Like her hair, Janet’s voice gave no hint of its original shape. It was soft, pitched low, and rose and fell like a stream flowing through a formal garden. “I’m so happy to meet you,” she told Jaqe. Later, when they saw Laurie’s cleaned and refurnished apartment, Janet laughed and said, “Now I know you’re the one for Laurie. You’re sure you’re not hiding a magic wand somewhere?” Jaqe discovered she liked Janet’s voice, even looked forward to hearing it without much concern for what it said. And yet she found herself wondering what Janet would sound like if someone stamped on her foot.
Laurie’s sister was fourteen but seemed younger. In a white dress and pink shoes with tiny heels, she tended to stand silently behind her mother. Occasionally her father would put his arm around her shoulders while he talked with Laurie and Jaqe. Sometimes Ellen looked up at him and smiled. More often she continued to look at the ground. Laurie said later that her father described Ellen as “an accident, but not a disaster.”
The graduation ceremony took place on the baseball field. The platform for the speakers reminded Jaqe of the one at the Toad Dance, and in fact both the chancellor and the valedictorian referred to “the quest achieved,” as one of them put it (probably the valedictorian, but Jaqe couldn’t remember), as well as President Benson’s “sad and untimely death.” Through the two-hour ceremony Jaqe sat with Laurie’s family on gray plastic chairs surrounded by hundreds of other bored and hungry people. She couldn’t even see Laurie, for the graduates all sat in the first rows and all you could see were black robes and mortarboards.
On and on the speakers went. Honor students, school officials, some government undersecretary of something. There were awards, fake (honorary) doctorates, commemorations…Poor Laurie, Jaqe thought, stuck in that hot costume. Poor me, she thought, as she struggled to stay awake. She began to doodle in her program: circles, spirals, stick figures chasing each other up and down hills. She drew a wavy line down a blank page and then a pair of lines crossing it. At the top she drew an inverted arch, like a bowl or the bottom half of a face. At the bottom she drew a series of half circles, with lines running in between them. Only when she finished did Jaqe recognize the tree the women had chalked on her parents’ road. The tree and the labyrinth. She held the program tight in both hands. Where was the stone? What had she done with it?
“Are you all right?” Janet whispered. Jaqe looked at her. “You were moaning.”
“What? Oh, I’m sorry. I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” Mrs. Cohen gave Jaqe’s hand a quick squeeze. “Maybe you should go find some shade.”
“No, really,” Jaqe said. “It’s just hard to keep awake.” Mrs. Cohen nodded and looked again at the current speaker. Jaqe waited a moment, then turned in her seat, as if bored and searching for something to take up her attention. She scanned the crowd, the women’s faces, the clothes, searching for red hair or a wide hat. She looked in front, but it was hard to see anything, so many heads. She told herself, She’ll be in the back, it’s not like her to sit in front. It was only when she let her eyes move beyond the crowd that she saw her. There—among a row of VIP cars parked on the road that ran along the edge of the field. There was the limousine, dark blue, not black as it had seemed on the night of the dance. Dressed in red balloon trousers gathered at the ankles and a gold silk jacket with padded shoulders, Mother Night leaned against her car. She was wearing a kind of oversized pink beret; the crushed velvet flowed down, framing the left side of her face. She raised her arm and waved softly to Jaqe. As she did so, a breeze stirred her hair so that it rose off her shoulders like wings.
“Excuse me,” Jaqe said to Janet, and started the climb over people’s feet.
Janet grabbed her hand. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Jaqe said. “I just saw an old—someone I know.” Gently she pulled her hand loose and continued down the row. Why did she have to sit in the middle? Why couldn’t people get out of the way? “Excuse me,” she kept saying. “Sorry.” Just as she reached the end of the row she saw Mother Night get into the backseat of her limousine. Softly the car slid down the road, its engine noise drowned out by the voice in the loudspeakers. “Ambition and responsibility,” the voice was saying. “Necessary partners in the dance of ethical opportunity.”
“No,” Jaqe said. “No.”
“Will you please be quiet?” a woman said. Jaqe jumped. “Sorry,” she said, and began the shuffle back to her seat.
