COMMUNE OF WOMEN

by SUZAN STILL

  Her forays into the world were highly selective. Even at the end of her life, she’d sally forth for shopping in the village, peddling at a leisurely pace, her posture as upright and proud as if she straddled a Lipizzaner stallion. Off she’d go down the dirt road, always following the right hand rut, raising little puffs of dust in the summer heat.

  And always in a skirt. Ondine never saw her in pants, except in her garden or studio, where she wore tailored men’s trousers, cinched by a large leather belt.

  “She and Coco Chanel were contemporaries and modest friends – but sisters in elegance.”

  “She knew Coco Chanel?” Heddi, doyenne of fashion, gasps incredulously.

  “Yes. In fact, someone told me once that it was Tante Collette who first started wearing men’s wear – and Chanel stole her style and then took all the credit for it.”

  “My God!”

  “Who’s Coco Cha-what’s-her-name?” This, from Pearl who has been leaning against the candy machine, quietly paring her nails with her pocketknife.

  “She’s a fashion designer, Pearl,” Ondine says patiently.

  “Well, I been wearin men’s clothes all mah life, an ain’t no one never cared one way or t’other.”

  Heddi and Ondine share a long look.

  “Well, it was probably just a rumor, anyway.”

  “This is interesting, Ondine,” Betty pipes in, “don’t stop now. Tell us more.”

  An ancient housekeeper, Marie, whose life was apparently dedicated to cleaning and polishing as a religious calling, underpinned Tante Collette’s elemental yet aristocratic life. Marie’s gnarled old fingers wielded broom, dust cloth and polishing rag like holy relics, and she fed the carved legs of tables and chairs with good local bees-wax and lavender oil as if she were genuflecting to administer the sacrament.

  Tante Collette’s banker was another of her ancient retainers, who handled all her accounts and managed the small fortune that her husband, Ruban, had left her when he died young. It wasn’t a happy match, she always implied, and she apparently loved him more for abandoning her in comfort than for any more romantic reason.

  Once a month, she’d stop at the bank and her old friend, although long-retired, would meet her in a private room to discuss the state of her resources which, given her modest needs and conservative spending, was ever-normal.

  But Ondine doesn’t want them to get the impression that Tante Collette was stodgy or boring. Quite the contrary.

  “When I was little, I always used to confuse her telephone, in my mind’s eye, with the hand-held porcelain shower head attached to her bathtub. They seemed equally complicated and exotic, and both were all white and gold, with big horns on the end, perforated with little holes. I pointed the similarity out to her one day, when I was sitting in her huge bathtub, surrounded by a foamy mattress of bubble bath.

  “ ‘The French do not invent things,’ she told me with a twinkle in her eye, ‘they fantasize them.’ Then she picked up the hand-held shower and, instead of rinsing my hair, she put the thing to her ear and shouted, ‘Allo? Allo?’ in her heavily accented English.

  “Pretty soon, she had me giggling, as she carried on an imaginary conversation with a desmoiselle, one of the local fairies.”

  Ondine shakes her head in amusement.

  Occasionally, Tante Collette would embark on more worldly travels. Maybe there would be an invitation to an art opening in Paris. As one of the last of the Nabi, she was always lionized. Or maybe she simply needed to replenish her underwear and nightgowns at Galeries Lafayette. And there’d always be a stop at Chanel for something deliciously simple to augment her wardrobe.

  And in the depths of winter, almost until she died, she escaped the cold Atlantic winds by embarking from Marseilles for Morocco, where she kept a tiny house with a walled courtyard, close to the kasbah.

  “I own that now, too – and what I’ll do with it is anybody’s guess. I’m afraid to go to North Africa, with all the terrorism...

  “Are you laughing at me, Heddi?

  “Oh! I get it! Afraid to go to my aunt’s house in Morocco, but then, here in L.A...! Very funny...

  “It is pretty ironic, isn’t it?

  “So, are you bored to death, yet? No?

  “Okay. Let’s see... What more can I tell you?”

