“Oh, dear.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re certain?”
I nodded.
“And who was the lucky young man, may I ask?”
“Adam,” I said. “Adam Schumacher.”
“Tall lad, blond hair? Muscular? Lives down the road?”
“That’s the one.”
“Well, then, I shouldn’t wonder you succumbed to his charms.”
“Now, hold on there,” I said. “I didn’t succumb to anything. He was the one doing all the succumbing. I know a little about pheromones. I hadn’t had a bath in months. And he loved it. He was no match for me.”
“I see,” said Miz Powell. She appeared to be trying to hide the huge amount of enjoyment she was getting out of this conversation. “So he was your victim, and the whole thing was your idea.”
“Well, no,” I said. “I mean, of course not.”
“So you succumbed to each other?”
“I guess you could say that.”
Miz Powell chuckled. “This was your first experience with a man, I take it?”
I nodded.
“And did you take a…shall I say, an active role in the proceedings?”
“Well,” I said, “mostly I just laid there.”
“I see. And yet he succumbed to you.”
I was starting to get uncomfortable. “I don’t see what you’re getting at,” I said.
“The point is, while your presence certainly aroused him, and therefore you could be said to have initiated the…ah, event—”
“That’s what I call it,” I interrupted. “The Event.”
“—nevertheless, that all took place on a deeper level, an underlying level. His action, on the other hand—which I take it was swift and precipitous—”
“Indeed,” I said, dusting off my mental dictionary and paging through to the P’s.
“—was the real action. Correct? You did say you ‘mostly just laid there.’”
“Yeah,” I said. “But so what? Was that wrong?”
“Honestly, Haley,” said Miz Powell. “There is no right and wrong in this situation. I am merely trying to teach you something about the dynamics between men and women. We succumb to each other, dear. We fall towards each other. It’s like planets in space. When one is bigger than the other, the smaller is left to circle around it, stuck forever in orbit. And when one is falling faster or slower, or is bigger or smaller, than the other—that’s when unhappiness occurs. We must always move in tandem if we are to coexist. We must be the same size. This I know.”
“Miz Powell,” I said, “if you know so much about men, why didn’t you ever get married?”
“There’s your answer right there,” she said, winking. “I know too much about them.”
“Right,” I said.
“Now, enough of this romantic nonsense. Let’s get down to brass tacks. Will you keep the baby?”
“I won’t have an abortion,” I told her. “But I maybe would give it up to someone else. I don’t know. I’m still pretty young to be a mother.”
She nodded. “By some standards, yes,” she said.
“By my standards,” I corrected her. “I don’t want to be stuck at home, like most women around here are, and I don’t want to have to devote all my energy to other people. Like kids. Or men. And I don’t want to stop feeling like I feel right now.”
“How do you feel right now?”
“Awake,” I said. “Besides these damn worms, I feel great. Awake and curious, and full of energy. And power. And…”
She waited.
“Zam,” I finished, rather lamely.
Miz Powell clapped her birdy little hands together. “Well said,” she said. “Exactly what I was hoping to hear you say.”
“You were?”
“Yes.”
“Why’s that?”
“Haley,” said Miz Powell, “what I have wanted to tell you since the day we met in the stable, when you swore at me like a pirate, is…don’t be afraid to become a woman.”
I balanced my teacup on my leg and cocked my head at her, not sure if I’d heard her right.
“I didn’t know I had a choice in the matter,” I said.
“You don’t,” said Miz Powell. “Which is exactly my point.”
“All right,” I said. “I’m definitely not following you.”
“Don’t be afraid to be all the things that a woman can be,” she said. “Because none of it means you can’t be all the things you want to be. Now do you follow?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“You can be a mother and still be Haley,” she said. “You can cook dinner for your family and still be free. I’m not saying your life is going to be independent of the people involved in it. You have to make the right decisions. But you can have a baby and still be yourself. You can fulfill traditional roles if you want to, without letting them define you. Who you are will change when you have children, of course, but you could let it be an improvement, not a detraction.”
