Godmother Night

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by Rachel Pollack


  During the winter break Jaqe and Laurie spent half the time at their apartment and the other half at Laurie’s parents’ in Laurie’s hometown of Thorny Woods. Janet and Jaqe cooked wondrous meals every night and Laurie sat at the table grinning at the march of turkey and baked potatoes and pumpkin pies. Twice during this three weeks Jaqe almost slammed the phone down on her parents’ rage. “Jesus,” Jaqe’s father said. “We said you could bring her home with you. What more do you want?”

  Everyone Laurie knew hated graduate school, not just the women studying women, but the women and men in philosophy or English Lit, or European history. They hated the endless work that always got worse, the private languages of academics, the attention paid to what other academics wrote on a subject in place of the subject itself, the insistence that everyone follow the school style in the way they approached their subjects, and above all the smugness of the professors, who took pride in their students’ hatred. “You’re not here to develop your sensibilities,” the professors would tell them. “You’re here to become professionals.” And they would tell stories of the horrors of graduate school, such as the man who returned to his university years later to give a speech and threw up the moment he stepped through the gates.

  Laurie called her program the “Ph.D. Steamroller,” two years of seminars followed by oral and written exams, and then her dissertation, which the school expected her to finish in one year. “I feel like a battery hen,” Laurie wrote Jaqe. “Stuck in the library and pushing out papers with a light bulb over my head.”

  Laurie had expected women’s studies to be different. Her professors often said they were different. They proclaimed their seriousness, their dedication to the feminist revolution, or else the reclamation of the Goddess, depending on the particular prof. They sometimes enlisted the aid of their students in tenure battles with the university, and they scornfully called the male professors “the boys.” It didn’t take long, however, before Laurie noticed the way they attacked each other in their articles, or the way they insisted on what one of them called professional rigor.

  “You know what they really want?” Laurie wrote Jaqe. “They want the boys to say, ‘Hey, you guys are okay,’ and take down the sign that says ‘No girls allowed.’”

  One professor really did seem different. Associate Professor Adrienne Beker taught women’s art history, a course that seemed to Laurie a kind of rope to hang on to. Professor Beker somehow mixed a dedication to radical theory with a constant reference to what she called the “usefulness” of women’s lives. Women were the first artists, she insisted, showing evidence of handprints in the prehistoric caves, and she demonstrated the way all the forms of “high” art derived originally from “the intrinsic elegance” of work done by women in tribal communities. Just as her lectures darted between centuries, she herself moved about the seminar room, sometimes with her hands in her pockets, sometimes jabbing a finger at the air.

  Adrienne (as Laurie thought of her) wore silk shirts and leather jackets and a single silver earring. Laurie was sure she was a dyke, but whenever Laurie managed to work lesbian references into the classroom discussion Adrienne always answered with historical or political points that supported lesbians but said nothing about herself. Even when she sat in a coffeeshop with Laurie and some of the other students she never spoke about her life outside art history. Once, Laurie tried to follow Adrienne after class. She had noticed that Professor Beker had recently been finishing exactly on time and then hurrying away instead of sitting on the desk surrounded by students trying to get close to her. She has a new lover, Laurie decided, and imagined Adrienne striding off campus and into the arms of a small woman with a delicate face surrounded by a halo of fur. But when Laurie shadowed her professor, using the snow to cover the sound of her boots, all she saw was Adrienne getting into her ten-year-old Porsche and driving alone onto the icy streets.

  One day Professor Beker displayed a slide of a cave painting of beasts surrounding a man dressed like a stag and playing a musical bow. For half an hour she built up a complex argument to show that the man, whom she called “the Sorcerer of Lascaux,” derived his power from the Goddess and was therefore the work of women. The cave of Lascaux, she said, formed a giant uterus, a generator of female energy. Laurie sat squirming through this whole speech. Several times she started to put her hand up and then dropped it. She looked around the room, wondering when someone was going to say something. Finally she raised her hand.

  Adrienne frowned. “Yes, Ms. Cohen?”

  Laurie said, “Isn’t that picture actually from the cave of Les Trois Frères?”

