All that year, our toilet was broken. You had to kneel down to adjust the water pressure and the men at our various parties went out to pee in the backyard instead. I never went back there myself because the landlord rarely got around to mowing and I didn’t want to know anyway. I imagined: wild mint and stinkweed, box elder bugs and raccoons, a couple pairs of bikini underwear Sonia had spread out over a bush to dry, and a naked female figure stretching her arms up toward the collapsed clothesline—the Goddess in her domestic guise. Sonia had been courting Her ever since the second abortion and the attendant short course in matriarchal religions. When in doubt, my new housemate consulted a series of colorful paperbacks, a herbal remedy recipe book, and a round deck of soft focus, water color tarot cards for guidance and instruction. And after I moved into the back bedroom with the warped wooden floor and the smell of insecticide and ginger root in the corners, I was expected to do the same.

Back then, Sonia was married to someone in another state and I was practically a virgin. She told me stories about men with independent businesses and illegitimate children who bought her gifts of edible underwear and Kama Sutra coffee table editions. I could only remember a bottle of sweet white wine with my boyfriend of six years, a disposable sponge with a red stain in the middle, like a broken jelly donut, the Moody Blues on a jerry-rigged stereo. Sonia was just three years older than me, but she seemed to belong to a completely different generation.

I watched her sitting at the kitchen table in her white nightgown and vintage mohair sweater, looking over a cookbook and testing the texture of the herbs between her thumb and forefinger. Then she’d lift up the pestle and start grinding again, without even shifting her gaze. Her long brown hair wasn’t curly or straight; it turned in different directions like the fringe on a weather-worn jacket, and she had a habit of lifting strands of it to her face, scanning for split ends. Her eyes were long, her hips were broad, her face flushed easily with anger or red wine—sometimes I couldn’t tell which until it was too late.

“I’m trying to figure out, did you do the dealer guy before or after you found the Goddess?”

She gave me a patient look and blew her hair out of her eyes. “You know, Lori, you’re obsessed with cause and effect. I’ve always had a sense of goddess energy underlying my relationships. Remember, we’ve got the power to give birth. So when they act out like that they’re just trying to make up for their inherent biological inadequacy.”

“Hmm, spooky.”

“I’m almost ready for the eggs.”

“I just wonder if it has anything to do with the boots. They say guys really like boots. It makes them think you’ll be willing to do it standing up.”

“You should get out and meet someone,” she told me. “The road of excess leads to the temple of the oversoul.”

Reprinted from Five Points (1999)
The Bones of Garbo (2003) The Ohio University Press
Copyright © 1999 Trudy Lewis

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