COMMUNE OF WOMEN

by SUZAN STILL

  She can see Serena’s face, so plump and pink, with her brown hair lying tight against her skull like a helmet. Pull your hair back, Betty’s always telling her. You’ve got such a pretty face. Don’t hide it. Wear some eye makeup. Wear some barrettes.

  And Serena always giving her that poisonous look, the one that says she wishes Betty was dead.

  Whether it’s hair or hamsters, Serena’s not going to capitulate. Betty can feel it in her bones.

  How can this child of a neat, clean home that celebrates Beauty be so involved in dirt and disorder? Is that what Heddi means when she talks about family members having to live out parts of Betty’s unlived Shadow? She notices her hands in her lap; her fingers are laced and balled together like hibernating worms. The tips are white from tension. She looks at the clock. My God! It’s 5:30! She’s missed Oprah! She’s that upset!

  And still no Serena.

  She can hear the grandfather clock ticking in the family room. It’s a nice room, with turned maple furniture she inherited from her grandmother and beaded board wainscoting with wallpaper above, a tiny floral, and a matching border at ceiling level. The TV’s in there, with an arrangement of coral roses on top. It’s a nice room. It’s just that there’s no family there to enjoy it.

  It’s 9:30 before Serena finally unlocks the front door. Betty is standing there, ready to say – what? She’s almost speechless by this time.

  Serena throws her one of those looks that says, Don’t even...! as she brushes past. And Betty stands there and can’t say a word.

  There’s a space of about 15 seconds with nothing. Then the scream – a sound like some animal that’s both badly wounded and truly enraged.

  Then instantly, she’s there in Betty’s face, in a fury.

  “My room! You’ve been in my room? You’ve fucking been in my room?!”

  Betty’s hands fly out on their own, as if possessed, and make vague dancing gestures in the air between them. They’re trying to explain, to ward off her rage, to placate and cajole.

  “It was the smell...” she begins, feebly.

  “What smell?” Serena screams.

  “Of those...of those... They smell. I smelled them. From out in the hall.”

  “No way! I clean the cage every day. No way, Mom. You had no right!”

  “Well, you never asked. I mean, I didn’t know. Where... how...did you get them? Where did they come from?”

  Betty is leaning against the hall wall now, her backside lodged against a little gold bracket holding a vase of pansies. She feels defeated, like a cornered rat with a terrier snarling at it.

  “It’s none of your business,” Serena scowls.

  “Now listen, young lady!” Betty bristles. “I think it is my business. This is my house too, you know, and I am your mother!”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Like, when? On alternate Tuesdays?” she asks in that duh voice that the girls have all cultivated; the You’re So Dumb inflection.

  “I pay the bills here, young lady. I put the food on the table for you to eat.”

  “Well, yeah! Duh! Because Dad sends a support check every month. Because you kept the bank account and he took nothing! Big fuckin’ deal, Mom! Great White Hunter, Mom! Bringin’ home the bacon!”

  Betty didn’t ever intend to hit her. Her entire intention had been to have an adult confrontation. And it wasn’t really a hard slap. It sounded like a rubber band snapping, is all. A big rubber band, she admits, but no more than that.

  Betty has never seen Serena move so fast. She spins as if the slap has put her into gyration. Two steps and she disappears down the hall. Her door slams. The weeping commences, loud and long. Then the rising and falling cadence of a telephone conversation that goes on and on.

  Betty sits outside of Serena’s door, her ear pressed to it, and can’t understand a word, just the aggrieved tone.

  She isn’t about to apologize. Where had that child learned such insolence? She used to be such a sweet little thing when she was younger.

  So, Betty barely saw her, after Serena discovered that she’d discovered the creatures – hamsters, as it turned out. She left the house early and came back late. When she came at all.

  Betty would have to call around to find out where she was. Usually, she was staying at her best friend Julie’s house. Sometimes at her father’s. Some nights, she never could locate her and just had to trust that Serena was still alive; that she didn’t need to call the cops and put out an Amber Alert or an APB.

