominous rustling in the rose arbor, as of leaves shrinking back in terror, and my mother-in-law arrived.

  “Karen!” I said, trying to sound pleased. “What on earth are you doing here? I thought you were in Baghdad.”

  “I came back as soon as I got Viola’s message,” she said, glaring at everyone in turn. “Who’s this?” she demanded, pointing at Bysshe. “Viola’s new live-in?”

  “No!” Bysshe said, looking horrified.

  “This is my law clerk, Mother,” I said. “Bysshe Adams-Hardy.”

  “Twidge, why aren’t you in school?”

  “I am,” Twidge said. “I’m remoting.” She held up her slate. “See? Math.”

  “I see,” she said, turning to glower at me. “It’s a serious enough matter to require my great-grandchild’s being pulled out of school and the hiring of legal assistance, and yet you didn’t deem it important enough to notify me. Of course, you never tell me anything, Traci.”

  She swirled herself into the end chair, sending leaves and sweet-pea blossoms flying and decapitating the broccoli centerpiece. “I didn’t get Viola’s cry for help until yesterday. Viola, you should never leave messages with Hassim. His English is virtually nonexistent. I had to get him to hum me your ring. I recognized your signature, but the phones were out, so I flew home. In the middle of negotiations, I might add.”

  “How are negotiations going, Grandma Karen?” Viola asked.

  “They were going extremely well. The Israelis have given the Palestinians half of Jerusalem, and they’ve agreed to time-share the Golan Heights.” She turned to glare momentarily at me. “They know the importance of communication.” She turned back to Viola. “So why are they picking on you, Viola? Don’t they like your new live-in?”

  “I am not her live-in,” Bysshe protested.

  I have often wondered how on earth my mother-in-law became a mediator and what she does in all those negotiation sessions with Serbs and Catholics and North and South Koreans and Protestants and Croats. She takes sides, jumps to conclusions, misinterprets everything you say, refuses to listen. And yet she talked South Africa into a Mandelan government and would probably get the Palestinians to observe Yom Kippur. Maybe she just bullies everyone into submission. Or maybe they have to band together to protect themselves against her.

  Bysshe was still protesting. “I never even met Viola till today. I’ve only talked to her on the phone a couple of times.”

  “You must have done something,” Karen said to Viola. “They’re obviously out for your blood.”

  “Not mine,” Viola said.-”Perdita’s. She’s joined the Cyclists.”

  “The Cyclists? I left the West Bank negotiations because you don’t approve of Perdita joining a biking club? How am I supposed to explain this to the president of Iraq? She will not understand, and neither do I. A biking club!”

  “The Cyclists do not ride bicycles,” Mother said.

  “They menstruate,” Twidge said.

  There was a dead silence of at least a minute, and I thought, it’s finally happened. My mother-in-law and I are actually going to be on the same side of a family argument.

  “All this fuss is over Perdita’s having her shunt removed?” Karen said finally. “She’s of age, isn’t she? And this is obviously a case where personal sovereignty applies. You should know that, Traci. After all, you’re a judge.”

  I should have known it was too good to be true.

  “You mean you approve of her setting back the Liberation twenty years?” Mother said.

  “I hardly think it’s that serious,” Karen said. “There are antishunt groups in the Middle East, too, you know, but no one takes them seriously. Not even the Iraqis, and they still wear the veil.”

  “Perdita is taking them seriously.”

  Karen dismissed Perdita with a wave of her black sleeve. “They’re a trend, a fad. Like microskirts. Or those dreadful electronic eyebrows. A few women wear silly fashions like that for a little while, but you don’t see women as a whole giving up pants or going back to wearing hats.”

  “But Perdita…” Viola said.

  “If Perdita wants to have her period, I say let her. Women functioned perfectly well without shunts for thousands of years.”

  Mother brought her fist down on the table. “Women also functioned perfectly well with concubinage, cholera, and corsets,” she said, emphasizing each word with her fist. “But that is no reason to take them on voluntarily, and I have no intention of allowing Perdita—”

  “Speaking of Perdita, where is the poor child?” Karen said.

  “She’ll be here any minute,” Mother said. “I invited her to lunch so we could discuss this with her.”

  “Ha!” Karen said. “So you could browbeat her into changing her mind, you mean. Well, I have no intention of collaborating with you. I intend to listen to the poor thing’s point of view with interest and an open mind. ‘Respect,’ that’s the key word, and one you all seem to have forgotten. Respect and common courtesy.”

  A barefoot young woman wearing a flowered smock and a red scarf tied around her left arm carne up to the table with a sheaf of pink folders.

  “It’s about time,” Karen said, snatching one of the folders away from her. “Your service here is dreadful. I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes. She snapped the folder open. “I don’t suppose you have Scotch.”

