In Search of Mary (28 page)

“Hello. Are you a vagina?”

“Why, yes I am!” she crows, patting down her four-foot padded labia and drawing them round herself like a precious shawl. “I’m so glad you could tell – don’t you just love it?” She jauntily adjusts the shiny pink hat. “Are you coming to the show?” Her name is Suzette, and she’s leafleting for further productions of the
Monologues
. Jean and I both hug Suzette, star-struck, and get Will’s photo taken with her. This will be one to bring out when his teenage mates come over to play
Call of Duty Advanced Warfare
.

A couple of haranguing hours later we’re in the car, driving back to the forest again. Phew. We’re both annoyed, and trying to figure out why.

“I’m glad it exists, and I’m sure it was necessary,” I say, “but I can’t help feeling patronized. It feels outdated. And not quite mother-lovin’ enough for me. Do you think there could be a penis monologues?”

“Come on!” says Jean. “I think they’d argue that Western civilization has been one long penis monologue ever since Aristotle!”

“But I didn’t like the scornfulness towards men.”

“Yeah, even the guy who loved vaginas was boring and dull and not hot.”

Will sings in his little car seat behind us. We both feel a little guilty and unsisterly for not joining in the collective whooping. Are we beyond consciousness-raising?

“I guess I don’t want it re-raised,” says Jean. “But there’s also a lot of stuff missing from the
Vagina Monologues
. What about labioplasty, vajazzling, hymen restoration? What about cross- and post-gender debates? What about trans men and women? And letting men join in? What about dialogues rather than monologues?”

“And what about motherhood?”

“Motherhood is such a layered question: you can’t escape that there’s one layer to do with culture, and then another biological layer. That’s the one thing that took me by storm when I had kids – the sheer physicality. That baby comes out and it’s just… oh my God…” She groans with passion. “On the one hand I’d sometimes think: fuck, I wish Douglas would do more dishes, but on the other I was so grateful, because I never had to leave my baby. There were moments when I’d have given my life to have someone show up and say: ‘Hey, I’ll take the kids for a moment.’ But when it really mattered, when I had to travel for work, Douglas would take over. And it was basically my choice: I could have gone back to work much sooner if I’d wanted.”

I stare out at the brake lights in a long red chain up ahead of us. “It’s like we’re free to choose, but those choices are hard, and somehow they make it complicated either way. Because it’s not assumed that we’ll tie the baby onto our backs and go straight back out to plough the fields. Those women just don’t know they’re born.”

“Oh yes, those lucky girls,” says Jean, laughing. “They have it so easy, don’t they! But seriously, that’s kind of the bottom line, isn’t it? This is what kids struggle with nowadays: what will I be when I grow up? Such a weird question. For humans to wonder what they will be, and the idea that you can even choose, is sort of a new thought in the history of the world.”

Back at Jean’s home. Ruby-throated humming birds buzz around her porch door. Some thirsty bees have assembled in a shimmering black heap on a dish of water. Bringing my diverse encounters and questions back here is like having a trying-on session after a blow-out shopping trip. Posing and mincing around, asking Jean what she thinks of my new thigh-high boots or hemp sandals. Actually, that particular brand of identity politics doesn’t really fit: you’ve got a VPL now that you’re wearing it outside of the changing room. Too sparkly? How about if we accessorize with a little eighteenth-century Reason – there now, just right!

Jean is pottering in the kitchen, Doug comes in from teaching his classes, Will is bumbling around the cat and Jean’s youngest child Garth is here for some dinner. He’s twenty
and a student. He’s tall and skinny, and looks like a model, but without the self-awareness. He’s cut his own hair, leaving bald patches round the sides as though he’s moulting, and is wearing falling-down jeans and knackered Converse hi-tops.

“So, Garth, you’re a young person,” I say in the chirpy voice that makes my own kids rolls their eyes. “What do you and your friends think of the term ‘feminist’?”

“Feminism is a bit dated, maybe,” he says between mouthfuls of Jean’s pasta. “I don’t really think about gender: we’re just people. It’s not OK to raise one gender above the other: we need a more androgynous society. I don’t think anyone gets a better deal. I can’t wear a dress without raising eyebrows.”

“And what can’t women do without raising eyebrows?” I ask.

Long silence. “I don’t know.”