  Things weren’t going well. Betty was feeling nervous and unfocused. To keep her sanity, she called in a landscaping company to tear out the front lawn and replace it with Astroturf. Then she had them cut holes in it, along the sidewalk, and put in juniper bushes – they don’t shed – with tanbark around the trunks. She bought herself a yard vac and vacuumed her new lawn every day.

  In late August, just when she was thinking it was time for the Back-to-School arrangement in the ceramic book-vase, the final blow came. Serena flounced in the door one afternoon and Betty nearly fainted.

  She’d dyed her pretty brown hair blue. Her nose was pierced with a gold stud. Her earlobes were hung with tiny crosses, safety pins and little metal symbols that looked Satanic. Her eyes were rimmed in thick black pencil and her mouth was white. The knee that protruded through the hole in her left pant leg was tattooed with a bat, hanging upside down.

  Betty felt like she was going to have a heart attack. She couldn’t breathe.

  “I’m leaving,” Serena said flatly.

  Cold as ice, she reaches into a big shoulder bag of Indian mirror cloth and pulls out a manila envelope. “This is for you.”

  “What is it?” Betty wheezes.

  “It’s my Emancipated Minor paperwork. It was final today. I’m moving out.”

  “But...you can’t!” Betty is staring at her in horror. She can’t think.

  “Why not?”

  “Because...I...”

  She can’t say, Because it will leave me all alone. There must be some reason it’s good for Serena, too. She just can’t think of what it might be, right now.

  “Sweetie, let me fix you some soup. Have you had lunch?”

  Serena just stands there staring at her, like she’s the Mother from Hell.

  “I’m taking my things,” she says. “Julie’s out front with her car.”

  “But where will you live? How will you get money?”

  “It’s all there,” Serena shoves her chin at the manila envelope. “The court won’t let you emancipate unless you have a job.”

  “You’re working?”

  “Yes, Mother. I can work, you know. I’m not a complete imbecile...or a parasite like you. God!”

  “Couldn’t we just talk this over?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re a loser, Mom. Because your values suck. Because I’m finished trying to talk to you.”

  “But, we never really got started...”

  “Yeah! Duh! No shit!”

  “Are you...are you going to take those...things with you?”

  “Yes, Mother. I’m taking the hamsters with me. God knows I wouldn’t want to leave them here – where nothing living is welcome!”

  She turns away toward her room. Betty turns toward the kitchen. She leans over the sink and begins to cry. She can hear Serena throwing things into the hall and her friend Julie saying, “You want this?” “You gonna take that?” “I think the cage will fit in the trunk.” Things like that. These terrible little decisions; so paltry, so final.

  When it’s over, Betty feels like her entire being has been lashed with burning electrical cords. Everything stings and aches and throbs and feels empty, all at the same time. She can’t sit without needing to jump up, can’t read, watch TV or eat. All the usual stopgaps don’t touch the scraped-raw place she’s feeling.

  Finally, in desperation, she decides she needs drugs.
/>   She calls her friend Emily, the most neurotic, drug-fortified person she knows. “Bring tranquilizers. I’m dying.”

  “The ones I have won’t kick in for two weeks,” Em says. “You need something that’s gonna work right now.”

  “What?” Betty rasps. “A gun?”

  “I’ll be right over. I’m taking you to Heddi.”

  And that’s how Betty came to be the patient of a shrink. She doesn’t know if it’s working. She still thinks drugs would have been faster. In fact, she’s sure of it.

  But talking to Heddi twice a week is an improvement on sitting alone in an empty house listening to the clock tick, waiting for Oprah. And even Oprah doesn’t interest her much right now. She’s that wrung out.

  And she hasn’t made a flower arrangement in weeks.

  “I’m sorry...I’m sorry. I just can’t stop crying.

  “I’m sorry.

