CHAPTER 31
Dalores sat feeling “gross,” not good gross but the “ugly” and “fat” of how she’s heard other women: mainly her sisters and Aunt Marge—“Up north. Hard as nails. But when she’s pregnant—don’t be around her!”
Anger: she recognized the anger, but Why?
“It’s all in understanding threes.” Said by Bertha as if “any idiot” would know that, as if there were three thousand books written on the topic.
Alicia was quick to grasp Dalores’ mood. “Bertha.” Said back to her with that, “Pay attention to what you’re saying” tone. “Bertha. Right now, you’re being one of the threes.”
Bertha got it. “Ummm.” And she left the room.
Alicia got up and brought Lonny in. “Lonny’s had kids. She knows.” Not that it was simply because she had kids but that Lonny had first gained insight into the magic of the threes when pregnant. All her kids were grown...husband dead of a heart attack...waiting for her first grandchild, herself.
“Who’s in you?” Smiling. Playful. A knowing nod, conveying the insight of a shared secret, You know what I mean.
Dalores immediately opens—felt herself opening. She liked Lonny but this had never happen. Like what Bertha had foreseen: “A common voice. Someday, we’ll speak and just know.”
“The child.”
They wait.
“The man? I mean male?”
They wait.
“Myself? Female?”
Alicia and Lonny crack-up into teary laughter as Dalores burst-—out and flares-up into an amazing smile: Got it!
“This is why we’re here,” speaking to Dalores that night with everyone present—Lonny speaking.
“It’s what Bertha has shared. She got it by way of sixty-nine. But it’s more natural for a woman than that.…Dalores has it the male way. Am I clear?”
Pat: “It’s like being literal, right? Dalores is fucked-up!”—a rush of embarrassed half-dead laughs; one gawfaw.
Alicia: “When we’re together like this, or maybe better when we ritualize, or better when a ritual attempt actually happens, at that moment, right?...we’re there. Symbolically. A psychic symbiosis. I like that.”
SunBlossom: “Round and round and round the round.” A mystical murmur.
Janet: “Maybe it’s because,” shyly, warily, “because I’m Catholic, was Catholic, but that’s what I count as our way, the female way. When we’re together, intending and that, we’re fuller, bigger, Earth Mothers. We’re robust! That’s what men can’t have,” sympathetically, dolefully, “What they can’t seem to have. Only want it the male way.”
Miranda: “Maybe I’m a little slow here, but if that’s”—pointing to Dalores’ rounding belly—“is the male’s way, and ritually is the female way, how, what or who is whatever the third way is?”
Had it been Miranda’s question? Or, was it “just that time”—the time which comes “Like a thief in the night” when what you’ve desired is actually realized. Or, had a greater hand reached out and blessed them, changing them?
No one has clear memory; even desires to have clear memory. “Let there be….”
Bertha and Lonny were the first. Stood up from the table, walked into the living room and began to dance. Danced without music...continued dancing as Pat stacked several long-playing platters…a dancing which began to make the room twirl and swish about, a dancing which became like a river flowing, each woman being lifted up like a beached log when the swelling spring floods came...startlingly swift, all-at-once, world changing common bond…dancing and in the dancing the threes assembled, came together, began to dissemble, disrobe, reassemble through glances and looks and touches...wisps of hair whispering, yearning of thighs flaming, moons of breasts bobbing like apples in a dip...dip up and down and in and out they did: thumping music, calming music, quickening music…till each threesome became a sound: humming, singing, breathing a sound, finding the common breath, the common tone, vibrating…vibrating and tuning-in, turning on, embracing, rolling on the carpet, frolicking, fondling, kissing, licking, sucking—an ensemble of lust and desire and craving and madness...two finding themselves as lovers, focusing upon each other, pleasuring and desiring to fuck and penetrate and commune and eat the other—but it was the third...and each in time became a third...who stood as faithful witness: as sentinel, as servant, working the bodies of both...intending and working, rubbing the bodies together...her imagining child labor: cooking ‘em, drawing the fire from their eyes, the bone crunching from their grapplings, the broth from their wet fluid couplings...taking and imagining them beyond their play as male and female—for it was common to their discipline at this point to accept and actually relish the switching of roles, no longer embarrassed to claim the male within...no longer mute upon their craving for their clits to become cocks...no longer hesitant to be fierce, “I wanna fuck you!”