  Tante Collette always sailed in the keeping of a young seaman who clearly adored her, a Captain Fouquet. There are photos of her bundled up on a deck chair like a film star, with him hovering over her like a handsome leading man.

  She never talked much to Ondine about these migrations to a warmer climate, but there would be huge amber beads against her couture blouses, or heavy silver earrings worn with cashmere sweaters that attested to her secret movements through the labyrinths of the exotic.

  It suddenly occurred to Ondine, during this last trip, that all this is hers now. But in a house so saturated with Tante Collette’s essence, could anything ever really belong to Ondine? If she chooses, she can go to the jewelry chest and, with a little rummaging, find those Berber earrings and wear them.

  Imagining that gives her a guilty sense of pleasure. At a time when her own identity is at its nadir – when she feels formless and chaotic – she can don Tante Collette like a mask and hide behind her panache.

  “Always create with compassion,” she wrote Ondine in her last letter. “With compassion, courage and originality.” Always, she insisted on addressing the artist in her, despite Ondine’s protestations that she hasn’t created anything in the way of real art in almost two decades.

  Would her aunt think her cowardly, if she crawled into her skin just for an afternoon and drew the last warmth from it? Put on her aubergine cashmere sweater, her amber beads as big as quail eggs and pretended, if she cannot feel it, that her soul vibrates to the same pure note that Tante Collette’s did?

  Would she say Ondine is creating herself compassionately? Or simply that she lacks originality?

  Eventually, Ondine had to try it. She dressed in her aunt’s clothes; a pale aqua silk sweater, an ankle-length wool skirt of deep sea green, Tibetan turquoise beads with a repoussé silver locket, topped by a full-length down coat of teal silk. For what, she had no idea. There was nowhere to go. No one to see. She simply needed her aunt around her, like protective coloration.

  Thus attired, she went out. The wind was silvery and cold like the handle of a coin silver spoon, thin and sharp.

  Silver seems, in fact, to have enchanted the land as if everything lay enmeshed in it. The sky, snared in a scrim of black branches, is that fragile blue that comes in winter with the cold. It is late afternoon and clouds are heavy in the west, deep blue-violet streaked with raspberry.

  The sun pulses above the western horizon, fiery apricot, hurling lances of lemon yellow. The far hills are deep, soft lavender blue, misted over with pale silver. Leaves that have survived the wind gleam like green-black glass in last light and the pale vanilla hemisphere of the moon is already mid-journey in the sky.

  Such beauty! It’s as if Ondine were seeing it through her aunt’s eyes, and for the first time.

  The front wall of her heart aches and burns as if the flesh were seared. And behind the pain, there’s a tremulous beating, so weak it seems to be announcing its ambivalence about living.

  She’s as insubstantial as her own shadow, wafting through bushes, stretching over the frosted grass, so vulnerable and unsure. The absolute integrity of what grows from winter soil rebukes her, as if speaking for Tante Collette.

  She feels like the Unluckiest Woman in the World, resisting even thinking about the things she cherishes, for fear the hellish curse of her lucklessness will waft towards them like a blighting frost.

  Yet, here she stands in the ruined garden with its shining black leaves, its red berries rimmed in a foil of frost, the thick grasses like a tangled pelt. Her passing leaves them undiminished, apparently.

  Maybe – just maybe – here at Tante Collette’s stronghold, where her magic still reigns, O
ndine’s luck will change at last.

  And then, suddenly, the beauty invades her and she is resistless. She seems to fall back into the child she was, wild and free and so sensitive to the natural world.

  What has happened to that fairy child of the past, with her wild fantasies and sprightly ways, the hubris and the innocence...?

  “You are Ondine,” Tante Collette told her that summer she was ten, gazing at her thoughtfully – worriedly, even. “The water sprite.”

  Ondine felt special and preened a bit. No other child she knew came with a myth attached.

  “When she married a man and bore his children, she lost her soul.” Tante Collette paused, watching this dire news spread across her niece’s complacent face. “I begged your mother not to name you after her.”

  “What does it mean?” Ondine asked, alarmed. “What can I do?”

