The Goddesses

by Swan Huntley

  After the proposal, she started to feel itchy. The fiancé—he was just so nice. Translation: not interesting. Not interesting at all. And their little prefab house and the cheap polyester suits, and then at the bank some stuff happened. It wasn’t good. Basically, they were figuring out it was an inside job.

  “So one day—one regular, boring Wednesday in Trenton—I went home early with stomach cramps. Jerry was at work. And I remember sitting on my pleather couch, thinking, Holy shit, I can’t do this anymore. I just cannot.”

  Ana pulled the Jeep into a parking spot outside Longs and said, “So I opened the AC vent, took the cash, loaded the car, and drove.”

  She drove to Vegas, and that’s where things got really bad. She formed new addictions and spent all her money on them. Gambling, yes, but mostly cocaine. Met a guy who thought she’d make a good dancer. “I told myself it was art.” She shrugged. “Which it was, in a way.”

  It was a nice club. Very nice. Fancy. And the men liked her. She got popular quickly. A good group of regulars. The money started rolling in. Fast, really fast. She moved to a swanky apartment, got a swanky new car. Hired a tailor to make her striptease outfits. All custom-made to fit her body perfectly. And there were themes. Not the usual nurse and schoolteacher clichés, but interesting, artful themes. Her favorite was the peacock. It started off unassuming, in a cocoon of thick black velvet, and then, bit by bit—and this was to Tom Petty, by the way—she expanded into feathers. It was hard to work the pole with all those feathers, but it was fun. And, if she had to be honest, she liked the attention. Being onstage like that. Their hungry faces. It felt powerful. Because she could control them. She could control their emotions.

  But then most of the money went up her nose, and she started unraveling. She tried to keep it together. She’d go to the gym. Well, at 5:00 a.m. after snorting a few lines, she’d go to the gym.

  It all ended when she got pulled over one night. A hundred and two on the freeway and she was blazed. They sent her to NA. Which stood for Narcotics Anonymous, in case I didn’t know. She thought it was a waste of time. And she knew it wouldn’t work either.

  And then something happened. Hard to explain. Suffice to say that this was when she decided on Mother Nature as her higher power and found Celia in the sky. Somehow—and she still couldn’t believe this, by the way—she never did a line of coke again.

  After that, Ana’s life was better, obviously, because she wasn’t fucked up all the time, but it also became harder in new ways. Without drugs, she had all this extra time on her hands. All this extra time to ask, What am I doing with my life?

  She used to drive deep into the desert and look up at the stars and ask, What do you want from me?

  And then she met Berta. “Berta was a badass. She’d been sober for three hundred years.” Berta was also a Buddhist. They had long, long coffee dates, talking about Buddhism. The non-cruelty aspect appealed to Ana most. She wanted to tame her mean streak.

  From Buddhism, Ana found yoga. Then astrology. Then she found a whole world waiting to be healed and decided to become a healer. In Hawaii, because being surrounded by water would offset her fiery nature. In Kona, because the volcano, full of fire, would remind her of who she was.

  “And here we are now,” she said, motioning to the red sign. “At Longs.” She chuckled, and then she let out a big sigh. “I hope you don’t hate me now, Nancy. I know that was a lot of information.”

  “No.” I was adamant. “I don’t hate you at all.” And then I sighed, just like her, and I was aware of our matching sighs, and why did that happen? Had I copied her? Or was it contagious, like hiccups?

  “I think it’s hard not to feel a little judgment when one hears a story like that.”

  “I feel no judgment,” I lied. Because of course I was judgmental. Robbing a bank? That was crazy. But, like she’d said, it only made sense, coming from where she came from. And she wasn’t a thief anymore. Or a stripper. She had changed. She was a healer now.

  When I looked at her, suffering under the heat of that big orange wig, I thought that she deserved mercy. We all deserve mercy, don’t we? And so mercy was what I would give her.

  “I don’t mean this in a victim, poor-me way,” Ana told me, “but sometimes I think if I had had better parents I would have been a better person.” She blew cool air up into her bangs. “But I guess they did their best. With what they had, they did their best.”

