Mother Nature: The Journals of Eleanor O'Kell (16 page)

Even as little girls they have the long legs of the finest colleens and skin so fresh it tingles. Thomas Cushing may have been a real bastard, an absolute son of a bitch, but his genes are worth a thousand words.

Becca comes to take pictures of my Tomgirls. “What?” she says. I am staring because there is something different about her, like she’s finally come alive. Who’s the lucky guy? I ask. “There is no guy,” Becca says. “There’s just me. That seems to be enough for now.”

July 2, 1977

Abigail Rickover is our secret weapon. But it’s up to me to turn her genius into a business. The O’Kell in me wants to make a profit
and
a point.

We will call our business The Good Egg because that’s what Sliv called Mother, may she rest in peace.

How do we make this into a business? I ask Abigail Rickover. “I’ve never really thought about it,” she says.

“Artificial insemination,” Abigail Rickover tells me. “
In vitro
fertilization. It’s simple, really. We put the egg in a petri dish with the sperm to fertilize it, then we place the fertilized egg in the womb.” Test-tube babies, I say. “That’s right,” she says. “That’s how we make money. For now.” I say this is a business I can understand.

I walk over to The Main Drag for drinks with The Tommies at the end of summer, at the end of the day. We’ve put in a deck out back that looks out over the canal, and I like to come here to be with my tribe. All the talk of free love in the world is starting to make sense to me. Free love is what happens when making love is no longer tied to making babies. Free love has to mean love that’s freely available to me.

We will specialize in producing girls, I tell Abigail Rickover. For business reasons. “People have been trying to do that for a long, long time,” she says. “In ancient Greece, men would lie on their right side during intercourse if they wanted a boy. In Germany in the Middle Ages, they used to put a hammer under the bed to get a boy, and in Denmark they thought a scissors under the bed would help them get a girl. In France, this was in the 18th century, they would tie up their left testicle to get a boy. But nothing worked, of course.” Can you do it? I ask. “I have a few ideas,” she says.

Ground is broken on our new mother ship, the Briody Center. Soon we will be ready to blast off.

Do our Tomgirls have names? Do I care? They call me Big Mama. I call each of them “Tommie.” I love them all dearly.

I take home a young woman from The Main Drag, a singer in a rock band called the Bi-Vocals. I don’t ask for her name and she never asks for mine. Who are
you? I say to her after. “Gracie,” she says. Did you run away from home? I ask. “Most people run away from home to the circus. I had to run away from the circus to find a home.” Oh? “I don’t even know my real name. And I don’t want to know.” I want her to stay here with me, with my new family, with my tribe of Tommies.

I ask Gracie
if she wants a job. “Forget it,” she says. When will you come back? I ask. “Whenever,” she says.

I can’t believe it but I’m smitten. I always thought being a Cushing was all about conquest, not communion. This has nothing to do with love or sex and everything to do with transformation.

“This is pure research,” Abigail Rickover says. “It takes time.
Real
time, not clock time.”

“She’s going to be a beauty, Miss O’K,” Sliv says. “Anybody can see that.” He is talking about the shell of our new Briody Center, not my new love.

November 30, 1977

Patience, I tell myself. It will be years before our girls are ready, before Abigail Rickover has solved the mysteries of life. Everything will take time, years and years.

Love or lust, life is hell without Gracie
.

I follow her hundreds of miles down canal, tracking the Bi-Vocals from bar to bar.
“What are you doing here?” Gracie says when she sees me. “You didn’t come here for
me
, did you?” I don’t say a word. “
My God!
” Gracie says. “I mean that’s
pathetic
. You are too
old
for me, girl.” I feel like a fool, like an old cow with a bell clanging around my neck.

I am going to find whatever love I’m looking for right here in the last town along the canal. I don’t want anyone to ever leave me again. Getting hurt’s not worth it, not at my age. I am going to make my own love.

They will wait until spring to finish the Briody Center and to landscape the grounds around it. For now we will use it to hang Christmas lights.

January 9, 1978

I give my first lecture to The Tommies about our Tomgirls, my first explanation in public. Every one of us, I say, is the mother of every child.
Every one of us has a lifelong obligation to care for every Tomgirl. When I am done, there are no questions.

We will leave the boys to the boys. For the test-tube girls in the United States, you will have to go through The Good Egg. I tell The Tommies they will be donating their eggs to a good cause.

We work out the sperm profile. Our donors have to be smart, without diseases or any sign of depression or anxiety attacks. I want them tall and  rock-hard. We start to screen them in Cambridge. Amazing, isn’t it? I say to Abigail Rickover. Women can produce one egg a month, and men can jack off until the cows come home, squirting out millions of sperm every single time. No wonder their come comes so cheap.

