by Bee Rowlatt
I ask about her magic, and she smiles. “You’ve never had any contact with this kind of thing, have you?” I must seem very unmagical.
“No,” I admit, “but I like it. Would you do a Tarot reading for me?”
“Sure!” She reaches down the cards and hands them to me. “You have to shuffle them whilst asking them a question, and you need to focus all your energies into that question.”
I start to shuffle, and a question immediately jumps into my head. Is there any point to these trips with Will – is there even an answer to the questions I’m asking? Is there an answer? I think about energies, and arrange my facial features into an approximation of religious awe.
My energies get hassled by Will dropping something into Mr Tickles’s food bowl. I hurry over and retrieve a coin and a teaspoon from among the cat food, then return to my shuffling and energies. Deborah sits down next me. She sets the cards out, making “ooh!” noises as she does. “Aah!”
The cards are beautiful, like illustrations from childhood books. They look as old as fairy tales, as stained-glass images. I’m delighted to spy a queen and an empress in there.
“So, what was your question?” asks Deborah.
“Well, it was… Is there actually an answer to my questions on this journey?”
“OK. That’s just beautiful.”
The very questions, I remind myself ruefully, that morph every day. But then: this is California, surely I can do better. What would Wollstonecraft ask? In her lines from the gloomy cell, she wishes she could have been “useful and happy”. I apply my energies as hard as I can. Somehow the question regroups in the voice of a beauty contestant over a Mariah Carey background: How to be useful and happy?
“Yes, this is beautiful…” murmurs Deborah, spreading the cards out. “The first one you’ve laid down is the Queen of Swords. She’s sitting in her chair with an idea. Your idea, right? So here you are, going after this idea. Then it’s crossed by Death, which doesn’t mean physical death. Death in the Tarot is about internal transformation. So it could be that the idea you started out with transforms and changes.”
It just did, in fact.
“And here at the bottom,” she continues, “is a fabulous one for your quest: the Wands. This is about energy: I’m going out to the world and I’m going to find it. And the sky has all the cups – it’s like I’ve learnt, I’ve drunk of these cups and I’m walking away. But look, they’re still full, so it’s just saying I’ve had enough and I’m moving on from this.”
I’ve drunk of these cups and I’m walking away. The sky has all the cups… I’ve drunk of these cups and I’m walking away. The bottomless dish of coffee, eternally recruiting my spirits. Is this Wollstonecraft?
“Behind this and passing is Justice, and this is a major one. This is some idea of fairness or setting things right. The most important thing is what you see – is there anything you see in it?”
Justice! Justice. That’s what we’re supposed to drink from Wollstonecraft’s dish of coffee? Am I doing this right? I’m trying my best, but it feels a bit like an imaginary shopping game.
“Ermm,” I waver. “I’m not sure how to think about that.”
“I’m not sure either, but there’s some major idea in here,” she says reassuringly. “Maybe that was the ‘Having It All’? The balance – you’re thinking about feminism and all that. Now it’s the Swords: time for a retreat and to process all the thoughts. Oh, wonderful. This is the question right here.. and this is you. This is YOU: the Star is the universal consciousness card – it’s being in touch with the earth, world, water and stars. That’s great for you, right there and – oh my Goddess – look at this: you have the Empress! The Goddess, right? Fertility. That’s a very creative matrix right now.”
Who doesn’t love stars, fertility and empresses? I’m enjoying all this a bit too much. But for the life of me I can’t think of a single thing to say. So I make some pleasure-based noises in my throat instead. Next we glide onwards into the Hopes and Fears aisle.
“These are your major arcana,” she says. “These are what matter to you, right now.”
“That one’s a bit scary.”
“What?”
“That funny hand coming out of a cloud.”
“Well, it’s something being offered – an emotional offering – and you’re not ready to take it. You’re saying: ‘I’m not ready, I don’t want to look at that.’ So there might be something you’re resisting?”
Would that be the Crock? Or Starhawk’s permaculture gardening advice? That brief episode in which my sacred and defining issues were fed into a woodchip machine and spread out for mulch? No, I certainly was not ready for that.