  Tante Collette shook her head slowly, as if already grieving Ondine’s future misfortunes. “Nothing. Unless you choose not to marry. Not to bear children.”

  She broke a pink rose that proffered itself from the long hand of a vine reaching through the music room window, and clipped it under Ondine’s barrette over her right temple.

  “How lovely roses look in that auburn hair!” Tante Collette stepped back to admire her.

  “Or...” she continued with a sigh, “once your soul is lost, you shall have to set about finding it again.”

  “Your only duty in life is to remain true to yourself,” she wrote in response to Ondine’s ten-page howl of pain, when she discovered her husband Richard’s betrayal. She was the only person who could say something so trite and get away with it; she, who’d followed her own dictates for more than nine decades.

  So then, how could she know how it is with Ondine, who has no idea what being true to herself might entail, who is as soulless as an old shoe?

  “Imagine that your own genius is at hand,” Tante Collette fired back, this time by telephone. Ondine could picture her at her desk, holding the ivory celluloid and gilded brass receiver of her 1920’s phone. “Nothing comes into being without imagination. Imagine yourself with a soul! What would a woman of your age, with your talents – with a soul – want?”

  “A bullet to the brain?”

  “Oh, Child!” A rare burst of exasperation. “Don’t you know that pain and chaos always herald Eros? You have birth pangs, for heaven’s sake!”

  “People die in childbirth,” Ondine intoned mournfully.

  “Now, you listen to me!” Tante Collette’s voice was suddenly cold. “If it takes you through the very holds of Hell, you honor it. You honor this passage. Or you are a woman without honor – a thing which is an abomination to me.” And with more vigor than one would have guessed a nonagenarian arm could possess, she slammed down the receiver.

  Now, the orchard lifts its un-pruned suckers like a wiry mauve haze in the westering light; wind soughs, indistinguishable from surf. Cindery trunks rise up all around her, brandishing black branches that scrawl a calligraphic account of her sorrows on the evening sky. She has come here to this wild Atlantic coast – to Tante Collette’s, to Quatre Vents – to begin the search.

  Ondine seems fated to live her life at the edge of continents, as is only proper for a water sprite.

  In southern California, where the ground shakes and waves periodically invade beachfront homes, while other houses simply slide down the cliffs with the first real rain, it all seemed evidence of the instability and marginality of her own life. It was proof that her psyche was neither here nor there – neither fully conscious, nor sufficiently immersed in the unconscious to be creatively endowed.

  At Tante Collette’s, however, she considers a new possibility: that she, Ondine the water sprite, might find her soul here, close to the waters of the Atlantic. This is not the plasticized beach of L.A. with its carnival atmosphere and a heat she always found suffocating. While others lay out in it slathered in oil, worshipping it, it wilted Ondine.

  The air of the Atlantic, though, is bracing, the wind like a god. That morning, walking along the bluffs, she looked down into a coffer of jewels – aquamarine, sapphire, emerald, citrine, and diamond – all caught up in lacy nets of foam that tear and are rewoven again and again. Such unbounded renewal must surely have the same effect on her.

  Mustn’t it?

  She finds as they become reacquainted that the house, too, is a treasure chest. One morning, looking for a coffee spoon, she pulls open a kitchen drawer and there is Tante Collette’s good silver where she had expected to find the everyday flatware – which is lovely enough, with its thin nickel silver spoons engraved with sweeping initials and its ivory-handled knives.

  But this collection sends her instantly into a kind of reverie. Lying on deep green velvet are implements of wondrous proportion and weight, the tines of forks half again as long as usual, the spoons with deep, lustrous bowls, vaguely webbed in scars of use and age. The knife blades are broad and curved like palette knives, inviting the spreading of rich butter and slow-cooked jam. The silver handles are thick and bumpy with ornament – flowers, birds, leaves and ribbons – not engraved, but sculpted in low relief. Oxidation lies in the crevices like black shadows under the plantings of a magic garden.

