Godmother Night

by Rachel Pollack

  When she could see again, Laurie discovered they were standing on grass. Mother Night wore a long green dress with wings of white silk fluttering on the shoulders. Behind her, the sea rolled up to the edge of the grass. Laurie wished the old woman would put her arms around her. Instead, Mother Night pointed at the ground.

  A group of stones lay piled on the bare dirt. Oval shaped and about eight inches long, they were painted gold or red, and when Laurie bent down she saw faces drawn on the flat surfaces: elliptical eyes, long thin triangles for noses. There were no mouths. Laurie lifted up a red stone with spokes of yellow light painted around the edges. Somewhere she heard a baby cry, and then a motorcycle. When she looked up at Mother Night, the sun behind the old woman made it hard to look at her.

  Mother Night said, “This face is the child. If you plant it in Jaqe, it will grow from the Earth to the Sky.”

  Two days later, on her day off, Laurie went out of town to the beach. On the subway she kept telling herself she should go to the city beach, where at least she knew the trains were running. When she got off the subway, would she find a bus this late in the year? But when she got to the end of the train line there it was, a battered old city bus with no one on board but a man with an aluminum camera case, another man asleep across a couple of seats, and the driver, a young woman with short red hair. The bus started up as soon as Laurie sat down.

  Laurie hadn’t been to the beach in autumn in years. She walked past the parking lot, with its scattered cars bright in the sun, past the closed toilets and snack bar, and along the slightly damp sand until she stood near the edge of the water. She sighed. What the hell had she come here for? She looked around. There were more people than she’d expected—mostly fishermen with long poles anchored in the ground, but also a few runners, a couple of photographers, and a girl about ten, who was trying to control her kite in the strong wind. Laurie didn’t see anyone who looked anything at all like Mother Night.

  Laurie could hardly remember what the old woman looked like. She’d only seen her once, at that dance a couple of years ago. And all Laurie’s attention that night had gone to Jaqe. She said out loud to the air, “What a dumbass thing to do.”

  Heading back to the parking lot, Laurie heard someone say “Shit!” When she turned she saw the girl with the kite, only now the kite lay on the ground, tangled in string. Laurie walked over and started to untangle the wooden cross with its painted diamond of paper.

  “This is some picture,” Laurie said to the girl. The yellow kite showed a bare-breasted dancing woman, with a black spiral painted over her face.

  “My mom made it,” the girl said. “She’s an artist.” For several minutes she and Laurie worked together to raise the woman into the sky. When Laurie said goodbye the girl said, “Thanks, lady. You’re really great.” She reached into her jacket pocket, then held out her closed fist. “Here,” she said. “Do you want this?”

  When the girl opened her hand, Laurie saw a small stone, dark gray, with short lines covering both sides. “Umm, thanks,” Laurie said to the girl, who immediately took off down the beach with her kite flapping behind her. Laurie looked at the stone again. If you looked at the lines a certain way, you could see pictures. A bent column of white above a line of white looked like a ferryman standing up in a boat. He even held a pole, a diagonal line running from one corner of the stone to the other. On the other side, a whole web of fine lines ran from either side of a thick vertical column. At the bottom of the column, a mass of lines tangled around each other, like the string from the kite.

  No. No, Laurie thought, not the kite, the tree. The lines in the stone made the same picture Jaqe had drawn in the park—the trunk, the stepladder branches, the ball of roots on the bottom. “Hey!” Laurie called to the girl, but the child was too far down the beach. She looked at the stone again, holding it close to her face, searching for the egg Jaqe had drawn in the top branches. There was something there. But not an egg. Too much sticking out. Like—like arms, and legs! “It’s a baby,” Laurie said out loud. She held the stone tightly in her fist, which she shook slightly in front of her. “It’s a goddamn baby!”

  When Laurie got home, she found Jaqe curled up on the couch with a blanket around her despite the late-afternoon sun heating up the apartment. Jaqe was watching TV, a talk show featuring nuns who had discovered their mother superior was a serial murderer. The host smirked as he explained that he and the audience took this “tragedy” very seriously, and only joked to relieve the tension.

  “Hi,” Laurie said. “It’s me.” Jaqe didn’t answer. Laurie said, “I brought you something from the beach.” Jaqe turned her head.