  “My name is Evangeline,” the young woman said. “I’m Perdita’s docent.” She took the folder away from Karen. “She wasn’t able to join you for lunch, but she asked me to come in her place and explain the Cyclist philosophy to you.”

  She sat down in the wicker chair next to me.

  “The Cyclists are dedicated to freedom,” she said. “Freedom from artificiality, freedom from body-controlling drugs and hormones, freedom from the male patriarchy that attempts to impose them on us. As you probably already know, we do not wear shunts.”

  She pointed to the red scarf around her arm. “Instead, we wear this as a badge of our freedom and our femaleness. I’m wearing it today to an
nounce that my time of fertility has come.”

  “We had that, too,” Mother said, “only we wore it on the back of our skirts.”

  I laughed.

  The docent glared at me. “Male domination of women’s bodies began long before the so-called ‘Liberation,’ with government regulation of abortion and fetal rights, scientific control of fertility, and finally the development of ammenerol, which eliminated the reproductive cycle altogether. This was all part of a carefully planned takeover of women’s bodies, and by extension, their identities, by the male patriarchal regime.”

  “What an interesting point of view!” Karen said enthusiastically.

  It certainly was. In point of fact, ammenerol hadn’t been invented to eliminate menstruation at all. It had been developed for shrinking malignant tumors, and its uterine lining-absorbing properties had only been discovered by accident.

  “Are you trying to tell us,” Mother said, “that men forced shunts on women? We had to fight everyone to get ammenerol approved by the FDA!”

  It was true. What surrogate mothers and antiabortionists and the fetal-rights issue had failed to do in uniting women, the prospect of not having to menstruate did. Women had organized rallies, petitioned, elected senators, passed amendments, been excommunicated, and gone to jail, all in the name of Liberation.

  “Men were against it,” Mother said, getting rather red in the face. “And the religious right, and the maxipad manufacturers, and the Catholic Church—

  “They knew they’d have to allow women priests,” Viola said.

  “Which they did,” I said.

  “The Liberation hasn’t freed you,” the docent said loudly. “Except from the natural rhythms of your life, the very wellspring of your femaleness.”

  She leaned over and picked a daisy that was growing under the table. “We in the Cyclists celebrate the onset of our menses and rejoice in our bodies,” she said, holding the daisy up. “Whenever a Cyclist comes into blossom, as we call it, she is honored with flowers and poems and songs. Then we join hands and tell what we like best about our menses.”

  “Water retention,” I said.

  “Or lying in bed with a heating pad for three days a month,” Mother said.

  “I think I like the anxiety attacks best,” Viola said. “When I went off the ammenerol, so I could have Twidge, I’d have these days where I was convinced the space station was going to fall on me.”

  A middle-aged woman in overalls and a straw hat had come over while Viola was talking and was standing next to Mother’s chair. “I had these mood swings,” she said. “One minute I’d feel cheerful and the next like Lizzie Borden.”

  “Who’s Lizzie Borden?” Twidge asked.

  “She killed her parents,” Bysshe said. “With an ax.”

  Karen and the docent glared at both of them. “Aren’t you supposed to be working on your math, Twidge?” Karen said.

  “I’ve always wondered if Lizzie Borden had PMS,” Viola said, “and that was why—”

  “No,” Mother said. “It was having to live before tampons and ibuprofen. An obvious case of justifiable homicide.”

  “I hardly think this sort of levity is helpful,” Karen said, glowering at everyone.

  “Are you our waitress?” I asked the straw-hatted woman hastily.

  “Yes,” she said, producing a slate from her overalls pocket

  “Do you serve wine?” I asked.

  “Yes. Dandelion, cowslip, and primrose.”

  “We’ll take them all.”

  “A bottle of each?”

  “For now,” I said. “Unless you have them in kegs.”

  “Our specials for today are watermelon salad and choufleur gratinée,” she said, smiling at everyone. Karen and the docent did not smile back. “You handpick your own cauliflower from the patch up front. The floratarian special is sautéed lily buds with marigold butter.”

  There was a temporary truce while everyone ordered. “I’ll have the sweet peas,” the docent said, “and a glass of rose water.”

  Bysshe leaned over to Viola. “I’m sorry I sounded so horrified when your grandmother asked if I was your live-in,” he said.

  “That’s okay,” Viola said. “Grandma Karen can be pretty scary.”

  “I just didn’t want you to think I didn’t like you. I do. Like you, I mean.”

  “Don’t they have soyburgers?” Twidge asked.

  As soon as the waitress left, the docent began passing out the pink folders she’d brought with her. “These will explain the working philosophy of the Cyclists,” she said, handing me one, “along with practical information on the menstrual cycle.” She handed Twidge one.

