The Predictions (3 page)

At the mention of the clitoris, I had strained to get a bet
ter 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 an intense 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 indi
vidual was drifting off to sleep. But that night, the sleeping hut pitched with restless energy. 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.

Gaialands

1978

O
UT OF THE YOUNGSTERS
, 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 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.

Shortly after their exchange, Meg piped up with, “Please read mine instead.” She had been watching eagerly from the sidelines, waiting for her turn. “I believe in it.”

“Precious child,” said Shakti. “You’re too young to have your fortune told. Your personality isn’t formed yet.”

“I’m not!” said Meg. “I’m almost fifteen.”

“Then fifteen is when I’ll do your first reading. It will be your birthday present.”

Meg counted on her fingers how long she’d have to wait. Her birthday was two or three months away, and I wondered how Meg’s entire personality could form in such a short amount of time.

“I’ll go next,” said Sigi, positioning herself across the table from Shakti and rubbing her hands together in anticipation. “And, Meg, you come and sit next to me to give your good vibes to the cards.”

Meg was delighted and nestled in next to Sigi. A few months into being a daughter, she was the only one who was beginning to get the hang of it. Sigi would often stroke the hair out of Meg’s eyes, for no reason other than to touch her, and the two of them would look at each other in a wistful way that was also somehow greedy and exclusive. Their interactions mesmerized me, but I was glad I didn’t have to go through that myself. Since I’d found out Elisabeth had birthed me, she hadn’t changed her attitude toward me at all. She was still cool, businesslike, practical—constantly preoccupied by all the mouths she had to feed—and I couldn’t imagine her behaving any other way. To see her behave like Sigi would have been disconcerting. But still, I sometimes thought it was strange that she hadn’t acknowledged our connection at all.

While Shakti shuffled her deck of cards, Lukas got up
from the table and stalked off to the orchard by himself. In addition to avoiding Shakti, he had been doing that a lot lately—trying to find places where he could be alone. I thought just this once I might go after him to see if I could draw him out of his sulk.

I found him under one of the plum trees, stripping the bark off a sapling branch with his pocketknife. It was something the boys had done compulsively when they were younger but now they only did it when they were in a funk. By the time I got to him, Lukas had been going at the branch so aggressively that there wasn’t much of it left. His expression, by the moonlight, brewed with dark thoughts.

“That was pretty harsh,” I said, standing above him.

He didn’t look up, but continued to slice at the sapling. “She’s a goddamn phony. She talks total horseshit but nobody sees it because they’re all trying to get into her pants.” Lately, Lukas had been reading a stash of pulp novels we had found in a junk shop in Coromandel town and talking as though he was a hardboiled American detective, an affectation that I hoped would soon wear off.

“Not everyone,” I said.

“No. You’re not, but you still fawn all over her.”

“You have to admit that she’s livened things up around here.”

Lukas scoffed. “A talking monkey would have done that. Living here is like being buried alive.”

“But that’s what I mean. It isn’t—not anymore.” I wanted to tell him about the consciousness raising, how it had opened my eyes to a whole new world, but I was too
embarrassed to go into detail. “She’s given us so much,” I said lamely.

“She doesn’t care about any of us. We’re just playthings to her.”

“Playthings? What do you mean?”

Lukas reddened slightly as he said, “Do I really have to spell it out?”

I didn’t give him the chance.

“She can’t help it if she’s prettier than everyone else.”

Still flushed, Lukas said, “Forget it, Poppy. The minute I turn eighteen, I’m leaving this loony bin behind.”

He had been saying that a lot lately, and each time he did, I wanted to shake him. There were seven of us kids at Gaialands, and even though I knew it was silly, I felt strongly that if we could just stick together, we would be okay. “Where will you go?”

“Auckland, probably. That’s where all the bands are.”

Lukas played guitar, self-taught, and even though he sounded okay to my ears, I wasn’t sure he was good enough to join a city band. “But you don’t have any money. Stuff isn’t free like it is here.”