  This was a familiar refrain, and one that all parents repeated to themselves frequently, I assumed. I did my best. We had to believe that to get through the day. But often, and usually at night, we questioned our definition of “best.” Had I done my best when Jed and Cam at five years old vanished in a supermarket and I continued to shop for ten more minutes before going to look for them? And what about those years I took care of my younger brother? Was it the best I could do to sew up the gash in his leg with fishing line instead of taking him to a doctor? Or what about when he was fifteen with no driver’s license and I handed him the keys to my boyfriend’s car so he could take himself to the SATs? Was that the best? In a way, I think it was. And maybe in every way it was. We had so little then. Just as we had had so little always. My mother’s version of “best” was bleak, hauntingly bleak, and even now, in certain moments, I still felt cast in its shadow.

  “What about your parents?” Ana yawned. “What were they like?”

  I don’t know why I hesitated. This was the part where I usually delivered my line in a smooth, uplifting voice: “My parents were just your average Jack and Jane.”

  I looked at her tribal bracelet tattoo. It was a parade of triangles and elephants bordered by two rows of dots. The dots were imperfectly spaced and they were also imperfect themselves—some bigger, some smaller. I wondered if this was intentional—some kind of message about the imperfections of life.

  And this, somehow—this perceived understanding about the meaning of her tattoo—was all I needed. If it hadn’t been the tattoo, it would have been something else. I was looking for a reason. I’d spent the last million years with people who didn’t understand me, and now here was someone who did. It felt right to tell her more. I felt like she could hold it. I knew she wouldn’t be shocked.

  I started small. I told her some pieces. About how my stepdad used to beat me as a kid, and about how when I’d told Chuck, he had protectively said, “What an asshole,” but I knew he didn’t really get it. Which—he had no reason to get it. His parents really were just your average Jack and Jane.

  I was already crying at this point. Ana had the ability to melt me like that. Or I was willing to melt myself in her presence, which still pointed back to her ability to make me feel like melting was okay. I wiped my eyes and said, “I don’t want to be crying. It’s such a beautiful sunny day!”

  Ana said, “Oh, who gives a shit. Every day is sunny here.” I thought that was hilarious.

  I went on. I told her my dad had left when I was young—I’d never met him, didn’t even know his name—and I told her how my mom—I swallowed hard—was gone now, too. “She ended up”—oh, how it still made me tremble to say the words out loud—“killing herself.”

  “Come here, Nancy.” Ana pressed me in close. Her coconut oil smell, how tightly she held me. How safe I felt.

  And then I told her more. I told her more and more and more. I told her everything. Well, almost everything. About how I had raised my brother. How I’d found an older boyfriend to take us in. How I’d kept my grades up so I could get into USD, how fixated I was on that the whole time because I knew it would get me out. Because the older boyfriend turned out to be abusive—of course he did, that’s how the cycle went. How all I wanted to do was stop the cycle and re-create myself and how now, a million years later, I was trying to figure out who the hell I was under this June Cleaver costume I wore like a straitjacket.

  When I said that, Ana said, “We all wear costumes, Nancy,” and the bangs of her wig were covering half her eyes, and I had to laugh.<
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  The sun had lowered behind the palm trees at Longs, and the fronds were casting moving shadows on us. I looked at the clock. “Speaking of costumes,” I said, “I should get home and put my Mom costume on.”

  We had four sandwiches left so we ate one apiece and left the others on the curb and drove back to her place.

  The last thing Ana said to me that afternoon—she said it in her usual soft and confident voice, but it had turned into a long, emotional day and maybe her guard was down, because just underneath her confidence I could hear her regret.

  “It’s interesting, you and me…” Her whole body was completely still. She looked at me. She didn’t blink. “I wonder why you turned out the way you did and I turned out the way I did.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I hugged her. That was my answer. Our bodies, I thought, fit together in a way that seemed just right. We hugged for a long time. We stood there in the driveway under the neon-pink sky, holding on to each other’s shapes.

