by Lee Lynch
When she’d first arrived, Allison had told Berry and the rapt nurses in the Vickers’ living room, “I live in Oregon, on women’s land.” Jaudon heard bits and pieces as she moved around the house after a long day of school and work. “Atlanta is a pokey little city, though with the big companies bringing young out-of-state employees it may change. I suppose every city was pokier in the 1950s. I thought the West Coast would be more exciting and I found a highly rated nursing school out there. It didn’t take me long to get into the rural scene. Hippies moved north to get in touch with nature, dropping out to save the world. I worked part-time in nursing, the rest doing art.”
Samantha had asked, wide-eyed and a little breathless, “Are you a hippie?”
Allison pushed her hair back and resettled her headband. “I love the music: Joplin, Grace Slick. The art is cartoonish and too psychedelic, there isn’t much depth. There were so many artists trying to make it, the lessons I took were cheap. I almost changed my major to art. In my school years, with the counterculture people, I was able to find my own style. I call it drawing with light. I ignore the object I’m reproducing and try to draw the light around it. Am I making sense? Without light, we don’t see the outlines of objects. When we look at an object, its details are created and emphasized by where the light touches.”
Allison had looked around the room, making eye contact. “But helping people is my thing, so I got a fifth-year certificate and a master’s in public health nursing, which was an offshoot of the school of social work. Art got me involved with the hippies and back-to-the-land lifestyle. After living so freely, the thought of nursing in a hospital or doctor’s office gave me claustrophobia. Public health took me out to underserved communities and health advocacy. I always carried a sketch pad when I went on rounds or to community meetings. I can draw in jail if I have to.”
Jaudon had seen Berry’s lifted face, her mesmerized eyes and deep contemplation of Allison’s words.
Jaudon had been in the kitchen when the group took a break. Donna Skaggs emerged from the bathroom and said, “You have one of those chain-pull high-tank toilets. My mother told me she grew up with one.”
Jaudon said, “Be darned grateful my folks upgraded from the outhouse.”
“You don’t have another bathroom?”
Jaudon remembered getting prickly. “We’ve got this one and the great outdoors.”
“You use the woods?” Jaudon hadn’t answered, but that was no deterrent to Donna. “I love the tin tub, but there’s no shower.”
“Sure there is.” Jaudon gestured to the window. “See those two rain barrels over the plank stall? Get under it and you have the softest shower water in the world.”
“You must be kidding.”
Mercie Lewis stood nearby, removing her guitar from its case on the kitchen table. “This is how my family lived before the housing authority bulldozed our house and put up the projects. You’re lucky to be able to keep some of the venerable ways, Jaudon.”
Her mood had lifted at Mercie’s words until Samantha came down the hall and peered into the kitchen. “Bless my soul. Look at the porcelain and cast iron sink. This whole house is an antique.”
Donna said, “It’s so quaint, I bet they clean their clothes in a set tub with a washboard.”
Jaudon ignored them and told Mercie she was welcome to use their shower anytime.
“Thank you. I’ll come by some extra-hot day as a treat to myself and pay you a visit,” Mercie said.
Jaudon had watched Donna herd Mercie and Samantha back to the living room. They stopped to admire Grandma Vicker’s sunburst pattern quilt.
Watching them, she’d concluded that Mercie Lewis was the only one worth a plug nickel, and maybe also that pool cleaner Cullie and her dog. Jaudon had gone out back and let the screen door slam. She was doing a lot of slamming lately. These women reminded her of the girlfriends who took Berry away from her in high school. She bit down on her fear and refused to let it get hold of her.
Since then, she and Berry’d been so busy they got sparse time alone together.
It was because of their schedules, they told each other. They worked, studied, slept. There was meager energy for play times, as they took to calling their intimate encounters. Childhood toys were gone—each had become the other’s toy.
Alone in her bedroom, studying, Jaudon played her blues records over and over. She loved Nina Simone in particular, despite the singer’s anger—or because of it. Her own harassment and rejection must be nothing compared to what black Floridians went through. Under her breath, she sang along with Nina because she shared her sadness and sorrow, bewitchment and bliss.
