The Moon Goddess Sings in the Kitchen
-Tribe
I'm sitting in the dark in Anna's parents' living room. There's just enough light coming from the hallway. The last of the Polaroids comes to life. The orange blurs darken into shapes. They swirl up out of the dark into amber tones and then coalesce into familiar images. I line them up on the coffee table in loose chronological order. Lining them up like this makes it all easier to understand. No. That's not right. Understanding it all is pointless. I line them up because they might tell me something. I'm only interested in what they might say, not whether they mean anything. There is a difference. At the same time, I want to put them out of order; read them like a crazy Tarot deck. Maybe, just maybe, they'll tell me a story. The story of something that was more than we could handle? Will the story be the same when their order is changed? I don't know. I hear Anna. She's been going on like that for thirty or forty minutes. I'm not in the first picture. Anna is mugging for the camera. Her arm is around Dorothy's shoulders. Dorothy's mouth is open wide in silent laughter as she holds her top up over her breasts. The one sitting on the floor, with the serious expression, is Daphne. "Gawd, I can't believe you showed your boobs, Dorothy," I laugh after the shot. Anna plops down on the couch giggling. She throws the black witches' hat at Daphne. "Lemme see the picture," Daphne says. She puts the hat on and blows on the healing Polaroid. "I'm bored, guys," I put the camera down and sit on the couch. Dorothy takes the picture from Daphne, "Hey, hey…lookit my perky titties." "Don't flatter yourself, Miss Thang," Anna reaches over and pinches Dorothy's breast. "Ouch," Dorothy screeches and pushes Anna back onto the couch. "So, what are we doin'?" Daphne looks out from under the brim of the black hat. Dorothy takes out a pack of cigarettes. "You better not burn anything or my mom is gonna be so pissed," I take one from her, "let's go sit on the porch." Dorothy straddles the railing, "I hate this fuckin' place." Daphne sits next to me on the porch swing. "C'mon, guys, let's do somethin', pleeze?" She kicks my bare foot. Anna sits on the porch steps, looking up into the night, "It would be cool if we could shake up our little piece of suburbia, wouldn't it?" She doesn't look at the rest of us. Daphne pouts and tosses the black hat high over the railing. "You guys are as boring as the kids at school," the hat orbits over the lawn, "I should've stayed home." I yank a little on Daphne's ponytail, "Think of this as special ed, Daffy." We watch the hat glide on the night air. It skims across the wet grass. The sprinklers hiss in retaliation. I can hear the sprinklers sputtering demonically now. Except for Anna, it's silent in here. I make sure the more recent Polaroid's are dry, then I shuffle them. I decimate their natural chronology. I deal them face down on the coffee table. I arrange them into a Celtic Cross, like Daphne used to. It's difficult to place them on the table, so I slide off the couch and kneel in front of the coffee table. I'm certain the wet spot I've knelt on is blood. I don't look, because I'm really hoping it's not puke. Puke disgusts me. I turn over the picture. I'm in this one; I used the timer on the camera. We're in my folks' basement; the four of us are standing in a circle of candles. We wear solemn smiles. Dorothy gives me bunny ears with her fingers. After the flash, Anna says "Oh Dorothy, you ruined it." Dorothy sticks her tongue out. "Can't we be serious for once?" Daphne says. Dorothy dismisses her, "Hey squirt, take this seriously," and she lifts her top. I snap the back of her bra. "You guys are so immature," Daphne giggles and rearranges a candle Anna nudged. Anna sets the CD player outside the circle, "OK, everybody ready?" She inserts "An English Ladymass" by Anonymous 4. The echoes of the chant bounce off the walls of the basement: "Salve mater redemptoris / fons misericordie /vas honoris flors decoris / aula regis glorie / celi sponsa creatoris / domina clementie / lux electa conditoris / thalamus decentie…" We hold hands in the circle with our eyes closed. "Christ, this music sucks," Dorothy huffs. "Dorotheee," Daphne whines, "you're ruining it." Dorothy walks out of the circle and rummages through the pile of CDs. "C'mon, Dorothy," I sit down on the