  Laurie hesitated. She wondered if Jaqe would see the resemblance, if she should explain it to her. Instead, she just held it out.

  The effect made her jump back in surprise.

  “Where did you get this?” Jaqe cried out as she grabbed the rock from Laurie’s hand.

  “I told you,” Laurie said. “At the beach.”

  “Who gave it to you? Was anyone there?”

  For some reason, Laurie shook her head. “Just some fishermen. And photographers. And a girl with a kite.”

  “A girl? How old was she? Was she wearing yellow overalls?”

  “No. She was about ten, I guess. Maybe a little older.”

  “You didn’t see a younger girl? Around seven?”

  “No,” Laurie said. “There was no one like that at all.” Tell her, she ordered herself. Tell her the kid gave it to you. But then Jaqe would know she’d lied at first, and Laurie couldn’t stand the thought of Jaqe thinking of her as a liar.

  Jaqe said, “And…the woman who introduced us. At the dance? Was she there? Today, I mean. Did you see her?”

  Laurie shook her head. “No,” she said. “I haven’t seen her since that one time.”

  But Jaqe had stopped listening. Instead, she was squinting at the stone, at the tree side, the top of the tree. “Something’s different,” she said. “There’s something…It’s hatched!” She hugged Laurie. “It worked, it worked.” She separated, only to kiss Laurie. “It’s going to be okay,” she said a moment later. “You did it. You did it. It’s going to be okay.”

  Two

  The Baby in the Jar

  The next day Laurie told Mark to warm up the turkey baster and look around for a healthy donor. “He’s got to be smart,” Laurie said. “Well, I don’t mean genius. You know, not stupid.”

  “I understand,” Mark said.

  “And healthy. I mean, no hereditary diseases.” Mark nodded. “And, uh, not too homely, okay?”

  “Got it,” Mark said. He held up three fingers. “No dummies, no sickies, no uglies.”

  Laurie stared at the floor. “Oh,” she said, as if she’d just remembered something. “I told Jaqe it was my idea. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Mark reached out a hand to tilt Laurie’s chin until she was looking at him. “It’s fine,” he told her. He smiled. “It’s all going to be fine.” When Laurie started to cry, Mark took her in his arms and hugged her almost half a minute before the two of them went back to work.

  It took Mark over a month to find someone. During this period Jaqe began to eat and sleep properly, even to get back to studying for a couple of her suspended courses. Every night, when Laurie came home from work, Jaqe greeted her with a bright hello, a hug and a kiss, and then the question “Any news?”

  “Sorry,” Laurie would murmur, and rush off to wash her hands, as if she’d come home from working in a garage or a foundry.

  “Haven’t you got someone?” Laurie asked Mark. “She’s driving me crazy.” When Mark told her it took time and delicate negotiations, Laurie said, “All he’s got to do is jerk off in a warm jar.”

  Jaqe stopped walking to the park without a coat, she’d even gone back to cleaning the house and cooking, a great relief to Laurie, who always did her best to do her share but never felt she had much “aptitude for the finer points,” as a girlfriend of hers had once said.
One day she came home to find Jaqe hanging cards on the two large plants framing the living room window. The dieffenbachia had grown almost to the ceiling since the time Laurie had given them to Jaqe for their one-month anniversary. “Our private forest,” Jaqe had called them. She’d trimmed them, Laurie saw, and now she was carefully tying on the cards with colored thread. The cards all showed babies surrounded by lace and fluffy clouds and chorus lines of dancing storks. Jaqe said, “I just thought I’d create a good atmosphere. And we can use them later for birth announcements.”

  “Can’t you find someone?” Laurie asked Mark. “I can’t take it anymore.”

  “Actually,” Mark told her, “I’ve got a prospect.”

  “Great,” Laurie said, without much enthusiasm. “When can he report for work?”

  “I’m still negotiating,” Mark said.

  That evening, Laurie told Jaqe she had some catch-up work to do at the store and went to a women’s bar she used to visit before she knew Jaqe. For a couple of hours, she tried to work up some enthusiasm for dancing, or at least finding someone to talk to. But the music only hurt her ears, and the women all looked too young or too flashy or too cold.