  •

  The boys came home with wet hair and chlorine-red eyes and picked at the plate of mangoes I’d set out for them. I told them their dad was taking me out tonight, which meant they’d get a Costco pizza for dinner, which somehow still had the power to excite them.

  “I’m going to call Dad and ask him to get Hawaiian,” Jed said. “ ’Kay, Cam?”

  “Yeah,” Cam said, and opened his binder.

  Jed put his phone to his ear and walked out to the lanai.

  It was when I reached for a mango slice that I noticed the burn mark on Cam’s arm. It looked like a small bursting comet. “Is that from the fireworks?”

  He covered the spot with his hand. “I don’t know,” he mumbled.

  I hadn’t thought about that night in a while. Two policemen at 1:00 a.m. and the boys looking at their shoes. “We found them lighting fireworks down at the Shores, with about a gram of marijuana in their possession. Can’t have that.” Chuck, who’d followed me to the door, had repeated this line: “Can’t have that, Officer, absolutely not.” The boys swore the pot wasn’t theirs—“I swear!” they each had said, too passionately; I didn’t believe them—and then they swore never to light a firework again. The cops let them off with a warning. Chuck wanted to ground them for a month. I voted for two weeks. We settled on three.

  The boys had done nothing illegal since, but I was always worried.

  “You boys didn’t bring any fireworks here, did you?” I put my arms around Cam’s shoulders, looked down at the equations he’d written out. “I don’t want you to hurt yourselves.”

  “No, Mom,” he said. “I swear.”

  I didn’t want to ask, but I thought it was my job to ask. “And you’re not smoking pot, are you?”

  “No,” Cam said, annoyed.

  Jed reappeared. “Mom, Dad will be home in twenty minutes,” he said. “He’s getting Hawaiian. Boo yeah!”

  “Crap, I have to get ready,” I said.

  “Craaaaap,” Jed said. When he thought I was out of earshot, he said to Cam, “Can I copy that, dude?”

  “Boys!” I called, “No copying!”

  “Okay, Mom!” they called back.

  But I knew they would do it anyway. It was impossible to separate twins.

  •

  “Hi, honey, I’m home!” Chuck said in his Ricky Ricardo voice. Which was so stupid, but which made me smile every time. Chuck’s Ricky Ricardo was funny because he really committed to character. He’d always been good at accents.

  I continued washing the sticky mango juice off the plates at the sink as Chuck took off his shoes by the door. I felt good. I didn’t feel annoyed by him this evening. I wondered why. Maybe because I felt like my life was expanding.

  I’d thrown on a purple dress I hadn’t worn in a long time. It was a dress I used to wear when I felt confident, and it was a little constricting, but only slightly uncomfortable.

  I set the dish on the rack, started washing the next one. The smell of pizza wafted toward me. Ham. Pineapple. Cheese. I was hungry.

  I dried my hands, turned around. There was Chuck, groomed and handsome, with a gorgeous purple Costco orchid in his hands. His blue eyes in the dusky light. That crazy, unreal dish detergent blue. He’d chosen his “really good shirt” for our date, the gray one from when Costco had had that Tommy Bahama sale. He held the flower in outstretched hands. An offering. “It’s better than the San Diego ones, isn’t it?” he asked.

  I touched his arm. “Much better,” I said.

  And then Chuck kissed me on the cheek without hesitation, which was the first time he had done that since the affair. Finally, he was taking control.

  •

  We went to a restaurant at the harbor called Bite Me because Brad had said their poke was the best. On the walls were big plastic fish and pictures of men holding up dead versions of these same kinds of fish. This place didn’t seem fancy enough to me. Not that I was a restaurant snob—it just wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I knew Chuck was thinking the same thing because he said, “Is this okay? Do you want to go somewhere else?”

  “No,” I said, touching his arm for the second time that evening. “This place is funny. It kind of reminds me of that place we went to…”

  “In Mexico?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That was a good trip.”

  “It was,” I said, remembering our green stucco hotel on the beach and the well-made straw hat I’d bought for a dollar.

