Godmother Night
Page 1
In the spirit of Angela Carter and Jonathan Carroll—but with a truly unique sensibility and an imagination as daring as Philip K. Dick’s—Rachel Pollack has created a magnificent modern fairy tale unlike anything you’ve ever read.
In a contemporary world much unlike our own, two women named Laurie and Jaqe find themselves and each other, only to be separated by Mother Night—a small, elderly woman in extravagant clothes who is, literally, death. She and her five red-haired, leather-clad bikers cruise through the lives of the lovers and their daughter, leaving behind a tale of heartbreak and humor, of loss and joy, of death and life.
Rachel Pollack imbues modern issues with the storytelling magic of fairy tale that makes Godmother Night one of the year’s most spectacular literary events. New fans of Pollack will join her legions of admirers to marvel at this magical and powerful novel.
RACHEL POLLACK is a poet and novelist whose four previous novels include Temporary Agency and the award-winning fantasy Unquenchable Fire. Her short fiction will be collected soon in one volume, entitled Burning Sky. Additionally, she has scripted various comic books, most notably Doom Patrol, and she is widely regarded as an expert on the Tarot. In addition to writing the official texts for The Haindl Tarot and Salvador Dali’s Tarot, she published her own Shining Woman Tarot deck in 1993. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she grew up in Poughkeepsie and moved to Europe in the early 1970s. In 1990 she returned to the United States and now lives in Rhinebeck, New York.
ALSO BY RACHEL POLLACK
FICTION
Golden Vanity (1980)
Alqua Dreams (1987)
Unquenchable Fire (1988)
Temporary Agency (1994)
Burning Sky (forthcoming)
NONFICTION
78 Degrees of Wisdom, Part 1 (1980)
78 Degrees of Wisdom, Part 2 (1983)
Salvador Dali’s Tarot (1985)
Teach Yourself Fortune Telling (1986)
The Open Labyrinth (1986)
The New Tarot (1989)
The Haindl Tarot, Part 1 (1990)
The Haindl Tarot, Part 2 (1990)
Le Jeu Divinatoire (1991)
Shining Woman Tarot Deck (1992)
AS EDITOR
Tarot Tales (with Caitlín Mathews) (1989)
Note: Kate Cohen’s healing potion, Phytolacca Americana, is an actual plant. This plant is poisonous and should not be taken as described in the story. It works for Kate only because Kate’s godmother makes it work.
GODMOTHER NIGHT. Copyright © 1996 by Rachel Pollack. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Design by Songhee Kim
Edited by Gordon Van Gelder
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pollack, Rachel.
Godmother night: a novel / by Rachel Pollack; [edited by Gordon Van Gelder]. —1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-14606-X (hardcover)
I. Van Gelder, Gordon. II. Title.
PS3566.O4798G63 1996
813'.54—dc20
96-19623
CIP
First Edition: September 1996
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for FARA SHAW KELSEY
in gratitude for
Wise Woman knowledge of babies and magical potions
and so much more
and
for ISABEL MILLER
Godmother of us all
Madrone Tree, red as blood
that once my mother was, be my rod
Death came when I was born
And from the Earth now you are grown
My father’s a shadow, the wind is my god
ROBERT DUNCAN
CONTENTS
One - The Woman Without a Name
One
The Toad Queen
Two
Snakes and Cakes
Three
The Bird Woman
Four
The Three Papers
Five
The Treasure of Thorny Woods
Six
Candles in the Sun
Seven
The Children of the Sky
Eight
Greenthumb and Redshoes
Nine
The Butterfly Tree
Two - The Child in the Stone
One
The Baby in the Tree
Two
The Baby in the Jar
Three
The Child in the Water
Four
The Child in the Street
Five
The Baby on the Bridge
Three - The Girl Who Played with Death
One
Fly with the Crows
Two
The Streetmarket of the Dead
Three
The Courageous Knight
Four - The Woman in the Boat
One
The Secret in the Brown Bottle
Two
The Spinning Bed
Three
Bee Sting and Snake Girl
Four
The Candle That Burned through the Day
Five
The Laughing Women
One
The Toad Queen
There were once two women who lived on the back of a turtle. Their home lay on the edge of a city at the end of a river, where saltwater surged in from the sea. Far away, by other towns and rivers, the rocks and trees and black roads of the land ended by a second sea, so that the country where the women lived rose up out of the water like a turtle drawn to memories of the sun. A great variety of people had come to live in this land. Most of them thought of the country as somehow the same as the laws and committees pasted like artificial mushrooms on the surface of the Earth. But the people who had lived there first, who may have come across a bridge from somewhere else, or may have woken up in darkness and emerged through holes into the light, or may have followed a lizard or a fish or a bird or even a turtle through tunnels up to the sun, these people who had lived there so long understood that the land is nothing else but itself. And they understood the way it lay between waters, with its hard shell hiding a soft, slow belly and a mind dull and tender and patient.
