The Novels of Lisa Alther

by Lisa Alther

  We all watched in terrified awe as flames roared and melted the snow on all sides. The driver was rolling fast down the hill.

  ‘Now what?’ I asked Eddie, our field marshal, as I trembled with fear.

  ‘We go out and “help,” — Eddie said with an insane giggle.

  Throwing on parkas and ski boots, we trooped from the cabin and strapped on our cross-country skis. We glided down the meadow along the packed snowmobile tracks. By now, the fire had burned down. The other snowmobiles were flocked close by, and their drivers were standing looking into the fading inferno and shaking their helmeted heads. The fire had fortunately burned away all traces of our stakes and fir branches. Only the blackened gutted carcass of a Sno Cat remained.

  ‘Goodness me, what happened?’ Eddie inquired.

  ‘I dunno,’ one driver mumbled. ‘Jesum Crow, didn’t see the goldurn hole.’

  ‘Can we help?’ Mona asked.

  ‘Don’t suppose none of us can now,’ another driver replied dourly.

  The driver of the burnt-out machine was still lying in the snow down the hill. A couple of his friends were with him. Eddie and I strolled over.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked gravely.

  The unhappy victim had his helmet off. It was Rodney, his round mean face shaken. Squatting next to him was Ira, his visor raised to display his ruddy high-boned cheeks and his quivering nostrils. He and I smiled slightly in recognition.

  ‘I’m all right,’ Rodney snarled, ‘but you’re gonna have to pay for my machine.’

  I immediately assumed that we had been found out,

  Eddie, however, gasped with feigned outrage. ‘Why, we wouldn’t think of it!’

  ‘You had no goldurn warning signs up, so you’ll have to replace my machine!’

  ‘That beats anything I’ve ever heard! You trespass on our posted property. You harass us in the middle of the night in our private home by circling around on those — lawn mowers. And now you ask us to buy you another one when you’re dumb enough to fall in a hole!’

  ‘Jesum Crow, lady!’ Rodney yelled. ‘We’ve driven our machines on this field and this pond for years! It’s the best racetrack in the county. You can’t post it just like that!’

  ‘The hell we can’t!’ Eddie turned around on her skis. Ira and I looked at each other and shrugged. Eddie and I began herringboning back up the meadow, hunched over and pushing with our poles and looking altogether like arthritic flamingos.

  ‘See you in court!’ Rodney yelled.

  Soon the shows began to fall in earnest. We five were spending quite a bit of time in the cabin. The atmosphere was tense. We were waiting to see what would happen next in our sheepmen/ cattlemen feud with the Stark’s Boggers, whom we had intended to befriend and instruct in the ways of The Revolution. For another thing, we had run out of things to say to each other. After several weeks of sitting around the stove in the evenings, we had completely exhausted the possibilities for conversation contained in each of our autobiographies. We had heard a limb by limb description of the dismemberment of the fetus in Mona’s womb by suction aspiration. Eddie had spoken haltingly, but at great length, about her mother, who turned out to be a prostitute who had brought her clients home for her couplings. Atheliah told about being called Goliath behind her back in secondary school. She had begun slouching and hunching in order to minimize her size, her spine becoming increasingly bowed under the weight of derision from diminutive pubescent males. Then, once she had successfully slumped down to their size, they began imitating her hunch when she wasn’t looking, stooping over and swaying their arms with their hands brushing their kneecaps. They began calling her Atheliah the Ape.

  Once we had all established that nothing about us was our own fault, that we were all victims of the exploitative patriarchal society we were now dedicated to overthrowing, that we were in the process of breaking free from the social constraints that had been imprisoning us, and that we were well on our way toward realizing our full goodness and virtue — what was there left to say?

  So we took up hobbies. One dark snowy afternoon Laverne had shut herself into her room with her vibrator. Squeals of ecstasy were filling the cabin. The electric lights in the kitchen where Eddie and I sat were dimming and brightening rhythmically, like the lights on death row during an electrocution. Our electric bill had jumped five percent since Laverne had moved in.

