Godmother Night

by Rachel Pollack

  She woke up sometime in the middle of the night. She and Laurie were sleeping in the guest room. “After all,” Laurie had said cheerfully, “I promised not to sleep in your room; you didn’t promise not to sleep in mine.” For a few minutes Jaqe lay there thinking she could just fall back asleep, but she couldn’t seem to get comfortable. Every time Jaqe turned on her side or back, Laurie groaned and tugged the blanket.

  After a while she slid carefully out of bed and went to the window. What had happened to the lights? The windows of the guest room looked out across the houses and down the hill so that Jaqe could see glimpses of homes through half the development. There were no windows lit. She knew from her childhood, when she sometimes would wake up from a bad dream and go look out the window, that there was always somebody awake, somewhere. And when she looked to the left, at the street, all the lamps were out. Power failure, she thought, and switched on the desk lamp, only to switch it off instantly when the light hit her eyes. Laurie groaned again but stayed asleep.

  Quickly Jaqe pulled on jeans, Laurie’s sweatshirt, and sandals. Downstairs she opened the door as softly as possible, afraid her mother, who had always been such a light sleeper, would wake up and investigate. When Jaqe got outside she half expected to find the street empty, but no, there were women there, a whole group of women—five, seven, nine of them—nine women weaving in and out among one another in something like a dance.

  Jaqe did her best to hide behind the oak tree on the front lawn. A few houses down, by Terry Santorini’s house, the women moved in a rough circle in the road, making a funny noise and shaking their hands. No, it was rattles, they were shaking rattles at the road, baby rattles; she could see the plastic clowns’ heads. Jaqe tried to make out the women’s faces, see if she recognized any of them, but they were too far away. One of them looked a little like Mrs. Bennet from across the street, and another looked like Jackie Lee, the one who used to give all those Tupperware parties. Maybe she’d supplied the rattles, Jaqe thought, and had to hold in a laugh. She wished she could get closer, but didn’t dare, in case they saw her and ran away.

  The women were dressed up, she saw, like proper ladies going to town. They wore straight or pleated skirts, some with little suit jackets, others with ruffled blouses. They all carried shiny black purses with metal clasps. And—though it was hard to tell without any streetlights—Jaqe thought they were wearing gloves, white gloves climbing into their sleeves.

  Something was happening in the street. The sewer was backing up—but how could it back up without any rain? No, it wasn’t water coming out of the grate, it was snakes! Masses of snakes were slithering out of the sewer into the street, coming up to the sound of the rattles. Jaqe had to shove her hand in her mouth to keep from screaming. A moment later she wanted to laugh. She remembered her father’s complaints years ago about extra taxes, and then later his civic pride when the county put in the sewer system to replace the old septic tanks. She almost wanted to run in and wake up Daddy and drag him outside.

  There weren’t so many snakes as she’d first thought. A dozen? Twenty? The way they moved together made it hard to tell. Snakes are so clannish, she thought, and had to fight not to giggle. She was giddy, she knew. Fear or excitement. The snakes were all in the center of the road now, with the women around them. The women did a kind of side shuffle with their bottoms out—Jaqe wondered if they were wearing girdles. When all the snakes had come together the women stopped their rattling. They stood still for a moment, with only a slight sway of the hips and shoulders. And then they opened their purses and took out…cardboard statues? No, they were cakes. Small cakes shaped like people with their arms and legs out, just like the pictures of the gingerbread cookies in that children’s story about the witch and her giant oven.

  The snakes caught the cakes in their mouths and headed back to the sewer. Jaqe wondered what snakes did with cake. Did they break it into crumbs with their fangs, or swallow it whole? When all the snakes had gone, two of the women took out pieces of chalk and began drawing on the road the way little girls draw a hopscotch pattern—a line down the center of the road and a lot of short lines crossing it. When the women with the chalk finished, two others sprinkled something on the ground around the outer circle. Pebbles, Jaqe thought, or maybe rock salt. Before the women could do anything else, a noise came from down the block, and then lights as a police car came around the corner of Mapleleaf Drive. The women all looked at each other, clearly surprised. Something had gone wrong, Jaqe realized. No one was supposed to bother them. That was why all the lights had gone out. But it was too late now for corrections. Before the lights of the police car could catch them, the women ran across Terry Santorini’s lawn and up the hill to Ashgrove Road. Jaqe was so busy staring after them she didn’t notice the patrol car slowing down behind her. Only when it stopped did she realize how peculiar she must look, crouched behind a tree in the middle of the night. She hurried inside and closed the door. Her heart beat very hard and she didn’t move, afraid the cops would come and knock on the door. At last she heard them drive away.

