"Sure," Iris said. "Just a bad day, that's all. But I feel great now. It was a bad day, but it's a beautiful night. Look at the stars."
They were driving down the narrow gravel road away from Graymalkin's farmhouse. The starry sky spread over them like a black velvet cape dusted with silver sequins.
"They're amazing," Chameleon said, though she could only glance up at the sky since she needed to keep her eyes on the road.
"Pull over," Iris said. "Stop the car for a minute so you can enjoy the sky."
Chameleon couldn't help smiling. Spontaneous moments like this had been her best times with Iris the year and a half they'd been together. "Well, you know me," Chameleon said, pulling the car to the side of the road. "I'm a sucker for stargazing."
They stood in a green field staring up at the glittering sky. Without Chameleon even noticing it at first, Iris had taken Chameleon's hand. Chameleon felt the power of their connection. She looked away from the stars and at Iris.
Iris smiled. "Come here," she said. She tugged on Chameleon's hand and led her across the starlit field to a dark grove of trees. "Here," Iris said, pulling Chameleon into the darkness of the woods.
"Why are you dragging me here?" Chameleon laughed. "You can't see the stars in here."
"Sure you can," Iris said, grinning. "If you're lying down." She leaned forward and pressed her mouth to Chameleon's, her arms encircling Chameleon, pressing them together breast to breast and thigh to thigh. They had always been a perfect fit. "Tonight," Iris whispered in Chameleon's ear, "when we were enacting the Great Rite, it made me remember what is was like when you and I would come together after a Sabbath, when you would be filled with the goddess, and I... I would make love to you and feel that power..." She found Chameleon's mouth again and gently pushed Chameleon down to a soft patch of moss that cushioned the ground like Gaia's carpet.
Chameleon lay back on the moss, smelling its sweet earthiness and feeling the sweet pressure of Iris's weight on top of her. She knew she should tell Iris to stop, to wait just a minute so they could talk about what this act was going to mean. They were lesbians, for goddess's sake. They weren't supposed to make a move without hours of processing their feelings. But Chameleon knew what she was feeling at this moment. Desire. Desire that flowed like warm water, drowning her questions, drowning the voice in the back of her head saying, "Don't do this," desire washing over her arms and legs and breasts and belly as Iris peeled off Chameleon's dress, and Chameleon lay naked on the good, clean earth, her breasts and hips and bent knees rising up like hills. And if she was the earth, then Iris was the sky, hovering over her, enveloping her, embracing her like the night sky embraced the earth in darkness.
Iris ran her small, skillful hands over Chameleon's shoulders, over her breasts, belly, and thighs. The words Chameleon knew she should say disappeared from her mind until there was nothing but Iris's hands on her skin, nothing but mouth touching mouth, skin touching skin, earth touching sky. And when Iris's hand entered the source of Chameleon's pleasure, there was nothing else in the whole world except that hand in that dark place, the athame penetrating the wine-filled chalice, the butterfly dipping into the flower's nectar, the yin merging with the yang—the source of all the power in the universe.
Chameleon felt the pleasure and the power fill her until she was full to bursting, overflowing, her bliss pouring out over the mossy earth and her cries piercing the night sky.
When Chameleon opened her eyes, she saw a sky full of sparkling stars. And when she closed her eyes, she could still see them.
Once Chameleon had returned to normal consciousness enough to realize that lying naked on moss made for a very chilly backside, she sat up to see that Iris had already gotten dressed. "Are you sure you want those clothes on?" Chameleon asked. "If you'd like to join me here on the moss, I'd be happy to... you know, return the favor."
"I couldn't let you do that," Iris said. "The goddess can be worshiped by her human subjects, but she doesn't worship them back."
Chameleon rolled her eyes. "Iris, I'm not a goddess. I'm just a regular witch like you."
"No," Iris said, offering Chameleon a hand to help her off the ground. "You're not like me. You're a high priestess—the goddess's vessel. And I am only worthy to worship at your altar."
