Once more Jaqe tore the paper, and then again. Crying, she said, “I love you, Laurie.”
Laurie said, “And do you forgive me?”
Jaqe said nothing as she looked from Laurie to the pieces of paper lying in her open hands. “I love you,” she said.
“Do you forgive me? I can’t bring you back if you can’t forgive me.”
“I forgive you,” Jaqe whispered. Then louder, “I forgive you.” She tossed the pieces of paper at the sky. A gust of wind took them and they swirled about, then vanished into the sun. Jaqe came into Laurie’s arms. As they kissed each other they closed their eyes, so that neither one of them saw the thousands of butterflies that came over the edge of the roof. In a single form they flew, the shape of a tree, a huge blue and green and black and gold tree whose branches stretched high above the women’s heads. In the middle of the branches lay the sun, the face of a child in a circle of light.
That night, Laurie woke up to find Jaqe by the bedroom window, looking out at the street. “Honey?” she called. “Are you okay? What are you doing?”
Jaqe turned around. “I want a baby,” she said. “I want a child.”
One
The Baby in the Tree
Laurie did not know what to make of Jaqe’s desire for a child. At first she made nothing of it, as if Jaqe had said something odd in an emotional moment. Laurie certainly had enough to occupy her, with her father in the hospital and her mother’s insistences—in vain—that Laurie go visit him. However, in the middle of all the conflicts, Jaqe said it again—“I want a child”—and Laurie began to suspect that her lover was serious.
“Please,” Laurie said to her. “Can’t we just finish things with the previous generation before we start working on the next one?”
Eventually Laurie’s mother gave up, and Laurie began to think her life might settle down for a while. But as the months passed, Jaqe became moody, sometimes refusing to eat, sometimes staring at the floor while Laurie would tell her stories from the shop, like the one about the customer who had come in requesting “rude photos” of the British royal family.
One evening they went to a housewarming party for Louise’s new apartment. Laurie had not seen Louise or the others for weeks. She dressed very carefully, in a red silk blazer and black jeans, and she carefully slicked back her hair and even used Jaqe’s lipstick to accent her cheekbones. When she saw that Jaqe did not intend to change from the T-shirt and worn-at-the-knees jeans she’d had on all day, Laurie demanded she put on something “dynamic.” Jaqe said she didn’t care. “Well, I do,” Laurie said. “I don’t want all those baby butches to think we’ve degenerated into old marrieds.”
Jaqe shrugged. “It’s just not important.”
“Well, what is? You’ve been moping so much it’s like you don’t care about anything.”
“I told you,” Jaqe said. “I want a child.”
“Oh great,” Laurie said. “That’s terrific. I’ll tell you what. You put on your backless strapless topless so I can get all worked up, and then after the party I’ll stick my genuine autographed Radclyffe Hall dildo up you, and start a bun in the oven. How’s that?”
When Jaqe looked about to cry, Laurie said, “I’m sorry, honey. I don’t mean to act like an idiot. I just do it so easily. Do you forgive me?”
“I mean it,” Jaqe told her. “I want a baby.”
“I really am sorry.” When Jaqe said nothing, Laurie said, “I promise we’ll talk about it later. Okay?” She grabbed a white blouse and pants from Jaqe’s closet and tossed them on the bed. “Why don’t you wear these?” she said. “It’s getting late.”
But when they got home Jaqe didn’t bring it up again, and Laurie announced that she needed to get right to sleep so she could help Mark in the morning, before the store opened.
Over the next weeks, Jaqe went back to school and Laurie involved herself first in work and then in a campaign to include education about women-loving women in the public schools. Jaqe became steadily more listless. She lost weight and her face became pale, with a sag around the mouth. She dropped most of her courses a few weeks into the semester. One night, in bed, Laurie looked at Jaqe and saw her staring over the pages of a book on feminist theories of architecture. Laurie realized that Jaqe had not turned a page in half an hour. “Good book?” she asked. When Jaqe didn’t answer, Laurie saw a picture in her mind—herself slapping Jaqe, or shaking her by the shoulders. To her own great surprise, Laurie began to cry.