“I’ll get a job,” he said. “Like everyone else.”

I was shocked. “You’d work for the man?”

Lukas snorted. “There is no man. That’s just some communist claptrap Hunter made up to scare us.”

“What about the rat race? That’s real.”

“Only to hippies. To everyone else, that’s just progress. I don’t want to live in the dark ages for the rest of my life.”

Lukas gently poked my leg with the stick he had sharp
ened. When I grabbed the end of it to stop him, he pulled me down next to him on the ground and pummeled my shoulders and back. We had been roughhousing since we were little, but this time when he started wrestling with me, I had an involuntary urge to submit to his physical strength, to let him win. Only when I offered no resistance we butted heads, our skulls knocking together like a couple of hollow coconuts.

The sound of it was worse than the pain, but I cried out anyway.

“Poppy?” said Lukas, springing apart, confused. “Did I hurt you?”

“No.” Whatever the submissive urge had been, it was gone, and I wished I had fought back when I had the chance. I got to my feet. “Last one to the mess hut is a big fat moron.”

“Don’t be an egg,” said Lukas, not moving.

He had never refused to race before, and it threw me, so I called him a dick and took off for the mess hut, trying to run off all these odd new sensations.

Rumors had been going around that in addition to doing tarot-card spreads, Shakti had been slowly and methodically compiling the astrology charts of everyone who lived at Gaialands. I was not sure what this entailed, but I was certain that if everyone else was getting one then I wanted one too. Weeks went by while I waited to be asked. Then Nelly had hers read and I could no longer bear it. On the pretext of delivering Shakti some coconut oil she had ordered from Auckland to smooth her hair, I made my way across the field to her caravan. A couple of the tires had gone completely
flat, giving it a tilted appearance, and I wondered if it bothered her to go about her business on a lean.

Halfway to the caravan I paused to consider something that had never occurred to me before. Did my outfit look okay? We shared clothes and lived in the sticks. Other than checking if what I was wearing was warm enough or too hot, I had never given clothes a second thought, but lately I had decided that I wanted to look more like a girl and less like a Coromandel bushman. But as for how to go about this, I was stumped. Boys and girls on the commune dressed the same. In the summer we wore running shorts and faded T-shirts with slogans for tractors or sports teams, and in the winter, dungarees or cords with a Swanndri or woolen jumper. Susie knitted all these jumpers to the same pattern, and they were stored in a trunk in our sleeping hut. We all wore them, moaning all day long about the coarse, scratchy wool. Sigi and Elisabeth occasionally wore faded shift dresses or sarongs, but nothing of the sort had found its way into our communal clothing trunk. We couldn’t just go out and buy anything new—we didn’t have money. I sometimes handled it when I worked in the Gaialands veggie shop, but other than that it never passed through my hands.

That day, I doubled back to our sleeping hut, found nothing except more shorts and more threadbare T-shirts, then made my way to the washing line and helped myself to a flowing Indian skirt I had seen Elisabeth wearing once or twice. It was a commune. We shared everything. Didn’t the skirt belong to me as much as it belonged to anyone else? It was the first time in my life I had worn anything other than pants.

Eagerly, I rapped on the door of Shakti’s caravan and waited, adjusting the ties of the skirt one more time. After a short interval, the door opened—she hadn’t asked who was there—and she stood in front of me naked.

“Poppy!” she said. “Nice skirt.”

“I brought you this,” I said, thrusting the coconut oil into Shakti’s hands and wishing I hadn’t changed. I didn’t feel like myself and was unsure how this new version of me ought to behave.

“You look pretty,” said Shakti, holding out her hand. “I’ve been wondering when you would visit.”

I took her small, agile hand and was pulled into the caravan, where Shakti had candles and incense burning, the air so thick with fragrance it was hard to breathe. My eyes darted about, greedily taking everything in. It was dark inside but the space was bigger than I thought it would be, with the bed tucked away on a platform at one end. This left enough room for a small round table and chairs, plus a kitchen area, shelves, and bench seats. Every surface was covered with batik cloths, shawls, cushions, lace, and on top of these were stacks of books, potions, candlesticks, trinkets, a lunarscape of carved boxes, copper vials, divining instruments, and fertility dolls. Shakti caught me drinking it all in and laughed. “I collect things,” she said. “As if you couldn’t guess.”

