“We can’t let this go on, Elliot! These dances are more lewd than anything I’ve ever seen in New York City!”
“I thought you were doing a citizen’s arrest?”
“The police are all a bunch of Chads. They won’t help. We’ve got to bring Comstock here, in person.”
My breath quickened. He was using anachronistic slang right out of the Celibate4Life forums in my time, where “Chads” were men who had fallen for women’s wiles and refused to join the fight. No way was this guy from the 1890s. Or if he was, he’d been spending time with C4L travelers. Which still made him an agent in the edit war.
Aseel and I exchanged looks and made a big show of oohh-ing and aahh-ing over the new subway entrance. She leaned over and spoke in a low voice. “I think that’s one of the fellows from the press club.”
I glanced over quickly, and sure enough, it was the creep who’d been handing out zines at the Grape Ape show. Now I had a name for him: Elliot. He scratched his muttonchops and grunted as the C4L guy continued to rant about how he was going to send a telegram to New York right now and teach everyone a lesson about virtue.
At last, Elliot cut him off. “I have a better idea.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I think we should take this to the Lady Managers Board.”
“The what?”
“You know the Woman’s Building on the other end of the Midway? It’s run by a group of upstanding women, and a lot of them are Prohibitionists. Good, faithful wives. If they get one look inside one of these places, they’ll bring the wrath of God.”
I could hear the C4L guy practically hyperventilating. “And then Comstock will have to come! He’ll have to!”
“He’ll arrest every one of those foul bitches.”
“Meet at the usual place tomorrow night, and we’ll figure it out with Ephraim.”
“Yes, sir.”
They broke apart and Elliot headed for the subway entrance. We turned our back on him and linked arms, walking at a leisurely pace like two ladies out for a stroll. When I glanced over my shoulder, Elliot had disappeared.
“We’ve got to do something to stop them.”
“Perhaps we’ll write our own song lyrics for that tune and start selling it, so those Persian Palace bints can’t claim they’re me.”
I couldn’t believe she was still obsessing about the Persian Palace. “Didn’t you hear what those men said? They’re going to bring the Lady Managers to the theater! They’re the most politically powerful women in the city, and they have Comstock’s ear.”
Aseel was angry. “Look, I know you’re on this traveler mission to stop Comstock, and I’m with you. But I can’t go back to some fancy future like you can, okay? I have to think about what’s happening right now. I can’t imagine those bumpkins coming up with a foolproof plan to stroke their own cocks. They’re idiots! I’m less worried about the Lady Managers shutting us down than I am about losing business if everybody is copying my dance.”
“But we have the jump on those guys. If we can get to the Lady Managers first, maybe they’ll ally with us and we can fight the Comstockers together.”
“You aren’t hearing me, Tess.” Aseel whirled to face me. “Didn’t you understand what you saw at the Persian Palace? Not all women are your allies. You know that, right? We have to protect the village.”
It was like we were defending a little town in the Maghreb against the Alexandrian army. I wondered, not for the first time, whether I’d been traveling too long. Times bleed together in my mind. But maybe that’s because there are always villages being ground to a pulp by somebody else’s war.
I hung my head. “Okay, I’m sorry. You’re right. You should write some lyrics. Sol could sell them for a nickel outside the theater.”
“He’ll love that.”
“But I still might visit the Woman’s Building tomorrow. If nothing else, maybe I can get them to meet with us.”
Aseel shrugged. “No harm in it.”
“What are you going to write the song about?”
“I think it should be about those two sad little Comstockers. They’ll never enjoy anything. They’ll never see the hoochie coochie.” She wiggled her hips, imitating the Persian Palace dancer imitating her.
“What the hell is the hoochie coochie?”
“You haven’t heard? That’s what they’re calling the danse du ventre. Soph is really peeved about it, but I don’t mind. Hoochie coochie! It sounds like being tickled.”
I laughed. “It also sounds a little naughty.”
