The Girls' Almanac

by Emily Franklin

“Ah, yes, in her Premotives life, Andrea was quite the sugar hound.”

  “Well, it wasn’t like I was hoarding a stash of Snickers or something.” Andrea gives Titian a flick on the arm. When he doesn’t respond, she pulls his goatee. Then, to Jenna, she adds, “Tim thinks he saved me from a life without whole grains.”

  Andrea invites Jenna to their house for late-night drinks, and she accepts. Titian puts one hand on each of their backs. “Not too late, though,” Jenna says. “Tomorrow is granola and yogurt, which adds a half hour to my prep time.” Titian nods, and Andrea rubs her belly as if Jenna’s already offered her the food. Jenna tries hard not to tummy-rub anymore; it’s such a second-trimester pose, protective and proud at the same time.

  “I love your granola,” Andrea says. She puts her hand on Jenna’s cheek the way a grandmother might; the gesture strikes Jenna less as one of tenderness than as one of wonder.

  “You could even use our goat’s yogurt, if you want,” Titian adds. When he turns to walk away, Andrea sticks her finger into her mouth, fake-gagging, and Jenna silently concurs.

  In the late afternoon, Avi the guruesque leader climbs a lifeguard-high chair and speaks down to the Emotives, who sit on spread blankets on the yurt floor below. Avi starts with a nondenominational prayer, even though he’s introduced himself as a Jewish atheist. He keeps his hair clipped very close to the head, silvers flecking the sides while the top is relatively dark. When the prayer ends, a couple amens, some stretching. Avi continues.

  “Man…knows only when he is satisfied and when he suffers, and only his sufferings and his satisfactions instruct him concerning himself, teach him what to seek and what to avoid. For the rest, man is a confused creature; he knows not whence he comes or whither he goes, he knows little of the world, and above all, he knows little of himself…” Avi climbs down from his chair-pulpit and adds, “Not my words, by the way. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.”

  He repeats the name as many of the Emotives search their pockets for pens. For a program based on verbal expression, Jenna thinks, they write incessantly. Each time Titian mumbles a key phrase—and he’ll even announce “I’m about to utter a Key Phrase”—they copy it into the tiny notebooks administered at registration. They’re meant to take them home, back to their cities and work pods for review, but Jenna can already see them slipped underneath paper piles, ready for recycling. She stands up, ready to leave, but makes it only as far as the yurt’s door when Avi addresses her.

  “Wait,” he says. He moves through the seated minions and stands two feet away from her. “Don’t go, we’re only just starting—I’m not going to spew quotes all day.” A few encouraging murmurs from the Emotives.

  “Oh,” says Jenna, her hands up, fingers spread as if she’s sterilized and ready to scrub in for surgery, “I’m not one of them.”

  “Oh,” Avi says, exaggerated now. He eyes the crowd and then Jenna, then speaks to the crowd. “She says she’s not one of you!” He doesn’t give them a chance to say that she’s not, really. That she wears her own clothes, not the Emotives T-shirts, that she has her own cabin, that she can’t speak in this forum. But Avi goes on. “Are we not all part of everything?”

  Jenna wants to back up, wants to say, “No, seriously, I am not part of this,” but instead finds her body too tired to keep moving, so she slumps onto a chair. Still, she figures, she’s not huddled with the masses on the floor, she’s sitting quite ladylike in a straight-backed chair like the one her mother had kept by the phone in the hall, so people could hold their conversations with focus. While Avi groups the Emotives, Jenna remembers how her mother disliked talking on the telephone when the person on the other end seemed otherwise engaged. “I wouldn’t even think of cooking or paying bills while conversing,” her mother had said once, when she’d heard Jenna’s fingers on the computer keyboard. “I certainly don’t want to share you with a machine.” She’d meant the computer, something her mother had never had interest in—even though Jenna’s father could scan, download; he’d print her e-mails out so her mother would feel included.

  “Where are you?” Avi whispers to her as he’s about to go back to his leader position.

  His verbal nudge wakes her up. “Here,” Jenna says. “Here.”

  An hour later, they’ve completed tongue twisters and role-played, dealt with Anger Scenarios and Comfort Confrontations. They’ve paired off and volleyed single words to each other. Then they choose phrases from a hat. Jenna feels suspiciously the way she’d done decades before in drama class but agrees to the exercise to avoid further admonishment from Avi.