One night, Jaudon went to Berry’s closed door, Zefer’s claws clicking on the wood floor behind her. She heard voices inside and retreated to her own room. She tried to study, but the murmuring went on and on. At least, she told herself, if they’re talking they’re not playing. The memory of her sudden lust for Lari returned, a lust without love or friendship or history. Berry deserved her own experiences. As long as they went no further than Jaudon’s. As long as Allison, who didn’t hide her very active love life, kept her hands to herself.
The next time Berry’s group met at their house, Jaudon leaned in the doorway to the living room, listening. Allison talked about a group of women in Arkansas who were trying to impress on their police department the urgent need for domestic violence training.
From her perch, Jaudon said, “You ain’t whistling Dixie.”
Every head but Berry’s turned to her. Why did they stare at her with repugnance? She was agreeing with Allison. Later she heard Mercie play her guitar. She guessed it was Perfecta singing along in Spanish.
Another night as Jaudon went in to study after supper, the door to Berry’s room was closed. Jaudon knew Allison’s voice. The two of them were talking well past Berry’s normal bedtime. She went to the kitchen and used the yellow wall phone to call Rigo. She hadn’t seen him in a while. Berry complained Rigo wasn’t respectful to women. True enough; he was always telling degrading stories about women he knew and celebrities. He didn’t listen when Berry insisted he use the term women instead of girls. It was the way Rigo talked—he called his male friends girls too.
She met Rigo every few weeks at a luncheonette which served Cuban sandwiches and batidos, mango milkshakes. The place offered a sweet rice pudding she loved.
On the phone, she told Rigo what was going on. She fingered the beaded wainscoting, a habit from growing up. Running from dip to dip with her fingertips settled her. Rigo had already been privy to news of the unwanted, unnamed guest in the trailer, but the closed-door visit to Berry’s room outraged him.
“Walk in on them, girl,” he told her. “What are you, man or mouse? Get that groper out of your house.”
“I don’t want to turn Berry against me, Rigo.”
“You won’t, you won’t. She’s a sensible girl. She’ll understand.”
“I’m so afraid the door will be locked. She might tell me to go away. Allison is as fetching as a movie star and then some, not a sorry excuse for a girl like I am.”
“Berry wants you smack dab the way you are. She’s a femme, so’s Allison, they don’t want each other. Do this and end your misery. Do it now.”
“Better I end me.”
“Do I have to drive out there from Tampa to do this for you?”
“No. I’ll die a mite more every minute I wait—I’ll go to Berry’s room. Stay by the phone?”
“You bet your sweet bippy.”
She’d been grasping the phone so hard she had to force her fingers to uncurl. Heaven help me. Please don’t take her away. This was her punishment, she decided, for her moment of temptation with Lari, for the boyish way she dressed, for refusing to shave where other women did or wear a bra.
Now she was outside the door, she heard the voices start and stop with a strange rhythm. Were they doing some form of chanting? Feminist chanting in a made-up language?
Warm relief casca
ded from her head to her toes. She wanted to kick herself.
Back at the phone, she told Rigo, “I forgot she borrowed Allison’s tapes to learn Spanish. She’s listening to our tape recorder and repeating words. What is wrong with me? I am such a suspicious creep.”
“What did you say to her?”
Toby jumped on her lap. “I called through the door to say I was fixing to make a tomato sandwich and did she want one.”
“So Uncle Rigo was right on the money as usual?”
“You should be a headshrinker when you grow up.”
“What a coincidence. Shrinkology is what I’m studying, as you well know. But tell me seriously, Jaudo, what in the world got into you?”
She scratched Toby’s neck until he purred. “I’m always nervous Berry will have a lapse like mine.”
“Don’t be silly, missy. I may not be a therapist yet, but I don’t need a textbook to tell me we all have those fears. You never know where the mind—or life—is going to take you.”
