COMMUNE OF WOMEN

by SUZAN STILL

  And Jackie was always so...well, it’s hard for her to say it and not sound monstrously cold. She is – was – her daughter, after all, her own flesh and blood. But the child, right from the womb, was unnaturally passive. Sweet-natured, no trouble at all. But somehow limp. There was no fight in her at all.

  Ondine came to think of her as the new genetic dispensation, bred especially for southern California, where fight-or-flight is more concerned with whether or not to skip school to go surfing than with battling saber-toothed tigers. She was born with her hand shaped to a cell phone. She was the easeful life, embodied. A domineering husband would scarcely have been a problem for her. She’d probably have welcomed never being called upon to make a decision regarding her own existence.

  In the weeks after Jackie’s death, people complimented Ondine on her grace under pressure, her heroic stoicism. They sent emails saying things like, “Thank you for being a courageous example to us all.”

  Only Heddi wasn’t fooled. “Where are you stuffing the grief?” she wanted to know.

  And when Ondine replied, without a glimmer of self-awareness, “What grief?” Heddi just stared at her without a word.

  Ondine wasn’t fooled, either. She knew with terrifying certainty that something major was wrong with her. She went through her paces like the good trick pony she was. The sun shone; waves rolled languidly up the beach. She ate at excellent restaurants with loving friends. She even shopped for clothes.

  All the while, it was as if novacaine had been injected directly into her brain. She was a walking, talking, robotic model of a human being.

  And there was no place to recover from the shock, either, because her home went from being a smoothly operating mechanism of family life to a war-torn, bombed-out battleground, over night.

  Richard, who had almost always deigned to keep his cruelty cleverly hidden behind smooth words and general physical absence, was suddenly and terribly present. He attached himself to her like a demonic possession.

  Whoever said that marriage is about doubling joys and halving sorrows never imagined their hellish household. Richard continued to place the blame for Jackie’s death squarely on Ondine, and his mother, Rose, a pretty creature resembling a plump, faded film star, began to show up daily in her opalescent crème-colored Coupe de Ville to aid him in this.

  Rose’s chirping voice and adolescent giggle warble from a body plumped by too much daytime TV and too many dates with her girlfriends at the ice cream parlor. Her thighs – the very ones, according to Richard, that Jackie had inherited – stand out a good six inches on either side of any other point on her body, and it’s no improvement that she chooses to wear Spandex stirrup pants and a platinum blonde bubble. She’s round and white and tender as gnocchi – but she’s got a core of elemental iron.

  Her only real interest in life being position and power, she rides Richard like a winning racehorse, with whip and spurs. And her hatred – Ondine’s friends say jealousy – of Ondine has always been complete.

  So Rose developed the habit of dropping by unannounced to “support you during your time of mourning.” With both her and Richard in the house, Ondine was caught between hammer and anvil.

  At first, she played a good game of duck and dodge. If they were in the living room, she went out to prune the garden. If they discovered her there, she pled the need for a shower and retreated to the bathroom, locking the door behind her.

  But there’s only so long you can stay in the bathroom, especially with water rationing.

  If she tried to cook, Rose horned in, meat cleaver in hand, and Ondine was never sure if it was the veal or her fingers that Rose was aiming for.

  Rose’s conversations went from thinly veiled to overtly acidic. Ondine’s clothes, cooking, housekeeping, interior décor, friends, lifestyle and artistic creations were all fair game. Especially her mothering, which had never met with Rose’s approval, anyway, but now was forever categorized as slipshod at best, but more accurately, lethal.

  At issue, of course, was the fact that Jackie died at a coffeehouse. At first, Ondine tried to defend herself. Girls her age went there. It was not in a dangerous part of town; it was Glendale, for heaven’s sake! Close to the college. There was an occasional legitimate poet who passed through and always an open mic. Some amusing and intelligent material. She liked going there, herself, sitting back in the shadows with an espresso, sipping in the rap and the self-indulgent angst.

  So she took Jackie there. She thought it might give her an alternate vision of herself – something a little to the left of the mall. Maybe political consciousness would seep in by osmosis.