  Adrienne stared at her, then the slide. For a long moment there was silence, and then Adrienne said, “Well. I guess we’re all indebted to Ms. Cohen. She seems to have caught me in the wrong uterus.” There was a ripple of nervous laughter, which stopped when Professor Beker went on to explain that the essential argument remained. Later, after the class had ended, Laurie moved to the front of the room, but Adrienne had already slipped her notes and slides back into her briefcase and was heading out the door.

  Two weeks later Laurie presented a paper to the class on the image of Amazons in different cultures. Far from a male fantasy, as some scholars maintained, Amazons (Laurie argued) formed tribal remnants of “matrifocal” culture. Laurie had worked very hard on this paper. When she stood in the front of the room her hands shook, and she worried that her voice quavered. Professor Beker sat on the end of her desk, her arms folded. For several seconds after Laurie had finished and sat down, Adrienne said nothing. Everyone waited; Laurie stared at the floor. “Well,” Adrienne said, “I think we are all impressed by Ms. Cohen’s devotion to her cause. However, the study of women’s history requires something a little more serious than lesbian erotic fantasies.” She went on to describe the dangers of adolescent wish fulfillment, and finished with the need to avoid “excited amateurs with visions of Camp Fire Girl sex.” During this speech Laurie sat with clenched fists, terrified she would start crying. When Professor Beker had finished, Laurie prayed no one would ask any questions. The Goddess granted her wish. She did her best to imitate calm as she left the room.

  Over the next several weeks Professor Beker developed the term “Amazon” as a catchword for amateurism. Her first remarks drew nervous laughter and glances at Laurie, but after a while the joke gathered its own history, and remarks about Amazons gave the class its own special unity. Sometimes Laurie found herself laughing along with the others.

  Laurie never told Jaqe what had happened. When Laurie complained about her life in graduate school, Jaqe suggested she speak to Adrienne. “Maybe I’ll do that,” Laurie would say, and then she would change the subject.

  In the second half of the year Laurie took a course in Goddess archaeology. According to the professor, ancient temples were built in the shape of a woman’s body. She showed them slides and photographs of artificial hills shaped like either a pregnant belly or a giant eyeball, or both. They examined diagrams of temples and saw how you could see them as a woman lying down, if that woman had huge breasts and hips, no waist, and a knob for a head. Laurie wrote to Jaqe, “It’s like those puzzles in children’s magazines. See if you can find Janie, her dog, her cat, and her bicycle in this tree. See if you can spot the Goddess in this old pile of rocks.”

  One evening in the library, Laurie read three articles on megalithic tombs before she realized she didn’t remember the basic point of any of them. She went back to the first and prepared to start again. Instead, she got up and took the article to the Xerox machine, where she copied a photo of a statue of a sleeping pregnant woman. With great patience she drew a picture of Jaqe curled up at the woman’s feet. The next day she made copies of all the photos of stone circles, ancient temples, and prehistoric monuments. She drew Jaqe into all of them—in the Goddess’s belly, standing on Her head, kissing the Goddess with her legs wrapped around a stone neck, half crawling out of temple doors. Each day she sent Jaqe another picture.

>   “Darling wonderful Laurie,” Jaqe wrote. “Thank you for the pictures. I’ll put them up on the sacred shrine—the refrigerator. But aren’t you going to write anything?” When Jaqe called, Laurie let her do all the talking; Jaqe leaped into Laurie’s silences like a woman running into a fire to save a child.

  Jaqe had an exam the same day Laurie finished her last class. “I can get a postponement and come get you,” Jaqe said on the phone. “I can say I’m sick. They’ll never know. And I can study on the bus.”

  “Forget it,” Laurie insisted. “I can find my way back by myself. You just do well on your exam.”

  Jaqe thought Laurie’s voice didn’t sound as convinced as her words. “I love you,” Jaqe said. “If you change your mind, if you need me, I’ll come right away. I don’t care what exam I miss.”

  “I do. I don’t want you missing any.”

  “Do you love me?”

  “More than anyone.”