“I’d be disappointed if it didn’t.”
* * *
The next morning, I stood in the long hall of the Woman’s Building, its soaring walls punctuated by a comically large number of arched doorways and pillars. When I climbed a lacy iron spiral staircase to the second level, the place took on the appearance of a blimp hangar whose curving roof was improbably made of glass.
Sunlight poured into the building, playing over a timeline mural that unspooled the history of U.S. womanhood as I walked toward the Lady Managers Board office. Painted beneath 1700 were white women in pioneer outfits, cooking and cleaning. In 1840, they joined hands with black and brown women, marching for abolition and universal suffrage. At least twenty feet were dedicated to the year 1870, with women dancing beneath the text of the Fifteenth Amendment: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex, race, color, marital status, or previous condition of servitude.”
There was the election of Senator Harriet Tubman, under 1880, the only prominent brown face on the wall. A collage atop a waving American flag showed women voting, running their own stores, teaching children, working as nurses, and smashing liquor bottles in a Temperance march. Eighteen ninety was entirely devoted to the construction of the Woman’s Building, of course, with women looking at blueprints and picking out some of the bizarrely mismatched interior details for the hall’s décor. Beside the office door was a final panel devoted to the far-off year of 1950, where women were looking through telescopes and operating giant dynamos. A white woman’s face, capped by a bulbous, “futuristic” hat, hovered over the words “Lady President.” I stared at the political prediction, still a fantasy in my time, and could imagine Anita adding it to her ever-expanding list of “Great Moments in White Feminism.”
I remembered Soph telling us that the Lady Managers were running an anti-abolition candidate for some office, but they were also devoted to promoting women’s rights. There had to be some sympathetic members of the group, and maybe they would see our point of view.
A short, harried-looking woman with a pile of unruly black hair tangled into an updo answered my knock on the Lady Managers’ office door.
“I’m here from the Algerian Village. Is there somebody I could talk to about hosting a meeting between the women in the village and the Lady Managers?”
She looked dubious. “You’re Algerian?”
“I work there. We’re on the Midway.”
“Oh, you’re one of those.”
“There are a lot of women working on the Midway, but especially in the theaters, and I thought maybe the Lady Managers Board might like to meet with us. For the sake of female solidarity?”
She put one arm akimbo and stared at me like I was an idiot. I had to put this in terms she would understand. I needed something that would lead them gently away from that Great Moments in White Feminism playbook. If they met Aseel and Salina and the others, they might find it harder to team up with Comstock to destroy their sisters on the Midway. What would appeal to these women? There had to be an idea so innocuous that they couldn’t say no.
“There are a lot of women in the villages who could benefit from a … cultural exchange,” I said hesitantly. “They could talk to you about how women live in their countries, and the Lady Managers could teach them about American womanhood. Maybe we could have a … woman’s cultural tea?”
Clearly one of those words was a magical key because suddenly she was smiling and nodding and showing me into the plush, oddly decorated interior of the office. Pink, fluffy curtains hung next to African prints, and Moorish tiles shared wall space with racist caricatures of indigenous Americans carved from corn cobs.
“Sorry about the mess. All this stuff was donated and we have no idea where to put it. I’m Sarah, by the way. This is Augusta.” Sarah indicated another woman at a desk, busy writing something in shorthand.
“I’m Tess.”
“So you’re really not from Algeria?”
“I’m from California.”
“I suppose that’s almost as savage, really. Tell Augusta about your idea for a woman’s cultural tea.”
Fifteen minutes later, Augusta had two pages full of shorthand, and Sarah was already planning how many kinds of biscuits they’d need. None of the other exhibits had done any cross-cultural events yet, and they wanted the Woman’s Building to be the first.
“The Woman’s Building has a hard time selling tickets to our exhibits, but surely people would pay to watch a civilized meal with women in their bizarre costumes from all across the world.” Sarah looked pensive. “Plus, don’t you think it would be the perfect opportunity to teach these wild women some manners?”