She picked up a fringed shawl and tied it in a knot around her waist—hardly covering anything, but modest compared to nothing at all. Then she cleared objects off the table, a set of watercolors and a stack of thick pieces of cardstock. The
card on top was painted with strange hieroglyphics, almost recognizable as an alphabet but not quite.

“What are those?” I asked, pointing at the symbols.

“Runes,” said Shakti, shuffling them into a pile and putting them away. “Would you like some tea? I have chamomile, peppermint, or nettle.”

“Peppermint, please.”

She balanced a small orange cast-iron kettle on top of a portable gas burner and shook out some leaves into a red enamel teapot. Then she reached into an earthenware jar and pulled out something that was banned from the commune, a large bar of supermarket chocolate. She broke off a square and handed it to me, holding a finger to her lips to let me know it was our secret. I wasn’t sure whether to eat it or save it, and settled on both, nibbling off a section and letting it melt on my tongue. God, it was delicious. She poured the tea into cups the size of thimbles.

“Those are tiny,” I said.

“Japanese,” she explained. “Given to me by my first lover. An older man. He really knew how to make love to a woman.”

“Oh,” I said, scandalized, bringing the tiny cup to my lips, then yanking it away when I realized the liquid was piping hot. I spilled some on my T-shirt and clumsily tried to wipe it off. “Sorry.”

“It’s your birthday next week, isn’t it?” Shakti said.

“November eighteenth.”

“Ooh la la—a Scorpio.”

“Is that bad?”

“It’s intense. Scorpios are deeply emotional—and elemental. They’re drawn to matters of life and death—almost to the point of obsession.”

“Oh,” I said. “Are we all like that? The twins and Fritz were born the same month.”

“They’re a week or two after you though, so they fall in the next sign. Sagittarius is a different breed altogether, much lighter of heart. How funny that you were all born so close together though, almost like someone planned it.”

“They did plan it. I mean, all the babies were born within two years of one another, then they stopped having any. I’m not sure why. Maybe seven was enough.”

“That’s so fascinating.” Shakti blew on her tea, then carefully took a sip. “I’ve been watching how you all behave around one another, and I have to say, some of the stuff I’ve seen is, well—it’s a little messed up.”

“That’s because the way we were raised was . . . unusual.” I had just opened the door to more questions, I realized, but I couldn’t think how to turn back without offending Shakti.

“You told me you were raised in a group. Does that mean you lived with your mom and dad until a certain age, then you were all lumped together?”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t mean that.” I wasn’t sure how to continue. This was the part that always freaked everyone out. “It means we were raised in a group from day one.”

“From birth?”

“From birth.”

Shakti let out a whistle and shook her head. “That’s
even more nuts than I thought.” She looked at me with a sad expression. “You poor, poor creatures.”

I had known this would be her reaction, but coming from her, the pity was strangely gratifying. I wanted more. I found myself adding, “We didn’t even know who our parents were until earlier this year.”

“Holy smokes!” she exclaimed, and her shock was like a drug. “How did you find out?”

“They called us all in for a meeting,” I began, wanting to tell her everything—to have her listen to me all day. “We had no idea what it was going to be about.” Once I was sure I had Shakti’s rapt attention, I continued, going back a little way to the end of summer, when Nelly had first confessed to me that she had fallen passionately in love with Timon. For as long as possible, I tried to prevent Nelly from saying anything, but as summer rolled into autumn, she only grew more determined to tell him how she felt. Nelly was too bold and too lovesick to wait any longer. She was convinced he felt the same way she did, and because she was so sure of it, the next thing I knew she had me helping her to write a love note.

“That’s so sweet,” said Shakti.

“It could have been—but things didn’t work out exactly as she’d planned.”