COMMUNE OF WOMEN

by SUZAN STILL

  When the east wind blows, there’s really no way to keep the house warm. Frigid air seeps into every crack. Sophia stuffs the stove full and it eats and eats logs, all day long. By evening, it’s warm enough to sit by the fire in comfort. An hour after she’s gone to bed, the place is frigid again. In the morning, she starts the process all over again.

  She likes living that way. It keeps her honest. There’s no ignoring the cycle of the seasons or denying the intensity of cold or heat. There’s nothing artificial about the way she lives; she and Earth commune.

  In November now, she limits her time outdoors and treasures her indoor hours. When spring comes, she’ll throw the doors open and let the fresh wind cleanse away winter’s smoke, while she washes windows and scrubs floors.

  Her day is made up of these small, elemental rituals. She keeps her life simple and deliberate. She digs and weeds and plants in her garden; she goes for walks with her dogs; she washes and irons her clothes. She writes in her journal. She sews or reads or cooks...

  “But Sophia,” Ondine blurts out, “how do you make a living?”

  Sophia shrugs. “Money’s usually the last thing on my agenda. I’m not a person who cares to have it. It’s simple necessity, nothing more.”

  Heddi scowls. Ondine looks at her in confusion.

  “But...I mean...you have to live! You’ve got bills, surely. You’ve got a car. You need to eat.”

  Sophia shrugs again. “I grow most of my own food. But you’re right. I do have a few bills; property taxes, if nothing else. And I have an old ‘57 Chevy truck that I maintain myself...but it does need gas once in a while.”

  “So...?”

  So she does astrological readings for a living, by phone or by mail. Every once in a while, she gets a client who insists on meeting with her personally. That’s always a bit of a jangle to her nerves because she’s so reclusive, but it’s interesting to see the face of the person she already knows so well through their chart.

  Seeing their reaction to her and her situation is pretty interesting, too. They always arrive a little shaken. There’s a narrow, twisting, five-mile grade up the mountain, with a 500-foot drop into the canyon. People have to really want what Sophia’s got. And fortunately, she has a good reputation, so they keep coming even if the journey’s death-defying.

  Once they pull in, they sit in the car for a minute or two, sort of collecting themselves. When they finally do open the garden gate, it’s with the trepidation of Vasilisa sneaking into Baba Yaga’s hut to steal fire.

  Sophia admits her place is a bit odd – an accretion of her personal aesthetic and the materials that fall to hand. There’s a high wall around house and garden – that’s to keep the deer out, or they’d eat not just the roses but her kitchen garden, too. Also, it’s a psychological boundary between her little enclave of civilization and the surrounding woods. Otherwise, her place would feel like a raft in the middle of an endless ocean.

  The wall’s a daub and wattle affair she pieced together out of oak branches, suckers pruned from the fruit trees and woven into screens, boulders and local clay. It’s a toss-up whether it supports the rose and grape vines, or they support it. It gives the place a distinctly medieval ambience, as if serfs in coarse tunics bearing scythes might come stooping by any minute.

  Inside the garden gate – an old cast iron bedstead that she’s outfitted with leather hinges – the courtyard is filled with herbs and native plants that she uses for her concoctions. Wind chimes clank in the branches of the fruit trees and fetishes of feathers, twigs, and colored twine, binding little sacks of this and that, twirl in the wind.

  The compost pile is lying ripe and black in full view. The woodpile and her chopping block are to the left of that, with the kitchen garden beyond. Chickens scratch under the rosemary and lavender bushes and peafowl strut among the cabbages.

  A huge iron hog-scalding cauldron dominates the center of the courtyard – not to scald hogs, Heaven forbid! – but as her primary aesthetic statement: the Vessel of the Divine Feminine. It’s six feet across and four feet high and must weigh two tons, if it’s an ounce. Too large to ignore or to take lightly, it looks like something from a cartoon about cannibals cooking missionaries for lunch. It always gives people a start when they first see it, a momentary intuition of their mortality, she supposes, looking into the maw of the Life-and-Death Mother.