  When Laurie got home, Louise was there laughing with Jaqe at some joke. Jaqe jumped up and gave Laurie a kiss. “Yecch,” she said. “Were you drinking beer?”

  “Yeah,” Laurie said, afraid she would blush. “I stopped at Pete’s on the way home.”

  “Here’s one for Pete,” Jaqe said, and kissed Laurie again.

  “Hi,” Laurie said to Louise.

  Louise grinned at her. “Hi, boss.”

  Laurie looked at their excited faces and knew something was going on. She waited while Jaqe glanced at Louise, who giggled. Finally Jaqe said, “Louise has been helping me calculate the best time.”

  “The best time?” Laurie repeated. She felt slightly queasy.

  “You know, for donation.”

  Louise added, “And we’re also planning how to set it up. We figure Jaqe will want to lie in the bedroom, which leaves this room for the mystery man.”

  Laurie wanted to scream at Jaqe, to shout at Louise, to run away. Instead, she stroked Jaqe’s face, which shone as Jaqe said, laughing, “I thought maybe we should get a pile of old Playboys and Penthouse s. You know, to give him inspiration. But Louise said we wanted a more spiritual atmosphere. So we could use pictures of the Great Mother instead.”

  Louise giggled. “You can include it in the contract.”

  “There’s no contract,” Laurie said. “We won’t even know who it is.”

  Louise ignored her. “Hey,” she said. “I just thought of something. When a man’s wife has a baby he gives out cigars, right? It’s pretty obvious what the cigar stands for. But what can a dyke give out? Maybe turkey sandwiches. The breast meat, of course.” She and Jaqe laughed so loud, Laurie wished she was back in the bar.

  Later, Laurie said to Jaqe, “Why the hell did you have to tell Louise?”

  Jaqe shrugged. “Why not? She’s my friend. Anyway, she really does know a lot about cycles. She works in that clinic.”

  “I don’t care where she works. She’s a gossip. She’ll think it’s so great she’ll just have to tell everybody. We’ll be lucky if she doesn’t write an article about it.”

  “It is great,” Jaqe said. “Why should we keep it a secret?”

  “Because it’s our baby. You and me.”

  “I know that,” Jaqe said. “That’s why it doesn’t matter.” Laurie tried to turn away, but Jaqe grabbed her and hugged her until Laurie put her arms around her.

  For the donor, Mark chose finally the poet who sold ice cream sandwiches during the day and wrote about the “seeds of all knowledge” in the evenings. Unlike the other men Mark had approached—who all feared Mark would let the child know its father’s name so that ten or twenty years later some stranger would knock on the door with a bill for child support—the poet, whose name was Aaron, found the idea enticing. “Aaron will raise his rod,” he told Mark, “and let the multitudes pour forth.” He put only one condition to Mark—that the anonymous mother give him two weeks to prepare himself and his “microscopic ambassadors.”

  Louise would have been delighted. Aaron did not use any Goddess pinups, but he did meditate every evening in a circle of upright “stones” he’d fashioned out of papier-mâché. Every morning, before going to his department-store booth, he stood on his head for five minutes—“to awaken the seeds and fill them with light” he wrote in his journal. “I have always,” he told Mark, “taken my responsibilities seriously.”

  As Louise prepared Jaqe, and Mark prepared the “mystery guest” (as Louise called the donor), Laurie began to concentrate more and more on “living a normal life.” Now she started to go out for walks, not, she told herself, in a stupor like Jaqe, but just to get away from the laboratory atmosphere of her apartment. Sometimes at night, when Jaqe would wiggle up against her, with her head against Laurie’s breast, Laurie would think of pushing her away, even as she put her arm around Jaqe and held her in a warm hug. One night she discovered she wanted to hit Jaqe, to slap her or even punch her, and she got out of bed to stand in the kitchen until she could calm down.

  It surprised Laurie when she learned that Jaqe assumed Laurie would administer the planting. Commander Turkey Baster, Jaqe called her.

  Laurie said, “I thought you’d get Louise to do that.” Instantly she felt like a jerk, though she wasn’t sure why.

  Jaqe said, “She’s just helping me figure out what to do.”

  “So now you want me to play the father?”

  “I’m sorry,” Jaqe said. “Don’t you want to?”