Jaqe looked as if someone had called her from a great distance. For a moment, she squinted at Laurie, then put her arms around her. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she said. “It’s all right. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Laurie pulled away. “No, it’s not all right,” she said. “You keep vanishing. I don’t know where the hell you go, but you go someplace.” She started to cry again. “I’m scared you’ll leave me.”
Jaqe looked down. “I’m sorry,” she said. She raised her eyes back to Laurie. “I don’t mean to…to vanish. You know I love you. It’s just—I told you, I want a baby.”
“Jesus,” Laurie said. “How can you have a baby? What about college? And money? Babies cost a lot of money.”
“I don’t care,” Jaqe said. “We can find a way. Other people do it. People have babies all over the world without a lot of money. And I don’t care about college at all.”
“Well how do you think we can make a baby? Haven’t you forgotten a pretty important ingredient in the recipe?”
Jaqe smiled gloriously at her. “You’ll figure it out. You can do anything.”
Laurie laughed. “Thanks. I may be butch, but I’m not that butch.”
“Alice got pregnant.”
“Oh great,” Laurie said. “I don’t want you picking up strange dicks in chess clubs.” Alice, an ex-girlfriend of one of the LSU women, had seduced an acquaintance to get pregnant. To check him for intelligent genes, she’d challenged him to a chess match.
“She didn’t join a club,” Jaqe said. “She met him in a café.”
“Alice was alone,” Laurie insisted. “She could do any crazy thing she wanted. You’ve got a partner.”
“Maybe Mark—”
“No!”
Jaqe grinned. “I just meant that maybe he’d have an idea.”
“Can’t we keep this at home?” Laurie said. “I’m sure you and Mark have a wonderful relationship, but he’s still my boss. He doesn’t have to know all our problems.”
“A baby’s not a problem. A baby’s a sacred gift from the Goddess of Life.”
“Great,” Laurie said. “Maybe she’ll mail us a gift certificate. But let’s keep this Goddess promotional program to ourselves for now, okay?”
And yet, two days later, Laurie asked Mark if he would like to have a beer with her after work. Sitting in the same bar where she’d once tried to write her papers, Laurie told him of Jaqe’s “obsession,” and asked him if he could help her figure out what to do about it.
Too large for the narrow wooden chair, Mark still managed to look at home as he sat with his hands folded on the scarred tabletop. An empty cappuccino cup sat on either side of him. Mark had been talking cheerfully about the “category error” of using computer models for dream interpretation, but had stopped the moment Laurie had begun to speak. Now he shrugged slightly, and said, “If she wants a child, why don’t you give her one?”
Laurie lifted her hands in a gesture of despair. “Not you too,” she said. “Am I the only person who ever took sex education in school?”
“They didn’t talk dirty when I went to school.”
“Well, let me explain it. Men and women may look exactly the same to you and Jaqe, but there’s a crucial difference where you can’t see it. The man’s got this collapsible tube—you’ve probably noticed it when you’ve gone to pee—”
“You worry too much about technicalities. If you can’t make the baby, you can act as the agent.”
“Great,” Laurie said. “Do I get ten
percent? Anyway, it still comes down to that one requirement. The technicality.”
Mark said, “There are more ways to make a baby than you realize.” The waitress came to ask if Mark wanted more coffee, or Laurie more beer. Laurie shook her head, but Mark said, “Do you have a child?”
“I certainly do,” she said. “A two-year-old little maniac. Would you like to have him? He gets along great with everybody. As long as you do whatever he says and don’t expect to sleep.”
“There,” Mark said to Laurie. “See how simple it is?”
Laurie made a face. “I don’t think she means it.”
The waitress said, “Try me.”
Mark asked her, “How did you get pregnant? Did you use the orthodox method?”
Startled, the woman shrank back, but Mark only smiled blandly at her. “Actually,” the waitress said, “not really. My husband…we used artificial insemination.” She shook her head. “Why did I say that? I’ve never told anyone before. We promised each other we wouldn’t tell.”