I cannot immediately determine whether I ought to rejoice at having turned over in this solitude a new page in the history of my own heart.
Even so, it’s all getting me onto something of a mystical high. My rational mind knows that the cards can’t be caught out or be made to be wrong. It’s not like you ask them to reveal your true love and they reply: “Beware of tracksuit bottoms because your child will pull on them really hard in the checkout queue.” But still. There’s something in it.
This ancient and mysterious rite makes you try to answer your own questions. The cards make you reflect, and they make you wonder. That has to be a good thing. I reach out and give the Wollstonecrafty Queen of Swords a little pat. My inner stores of universal consciousness are all stocked up like a shelf full of baked beans and Marmite. It’s not going to be easy to leave the safe warm world of Deborah. When I grow up, I want to be a witch.
Chapter Seventeen
The Croak
Goodbye, San Francisco, you most magical of places. I scoop up my Elvis-hassling life-enhancing boy, and we head out to find the car. Our stuff is heaped around us again, and we’re back on the road. I type the next destination into the Satnav so she can guide us there with her irksome lady-voice. She reckons only a couple of hours. It’s a clear and sunny day, and I’m full of that now familiar mix of fear and joy. We’re heading to an unknown place – where will we sleep tonight, what will we see when we wake up?
We drive out of the heart of San Francisco, “the cool grey city of love”, away from the wooden houses cohabiting with the steel and concrete skyscrapers. The trip north delivers us to that handsome beast, the Golden Gate Bridge. Rugged splendour, sunlight bouncing off its orange Art Deco towers: how is anyone supposed to be able to drive over it in a straight line? I fall a little bit in love. Like all good American things it is nothing less than the triumph of optimism: the bridge they said could never be built.
We cross over, agog. Over the bridge and northwards into the mountain lines of the Golden Gate National Park on the other side. It’s not golden, and there’s no gate, but there is a rainbow tunnel. I promise you: an actual rainbow tunnel. “Look Will!” We drive right in.
It is now the last stage of the last journey, and we’ve been saving Jean up until the end. She’s the one I met in London, the one with time to talk about conkers, the one who said: “Yes, mothers can write – indeed they should.” Jean Hegland, author of Still Time, Windfalls and Into the Forest, has three kids, Disney-large eyes and a sarcastic streak that’s downright un-American. And she lives in fifty-five acres of wooded wildness.
We’ve arranged to meet in the town of Healdsburg because there’s no way Ms Satnav will be able to locate Jean’s wilderness home. From there we set off in convoy, and I follow Jean’s tail-lights obediently through the gathering darkness. We turn onto a smaller track, then another. This goes on for a long time. It’s like following Mr Tumnus. The trees get taller until they touch above us, blocking out the stars. Finally there are lights up ahead and we slow down. I pull in behind her, and we step out into the smell of pine trees and night-time.
The house has a large porch covered in plants. Jean’s husband Douglas comes out to greet us. Douglas is a teacher and Shakespeare enthusiast with dashing white hair and a collection of ancient Volvos
lounging around the drive. Their wooden house is filled with books, books books books, and a piano. The kitchen has slow-cooked food and different kinds of honey. And proper tea.
There’s a cat sitting with its paws folded: it’s called Kitty. Another notch on Will’s international cat-victim tally: he advances on Kitty’s tail. Kitty takes this in his stride. “We’re going to like it here,” I silently say to Will. I’d love to be a fun and gracious guest, but within about ten minutes Will and I are both in bed, fast asleep.
In the morning the light filters through the greenery, with an underwater quality. Jean takes us out to walk around her forest. The trees are immense. You have to bend your head right the way back to see their tops. We walk along talking, and she introduces us to giant redwoods, native ferns, redwood sorrel, poison ivy, peeling madrone trees and a surprised baby fire salamander underneath a log.