  And Jackie did seem interested. Ondine only took her that once and she warned Jackie never to go there without her.

  So how was Ondine to know that Jackie’s friend, Amanda, turned sixteen the next week? Or that her parents gave her a brand new Porsche convertible for her birthday? Or that Jackie would propose a jaunt into Glendale as one of their first outings?

  Would Ondine have said “No,” if Jackie had asked permission?

  Yes! She thinks surely she would have because she would have doubted Amanda’s driving ability – especially on the tangle of freeway interchanges around Glendale that’s always clogged with high-speed traffic.

  But she never got that opportunity.

  Jackie and Amanda were full-blown in the stage where parents are terminally stupid. They communicated with rolled eyes and pained sighs.

  When they were still dependent on Ondine for rides, they were more or less loosely under her control. But with a car – especially one she didn’t even know existed...!

  Ondine had no idea that they had been loosed on the world, adolescent whim in full cry.

  Even the police defended her: a drive-by shooting in Glendale? In that part of town, close to the college? It was unheard-of. It was a weird fluke. No one could have predicted it.

  Even the shooter, when he was caught, admitted that his friend who was driving had taken the wrong off-ramp. They wanted to go to L.A.’s South Central. But then they thought, what the hell? “Hunting,” they called it. May as well hunt Whitey. It was a novel approach. They kind of liked it. It was kinky. And two hotties in a Porsche convertible? Shee-it!

  None of that mattered to Richard and Rose. For them, it would never be anything but Ondine’s fault, completely and utterly.

  And it didn’t help when Amanda, in her tearful funeral remembrances, trying for a little humor with the teenagers who were there, gasped out that Jackie had wanted them to go to the coffeehouse to prove, once and for all, how terminally lame her mother’s taste really was.

  “The poor kid,” Richard muttered, driving home, “she was so embarrassed by you!”

  So why can’t Ondine grieve? Why is there only stone where her living heart should be?

  The only thing she can think is that it’s not possible to grieve for anyone else until you’ve truly grieved for yourself.

  “Heddi says Richard is an extroverted thinking type. Can you explain that again, Heddi? I’m still not too clear on it.”

  Heddi smoothes her skirt before responding, trying to formulate an answer that will be comprehensible to the others. “Well, basically that means that he formulates a vision of reality based on objective facts and communal values. In other words, from things outside himself. He has no expectation of finding anything of value in his own inner life.”

  Ondine nods enthusiastically. “And that, of course, puts him at complete odds with me, the artist, whose inner life is everything,” she says, launching back into her story.

  Watching her as she tells her long and convoluted tale, with her beautiful, pale, worried face framed in clouds of auburn hair, Heddi envisions Ondine as a mermaid newly arisen from the depths, her white skin coated in salt crystal that sparks and glows around her like an aura in the blazing sun of consciousness.

  She has a sudden, hospitable realization. How painful the Sun’s glare must be for her, she thinks.

  As a
doctor, Richard is completely oriented toward objective data. It is a short step, according to Heddi, for him to elevate his intellectually oriented formula into the ruling principle of his life. Shoulds and oughts stud his speech like cloves in a ham. In the world he inhabits professionally, this makes him a powerful ethical voice for quality treatment of patients and for reform of lax procedures in the hospital.

  Ondine can’t begin to list the committees, the panels and the honorary degrees that Richard has accumulated. She could paper his study walls with certificates and diplomas, not to mention the glossy photos of him shaking hands with important people at important events, always tall, elegant and commanding, immaculate in his Armani suits, the very archetype of the Hero Doctor.

  At the dinner where he was to accept the position of hospital Chief of Staff, one of his nurses leaned toward Ondine during happy hour and whispered, “What’s it like living with a god?”

  Apparently, his nurse was confused about the difference between divinity and autocracy, because at home, at the real center of his power, Richard was tyrannical. Maybe that nurse was right in a way, though: he was like the Old Testament Jehovah, who withers the life of everything that doesn’t conform to His dictates.