  I was sitting next to the wood stove crocheting the green section of my ninth rainbow curtain, to be used in Eddie’s and my bedroom. Eddie had installed a foot-powered potter’s wheel in the kitchen corner and was directing her considerable sculpting talents into more immediately relevant channels by making dishes. That afternoon she was working on soup bowls. Snow was lashing against the windows, and the fire felt good.

  Mona and Atheliah were in the living room practicing their Tae Kwon Do, which they were learning via a correspondence course from Boston. Grunts and jarring crashes blended with the gasps and shrieks from Laverne’s bedroom to make the cabin sound like a medieval torture chamber.

  ‘What did you and Laverne do all day alone here together when the rest of us used to go up to the woodlot?’ Eddie inquired casually, wetting her fingers in a dish of water and pedaling the wheel with her foot.

  ‘Oh, nothing much. I did the usual stuff — cooking and cleaning. And Laverne just wandered around trying to figure out what she should be doing.’

  ‘I bet.’

  I let my hands and my crocheting fall into my lap and looked over at her.

  ‘Did she use it on you?’ she asked, not meeting my eyes.

  ‘Use what on me? What are you talking about?’

  ‘That appliance of hers. That plastic phallus.’

  ‘What — the vibrator? I’ve never even seen it. Look, now what’s bugging you, Eddie?’

  ‘Oh, I know you wish you were up there with her right now. Don’t think I don’t notice the way you look at each other.’ She smoothed the clay with her fingers.

  ‘Eddie, no. You’re on the wrong track, sweetheart. If I wanted another lover, it certainly wouldn’t be a wo….’ It was too late.

  ‘A woman?’ Eddie crowed. ‘I knew it: You’re going straight! Who do you go to down in Stark’s Bog, Ginny? Which one of the village studs is putting it to you? There’s no use pretending it doesn’t happen. I’m onto your game. I’ve been at the clinic when you were supposed to be on duty and weren’t there.’

  I blushed and looked away guiltily. She had indeed found me out. I had been unfaithful to her a number of times over the past month or so. On my days at our center, I’d dutifully make myself a sandwich for lunch — soy-olive spread on dense whole wheat bread. But not only had I come to loathe the sight of a soybean, our jars of unsprayed grains and seeds had turned into terrariums, insects of every type hatching and flourishing in them. Consequently, at lunchtime, I’d taken to sneaking over to the IGA. I’d buy a can of Franco-American Spaghetti-O’s and wolf it down out back by the garbage cans, one of which would be blessed with the deposit of my untouched soy-olive sandwich. I remained silent, unable to confess this to Eddie.

  ‘Don’t think I didn’t notice the sly smile you gave that creep whose friend wracked up his snow machine in the meadow!’

  I looked at her helplessly and picked up my crocheting and jerked its strands straight with a gesture of disgust. ‘I’ve seen him around town,’ I replied with dignity. ‘I was just being pleasant.’

  ‘Oh sure. How does it feel to have the real thing, Ginny, after all these months of makeshift sex with me?’

  ‘That settles it,’ I said calmly, dropping my crocheting into my lap. ‘I’ve had it. I’m leaving.’

  ‘Oh no you aren’t,’ Eddie informed me.

  I looked at her.

  ‘I’m leaving.’ She stood up.

  ‘I’m leaving,’ I insisted, standing up. ‘I thought of it first.’ I began to stalk from the room.

  I felt a sharp pain on the side of my head and heard something hit the f
loor and shatter beside me. I felt dizzy and propped myself against the doorjamb.

  ‘God damn you, Ginny!’ Eddie yelled through clenched teeth. ‘Don’t you ever turn your back when I’m talking to you, you fucking bitch!’

  I put my fingers to my forehead and brought them down covered with blood.

  In a moment, Eddie was standing next to me in the shattered earthenware, dabbing ineffectually at my forehead and sobbing, ‘Christ! I’ve killed her! Oh God! What have I done! Ginny, you’re bleeding!’

  The cut turned out to be minor, though the bruise would be more major, to my satisfaction. Later, after it was cleaned up, I said, ‘Eddie, something scary is happening to you. You’ve got to get a grip on yourself. This jealousy number just doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t make sense,’ she said sullenly, slumped over her wheel, ‘but I feel that it’s valid. It’s you something is happening to, not me. And what’s happening is that you’re going straight. I know it as clearly as if you’d said it.’