  “But I don’t want to let go,” Jenna’s phrase-partner says.

  “But you have to,” Jenna says.

  “Great!” Avi intervenes. “Now switch the tone of phrases.” Each pair repeat themselves in happy, sad, frustrated, indignant tones of voice.

  “Now swap phrases,” Avi says.

  “But I don’t want to let go,” Jenna says, still riled up from her indignant “have to” before. She hasn’t spoken this much in weeks, maybe months. Not so many words, not in a row. There’d been a couple of phone calls, just to say her mother’d gone, to arrange flights, a meeting with the lawyer, a few spare meals with her father, the OB follow-up.

  “But you have to,” her partner says.

  “But I don’t want to let go,” Jenna says, and it comes out so desperate she can feel too much in her chest and wonders if she might faint or something equally dramatic. But she doesn’t.

  “That’s enough,” Avi says.

  Andrea comes to fetch Jenna from her cabin and walk her up in the total blackness to the main house.

  Andrea’s boots crackle the dried leaves underfoot, and Jenna holds her arms out in front of her, aware of scurrying nocturnals, the cold wind chapping her face.

  “Sorry about Titian,” Andrea says, as if they’ve just been discussing him.

  “That’s okay,” Jenna says and then, “What do you mean?”

  “He’s just trying to break you,” Andrea says. In the dark, in the late fall, suddenly Jenna thinks she could be in a thriller; Andrea and Titian could murder her, make her disappear completely. “What I’m saying is, he’s not kidding. He really buys everything he’s saying out there.” Jenna can’t see but senses that Andrea has gestured to out there, the rest of the complex. “And he wants everyone else to get inspired. And he’s jealous of you, I think.”

  Andrea stops where she is and reaches out for Jenna. Jenna thinks about Titian’s jealousy and is glad of it, then protective of Andrea. “Are you okay?” Jenna asks. “Can I do something for you?” She touches Andrea’s thin arms through the bulky jumble of her sweater and blanket wrap.

  “Oh, sure, I’m good,” Andrea says. “Tired is all.” They stand there, quiet a minute, until Andrea adds, “Don’t get me wrong. I like my life here. And even though I’m not the most expressive person in the world—which is why I signed up here in the first place—I’m getting better.”

  “You’re an Emotive?” Jenna asks, aware how bizarre her language has become, also aware of a sudden other side to Andrea.

  “Nearly three years ago,” Andrea says. “How a girl from Texas got here is anyone’s guess—but I’ll tell you what. Where I grew up, no one talked.” She does not mention her deaf mother, her father and his liquor, the brothers who—except for one—all linger at her parents’ tumbling house.

  “How’d you even find out about it?” Jenna asks.

  “My mother. She saw a flyer—or a pamphlet.” The two women move now, trudging through the freezing mud toward the very distant glow of the house. “Tim had just started out then; you know, he hadn’t perfected his spiel. But he was this—just a comforting force for me. I came for the two-week program, but I never left.”

  “Wow,” Jenna says. Somehow she’d figured Andrea and Tim had started the place together. But now she can see it, Andrea slowly pulled over to the Emotive way of life.

  “You’re probably thinking, How the hell does she d
o it? and I’ll tell you—it’s not easy. Part of me just hates this shit—the talking and the talking and the talking. That’s why the TV in your cabin. But then, there is a good part of all this. Really.”

  Jenna bites the middle of her upper lip, nibbling where there’s a tiny itch. “Will you stay here?” She’s not quite sure why she asks, just lets the question out and waits.

  “If Titian has his way. But fuck me if I raise kids here. And I want them, but he gives the same old fight: too many people on this earth, too much of a drain on natural resources.”

  “You’ve got time, though, right?” Jenna’s mother had always said that, sounding biblical or like that Byrds’ song.

  Andrea responds, “Turn, turn, turn. Yeah. But I’d be pregnant right now if he’d agree to it. But not until then. So maybe not ever.”

