Gross Anatomy

by Mara Altman

  I breathed and released. She moaned and asked me to moan along as if I were in labor and trying to deliver my vaginal knots. “Ah, there we go—there’s much more space in this pocket now,” she said.

  At the end of the session, she said my bowl had become much more malleable. She said the blood flow was stronger and my muscles responded better. “This would be so much healthier for women to do than a Pap smear,” she said. She views this type of massage as preventative medicine. She pulled out her finger and said some blessings, then sat by my side as my eyes fluttered open.

  I was relaxed and peaceful, but I still couldn’t help getting back on topic, the one I’d originally traveled there for. “So, um,” I asked, “how is all this going to help me figure out PMS?”

  “It might not,” she said.

  I gave her my confused look: duck lips and furrowed brows.

  “But it’s getting you more connected to that part of your body,” she said, “and that’s important for all of us.”

  She stood up, grabbed some papers from her desk, and turned out the light. I was still lying down, wearing only my shirt. “I encourage you to spend some time alone with your bowl,” she said as she walked out.

  * * *

  The Red Tent wasn’t until the next day, so Maggie and I spent the afternoon exploring the property. As we hiked through the forest, she asked how the pelvic session went.

  “I feel like I got the wood floors refurbished,” I said. “Know what I mean?”

  She liked the imagery—she’s all about home renovations—but wanted me to further elucidate.

  I didn’t expect to like it—it seemed a little out-there—but when I’d stepped out of the Castle afterward, the world felt more vibrant. I was high, but without the dry mouth. I saw a brown and beige chicken clucking, and a huge-ass grin ripped across my face. For a fleeting moment, everything made sense.

  It was all so simple: I am hungry. I will eat something and not be hungry anymore.

  I was convinced that every woman should be able to go down to the local strip mall and get her vagina muscles tenderized with the same ease she can get her nails done. The world would be better for it.

  Then Maggie farted. “I think I just had an emotional release,” she said, making fun of me.

  * * *

  That evening, Thérèse and Tere were hosting a wailing circle. I didn’t sign up for it, but it was happening anyway. From all over town, people came together to grieve. They could grieve about whatever they wanted—loved ones who had died, the state of the planet, traffic jams, a hangnail. The idea was to give people an opportunity to emote in a society that is often considered cold and emotionally remote.

  The circle took place in the large yurt, which was decorated exactly how you’d expect a home for women who would host a wailing circle and a Red Tent at their residence to be decorated. The sofas were mismatched. Feathers, candles, geodes, and shells made up 75 percent of the interior design. No matter what direction you looked, there was a painting of a woman. There were mugs on every flat surface and enough boxes of tea in the kitchen to build a pyramid large enough to fit their overweight cat, Oreo, inside.

  Tere beat on the grandmother drum, as twenty-three people walked in a circle, screaming, crying, and falling to their knees. The whole thing made me uncomfortable. I’m not a griever. I have been properly trained to hold all my pain and suffering inside. I excrete my emotions the polite way: in ulcers.

  The good thing was that after the grieving ritual, I was able to ask one of the attendees about her PMS. Her name was Jude. She had long white hair and was now postmenopausal, but she said that in all her years of menstruating, she’d never experienced any symptoms. “I think society builds that tension in people,” she said.

  She explained that she’d dropped off the grid and lived with her husband in the hills of West Virginia. She spent most of her time frolicking naked in the woods. “I was never stressed out,” she said, “so I didn’t have to release anything—I wasn’t living in a way that made me unhappy.”

  What she said reminded me of a study I’d read: Despite having hormonal changes similar to Western women, the !Kung, a hunter-gatherer people in Africa, never associated the menstrual cycle with a change in mood. The same went for Samoan women and the Rungus of Borneo. While the physical symptoms—cramps, lower back pain—seemed near universal, Alma Gottlieb, a professor of anthropology, reported that the psychological aspects of PMS were exceedingly Western.

  Later, on the way back to our yurt, Maggie threw down some knowledge from her acupuncture studies. She told me that in Chinese medicine, PMS is due to liver qi stagnation. She says weird shit like that all the time—like when I have a stomachache, she’ll ask me if the pain feels hot or cold.

  As usual, I had to ask her to translate.

  “If you have PMS,” she said, “we say that you’re getting blocked up, because you’re not getting something you want—you’re not getting your deepest desires met.”

  This was odd; she was someone who had always blamed her bad days on PMS, on her brain chemistry gone haywire.

  In light of that, it was surprising to hear her say it was due to something deeper. “So,” I asked, “what do you think your PMS has been trying to tell you?”

  She thought for a moment and grew increasingly serious. She stopped and looked around at the towering firs. “I guess, a lot,” she said. “I feel insecure financially and am deficient in taking care of myself.” She admitted that most of all, she probably needed to concentrate on bringing more love into her life. “I want a partner,” she said as pine needles crunched under our feet.

  * * *

  In the morning, the sunlight funneled through a big circular window at the top of the yurt. I slowly became conscious as the sky lightened minute by minute, hue by hue. It was so peaceful; it made me think of Jude. Maybe there was something to her theory—if there was no stress, maybe there would be no PMS.