More than once, Chameleon had thought that Iris might be a little nuts when it came to Wicca. Iris was a literalist, and so when Chameleon enacted the part of the goddess, Iris seemed to really think of her as a goddess, which had made their romantic relationship difficult. After all, Chameleon wasn't very goddess-like first thing in the morning, her hair a big mess and her mood a bigger one, her pillow wet with drool. Iris seemed to love going to bed with a goddess, but she was less fond of waking up with a regular woman.
Chameleon could've chosen to argue with Iris, but she decided to chalk Iris's oddness up to excessive alcohol consumption. "I'm assuming you're pretty drunk, or you wouldn't be talking that way."
Iris smiled. "Yeah, I'm still pretty drunk. Are you ready to go?"
"Well, I guess I'd better put my dress on first."
"In case we get pulled over?"
"Yeah."
They held hands walking back through the field. Chameleon's limbs were still heavy and languid with pleasure, but her brain was starting to work overtime. Had this encounter in the woods meant anything other than a few minutes of fun? And if it had, could she and Iris patch their relationship back together?
They rode in silence until they neared the turn-off for Iris's house. "So . . ." Chameleon said, "I could take you to your house. Or you could spend the night at my place. In the morning, I could make you those banana-oatmeal pancakes you like."
"You'd better just drop me at my place," Iris said. "Tempting as those pancakes are, I think I need to be by myself for a while and try to think through what happened today."
Chameleon felt shallow for the irritation she felt when Iris turned down her bed-and-breakfast offer. Clearly, something was really bothering Iris, and as both her high priestess and her friend, she needed to offer help and support. "Are you sure you don't need to talk about what's bothering you? Maybe I can help." She pulled the car over in front of the ramshackle Victorian house Iris shared with two roommates.
Iris smiled and touched Chameleon's cheek. "You already helped. Out in the woods, I needed that so much after..." Iris laughed. "You know, you're probably the last person I should be talking to about this."
"What do you mean?"
"The reason I had a bad day was because Jackie broke up with me."
Chameleon racked her brain, trying to remember if Jackie was a name she had heard Iris say before. "And Jackie would be...?"
"My girlfriend."
"Your girlfriend?" Chameleon and Iris hadn't been broken up two full months yet. How had Iris had time to get a girlfriend?
"See, I told you I shouldn't be talking to you about this. For you, it's like, 'Okay, Iris dumped me, so now Iris is the one who gets dumped.' It's only fair, isn't it? Like the Rule of Three."
The Rule of Three was die Wiccan idea that whatever you do, good or bad, will come back to you threefold. Like witch's karma. "Don't tell me what I'm thinking, Iris," Chameleon snapped. "Figuring out my thoughts and feelings was never a strength of yours."
"So now you're mad?"
"Apparently your ability to figure out my feelings has improved. And now if you'll excuse me, I think I need to be by myself for a while."
Iris grinned and shook her head. "Well, you wouldn't be much of a high priestess if you didn't have a flair for drama."
Chameleon didn't grin back. "Good night, Iris." When Iris leaned in to kiss Chameleon's cheek, she turned her face away.
Driving home, Chameleon marveled at Iris's slash-and-burn relationship style. She remembered watching a TV nature program that showed a rose going from a tightly closed bud into full bloom in less than five seconds. That was what dating Iris was like ... there was no ta
king it slow, no letting things develop gradually. She moved from first date to full-blown relationship with the speed of time-lapse photography. Of course, the rose in the nature program had also been shown dying alarmingly quickly, its petals falling one by one. This was where the metaphor in Chameleon's mind fell apart. Iris would never stick around to watch the petals dropping off pathetically; once the fullness of a relationship's bloom started to fade, she was out of there.
Chameleon's apartment was a converted garage in Fort Sanders, a funky neighborhood near downtown which was mostly inhabited by UT students and hippie throwbacks. Chameleon had first moved to the Fort when she was a UT student, but with each passing birthday she was moving more fully into the hippie throwback category.