Jean chimes in from the kitchen area: “Old men are privileged in ways they don’t deserve, but I think that young men now are challenged in ways they don’t deserve for being male. In some ways it has been overcompensated.” She pops right out, a pan in one hand. “But I’m still definitely a feminist.”

Doug comes over and sits down next to Will, tenderly helping to spoon in his pasta. “In general, the young women in my classes don’t realize who fought for the rights they enjoy and take for granted.”

“But should they?” I ask. I’m getting a bit bored of the gratitude argument. “Is feeling thankful really your best reason? The witches told me: ‘You don’t understand what it was like before, in the 1950s.’ And it’s true, I don’t. But isn’t that a good thing?”

“But that’s why I get so cross that young women won’t call themselves feminists.” says Jean, sitting down at the table.
“It’s denying an important part of history. It denies Mary Wollstonecraft. It denies the suffragettes, and all the women of the Seventies who did so much for us. That was so urgent and necessary at the time.”

Garth joins in. “There’s a middle ground, though. You don’t have to call yourself a feminist to respect the movement. If you wanted to respect every cause, there are so many things you’d have to call yourself. Like, we shouldn’t forget slavery – so does that mean we have to go around calling ourselves abolitionists?”

“People don’t have to say they’re abolitionists, no, but they shouldn’t say I’m NOT an abolitionist,” says Jean. “You don’t have to be it, but you can’t go around dissing it and removing yourself from it.”

“In Britain a lot of women won’t touch the label with a barge pole,” I add.

“Wait, what?” says Garth.

“In Britain lots of women, especially younger—”

“No, I meant the pole thing – what was that?”

“Oh, a barge pole. It’s something you keep on board a boat for poking away other boats and the sides of the canal. And it’s long.”

“That’s awesome. We’d say a ten-foot pole in America.”

“Well a barge pole is even longer than that,” I say with authority. “And that’s how much people don’t like feminism.”

Jean weighs in again: “We need only to ask: ‘What’s the definition of a feminist?’ And I believe it’s someone who thinks all genders should have equal responsibilities and equal opportunities.”

“Isn’t that an ‘equalist’?” fires back Garth.

Doug quietly adds: “I think people should have equal but different rights.”

“What?” shouts everyone, at once.

“Well, women have babies and men don’t – and so to be equal we have to take that into account.”

I think I know what he’s saying, but it seems to be a slightly heretical position. I meanly keep quiet and let him be pounced on by his own family.

“What are you
talking
about?”

“Do you mean reproductive rights?”

Doug makes a teacherly gesture, hands spread apart, and speaks thoughtfully: “Back in Mary Wollstonecraft’s time, women were considered both different and inferior. The philosophical shift that was made was that you could say: ‘Yes, something can be different, but not inferior – and being different does not render it devoid of rights.’ Discussing literature with my students is how you get to see these ideas roll back and forth, and re-emerge.”

There’s an empty moment, with only cutlery scratching. Everyone frowns and looks at their food. Will stops eating and looks up, gazing quizzically from person to person. Doug has scored a direct hit on the tension between difference and equality, and I’m secretly enjoying his struggle.

“What about single parents, a single dad?”

“And
human
rights is called that for a reason, you know!”

I look over at Will. As the conversation tips into the familiar back-and-forth, I watch him fumbling around with a bit of stray pasta. He’s not a man or woman, just my Will – a small
being, becoming whatever he will be, not knowing about inequality or difference. He is happily unaware of interconnectedness, of conflicting oppressions and -isms. What if he were a single parent? Or trans? Would he be helped by Wollstone-craft’s call for “JUSTICE for one half of the human race”?

The umbrella will just have to keep growing wider, however scrappy it gets, however defiantly we need our own stories. It’s like an oasis, a calm refuge, to look across and see Will sitting there. His head scarcely reaches up to the level of his bowl. He peeps over at me, and we smile. Then, almost immediately he lets out an angry wail. Is that enough pasta? As I move to help him he knocks over his water.

Maybe that’s enough everything. Once again, like a dictatorial egg-timer, Will intervenes when things have boiled on for too long: I will start throwing food if you keep banging on about the width of umbrellas. Enough is enough.

