Dominion

by Bentley Little

  For this she was grateful.

  She glanced around the walled yard. In the center of the quadrangle was a fountain, an exact replication of a Hellenic fountain discovered in the ruined courtyard of an old villa by Mother Margaret on one of her trips to Greece. Spreading outward from the fountain like spokes in a wheel were Mother Sheila’s medicinal herbs and rare flowering shrubs, the even rows of greenery subdivided by the purposeful placement of various Old World archaeological artifacts and folk sculpture purchased by her mothers over the years. There were several benches within the Garden, but Penelope had always preferred sitting on the edge of the fountain, listening firsthand to the burble of the water, feeling the spray of light mist against the skin of her hands and face.

  Although she hadn’t said anything to Mother Felice and probably wouldn’t, the question of her mothers’ sexual preference had come up again today at school. Last year she had nearly been suspended after fighting with Susan Holman, who had called the product produced by their vineyards “Lezzie Label Wine.” She and Susan had no classes together this year, but in the hall after lunch she had heard Susan loudly say something about “the Dyke Factory” while her tough blue-jeaned cronies laughed hysterically. She had ignored the remark, continuing on to class as though she hadn’t heard. But she had heard. And it hurt.

  It always hurt.

  What made her feel worse was that she wondered herself sometimes if any of her mothers were lesbians. That had been the rumor around town for years, and it was not beyond the realm of possibility. Each of her mothers went out periodically on dates, but for all she knew that could have been a cover-up, merely an attempt to maintain respectability for the sake of the business. There were no serious men in any of their lives, and there never had been, at least not in her lifetime.

  Besides, her mothers were … well, weird. She hated to admit it, but they not only seemed peculiar to outsiders. They often seemed strange even to her.

  Particularly Mother Janine.

  Of course, if that was the case, if they were lesbians, one of them had to be bisexual. Or had to at least have done it once with a man.

  Unless she had been adopted.

  No, she was not adopted. Of that she was certain.

  She sat down, dipping her fingers into the cool water of the fountain pool. She called them all “mother,” but she knew that, really, she had only one female parent. She had a pretty good idea of who her biological mother was too. It was something all of them denied when she put it to them, confronted mem with it. They all handed her the same line, saying that traditional one-on-one relationships, such as those usually associated with parents and siblings, were ultimately limiting and were not to be established or recognized within this household. They told her she must always treat each mother equally. But she noticed that they did not all treat her equally. Some were kinder to her than others, some were more open and honest with her than others, and so she was closer to some than others.

  She felt closest to Mother Felice, and it was Mother Felice whom she believed to be her true mother, her biological mother. The reasons were vague, more feelings than thoughts, but they were consistent and always had been. It was Mother Felice who throughout the years had seemed most concerned with both her physical welfare and her emotional well-being.

  Like today. It had been Mother Felice who had stayed in the house to wait for her. The apron and the pantry routine hadn’t fooled her at all.

  Her mother was here instead of at the winery because she wanted to know how her first day in school had gone.

  That made her feel good.

  Sometimes she wished that Mother Felice was her only mother.

  She looked down into the water, seeing in the shimmering a distorted reflection of her face. She was pretty, she knew, and she liked looking at herself, though she was by no means obsessive about it. She had never been one to spend excessive amounts of time on makeup or hair care, but if she passed a mirror she invariably looked into it. She found it reassuring to see her own reflection, to know what she looked like, although it always embarrassed her if someone caught her at it.

  Sometimes she wondered if she herself was homosexual. It was not inconceivable. Growing up in an all female environment, it might even be expected. She had always had a hard time talking to boys and had never really made that leap of socialization that most of her peers had made during the awkward years of junior high. At night, in bed, when she masturbated, she liked both the way her fingers felt on her vagina and the way her vagina felt against her fingertips. She enjoyed the pliant softness, the warm wetness, even the subtle pressure of the vaginal walls against her middle finger when she occasionally slipped it into the opening. She could not see herself ever touching another girl’s body-^the very thought was revolting—but wasn’t the joy she felt when fingering herself enough to make her a lesbian?

  She wasn’t sure.

  Maybe the fact that she had trouble imagining herself in a romantic situation with anyone, boy or girl, meant that she was asexual. She splashed her reflection, dissolving her face in a fluid ripple. Why was it all so complicated? There was a knock behind her, and she turned around

  to see Mother Felice at the window, waving. She waved J back, then looked down, opened her journal, clicked her pen. “Today,” she wrote, “was the first day of my senior year …”

  As one, the four grandfather clocks lined along the wall next to the door chimed six, and Vie Williams stood up, shut off the cassette player, and moved from behind the counter to lock the door. It had been a long day, a boring day, and not a very profitable one. Tourist season had pretty well run its course, and only five people had come into the shop since he’d opened this morning, all of them browsers, not buyers.

  It was a taste of things to come, he knew. School had started, vacations had ended, and from now until mid-October business would be pretty much hit-and-miss.