  In other words, if the toilet seat is not constantly up, then you can’t get upset about it not being down. But then I turned over and saw a black-winged ant the size of a thumbtack on my sheet. I flicked it off. About two minutes later, it was crawling up my pillow. Then Maggie awoke to one clinging to her bedspread. She took a shoe and smashed it. I flicked away two more and saw one fly into my suitcase before we retreated to the main yurt.

  “Did you meet our anties this morning?” Thérèse asked. She sounded close with these insects.

  “Were we supposed to take care of them,” I asked, concerned, “because I murdered a few.”

  She told us that they had accidentally built the yurt on top of an ant’s nest and they’d done everything possible to try to get rid of them—poison, sucking them up a vacuum, and even praying. “Then I went on a vision quest,” she told us, “to try to speak with the ant queen.”

  “You talked to the queen ant?” I said, confused. It was still early and I forgot that I was in an alternate universe.

  She told me she did it through a shamanic journey. “So you made some peace overtures?” said Maggie.

  “Yeah, but the queen ant was like, ‘You’re not the great Earth Mother, I am, and now you’re trying to kill me, what a hypocrite you are!’”

  Thérèse said the queen ant told her that the only way she’d leave was if they burned the yurt down. “So we backed off and now we try to make peace with them,” she said.

  Since we were already halfway through the weekend and yet to speak of PMS, I wondered if Thérèse was making a subtle metaphor.

  * * *

  After breakfast, it was finally time for what I’d come there for: the Red Tent. We constructed a literal one in the living room. It was made out of a metal frame with different swatches of red fabric tacked over the top and sides until it closely resembled a street-fair booth that would have Middle Eastern rugs for sale inside. By the time everyone arrived, it was one p.m. and there were fifteen of us spanning from age eleven to seventy-three.

  Susan, the elde
st, showed up first. “I’m glad we are living in this day and age,” she told me. “If we lived in the colonial times, we’d be hung.” That seemed like an extreme outcome for our actions thus far; all we’d done was put out some tubs of hummus. I hoped her comment meant something outré was about to happen. Was Thérèse about to command us all to strip down and paint friezes with our menstrual blood?

  Before Susan could elaborate, the cat distracted her. “Come here, Oreo!” she said, ambling toward him. “Oreo!”

  Maggie and I milled around, visiting the snack table multiple times.

  Mary, a woman in her forties, washed some dishes. Her two daughters were on a sofa, chatting with each other. Another woman was sitting with a book by the window. A mom and daughter from Austin, Texas, had gone for a hike somewhere outside. At that point, it was already close to two p.m.

  I asked Thérèse when the Red Tent was going to begin. “It’s already happening,” she said, smiling and opening her arms toward everyone in the living room.

  This was what I was anticipating all weekend? People would get hung for this?

  The way everyone was loitering reminded me of the waiting area at an Amtrak station. But if that was indeed the case, I tried to make some inroads and deployed Maggie to help me drum up some PMS conversations, but no one seemed particularly interested in talking about their cycles, which was odd, because I thought this whole thing was supposedly about how we bleed through our crotches.

  I felt concerned; I had traveled all the way to Bainbridge Island, Washington, to become enlightened. “When are we going to talk about PMS?” I asked Tere as she prepped chia-seed pudding in the kitchen. I noticed her mustache—how she didn’t mess with it, but rather kept it dark and conspicuous.

  These ladies are so cool, I thought, being themselves in the middle of the forest.

  Tere said we’d address PMS later, during the ritual portion of the evening. “For now, relax,” she said, “partake.”

  At first, it didn’t seem like much to partake in, but I soon found myself submerged in a galvanized horse trough that Tere had transformed into an outdoor hot tub. Five of us, including Maggie, sat in there, proudly bearing our breasts and bushes under the sky, under the birds chirping, under the fresh cold air. We managed to get lost in conversations about death, babies, and career. There was also a heated debate about coffee dates. “You shouldn’t say yes to coffee unless your intention is to actually go,” said Mary.

  “But how are you supposed to say no when someone stands before you and says, ‘Let’s get coffee sometime’?”

  “You have to be authentic,” she said.

  “And hurt someone’s feelings?” I asked.

  Besides, I thought, “Let’s get coffee” had simply become a figure of speech. People said it so often with such little conviction that it had become an alternative punctuation; it was a synonym for “goodbye.”

  After every square inch of my body was waterlogged, Thérèse walked with me to the Red Tent. She swaddled me in a blanket and placed hot rocks that had been heating in a slow cooker on my chakras. She covered my eyes with a piece of cloth and turned up the music as I took in gentle wafts of her chamomile breath. As I fell in and out of sleep, she whispered blessings into my ear.

  “Bless your mouth and throat that you have an open channel to speak the truth,” she said. “Bless your feet—may they always feel their connection to Mother Earth’s support and ground.”

  Four other swaddled bodies already lay on the ground around me, and I could hear the steady breathing that signified sleep.

  Thérèse tucked the sheet a little tighter around my chest. As she left me to rest, she said, “You’re perfect.”