  Heddi opines that that’s because the unconscious attitude of such a rational man, the flip side, is an egocentric hysteric. Ondine shudders at the thought of anyone trying to tell Richard such a thing!

  But Heddi’s right about Richard’s hysterical tendencies: the need to make himself interesting; the impression management; his effusiveness that morphs so often into either a lie of self-aggrandizement or imaginings of wrong-doing on the part of anyone close to him. The children suffered often from his morbid fantasies of their divergence from his dictates but, of course, Ondine was the perennial favorite focus of the dragon’s scorching breath.

  One afternoon as Ondine is heading into Heddi’s tranquil office, built onto the back of her big house in Malibu, she has an insight. The house, what she can glimpse of it coming down the side walkway, is all done up in Oriental rugs, French furniture and old porcelain blue-and-white jars. Bronze rain chains hang from the eaves into the moss carpets of a Zen garden studded with lichen-covered boulders and antique stone lanterns.

  It’s perfect, all of it. Everything is here, except the warmth, she thinks.

  She doesn’t mean it to be catty. It’s just that after years under the rule of Richard’s perfectionism, she’s more than a little leery of Heddi’s. She wonders what kind of shadow lurks beneath those polished surfaces. It’s hard for her to hold such an apostate thought – and she’s quite sure she hasn’t the courage to share it with Heddi.

  On this particular afternoon, Heddi is laying out for the first time the full picture of the man Ondine has married. It astonishes Ondine that anyone could know him so accurately and intimately without ever having met him. It’s two years into her analysis and she still hasn’t fully accepted that depth psychology can actually reveal anything important to her – or maybe she’s just wary of being caught in another perfectionistic trap.

  Heddi says, “Richard is an icon for our culture,” in that conversational way that always puts Ondine at ease. “He completely embodies one of our cultural ideals that says that a truly enterprising person has to concentrate everything on a single goal.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That means that his professional focus has been absolute. Almost all his libido is consumed there. But the unconscious always compensates for the conscious attitude. So the unconscious attitude of such an extraverted person is subjective, but in an undeveloped, infantile way. Which would make him, unconsciously, terribly egocentric.”

  Ondine feels as if Heddi is gazing into a crystal ball, seeing with mystical clarity something that has, for years, troubled her home like a phantom.

  “Jung says that the extrovert’s unconscious attitude goes far beyond mere childish selfishness; that it verges on the ruthless and brutal.”

  As if Heddi had triggered a secret spring mechanism, something that has lain ever more tightly coiled in ondine is suddenly released in a wordless shriek, both agonized and ecstatic. Both of them are startled by the violence of the sound.

  “I’ll take that as an affirmation,” Heddi says, honing the sardonic edge of dry humor.

  Ondine nods, speechless, her mouth agape.

  “It must have been terribly hard for you, all these years,” Heddi says gently. “The whole world idolizes your husband. And I’m sure you tried hard to do the same...”

  She leans across the space between their two chairs to hand a tissue to Ondine who, without knowing it, has begun to leak sparse, reluctant tears. One by one, they gather like drops of acid in the corners of her eyes and then trickle down her cheeks, furtive and stinging.

  “How is Richard’s health?”

  The question catches Ondine off guard. “F...fine,” she stammers. “He’s...he’s indestructible.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that.” Heddi’s voice is dry, soft and sure.

  “What do you mean?”

  “When the conscious attitude becomes so absurdly exaggerated, there is a resulting deepening of repression of the unconscious. All the trapped energy in the unconscious can only come to light in symptomatic form. Often, that takes the form of a catastrophe.”

  “What...kind of catastrophe?” Ondine can’t tell, in that instant, if she’s terrified or hopeful.

  “It can take various forms. A professional collapse through some kind of misstep. A nervous breakdown, where the unconscious simply paralyzes all conscious action. A life-threatening disease. Or even suicide.”

  They sit in silence awhile, as this information slowly seeps through Ondine’s defensive crust. She can hear the faint grind of traffic out on the Pacific Coast Highway. Heddi’s wristwatch gives the tiny beep that signals only five minutes left of the session. Ondine dabs a few more fugitive tears, wondering if her mascara has run.