  Time was when the antique market was bullish all year, when he didn’t have to depend on outside trade, when even local women wanted stained glass windows to decorate their living rooms and conservative middle-aged men bought Victrolas for their wives’ anniversaries. But antiques were out these days. People bought Nagels and Neimans now, mall art for their walls, and anniversary presents consisted of televisions or VCRs.

  Vie pulled the shade on the window. He was hungry and wanted to grab a bite to eat, but there were still three cartons of Depression glass he’d purchased at an estate sale a few weeks back which needed to be catalogued. He could have, and should have, done that earlier today, during the long slow stretch between lunch and closing, but he hated going through purchases during business hours. Somehow, the ritual of examining, appraising, and pricing items seemed more suited to evening than morning or afternoon.

  He’d pick up a burger on the way home.

  Vie retreated behind the counter once again and walked through the beaded doorway into the back room. The three cartons were on the floor, and he hefted the largest onto the long metal table which ran the length of the side wall. He took a razor blade out of the desk drawer and cut two cross slits through the layered masking tape which sealed shut the top of the box. Dropping the blade on the table, he pulled up the cardboard flaps and, one by one, began unwrapping the individually stacked plates. The pieces were good. Rose glass from the mid-thirties.

  He held each up to the light, checking for flaws and chips and scratches before setting it carefully down on the tabletop. After unwrapping, examining, and setting down the last plate, he looked into the box. At the bottom, lying as if thrown there by accident or afterthought, was an old waterstained paperback. In Watermelon Sugar.

  In Watermelon Sugar.

  Richard Brautigan.

  Whoa, did that bring back memories. He picked up the book, flipped the pages. Half of them were stuck together, glued by the hardening of some spilled beverage. The photo of Brautigan on the front was almost completely obscured by a brown stain, although the woman next to him stared out of the pi
cture undamaged. It saddened Vie to see the book in such shape. It had been originally purchased, no doubt, by a member of what had then been called “the counterculture,” someone young and enthusiastic, hungry for new ideas. Now that person was probably balding and overweight, dully establishment, interested only in interest rates and IRAs, the book and its fallen idol author now not even a memory.

  Vie dropped the book in the wastepaper basket and sighed heavily.

  He had come to Napa as a college student in the late sixties, and though he now wore his hair short and dressed respectably in the fashions of today, he still aligned himself with the sentiments of that era, still considered himself a part of that generation. Of course, those days were long gone, even here in northern California, where small conclaves of ex-hippies still lived in converted Victorian houses amidst the faded relics of psychedelia. People these days were harsher, harder, more willingly insensitive. The pace of life was faster now; there was less time to talk with friends, less time to be kind to strangers, less time to stop and smell the roses.

  It made him feel depressed.

  A lot of things made him feel depressed lately.

  Last night he had watched a television program on the Vietnam War which, straight-faced, had portrayed the army as an upright organization of highly moral men bravely doing their patriotic duty despite the protests of an obnoxious and misguided crowd of drug-crazed college students. He had turned the program off before it ended. If there was one thing that really drove him crazy, that made him absolutely furious, it was the revisionist history now fostered by the media which characterized the sixties as an anarchic aberration, a decade in which the traditional values of America had been trashed by rioting longhaired, dope-smoking freaks. Jesus, couldn’t people even remember what it had been like? What the hell had happened to the nation’s short-term memory? Of course there had been a harsh element—a protest against the amoral complacency of the establishment and the immorality of the war—but there had also been a kindness, a gentleness of spirit which had gotten lost in the translation, which was never captured by movies or television shows or news retrospectives. It had been a time of turmoil, yes, but the people of that time had been open and giving and trusting and honest, filled with an optimistic generosity which in today’s pragmatic light seemed quaintly naive. He shook his head. Even the hip today, their counterculture counterparts, seemed much more materialistic and opportunistic, less real, much phonier, pretenders to the throne, pseudo-beatniks dressed in black turtleneck costumes of the past, capturing only the surface details of a much more serious movement.

  The times they had a-changed.

  Vie lifted the box off the table, put it on the floor, and was about to crush its sides when he heard a noise from the front room, the sound of someone bumping into a piece of furniture.

  He frowned. What could that be? There was no one in the store.

  The bump came again.

  He stood up and walked out to the counter. The front door, he saw immediately, was still closed and locked, the window shade pulled down.

  Could someone have been shopping in one of the rear aisles and not heard or noticed that the shop had closed?

  He heard footsteps from behind a row of armoires to the left.

  “Hey!” he called. “Who’s there?”

  There was no answer, but the footsteps retreated down the aisle away from the counter. The thought occurred to him that someone had been deliberately hiding in one of the trunks or armoires while he closed up, waiting until he left in order to rob the place. Common sense told him to call the police, but instead he walked around the front of the counter.

  “Who’s there?” he called again.

  From the other end of the store, the dark furniture aisle farthest away from the windows, came the sound of a woman singing. Vie stopped. The sound sent a chill through him. There was nothing threatening in either the voice or the song, a folkish tune sung in another language, but the incongruity of the circumstances lent the situation a decidedly surrealistic tinge.

  “We’re closed,” he said, instantly aware of how ineffectual his announcement sounded.

  The woman continued to sing.