“Aw, heck, Rigo, why would anybody want me in the first place? Bat says when the stork brought me, he dropped me on the ugly tree and I hit every branch on the way down to Momma.”
“He was trying to get under your skin, Jaudo. No one’s as gorgeous as me, of course, but remember I was about to make a pass when I thought you were a boy.”
“You need glasses. I’m a bearded lady from a circus sideshow. I saw one when I was a half-pint. She had a full beard, moustache, long hair and wore a dress. She was built the same as I am. Scared the living daylights out of me. Pops says I walk like a sailor and the doc says I can’t have a young ’un. Not that I want to. He says it’s my endocrines. He’d give me shots, but needles scare me silly, and besides he told me it’s too late at this point. Plus, I’m not about to mess with what’s natural to me, but one hint my looks bother Berry and I’ll stand aside.”
“Be careful not to worry your love life to death. Berry knows her mind and you are what’s on it—along with Spanish lessons.”
“I don’t know, Rigo. Ever since she got in with those feminist nurses she’s forever woolgathering, as if she’s trying to unlock the secrets of life.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
She heard him light a cigarette. “I don’t appreciate her doing it without me.”
“Aha. Go ahead—do it with her.”
“I worry her feminist nurse pals take a dim view of Berry and me loving each other.”
“Isn’t Lari running with those feminists? She doesn’t speak to me anymore. Forget staying friends with that no account hussy after she came between you and Berry, but is there a rule they can’t have men as friends?”
“Seems like it. I hope Berry can tolerate me.”
“If she can’t, I can. What are you doing tonight? I might go over to the bar for a while.”
She needed to let off some steam and discourage another attack of nerves, though going to the bar created its own tumult inside her. “I’ll meet you there.”
Chapter Eighteen
Allison met with Berry’s group of nurses in the living room one night when Jaudon was working. She’d taught women’s self-help clinics when she lived out West. The group took her up on her offer to teach them cervical and breast self-exam techniques. They used the Boston self-help book. Allison brought three new women with her, nursing students from a different college.
Samantha acted like a timid kid despite all the babies she’d had. The rest were guarded, except Cullie, who cried out, “I’m as excited as a heron after a frog. This is the first step in creating our women’s clinic.”
Berry invited Gran to join them, but Gran preferred staying put in her bedroom with two hours’ worth of saltines, stewed prunes, TV shows, and her needlecraft project.
The women pushed back the furniture to make room.
Allison instructed them to lay out white paper from a roll she produced and to place the pillows they brought from home on it. Donna supplied each of them with a clear plastic speculum from a medical supply shop. Allison handed them small mirrors and the others brought their own K-Y Jelly. They were going to see what the insides of their bodies looked like.
Nervous goose bumps on her arms, Berry’s hands shook as she sat on the paper across from Cullie. There was giggling from the twosomes around them.
“You know I’m not a nursing student,” said Cullie. “Please don’t think I’m a pervert for being here. I mean, I am, everyone knows”—she poked Berry on the elbow—“but it’s not for the thrill or anything, honest, amiga.”
“I may be eager to learn, but I’m as twitchy as you, Cullie.”
“This is a procedure you need to know to do your job. It’s related to my job because…” Cullie wrinkled up her forehead. “It doesn’t relate to my job at all.” With a thoughtful look she added, “But it might make me a better lover, neener-neener.”
Cullie’s silliness in the midst of their earnest probing made the whole procedure brighter for Berry.
Berry tilted her head. “They should teach this in school, like Allison said. Instead, we learn about what equipment to lay out for the doctor, what notes to take. The doctor is almost always a man.”
“Honest? I better learn to do this self-exam stuff because no man is ever poking me with any instrument down here.” She took her shorts off. “Let’s quit shilly-shallying.”
“Okay, I’ll go first because I learned this part of it at school.” She unwrapped the speculum and slathered K-Y on it. Cullie wiggled her pillow under her bottom. Berry placed the speculum, but told Cullie to insert it, which she did with an unexpected swiftness. Berry winced. With the exception of Samantha O’Connell, the other women were complaining about discomfort and telling their partners to slow down.