They understood the male way.
They understood the female way.
Now….
Some were exhausted; slept where they fell. Others were exhilarated—left for the exercise room in the basement, or started writing, or, as with Anna started baking...soon sweet herbal and sugary aromas seeped into every corner and crevice, intoxicating the house, itself.
Sally and Kunja were the writers. After every significant event they got together to write: journal and stories; notes. Tonight they were hard pressed. Their separate sentences each stumbled and fell apart as they got caught up in oxymoronic words and notions. Kunja was a poet; published and respected...she, the most, was at a loss, tonight.
“I want to say transcendental, but I can’t get stupid dental out of my mind each time I write it!”
“The words are playing us.” Kunja realized that this was true but if Sally asked how would she answer: What does that mean?
“One and one is two. Two with one is three. Terrible. Terrible.” Sally strikes out; blotching the sentence.
“I keep remembering The Holy Trinity. Sister Esmeralda, there. It’s a mystery, she’d say. And we were supposed to shut up. Shut up and be happy. That’s how I’m feeling now. Weird.”
Then she was there: Red Fox. Sally and Kunja looked up in a common reflex and there she was. Red Fox had this unnerving way of just being there. Neither had heard her enter.
Red Fox hands Kunja a doll. Lacquered. Brightly painted. Eastern European garb. “Open her.”
Kunja quickly gets it—a doll with another inside and another inside that and another...five all toll.
Dalores had walked into the room just after Red Fox; watching, leaning against a wall.
Sally: “Matryoshka. The One is Many. The Many is One.” But not satisfied; frowns.
“Nested. Each nests within the other. Cool.” Miranda, having joined them.
“Matry—don’t need Frank to know that means mother.”
Pause. Somewhat bemused. Waiting. Realizing that there is a lesson being taught.
Red Fox hands Kunja another doll. She doesn’t say that Janet made it, but all know, for they are fired clay...but male, an old wizened male, gnomic. “Open him.”
There are another five.
Red Fox waits. Her Sisters know that she is waiting for them: What?
Dalores picks each one up and arranges them into an ellipse: two foci
Sally: “Male and female. Ten?…An ellipse. What else?”
“It’s my belly.” Ouroboric: a phrase Frank had expounded on, preached!…she feels it.
A meditative moment shrouds each and all.
Kunja: “What is, is not.”
Shit!
Sally: “We’re becoming what we’re not?!”
“Dicks!” Flat-lined humor.
“Eternal beings?”
The question...the image...the weirdness, queerness of the question halts them.
Red Fox answers: “Family,” she says; matter-of-factly.
Pause.
Group choking on
inarticulateness.
No! …screamed through minds, hearts, contorted faces—a No of pain and obedient passivity and hand cracking slaps across face, bottom, shoulders, back of head—NONONONONONONONONONON……………!
Quiet like fog...at their feet, rising up their bodies, submerging them—Red Fox stands, preparing to leave, go to bed: “No.” Who voiced it? But then it was a drop, leaking into a drip, pouring into a stream, bounding into a rushing river: DANGER! WATERFALL AHEAD!
Family—it couldn’t be...it had to be. Tribe? Kin? Collective? Commune? Body? How to express ourselves more than just a clump, a dump, a gathering, a wandering? But what image has not been used to subordinate towards the goal of submission towards the goal of obliteration? Womb? Tomb? Bomb? Hive? Nest? Why not something just emotional? Heart or Breath or Gaze or Hug?
“Dig this, what is it we do when we get together? Embrace. Okay. Why not? Okay. Why not?”
The Corn is an Embrace.