Her garage apartment, which had once housed two cars, provided ample space to house Chameleon, her cat, and her belongings, thanks to a clever combination bookcase/desk/loft bed she and Coyote had built to occupy the center of the large, high-ceilinged room. Underneath the loft bed, a couch and a steamer trunk doubling as a coffee table served as her living room area. A little kitchen was tucked into the back corner of the apartment, and she kept her altar, with its candles, chalice, athame, and goddess statues in a little alcove between the bathroom and the closet door. Many people—Chameleon's family members, especially— had expressed shock that she could make a home out of what was really just one room. But to Chameleon, the space felt safe, womblike.
She needed to feel safe tonight. Often, after leading a ritual, she felt the need to retreat from people, to go away into herself. Tonight, of course, it was more than that. She had let herself feel for Iris again, even though she knew the problems she and Iris had weren't easily fixable. This was how it had always been with Iris. When Iris made love to her, she treated her with such reverence, but afterward, Iris had always pulled away, making Chameleon feel weak, vulnerable, and decidedly un-goddess-like.
Chameleon changed into her pink poodle pajama bottoms and her Glinda of Oz T-shirt that read, "Are you a good witch or a bad witch?" Taking the question on her T-shirt personally, she thought of the choice she had made to go into the woods with Iris: "Tonight I was a bad witch. But I'll try to do better."
Chapter 2
"Camille! Hold the tomato on the tempeh sandwich!"
Sally called through the kitchen window.
"Got it!" Chameleon yelled back. Here at the Moonshadow Cafe, the vegetarian restaurant where she worked die lunch shift five days a week, Chameleon was called by the name her parents gave her. She much preferred her pagan name to her Christian one, but she chose to use Chameleon only in the coven and among those in the know. Sally, the Moonshadow's owner, was a big-hearted, open-minded earth mother type, and Chameleon knew Sally would be happy to call her by her pagan name or any other outrageous nomenclature she could think up, but something stopped Chameleon from using her chosen name in the workplace—maybe the feeling that using her witch name while slinging sandwiches might rob it of some of its magic.
Not that she minded slinging sandwiches. Despite her mother's frequent admonitions that she was wasting her college degree, Chameleon liked cooking at the Moonshadow. She had been an art major in college, and working with food and all its different colors and textures had become a surprisingly satisfying creative outlet for her. And since Sally gave her free reign with the food as long as there was no meat on the menu, Chameleon could be as creative as she wished.
Her favorite idea for the menu, and the favorite of many customers as well, had been the Mashed Potatoes of the Day. Almost any non-dessert item, Chameleon felt, could be delicious when mixed with mashed potatoes. She had known her roasted garlic and shallot mashed potatoes would be good before she even made them, but her favorites were the more adventurous experiments that turned out well, like the avocado and Monterrey Jack mashed potatoes topped with sour cream and homemade salsa, or the root vegetable mashed potatoes that came out a festive hot pink because of die beet juice.
After assembling what seemed like hundreds of tempeh, tofu, roasted eggplant, and Portobello mushroom sandwiches, the lunch rush was finally over. Pantomiming wiping sweat from her brow, Sally hung the "closed" sign on the front door. "You know," she said, "the greedy side of me loves that all these yuppies from the downtown offices eat here because healthy food is trendy. But the old hippie dyke side of me liked it better when we were just a cult restaurant for cool people in the know."
"I know what you mean," Chameleon laughed. "Say, I'm experimenting with a new sandwich—a black bean and avocado wrap. You want to be my guinea pig?"
"You know me. I'm always a happy, hungry guinea pig."
They sat down with their sandwiches and chewed thoughtfully. "What do you think?" Chameleon asked.
"Good," Sally said. "Real good. Maybe we should try it for the Monday special."
"Okay." Chameleon pushed her plate away, most of her sandwich uneaten.
"Camille, are you okay?"
"Yeah, just feeling a little funky. Have you ever been dumped by a girlfriend, and then when you see her again, the old spark's there, and—"
"And before you know it, you're in the sack, and then afterward she makes you feel like shit?"
"Yeah," Chameleon said, amazed as always by Sally's perceptiveness.
"Nope, never had it happen," Sally said, then burst out laughing. "Of course I've had it happen. More than once. However, when you've been an out dyke for over thirty years, there's not much that hasn't happened to you more than once."
