COMMUNE OF WOMEN

by SUZAN STILL

  Of course, it woke her straight up. But she was so tired, she’d doze again, and again find herself on the beach. She must have dreamed the same dream at least five times, with variations on the theme.

  Until those dreams, she didn’t really understand the seriousness of her situation. Somehow, it’s seemed like this is the dream – this little room, these women, being trapped here. She’s been in denial, thinking this would suddenly all just go away magically, like a terrible nightmare that evaporates with the dawn.

  But now she feels that Tante Collette has appeared to warn her of real danger – to say that Death is a reality.

  Tante Collette always was her Early Warning System, using age as a promontory from which she looked down on everything that seemed like a jumble to Ondine. From her eminence, chaos must have showed as patterns, like Ondine seeing the mandala in the heart of Paris from the plane.

  So the pattern Ondine’s weaving now – or being woven into is more the case – is Death. And she guesses it’s not so much the dying that scares her. It’s all the unlived Life.

  Erika

  Erika thinks she’s going to die. She can’t get any relief from the pain. She feels sweaty and hot – then icy cold.

  They’re just going to fucking let her lie here and die!

  Pearl

  Whooo-eee! Pearl ain’t had a good sleep lak that in a coon’s age. She done fergot what it was ta sleep indoors an not have ta worry bout some feller a-sneakin up on her; some junkie lookin fer dope or money, or some prevert lookin ta take his pleasure on her ol body – now ain’t that the very vision a desperation!

  She wonders what’s fer breakfast an hopes the coffee ain’t run out yet. She sure do enjoy a cup in the mornin!

  She’s gettin spoilt.

  Ain’t it amazin how quick a gal gets use ter the high life?

  X

  X cannot believe herself. Here she is, watching television and eating Oreos out of Fat Guy’s lunch box like some American housewife!

  It is the body again; it does not want to die, especially by starvation. Her stomach is rumbling so loudly she thinks it will give away her position!

  If the police ever bother to come, that is.

  When X first came to America two years ago, she was so excited! She wanted to become an American – to think like one, dress like one and eat like one. She discarded all her mother’s notions about food and dress. Instead, she consumed Big Macs and fries and wore jeans. She thought she was so chic, hanging out at MacDonald’s with her friends!

  She cannot believe now that she was so naïve.

  No one from the organization of Christian churches gave her any instruction. She was just brought here straight from her hiding place in Jerusalem because her English was good and her parents were dead, and because she had excelled in her classes.

  She knows certain people risked their lives for her, and that she was favored by luck or she would not be here now. She would have missed this opportunity completely.

  Still, they just threw her in the water and no one really cared if she would sink or swim.

  The first year was devoted only to study. She was determined to excel in all her courses because she was afraid to lose her scholarship. It was not until the Imam and Father Christopher brought them together that she began to see the error in her ways. When the Kultur Klub was formed, everything changed.

  First of all, she met Jamal. In the beginning, it was so frightening. What would her parents say, if they were alive? An Egyptian Copt and a Palestinian Muslim? She thinks she would be stoned to death.

  But the entire point, according to the Imam and Father Christopher, was to break down the old prejudices that have left them all orphaned. Ibrahim and Hassan are from the Palestinian camps, like her; Abbas lost his parents to the intelligence agency VEVAK’s assassins in Iran; and Bros is an orphaned Croat. Slobodan’s entire family was murdered in Bosnia. Yuri’s parents died in a Russian bombing of Chechnya. Abdullah has permanent genetic damage from Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds that killed the rest of his family – eighteen of them! And Hansi has one hand missing from the massacre in Rwanda that took his family of ten. There’s even a Jew, Abraham, from a frontier village in Israel that was bombed by the Palestinians. She thinks he may still have a sister left alive somewhere.

  It was only a fluke that X was included in the Klub. The Imam and Father Christopher located every foreign orphan they could find on campus and all the rest just happened to be male – or women too frightened to join.