  “But Richard’s indestructible,” she repeats inanely.

  Heddi just stares at her without a word, as if Ondine’s head were a crystal ball in which the future is fulminating darkly.

  “I guess I’ve gone on and on. I’m sorry. This isn’t really a story like Heddi and Betty told. It’s just a ramble.

  “I won’t keep you any longer, except to say that Heddi was right. The reason I’ve come back to L.A. is that Richard’s sick. In fact, he’s apparently dying.

  “You see, it turns out that Richard was in the closet all those years and, after we divorced, he went to live with his lover. But now, he’s got AIDS and his lover’s abandoned him. I’m here to tend to him, while he dies.”

  “Why doesn’t his wonderful mother do that?” Betty asks.

  “Oh! I forgot to tell you. Rose had a stroke about seven or eight months ago. She’s in an extended care facility in Burbank. She can’t even speak much less tend Richard. Kyle thinks it happened when Richard finally had to tell her he’s gay and has AIDS.”

  “Talk about the return of the repressed!” Heddi mutters to no one in particular.

  “And you don’t have...?” Betty asks, tentatively.

  “No, I’ve been tested. I got lucky. I’m fine.”

  “But won’t it be awkward to see him?” Betty persists.

  “Probably. But I guess he’s too weak to make it too awful. The first thing I’m going to do is paint his bedroom. Kyle says it’s all white...so stark you’d think he was already in the morgue.

  “So I think I’ll paint it rose, in honor of his mother.”

  Heddi

  Well, that’s Ondine for you; everything in her life viewed in terms of color – even her bruises.

  In her mind, it all turns into paint on canvas or sculpted forms. Even death becomes a Pietà. Maybe there’s only one thing a person like Ondine can do – just do the obvious and turn life into art. Maybe that’s all that’s asked of her in this life.

  Pearl

  Well, Pearl cain’t ratly make head
s or tails a the Onion. From what she cain tell, she’s god-awful sorry fer hersef cuz she’s so darn rich.

  An as fer yer man beatin on you – that’s a story old as stones an don’t hardly bear mentionin.

  Now, Pearl cain relate ta losin yer kid. She’s lost a passel of em. Ain’t nothin, never, gonna make that rat.

  Now everone’s had a break an used the john, an that Heady gal, she’s turnin her eyes on Pearl, who espects she’s got ta do it, if only ta keep all them women from gabblin lak a gaggle a geese.

  Well, Pearl laked her corner. Even on the coldest days it gots shelter from the wind an the afternoon sun keeps it warm, rat up til it goes down in the ocean. It’s betwixt a surf shop an a greasy spoon called Pop’s. Jes the way they built the places, both with angled front winders, makes a little V Pearl jes fits in, her an her pack an cart.

  She spreads out her cardboard – the best is a water heater box, good an thick – an gets out her pillers an lap robe. Digs out her pipe an lats up. Sets out her can.

  Don’t take long. Some bleached blond young feller from the surf shop, or some old fart comin belchin outta Pop’s’ll drop some change in, an the day’s off ta a good start.

  Long’s she gots enough ta buy her some tobaccy, she’s fine. Pop makes sure she’s fed. He’ll fry up a burger after the noon rush. She uses his john. She don’t need much. Never did eat much.

  Yer the skinniest child in the Choctaw Nation, her Granny use ter say, sizin her up. Must be that nigger blood a yer pappy’s – you got bones half the size a anybody fer ten miles in any direction.

  She warn’t being mean. It was jes her way ta say a thin as it come ta her. She was kinda short on eti-cut, but you always knew whar you stood with Granny.

  One thin you can say fer California, the weather’s fine. Back in Oklahoma this time a year, a gal woulda froze ta death, settin out lak Pearl does. The Roads Department’d have ta haul her off lak one solid block a human ice. But out here, thar’s but a few days she cain’t set out in the fresh air an smoke her pipe an watch the world go by.