Consciousness Raising

by Lorraine Ray

apple from the foggy depths of a sliding vegetable drawer in the bottom of the refrigerator. As she casually slumped away, I trotted after her, noting a thick volume of Rabelais in French beside the toaster. I suddenly remembered that Maureen’s mother was a published French translator, and I sighed, yearning for just such an intellectual home life, though I was rather glad my middle class mother cleaned up after herself.

  Chaos in the form of horsehair sofas and overstuffed ottomans greeted me in the vast Maywood den; I had difficulty keeping up as Maureen zigzagged ahead. When she suddenly plopped onto a rocking chair, I spun around in a frantic search for a suitable seat. I picked a nearby sofa. It wasn’t long before I regretted my choice, horsehair having an undesirable quality when one is wearing shorts.

  While I suffered prickly tickles on my thighs and calves, and nervously awaited more company, Maureen rocked herself, content to munch her apple. Her eyes had a creepy, smug look, exactly resembling a horned toad lounging atop an anthill. Under half-closed lids, she seemed to be studying me and, in evil glimmers, laughing. Flinching at the unwelcome scrutiny, I comforted myself with the thought that my mysterious benefactor would arrive soon. After a few minutes the silence between us became embarrassing, so I made small talk—mostly about school. When Maureen replied in monosyllables, I concluded that she was angry. “I’m sorry if you stayed here for me. You probably wanted to go to the reading instead, but I’m sure the others are on their way.”

  “Perhaps,” said Maureen to her apple. “On the other hand maybe nobody but you will bother coming.” With a sharp flick of her wrist she turned the apple and bit it.

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t like the way she said ‘you,’ and it shocked me to hear that the person who had nominated me might stay away. “Did you say a lot of the women you invited went to hear Plath read out loud? I’ve heard of her—Plath—didn’t she write The Glass Jar or something?”

  Maureen, her mouth agape over the apple like a snake’s jaw dislocated before its prey, halted the chair in mid-rock. “You mean The Bell Jar.”

  I grinned at my mistake. “Oh yeah. Same thing.”

  She studied me with real disgust. “No. There’s an idea incorporated in the title. If you think they’re the same, you may as well call her book The Peanut Butter Jar or The Big Bread Box.”

  I chuckled.

  Maureen rolled her eyes and emphatically snorted. She tossed her apple in a wastebasket; the fruit had become an hourglass-shaped corpse. “I suppose you’ve never read it.”

  “Well, actually, somebody told me it’s pretty good.”

  “You’ve heard it’s pretty good,” Maureen said in a mocking tone. “You don’t hear Plath is good. You’ve got to read her. Come on.” She launched herself out of the rocking chair. I stayed on the sofa, my hands in my lap, and cringed as she stomped by. “Shouldn’t we wait for the others?” I asked, leaning forward, my body willing her to return. “Can we hear the doorbell from there?”

  Frowning, at a loss for what to do or say next, I studied the high, beamed ceiling made of saguaro cacti ribs and an enormous, apocalyptic oil painting of an erupting Mexican volcano. In the painting, screaming peasants with their backs aflame fled a fiery caldron. Somehow at that moment that world seemed rather inviting.

  “When the others arrive we’ll want to be able to hear the doorbell,” I ventured plaintively. “Maureen?”

  I got up.

  “Maureen? We’ll want to hear the others when they come.” I crept across the room toward the threshold where Maureen had disappeared. Summoning all my courage, I discreetly peeked around the doorjamb and found myself inches from Maureen’s scathing face.

  “It’s twenty minutes until two o'clock,” she said in a withering whisper. “I think we can safely assume they’re not coming.”

  “Not coming—?”

  “We’re going to have to stay in my room, so I’ll loan you my personal copy of The Bell Jar.” She spun around and pounded up a flight of stairs.

  I hesitated, then followed. “Why do we have to stay in your room?”

  “Because my stupid parents let my stupid brother come back from the Desert Arbor, that’s why.”

  The Desert Arbor? That was a reformatory!

  Trailing Maureen through a high-ceilinged hallway on the second floor, I glanced into a bedroom where a huge adolescent male with corpuscular acne saw us and shouted, “Brought home another palsy-walsy?”

  “Drop dead!” Maureen yelled, charging back to kick his doorjamb.

  My chest throbbed; I was hardly breathing. “How did he end up at The Arbor?”