chilled basement floor, "I thought that you wanted to go through with this." "Hold on, hold on," Dorothy holds the labels towards the candlelight, "the Starhawk books say we can make up our own ritual, right?" She places another CD in the player and scurries back into the circle. As the first strains of the piano come on, I look at Anna. She shrugs and smiles. We hold hands tight and scream out the chorus in the candlelight: "Thank you india / thank you terror / thank you disillusionment / thank you frailty / thank you consequence / thank you thank you silence." Anna is silent now. That concerns me. I get up and peek into the kitchen. Anna is sitting with her back against the refrigerator. Her arms are wrapped over her bare legs, her knobby knees pressed tight against her. She rocks rhythmically, humming to herself. She looks ok, all things considered. I'm awfully thirsty, but I don't want to disturb her. In the bathroom I splash water on my face. I open the medicine cabinet. I don't need anything. It's just a habit from our night crawls. As I open the cabinet door, I see Dorothy in the mirror. I scream and jump. She's standing in the doorway. She has specks of blood on her shorts and legs. "Remember this one?" She hands me one of the Polaroids. Daphne, Dorothy and Anna are standing on the back deck of Daphne's house. The puddle of water flowers on the wood of the deck. They are ultra-white under the camera flash. The dark spaces of their hair, eyes, nostril and mouths make their faces look like reversed negatives. "Some witches we are," Dorothy wrings the water out of her hair. "What did you think we were gonna do," Anna says, "conjure Satan or some such nonsense?" We sit on the deck railing, the water from our toes dripping onto the deck floor in patterns. Our clothes are all over the deck. "Seems like this coven thing is pretty much the same boring stuff we were doing before," Daphne stares at her toes, "wasn't this supposed to be empowering or something like that?" Dorothy slides off the railing and walks under the stars. Her white body is blue in the moonlight. "Your folks are asleep, right Daff?" Dorothy grins. Daphne shrugs "If they weren't, I'd be getting all kinds of shit right now, and your parents would be getting phone calls." Dorothy rushes towards us. "I've got an idea," she slowly slides the back door open, "let's creep around." Anna starts to collect our clothes. "No, no," Dorothy takes them away from Anna, "as we are. C'mon." We slink through the back door. Daphne slides it shut with a soft thunk. I shut the medicine cabinet door. "I wanna go home," Dorothy cries. "There's no going back, Dor," I hug her. Dorothy sits on the toilet. I take the pictures from her, turn the light out and leave her. The door to Anna's parent's bedroom is open. I see the flickering of the television screen against the white wall. Anna's dad is cowered stiff against the wall. The bloody sheets are tangled around his ankles. He's shit on the bed. Shit also disgusts me. I throw up by the bed. His head is turned toward the television. I glance at it. Why is "Blue Velvet" on? Frank Booth looks at me from the screen, "Don't you fuckin' look at me." I turn away. I meander through the house. It used to be the nicest house in the neighborhood until tonight. We all used to come here often for sleepovers, pool parties, birthdays. The rooms seem distant to me now. I go to Anna's room. I hear her going at it again from the kitchen. When I stub my toe against her dresser, I drop the pictures. The one I pickup has Daphne, Anna and myself in it. It's an extreme close-up of our faces. We're in Dorothy's mom's living room. We look stark, ghostly in the contrast of the camera flash and the dark of the living room. Daphne's eyes glow red. "This is so exciting," I whisper. We all feel the exhilaration. We sneak in late in the night. Our bare feet like cats' paws on the carpet. We don't speak. We move through the shadows picking up household articles, passing them to one another. We examine them, turn them in our hands. These things all look and feel different in the twilight of the house. We all feel it. It's exciting to discover this new side to things; these aspects that we never knew were there. Daphne stifles a squeal. It's contagious. We've become good at crawling through darkened houses, stripped to our underthings. The brazenness of it gives