We scramble through dense underbrush along a creek and up steep slopes, lifting Will over fallen branches and round improbably large tree stumps. We soak up the foresty sounds and lose our way. It’s miles to the next anything. I’m a bit scared of the wilderness, I tell her. Jean laughs and says it’s not wilderness. I laugh back and say: “I’m from England, and this is wilderness.”
It feels so far from the world that the passing of time doesn’t happen in a straight line. We meander back home and mosey around. At some point we organize and get ready for the following day’s activities. Reluctant though I am, we have to emerge from the forest. Jean is giving a reading in the morning, and in the afternoon I’ve got us tickets to see Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues. On top of all this, it’s International Women’s Day.
“Let’s all go on a consciousness-raising day out!” cheers Jean.
We leave early for her event, at a conference called ‘Women on Writing’. Jean is appearing with the African-American poet Camille T. Dungy. Their readings are thoughtful and stately. It’s all very elevating. But then there’s an open-mic session, and apparently everyone’s got something to chip in about women writing. Things all go a bit random and blogospheric. Hark at me with my total lack of dramatic irony. Anyway, about seven or eight women writers in, something disgusting happens.
I’ve got Will on my lap and I’m stroking the curls of his hair, when my fingers encounter a small, warm lump. Some kind of soft growth. I get a bad gut feeling and lift the hair at the back of his head, peering closer. It’s a tick. A live creature is burrowing into my baby’s neck. This instantly sickens the world all around me and my throat shrivels. Do I leave it or yank it off? Is it true that their head stays behind and then you die of blood poisoning? I wildly signal to Jean: she comes round and knows exactly what to do. She whips out some tweezers, seizes the parasite and crushes it right there.
The other women writers throng round to see what’s wrong with the unhappy and very noisy baby. I’m told to observe him. I’m told he should be fine – as long as he doesn’t spike a fever in the next few weeks. I’m told he’s most likely OK: these things happen. The first few pieces of advice are welcome – the next few less so, and before long I get the angry, vulnerable feeling of being judged and want to reclaim the tweezers and jab a few well-meaning commentators in the eye.
I’ve let my poor Will down. A burst of fiery tenderness aches in my chest as he leans his head on me, pushing into me. I enclose the entire, sweet weight of him. I shut my eyes and whisper into his hair that I’m sorry. I reach my arms all the way around him, encircling him with myself, as if trying to protect him retrospectively. It takes a while for the world around us to come back into focus.
Camille the poet is a majestic woman. Apparently she once told Jean that she’d love to write about motherhood and to convey the feelings that she has for her daughter. But she didn’t want people to think she was “on the mommy drugs”. Her poems are the big questions – death and slavery. She continues with the reading but I’m distracted by the credibility gap of motherhood as subject matter. Just look at movies, where car chases outnumber mothers by a ratio of precisely eighty-two hundred to one. Mommy drugs indeed. I say inhale. There are worse drugs out there.
Motherhood is not deemed worthy as book material – or even, let’s face it, a job description. I summon two of my wisest friends to mind, both full-time mums. They’re clever, brutally funny, and both get in a twist about what to call themselves when they meet new people. “Why can’t we big up the subject?” I later ask Jean. “Motherhood is all about reinvention, heaving passions, hard physical labour and going round the bend. Surely that’s quite glamorous – there’s plenty there to be going on with, isn’t there?”
Jean not only agrees: she wrote a novel about it. She goes further than Camille: “Out here in puritan America, where we generally have no trouble bragging, the people who celebrate motherhood are typically neo-conservatives and the Christian right, so any of the rest of us who might have stumbled into motherhood’s great pleasures and deeper meanings find ourselves scared of coming off like lobotomized Jesus-wives.”
Mommy drugs, lobotomies? Not quite what I had in mind. That’s how Stephen King would write Motherhood. What about the good stuff?
We’ve left the ‘Women on Writing’ behind, stopped off for burritos, and now it’s time for the afternoon’s entertainment: collective enlightening with the Vagina Monologues. We’re hovering around outside the theatre figuring out where to collect our tickets when something catches my eye.