  “Attempted suicide, threatened murder, and beat up the idiotic bag full of God called my father.” She ushered me majestically into her room. “That’s from Plath. The bag full of God part, I mean. You’ll read it, of course. Plath hated her father, and I hate mine.” Maureen slammed the door and immediately leaped on a step stool and stretched her arm toward a spot in the towering shelves of books. “There are frequent references to this hatred of her father in The Bell Jar. Watch for them when you’re reading and jot them down. Then we’ll discuss what you find. The Bell Jar is an important book for you to get acquainted with right away,” she said, half to herself. As I watched Maureen gliding her hand back and forth in front of the shelves, I saw her lips moving, and I had the uncomfortable feeling she was devising a whole series of books and lectures to educate me. Given time to think, it was becoming clear that Maureen had planned the feminist consciousness raising herself; there was no group of activist women and no woman—other than Maureen—who had nominated me. The whole thing was depressingly similar to a detective club, called The Secret Eye, which I had unsuccessfully tried to organize when I was eight. I felt a twinge of pity for Maureen. Well, now she had me and I was going to be an interesting experiment for her; she was going to be my same-sex Professor Higgins, or my mesmerizing Svengali. “Voila!” She pounced on a thin paperback.

  “Ah,” I said when she handed me it. Reverently I cradled the book and nodding, backed onto a canopied bed. It was another bad choice for a seat; over and over, the pink silk duvet conveyed me downward. I nervously riffled The Bell Jar. In a series of furtive glances I canvassed her shelves for a book we might have in common. Why hadn’t I read the entire contents of the world’s great literary works the prior summer?

  Things were quiet, too quiet. I sensed someone lurking outside the door, but no, I was only jittery. Then I heard something odd. A mew. Meowing sounds came from somewhere behind me. Glancing around, I saw a tortoise-shell cat in a cardboard box. The cat reclined in squint-eyed pleasure while six kittens lapped her pink, protruding nipples.

  At last here was something I could relate to! Our two cats were grown, and it had been years since I’d seen kittens. “Goodness!” I exclaimed. I leaped up and instantly dropped down to scramble toward the box on my hands and knees. “Aren’t they the sweetest most darling little things?” I knelt beside the box and chose one kitten. Laughing at the tiny claws that clung to the toweling, I draped the kitten over my leg. The small gray blind thing, hot under its soft fur, breathed hard and fought to return to its mother.

  “I’m sorry today didn’t turn out the way you planned,” I said, letting the words out freely once I held two other kittens against my cheeks.

  Maureen contemplated me as though I were subhuman. “You’re sorry a lot, aren’t you?”

  “No, not really.”

  “You say ‘I’m sorry’ a lot, though. I noticed that about you. What do you have to be sorry about?”

  “Nothing really.”

  “Then, may I suggest, you’re feeling rage instead of sorrow? C’est vrai, n’est pas?”

  “When I say I’m sorry? No. I think it’s just a tick. An unconscious habit.”

  “Hmm, no. Frankly, I’m afraid your self-esteem isn’t adequate.”

  I was about to protest strenuously when someone rapped t
heir knuckles against the door, and Maureen’s brother barged right in. “Oh, I see you’re busy playing with the itty bitty kitties.” He bounded across the room and, with an enormous hurdle, flopped on her bed. “Some big feminist consciousness raising.”

  “Get out of here,” hissed Maureen. “I mean it. Mother said you were supposed to stay in your room.”

  “Listen, Maureen,” I began, “I’ve got to go.” I hastily shoved the three kittens in their box.

  “Don’t go. I’ll get rid of him.”

  “Do you want to know why women can’t achieve anything, won’t every achieve anything?” said her brother, cocking himself up on one elbow, his strange glossy face grinning happily at me as he addressed me in a croaking voice.

  “Get out of here,” said Maureen.

  “Get out of here. Get out of here,” parroted the brother. “If you think that’s going to make me go, you’re more lamebrain than I thought, but then all women strike me as lamebrain because they’re constitutionally...”

  I didn’t stay to hear his theory of female shortcomings. “Goodbye Maureen,” I said with a weak, blundering wave.

  “Don’t go!” she shouted and turned upon her brother. “Once and for all, get out of here.”

  “Get out of here. Get out of here.”

  The last thing I saw was Maureen lunging at him.

  Everything that had happened ran through my mind as I left that horrible