Throughout the rest of the speeches Jaqe kept trying to spot Laurie’s back, the set of her shoulders, the slight leftward tilt of her head. When the school’s acting president began giving out the degrees, Jaqe ran her finger down the list of names in the program, furious at how slowly they all moved, how they all had to stop and shake hands with the goddamn acting president. And then at last Laurie was there. She was all right, she was okay; look, she stood up straight, she wasn’t in pain or about to faint, she was fine, she was fine.
“She looks beautiful,” Janet whispered, and sniffed into a tissue.
“Hey, did you see that?” Bill said. “She winked at him. Can you believe that?”
She’s okay, Jaqe thought.
For the rest of the day and the evening, Jaqe kept watching Laurie, looking for signs of illness or food poisoning. When they drove to the restaurant (where she refused to let Laurie order clams), and later the Cohens’ motel, Jaqe watched every crossroad, every car, searching for drunk drivers or teenage maniacs or even broken glass that could shatter the illusion of solid tires. She didn’t relax until eleven o’clock, when Laurie turned on the late news. For only then did she learn that half an hour after they had left the campus a rejected lover of the undersecretary had broken into the official dinner given by the chancellor, and then, while all the guests were drinking champagne in honor of the university, taken out a gun her lover had given her and shot the undersecretary two times in the chest and once in the face. “Thank God,” Jaqe whispered, and rushed into the bathroom where no one would see her cry.
Three
The Bird Woman
Laurie went to graduate school at a university on the shore of a poisoned lake. There were many poisoned waters in Laurie’s country at that time, and while some people wrote books or signed petitions demanding the water be cleaned, others continued to pour poison into the lakes and rivers, as if acting out some ancient curse. In winter the lake by Laurie’s school froze and people could drive cars and trucks across it. Traditionally the local men drilled holes in the ice and built shacks where they could sit in the evenings and catch fish for their families. The state tried to forbid ice fishing, for the fish had become poisoned along with the water, but there were too many families who counted on the fish to get them through the winter when heating costs took up so much of the budget.
One afternoon in late November, Laurie’s professor for Female Spirituality and the Neolithic Revolution led the class in a ritual, an “enactment” she called it, to heal the lake. “The rivers are the veins and arteries of Mother Earth,” she told her class. She also told them that lakes were the Goddess’s eyes, a contradiction no one dared to mention. “The Goddess loves contradictions,” she once told them. The enactment consisted of performing a chant while holding (gloved) hands and walking sideways along the lakeside, drawing symbols of protection in the snow with forked branches, calling to the spirits of the winds to heal the water, and finally pleading for forgiveness from the Lady of the Lake. At the end the professor poured a bottle of distilled water onto the ice.
While the others headed for their cars Laurie stood and looked out on the lake. She’d always assumed that a frozen lake would be transparent all the way to the bottom, or maybe white and glittery. In fact, if she pushed away the snow with her foot, the ice looked almost black. She looked up at the row of shacks about two hundred yards from the shore. She saw a pickup truck parked next to one of them. When she squinted against the sun she could make out a few wisps of smoke above the roof of the shack. Someone must have
a stove, she thought, or even a small campfire. She sighed. If only Jaqe were here. Jaqe would have loved this, a whole lake frozen so solid you could park a truck on it and build a fire. She smiled now. What would Jaqe have made of the ritual? Probably laugh. Sometimes—sometimes when she thought of Jaqe it became hard to breathe, and she felt all queasy inside. She made a noise. She didn’t even have to think of Jaqe. Sometimes, sitting in class or the library, or waking up in the middle of the night, something would get all twisted inside her, and then her breathing would get stopped up and she’d have to pull the air into her lungs. Just the other day she’d been reading an article about parents who—Laurie shuddered, then shook her head to clear out the memory. She hated it when she felt weird. As soon as it went away she tried not to think of it. Now she took a deep breath of the cold air, grateful that it went all the way down, that she didn’t have to fight for it.
“Hey, Laurie,” one of the women from her class called. “Come on, it’s freezing out here.”