  Jenna wishes she could see Andrea’s face. Then she wonders about who did the cooking before her arrival, who’ll come the next season after the winter shutdown. She wonders if everywhere she has been, in each connection, she is replaceable. Jenna touches Andrea’s hair and feels her own dry hands. She wonders if the woman is teary or more complacent, like her mother had been when Jenna’d reported news of her first miscarriage.

  “Don’t you even feel bad for me?” she had wailed at her mother. “It would have been your grandchild—don’t you get it?” Her mother had let Jenna scream at her, cry and shriek until her face was raw and blotchy, but she hadn’t responded. Jenna could see the relief on her mother’s face.

  “Lots of people miscarry,” her mother had said finally.

  “People?” Jenna liked to pick at her mother’s grammar, her word choice.

  “Women. Women, then.” Her mother corrected herself.

  “You didn’t.”

  “No,” her mother said. “But after you have children, you won’t look back at this the same way. It simply won’t mean as much. You’ll see.”

  Now Jenna thinks this is true. The first one paled in comparison with the second—wasn’t even with the same person. For the first time, Jenna realizes her mother died thinking Jenna would have had the baby. Her mother never knew about the hospital, the limp form that emerged and was shuttled away from Jenna, the genetic tests administered to the fetus. Jenna is comforted and sick, too, that her mother believed herself a grandmother-to-be right up until the end. Jenna feels the stomach roll she still has, then follows Andrea up the porch steps. Jenna thinks about how she’s found a place empty of strollers, vacant of cooing—how she doesn’t even have to go to the grocery store and skip the baby items aisle. Then she suddenly has an image of all of them as adult-sized infants, and before she can laugh, she feels like crying—who would pick up the big babies, who could possibly take care of them all?

  “The thing is,” Andrea whispers back to Jenna, “I think Tim’s just scared. If he has a kid, he’ll have to talk to it, and do all the things he does with these people he never sees again. And then—one day—that kid will leave. And then where’ll he be?”

  Avi adds a splash of Jameson’s to his coffee and doesn’t bother to explain himself to Titian, who dramatically gestures no when offered a spill from Avi’s flask. Jenna accepts and likes the burning slide of liquor in her throat. The drink also gives her a break from talking, from answering questions: where from, married to whom, doing what, why here, what next.

  It’s Avi’s turn. “Three down, one to go,” he says and produces school photos from his wallet. Jenna blushes; somehow she doesn’t picture spiritual leaders even having wallets, let alone two-by-two snapshots of Jesse, Danielle, Davy. “Our fourth’s due in three weeks.”

  Jenna clears her drink to the sink’s edge. “Don’t go,” Titian says. “We can play games.”

  With pleasure, Jenna notes that the salsa and chips Titian slumps into bowls are nonorganic. He catches her noticing this and says, “They ran out. In town—they don’t always carry everything we want.” It’s the first time Jenna has heard Titian sound apologetic, embarrassed.

  The four crunch and dip, eat and chew audibly until Avi offers, “Let’s play a game.”

  “Not some psychological shit, right?” Andrea asks. She turns to Jenna and talks while thumbing to Avi. “This guy interprets everything: dreams, what color you like best, the way you wipe—”

  He cuts her off. “It’s true—whether you’re a folder or toilet paper crumpler says a lot.”

  Titian laughs hard, Andrea follows, and Avi checks to see what Jenna’s reaction is. She says, “But—doesn’t it make a difference that women have to wipe a lot more, and maybe that influences their style?”

  They wait for her to say more. “I had a roommate who used to wrap up her whole hand like a glove, then go front to back.”

  Avi says, “From a bacterial standpoint, front to back is important. For women.”

  The chip bowl nearly depleted, Andrea swigs liquor from Avi’s flask while Titian brings out paper and pencils. They all write the names of famous people on tiny scraps, and then each plucks one from a bowl and acts it out.

  “Verbal charades,” Avi explains.

  “And why is this psychologically exploitive?” Jenna asks.

  Andrea’s eyes are wide, her top lip flecked with salsa. Avi’s mouth is slack from the drinking, his nose red. “Not exploitive,” he says. “Revealing. Not exploitive.” It is clear to Jenna that now Avi thinks she’s damaged or troubled, that she picked the wrong word.

  After Jenna gestures Elizabeth Taylor, Bob Dylan, Richard Nixon, the game slows down. Titian is tired. He pulls Andrea into the kitchen, and Jenna can see him snake a hand up her shirtfront. Andrea kisses him.