  But she doesn’t really want other women included. She’s proud to be the only one. She wants to be the token female and show how strong her gender can be. In Women’s Studies, they studied women like Ida Tarbell, Harriet Tubman and Madame Curie; women who did not let gender prejudice defeat them, who broke through the barriers and opened the doors.

  X wants to be one of those women. She wants girls in Lebanon and Egypt and Palestine and yes, even America, to read her name in books and say, I want to be like her!

  Even though, meeting after meeting, she had to go to the restroom and be sick, she made her spirit stronger than her body. She did it by overcoming the body’s natural prejudice for life.

  She had to make herself willing to die.

  Sophia

  Thank the Goddess the food’s holding out. Breakfast was a little sparse, but potato chips taste pretty good with coffee when you’re ravenous.

  Something’s going on with Betty. She’s roaming around in major meltdown, so distraught that she doesn’t even realize the green plastic chair is pinched on her enormous bottom like a squashed animal, its stiff legs protruding backwards in a kind of supplication.

  A new take on having a reserved seat! Sophia wants to smile, but thinks she might burst into tears, instead.

  Heddi and Ondine are hovering.

  Sophia’s got to catch Heddi’s eye and get her to calm her down. Hysterics that loud could be heard outside.

  Heddi

  Complete hysteria! She’s got to get this creature quieted down before she draws the terrorists to them like wolves to a wounded deer.

  Betty

  “Okay. Okay.

  “Let me catch my breath.

  “Okay.

  “Okay.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

  “It’s just...just that...

  “It’s my family. They all hate me.

  “They don’t even know I’m here...or care, if they do know.

  “Heddi says I should tell you my story – not the neighbor’s – and I don’t really know where to begin.

  “I guess it should be with the flowers.

  “Heddi says that flowers are a symbol and that flowers are my fetish.

  “I don’t really understand that. I always thought the flowers just created a nice, homey atmosphere. Celebrated the seasons and holidays. That’s what I thought they symbolized...a nice, loving home.

  “For whatever reason, though, what started out innocently has become a big problem. I don’t really know how it happened, it was so gradual...

  One Halloween, as she was arranging a plastic pumpkin full of corn stalks, Betty conceived a noble project. She would assemble a huge bouquet of flowers for every holiday and every month of the year.

  For years after that, her secret vice was to drive by various shops – K-Mart, if she was poor, and the local gift shop, if she was flush – and buy a stem or two of plastic roses or holly or yellow daffodils, whatever the season or holiday dictated.

  Her collection kept growing. It filled up the basement and so she started hanging things from the garage rafters wrapped in old sheets, with manila labels dangling on white string: Christmas; Valentine’s Day; Memorial Day; Feast of the Assumption.

  It was her nod to spirituality. She was as industriously ceremonial as any pagan. On February 15th, the red roses and flocked red hearts on stems came out of their Styrofoam block, were dusted under running water, left to dry on the drainboard, then bundled back into an o
ld florist’s box and returned to their crypt in the basement, as vivid and ever-living as Dracula.

  Then out to the garage for the Styrofoam Presidents Lincoln and Washington in their polyester winding cloth, swinging from the spanners like primitive tree burials. Along with them came embalmed foliage – whatever she could assemble that was red, white and blue.

  She had the routine down pat: take the step ladder from its hooks by the window; mount three steps; un-twist the wire holding the bundle to the two-by-four; twitch her nose against the dust; lower the package and herself carefully down three steps; rest the bundle on the hood of the car; put the ladder back on its rack. Then scoop up the prize and scuttle away with it to her living room bay window like a spider with a fresh fly – all very neat and tidy.

  Of course, with so many different themes, she needed lots of containers. At first, she just crowded them on top of the refrigerator, but then one fell off and broke and that led to the complete emptying-out and repainting of the old butler’s pantry to keep them safe and display them better. Then, slowly and insidiously, they began consuming the canning shelves in the basement.