  All the tables at Bite Me were made of wood that looked sticky. We chose one by the window. Chuck scooted my chair in for me, which was a hilariously too-formal thing to do at this restaurant. The waitresses wore cutoff shorts that looked more like underwear, and tight red shirts that said BITE ME, and when I set my hand on the table, it was even stickier than I’d thought.

  We ordered the poke, which arrived two minutes later on a cheap dish with no garnish. But Brad was right. It was the best poke we’d ever had.

  Chuck told me he was liking this Costco, maybe even better than the old one. There was a real fraternal spirit, he said. Some of the guys had even started a pool team. They played a few nights a week at a bar in town and they were called the Tide Poolers.

  “That’s fun,” I said. “Why don’t you join?”

  “I want to spend my free time with you, Nance,” he said, as though offended I had asked.

  But I knew Chuck better than that. He didn’t want to hang out in a bar because he didn’t trust himself not to drink. Chuck wasn’t ready to call himself an alcoholic yet, but alcohol scared him in the way it scared alcoholics. I knew he thought about it more than normal people did.

  “So,” he said, “tell me about your day.”

  “I spent time with Ana,” I said. “Turns out we have a lot in common.” I was about to tell him about the sandwiches—I really was—but then Chuck said, “What do you have in common?” and the way he said that—almost like he was a little jealous?—made me want to keep more to myself.

  So I gave him a surface-level answer—“We both love yoga”—and then continued that train of thought by saying the class was really fun and inspiring and I was getting better at the poses already.

  Chuck’s smile. “I’d love to see you do yoga.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I bet you would.”

  He took my hand. The sticky table. How life was always imperfect. Even in the best moments, it was still sticky tables and sweaty thighs.

  Chuck’s wedding band pressed into my fingers. The metal was hard, warm. “Nancy.” He looked right at me. “You don’t have to say it back, but I just want you to know…”

  I kissed my fingers and pressed them to his lips. “I love you, Chuck.”

  A pause, and then Chuck let his whole body sink back into the chair. “I’m so relieved to hear you say that.”

  •

  We made love that night on the hibiscus bedspread. We had to be extra quiet because the boys’ rooms were just across the hall in this house, which kind of mad
e it more fun. I felt sexy and spontaneous and like I owned my body again. I didn’t know when my body had become an imposition—just this thing I was forced to lug around—but now it was back and it was mine. It had been at least six months—we’d stopped making love long before Shelly—so Chuck’s old moves felt almost new to me. New but also pleasantly familiar. Something I could trust. We messed up the sheets. Pillows got lost on the floor. My purple dress landed somewhere near the window. Normally, I would have gotten up to fix the sheets and pick up the pillows and find the dress, but I told myself to stay. Stay in this moment, warm and tangled in your husband’s legs. We didn’t put on our pajamas. We didn’t brush our teeth. We fell asleep naked with nothing between us.

  10

  “Here we are at the beach. The waves are crashing. The birds are chirping. Cars are going by.” Ana inhaled and exhaled deeply. She was back in the black wig today with the pink streak that hooked just below her chin. “Here we are, breathing like we mean it. Here we are, shifting our perspective. Shifting our train onto a new rail. Shoulders back. Relax your neck. Relax your tongue. The tongue is the strongest muscle in the body. It works hard for you all day. It needs a vacation. Relax that tongue.”

  A pause.

  “You have chosen to come here this morning. You chose to get up early. You chose the clothes you’re wearing. You chose to drive to this beach. After you leave here, you’ll make more choices, and every one of them will matter. It all matters. It all counts. Every breath counts. Make it good. You are alive. Breathe like you mean it.”

  My eyes were closed, but I could see Ana reaching for her book, see her opening to the page.

  “A quote I want to share with you: ‘Be a lamp to yourself. Be your own confidence. Hold the truth within yourself as the only truth.’ ” She repeated it. “ ‘Be a lamp to yourself. Be your own confidence. Hold the truth within yourself as the only truth.’ ” She inhaled, exhaled. “What is your truth and how is it manifesting? How will your choices today affect the rest of your life? Come back. Back back back. What do you want? What do you think you deserve?”