A woman with granny-ish hair and sensible shoes is standing by the door, handbag on her arm, giving out leaflets. She’s wearing some kind of inflatable pink suit – it looks like giant rashers of lurid bacon draped over her shoulders – and a small round pink hat. It’s somehow familiar – I stare for a moment more. The penny drops and I go over and greet her:
“Hello. Are you a vagina?”
“Why, yes I am!” she crows, patting down her four-foot padded labia and drawing them round herself like a precious shawl. “I’m so glad you could tell – don’t you just love it?” She jauntily adjusts the shiny pink hat. “Are you coming to the show?” Her name is Suzette, and she’s leafleting for further productions of the Monologues. Jean and I both hug Suzette, star-struck, and get Will’s photo taken with her. This will be one to bring out when his teenage mates come over to play Call of Duty Advanced Warfare.
A couple of haranguing hours later we’re in the car, driving back to the forest again. Phew. We’re both annoyed, and trying to figure out why.
“I’m glad it exists, and I’m sure it was necessary,” I say, “but I can’t help feeling patronized. It feels outdated. And not quite mother-lovin’ enough for me. Do you think there could be a penis monologues?”
“Come on!” says Jean. “I think they’d argue that Western civilization has been one long penis monologue ever since Aristotle!”
“But I didn’t like the scornfulness towards men.”
“Yeah, even the guy who loved vaginas was boring and dull and not hot.”
Will sings in his little car seat behind us. We both feel a little guilty and unsisterly for not joining in the collective whooping. Are we beyond consciousness-raising?
“I guess I don’t want it re-raised,” says Jean. “But there’s also a lot of stuff missing from the Vagina Monologues. What about labioplasty, vajazzling, hymen restoration? What about cross- and post-gender debates? What about trans men and women? And letting men join in? What about dialogues rather than monologues?”
“And what about motherhood?”
“Motherhood is such a layered question: you can’t escape that there’s one layer to do with culture, and then another biological layer. That’s the one thing that took me by storm when I had kids – the sheer physicality. That baby comes out and it’s just… oh my God…” She groans with passion. “On the one hand I’d sometimes think: fuck, I wish Douglas would do more dishes, but on the other I was so grateful, because I never had to leave my baby. There were moments when I’d have given my life to have someone show up and say: ‘He
y, I’ll take the kids for a moment.’ But when it really mattered, when I had to travel for work, Douglas would take over. And it was basically my choice: I could have gone back to work much sooner if I’d wanted.”
I stare out at the brake lights in a long red chain up ahead of us. “It’s like we’re free to choose, but those choices are hard, and somehow they make it complicated either way. Because it’s not assumed that we’ll tie the baby onto our backs and go straight back out to plough the fields. Those women just don’t know they’re born.”
“Oh yes, those lucky girls,” says Jean, laughing. “They have it so easy, don’t they! But seriously, that’s kind of the bottom line, isn’t it? This is what kids struggle with nowadays: what will I be when I grow up? Such a weird question. For humans to wonder what they will be, and the idea that you can even choose, is sort of a new thought in the history of the world.”
I am the first of a new genus.
Back at Jean’s home. Ruby-throated humming birds buzz around her porch door. Some thirsty bees have assembled in a shimmering black heap on a dish of water. Bringing my diverse encounters and questions back here is like having a trying-on session after a blow-out shopping trip. Posing and mincing around, asking Jean what she thinks of my new thigh-high boots or hemp sandals. Actually, that particular brand of identity politics doesn’t really fit: you’ve got a VPL now that you’re wearing it outside of the changing room. Too sparkly? How about if we accessorize with a little eighteenth-century Reason – there now, just right!
Jean is pottering in the kitchen, Doug comes in from teaching his classes, Will is bumbling around the cat and Jean’s youngest child Garth is here for some dinner. He’s twenty and a student. He’s tall and skinny, and looks like a model, but without the self-awareness. He’s cut his own hair, leaving bald patches round the sides as though he’s moulting, and is wearing falling-down jeans and knackered Converse hi-tops.