The Predictions Page 3

  Loretta looked around the room at the doors and windows, trying to find an escape route, before saying in a quiet voice: “Someone who stays at home, who looks after the children and does all the chores—­the housework.”

  “Anyone else?” Shakti studied the gathered women.

  I put up my hand, unsure if it was okay to speak.

  “Go ahead, Poppy—­your opinion counts as much as any other.”

  “A housewife doesn’t go out to work,” I said. “So she doesn’t have her own money. She’s dependent on her husband for everything.”

  “The only bargaining tool she’s got is sex,” said Susie. “So she has to use that to get what she wants.”

  “These are all great points,” said Shakti. “But instead of describing this other woman, this ‘she,’ I want us to relate things back to our own experiences.” She rubbed her hands together. “Ladies, let’s get personal.”

  “We’re lesbians,” said Katrina, gesturing to Susie at her side. “So we don’t have to put up with any of that bullshit.”

  To everyone’s surprise, it was Elisabeth who piped up next.

  “I don’t put up with any of that bullshit either. I refuse to use sex to get what I want.”

  “I do,” said Sigi, and we all looked at her, shocked. “If I want to ask Paul to do something, I make sure to have sex with him first.”

  “Really?” said Susie. “You actually do that?”

  “Sure,” said Sigi, shrugging. “Men are simple creatures. It makes life easier.”

  I was unsure if I wanted to hear any of this—­if I was ready to hear it—­but at the same time, I was hungry for these insights into the strange world of grown-­ups. It was like an initiation, or a warning as to what lay ahead.

  “Let me ask you a question,” said Shakti, addressing the group. “All of you have fairly specific roles on the commune. How was it decided who does what?”

  “It wasn’t,” said Susie. “We just started doing what we were good at—­and I guess we got better at those things, and stopped doing the things we weren’t good at.”

  “And what things were those?”

  “I’ve always tended to the vegetable gardens,” Susie said proudly. “I love watching things grow from tiny seeds into flourishing plants and legumes that you can eat.”

  Sigi said, “I run the school. I love teaching. The children are like my plants.”

  Everyone nodded approvingly and said, “Right on.”

  “I do all the cooking,” said Elisabeth, also with pride.

  “Loretta, what about you?” said Shakti, singling her out yet again.

  “I like sewing—­and I also run the laundry. We don’t have an automatic washing machine, no electricity, so that keeps me busy. I don’t have time for much else.”

  Katrina said, “I used to be in charge of the nursery. I was really good at that. Since then, well, there’s still plenty to do—­cleaning and organizing and helping the other women—­but I miss having small children around.”

  Susie squeezed Katrina’s arm and smiled. “Don’t worry, love, there’ll be littlies around again one day.” She glanced at Nelly and I and winked.

  “You say ‘helping the other women’—­don’t you ever help the men?”

  “Not really,” said Katrina. “I guess they don’t need it.”

  Shakti narrowed her eyes and nodded, processing this information. “And the men, do they ever help out with what I’d call the domestic chores—­cooking, cleaning, washing, that sort of thing?”

  It was Sigi who said, “They would if we asked them to.”

  Shakti replied, “And have you?”

  Sigi shook her head. “It’s like what Susie said. Things work best when we stick to what we’re good at.”

  “But how do you know?” said Shakti. “You haven’t tried it any other way.”

  Sigi laughed. “We don’t need to try it to know Paul or any of the other men would be hopeless at washing clothes. Can you imagine it? All the muddy clothes mixed together with our underwear?”

  Loretta laughed loudest. “We’d have to wash everything twice!”

  Shakti listened to all this, let the women have their joke. But when the laughter had died down, she cleared her throat. “I just wonder if women are better at washing and cleaning, or if men do it badly because they don’t want to do it.” She paused. “I mean, I’m no good at it—­and I don’t try to get good at it.”

  Shakti’s words hung in the air while no one said anything. Nobody spoke, but the room was thick with the collective dawning of a realization, a thing so palpable that you could almost see it, even if no one was prepared to say it out loud.

  When the silence became too uncomfortable for anyone to tolerate Shakti spoke.

  “Well, I think that’s enough for tonight, don’t you?”

  Several of the women hastily agreed.

  “For our next session, I want you all to wear loose-­fitting clothing and bring a hand mirror.”

  Someone gasped.

  “What about the girls?” said Elisabeth, under her breath. “Surely they won’t need to bring one of those?”

  Nelly and I looked at one other, utterly bewildered.

  “No, I suppose not,” said Shakti. “They’ll be fine to just watch.”

  “And will it be all right,” said Loretta, discreetly raising her hand, “if some others among us don’t bring mirrors either?”

  Shakti frowned, or as close to that as her exquisite features would allow. “No one can force you to do anything you don’t want to do, but shared experience is one of the foundations of consciousness raising. We learn through taking part.”

  THAT NIGHT, NELLY AND I were too worked up to sleep. Our beds were next to each other in the sleeping hut, but still we had to whisper very quietly so as not to be heard by the other kids.

  “What do you think she’s going to do?” said Nelly, squeaking with excitement.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But whatever it is, I’m glad we don’t have to do it.”