  “More than the Goddess?”

  “Lots more. She’s got the whole world to worry about. All I really care about is you.”

  Jaqe left her Russian history exam early in order to meet Laurie’s bus on time. She’d answered every question, though she knew she could have written more on the essay comparing Peter the Great and Catherine the Great—“those two great Greats” as Louise called them. It wasn’t just a lack of time. She kept thinking of Laurie, how sick she’d looked the last time Jaqe had seen her, how she sounded on the phone like she was trying not to cry.

  At one time a great portion of the city’s drunks, prostitutes, and ambulatory schizophrenics had occupied the main bus terminal like a foreign army. In recent years, however, that army had grown so large the city had launched a counter-coup and expelled them back into the street. Instead of ordinary doors, the bus station now had a wall of glass that slid apart only when a guard in a bulletproof booth pressed a button. “For admittance,” a sign read, “first show ticket to porter.” A ticket booth stuck out into the sidewalk, with more bullet protection for its inhabitants. Outside the glass wall men and women lay on the pavement like trolls guarding the entrance. Some drank magic elixirs from paper bags. Others had laid out filthy blankets with plastic jewelry or old magazines to sell to tourists. Still others walked up and down, whispering or shouting to people either passing by or invisible.

  The building occupied a whole block. As Jaqe hurried along the street to the entrance, she could see buses slide into their slots and she kept thinking Laurie had arrived early and what would she do when Jaqe wasn’t there? She paused near a tall man in a white caftan. A stand in front of him displayed copper earrings and bracelets, small bottles of oil or perfume, and a pile of pamphlets with a bearded face smiling on the cover. “Follow the twisting path with Dr. Root,” the pamphlets declared.

  The man in the caftan leaned toward Jaqe. “Talismans,” he said. “Potions of wisdom and protection. Made from genuine ingredients, original recipes. Amulets to protect you on your journey.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Jaqe said, and slid around him, only to have a woman in a torn dress and a purple wig step in front of her.

  The woman looked over sixty, but when she stuck her face close to Jaqe’s, Jaqe saw it was marked with acne, like a teenager’s. She reminded Jaqe of Dan Reynolds, her high school boyfriend. “Get your ticket,” the woman said. “Right to the Land of the Dead.” She laughed and clapped her hands. “The Land of the Dead. Express leaving now.”

  Jaqe stopped herself from giving the woman a shove. Probably the whole army would rise up against her. She slid around the woman, who was still laughing at her own joke. “I don’t have a ticket,” Jaqe started to tell the porter, but he waved her on.

  Laurie’s bus was late, not early. For half an hour Jaqe walked back and forth, drank tea from a machine, and checked the announcement board in case she’d misread the gate number. Finally the bus, green and white with darkened windows, rolled into the dock. The doors opened with an explosive sigh. As the passengers stepped out, Jaqe bounced up and down on the balls of her feet. Where was she? Who were all these stupid people? She must have missed the bus, maybe she was sick and trying to call Jaqe at home. “Relax,” said a man in some sort of uniform. “He’s coming.” Jaqe made a face at him and he shrugged. And then Laurie was there. She was wearing black jeans and a white blouse with a stiff collar, and she was carrying her blue cotton blazer over her arm and her black leather travel bag in her beautiful long-fingered hand. She ducked her head as she came through the door. When she lifted it she looked around a moment before she spotted Jaqe, and then she grinned. Her free hand pointed at the side of the bus where the driver was handing out luggage.

  For some reason nonpassengers were not allowed through the doors to the parking area, so Jaqe had to wait inside the building, watching Laurie, unable to touch her. Laurie looked wonderful and terrible all at once. It was still the strong face, but now it was all drawn and thin—she must have lost ten pounds. Jaqe wanted to run and get her a double milkshake. And the way she moved—there was still that same arrogant grace, but now tension had mixed in with it, the shoulders tight, the face hardened except in those moments when she smiled or winked at Jaqe. Her luggage came, a garment bag and a black nylon duffle which she hoisted onto her shoulder. It almost made Jaqe cry, the way Laurie balanced everything so carefully, just for those few steps into the terminal.