“I have figured out a way to freeze the eggs,” Abigail Rickover says. She says they will last forever. Tommie immortality, I say.

We will corner the market on low-cost, top-quality test-tube babies. One day soon we will corner the market on test-tube girls.

I am looking at books about the original Amazons. I want to know everything about them, their homes, their bones, their enemies, their gods. They say the Amazons are a myth but I don’t believe it. To build the modern woman we have to understand our warrior past.

Abigail Rickover and I are meeting every week. “It’s too much,” she says. I say I need to update her on the Briody Center. “I don’t need to know,” she says. “I just need to keep working.” I wonder whether that might be the best thing I’ve heard yet about Abigail Rickover.

Everything about the Amazons is real to me. I think they were women who loved women but got what they needed from men. They were warriors mating with a male tribe just to make baby girls. I think they had sex slaves,
too, from their conquests. And sex with each other. I think they would conquer towns and take the best-looking men captive and kill the rest. They understood that sex was war. No wonder men say Amazons must be a myth.

I make my Amazonian preferences known today, May Day, the next time The Tommies come together in the basement of the Cathedral. I tell them all about the Amazons, the warrior mentality, the way we must ready the Tomgirls for a new kind of combat in a new kind of world, one of our own making. I tell them we all have to be Amazons in thought, word, and deed, because this is war, and in war you must destroy your enemies.

“But I’ll never look like that,” Scarlett says. “There’s nothing Amazonian about me.” I say surgery is
always
an option.

June 2, 1978

I will pick and choose. I will pluck. I will tell them all the same thing, that they must submit to me to know what love is all about. Some of The Tommies will say no but not many. They are all reasonable women, and I see no reason not to reason with them all. I will make sure that I have what I need.

June 4, 1978

Why shouldn’t I have everything I want? This is my town, my creation, my dream.

Sliv says there have been men poking around the town. “They stick out like sore thumbs, Miss O’K,” he says. “You know how it is here with guys.” He says he thinks they’re spies. “But why?” Sliv says. “Who’re they spying on?” I have no idea, I say. No one knows what we’re doing here. “Not even me,” Sliv says. I ask Sliv if he wants to know. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” Sliv says, “or the hair of the dog will bite you.”

If we can make a whole new race of Tomgirls from scratch, then why can’t I re-make The Tommies into what I need right now?

With my blessing, Scarlett takes a van full of Tommies to Boston for plastic surgery. “You won’t even recognize us,” she says. I tell her I can’t wait.

There’s a peace about Rebecca now, as if the lens completes her own self-portrait. She is the only member of my family who ever makes the trip up here. Every time she comes she seems to have more cameras, more lenses, more equipment, less baggage. Why are you here? I ask. “This is where our story begins,” she says.

Back from Boston, The Tommies look battered, bandaged, like raccoons carved up by a bigger, nastier animal. The doctor tells me they will be beautiful once they have a chance to heal. But you would never know it from looking at them now. “What happened?” Becca wants to know. Self-improvement, I tell her.

Becca sets up a dark room in the bathroom of the Eileen Bell suite at the Queen Mother. It looks like she’s going to stay for a while.

My sister takes pictures of The Tommies as we peel off the bandages in the Eileen Bell Lying-In. They still look like prizefighters or war criminals to me. “My God!” Becca says when she sees their beat-up faces. She snaps away, making her pictures.

“What have you done to them?” she says. Nothing, Becca, I say. It’s something they decided to do to themselves. “They all say it was
your
idea.” I want them to think that, I say. To make it easier for them to do what they wanted to do anyway. I wanted to remove the stigma from the surgery. “That’s not all you removed,” Becca says.

You really do have to do something with your hair, I say to Scarlett, and she starts to cry.

“I don’t know who I am any more, Eleanor,” Becca says. Beats me, I say.

Our little Tomgirls are growing up so fast. Now is the time to teach them the difference between right and wrong, between good and bad, between women and men. Our curriculum and our little girls are developing nicely. In another ten years or so I will have what I need.

Becca shows me pictures of The Tommies after surgery and at first I don’t know what I’m seeing. Becca’s done something with time, before and after the surgery, so that one image blends into the next. The surgeon changed the way Scarlett and Heather and Kelly and Allyson look, but in cutting at their flesh it’s like he’s cut into their souls. They look lost and terrified in Becca’s pictures, battered and bruised, as if they’ve seen a ghost.