She switched her flashlight on and looked through the vagina into Cullie’s cervix, which was close to identical to her textbook. Allison told them the act of demystifying and studying this part of a woman’s body was liberating. It was not an idle exercise; the purpose was learning about their bodies, ending the taboos, enabling them to say the forbidden words, name their secret parts, and claim their bodies for themselves.
“Are you okay, Cullie?”
“As okay as I can be having intercourse with a cold medieval torture device.”
The skin around Berry’s freckles prickled and, she knew, reddened.
Cullie apologized. “You still want me to do this to you?”
“For me sounds nicer. But not till you look in this mirror.” She gave Cullie the hand mirror.
“We are going to change the world by taking care of business ourselves.” Cullie positioned the mirror as Berry shined the flashlight. “Well, bless my girly soul. Who’d have guessed I’m pink and creamy in there?”
“What did you expect?” Berry tried to keep a professional face, but lost it with Cullie’s answer.
“Something coarse and damp and bumpy, like toad skin.”
Berry laughed out loud. Someone said, “Shh,” but Allison cut her off. “It’s okay to have fun doing this, women.”
This clinic was, as Allison kept saying, empowering. Nonetheless, Berry wasn’t comfortable exposing herself to anyone but Jaudon and she saw she wasn’t the only squirrely one. She was in a skirt, so needed only to remove her underwear. Cullie performed the procedure as Berry had, but in complete silence, her face red. She wondered if Cullie was even able to see through her steamed-up glasses.
All the while Berry worried. She wanted to kick herself for not warning Jaudon the nurses and Cullie were coming over. With more women than she expected, the whole situation was out of control. Jaudon was with Rigo at the bar tonight. There was always the chance Jaudon might come home sooner than she planned. Cullie was there; telling Jaudon the clinic was for a class was not going to work.
Next to them, Mercie cried out. “I am so sorry. It came on early.” She had her period.
“No, no, don’t apologize. This is our lucky day.” Allison asked Mercie if she would be willing
for others to look. “Fact, sisters: we menstruate. I know the word sister sounds corny, but we are sisters in the struggle.”
Not Jaudon, Berry thought with some sadness. How mortified she’d be if she were here. Donna Skaggs, as put off as she was by lesbians, would have a cow if she was partnered with Jaudon. She swallowed a laugh at the idea of Donna having a cow while they watched. They all took turns viewing what they looked like when shedding blood.
By that time, Mercie was crowing about being the one to offer their first view of the curse, as she called it, and the atmosphere was warm and victorious.
“You see why this is important?” Allison said. “We know more about our bodies. Just as good, we can run across one another anywhere in the world and recognize sisters. We have a bond much greater than a cigar-smoking Bubba club.”
Allison was inspiring. They applauded with excitement as she urged them to say words they’d never used before: mons, labia, vulva. Berry recognized a sense of accomplishment new to her, and a glowing pride she tried to tamp down, as she was taught to do in her church. It wasn’t so much a personal pride, as a tribal certitude. The women were doing for themselves. It seemed so natural she wondered why they’d let go of their powers way back when.
What was that? She plainly heard a key in the two sticky front door locks. Bat! The others heard it too and looked as one toward the door. Someone whimpered.
Jaudon called out in her raspy voice, “Hey, how come you locked me out?” The front door slammed behind her as she, mouth open on her last word, scanned the half-naked pairs of women on the white sheets, frozen in the act of examining their own or one another’s breasts. Plastic instruments shiny with clouded jelly and, next to Mercie, a bloody paper towel lay discarded.
“What in the Sam Hill…?” She backed out, bumping the door ajar with her bottom and pulling it closed with an arm, her book bag catching on the knob.
The eyes of one of the new women, round with horror, shifted from the door to Berry. Pointing, the woman asked, “Who was he?”