  Upstairs, Jaqe touched Laurie’s shoulder. She whispered her name. “Wake up,” she said.

  “Sweetheart?” Laurie mumbled, “I love you too,” and rolled over.

  Jaqe reached out with her hand again, hesitated, then let it drop. She realized she didn’t want to tell Laurie, though she wasn’t sure why. Maybe she thought Laurie wouldn’t believe her. Or maybe she wanted it for herself. Or maybe she was supposed to keep it secret.

  She crossed the hall to her own room, where she sat down on the bed. She looked at her books, made a face. The last thing she wanted to do was study. Near the foot of the bed lay a photo album, pictures of Jaqe as a child. Jaqe smiled, remembering how Laurie had laughed and then kissed her when they came to the picture of Jaqe in a tutu with her feet crossed and her arms over her head. She opened the book and saw herself on her side in a pink crib, with a pacifier stuck in her mouth and her hand on the bottom of a white walrus.

  I want a child, Jaqe thought. Startled, she looked up at the window, as if someone had slipped inside to put the strange notion inside her head. A child. The idea was ridiculous. She hadn’t even finished her first year of college. What the hell would she do with a child? Bounce it on her knee in French Lit? And where the hell would she get a child? Women-loving women didn’t get pregnant. “Safest method of birth control ever invented,” Louise had once proclaimed. Well, there were some who had children, but usually from before they’d begun their women-loving careers. “This is ridiculous,” Jaqe said out loud and closed the photo book. When she put it down, she felt a great desire to cry. She was overemotional. Something about those strange women. She jumped up and looked out the window. Lights. The streetlights had come back on, and she could even see one or two houselights somewhere up the hill. More people up late with crazy thoughts.

  Jaqe went back to the guest room, where she stripped down, and slid into bed. Gently she put an arm around her lover’s shoulders and pressed her front against Laurie’s back. I love you, she thought. I love you so much. And yet, just before she fell asleep, the other thought came again and with it the astonishment. A child. A baby.

  In the morning Jaqe slipped outside before breakfast. There it was—the childlike drawing. It looked faded, as if it had lain there for weeks instead of just a few hours. For a moment she wondered if she’d seen it earlier in the weekend and then dreamed the rest. She squatted down. It looked like a tree, about a yard long, with a central trunk and nine crossing branches. At the top, the trunk forked, somehow suggesting a head or a face. Suddenly Jaqe jammed her hand in her pocket to find the stone she’d picked up in the street the day before. She wasn’t sure, maybe her imagination was jumping too many gaps, but the picture in the street looked a lot like the tree she’d seen in the stone. She looked again at the rock, at the tangle of roots at the bottom. When she looked back at the pavement, she saw that a car must have driven over the roots, for she could hardly s
ee them. She bent down to look closer. They looked like circles or a spiral. Only when her finger traced the pattern did she recognize the in-and-out route of a labyrinth. Her hand leaped away like a toad. “Mother Night,” she whispered.

  Breakfast was pancakes, something Jaqe’s mother hadn’t made in years. After breakfast, Mr. Lang offered Laurie the keys to Mrs. Lang’s minicompact and suggested a couple of historical sites Laurie might want to visit. “The point is,” he said, “we’d like to talk to our daughter,” and Mrs. Lang added, “And we don’t feel you should have to just walk around the block.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Laurie said, and flipped the keys in the air. To Jaqe she said, “Well?”

  “I don’t mind,” Jaqe said, “if you don’t.”