The more she talked, the more I felt like I had eaten a spoonful of salt. It sounded like she wanted to turn our tea into a freak show. “I don’t want to sell tickets,” I said. “I thought we’d have more of a private meal, to get to know each other.”
Augusta looked up from her notes, perplexed. “Whatever would we do at a private meal? A lot of those women on the Midway can’t even speak! They use grunts and hand gestures.” She grimaced and mimed grabbing something. “But wouldn’t that be a fun show? Primitives with tea and biscuits?”
I stood up, my face filling with blood. I thought of a million things I could say, cruel and wrathful and right. I thought about how easy it would be to pierce these women’s hearts with the letter opener on Augusta’s desk and blame it on a man. But I did none of that. I cleared my throat carefully and said nothing. When I left, I didn’t slam the door. Aseel had been right. Not all women were our allies.
I bought a hot dog for lunch and took a brief detour around the artificial lagoon next to the Woman’s Building. It was full of paddle boats that bore visitors to an artificial island, planted with invitingly shady trees and dotted with park benches. The avenues here in the White City were wide and clean, and it seemed like every exhibit was devoted to mechanical devices and inventions that would make us richer. It couldn’t have been more unlike the thronged, polyglot alleys of the Midway, where the villages sold trinkets and cheap entertainment. If the White City was the world that Americans imagined for themselves, perhaps the Midway was the reality they couldn’t accept.
* * *
Aseel had almost finished her song. The lyrics were set to the complete tune Sol had improvised, going beyond the awful Persian Palace ditty. She belted out the first verse and chorus for a small afternoon audience as Salina danced and the musicians played drums and piano. The result was a cheerful cacophony:
I will sing you a song
While the ladies dance along
’Bout a very moral man
Who swore he did no wrong
Sad for him no girl was pretty
He was not long in the city
All alone oh what a pity
Poor little lad
He never saw the streets of Cairo
On the Midway he was never glad
He never saw the hoochie coochie
Poor little country lad
I applauded until my hands hurt, and Soph let out a delighted squeal. She had finished her article about the danse du ventre and brought a copy of it for Aseel and me to read. New York World wanted to publish it, and she was excited that her byline would appear in the same pages that featured the reporting of Nellie Bly.
Aseel joined us in the dressing room a few minutes later, exuberant about her own creation.
“What did you think?”
“I love it but…” Soph looked anxious. “Well, do you have to say hoochie coochie? That isn’t the proper name.”
“Neither is danse du ventre, love. That’s simply French for belly dance.”
I interrupted. “In case you care about my opinion, I thought it was perfect.”
Aseel laughed and Soph threw her hands into the air. “Fine, fine. Call it whatever you want.” Then her face lit up again. “You guys are coming to the invocation tonight, right? You have to be there by half past eleven at the latest, because she comes at midnight.”
“What? Who?” I remembered Soph mentioning a Spiritualist meeting tonight, but this sounded like something more elaborate.
“We’re invoking the goddess!” Soph said.
Aseel grinned and winked at me. “You know … the goddess?”
I didn’t know, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss it.
* * *
When I arrived at Soph’s chambers later that evening, a woman I’d never met before answered the door and shushed me as we came into the parlor. I could hear Soph speaking indistinctly and the murmur of other voices coming from her sitting room. The woman from the door handed me an ivory linen dressing gown. “Change into this,” she whispered. “You’ll need it to meet the goddess.” I could see now that the parlor was lined in neat piles of ladies’ clothing, each gown and skeletal corset balanced atop a pair of slippers. There must have been quite a crowd in there—I counted thirteen bundles, including my own.
The room smelled of sweat and incense when I slid between the pocket doors. Soph sat in the lotus position at the center of the room, surrounded by women lying back on pillows. Some rested heads on other women’s bellies, while others stayed at the periphery, their backs against the wall. All of them had their legs spread, hands pressed lightly against the fabric draped over their pelvic bones. It looked disappointingly like a New Age-y tantra situation. Then Soph spoke and I knew it was something else.