our coven a purpose. Dorothy leads us into her mother's bedroom. We stand silent near the bed. Dorothy's mother breathes heavy. She mutters in her sleep, "Yes… give it to me." Dorothy takes her hand. I can't hear any of us breathe now. I hold Dorothy's hand and take Daphne's. Daphne does the same with Anna, who holds the sleeping woman's foot. We stand there with the sleeping woman. I can feel Dorothy and Daphne tremble. Dorothy's mother opens her eyes. "Be careful, girls," she smiles, "there's bad stuff in the dark." When she closes her eyes, the spell is broken. We run noiseless through the back door. I push Daphne onto the dewed back lawn. She slides along the slippery grass. I dive after her. We all tumble hugging each other, giggling like mad. "That was so cool," Anna puts me in a neck hold, "the coolest yet." We lay on our backs looking up at the stars. Dorothy lifts a foot covered with wet grass, "So many houses, so little time." "At least we didn't have to see Daff's dad with a hardon while he slept, like the last time" I nudge Daphne. "That was so gross," Daphne elbows back. "Not as gross as listening to my mom have a horny dream," Dorothy says, "but still, it was thrilling to hear her secrets." Anna laughs out, "The dark side of suburbia. I love it." Daphne is sitting in the dark on Anna's bed. She lights one of the candles. She has a bruise on her forehead where Anna's dad hit her. She doesn't look at me as I sit on the bed next to her. "There wasn't anything in the Starhawk books about this, was there?" Daphne half-heartedly giggles. I hold her hand tight. "What's gonna happen to us, now?" she asks me, as if I know. As if I can make it all better. I take her hand and lead her to the living room. We step over my mother's body in the hallway. She's laying face down in the blood-soaked carpet. She looks more real to me nude and in death then she ever did to me when she lived. The star-shaped bullet hole in her back seems to belong there. I wonder how long it's been missing. Daphne pokes her with her big toe. She leaves a pale indentation on her freckled shoulder. We sit on each side of my mother, our backs against the walls. Daphne reaches over and takes the Polaroids from me. She thumbs through them like baseball cards. She throws them back at me. They hit the wall behind me like buckshot. I pick up the one that falls on my mother's pale back. All four of us are in this one. We're in the basement of Daphne's house. Each of us is holding handguns. Dorothy is blowing against the barrel of hers; she looks like a pretty Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar with the bandanna around her neck. Daphne and Anna are kneeling on each side of Dorothy and I, pointing guns at each other. They hold the gun grips with both hands. I aim at the camera. "I've never, ever got into my dad's gun collection," Daphne says, "you guys have no idea the world of shit I'd be in if he found out." "You think they're loaded?" Dorothy looks into the barrel. "You idiot," I grab it away from her. "We're just lucky my dad's out of town, guys," Daphne pulls another gun out of the cabinet, "trust me on this." The guns fascinate us. I take a picture of Daphne posing as a high priestess in a bikini top, holding a gun to a kneeling Anna. Anna looks up at her in a mock plea for forgiveness. Dorothy poses for a close-up wearing the witch hat, the gun barrel against her cheek. Her eyes are open wide and her is mouth shaped like an "o." "Hey, you guys," Dorothy tries to twirl the gun around her finger, "you think we should start packing during our crawls?" The gun falls on the basement floor. The blast takes over the basement. It's as if nothing else in the world exists. The bullet caroms off the cement wall and disappears into the basement. We never find it. "Shit," I manage to say. We're silent. "Pretty fuckin' freaky," Anna gets on all fours and looks at the smoking gun, "dang, girlfriends, this adds a whole new dimension to this, doesn't it?" It breaks the ice. We cackle in agreement. Anna starts singing again. Her voice is loud, abrasive. "You didn't know, did you?" Daphne stands up against the wall. "About your mom and Anna's dad?" I shake my head. I pick at the strewn pictures. We aren't in the ones we took tonight. Just Anna's dad and my mother. In life, in bed, in death. Anna wails away in the kitchen. I hear glass breaking.
|