  Heart pounding, he proceeded slowly down the aisle toward the source of the sound. I should be carrying a baseball bat, he thought, some type of weapon.

  Then he was around the corner and it was too late.

  The woman was of approximately his own age and was dressed in a long, sheer gown which recalled the earth dresses of the past. She was obviously drunk or stoned and was humming to herself as she swayed back and forth in the center of the aisle, eyes closed. Next to her on the floor was a stick about half the size of a broom handle, tipped with what looked like a small pine cone.

  Vie stood silently for a moment, watching the woman instead of announcing his presence. She was beautiful. Her hair was long and black and hung in naturally uncombed splendor over her shoulders and down her back. Even in the dim light he could see the smoothness of her perfect complexion, the classic line of her well-formed nose, the sensuous fullness of her lips. Through the transjuscent gown he could see a dark thatch between her shifting legs, the outline of nipples where the light material caught at her breasts.

  What was she doing here? he wondered. How had she gotten in?

  He was about to clear his throat, let the woman know that he was here, when her eyes suddenly snapped open. The effect was so startling and unexpected that he nearly jumped. Her eyes fastened on his. There was hunger in her expression, and a wildness which seemed totally at odds with the makeup of her face. Although she had seemed spaced out a moment before, there was in her features none of the vagueness associated with being high. Her gaze was sharp and focused, crystal clear.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing here,” Vie said. “But you’ll have to leave.” His voice sounded more authoritarian than he’d intended, than he’d wanted.

  The woman closed her eyes again, began humming, began singing.

  “You have to leave,” Vie repeated.

  Smiling, swaying, almost dancing, the woman moved forward until she was directly before him. One arm snaked around his waist, the other lightly cupping his crotch, as she tilted her face upward to kiss him. He did not draw her to him, but he did not push her away. Unsure of how to react, he allowed her to control the moment, silently acquiescing as she kissed him, her soft tongue sliding gently between his lips. He felt himself growing. It had been a while since he’d been to bed with anyone, and to his body even this casual contact felt good. She gave his crotch a small squeeze.

  Pulling away, still humming, she dropped to her knees and began unbuckling his belt.

  This isn’t happening, he thought.

  She’s crazy, he thought.

  AIDS, he thought.

  But he remained in place. He wanted to back away, to put a stop to this—it was too strange, it was happening too fast—but he stayed rooted, his body refusing to listen to the arguments of his mind.

  She pulled down his pants, pulled down his underwear. He was hard and quivering, and slowly, expertly, she began massaging him, stroking him.

  He found himself putting his hands on the top of her head. Her hair felt smooth, soft, wonderful. He closed his eyes.

  The rhythm changed. What had been gentle became aggressive, then just plain rough. He opened his eyes, looked down. The woman was smiling up at him, and there was something in the expression on her face that chilled him.

  She grabbed his-balls tightly and with one quick pull yanked them out by the roots.

  Vie screamed, a primal, instinctive expression of agony, as his erection disintegrated in a wash of warm blood. The woman, still on her knees before him, lifted her hands to catch the spurting blood, smearing it on her face and in her hair, laughing with drunken, ecstatic glee. He staggered backward and would have fallen had it not been for the armoire behind him. And then she was wielding her pine-cone stick, shoving it deep into his stomach, thrusting upward. New a
gonies flared within him as the serrated, irregular end of the spear pushed in farther, piercing skin, rending muscle, ripping veins. She pulled the stick out and dropped it, trying to shove a hand into the hole she’d made. Her gown was covered with a Pollock canvas of red, and still she was tearing at him, her mouth open to catch the spray, greedy fingers bathing in the hot liquid.

  He kicked out at her with what strength and coordination was left to him, all the time screaming, but she absorbed the blows happily, laughing, her head whipping back and forth in a frenzied motion as she clawed into his abdomen, grabbing viscera, squeezing. He slumped to the floor, his vision clouding, coherence slipping fast.

  The last thing he noticed was that she had ripped off her gown and was naked.

  After Mythology, Dion followed Kevin out of the building to the cafeteria. He felt pretty good. He had been here less than a week, but already he had settled in to the familiar rhythm of school, making the adjustment with unusual ease. The teachers, the classes, seemed not much different than those in Mesa, certainly no harder, and most of the students he met seemed all right, although he hadn’t really spoken in depth to any of them except Kevin.

  He was still not sure of Kevin’s status in the school social structure.

  His friend clearly did not belong to any of the identifiable cliques, but neither was he a true loner or outcast. He seemed to fall through the categorical cracks. Kevin knew almost everyone, was on good terms with most of the people he knew, yet he chose to spend his lunches with Dion. The two of them were still not completely at ease with each other, were still in fact defining their roles within the friendship, but a friendship it was, and for that Dion was grateful. Kevin talked tough, but between the frequent obscenities there lurked evidence of a mind, a sharp one, and Dion suspected that Kevin had latched onto him because he sensed a soul with similar interests. Indeed, their taste in everything from music to movies to schoolteachers seemed remarkably in sync, and Dion thought that perhaps that was one reason why he and Kevin seemed to get on so well.