  Larry called it The Invasion of the House-eating Vase Creatures. He said all those open mouths gave him the creeps.

  They came from garage sales, the Salvation Army, Wal-Mart, her friends’ gift rejects, and mail order catalogues. They were tall, squat, elegant, cozy, shiny, matte, plain white, brightly colored, patterned, wide-mouthed, narrow-mouthed, metal, porcelain, pottery, wood, plastic and basketry. Each one was tawdry and uneventful in its own right, but as a collection they assumed gravity and power. In combination with the flowers and the enormity of the holidays they took on the grandeur of sacred relics.

  So it was only right, a matter of religious virtue, when Betty refused to let her husband’s departure from her life dissuade her from her mission.

  One day, Larry just couldn’t take it anymore. He was upset because he couldn’t reach his fishing pole without moving a bale of hot pink spider mums she’d found at a discount store for pennies. And that was that. He threw his shorts and socks in a brown paper grocery bag, slung his shirts over his elbow and left.

  But Betty wasn’t alarmed. She knew it was the Universe telling her that he wasn’t the right one. Flowers trump fishing poles, cosmically. Everyone knows that. Besides, Betty was sure – at first – that he would come back, even though Madame Zola was dubious.

  It wasn’t long before her 10-year old, Sam, speaking from the banana seat of his half-sized bike, said in his soft, squeaky voice, “I think I’m gonna go live with Dad.”

  This occasioned another departure, somewhat more majestic than Larry’s, of trucks and balls, bedding, chest of drawers, even the rug – although Betty knew he’d soon be rejecting it with its motif of Teddy bears frolicking – all carried out by Larry, a couple of his drinking buddies, and a bevy of neighborhood youngsters as sober and fastidious as a sultan’s slaves.

  This hurt, there was no denying it. To keep herself from flying to pieces, she turned Sam’s room into her studio, a kind of Holy of Holies, and started making flower arrangements for every room of the house.

  Not long after that, her 16-year old, Serena, opened the door to her bedroom, shrieking, “If you ever put another of these fucking things in here, I’ll kill myself!” and lofted a basket of plastic forget-me-nots into the hall.

  She slammed her door. The bouquet smashed against the far wall, but nothing was broken. There was no water to mop up, no dirt spilled, no broken stems. Betty just scooped it up from the carpet, flounced it all back together again and took it into the master bedroom and wedged it onto the nightstand between the alarm clock and the box of Kleenex.

  A few weeks after that, she smelled a weird smell in the hall. She sniffed around and it seemed to be coming from Serena’s room. Getting down on hands and knees, she put her nose under Serena’s door. For sure, the source of that smell was behind it somewhere. Betty didn’t want to intrude on Serena’s precious privacy, but that smell...

  She knelt in front of the door like a penitent, trying the knob. It was locked.

  She went to the kitchen and found an ice pick; got her reading glasses; knelt again, this time as focused as a safe-cracker; leaned close, took aim, inserted the ice pick in the lock and jiggled it around. The pin sprang back with a little thump and she was in.

  Betty opened the door and shuffled forward, still on her knees. How long had it been since she’d seen Serena? Was that basket of pink peonies on her toilet too much? Had it pushed her over the edge, even though they weren’t, technically, in her bedroom?

  She floundered into the room, sniffing as she went, anxious for sight of her, thinking, Did I make her breakfast this morning? Or was that yesterday?

  All she could remember was Serena snarling at her, “This place sucks.”

  Was that today? Wednesday?

  There was her bed, unmade of course. Betty struggled toward it through drifts of dirty clothes like a snow shoer in deep powder. She groped around in the sheets and cast-off clothing.

  No. There didn’t seem to be any bodies buried underneath.

  But the smell! The smell...

  Her eyes darted around: a huge pile of movie magazines on a chair; the desk, stratified like an archeological dig with papers, books, print-outs, notebooks, clothes, rat-tailed combs, used dental floss, what might be a dirty pillowcase...