  Ondine is aware of the ticking of the old wooden clock on the wall, of the smell of coffee, and a thick atmosphere of silence and satisfaction. A damask linen tea towel draped across the Moroccan tile of the counter catches the morning light with a kind of promise – but of what? Blank canvas? The slow elegance of a life fully lived? The richness of everydayness?

  All this, as she gazes into a kitchen drawer.

  And every inch of the house contains these vignettes. At all hours of the day, sun sweeps through room after room igniting the soul of old wood, of silk draped into shimmering clouds, of softly knapped leather books with sparking gold edges and embossings. And especially, it incandesces the fabulous, bright images of the Nabi, glorifying the garden of Quatre Vents.

  Ondine stops to sip from a can of Squirt and glances around apologetically.

  “All this about the house must be awfully boring...”

  She encounters Heddi’s ferocious stare. Its message is unequivocal. Ondine sighs.

  “...and besides...I guess I need to tell you what’s happened to me here in L.A., instead of hiding inside Tante Collette’s life. Heddi knows. It’s really hard to talk about...”

  She looks tentatively at Heddi, who nods silently in response.

  Ondine sighs again, heavily.

  “It’s just that, one day when I was still married to Richard, I was returning to our house in Malibu, just above Point Dume. I’d just been to my aerobics class and I’d picked up my daughter Jackie’s cheerleader uniform at the dry cleaner’s. I was thinking about what to fix for dinner...”

  On that terrible afternoon, Ondine runs up the front steps with Jackie’s uniform over her arm in a dry cleaner bag, throws open the door and prances in, still in her hot purple Spandex workout leotard, to find her son Kyle on the entry hall floor in a heap, screaming and flooded with tears.

  She knows instantly that it’s disaster – but what?

  She opens her mouth to ask, but her tongue is paralyzed like the warped leather of an old boot.

  Kneeling, she scoops Kyle into her arms. This child who, since the age of five, has been Southern California cool is now a drooling, hysterical rag of a huge teenager. And she holds him and rocks him and croons to him, while her mind turns to razor blades in a blender.

  “Baby! Baby! Kylie, Baby!” she says over and over, rocking and rocking.

  Before she can calm him enough to tell her, though, there is Richard, looming over them with the most horrible expression on his face. He looks down on their pitiful Pietà like an Old Testament Jehovah, colder than an ice storm, his face clouded with incipient judgment.

  “What?!!!” Ondine screams. Even Kyle, lost in his inner hurricane, jumps at the shrillness.

  “You cunt!” Richard hisses, n
o trace of his handsomeness left, all viperous tongue and curled lips.

  Ondine recoils but screams, again, “What?!!!”

  “Jackie, you cunt. It’s Jackie.” His foot lashes out and he kicks her in the thigh. Then he kicks her again.

  She’s holding Kyle. She’s screaming. She’s in a darkness shattered by jagged lightning bolts.

  “What?!!! What about Jackie?”

  “She’s dead, you cunt! You bitch!” He’s kicking her metronomically now – hard, up and down her – from head to foot.

  She doesn’t remember it for a while. It’s a blur of horror. There’s pain, denial, terror, and sickness in the pit of her being that comes raging up like a rabid animal in ragged screams.

  What she remembers next, very clearly, is Kyle clinging to his father’s leg, yelling, “Stop! Stop! Please, Dad! Please, Dad! Stop!” His face is red and gooey with tears and mucus.

  Her family has metamorphosed in those instants into something unrecognizable to her, including Jackie, whom she knows to be, without any question – almost without surprise – dead.

  She feels as outcast, as if Richard had kicked her, narcotized and without a parachute, out of an airplane over the open ocean.

  Their nice, calm, prosperous life is blown up. In an instant, everything is changed forever. What is the meaning of that?

  That’s what Ondine is grappling with now. Can it be that some hidden benefit is tucked into her being, something positive and strong that’s boring its way out from the middle of this catastrophic heap of rubble that she is?

  And where does one begin looking for a lost soul? In what direction does one point oneself? What rituals does one perform; what obeisances make? What are the necessary sacrifices – as if more could possibly be required – and what is the desired restitution?