The women who lived on the turtle were named by their separate parents Lauren and Jacqueline. As a child Lauren allowed common agreement to change her name to Laurie. At the age of thirteen, however, she gathered up her childhood coloring books, her diary, and several other bits of paper with the name “Laurie” on them and burned them all in her parents’ backyard. For several years she allowed only her grandmother to call her Laurie, a curious exception, since it was this grandmother who’d originally named her Lauren. Lauren, formerly Laurie, née Lauren, insisted that “diminutives diminish” and that “Lauren” sounded like an ancient bird, whereas “Laur-ie” sounded like some small animal poked with a stick.
Late one spring evening several years later, she once again abandoned “Lauren” and returned to the “-ie” of her childhood. She did not do this casually, or simply to annoy people, or to demonstrate she could train and retrain them “like dogs in the circus,” as her father said. She made the change because of a special event that happened that night in the last half of her senior year of college.
Jacqueline bore the same name for eighteen years, including brief periods in which she thought of variations, such as Jac-qué-line, or Jacque-lien, or even Jack, none of which she mentioned to anyone, even to those people she thought of as her best friends. She never believed in the nam
e Jacqueline. Sometimes, in school or at family parties, people would have to call her two or three times before she realized that “Jacqueline” meant her. People accused her of dreaminess, or arrogance, or stupidity, despite her high marks and carefully written compositions. Jacqueline accepted whatever version they created of her, never explaining that the name was wrong, that it could never refer to her.
It sometimes seemed to her that her real name lay just out of reach, just past memory. She tried playing tricks on herself, like writing down everything that happened in her dreams, thinking she would automatically catch some dream person calling her Helen or Sophie or Rachel or Gretel. But nothing ever came. She tried studying lists from books, such as Lives of the Great Storytellers, or What to Name Your New Baby. She would say each name aloud and slowly, waiting for some flash of recognition. Or she would read the names very fast, hoping to stumble over one in particular. Again, nothing. She began to think her real name didn’t exist, that God, or the angel in charge of such things, had forgotten to give it to her.
Throughout her childhood she cohabited with this name that had nothing to do with her, thankful at least that only doctors insisted on calling her Jackie. On her sixteenth birthday, when her parents insisted on a party, and ordered a cake with “Jacqueline” written in pink across it, and even gave her a gold bracelet with a name tag attached to it, the birthday girl decided to accept the emptiness created by a body and mind without a name. For another two years and four months, she tried not to think of this emptiness, until a single event changed both her name and her life forever.
The event that broke open the names of Lauren and Jacqueline began as a dance on the campus of their college, in that city in the eastern part of the turtle, not far from the sea. The school announced the dance to celebrate a victory in a yearly contest among a league of colleges. The contest was a quest sponsored by a foundation that had been created by an archaeologist who had won a government lottery. The goal of the quest was the same each year, a large porcelain toad, with black stones for eyes and a dark red circle on the top of its head.
In recent years, as the quest gained more and more status for the school that found the toad, more and more resources went into it, with plans and analyses coming from the departments of computer science, physics, psychology, cultural anthropology, and even comparative literature. Lauren and Jacqueline’s school, however, won that year by the efforts of an unusual champion, a woman who washed dormitory sheets and lab coats in the school laundry.
Fed up by all the shouting and the demonstrations (for the different departments had taken to attacking each other), the laundress, Gertrude, was sitting by her washing machines when the sheets spinning round and round reminded her of something. That night, she dreamed about a time when she was very little and her mother had taken her to hear a storyteller at a shopping mall near their home. The storyteller had sat outside, before a giant lottery wheel, which appeared in Gertrude’s dream as a rack of wet sheets turning and flapping in the wind. On her next day off, Gertrude took the bus back to her hometown and the shopping mall. The wheel was still there, and at the back of it she found a small door with a brass ring. Gertrude pulled, and pulled again, while a group of teenage girls in leather jackets and tight skirts stood around laughing. The door jerked open; inside, Gertrude found something cool and smooth. The dark eyes of the toad stared at her as she held it up to the sun.
So the toad came to Jacqueline’s college. In the week of the dance—with banners going up around the gym, and posters appearing on walls, and flags flying from dormitory windows, and men and women in toad masks and overalls building a giant replica of the trophy out of balsa wood and papier-mâché—in this week of spectacles, Jacqueline thought over and over of attending the dance, and every time, she decided it was not for her, not for a woman without a name.
In high school she had never participated much in teenage culture. Her friendships always seemed apart from the various groups that clustered around sports or honor societies or gangs or intellectual pretension. And the people she considered friends always seemed to put the group first, spending time with her mostly at her invitation, when nothing of greater interest summoned them. Jacqueline did not think of herself as very interesting. Without a name, even her body seemed half out of existence, a little like the holograms displayed at science fairs. She went to a few dances but didn’t stay long. The other girls always seemed to know what to do—how to stand, or make jokes, or dance with each other if there were no boys available. Jacqueline would sip punch, or try dancing or talking to people, but after a while her legs and shoulders would hurt from the strain of trying to appear relaxed, and she’d leave.