  And then she spied it; the metal cage on the dresser under a pile of flung clothing! And little furry bodies, plump and slow, clinging to the bars, running frantically on a metal wheel or asleep in piles.

  What in God’s name were they? Whatever kind of creature they were, they – they! – were the source of the smell in Betty’s house!

  And lots of them! Lots and lots and lots of them!

  “Just an aside – I don’t often say a thing like that, ‘in God’s name.’ I think it’s blasphemous. I was raised by God-fearing parents who never uttered an oath in their lives – well, almost.

  “I do remember my father watching TV when Nixon resigned and him saying, ‘The damned Communists have finally won!’

  “I didn’t really know what he meant at the time. I just remember being shocked that he would swear right there in the front room in front of Momma and me.

  “I remember Momma swatting him on the thigh and hissing, ‘Judd! Hush!’ and throwing a look in my direction.

  “But Daddy just said it again. ‘I mean it! The damned Communists have finally won!’ And then he got up, took his coat off the hook by the front door and went out.

  “I heard the car starting in the driveway and saw the look on Momma’s face; a burning red blush and the shame in her eyes.

  “That was the only time I ever heard swearing in my home, growing up. It seems to me that young people are irreverent nowadays. It’s f___ this, and screw that, and Jesus’ name attached to everything but what it should be.”

  Betty used to like going to church on Sundays as a child. There was a nice, quiet atmosphere, somber and special, and always a fresh bouquet on the altar. It wasn’t until she was about seven or eight that she realized that she’d seen some of those bouquets before, and maybe that’s when her passion for fake flowers was born.

  They get confused in her mind with organ music and old hymns and that smell church had – maybe some kind of cleaning agents, wood polish, the old paper and soft leather of the hymnals, and probably the mixture of different colognes worn by the congregation.

  At Christmas, they had green candles on the pulpit, short, fat ones, and the place smelled of cedar and cinnamon. Betty always associates those smells with the Holy Ghost, like His epiphany is heralded by smells of the holidays.

  She buys those same candles now for Christmas, and along with the lights on the tree – which of course doesn’t smell because it’s plastic – they make her house fill up with some of that holy energy she used to experience in church.

  Nowadays, she doesn’t know if there is a God, but she sh
e hopes there is and wishes He were as easy to contact as those candles are to buy. She could use Him right about now, with this thing with Serena.

  She doesn’t know what to do, really, and she wishes He could at least send an angel or something to clue her in. Wouldn’t you think that with all the churches there are in Los Angeles and all the candles burned – look at the Catholics, alone – and all the pretty flower arrangements, that the Holy Ghost maybe would come every few months, at least, on some kind of regular round, like a circuit rider?

  She just wants the others to understand that she had a solid religious upbringing, even though Heddi says she’s transferred her religious function onto flowers and forgotten about God:

  Heddi leans back in her office chair, the soft light off the ocean playing across her elegant face, and says, “The gods choose their moments to intervene. You’re in an ages-old situation, Betty, the very nature of which is meant to stir you to the depths until you remember the gods.”

  “Well, for one thing, is it God or gods?” Betty asks in pique. “Sometimes, I think it’s you, Heddi, who’s confused! And what have the gods got to do with Serena, anyway?”

  So Heddi has her go over the incident that was the turning point with Serena one more time.

  That afternoon, at the hour for Serena to return from summer school, Betty sits on the couch in the living room, composing herself.

  The arrangement in the bay window, a huge burst of silk sunflowers, honors Summer. One of her splurges, silk. Not quite as durable as plastic but more lifelike.

  The afternoon sun slants in and the sunflowers blaze, proclaiming Summer, and Betty sits, wondering how she’s going to keep her last remaining family member from running screaming from the house, when she announces that really, definitely, the Creatures have to go.

  What in heaven’s name are they? she practices saying. Rats? Gerbils? Hamsters? How did they get here? Take them back. Take them back where they came from. We can’t have them in this house.