  “Please forgive me...I’m so sorry!”

  Erika

  “Honky bitches! Every one of you’s got things so good you don’t know what else to do with yourselves except fuck things up.

  “Try growing up in a fucking garage, you cunts! A garage in Oakland with seven brothers and sisters, one toilet, a junkie prostitute for a mother and an alcoholic child molester for a father.

  “Jesus Christ! Give me a fucking break!”

  Ondine

  Poor Betty! She’s just a puddle.

  And what’s with Erika? She’s moaning and groaning this morning, like she’s trying to talk, but nothing comes out that’s intelligible. Is she getting worse? But then, how could she not be? Two and a half days without medical care...it’s a wonder she’s still alive.

  Even so, Ondine doesn’t like to go over there near her. Even half dead, she’s got a fierce energy. Thank God Sophia’s here!

  She spent the waking hours of the night wondering if Richard realizes she’s in here, in this mess? Does it tickle him, thinking of her as a hostage? Or dead? He probably thinks it’s justice being meted out; an eye for an eye.

  Her life to appease Jackie’s.

  Pearl

  These here women is a trip! Reminds Pearl a one a them Baptist prayer meetins. Everone rollin round, moanin an groanin an carryin on. Wearin shirts a agony an britches a sorrow.

  Pearl don’t ratly give a hoot. Maybe she’s jes been wrung out, lak boilt laundry. Only so many tears God gives a body in this lifetime an Pearl used up her share, long ago.

  Sophia

  Time to shift the energy in here before everyone loses control completely. The only one who seems solid is Heddi. Maybe Sophia can get her to tell her tale.

  Of course, there’s Pearl. She’s steady as a rock. But she’s off in some space, sucking on her pipe. Sophia never knows if the old woman’s in this world or some other. Pearl’s a true crone. It wouldn’t surprise Sophia if she already knows the outcome of all this.

  Or if she simply doesn’t care, one way or the other.

  Heddi

  “Well, my life doesn’t seem all that interesting. So I don’t really know what to tell you. I mean, I’ve never had any really great adventures...until now, that is!

  “I just went straight through my life like an arrow. I set my sights and off I went. And nothing really stopped me until this thing with Hal.

  “When Ann Landers first got her divorce, all my gal pals and I howled! We thought it was hilarious! Here was the doyenne of advice, missing all the clues in her own life. The irony was too delicious.

  “Personally, I was never one to miss a beat. Straight out of high school, I did my pre-med, then entered medical school, then a specialty in psychiatry and then off to Switzerland to become a Jungian analyst...”

  Now, after decades of practice and hundreds of her patients’ life stories, Ann’s humiliation doesn’t seem so funny to Heddi. It seems damned pathetic and all too common.

  She’s seen it all – or at least enough not to want to see the rest: drug addicts driving Mercedes, with season’s tickets to the opera; frumpy little nothings working two jobs to hold the family together, while the old man drinks himself into oblivion, beating the kids on the way there; spoiled brats, hating their parents, while sponging off their money; victims of childhood abuse so scarred by rage and shame that no balm will heal them. And it goes on and on, as if her analytic practice were the confluence and summation of human psychological disaster.

  The hardest for her to deal with are the simple neurotics who chafe against every aspect of their lives, blaming everyone and everything, while failing to lift a finger to save themselves. They’re full of angst and ennui without the slightest clue that they’re their own worst enemies. The smallest hint that they’re responsible for their own pain sends them into a rage. The barest whisper of self-realization can send them skulking out of analysis altogether.

  They wring their hands, weep, and flounder in a lack of focus remarkable for its tenacity. Theirs is not so much an inability to imagine a productive life as a refusal to do so.

  Because isn’t it imagination, after all, that gets people out of bed in the morning? Or that motivates them to spend years, even decades, working to accomplish some personal goal?