  When she comes down to greet them, that gives them a jolt, too, because she always puts on her ceremonial garb. What’s the use of arcane practices without ritual trappings? Would you go to a wedding in a bikini? The opera in your nightshirt? So why do a reading about the designs of the Cosmos in bib overalls?

  She’s been working on her robes for years, starting in her early twenties with a coat that she found at a thrift store, stitched from a two-point Hudson Bay blanket. From the early days of the fur trade, she explains, point blankets were made into hooded coats called capotes by both natives and French Canadian voyageurs. Whoever designed this one was off to a good start – wide straight sleeves and a pointed hood with a long streamer cut from the border hanging down the back. It’s bright rosy red with two black stripes running around the hemline and the two 6-inch points along the front edge. She figures it was well over a hundred years old when she found it.

  When she bought it, it was full of moth holes, so she spent the next ten years embroidering moths over every hole, using her insect field guide for accuracy. The smallest is a tiny gray thing barely half an inch long and the biggest is a full-sized Luna moth in an exquisite pale green that looks very exotic against the fuzzy red wool.

  The coat is never really finished. Every summer, when she stores it away, the moths eat new holes. When winter comes, she begins stitching all over again – which is okay because there are still so many moths to choose from in the book.

  If butterflies are the symbol of the soul, she thinks of moths as night steeds that carry the soul into the deep realms, other dimensions or alternate realities – places into which she’s never been afraid to venture. They’re bringers of the energy she needs for the readings.

  But red was never really her color. She’s a Pisces and drawn to cool, watery shades. So she’s made herself a skirt of aquamarine silk cut from a single old drapery she found at the flea market. The places where it folded outward and caught the sun are faded and the interior folds are dark, so it has the tonal variation of water that she loves.

  Being so big – not fat, of course, but just so tall and broad-shouldered – she’s lucky to have all that curtain yardage for her outfit. She’s like one of those jokes men tell about women who have their clothes made by Omar the Tentmaker.

  And she’s also working on a cape that’s to look like sea foam when it’s done. The base is a curtain of handmade lace, one of a pair that a friend gave her when she cleaned out her grandmother’s house. It’s wide and long and trails behind her a bit because she doesn’t dare cut it.

  Then she started gathering bits of lace, old linen napkins, a tattered antique Chinese shawl in white silk pongee, embroidered in white with flowers and birds. That, she stitched down whole over the shoulders, using the ends to tie the cape on. The other scraps she just sews side by side, making an incredible patchwork of white fabrics and textures: old crocheted doilies, lengths of tatted trim, bobbin and Battenburg lace – anything white and feminine, and only those treasures actually made by women’s hands.

  She started at the hemline and after about seven years, she’s reached the waist. Other than the shawl it’s just lace from there up, but she wears it anyway, just like the moth coat. Probably neither one will ever be finished.

  Someday, they’ll bury her in her unfinished finery.

  So with her gray hair hanging to her waist, her aqua skirt, red coat and white cape, she supposes she’s quite a spectacle coming down the stairs to greet her clients.

  She doesn’t do this to alarm or impress them. She does it to honor the old gods and goddesses who honor her with their inspiratio
n. She knows the God of modern religion doesn’t care if you’re in polyester or Spandex, as long as you’re decent. But she believes that her goddesses do care – they’d rather she came naked than in synthetic fabrics. Natural fibers are gifts they give us, and using them in ritual is part of the sacred cycle.

  She always starts her astrological readings with a Tarot reading. She never touches the cards without washing her hands first. Then she prays over them that only the truth will manifest there, that the best and highest good will come through them.

  Sophia stops and glances around to see the women looking at her oddly.

  “You must think I’m incredibly weird. Sometimes, I think so, myself. But really, I was just born in the wrong century or the wrong culture. Women like me have been carrying forward the rituals of humankind since we lived in caves. I’m just a latter-day shaman, is all.”