“I don’t mean to be rude, but how do you know all this?” I said. “You never did any of those things.”
“No,” she said. “What I have done is be a woman, with all my feminine qualities intact, in a world that was run completely by men. And you know something? They appreciated it. They didn’t exactly move over and make room for me—I had to carve out my own space among them, but that was nothing different than any of them had had to do. That’s something some women don’t seem to understand. Nobody is accepted right away. Everyone has to prove themselves. The world will never make room for you—you have to make it yourself. You have to make your own place, and stick to it. And there is nothing weak whatever about those same feminine qualities, Haley. That’s what I want you to recognize. They are not a liability. They are a strength.”
“I sort of know that,” I said.
“Deep down, you do,” she said. “I know you do. But you’ve been fighting it. Yet there is a part of you that’s been fascinated by it, also. Yes?”
I had to admit she had a point. Here at last was the guidebook I’d been looking for, the traveler’s companion to the journey I was on. “I’ve never known anyone like you,” I said. “I wish I’d known you a lot sooner.”
“You wouldn’t have appreciated me if you had,” she said. “The time wasn’t right.”
“Yeah, but how did you know it was right?”
“I came home for other reasons besides that of making your acquaintance, Haley,” said Miz Powell, “though I must add that when I realized I could make some difference in your life, I grew rather excited. That’s about the only legacy I can leave.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I have to show you something,” she said. “Something rather difficult.”
She got up from the couch with a slight effort and headed off to another part of the house. “Wait here,” she commanded over her shoulder. Slowly she made her way up the stairs—I didn’t dare even to consider giving her a hand—where I heard her rummaging around. A few minutes later she came back down, clutching something to her chest.
“Close your eyes,” she said. I obeyed. She sat down, the weight of her scarcely depressing the springs in the couch, and put something in my lap.
“Open them,” she said.
I did so and nearly screamed. There, sitting on my lap and staring up at me, was one of the most horrifying images I’d ever seen. A man and a woman, naked, stood near a tree. The woman was reaching toward the tree, as if to receive something from the creature that was wrapped around it—a woman with the body of a snake. You could see quite clearly where the woman’s body stopped and the snake’s started. I had never conceived of such an abomination. Worse than two-headed Siamese twins, more terrible than the most twisted Chernobylesque mutations. My stomach did somersaults as I stared at it. I had a hard time keeping my chicken soup down.
“Please take it away,” I whimpered through clamped jaws.
“No,” said Miz Powell. “It’s going to st
ay right there on your lap.”
I was being tested. I wasn’t allowed to remove the picture—the old woman was doing this for a reason. All right. I closed my eyes and breathed deep.
“Open your eyes,” said Miz Powell, “and look at it. Look.”
“No.”
“Do it.”
Her hands were on my face, and gone was the trembling weakness that had been there just moments earlier. Now they were strong and hard, and one of them forced my face down while the other actually pulled my eyes open, tugging at the skin on my forehead until I had no choice but to look.
“Look and ask yourself, young woman,” said Miz Powell. “What is it about this image that disturbs you so?”
“Snake,” I croaked.
“Yes, indeed. A snake. And what else?”
“Woman,” I said. I was suddenly reduced to monosyllables. “Woman snake.”
“And there you have it,” said Miz Powell. Her fingers burrowed into my forehead like drill bits. “Woman snake. But why should that bother you?” she asked. “Snakes are part of nature, are they not?”
“Please,” I said.
“This bothers you,” said Miz Powell, “because that woman is you, Haley Bombauer.”
“No.”
“Oh, yes. That woman is you, and your mother, and your grandmother, and all of them before. And it’s me. And Letty. You know us and you trust us. Yet why do you reject this simple truth? Why do you go on with this stupid stuntman fallacy, pretending you’re someone else? And why do you hate snakes so much? What do they represent?”