  It might be simply to rear a healthy family, or to become a brain surgeon, or discover a new star, or to reevaluate, pare down, and simplify, revealing the essence of character the way fire brings up the grain on charred wood. Heddi has several patients who are working in that direction, by sitting in Zen meditation or working in Catholic soup kitchens or writing poetry or returning to school.

  Which makes the neurotics even harder to take: all they can imagine is ingesting Prozac for the rest of their lives.

  So imagine Heddi’s astonishment at finding herself in Ann Lander’s place! In her meditative moments, she supposes that it was inevitable: that which I have despised has come upon me.

  It’s a scenario too limp and worn even to credit it with life, but it’s alive, all right. It’s sunk its parasitic tendrils deep into the tree of her being and sucked her life force without her even being aware of it, just like mistletoe – and not the kind you hang up over doorways to get kisses, either!

  It’s almost predictable now that she thinks about it: 40 years of marriage, and Hal’s got a babe.

  And to garnish trite humiliation with further trite humiliation, she’s only 26. And he ferries her about in a brand new, shiny red BMW convertible.

  Can throat lifts and hair transplants be far behind? Maybe a new Harley and a road trip to Phoenix? The wilds of the aging male mind are as yet unmapped. Anything is possible. Jung never prepared her for this.

  Ann could have her last laugh if she were around, but she’s departed this wicked dimension for another and Heddi wishes her Godspeed and hopes she finds conditions improved there – wherever.

  So now Heddi has a little more understanding for her neurotic patients. They used to drive her crazy – even though that’s a cliché scarcely fit for an analyst.

  Sometimes, they seem to have everything: brilliant husbands, beautiful homes, healthy children, all the time and money in the world to lavish on themselves; often, they’re smart, rich and socially prominent – and slender. God! For that alone, most women would kill!

  And still, they come to her office in their designer jeans or silk dresses, pampered as any women on the planet, with dead eyes, with sighs and woeful countenance.

  (At this point, Heddi is careful to avert her eyes, so no one will realize Ondine is one of these problem patients.

  What do you want? Heddi sometimes asks her in exasperation. And Ondine just sighs and shakes her head, completely innocent of an answer to one of life’s most fundamental questions.)

  So Heddi’s frustrated, dealing with her neurotics. Sure, maybe their relationships lack intimacy. People always complain about marriage as if they didn’t know beforehand what they were getting themselves into. And they could have a closer relationship with their children, but what mother couldn’t say the same?

&nbs
p; The real problem is a lack of imagination about what to do with themselves, plain and simple.

  They aren’t without assets. They have fine educations, good minds and economic support. They could do or be anything. Instead, they come with vague complaints, both physical and emotional, wanting prescriptions for this and that, especially Prozac, which Heddi steadfastly refuses to prescribe.

  Even when their lives take a terrible turn, when there’s death or divorce or illness, there’s a vacancy where true grief should be. Their tears are mechanical. Obligatory. They’re as empty of genuine emotion as wind-up dolls.

  With some – Ondine especially, if she could say it – Heddi ends each session more frustrated than the patient. She’s begun to have a sense of dread on certain appointment days. Anyone with half a grip on depth psychology could have told her that the counter-transference was at work, showing her her own dark emotional underbelly. But Heddi has lived so ideal an existence for so many years that that simple and unpleasant possibility just didn’t occur to her.

  And her own analyst was either asleep at the wheel or far too subtle when he should have been poking her in the rump with a cattle prod. They both missed it. By the time the obscure became the obvious, things had gone way too far to repair them.

  What had her own lack of imagination wrought? Well, an errant husband, for starters. But that was just the first trump to buckle in the house of cards she’d built for herself.

  She went into a profound slump in self-esteem. When had her jaw line become so slack and crepe-like? When had she developed kimono-arms? How good an analyst could she be, if she’d let this thing burgeon right under her nose? How would she survive the social humiliation of having her husband escorting his girlfriend into the homes of their friends? Who would love and protect her? Would she die old and abandoned?