  “Don’t have to do what?” said Timon, from one of the other bunks.

  “None of your beeswax,” I said.

  “We heard all about your secret meeting,” he continued. “In fact, we had a grandstand view.”

  “You creep.” I picked a book up off the floor and hurled it into the darkness around his bed.

  “Ouch,” said Fritz. “You missed!”

  “Sorry, Fritz.”

  Timon snorted with laughter. “You all looked so serious, like somebody had died. Were you having a séance?”

  “I repeat: fuck off, dickhead.”

  “Poppy!” said Nelly, close by. “You don’t need to swear.”

  “Oooooh!” said Timon, imitating a girl’s voice, which always made me want to murder him. “We had an itty bitty séance and talked about our titties.”

  “Timon,” said Lukas. “That’s enough.”

  But it wasn’t enough for Timon—­not even close. He could keep this going for hours unless somebody physically stopped him. I had a glass of water by my bed, and as he launched into what he thought was a hilarious monologue about periods and fannies and how girl farts smelled like flowers—­all in that same high, grating voice—­I picked it up, crossed the room, and poured it over his head.

  Timon batted at the wet bedclothes. “Fucking hell, Poppy! You’re going to pay for that!”

  He didn’t need to remind me. Halfway over to his bunk bed with the glass of water, I had, in fact, imagined the revenge he would take and had almost turned back. The last time I’d picked on him, about two years earlier, Timon had spent a week collecting native cockroaches, which grew to about two inches long, and had filled my bed with half a dozen of them. Sometimes, even now, when I climbed into bed in the dark, I recalled them scuttling against my skin, and m
y legs kicked out in fearful response. But then I had thought, At least the worst thing has been done.

  The following Sunday, after the evening meal, Shakti unfolded several large swathes of Indian batik fabric and began to drape them over the half dozen windows of the mess hut. The joinery had been salvaged from old houses and churches and some of the windows were oddly shaped, bowed, arched, even circular, and defied the hanging of curtains. The gaps around the edges troubled me, and I remembered what Timon, the peeping rat, had said about his grandstand view.

  As before, Shakti laid out cushions, but this time they formed a more defined circle with an empty space in the middle. “Don’t be shy,” she said, before placing the plumpest cushion in the center of the circle and seating herself upon it. Slowly and hesitantly, the women took their places around her, with Nelly and me hovering at the edge of the group. Each woman took out the small mirror she had brought and placed it beside her, every last one with the glass facing down. Most had brought plain squares of mirrored glass, like the ones we had tacked to the walls of the communal bathroom.

  Shakti, in the middle, removed a series of items from an orange string bag. The first was a small bottle of oil with a cork stopper; the second was a hand mirror, a professional-­looking thing that propped upright on its own metal stand; the third was a flashlight; and the last was a book, which she held up so we all could read the title. “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” she said. “The foundation of the women’s self-­help movement. Make sure you all take a look afterward.”

  “I’ve read that,” said Susie. “It sure is an eye-­opener.”

  “Is that the one with all the drawings?” asked Sigi.

  “Yes,” said Shakti. “Drawings of women’s bodies as they really are—­not as they appear in medical textbooks.” She took the last item out of her bag and it was unlike any object I had ever seen before. It looked, at first glance, like a pair of plastic salad tongs, joined together at one end in a beak, like you might find on a sea bird, a gannet or shag. Shakti propped the mirror on its legs in front of her and reclined on the cushion, gathering up the folds of her long Indian cotton skirt and hitching it above her waist. She was not wearing underpants. Her legs she bent to form two triangles. I was behind her, to the left, and stuck with a bad view. But then she adjusted the mirror, tilting it up, and I saw everything, magnified and framed.

  The room fell very quiet; all rustling and moving ceased.

  “This is my vagina,” said Shakti, matter-­of-­factly, as though describing the contents of a kitchen cupboard. “At the top, under here, is the top of my clitoris, and these are my labia majora.” She drew a line down, nearly to the crack between her butt cheeks. “The muscles of the clitoris go right down to here. It’s much larger than everyone thinks.”

  At the mention of the clitoris, I had strained to get a better look, but either I had missed the revealing moment, or there was nothing to see. Frustrated, I turned to Nelly. She was biting her lip, maintaining a neutral expression, which I tried to copy, but my face grew warm and then prickly, like I was coming up in a heat rash. When I turned back to Shakti, she had picked up the salad tongs and was slicking them with an oily substance from the small, stoppered bottle. Then she leaned forward and inserted the beak end into her vagina, fiddled with a screw on the side, and readjusted the mirror. “Can everyone see properly?”

  There was murmured assent, then an even deeper silence than before, as though every last bit of air had been sucked out of the room. All eyes were fixed on the mirror in front of Shakti, and I swallowed my embarrassment and looked.

  “In the center here is my cervix,” she said. “It’s the pink mound with the dot in the middle. There’s also some scar tissue on one side from an old surgery. It was at the hands of a male gynecologist—­I prefer to think of him as a butcher.” Someone made a tsk-­tsk sound of solidarity. “Otherwise, everything is healthy, the flora and fauna normal. Any questions?”

