“This model is not perfect, but it is the most egalitarian way to structure things, I think. It’s an experiment. Each way of organizing creates its own repercussions. Simple things, like organizing work, can have dramatic social effect. We may, at a later point, encourage people who excel at something to do more of it, but then we will end up with people born to clean toilets who never get to do the good jobs. So at the cost of efficiency and quality, we have an extremely high level of fairness and equality,” said Mother G to Caroline over a breakfast of fruit preserves and sourdough bread.
Caroline enjoyed the possibilities of the community. She even liked the element of no men. Berry showed less enthusiasm. She spent her days up on the tech-nos’ ridge, smoking pot or hanging out in the sweat lodge. She found the tech-yes industriousness exhausting and a little suspect. She preferred to have fewer amenities at less effort. But she still slept at the dormitory with Caroline and did the labor assigned her on the wheel. After their first week ended, Caroline and Berry told Mother G they would stay and wanted to petition for membership.
Mother G explained that if you wanted to stay you eventually had to build your own house, and not in view of anyone else’s house. You could participate in community meals and decision making as long as you participated in the work wheel. If you wanted to fend for yourself, like some of the tech-nos, you could opt out of the labor credits.
Caroline learned that most of the women had dropped out from the Harvard Classics Department, where Mother G used to teach. Others were design and architecture heads from MIT. She also discovered that Mother G was the financial benefactor of the community. It would take years for actual self-sufficiency to develop, so she’d put up the money to buy the land and initial equipment. Many of the women were veterans of other communes, usually defunct, that had open-door policies and absolute freedom. These became overrun with drug addicts and social outcasts. This place was to be a revision of previous communities. Mother G wanted to have a space where basic cultural assumptions could be challenged. Such as what women were like without men. And whether we could escape the cultural paradigms we were raised with. She restored the old Shaker-style house, paid the taxes and often bought supplies for the community. Although they grew vegetables and kept chickens and cows, they were not anywhere near self-supporting. So in a sense Mother G was deeply in charge, and this too could not be escaped, no matter how many work credits she clocked in.
But Caroline liked her. And she liked the place despite its contradictions. She liked the cloistered effect, the way each woman reinvented herself. No one admitted to their past lives here. No one wanted to cop to anything but the moment and the future. It was the perfect place for someone like her, wasn’t it?
Temporary Like Achilles
AFTER NEARLY two months, Caroline and Berry still hadn’t built their own house. Instead Berry managed to convince the cloistered women on the hill to let her move in with them. But she took frequent breaks — after a few days huddled with the tech-nos (open-fire cooking, barefoot basic farming, infrequent bathing, spell casting) she escaped to the tech-yeses (hi-fi players, refined sugar, clean water, Band-Aids, tampons). Caroline still saw her most days, in her floppy hat and granny dress, when Caroline decided she wanted a moment of sotto voce commentary or just an unspoken collusion of outsider feeling. Caroline still didn’t feel entirely comfortable at the commune. She had been living at the dormitory as discreetly as possible — certainly she should have moved out by now. But building a house seemed a big commitment for someone in her position.
After collecting her weekly work assignment, Caroline met Berry on the trail, and they took a walk out beyond the edge of the commune. They sat eating sandwiches on some rocks by the stream. Caroline turned on Mother G’s portable radio. The Beach Boys’ song “Good Vibrations” came on. Caroline turned up the volume, and the song played up into the hills around them.
“This was the song my junior year at high school. That fake end, when it segues into this whole other sounding song but still is connected, somehow, to the old one — that blew my mind.” Caroline talked as she braided Berry’s hair. She just began combing it and braiding it without asking Berry. Otherwise Berry would start to get dreadlock mats and knots that were impossible to remove. Berry didn’t seem to care one way or the other.
“This song is all right.”
“This is a great song,” Caroline said.
“Thing about the Beach Boys, it’s not that they’re too corny or whatever. I don’t mind that. But they are completely not sexy—”
“Yes, that’s true—”
“Utterly sexless, even. Unless you are twelve years old.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What else could be the point?”
“Loneliness. Longing. The sadness that leaks through all that enforced sunny cheer. It’s heartbreaking.”
Berry shrugged. “This is a cool song.”
“It’s in the sound, not the words. It’s the way you feel, or rather the feeling you get. Like slightly off, rancid America, you know?”
Berry turned to her and smiled. Her blond braids glittered in the sun. “When you move somewhere new, it’s good to have someone or something from your past there with you, reminding you of who you are, don’t you think?” she said.
I don’t know where but she sends me there
“Listen to the harmonies. Why is it that harmonies can give you chills? Why do they please so deeply?”
“Like it is so easy to lose track of yourself, in a way, if you go somewhere new,” Berry said, her voice choking a little bit. She laughed at the sound.
“Are you feeling nostalgic?”
“Emotional, maybe. What do you expect with all the free-floating estrogen around here, right?”
Caroline tied the long braids with leather laces. She got up and brushed tiny pebbles from the backs of her bare thighs. It was cold already. As soon as the sun went down it got cold in these old mountains. Berry got up, and the two of them walked slowly down the path. As they approached the community from the north, Caroline glimpsed the common house through the trees. For the first time she thought Mother G’s house looked beautiful, particularly with the gentle diffusion of the dusk light making the purple paint a nearly unnoticeable natural brown. Usually the flush clapboard and lack of adornment seemed too plain to her. No flourishes in the returns at the edges, no fluid, fanciful lines, nothing for its own sake at all. No embellishments to discover in a lintel or in a dormer. Not a hint of whimsy in a molding or a cornice. But now, when she glimpsed it through the trees, she noticed its symmetry. Its economy and its balance. The harmony of the lines of the perfectly straight clapboards and the mullion lines between windowpanes. Repetition and order. The sturdiness of it. And the beauty of it, quiet, modest. Even, perhaps, despite itself. But there was a slight pretense in all this simplicity, though, wasn’t there? It was just as deliberate, just as constructed as the most ornate Victorian house; just as contrived as the elaborate and distinctive Greek Revival houses that dotted the surrounding countryside. Its absence of style was never that, was it? Just as contrived as the simple, reduced culture of the commune. Nature had nothing to do with any of it. Artifacts, all of us, no matter how deep in the woods.
“The tech-nos will be gone in another month. They spend their winter in the Southwest,” Berry said.
“No kidding,” Caroline said. “That’s funny. I’ll bet this whole place gets halved in the winter. They get stacks of snow up here.”