  Laurie shrugged. “Sure. Of course.” She remembered her dream, Mother Night telling her to plant the seed in Jaqe.

  Jaqe did her best to look lewd. She said, “You’ve put lots of other things inside me. What’s wrong with a turkey baster?”

  Laurie said, “It’s just what’s in it.” She added, “I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean that.”

  “Try not to think about it,” Jaqe said. “Pretend—I don’t know—pretend it’s turkey juice.”

  Laurie found herself grinning. “Maybe you’ll lay an egg instead of giving birth.”

  “That’s right,” Jaqe said. “And when it hatches we’ll find a baby girl with golden wings and a beak in place of a nose.”

  “And everyone will call her Turkey Nose. But then when the dragon imprisons the princess, Turkey Nose will use her beak to pick the lock.”

  “And her wings to carry the princess over the dragon’s fiery breath.”

  Laurie said, “And we’ll all live happily ever after.”

  According to Jaqe and Louise’s reckoning, Jaqe’s ovulation that month would coincide with the full moon. When she heard this, Laurie thought of telling Jaqe to skip the turkey baster and just go for a walk, naked, on the rooftop. She told Mark the idea, but he suggested Jaqe might not go for it.

  It amazed Laurie how simple the technique was. The donor would “ejaculate” (as Mark insisted on saying) into a warm sterile jar. Then he, Mark, would draw the contents into the baster and pass it to Laurie, who would squirt it into “the waiting chamber” (Louise’s term), trying to get it as close to the cervix as possible. “I guess it doesn’t sound too bad,” Laurie said to Mark.

  “Not bad at all,” Mark assured her. “It’s a wonder folks don’t do it this way all the time.”

  A few days before the time, Jaqe told Laurie to ask Mark to ask the donor if he could do it a second time the day after. “For insurance,” she said. Over Laurie’s protests, Jaqe pointed out that even married couples who did it the old-fashioned way sometimes missed the target.

  Laurie said, “Let’s try it once, okay? If it doesn’t work, we can do it more times next month.”

  Laurie wanted them to do it at Mark’s house. She wanted to say, “So we won’t have to smell it after he’s gone,” but instead she suggested that they wouldn’t want him to know how to find th
e apartment.

  Jaqe refused. “I want to do this in my own home,” she said.

  Laurie told her, “Suppose he suddenly decides to investigate who lives here. Or just watches the place for pregnant women.”

  “I don’t care,” Jaqe said. “Mark can blindfold him.” Nor would she accept Laurie’s idea that they wait in a diner until Mark telephoned them to say the baster was ready. “I don’t want to take a chance,” Jaqe said. “We’ll wait in the bedroom and Mark can hand it to you through the door.”

  Great, Laurie thought. A prisoner in my own bedroom while some jerk jerks off in my living room.

  On the morning of the full moon, Jaqe found it hard to decide what to wear. Should she choose something sexy, like the short red dress she’d bought once to shock everyone at the LSU? Or something maternal? (The closest she could find was a checked blue-and-white jumper over a white blouse with a lace collar.) Finally she put on jeans and a T-shirt Louise had given her, with a picture of the moon and a profile of a naked woman bending a bow to shoot an arrow at the stars. To Jaqe’s surprise, Laurie wore a gold silk shirt and tight black jeans; she had even polished her black cowboy boots.

  Aaron had no trouble at all deciding what to wear. When Mark came to pick him up, Aaron carefully framed himself in the doorway. He wore his black Iranian caftan, with a silver phallus on a chain around his neck. A black leather bag hung from his shoulder. He had waxed his beard and mustache until they gleamed in the winter sun. As they drove to the home of the mother, Aaron explained to Mark that he would need to chant for at least ten minutes “to awaken my seed for its mission of potency.” Mark advised against it, pointing out that Aaron didn’t want the women to hear his voice.

  When they arrived, Mark went to knock on the bedroom door to make sure the women knew the other team was there. Aaron meanwhile walked about the room, investigating the walls and the furniture and nodding his head. Mark saw, with relief, that Laurie and Jaqe had remembered to put away any photos, as well as letters or envelopes displaying their names. He smiled when he saw that someone, Jaqe probably, had set out a bowl of homemade popcorn.