  “In that case—” Laurie put the keys in her pocket. She whistled “Oh Susannah” on her way out the door.

  “Oh,” Mrs. Lang said, “can you handle a stick?”

  “For God’s sake,” her husband told her, “of course she can handle a stick.” He blushed. “I just mean, if you can—”

  “No problem,” Laurie said. Halfway out the door, she turned. “Jaqe,” she said, “I love you.” She waved a salute at Jaqe’s parents and went out the door.

  The talk came mostly from Jaqe’s parents, who told her about unnatural acts, the perfect fit of male and female parts, danger to their standing in the community, the availability of psychiatric and religious assistance, dangers to Jaqe’s future career, dangers to her marriage prospects, dangers to her health, including breast and cervical cancer (Jaqe remembered Louise at a student debate shouting “Cancer comes from penises”), Laurie’s niceness and how Jaqe’s parents wished her well, how Jaqe wasn’t helping Laurie, the pathos of those who cannot help themselves compared with the hope of those who can, and finally various great villains of history who were men-loving men. Jaqe said very little because she could think of very little to say. Laurie, or Louise, would have matched them point for point (or else slammed the door), but Jaqe knew that none of these calamities had anything to do with her. She broke in only now and then to explain that she and Laurie loved each other with a certainty beyond the need for professional consultation, and that her name was not Jacqueline but Jaqe. Otherwise she felt like someone standing on the grass and watching a high-speed merry-go-round. Only once did one of the horses brush against her. “You know we’ve always wanted grandchildren,” her mother said, and took up a fresh tissue.

  Jaqe looked at the floor. “I think I’m a little young,” she said.

  “Of course, of course,” her father broke in. “We don’t want you running out and getting pregnant. But if you get into bad habits now…” He let his voice trail off while he stared ominously at her.

  Jaqe forced herself to look at him. “Do you mean when the time comes I won’t be able to give them up?”

  “Sometimes,” her mother said, “we start something; maybe it seems like an adventure—”

  “Or a rebellion,” her father said.

  “Or a rebellion,” his wife repeated. “And then when we’ve made a mistake it’s too late. I mean, we think it’s too late. It’s never really too late, but we feel…we feel ashamed.”

  “Or stubborn,” Jaqe’s father said.

  Jaqe was thankful to get back to safer ground. “Laurie is no mistake,” she said. But her parents weren’t listening, for they had gone on to the theme of justifiable social anger and the difficulty of finding a man big enough to forgive the past. “Men are only human,” her father assured her.

  Laurie returned with a handful of flowers plucked from the garden of a famous governor’s childhood home. “For you,” she said, with a slight bow, to Mrs. Lang, who looked first at her husband, then took the flowers nervously, as if the bouquet might give her a rash. The moment she was rid of the flowers Laurie stepped to Jaqe and took her hands. “Are you all right?”

  Jaqe smiled at her. “Of course I’m all right. They’re just my parents.” Looking at her lover’s face Jaqe could see the emotions as clearly as if Laurie had labeled them: worry, anger that Jaqe might be hurt, desire to rescue Jaqe like some princess imprisoned on a glass mountain, shame at having left the princess alone with the wicked king and queen, fear that Jaqe’s parents might have turned Jaqe against her, anger and fear at her own helplessness if Jaqe should ever decide to leave her. Jaqe wished that she and Laurie could exchange hearts, each one beating in the other’s chest, proof that nothing could ever pull them apart. “I love you,” she said, and took a half step into the garden of her lover’s arms.

  Jaqe met Laurie’s parents on graduation weekend, when Mr. and Mrs. Cohen and Laurie’s younger sister, Ellen, drove in for the ceremony. Jaqe was delighted at how well they all got along, especially after the fight she’d had with her own parents when she’d told them over the phone that she wasn’t coming home, at least not until after Laurie’s graduation. It all went so smoothly. Laurie’s father shook her hand, Mrs. Cohen kissed her on the cheek, then rubbed the lipstick off with a scented tissue, and Ellen told her, “You’re a lot prettier than the last one,” at which Mr. Cohen laughed heartily and Mrs. Cohen scolded, “Ellen, don’t embarrass your sister.” After the ceremony they all stood arm in arm for photos, with Laurie and Jaqe in the middle, Ellen in front of them holding Laurie’s hand, Mrs. Cohen with an arm around her daughter’s waist, and Mr. Cohen with his arm over Jaqe’s shoulders. The following week, when Laurie’s parents sent copies of the photos, Jaqe set up the family shot in a glass frame above the refrigerator. For a long time—a year and two months—she would not understand why the picture made Laurie so furious. “What the hell is that doing there?” she shouted.