  Elisabeth said, “Why are you showing us your cervix?”

  “Have you ever seen one before?”

  “Yes, in a medical diagram—­a cross section of the female reproductive organs.”

  “Exactly,” said Shakti, gently removing the salad tongs and returning to a cross-­legged position. “But I bet you’ve never seen one up close, in the flesh—­not even your own. Don’t you think that’s weird?”

  Elisabeth shrugged. “Not really.”

  “Well, I do,” said Shakti. “We women have no idea what we look like down there—­let alone what’s normal. We can’t just flop it out like men do so we rely on doctors—­most of them male—­to take care of our sexual health and deliver our babies.” She observed the group to make sure everyone was listening. “We have given away control of our bodies and we need to take it back. The first step is to share knowledge, to learn how our bodies work. Self-­examination is a political act.”

  “I’ll go next,” said Susie. “You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a lesbian’s vagina.”

  The women laughed, earthy and full.

  “You got it,” said Shakti, delighted. “The more we look at, the more we learn. The next step after this will be to teach you a few simple techniques for self-­care.”

  The salad tongs were washed in a bucket of soapy water that someone had fetched from the kitchen and then dried on a tea towel that said “Welcome to Waihi.” With a little help from Shakti and a gasp of mild discomfort, Susie inserted the salad tongs, and everyone peered at her anatomy.

  “You see how it’s the same but different?” Shakti said, encouragingly, to a chorus of agreement.

  “That’s more what I look like down there,” said Sigi, chuckling. “Things move around a little when you have children.”

  “They sure do,” agreed Katrina. “I hardly even need a mirror to see my cervix.”

  A ­couple of the women laughed, but not Shakti. She had been, and remained, steadfastly earnest all evening.

  “I want to go next,” said Loretta, taking everyone by surprise. “It’ll be a good comparison.”

  I had rarely seen the women so fired up about anything, and the spirit was contagious. The only one seemingly not caught up in this energy was Elisabeth. She hung back for most of the evening and was the only woman to abstain from self-­examination.

  Filing out of the mess hut afterward, Nelly and I broke away from the other women and sprinted arm in arm across the dark field, so exhilarated I thought we might at any moment break out in song. There was something I wanted to ask Nelly, but I waited until I was sure we were alone before I stopped her. Breathlessly, I whispered in her ear, “Did you see a clitoris?”

  “I think so,” said Nelly.

  “What did it look like?”

  “Hairy.”

  We both laughed and carried on walking, navigating blindly through the pitch-­black darkness. When the faint lights of the sleeping hut appeared in the distance, so did the outlines of two scurrying figures. Whoever it was, they had been traveling in the same direction we had but reached the hut before us. I halted in my tracks and tugged on Nelly’s arm.

  “Did you see that?”

  “What?”

  “I think we were followed.”

  “By who?”

  Kerosene lamps flickered in the windows of the sleeping hut, casting pockets of light onto the porch. We pushed open the door and were immediately greeted by the smirking faces of Ned and Timon, both flushed with excitement and in the process of describing something to the other boys, one of whom was Lukas. Poor Meg, tucked up in bed on the other side of the room, was either asleep or, more likely, feigning it.

  “Good night, was it, ladies?” said Timon, with a shit-­eating grin.

  I couldn’t resist giving him the finger.

  Timon held up his own middle finger and put it in his mouth, before languidly drawing it out, taking great care to make sure it was coated
in saliva.

  I was about to run at him, to do what exactly, I wasn’t sure, but Nelly held me back. Timon looked to the other boys for support, but instead of giving it, they one by one wandered off to their beds, either too traumatized, or too embarrassed by Timon’s lewd gesture, to do anything else.

  Lukas, on the way to his bunk, fixed me with a look that I took to be sympathetic, until I smiled back, to reassure him I was fine, and he turned away, self-­conscious.

  In the usual underpants and T-­shirt we all wore to bed, I climbed beneath the covers, my mind whirring with the knowledge I’d gained that night, and listened for the reassuring sounds of everyone around me nodding off. After sharing a dormitory our entire lives, I knew intimately the shifts in breathing and tiny sighs that signaled each individual was drifting off to sleep. But that night, the sleeping hut pitched with restlessness. My bunkmates fidgeted and tossed in their beds, releasing audible sighs of frustration. No one spoke but a thrilling new current charged the room, and I wondered if the others heard it too.

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  CHAPTER 3

  Gaialands

  1978

  OUT OF THE CHILDREN, only Lukas failed to warm to Shakti at all. At first he had been just as curious about her as the other boys, but once she had been on the commune a few months, I noticed he had developed an aversion. Had she insulted him? But then I decided the main reason had to be what he called “that witchy-­poo stuff.” Whenever Shakti got out her runes or tarot cards, or offered to read someone’s palm, he would cast a disdainful eye over the proceedings or would simply get up and leave. One night after dinner and sing-­along, when she had, in front of half a dozen ­people, offered him a reading, he had told her openly that he thought it was “a bunch of bullcrap.” Shakti’s response had been simply to laugh, which impressed me as a highly effective way of both belittling and dismissing his opinion.