Mark took her hand, for just a moment. “It’s all right,” he told her. “You haven’t done anything wrong. This woman needed help, and now you’ve helped her.”
When the waitress had hurried away, Mark said, “There. That’s one method.”
“Clinics don’t take lesbians.”
“You’re too full of objections. How do you know who clinics take or don’t take? Anyway, you don’t need a clinic for artificial insemination. All you need is a donor and a turkey baster. If you read more, you would know that.”
Laurie said, “If you’re offering—”
Mark waved a hand. “No, no, don’t worry. I don’t do that kind of work. Of course, I could act as arranger. So you and Jaqe won’t have to know who the donor is.”
“I don’t know,” Laurie said. “I don’t like it.” She waited for Mark to tell her she just didn’t want children.
Instead, he said, “And if AI doesn’t work—did you ever notice how the same term is used for artificial insemination and artificial intelligence?—if AI doesn’t work, you could try dreams.”
“Dreams?”
“I read a book recently where a woman gets pregnant from a dream. Kind of an odd dream, something to do with eating jeweled hot dogs at a Persian baseball game.”
“Mark,” Laurie said, “that was a book. This is life we’re talking about now.”
“How do you know everything that happens in life?”
“I know how to make a baby.”
“People have always known how to make babies. Only, they sometimes know different things. Some people know that babies come from walking alone under a full moon. Maybe at some future time people will think it astonishing that we thought babies came only from sexual intercourse. They’ll say things like ‘Didn’t they notice how many women had intercourse and didn’t get pregnant? Didn’t they ever study the dreams of pregnant women?’”
Laurie got up. “I’ve got to go,” she said.
Mark waved to her, as if she were already traveling down the street. He said, “Give my love to Jaqe.” Laurie nodded.
Outside the door she looked back through the window. Mark sat back with his hands behind his head as he talked to the waitress, who looked confused but nodded her head.
Winter was coming, and Jaqe kept getting sick. Colds, flu, backaches. Sometimes she would wake up more tired than when she went to sleep. When Laurie asked her to go for blood tests, Jaqe didn’t answer, just shrugged. She wasn’t eating right, Laurie knew. Laurie made elaborate dishes from a vegetarian cookbook; Jaqe just ate a few bites and left the table. The same went for steak or ice cream or home-delivered pizza or Chinese food.
Sometimes Jaqe woke up in the morning with her eyes wet, as if the tears couldn’t wait and had started in her sleep.
Laurie said to Mark, “It’s like someone’s cast a spell on her. And she won’t get help. When I tell her to see a shrink or something, she says she knows what’s wrong.”
“Maybe she does.” Mark said this without looking at her. He had just bought a computer and was playing a game in which a digital hero had to climb a tower and rescue a princess while packs of digital witches on broomsticks tried to knock him to the ground. He said to Laurie, “Maybe you should just give her what she wants.”
“Come on,” Laurie said. “Even if the medical miracle of donor insemination provided a baby, what would we do with it?”
“What does anyone do with a baby? Shit!” he said, and slammed his fist on the counter. A teenage girl jumped, and turned around from the stack of books she was scanning. Mark said to her, “The witches won again. There’s just too damn many of them.”
“Wow,” the girl said. “That’s the best news I’ve heard all week.”
Mark put his face closer to the screen, as if he could look past the tower to some wider scene. “You’re right,” he said. “It all depends on how you look at it, doesn’t it?”
Winter was coming, and Jaqe kept getting sick. She went out without a coat, walking sometimes for hours in just a sweatshirt and jeans. One morning, Laurie followed her. First she made sure Jaqe dressed properly. As Jaqe was leaving, Laurie gave her an apple and a small knife to peel off the pesticide and wax. Half a minute after Jaqe had left, Laurie suddenly grabbed her pea jacket, pulled on her cowboy boots, and ran down the stairs. Despite her worries, it excited her to play detective, and she found herself smirking as she occasionally hid in doorways. Mark’s going to love this, she thought. She remembered the day she’d followed Adrienne Beker, but she pushed the thought away as she bent down to fake tying a shoelace while Jaqe waited at a walk sign.