  I sighed and then said calmly, fearful of another outburst, ‘You’ve always insisted, Eddie, that two opposite points of view on something could be argued equally convincingly in rational terms by merely switching the underlying assumptions. You said that to find out the truth about a situation, I had to rely on what I felt about it. Well, you feel I’m losing interest. But I feel I’m not. Which of us is right, Eddie?’

  ‘I’m right because I know I’m right.’

  ‘And I know I’m right. So where does that leave us?’

  Eddie brooded, while I crocheted. That night at supper she asked, ‘At what point do people cease to be roommates and begin to be a commune?’

  We all shrugged indifferently, me holding an ice pack to my swollen eye.

  ‘This set-up is getting to be, like, incestuous,’ Eddie continued. ‘It doesn’t feel good to me anymore. I think in time we’re going to drive each other crazy.’

  Mona shook her head in emphatic agreement. ‘You’re right, Eddie. It’s a totally insular existence.’

  ‘It had to be,’ I insisted. ‘We had to get everything going around here. But lately we’ve been getting involved with the clinic and all.’

  ‘That isn’t the kind of involvement I mean,’ Eddie said scornfully. ‘That’s small-time stuff. I’ve been thinking about this all afternoon. See what you think of it: a Third World Women’s Commune here at the Free Farm! We buy the land, and we get groups of women from the cities — black women, Puerto Ricans, American Indians — to build houses all over. Not randomly, but planned so that everyone would have both privacy and community. Then we build a community center with potter’s wheels and woodworking equipment, all kinds of craft supplies. And a day care area! We work the land together and become financially self-sustaining with cash crops of maple sugar and apple cider. A truck garden. Facilities for radical groups from the cities to come up with their families for vacations in the country. We prove right here in Stark’s Bog, Vermont, that it’s possible for women of different races and classes to live together in peace and loving cooperation. We establish once and for all that when life is otherwise, it’s only because people have been so fucked over by the macho ruling class!’

  I prodded my bruised eye, wondering how we were to get along with unknown blacks and Puerto Ricans when we couldn’t even get along with each other more than intermittently. But Eddie’s words had kindled a fire in the others. By the time she had finished, the hills around us were dotted with owner-built homes; the fields were full of bare-breasted sisters of all colors, sweating shoulder to shoulder. A community center sat by the beaver pond and was packed with talented craftswomen who were cheerfully casting and molding and weaving all the material goods needed by the entire group. The hills rang out with hymns of female solidarity.

  “Eddie,’ I asked hesitantly, afraid of sounding bougie, “where are we going to get the $60,000 to buy the land?’

  “You and your fucking accountant mentality!’ Eddie said grandly, waving the question aside.

  ‘I have an idea!’ Atheliah said with an inspired smile, her frizzy red hair waving around her head like a mad inventor’s. “We have, like, a women’s festival. A weekend thing with workshops and stuff. The Free Farm Women’s Weekend! I can spread the word through friends in Newark and New York. That way we can get women here, they can see the place, we can see them, and maybe some will join us!’

  ‘In other words, we need reinforcements against Stark’s Boggers?’ I asked sourly. I was ignored. An accountant mentality had no place in The Revolution.

  God only knows how we fitted eighty women into our cabin. The first night their sleeping-bagged bodies covered the floors like casualties waiting to be evacuated from a battlefield. They came from the surrounding towns and woods of Vermont. They also came, women of all sizes and shapes, from Montreal and Boston, from New York and Philadelphia, The grapevine approach had worked. The men in Mona’s and Atheliah’s former house had agreed to babysit as their contribution to the cause of female freedom and were now saddled, in their moss-lined living room, with twenty-eight frightened and unhappy children in various phases of toilet training.

  The next morning, after the frantic line-up in front of our one toilet, and after volunteers had cleared away the remains of some 48 pieces of whole wheat toast and half that many styrofoam cups of rose hip tea, we divided into groups and went into different rooms for our seminars. My job was to supervise volunteers in assembling a lunch out of the food everyone had donated. I had some free time, so I wandered quietly from room to room. Eddie’s group, called ‘Women and Politics,’ went on a tour of the Free Farm, taking in such inspiring sights as the manure-filled barn, the eggs we had neglected to collect, the un-pruned orchard. Eddie considered her workshop the equivalent of a model home showing in a suburban development. She was out to make converts to the simple life, which ours was, to hear her tell it.