  Sophia sings the sun up in the morning and down again at evening, in Sanskrit – the Agni Hotra. She blesses the yogurt to set while it’s still liquid and thanks her vegetables and flowers before picking them. It takes so little effort and energy to honor the sacredness of the world.

  Lately, she’s taken to blessing road kill, those poor little creatures and rags of bloody fur that people whiz past so thoughtlessly. They break her heart, so she prays for their souls. She’s sure they have them, just like people do. So as she’s rolling along in her pickup, she says her prayers. Her eyes aren’t what they used to be and if she blesses a grease rag or a shoe lost beside the road, so what?

  The other day, she mistook some fast food trash for a dead skunk and was well into her prayer before she realized she was praying for a bag of Taco Bell Styrofoam. Well, who’s to say Styrofoam doesn’t need our prayers?

  Sophia looks around at her audience again. Pearl is lost in some reverie of her own. Erika is tossing in a sweat-glazed doze on the couch. Ondine looks listlessly at the floor, while Heddi and Betty stare – Heddi with fathomless eyes, and Betty as if Sophia might suddenly straddle the broom and dematerialize through the wall.

  “I think I must be boring you to death. Let’s take a break, shall we?”

  Heddi

  The archetype of Diana the Huntress, as she lives and breathes! The purest example Heddi’s ever witnessed in all her years as an analyst. It’s easy to imagine Sophia on a full moon night, with her pack of dogs, cloaked in fierce independence, striding out into the inky shadows of the oak woods, intent on performing her secret rituals, or dancing naked to the rhythms of the night wind. Amazing that so pure a type could still exist in 21st-century America!

  Betty

  Well, that’s the weirdest story yet! Even the bag lady isn’t as strange as this gal. What is she – a witch? A pagan? Betty’s father would have said she’s Satanic. All that talk of fairies and goddesses and Tarot cards! If it weren’t for Madame Zola, Betty wouldn’t even have a clue what she’s talking about.

  And all these little details of her life! Should Betty care how she builds a fire in the morning? Or what the weather patterns are at her house? They’ve got weather in L.A., too, but Betty never bothers with it and she’d never bother anybody else with it, either. She guesses when it rains and the freeways flood, it’s a big deal, but really...!

  Betty just can’t get on her wavelength, at all.

  And all this talk of dreams... Heddi does it, too. Every session: “Did you dream?” Well, yes, of course Betty dreams – but it’s all just nonsense.

  But she does daydream. Some, she’s been working on for years, kind of perfecting the plot. Then there’s a new one that she’s started, just since they got trapped in here. It helps her cope. She just sort of slips away into it like mental knitting; how you always want to do just one more row before you quit. Her story’s like that. She wants to imagine just one more detail before she has to come out of it and deal with what’s here and now.

  Heddi wants her to start imagining living things instead of dead flowers, so it’s kind of strange that in this latest story Larry is dying of prostate cancer, but that’s what her imagination is dishing out.

  On his deathbed, Larry calls for her – and forgives her...

  “I made a promise, ‘til death do us part. I’m glad we didn’t finalize the divorce. I’m glad I can keep that promise to you... Don’t cry, Betty. I need you to hear this.

  “I’ve got a life insurance policy you never knew about. It won’t make you rich, but it’ll get the kids through college and help you get started in whatever you plan to do next.”

  Betty sits by his hospital bed, silently weeping. She is filled with shame and gratitude.

  “Now you listen to me, Betty! If I so much as hear a peep on the Other Side about you spending one cent of it on fake flowers, I’m going to come back and haunt you. Do you hear me?”

  He stops for a weak, hacking cough that produces nothing but exhaustion. When he continues, it’s in a rasping whisper. “That money is for moving on. Do you understand? For the kids to have the education that’ll help them move on. And for you to start a new life. Something real this time, okay? Something not artificial. Something living.”