Laurie followed Jaqe all the way to the park in the middle of the city. Jaqe seemed to pick up the moment she entered the park. Her shoulders straightened and she no longer looked at the ground. Without buildings or crowds to use for cover, Laurie worried that Jaqe might spot her, but Jaqe never turned around or looked to the side. Jaqe clearly knew where she was going, for she moved swiftly along the path and then across the grass, past the rocks and the pond and the people admiring the colors of the leaves. Finally she stopped before a large tree with gnarled branches that stuck straight out to the sides, like a candelabra. At the bottom the roots half stuck out of the ground, forming a tangled ball.
Jaqe stood before the tree for over a minute, with her head tilted slightly backward. Finally she began to walk around the tree, with her eyes on the ground, as if searching for something. Laurie did her best to hide behind a cluster of young maples, but she needn’t have bothered. By a small group of rocks Jaqe found a short stick, about a foot long, lying on the ground. It looked like a fallen branch, except that someone had peeled off the bark. Jaqe kneeled down with one knee on the grass. In sharp, practiced movements she used the stick to scratch some sort of picture in the dirt in front of the tree. Then she got up, laid the stick against the ball of roots, and stood there looking at what she had done.
With a sigh, she took out the apple and knife Laurie had given her. She began to peel it, but she must have cut herself, for Laurie saw her hand jerk away. And then Jaqe squeezed her finger, with great concentration it seemed, until blood started to flow. Like someone watering a plant, she sprinkled the blood on her drawing. Laurie could see Jaqe’s lips moving, but she couldn’t hear the words.
When Jaqe headed back the way she’d come, Laurie decided not to follow her. Instead she waited until Jaqe was safely out of sight, then went up to the markings Jaqe had made on the ground. Jaqe had drawn a copy of the tree, Laurie saw. There was the straight trunk, the branches like layers of arms. Only, Jaqe had made a couple of changes. Instead of the twisted roots, she’d drawn a pattern, a maze, at the bottom. And at the top she’d carefully scratched the figure of an egg, set between a circular sun and a crescent moon.
That night, Laurie dreamed of women in trouble. There were women whose husbands beat them, old women evicted from tenement apartment buildings, women whose lovers had deserted them after a fight in the m
iddle of the night, women with incurable diseases and no health insurance, women thrown out by their families. In the dream, Laurie stood in the parking lot of an all-night convenience store. She wore a yellow raincoat and a baseball cap with a feather stuck in the side. One by one, the women slipped into the store. Laurie saw a professor of hers from graduate school, and then a young woman who looked nothing like her sister Ellen, yet was Ellen. The dream-Laurie whispered, “I’m sorry. I know it’s wrong, but I’ve got to think about Jaqe now.”
Inside the store, a young woman in a mechanic’s outfit stood behind the cash register. She wore her red hair slicked back, and her hands were stained with grease as she took people’s money. She never spoke openly to the customers, but when one of the desperate women came up to her, the mechanic would tell her softly, “Mother Night can help you. Go to the water and find Mother Night.”
Laurie stood at the back of the beach, at the edge of the sand dunes. In front of her, close to the water, stood a shack with streaked walls, a sloping tarred roof, and windows too dirty to see inside, except where the glass had broken to reveal the gray darkness of a room impervious to the sun. Laurie stood there all day, while women came one by one to pass through the broken door.
Laurie heard a child cry, a strange whooping noise that went on and off like a siren. When she looked around, however, she only saw an old tire lying in the sand, and inside it a pile of colored rocks. Laurie looked back at the edge of the world, where the sun was sinking helplessly into the water. She rushed into the shack.
Mother Night sat behind an old desk of scarred wood. She wore a denim jacket and jeans, and she sat with her legs up on the desk so that Laurie could see the scratches and cuts on the bottom of her basketball shoes.
“Please help me,” Laurie said. “Jaqe wants a baby and I don’t know what to do.” For a long time Mother Night didn’t move, and the dream-Laurie wondered if Mother Night was dead. But then she swung her legs down and said, “Come on,” and led Laurie outside, where the sun slapped her eyes.
Godmother Night Page 16