I couldn’t speak anymore. Tears had long been streaming down my cheeks, and I was choking back sobs.
“Snakes represent you,” said Miz Powell. “They are your totem animal. They are your true self.”
“Shut up!” I said.
“Say hello to Lilith, my dear, as conceived by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” said Miz Powell. “Say hello to the oldest and most powerful demon of them all.”
I grabbed the picture and threw it across the room as hard as I could, and the sound of the glass tinkling into a hundred pieces was a glorious one indeed. Then I got up and ran from the house—we got up, I should say, because even though I was scarcely into my first trimester, I was already cognizant of the little being growing inside me, and I knew that it was aware of me too, not as an individual but only aware of me as dimly as we ourselves are aware of the universe, and of all the strange things that exist in it, most of which we have not yet even begun to understand.
I was not a woman-snake. I was not this Lilith person. I was me, and I hated snakes. And at that moment, I hated Miz Powell.
Yet, I couldn’t help asking myself as I ran along the road back home, why had something about it rung true? What about it made sense? Why did I know deep down that Miz Powell was right, just as she always was?
13
The Hardest Thing
Seven months later, I was out on the porch of the old Grunveldt house—now my house—swabbing away cobwebs with a mop. I had bought the place with my share of old Fireball’s invention money, knowing that even though Mother and I seemed to be getting along better these days, I would throttle her if we lived together. I was getting too old to put up with her anymore.
When the Grunveldts were still alive and the house was for sale, there had been more than a few parties interested in buying it. But now that the family was gone, it was as if there was a force field around the place. The For Sale sign had disappeared while I was in the woods—probably stolen by vandals—and now no one wanted to come near it, except me.
The house had decomposed. Once it was a kingdom of cleanliness. Mrs. Grunveldt was of that generation of women who rarely stepped outside, who believed a woman’s world was bounded to the north by her front porch and to the south by the kitchen step. Women like that took housecleaning seriously. She turned domesticity into an art form. My childhood memories of the Grunveldt house were of stepping onto wooden floors so slickly waxed that one sneeze would send you shooting backwards like a rocket. And if you happened to touch the always freshly scrubbed walls with a grubby hand, Mrs G. could identify and convict you by your fingerprints alone.
Maybe she found cleanliness cathartic. Or maybe—and this is more likely—she thought she could compensate for her abnormal child with a supernormally clean abode. These kinds of bargains are often made between mothers and the rest of the world, though the world isn’t usually aware of it.
Now the house had fallen into disrepair. When I moved in, it had been just over a year since the Grunveldts died, but in that short time dust had fallen like snow over everything. Windows had been broken. Doors had warped. The forces of filth, kept at bay for so long, were dancing on Mrs. Grunveldt’s grave.
Since the age of four or thereabouts, as soon as I was old enough to understand what gender I was, I had looked at women like Mrs. Grunveldt and my mother and shuddered at the fate that awaited me, a cursed girl. Housebound, driven to near madness by the confines of their existences, their only successes vicarious, through husband and male children. What of my poor mother, then? With no husband to be proud of, and no sons to beam upon, she resorted to the only form of child rearing she understood for girls: molding me in her image. Even as a tiny girl, I wasn’t having any of it. And underneath the surface, beneath the still waters of that placid mind, she understood. I knew now as I had never known before that her frustrations were not at my recalcitrance but at her failure to recognize the dangers of her own life before it was too late. It would drive me mad, too, to see a daughter of mine figure out a way to be a woman and a person. I would probably think to myself, Why doesn’t she share the secret with me?
Perhaps it wasn’t too late for her, though. After all, it never really is too late for anything.
Cleaning the inside of the Grunveldt place had occupied a good portion of my first two trimesters, and allowed me to ignore the snow that had come early again this year. Frankie’s spirit, mournful and starved for conversation, followed me through his former home as I went through the sweep-mop-dust phase, and then through the paint-everything-that-doesn’t-move phase. I talked aloud to myself sometimes, to let him know I knew he was there, but I was not about to start humoring him unless he really started causing problems—throwing things around, et cetera. I didn’t think he was going to be that kind of ghost. I didn’t think he would turn out to be much of a ghost at all.