Harbin Hot Springs. This place has been on my radar for some time. It’s a 5,000-acre spa retreat whose website says: “During your stay you become part of our community.” Is that a warning? The place is top of the list of “woo woo” Californian things to do, and is renowned as the home of Watsu, or water-based re-birthing therapy. I check out this practice online and then wish I hadn’t. I am not keen on hairy men cradling me and breathing in my face. But “travel”, as Wollstonecraft tells us, is “the completion of a liberal education”. And when in California…

I phone up to make the reservation, and hear that my Watsu therapist’s name is Patty. “What’s Patty like?” I ask, ardently
wishing not to hear “he’s a great guy”. Luckily no. “Patty’s awesome, she’s one of our best.”

“OK then book me in,” I say, then call out: “Jean, do you want me to book for you as well?”

“No thanks. I can’t get water in my ears.”

“You sure?”

“Oh yes I’m quite sure.”

Harbin is a two-hour drive from Jean’s place. We check in and wander around through some basic huts, trying to find the Watsu location. We spot a series of small domes up on the mountainside and, leaving Jean and Will behind, I hurry up there. I approach some small hobbity-looking houses around a steaming pool with a rainbow tepee over the top. A thin, shaggy man with reflective sunglasses waves and says: “Hey. I’m Antelope.”

“Hello Antelope.”

I do not want to be rebirthed by Antelope. I advance cautiously and look into the pool. There is a smiling woman rising from the water. She has a pretty and sensible face, like a reliable milkmaid – and extremely enormous breasts.

“Hi! You must be Bee!”

“Yes, are you Patty?” I reply to her face. Her face. Talk to her face.

“Why, yes I am – take a shower and come on in!”

Gulp. She’s naked. I brought a swimming costume along, but don’t want to seem uptight. So I have a quick shower and stride nakedly forth into the warm water as if to say: “Why, I do this every other day.”

“OK, it’s your first time,” says Patty encouragingly. How can she possibly tell.

“Anything you want to tell me about your body?”

“Erm – I don’t really think about my body all that much, but I do have four kids, so maybe I’d like to unwind a bit,” I say, the tension rising as I imagine being engulfed in her capacious bosoms.

“OK, now let’s see how you float,” she says, and supporting my head she lightly pulls me along while my body flails awkwardly.

“Oh,” she exclaims. “You’re going to need a lot of floating support!”

“Do I lack normal flotation skills?”

“No, dear: it’s just if you have a lot of energy and movement it can affect how you are in the water.”

I’m a special-needs floater. Patty attaches two floats to my legs, one around each shin, and takes my head again. This time I lift up and float into an obedient baby position. I feel like a diagram of an unborn baby at about six months’ gestation. My arms and legs are small floating appendages. She begins to rock me from side to side and questions stampede into my mind as I firmly screw my eyes shut.

What if I bump into her breasts? My breasts are intimidated. Is this sexual? I don’t want it to be sexual. And what if I need to cough – or scratch my nose? What if she talks or breathes on me, or utters some ecstatic moan and I have an attack of giggles? Can she see my fanny? Is it too Brazilian for this environment? I bet everyone else has bushy fannies. Mine suddenly feels like a traitor. Is Antelope in the water too?

I shut my eyes a fraction less fiercely, and some light gets in through my eyelashes. We are gently moving between sunny
patches in the water, and I can just make out the colours of the tepee overhead. I lie back, and my ears go under the water. I can hear some distant bubbling and squeaky noises. It’s very amniotic. It makes me think about being a baby.

It’s quite powerful, the weightlessness of being in water, and the weightlessness of not being able to see or hear anything. I start to feel like a baby. I sneak a secret peep out of one eye, to make sure Patty’s not spying on me, or rolling back her eyes while chanting a Native American incantation. But no: she’s gazing peacefully into the distance. That’s OK. Eyes closed again.

Soon I start to feel that Patty loves me. My mind tells me this is absurd, but I can just tell she really does. She’s doing deep yoga breathing, but not in an impolite way. Just enough so I know she’s there. The movements blur and roll, concertina-like, and I lose track of gravity, and of where my swaying spine and legs are. Everything is mildly floating away.

There’s a small panic when I think she’s passed me on to Antelope, then I know I’ve become a baby. No, don’t give me to him! Frowning baby. Don’t worry, it’s all right. The touch of the water soothes me. The word “caress” appears, uninvited. I’m being caressed and unravelled by the movement of the water. Mountain smells on the breeze. Patty is weaving and turning me in the water like oblivious seaweed. Total immersion. She folds and stretches me out. And it goes on and on.