  He slides his hand limply across the blanket in her direction. She sits there, frozen – but only for a moment. She grabs his hand quickly and holds it with a fierceness she didn’t know was in her.

  “I love you, Betty. Always did, kid. Whatever happened between us, it wasn’t because I didn’t love you. You hear me?”

  She can only nod dumbly.

  “Come here.” He pulls her to him with a little jerk of his head, like he always used to.

  She creeps onto the bed and lowers her big body down gently, so she won’t jar him and ignite the pain that’s smoldering in his bones.

  Gingerly, she rests her head on the shoulder he offers her. His arm comes around her protectively, lying across her shoulder with a pale warmth.

  “Always did, kid. You know that, don’t you?”

  She nods, working the top of her head underneath his chin. And slowly – oh, so slowly, as if it were a frozen hand reaching up from frigid water through ice – she watches her hand rise up, then float gently down and settle over his heart.

  She hears Heddi and Ondine talking and it distracts her. Heddi’s saying, “I know it seems like the terrorists are winning, but in the end I think they will fail. The healthy psyche – and even the unhealthy one – has to withdraw periodically, so that the inner voice can be heard. The Self demands it. That’s why fanatical political action is incompatible with individuation.”

  And then Ondine’s soft, tentative voice: “But the problem is, so many of these terrorists seem to be young men. They’re too young to have felt the urge for individuation. Their strength comes from the collective... from being a hero in the eyes of the group.”

  And then Heddi: “It’s true that the collective opinion distrusts and rejects the bringing to life of psychic images and revelations. There’s a fundamental collective resistance to the unconscious because its messages rock the boat. But depth psychology shows us that when unconscious forces are repressed, they gain strength in the darkness and then erupt in terrible, pathological ways.”

  “But isn’t that exactly what terrorism is?”

  “Yes, this is what Jung warned about at the end of his life – destructive collective energies. But I think it’s also that the ego is unable to free itself from extroverted rational prejudices. The ego doesn’t want to relinquish control and admit that true liberation in our time can only come from psychological transformation. What does it matter if one dies for one’s cause, if the cause recognizes no meaningful goal in life – no goal for which it’s worthwhile to be free?”

  “So, only if a person can create something meaningful is it worthwhile to be free?”

  “Exactly. Isn’t that what freedom is – to be at liberty to live and create authentically? And that’s why the individual voice – the one that’s developed during the process of listening to the deep psyche – even if it’s a whisper, is
so much more powerful than the communal shout.”

  Their voices go on and on, attempting to put an intellectual corral around the crazy, chaotic energies that are encircling them like Attila’s hordes. Betty hopes it gives them comfort, the same way her story does for her.

  So where was she?

  She’s lying beside him and she slides her hand over his heart...

  They bury him on a cold day in early spring.

  In the days between his death and his interment, Betty fights her addiction. She plans wreathes of spring flowers, of rosemary for remembrance, of evergreen. She even goes so far as to start pulling bundles of them down from the garage rafters, getting herself all dusty and wheezy in the process.

  But in the end, she forces herself to drive by a florist’s shop. She goes around the block three times before she has the courage to park and go in.

  When she pushes open the heavy plate glass door with its little tinkling bell, it’s like Sisyphus pushing his rock. Just like Heddi says, anyone who hasn’t experienced it can’t believe the actual weight of psychological resistance.

  She steps into a room that is really just a narrow passageway between banks of ferns and tubs of flowers. The heavy, penetrating perfume almost makes her faint.

  It’s the smell more than anything that makes her want to bolt. It’s so alive – like the voices of children calling out for love; so desirous to be regarded and cared for.

  It’s too much. Everything in her is gathering strength to turn and flee.

  But she’s there for him. For Larry. And he wanted something living. So she starts poking around in the tubs, pulling out some daffodils here, some hyacinth there. Kind of clustering them in her hand and pushing them into one another until the colors begin to harmonize and hum together.