"Well, it happened last night with Iris and me," Chameleon said. "And I guess I'm worried that the weirdness between us is going to rub off on the coven. It was probably stupid of me to think I could work with her in the coven and not be bodiered by it. There's such a strong connection between the emotional and the spiritual."
"If you ask me, the emotional and the spiritual are the same thing," Sally said. "I've never needed religion because I've always had a girlfriend. Sometimes several girlfriends."
"When you're feeling polytheistic?" Chameleon laughed.
"Yeah, I guess you could say that. Listen, the best thing for you to do is talk to Iris the next time you run into her at one of your little witch fests and make it clear that what happened between y'all isn't going to happen again."
"Well, I guess I'll run into her tomorrow," Chameleon said. "We're meeting to do our Adopt-a-Highway project..."
"Wait," Sally said. "Your little witch club is doing that Adopt-a-Highway thing?"
"It's a coven, not a witch club. And yes. Caring for the earth is one of our biggest concerns, and I've been wanting us to do more community service."
Sally's mouth was drawn into a straight line. "Well, expect trouble, that's all I'm saying."
Chameleon knew good and well that wasn't all Sally was going to be saying on the subject. "What do you mean?"
"I mean that when the Department of Transportation puts up those nice little signs that say, 'This stretch of highway was adopted by...,' nobody minds when the organization listed is the Lions Club or the Future Farmers of America, but when certain people hear about a stretch of road adopted by witches, they're going xo freak out."
"Do you really think so? I mean, we're adopting a road, not a Christian child."
"Yeah, well, some people will think if you're allowed to adopt roads, then you're going to be after the Christian children next. Come on, Camille. Your brother's a fundamentalist minister. You know how these people think... if you can call it thinking."
Chameleon winced as she recalled the last time she had gone home for Thanksgiving, when her brother had held forth about how the Harry Potter books should be banned because they enticed children into witchcraft. She had nearly come out to them as a witch right there over the Thanksgiving turkey, but given that they still hadn't gotten over her coming out to them as a lesbian four years earlier, she wasn't quite ready to make the leap. So instead she had merely come out as a Harry Potter fan and had given a passiona
te defense on the value of fantasy in children's literature. Her brother's response was that she had been "brainwashed" and that he would pray for her. Her parents, as always, had smiled at him benevolently, as if they were amazed by his patience with his heathen sister.
"You've got a point, Sally," Chameleon said. "But it isn't like this project is going to attract a lot of media attention. The fundies will probably be so busy picketing over at the abortion clinic that they won't even notice us flying around on our broomsticks picking up trash."
"Maybe so," Sally sighed. "But if I were you, I'd still expect trouble."
Saturday morning dawned clear and sunny. Chameleon loaded boxes of garbage bags into her car, along with the ugly fluorescent vests the Department of Transportation had provided for them, two gallon jugs of herbal tea, some paper cups, and two batches of apple-walnut muffins she had stayed up to make last night. When she pulled into the parking lot of the Quick-E-Mart, Belladonna and Coyote were already there, splitting a package of lurid pink Snow-Ball cakes. Chameleon looked at their chocolate crumb-lined mouths and said, "I stay up half the night baking organic whole-grain muffins for you, and look what you're eating."
"I know we're bad," Belladonna laughed. "It's the lure of the convenience store. They've got some evil stuff in there."
"Actually," Coyote said, "I'm eating this garbage for a very good reason. I figure some refined sugar will make me pick up all that litter extra fast."
"No," Graymalkin said, joining them. "It'll just make you burn out faster. We'll be picking you up with the litter."
"Hey, y'all." Anansi walked up to them. "Sorry if I'm late."
"If you're late, then I am, too," Chameleon said. She looked over to see Raven, Anansi's coltish thirteen-year-old daughter, standing next to her mom. "Hey, Raven, are you here to help?"
Raven, who used to be very talkative but had recently been struck shy by the ravages of adolescence, nodded silently.
Bell, Book and Dyke - New Exploits of Magical Lesbians Page 28