  “I thought you’d like it,” Jaqe said.

  “Well, you thought wrong.”

  “But it’s sweet.”

  Laurie was almost shaking as she pointed at the photo. “Get rid of that fucking picture.” She stamped out of the room. Later, when Jaqe asked her about it, Laurie said, “I just don’t like it there, okay?”

  On that sunny day in June, however, Jaqe knew nothing of her lover’s ambivalence toward her family. In fact, she was relieved to find them as nice as Laurie had said. After her attempts at harmony with her own parents, Jaqe had dreaded meeting the Cohens and had taken the distance of several hundred miles as a blessing arranged secretly for her by God. “My folks aren’t like that,” Laurie kept saying. “Wait till you meet them.” And some of the members of the DCC agreed. “Laurie’s parents are really special,” they’d say, and talk about the time Laurie took five of them home for Christmas and they could sleep with each other or hold hands in the living room. Or the time Laurie’s parents came to campus and Mrs. Cohen went along to a lesbian bar to see what it was like. “She looked great,” someone said. “I mean, you could see she was straight, but she still looked really great. She danced with a couple of women too.” And Laurie herself told Jaqe about the time she seduced a hometown girl, and the girl’s father came to the house when the two of them were upstairs in bed together. Laurie and Gail had held each other fearfully and listened to the argument. “Do you have any idea,” Gail’s father had asked, “what they’re doing up there while you watch TV or whatever the hell you’re doing with your head stuck in the sand?”

  “Having fun,” Laurie’s father had said.

  “Fun!” the other had shouted. “Are you crazy? Your perverted daughter—”

  And at that Mr. Cohen had shoved the man off the step and slammed the door.

  Laurie’s father was a hairdresser, the owner of three beauty parlors, one of them specializing in Black hairstyles and treatment. When she first heard of Mr. Cohen’s profession, Jaqe wondered what her parents would make of this. Would they assume that Laurie had inherited his cross-gender tendencies? Or maybe that Mr. Cohen had wanted a fairy for a son and covered his disappointment by raising his daughter as a dyke? But in fact, as Beth, the LSU vice president, put it, “Bill Cohen is no faggot.” When Jaqe met him at the graduation she sa
w a burly man with heavy shoulders, a slight potbelly, muscles that had run a little (but only a little) to fat, a rugged face that had gone a little puffy, especially around the eyes, and hands that looked too large for wrapping hair around rollers. He looked a little like a professional football player who’d retired and gone into public relations.

  “Call me Bill,” he told Jaqe when Laurie introduced them. “Bill and Jaqe. Sounds like a team already.”

  “And I’m Janet,” Laurie’s mother said. Janet was all suburban elegance, with her pleated permanent-press skirt and fitted blazer (pale green, to celebrate the beginning of summer), her cream-colored blouse that had never known sweat, and her medium-heeled green pumps with a strip of gold between the heel and the shoe. Molded into a gentle landscape of hills and valleys, her hair gave no clue to its natural form. Jaqe wondered if Mr. Cohen had designed it himself or, having no time, delivered her to whatever genius headed up the flagship of his small fleet. (“Marcel,” he would say, “this is Mrs. Cohen, take good care of her.”) Or maybe Bill kept up his old skills by practicing on his wife, just in case some young turk challenged him to show he still had the stuff. Did he set her hair before they made love? Maybe they put on special robes, like a king and queen, or priestess and slave. Maybe he wore a loincloth. Stop it, Jaqe warned herself. Soon she’d start to giggle, and then would have to think up some excuse when they asked her why.