  “It looks just like those books we used to get in junior high,” Mother said, looking at hers. “‘A Special Gift,’ they were called, and they had all these pictures of girls with pink ribbons in their hair, playing tennis and smiling. Blatant misrepresentation.”

  She was right. There was even the same drawing of the fallopian tubes I remembered from my middle-school movie, a drawing that had always reminded me of Alien in the early stages.

  “Oh, yuck,” Twidge said. “This is disgusting.”

  “Do your math,” Karen said.

  Bysshe looked sick. “Did women really do this stuff?”

  The wine arrived, and I poured everyone a large glass. The docent pursed her lips disapprovingly and shook her head. “The Cyclists do not use the artificial stimulants or hormones that the male patriarchy has forced on women to render them docile and subservient.”

  “How long do you menstruate?” Twidge asked.

  “Forever,” Mother said.

  “Four to six days,” the docent said. “It’s there in the booklet.”

  “No, I mean, your whole life or what?”

  “A woman has her menarche at twelve years old on the average and ceases menstruating at age fifty-five.”

  “I had my first period at eleven,” the waitress said, setting a bouquet down in front of me. “At school.”

  “I had my last one on the day the FDA approved ammenerol,” Mother said.

  “Three hundred and sixty-five divided by twenty-eight,” Twidge said, writing on her slate. “Times forty-three years.” She looked up. “That’s five hundred and fifty-nine periods.”

  “That can’t be right,” Mother said, taking the slate away from her. “It’s at least five thousand.”

  “And they all start on the day you leave on a trip,” Viola said.

  “Or get married,” the waitress said. Mother began writing on the slate.

  I took advantage of the cease-fire to pour everyone some more dandelion wine.

  Mother looked up from the slate. “Do you realize with a period of five days, you’d be menstruating for nearly three thousand days? That’s over eight solid years.”

  “And in between there’s PMS,” the waitress said, delivering flowers.

  “What’s PMS?” Twidge asked.

  “Premenstrual syndrome was the name the male medical establishment fabricated for the natural variation in hormonal levels that signal the onset of menstruation,” the docent said. “This mild and entirely normal fluctuation was exaggerated by men into a debility.” She looked at Karen for confirmation.

  “I used to cut my hair,” Karen said.

  The docent looked uneasy.

  “Once I chopped off one whole side,” Karen went on. “Bob had to hide the scissors every month. And the car keys. I’d start to cry every time I hit a red light.”

  “Did you swell up?” Mother asked, pouring Karen another glass of dandelion wine.

  “I looked just like Orson Welles.”

  “Who’s Orson Welles?” Twidge asked.

  “Your comments reflect the self-loathing thrust on you by the patriarchy,” the docent said. “Men have brainwashed women into thinking menstruation is evil and unclean. Women even called their menses ‘the curse’ because they accepted men’s judgment.”

  “I called it the curse because I
thought a witch must have laid a curse on me,” Viola said. “Like in ‘Sleeping Beauty.’”

  Everyone looked at her.

  “Well, I did,” she said. “It was the only reason I could think of for such an awful thing happening to me.” She handed the folder back to the docent. “It still is.”

  “I think you were awfully brave,” Bysshe said to Viola, “going off the ammenerol to have Twidge.”

  “It was awful,” Viola said. “You can’t imagine.”

  Mother sighed. “When I got my period, I asked my mother if Annette had it, too.”

  “Who’s Annette?” Twidge said.

  “A Mouseketeer,” Mother said, and added, at Twidge’s uncomprehending look, “On TV.”

  “High-rez,” Viola said.

  “The Mickey Mouse Club,” Mother said.

  “There was a high-rezzer called the Mickey Mouse Club?” Twidge said incredulously.

  “They were days of dark oppression in many ways,” I said.

  Mother glared at me. “Annette was every young girl’s ideal,” she said to Twidge. “Her hair was curly, she had actual breasts, her pleated skirt was always pressed, and I could not imagine that she could have anything so messy and undignified. Mr. Disney would never have allowed it. And if Annette didn’t have one, I wasn’t going to have one either. So I asked my mother—”

  “What did she say?” Twidge cut in.

  “She said every woman had periods,” Mother said. “So I asked her, ‘Even the Queen of England?’ And she said, ‘Even the Queen.’”

  “Really?” Twidge said. “But she’s so old!”

  “She isn’t having it now,” the docent said irritatedly. “I told you, menopause occurs at age fifty-five.”

  “And then you have hot flashes,” Karen said, “and osteoporosis and so much hair on your upper lip, you look like Mark Twain.”

  “Who’s—” Twidge said.

  “You are simply reiterating negative male propaganda,” the docent interrupted, looking very red in the face.

  “You know what I’ve always wondered?” Karen said, leaning conspiratorially close to Mother. “If Maggie Thatcher’s menopause was responsible for the Falklands War.”