  But she had a devil’s advocate — a tall, attractive, intelligent woman who kept making uncomfortable remarks like, ‘What you doin’ up here in the woods, man? The world’s crashin’ down around your heads, and you’re playin’ at being peasants! You’re on a fuckin’ earth trip, man!’

  Huffily, Eddie replied, ‘Like, it’s not enough to say that you’re against war, or you’re against the society that’s fighting it. What are you for, man? It’s not enough to be antideath, you got to be prolife. You can’t criticize a society and expect to enjoy its fruits at the same time, man. You have to produce, not just consume. It’s not enough to believe certain things, you have to live them as well.’

  ‘I am living my beliefs,’ the woman protested, glancing with distaste at the piles of manure. ‘And not in Outer East Judas, Vermont, where no one cares. I teach at Boston University. I’m changing society directly by my influence on the heads of my students, the future leaders of this oppressive society. There’s no more radical trip a person can get into than teaching. You’re the one that’s copping out — stuck away in some snowbound corner of the nation playing with yourself!’

  Eddie and the woman were locked in a match of revolutionary oneupsmanship, both having adopted more-radical-than-thou tones of voice. This might go on all weekend, I speculated as I turned to leave.

  ‘Garbage!’ Eddie snorted. ‘You’re ensconced there in that temple of learning where every student in sight already agrees with every word you utter. They come from the exact same background as you, they think the same thoughts, they use the same words. The real radical trip is to voluntarily place yourself among The People, who may scorn everything about you. To win them over to The Revolution is an achievement. Well, we’re working shoulder to shoulder with people like that every day. Making inroads into their heads, winning over their hearts by stealth.’

  I turned around and shot Eddie a questioning look. Could she possibly be speaking of us — the Commie outcasts of Stark’s Bog, who were engaged in weekly skirmishes with The People over our continued corporeal existence? I headed back
through the snow toward the cabin.

  Laverne’s group, “Women and Their Bodies,’ in Eddie’s and my first-floor bedroom, was in a fascinated cluster around Laverne herself. She sat in a chair, her knees drawn up to her shoulders like chicken wings. With the aid of a complex arrangement of an inserted plastic speculum, mirrors, and a flashlight, Laverne was demonstrating to the intrigued gathering how it was possible, if one possessed the flexibility of an Olympic gymnast, to view the inside of one’s vagina and the mouth of one’s cervix. I stood transfixed, gazing at the moist red hole. But for the life of me, I couldn’t grasp why anyone would want to view the mouth of her cervix as reflected in a mirror. I felt I couldn’t ask Laverne at the risk of sounding bougie.

  I kept going. In the living room was Mona’s group, the “Women and Rage’ set. A woman in a Sisterhood Is Powerful T-shirt was lying on the floor. Tears were gushing from her closed eyes and down her cheeks. She was shaking with sobs. Mona and her group were lined up on either side of her, slowly massaging the entire length and breadth of her shuddering body.

  ‘It’s cool,’ Mona was saying quietly, kneading a thigh. ‘We’re all sisters. Most of us have been in the same space. Go ahead. Lay it on us.’

  ‘Well,’ she gasped, between sobs, ‘so I told him I was pregnant. I thought he’d be, like, you know, happy or something.’ She paused to shake with sobs. Someone stationed near her head leaned over and gently licked the tears from her cheeks. It seemed to calm her, although it was driving me wild with revulsion.

  She continued shakily, ‘…so he stood up. I thought he was coming over to kiss me or hold me or something. I smiled at him. I was so proud and pleased. You know what he did? He slapped me, as hard as he could. It knocked me out of the chair and onto the floor. He started yelling, calling me a whore and a cunt and a bitch, and accusing me of trying to, like, trap him.’

  She wailed in agony. The group speeded up their massage. Mona crawled around to the top of her head, looked down at her fondly through purple-tinted lenses, and began massaging her temples.