“Go on,” Laurie shouted. “I’ll come back later.” She wiggled her toes in their padded moon boots. They hurt a little, just like her fingers and her face, but nothing seemed in any danger of frostbite. She was glad she’d borrowed a car for the day, though she knew she’d better not stay until dark or the battery might freeze.
“What are you doing?” the woman asked.
Laurie laughed. “I’m going to walk on water.”
The ice was uneven and covered in snow, which made it difficult for her to judge her steps. It took her twenty minutes and several falls to reach the shack. Inside she could hear the local radio station. The disc jockey was saying something about “serenity” and “eternal rest,” and Laurie realized he was advertising a funeral parlor. She knocked on the door. No answer. She knocked again. “What the hell?” came a man’s voice. “Is someone there?”
Laurie pushed open the plywood door and leaned inside. “Hello?” she said.
“Sonofabitch,” the man said, and grinned. “Come in. I thought you were a ghost or something.” His right hand held a fish line that disappeared down a hole in the ice about a foot across. His left hand held a bottle of beer. He sat on a stool. Next to it stood a case of beer bottles, two-thirds of them empty. By the back wall a small kerosene heater filled the prefabricated shack with warmth and the smell of oil. Above the heater a plastic window let in the sun. Near the door stood a pail of water half full of small fish. “I’m Eugene,” the man said, and reached down to turn off the radio. “Want a beer? Just grab one. I gotta keep hold of this line.” He jerked it up and down a couple of times to demonstrate.
Laurie took a beer from the crate. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m Laurie.”
“Nice to meet you, Laurie,” Eugene said. His grin got wider. “Sorry I ain’t got a chair to offer you. I don’t get too many visitors. Tell the truth, you’re the first. Ice fishermen ain’t much for socializing. You from the college?” Laurie nodded as she sat down on the edge of the crate. She was suddenly conscious of her bright red boots and her padded nylon jacket. Eugene wore a checkered woolen jacket and a matching cap pushed back on his head. Though he didn’t look more than thirty-five, his hair was dirty with gray. “Hey,” he said, “why don’t you take out all them bottles and turn that thing over. Make a real seat.” As Laurie began taking out the beer bottles Eugene said, “Put the full ones on this side, okay? I’d give you a hand, but…” He waved the hand holding the string.
Laurie sat with Eugene for over two hours, during which time he caught six fish—smelt, he called them. For the first time since she’d left Jaqe, Laurie felt relaxed, not angry or depressed or afraid. When she told Eugene she was doing women’s studies he gave the predictable answer. “Studying women, huh? Think I could sign up for that?” Somehow it didn’t bother her, not like when her father said it. She thought of her course in deconstructing patriarchal discourse, and then of Eugene’s wife frying the poisoned smelt Eugene brought home from the lake.
Halfway through her second bottle of beer Laurie thought she might be in trouble. Eugene asked her, “So you got a boyfriend, Laurie?” Tell him, she thought. Don’t leave it open. She shook her head. “Uh-uh,” she said. “Girlfriend.” She took another swallow of beer.
Eugene nodded, like a doctor in a TV commercial. “Girlfriend,” he repeated. The sage mask fell apart in a smile. “Women’s studies, huh?” Laurie laughed. “I had a cousin once who was doing women’s studies. Couldn’t believe the scores she made. Pretty? You wouldn’t believe some of them girls. Your girlfriend pretty?”
“Prettier than the end of winter,” Laurie said.
On the next bottle of beer Eugene asked her, “You believe in past lives?”
“I don’t know,” Laurie said. “A lot of my friends do.”
“A cousin of mine learned how to do that regression stuff. It’s easy. You lie down, maybe smoke some pot, close your eyes, and suddenly you’re in Egypt or someplace. Beats television anyway.” He jerked the line out of the water and a fish came with it. Still talking, he put the fish in the pail, hooked another piece of bait, and dropped the line back in the water. “My favorite was a pirate. Robbing the shit out of rich people. Of course, sometimes they can turn out pretty nasty. One time I even became a lawyer. Gave me nightmares for weeks.”