  “So,” Avi says to Jenna. “You gonna end up staying here like the rest of the cooks?”

  That night, Jenna listens for the nameless scurrying—the squirrels or possum, a distant howl—but hears nothing. She fetches the tiny TV from the closet and sticks it at the foot of her bed while she slithers into her sleeping bag. Each night when she gets inside, she thinks about sleeping with Jay in the first months of their courtship. Outside on the deck, they’d zipped their bags together—it had seemed so intimate. Jenna hadn’t even ever thought zippers to be universal, to fit one in the other. Until Jay had told her, she’d thought that only their sleeping bags would link up—that their fate together was determined by their mutual affection for Patagonia gear.

  On the little screen, the reception is surprisingly clear. News, reruns, a science fiction program Jenna’s never seen before. She watches with the sound off as a three-headed warlock attempts to woo—or slay?—a shrunken yet buxom beauty. Jenna thinks about what Avi said. She could stay. It seems so simple suddenly; she could leave Jay, their cottage with the unfinished built-ins, her bread pans neatly stacked near the stove, the ovulation kits packaged in the bathroom. Jenna imagines living in the cabin through the winter, into the spring; maybe longer. With her two sweaters, one pair of jeans, the red long underwear—an entire wardrobe in one drawer—the same foods week after week. She falls asleep with a dragon, two little people, and the warlock toasting something, her feet rustling inside her bag.

  At one of the camps Jenna’s mother had forced her to attend at age eleven—a day camp, for “girls on the verge of becoming young women”—Jenna’d been taught how to cross her legs at the ankles, play kickball, practice tongue-kissing on the back of her hand. This last was revealed by her mother, who’d found her daughter sitting at the breakfast table practically gnawing on her right hand. Jenna had not been embarrassed, the act was aimless on her part—she’d felt disconnected from her body, dreamy—until her mother had swatted her hand away.

  Later, to try to apologize, Jenna had found her mother in the flower garden and told her about the trust circle she’d been a part of at camp.

  “You get in a circle,” Jenna said. Her mother had a basket over her wrist and was laying dahlias, foxglove, and snapdragons, alternating the stalks so the blooms wouldn’t tangle.

  “A circle, okay,” her mother said.<
br />
  “And, well, you all crowd around? Like this.” She moved closer to her mother. “No, wait, Mom—put the basket down.” Her mother set the flowers and basket on the grass. Jenna pulled her mother by the hands and turned her around. “So, you need to sort of sit in my lap.” They tried that, but Jenna nearly toppled over.

  “What’s the point of this exactly?” her mother asked. She wiped her mouth, tasted the salt slick.

  “You’re the one who makes me go to that stupid place.” Jenna suddenly whipped around so they were face-to-face. “Now, you have to let me sit like this.” Jenna’s mother, still standing, felt the weight of her slim daughter. Jenna bent her knees slightly but didn’t sit all the way. They stood there, semisuspended, for a few minutes.

  Jenna’s mother kissed the back of her daughter’s neck.

  “I guess it doesn’t work very well with just two people,” Jenna said. “There was a whole bunch of us, you know. And, well, you could really sit—like relax and everything, but still be standing.”

  “Because the circle supported you?” Jenna’s mother asked.

  Jenna brightened. “Yeah. Because of that.”

  After the granola and sheep’s yogurt, Jenna finds Avi in the yurt. He’s separating various colors and lengths of silk strips.

  “Another game?”

  “Of course. And a lecture. About openness.” He smiles at Jenna, who smiles back. “And closure.”

  Jenna picks up a green strand. Then she notices Avi staring at her. “Oh, God, don’t analyze me, okay?” He laughs. She imitates him. “Hmmm…she picked green, she must be missing something, deprived.” He laughs, but Jenna then wonders—why would she say that? She drops the green one and picks red.

  “You’re not going to make us do a trust circle, are you?” she asks.

  “No. No. And you won’t have to fall back into someone’s arms, either.”

  “Oh,” Jenna says. She can see Titian and Andrea walking toward the yurt, followed by the Emotives, all clad in their special T-shirts. “That sounds kind of nice, actually.”