Sometimes boys asked her to dance, just as boys sometimes asked her for a date. Usually she agreed. She’d move around the floor, or she’d go to whatever horror movie the boy had chosen, and do her best to work out the correct responses of a girl with a name to anchor her in the world. Her parents never understood why their daughter wasn’t more popular. She was certainly pretty, they reassured her. And smart, they added, as if they’d forgotten. Maybe she should join more clubs. Her mother suggested different hairstyles or brighter makeup. Her father gave her money for clothes. Their daughter never paid much attention. They kept saying that name that had nothing to do with her. “Jacqueline, would you like a party?” or “Jacqueline, do you need a new dress?”
For a while in high school Jacqueline went out regularly with a boy named Dan Reynolds. Dan was a science student who frequently angered his teachers by demonstrating ways to cheat on lab experiments. Dan planned to open a computer business after college. At other times he talked of gathering a squad of renegade hackers and sabotaging the armed forces of several nations. He was handsome, or could be in a few years, when his face cleared and his body filled out. He never seemed to know how to behave in groups of people, sometimes talking too loudly, other times saying nothing at all. A couple of times Jacqueline overheard girls talking about Dan, calling him “weird” or “slimy.” Jacqueline guessed they knew she was listening.
Dan’s mother drank, Dan told Jacqueline one night after he himself had drunk several beers stolen from home. Because his mother was drunk so often, he and his father had to do all the cleaning and shopping. Dan and Jacqueline were sitting in Dan’s car, in the parking lot of a golf course. He kept his hands on the steering wheel while he talked, and though he didn’t look at her he clearly expected some reaction. Jacqueline said, “There’s nothing wrong with men doing the cleaning.”
Dan said, “Shit,” and started the engine. To both their surprise Jacqueline insisted on driving, even grabbing the keys from the ignition. For a moment it looked like Dan might hit her, but she just sat there, with the keys closed in her fist, saying, “You’re drunk, you can’t drive,” until at last he got out and came around to the passenger side.
As Jacqueline drove onto the highway a red sports car passed her. Inside, a woman with long hair and shiny teeth waved at her. “Did you see that?” Jacqueline started to say, but Dan was staring at the trees along the road. When Jacqueline looked again, the red car was gone.
That night, Jacqueline lay in bed, thinking not of Dan but of the woman in the car. The woman had waved to her, she was sure of it. Jacqueline thought she knew her, but couldn’t think from where. A long time ago: Very young. Her mother had left her in the stroller, outside a store. There was a park or something—she remembered trees and a group of people, women with short red hair, running or dancing. With her eyes and fists shut, she tried to bring it back. Someone came up to the stroller, a woman, bending over her, long hair…No use. If it actually had happened she’d been too young to remember it. Except—she remembered a sound, which when she thought about it now might have been sirens. And people crying, and her mother wheeling her away very fast. She sighed. Maybe Dan could hypnotize her. The idea made her laugh. Jacqueline did her best to relax; after a while she fell asleep.
The next morning, Dan called while she w
as having breakfast. Very calmly, he told her his mother had died during the night. An accident, he said. She’d fallen asleep at the wheel of her car and smashed it into a tree. Would Jacqueline please tell his homeroom teacher what had happened, and explain that Dan would be out of school for a few days? Perhaps she could bring him his assignments.
At the funeral, Dan stood very stiffly in a gray suit, thanking everyone for coming, including Jacqueline and his own relatives. For a week afterward, Jacqueline attempted to persuade Dan to talk about what had happened, to tell her the details of the accident, to describe how he felt. “I’m okay,” he told her, and “Life goes on, with or without us,” and “There’s no sense crying over spilt milk.” He then went on to describe his project for the science fair, a method of decoding cosmic radio signals for signs of UFOs.
Jacqueline’s relationship with Dan ended one evening on the floor of her parents’ house. She and Dan were alone, her parents having gone to a party. “Fate’s sending us a message,” Dan told her, kissing and rubbing her. Lately he’d been pressing for an “affirmation” of their love, saying that virginity was old-fashioned even in their parents’ time, or else describing ancient rituals to celebrate nature. Just as it looked like she might give in—they were half undressed, and Dan had his hand somewhere inside her panties—he breathed to her, “Jacqueline, I love you, Jacqueline. Oh, Jacqueline.” Suddenly he stopped. She wasn’t looking at him. When she turned she said, “What?” in a confused sort of way, as if he’d been talking to someone else. Dan yanked out his hand from her crotch. He slammed the door as he left.
In her first year of college now, in the week of the toad, Jacqueline couldn’t see much point in going to another dance. It would be just like high school. And it was a costume dance, too, which meant trying to think of something, spending money, feeling dumb.
Her roommate, Louise, was going. She’d already gotten a black shirt and tight black pants, a black polyester cape with a plastic sword, and a mask to cover her eyes. Sometimes Louise would wave the sword and leap onto her bed, until she fell over laughing. Louise had recently joined the Lesbian Student Union. She was “in love with all womankind,” Louise told her roommate. Jacqueline thought how wonderful it must be to belong somewhere.