Sitting with Eugene, Laurie had promised herself she would study after dinner. But instead of going to the library, she wrote Jaqe a long letter. When she couldn’t think of anything more to write she drew a cartoon of the two of them running through storms and flames into each other’s arms. By the time she finished, the library was closing. She smoked the end of a joint she’d been saving and lay down on her narrow dorm bed. Past life, she thought. Send myself into a past life. Instead, she fell asleep. She dreamed that she was riding a snowmobile through the woods at night, weaving among the trees while birds flew in and out of her headlights, visible only in those moments they passed through the beams. Suddenly she burst out of the woods onto the lake. From either side the snow spewed into the air in great fountains. Soon other snowmobiles came to join her, a long line of women bending forward, their mouths open to the wind. In the distance she could make out something tall and shimmering, like a mirage of a tower. When she came closer she saw a woman in a loose dress that flapped against her body. Laurie and the others cut their engines to let the machines glide slowly toward the woman. Only when the others jumped onto the ice did Laurie recognize Mother Night. At her feet, dead, lay the birds of the forest.
The dream shifted and Laurie sat on a chair on the ice, fishing through a hole. Her line jerked and she pulled back on it to bring out a dark gold fish. “If you let me go,” the fish said, “I will grant you three wishes.”
“I want to go home,” Laurie said. “I just want to go home.” She found herself in her parents’ house, at the dinner table, with her father beside her and his arm over her shoulders. “No,” Laurie said. “I didn’t mean here. I meant home. I want to change it. I want my second wish. Hurry!” But at that moment her mother brought a large iron plate to the table. On top of it lay the fish, covered in green sauce, with only the dead eyes and mouth open to the air.
The following Wednesday Laurie skipped her seminar and borrowed her friend’s car to drive out to the lake. For half an hour she searched among the shacks, but Eugene must have caught his fill for the winter, for his prefabricated home was gone.
Laurie lived in a cell-like room in a residence for unmarried students. It seemed strange to be living in a dorm again, but without Jaqe there didn’t seem much point in looking for her own place. Some of the male students were married and lived with their wives in three-room apartments rented by the university. Laurie wondered if they would accept a lesbian couple on the same terms. But the wives all worked, usually in office jobs for the university, and the last thing Laurie wanted was Jaqe working for her.
“I could transfer here,” Jaqe told her during one of their long weekends together. “One school’s the same as any o
ther. And we’d be together.”
“Sure,” Laurie said. “And your parents will keep paying your tuition if you transfer just to be with me.”
“I don’t need their money. I could get a job. Or extend my student loan.”
“I don’t want you getting a job. And your loan’s going to take long enough to pay back as it is.” Laurie went on to point out how quickly she could finish her class time and move back to the city while she wrote her dissertation, and how they could have their summers and breaks, and how Jaqe could visit her on weekends. Only much later did she realize that she didn’t want Jaqe to join her because then she could no longer dream of going home.
During the months Laurie was away Jaqe continued to live in their apartment, taking comfort in the fact that Laurie had lived there for two whole years before Jaqe had known her. Sometimes she would take a deep breath and think how Laurie had breathed the same air, how wherever she stepped she was walking where Laurie had walked. She even thought once of finding all of Laurie’s ex-lovers, or at least the ones Laurie had brought home to the apartment, and giving a party. Louise had talked her out of it. “Take my word for it,” Louise said. “You won’t get the Queer of the Year award with ideas like this one.” Officially, Jaqe still lived in the dorm with Louise, for when Jaqe had told her parents there was no point in wasting their money they insisted it was their money and they would waste it any way they liked. “Don’t burn your bridges,” her father told her. “If you change your mind the room will be there for you.”
Jaqe found it hard not to measure her parents against Laurie’s, especially when she thought how Laurie’s parents were paying for the apartment—“so the two of you will always know you have your own place,” Janet had said. Sometimes Jaqe called Laurie’s folks in the evenings, or on weekends if she and Laurie couldn’t get away to each other. She and Janet would talk of how much they missed Laurie, how they worried about her, how she was losing weight—“without your home cooking,” Bill said—and sometimes looked a little green when she came home for a visit. Or they would make jokes about Laurie’s rotten cooking and about all the trouble she must be giving her poor naive professors.
Godmother Night Page 5