“Today we’re going to learn about a gift given to us by angels, because its sole purpose is to bring joy. It’s called the clitoris.”
“Praise be!” one woman cried. Then everyone giggled, including me.
I’d wondered whether Soph’s rituals had an erotic component to them, but I had no idea it would be this overt. She was basically throwing a masturbation party, like something out of the 2000s sex positivity movement. After traveling through millennia, I’d seen a lot of sex parties. I wasn’t completely taken by surprise. Still, none were quite like this.
Soph spoke again, a laugh lingering in her voice. “Let’s begin by calling the directions. I call the Goddess of the East, who teaches us the mysteries of yoga and the importance of contemplation. I humbly ask the East to allow us the use of her teachings, and have patience if we bungle them. We seek her guidance, but sometimes we get it wrong. I ask her to grant us peace, despite trying encounters with annoying bosses and rogues and moll buzzers.” There were a few titters at that.
“Now who wants to call the North?”
A woman I recognized from the Algerian Village volunteered, then a pink-cheeked lady with an expensive hairdo called the West. Each invocation was an alloy of irony and sanctity. As I settled into a pile of pillows next to Aseel, I saw a few more faces from the villages alongside the rich wives who made up most of Soph’s paying clientele.
Soph completed the opening ritual on a more earnest note. “Now I call the Plural Goddesses, who encompass all lands and times, who bring new hope and new beginnings. They bring us pleasure and delight without shame, and they remind us that we find sanctity through the fusion of friendship. They love all bodies because they have been every shape and size. The goddesses are now with us, to bless us and give us permission to quicken the plush where life begins.
“And now, we witness the miracle of angels. Everyone take a deep breath.”
The room filled with sig
hs. Some of the women began to hum quietly to themselves. I got the feeling that most of them had done this before, especially the ones who reached under their gowns and looked expectantly at Soph.
“Cup one hand over your mons Venus, ladies, and slowly move your fingers in a circle. Keep breathing.”
A few of the women had pulled their gowns up, but most seemed more comfortable with the modesty of exploring themselves under the cover of soft cloth. There were a few muted “ohhs” and hums as Soph continued to issue gentle instructions on where to move next, and what kinds of motions to try. The longer I listened, the less it felt like a sex party and more like one of those consciousness-raising groups from the 1970s where women used mirrors to see their vaginas for the first time. Soph’s goal was simply to teach these women where to find the clitoris, and how to use it. As the breathing slowly blurred into moans, she quietly checked in with each woman, guiding her if she needed it, making sure everyone’s fingers found a spot that gave them pleasure.
Soph spoke again, her voice low. “Now I want you to think about something that makes you feel good. It could be a flower, or a nice breeze. It could be a man…” She was interrupted by a few breathless giggles. “Or a goddess, or a songbird. It could be how warm water feels on your feet, or silk against your neck. It could be the taste of sweets on your lips.”
And then she was next to me, the pressure of her hips on the pillows causing me to roll slightly toward her. “Everything okay?”
I nodded and she winked before turning to Aseel, whose back was arched and breaths shallow. “Remember to take it slow. Draw it out for as long as possible.” She rubbed Aseel’s belly sensuously, which didn’t exactly seem like it would make it easier for her to hold out. “Breathe, breathe.”
Then, her voice raised, Soph switched tactics and urged us to take it faster. “The goddess is coming. I feel her. Do you feel her?”
There were sighs and moans and a few scattered cries of “Yes!” All around me were women with their heads thrown back, eyes closed, their bodies thrumming with desire. I felt it too. More than I’d realized. Cursing the lack of commercial vibrators in this period, I followed Soph’s instructions as she guided us closer and closer to the palace of angels. “The goddesses want you to come meet them. Have no fear. Give yourself to them. Come to them.”
The Future of Another Timeline Page 11