  * * *

  By dinnertime, I felt completely immersed in the moment and apathetic to my original quest. People were scattered around, eating in little groups. I sat next to Tere, whom I’d really come to like. She was lanky and had short brown curly hair with an androgynous appeal.

  As our plates teetered on our laps, I pointed to her mustache. “So is that like a ‘Fuck you’ to society,” I asked, “like you’re not going to play by their rules?” I thought that was one of the modus operandi of lesbians who lived out in the woods.

  She looked at me—opened her eyes wider—and then crooked her head to the side. “No,” she said. Then she touched her upper lip with her fingers. “Is it really that bad?”

  I shook my head. “No,” I said, stitching my brows. “It’s totally fine.”

  She moved some salad around her plate.

  “I just thought,” I said. Then paused. “Never mind.”

  We went back to picking at our vegetarian enchiladas, but then I stuck out my chin and told her I had some whiskers. Even though I’d come to terms with them, I still did my best to hide them from the world, so what I did next surprised me. “Do you want to rub them?” I asked. She rubbed mine and then she stuck out her chin so I could give hers a rub, too. Tiny grains of stubble tickled my fingertips. When we were done sharing, I said, “I’ve never done that before.”

  “Me neither,” she said.

  We laughed as we cleaned off the last bits of food on our plates.

  I had a fleeting feeling that it was actually moments like those that the Red Tent existed for.

  * * *

  Finally, at seven p.m., everyone gathered for the ritual part of the evening. We formed a circle inside the tent—some sat on the maroon sofa, others on big pillows, and a few on the wood-slated floor. For the next hour, we meditated on our ovaries and then shook maracas while we sang songs with lady-centric lyrics.

  Oh, Momma Ocean, hold me close and tell me your ways

  I feel your tides inside of me

  I surrender and I am set free

  It was all as corny as a fifty-year-old man with high-waisted Dockers telling knock-knock jokes, yet I still managed, when guided, to earnestly visualize my egg traversing my fallopian tubes. Then, as the evening began to wind down, I finally came back to myself. I realized that there had still been no mention of PMS. I resolved to hijack the group and appeal to the women myself. “What do you all think of PMS?” I asked.

  It was quiet for a moment, but then a few women piped up.

  There was the girl, Olivia, who said that she acts out. “I just warn my friends,” she said. “I say, ‘I’m PMS’ing, so I’m going to be a bitch this week.’”

  I thought about Chrisler—how she thinks that we use PMS as a permission slip to show the gruffer side of ourselves.

  Then another woman said, “I’m so sick of having shame for being pissed off.”

  But then the conversation quickly petered out. Thérèse was standing at this point, getting ready to wrap everything up for the night.

  I looked to her, somewhat accusatorily, and said, “Why didn’t we talk about this more?” I was pissed. Before I came, I made sure that PMS would be heartily addressed.

  “This is the woman’s way,” she said with no anger or ill will.

  That made absolutely no sense to me, but it turns out that didn’t get in my way of accepting it. I was so content from a day spent lounging that, at that point, her answer—maybe the fact that there was an answer at all—seemed perfectly satisfying.

  “Oh, right,” I said, nodding. “The woman’s way.”

  Everyone got up and Mary said to no one in particular, “When do you get to let go like this?”

  We all hummed in agreement and then parted ways as we went off to sleep.

  * * *

  I woke up at six a.m. with the chickens clucking and the sky just beginning its transition from black to blue. I felt calm and relaxed until I stared up at the ceiling. Last night I must have been in a chia-pudding-induced coma. What did that even mean—“the woman’s way”? Maggie and I would be leaving in a few hours, so I threw off my covers and rushed to the main yurt.

  Tere was alone in the kitchen, brewing some coffee and tipping a bag of oats into a large water-filled saucepan. “‘The woman’s way’?
” I said. “Explain that, please.”

  Tere poured herself a cup of coffee and gave me one, too. She told me that where the masculine way was direct and goal-driven, the feminine way was circular and open. “You put your question out there, which you did before you started the weekend,” she said, “and then you sit back and wait.”

  “You just wait?” I said. “That sounds unproductive.”

  “It’s not generally productive.” She laughed.

  She said that the masculine style is accepted by society and is what we think of as “productive”—it is to narrow your vision until your goal is accomplished. “But the woman’s way,” she said, “is, ‘I don’t really know what is going to bring me the information I want and there is no way I can direct it, but I can open myself to everything that’s coming at me and learn and somehow what I receive will be greater than my original question.’”

  I tried to parse what she was saying.

  “And that state of not knowing—when you don’t have a fucking clue—is also when you’re closest to God, when you’re closest to the creative force,” she continued. “And that’s a hard place to be for us humans, because we really want to know.”

  “So PMS?” I said, shrugging.

  She stirred some nuts and dried fruit into the saucepan. “Yeah,” she said, “embrace the chaos.”

  * * *

  A few weeks after the weekend at Sacred Groves, on a Saturday morning, Dave and I went out to breakfast. We were walking to Pig and Khao, a Southeast Asian place, on the Lower East Side. I’d been building up to this conversation for a long time—since back when I learned about (and was permanently traumatized by) puppy fumigation. We were in lockstep, crossing Houston Street.