“Damn these spiderwebs,” I said aloud, for his benefit. The mop made a gritty, ripping sound as it caught on the splinters on the underside of the porch roof.
Now, starting my third trimester, I was having to face up to the disheartening revelation that I wouldn’t be able to do any more heavy work until the baby was born. For the second time in my life, I was “disabled.” Not that being pregnant was turning out to be a bad thing—I was rather enjoying it. It was certainly better than having my leg in a cast. It was weird and fun and magical, in a way, and so far I hadn’t suffered much. But heavy lifting or pushing could easily cause the placenta to dislodge from the wall of my uterus, and that would have been the end of the baby. And suddenly I wanted this baby more than I’d ever wanted anything in the world.
What about my theater? I heard Frankie’s spirit demand. Hard to tell whether it was really him or only an echo of that old conversation that was still bouncing around the place.
“What theater, Frankie?” I asked.
The theater of the human spirit. The theater for the Indians. I want you to build it.
“Oh, Frankus,” I said, “one bloody thing at a time, all right? I’m trying to accomplish something here.”
Silence, though he was still there. He knew when he could push me and when he should leave me alone.
In the kitchen, hanging over the table, was a copy of the picture Miz Powell had shown me that traumatic day in her living room. I dusted this picture every day, whether it needed it or not. The snake, she’d explained, is the oldest symbol of fem
inine power in the world. It’s not a female power—it’s a feminine power. Miz Powell was very clear on this point, because men and women alike have feminine energies within them—as well as masculine ones. People were too obsessed with gender these days, she said. Really, there weren’t nearly as many differences between us as we liked to pretend.
Who was this Lilith, anyway? Miz Powell, ever the walking mythological dictionary, was only too happy to explain. Lilith was an ancient figure, so old she had already been worshipped in half a dozen cultures by the time the New Testament was written. We know most about her from the ancient Hebrews—she was, in some versions of the story, Adam’s first wife, before Eve.
Originally, according to Miz Powell, God had created Man and Woman as one being, an androgyne that was complete in itself. But an androgyne cannot reproduce with itself, and so they were split down the middle—one half being the man, Adam, and the other half being Lilith.
“And this, of course, led to the First Argument,” Miz Powell said. “Because the two could not agree on who should dominate. Adam felt that he should be Lilith’s superior, and Lilith felt quite the opposite. When he tried to force her to submit, she became angry, uttered a magic word, and flew into the air.”
“What was the magic word?” I asked her.
“The true name of God,” Miz Powell said.
“Which was?”
“Don’t look at me,” she said. “If I knew that, I would have flown away long ago.”
“And then what happened to her?”
“According to myth, she kills human babies in their sleep,” she told me. “The girls before the eighth day of life, the boys before the twentieth, which was when they used to circumcise them. Also, Hebrew parents used to warn their sons that when they masturbated, Lilith became pregnant from their seed and gave birth to demons.”
“Lot more effective than the old hairy-palm rule,” I said. “So you really think I’m like this…person?”
“Demon.”
“Demon?”
“The point, my dear,” said Miz Powell, “is that if the masculine and feminine halves would have accepted each other as equals, there never would have been any sort of disagreement at all, and we would be living in a world of perfect harmony. But for some reason, they couldn’t do this. Later, God made Eve, and as she was made out of pure dust—Lilith being made out of filth and sediment—she was somehow more receptive to Adam’s authority. When the masculine and feminine are integrated in a person,” she said, looking directly at me, “conflict is removed, and great things can be achieved. But rare indeed is the individual who has that kind of courage. That is what I’m trying to tell you. That, and the fact that you have the same energy she has. The same spirit.”