I stood up from the tiny table in my tiny kitchen. “Alison,” I said, amazed at how nervous I was with this woman who had so recently been climbing inside my body, “I would like to do an enactment with you.”
She stood up as well. Her face became grave and I panicked that I had done the wrong thing. But then she took off the purple satin robe I’d given her to wear (a present from an ex-lover, but I didn’t feel she had to know that; she was wearing it open, draping the sides of her breasts) and inclined her head towards me in the way of someone accepting a spirit obligation. She held out her hand, palm up, for me to take it. Briefly, I thought of just pulling her to me and kissing her, but I knew I had to follow through on what I’d said. To proclaim an obligation and then abandon it is like slicing through a tenuous web that has only begun to take shape. So hand in hand and walking slightly apart, we marched into the bedroom, this time heading not to the bed, but to the screened-off part of the room where I had set up my true life altar.
The enactment was slow and graceful. Before I could move aside the screen, Alison insisted on touching it, spreading wide her fingers as she traced the paintings of the night sky and the waves, touching the beads and feathers and ribbons, carefully reading (she moved her lips) the texts I’d copied from Ingrid Burning Snake and Maryanna Split Sky and Li Ku Unquenchable Fire, while touching their photos, taped with shiny black Founder’s Tape to the centre of the screen.
A pot of finger paste lay in front of the screen. Alison pointed to it and I nodded. Her designs were simple, abstract swirls for the most part, but I liked that she used both hands, and especially that she allowed herself to paint over some of my designs, even touching the photos of the Founders with dots of paint, as if to acknowledge that the place of “Ellen alone” was about to change, that I had invited her to change it. “All right,” she said finally, and let me accordion the screen aside.
For years I’d been collecting and making materials to use in some special enactment, when I would know it really counted. I had no idea what it would be (well, at first I thought I would do it when I met Mr Right, but I soon gave that up), only that I didn’t entirely trust anything from the SDA, and at some point I would want my own ingredients. Now I kneeled by a large wooden box covered in sea shells and small pebbles I’d pasted on, one by one, over a couple of years. When I opened the lock (a gold-plated lion, with the key sliding into its roaring mouth) and lifted the lid, I could almost hear a whisper of voices, excited at being called to action.
Before Alison could enter I needed to lay out a true ground. For this I used a rope made of strips of cloth torn from the clothes I’d worn at different primary enactments throughout my childhood, starting with the feathered blanket the midwives had given me for my rising into my newborn body. My mother had given me all these things when I’d left home to go to college. I’m sure she’d have approved of me putting them safely in a chest—but not ripped to pieces. With the rope I set out the lines of a true ground on the floor, careful to keep it curved at all points for the female body.
Within this field I laid down a silk scarf, golden and turquoise, for the Sun and the Sea, the light of knowledge shining on the sullen mysteries of the soul. Broken pieces of chains held down the silk, a sign of liberation for Chained Mother, held prisoner at the bottom of the ocean.
Next came a “standing announcement”, a metal pole I’d made, with branches hung with downward pointing triangles. The triangles were made of red velvet on wire frames, decorated with yellow and indigo ribbons. In the centre the largest triangle was a double layer of black velvet, with a space between the layers for a small revolving light and a tape loop. The light shone through a gauzy red vertical strip down the centre of the triangle. On the outside of this strip I’d pasted folds of pink satin to suggest labia. The tape loop, set up on a miniaturized cassette player (another boon from Radio Temple), consisted of women moaning in soft joy. A single wire fed electricity to both the light and the tape. The wire plugged into one of two sockets in the apartment officially sanctified to receive sacred current. So I guess I couldn’t escape SDA involvement after all.
When I turned on the tape and the light Alison grinned at me. I could see she wanted to say something, or maybe even do something inspired by the moaning triangle, but she kept silent, allowing me to go ahead. There were several other things to set out, including a small fan which plugged into the other half of the sacred socket. I’d painted the four blades of the fan with dots, concentric circles, mouths and my handprint. Before I set it going I asked Alison to dip her hand in the black paste and place her print over mine. When I turned on the switch the blades moved around slowly, just enough to billow the cloth.
The final participants didn’t come from the box, but from my shelf of permanent house guardians above the regular altar. These were three clay statues, rough images of women I’d made from mud collected after a storm on a song journey I’d made in the Adirondack mountains shortly after I left college. I’d painted them in thick globs of paste, one yellow, one red and one black. I set them on the floor in a row, but when I straightened up Alison bent down before the guardians to remove the protection from around her neck and slip it over the head of the one in the middle, the black. I touched her shoulder and looked at her as she stood up. I think I was crying, I’m not even sure. This small silver and gold cylinder was refuge, the place where she kept the external bodies of her real self. She had made herself naked for me, willing to start over, and she had shown me that that was the point of what we were doing, to allow ourselves a new beginning, naked and fresh. We had to offer the relationship we used to have, because we could not just build on that, and at the same time we had to cherish it, even the people who had died in the making of it.
I was about to invite Alison into the circle with me when she held up a hand, the one still dark with paste from the handprint, and darted into the kitchen, coming back with an apple and a knife. I smiled and nodded at her and then we entered together.
I closed my eyes and took a breath as I always do when I enter an opening to the Living World. The fan blew on my legs and I could smell a sharpness in the air as I breathed deeply, taking life and Alison into my blood. When I opened my eyes she was looking at me. We kissed each other and moved our hands in slow loose waves up and down each other’s bodies, lowering ourselves until we were kneeling on the silk floor, our bodies pressed together. The revolving light moved on and off her face, searching her out, while the number of women moaning on the tape seemed to increase with every turn of the loop.
With my hands I guided Alison to lie down on the ground, where I stroked her in one long movement from her forehead to her toes, sweeping off all the strains and residues she’d brought with her from the outside. Speaking very softly I told her the story of Maryanna Split Sky, how the day after the Parade of the Animals in Pasadena, the masked children’s riot that sparked the Revolution, Split Sky lay down naked in the main street of her town, offering her body as an opening to the Living World so that the Revolution might truly begin. I repeated for her that story we all know, how when the police came a wind blew them back, and when the TV people tried to badger her their cameras broke, how her body glowed like molten rock, like the Earth in its infancy, and how the sky filled with grey clouds, becoming like stone, weighing people down to their knees, until Maryanna shouted and the stone sky split open with light and rain, all at the same time.