  She didn’t wait for Laurie to drop her bags before she hugged her. “Welcome home,” she said, and now she really did start to cry, with the side of her face against Laurie’s shoulder.

  Laurie laughed. “This is great,” she said, “but can we get out of the doorway?” Behind her, people were trying to push through. “No,” Jaqe said, and hugged her harder, but then she let Laurie move to the side and set down her luggage.

  The man in the uniform walked around the two of them, as if to examine an exotic animal. “It’s a woman,” he said in mock amazement.

  Jaqe half turned her head. “You better believe it,” she said, and Laurie burst out laughing.

  Outside the terminal the woman in the purple wig rushed up to Jaqe. “Back from the dead already?” she said. “And with a refugee too.”

  “Friend of yours?” Laurie asked, but Jaqe was already hailing a cab.

  In the apartment, Jaqe had set up a bouquet of pink roses in an old orange juice bottle she’d washed down and then painted with a spiraling red stripe. Around the bottle she’d placed a circle of painted eggs left over from the “Celebration of Spring” she and Louise had hosted before the beginning of exams. The women in the party had stood in a ring with the eggs in a bowl on the floor. They passed around a bundle of burning sage and sang an old Turtle song more or less translated into English. Then each woman had picked up her egg, held it in the air and asked “Grandmother Earth” to help her face her most difficult task: an exam in organic chemistry, a term paper on the theme of revenge in Greek Lit, or a conversation test in colloquial German. To end the celebration several of the women had wanted to eat the eggs, but Jaqe said they should leave them in the bowl, as “carriers of power.” “Psychic batteries,” someone joined in. In fact, Jaqe really had wanted to save the eggs for Laurie, for even though she claimed her egg represented her paper on images of family conflict in European folklore it really meant—all the eggs meant—Laurie returning safe and happy from her exile at the frozen lake. After the party, when everyone had gone home, Jaqe had written Laurie a long letter, carefully light and amusing, about the party, each of the women’s costumes, and how she had saved the eggs from destruction, though she didn’t say why. The letter went on for five pages, and Jaqe hoped it would inspire, or shame, Laurie into a reply. Instead of words, she’d gotten back a drawing of an egg half buried in a hillside. Inside the egg was a Xeroxed photo of Jaqe, asleep on the couch in Bill and Janet’s living room. When Jaqe received the picture, without even a signature at the bottom, she cried for half an hour.

  Now, when Laurie came in the door and
saw the roses and the eggs, her own eyes teared and her face seemed to shiver. She dropped her duffle bag and hurried into the bathroom, where she turned on the water and sat down on the edge of the tub to cry. Jaqe didn’t know what to do. She wished there was some spell she could say, or magic food she could feed Laurie to bring her back. But, despite the party with the LSU women, Jaqe didn’t believe in magic words, and all she’d made for dinner was a salad with different kinds of pasta and a thick blue cheese dressing. When Laurie came out of the bathroom she’d washed her face and was smiling again. “It’s good to be back,” she said, and Jaqe ran to hug her again. But there was something wrong with the smile, and Jaqe could feel the jerkiness in Laurie’s arms, even when they weren’t moving. She pulled away. “Are you tired?” she asked. “I made a salad, but you can lie down if you want.” She hated sounding like a hostess, like her mother.

  “How was your exam?” Laurie said.

  Jaqe shrugged. “Dumb,” she said. Laurie nodded, as if that was the right answer.

  They decided to eat, and then to drink tea. Laurie talked about graduate school, how nothing made any sense, how it was all just competition. To Jaqe it sounded like a report from an impartial observer. She noticed that Laurie took the smallest possible amount of pasta and still didn’t finish. “You know,” Laurie said as she leaned back and put her hands behind her head, “I didn’t even finish my papers. Can you believe that?”

  “What do you mean?” Jaqe asked.

  Laurie’s attempt at casualness only made her look more strained. She said, “I took them home. Three of them. I’m supposed to mail them in. Two weeks to finish three papers. Think I can do it?”

 

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