The Predictions (2 page)

Shakti considered this for a moment. “Well,” she said, playfully, “maybe you’ll grow up to be an intoxicating woman?”

Somehow, I doubted it. Shakti followed me down a dirt path that ran between the chook house and a hay barn, the bells on her ankles tinkling as she walked.
She
was certainly intoxicating. Next to her I felt like a troll. We passed by the orchards, where a couple of the boys were up in the
avocado trees, whooping and hollering as they picked ripe fruit. Lukas climbed halfway down his ladder and wolf-whistled. I waved back. Then he climbed back up the ladder, no doubt to speculate with Timon about who the pretty visitor was.

“Who was that?” said Shakti, when he had disappeared.

“Just Lukas.”

“
Just Lukas?
” she repeated. “I’d call that a handsome young fellow.”

“He’s the oldest of us kids—and boy does he like to remind us.”

“And he’s how old?”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen,” repeated Shakti. “The perfect age.”

She didn’t say what for. Behind us, Nelly and Ned peeled away. They were supposed to be picking avocados too.

Shakti turned around and watched them go. “Are they twins?”

“Yes.”

“And are there more of you? More kids?”

“Seven in all. After Lukas comes Timon. I come next, followed by the twins, Nelly and Ned. The youngest are Meg and Fritz. You met him too.” I paused, adding, “He’s my . . . brother,” to see if saying it out loud still felt strange, which it did.

“You all have quite straight names for a commune. The one I’ve just come from, there were kids called Astral and Rainbow and Star.”

“Is your name from a commune?”

“No,” said Shakti. “It’s a name I have earned.”

In the mess hall Elisabeth was in the process of setting the table for dinner. She was in charge of the kitchen, making up menus and rosters and supervising whoever was on cooking duty. We ate dinner early, when the heat had gone out of the day—or in winter, the light—then went to bed early and rose not long after dawn. We had to. Sunlight ruled the length of our days. The commune had no electricity, only candles, kerosene lamps, and a diesel-powered generator for emergencies.

I was surprised to have to introduce Elisabeth to Shakti. Elisabeth was Hunter’s life mate, and I had assumed she and Shakti would know each other. Hunter and Elisabeth had been married once, before they realized marriage was a capitalist construct.

Elisabeth was her usual prickly self. Instead of welcoming Shakti, she said, “You’re our first visitor. It always starts this time of year, in the spring. Hippies mostly. They think they can come here and sit around getting high. They don’t want to lift a finger.” She was setting out chairs, and as she spoke, she moved an enormous stack of them from one side of the room to the other, showing off her strength.

“We work hard at Gaialands.” She put her hands on her hips and looked squarely at Shakti. “Hippies don’t last long around here.”

“Oh, I’m used to hard work!” said Shakti. “I’ve been living on an
ohu
. You’ve heard of those, right?”

Elisabeth nodded. “We met some folk from the one near Wanganui.”

“That’s the one I’ve been living on,” said Shakti. “Ahu Ahu.”

“Across the river from Jerusalem?” Elisabeth was more interested now.

Shakti nodded. “We had to do everything from scratch. It was like a frontier settlement.”

I had heard of the place too, and the ohu scheme. Prime Minister Norman Kirk had leased shitty pieces of land to groups of young people for next to nothing to build communes. Most of them had lasted five minutes but the people who had started Ahu Ahu were made of hardier stuff.

“Just getting to it was a mission,” said Shakti. “There’s no road access so the only way in was to cross the river. It was all right in the summer but in the winter”—she whistled—“boy, you took your life into your own hands. They had this basket, attached to a rope, operated by a set of pulleys. It was basically just a flying fox.”

“Cool!” I said. We kids had been trying for years to build a flying fox across the stream, but the trees on either side were too low and we could never get the wire tight enough.

“Nuh-uh,” said Shakti. “Not cool at all. A death trap.”

I had heard of Jerusalem too, not the Holy City but its namesake, a small settlement up the Wanganui River. A famous poet started a spiritual commune there with a bunch of his followers but the newspapers were filled with reports of squalor and drugs and children with head lice. Then the poet died. It was one of the stories Hunter loved to tell to remind us of the difference between our commune and the ones started by “bandwagon jumpers and filthy bloody hippies.” Hunter and Elisabeth had started Gaialands in the early sixties, long before anyone in New Zealand had even
heard of communes. They had gone on an overseas experience as undergraduate students and spent a long, hot summer on a kibbutz, returning to New Zealand eager to start one of their own.

Shakti drank her tea and I sat next to her while mine went cold. I liked tea well enough, but I was too mesmerized to drink it. Two of the other women, Susie and Katrina, a couple, had come into the mess hut, and listened quietly to the end of Shakti’s tale about the ohu. “All winter it rained and rained,” she told us. “All of the buildings were makeshift and leaked like nobody’s business. The place was like a swimming pool; all the food got wet, ruined. I had to leave, before my caravan floated down the river.”

“How did you get it across to the ohu?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” said Shakti. “It was waiting for me on the other side.”

I wondered what had happened to the other people living there, if they had stuck it out, eating ruined food and wearing soggy clothes. But Shakti didn’t say.

“Anyway,” she said, “already I can see Gaialands is nothing like that place. I’ve dreamt of coming here ever since I met Hunter at the Nambassa Festival last year. It’s so good to have finally made it!”

We had all gone to Nambassa the year before but it seemed only Hunter had met this dazzling woman, about whom he had said absolutely nothing in the months since. We were going to the festival again this year. Paul had built a wood-powered combustion engine, and he and Hunter were going to demonstrate how it worked.

“What part of America are you from?” asked Katrina.

“Berkeley,” said Shakti. “My parents were professors.”

We looked at her blankly. No one knew where this was.

“The Bay Area—near San Francisco.”

“I went there once,” said Elisabeth. “Everyone was so stoned. Tripping on acid. No one washed. You could see fleas jumping off their skin. I couldn’t leave fast enough.”

“That must have been a while ago,” said Shakti, laughing. “Things have really changed. Everyone’s into disco, and all the men are gay. Before I left I was the spiritual adviser at a self-help clinic for women.”

“What’s a self-help clinic?” asked Susie.

“We helped desperate women find men that aren’t gay.”

“Really?” said Katrina, who was a lesbian. “What for?”

“I’m joking,” said Shakti, adding in a serious voice, “it’s a health clinic. We helped women find their cervix—and in a surprising number of cases, their clitoris.”

“Oh,” said Elisabeth, reddening, and looking in my direction. “I’m not sure we need to mention that in front of Poppy.”

“Are you kidding?” said Shakti. “Every woman needs to know how to find her clitoris.”

“She’s still a girl,” said Elisabeth.

“What’s a clitoris?” I said, then wished I hadn’t when the women around me all laughed.

Shakti looked with curiosity from me to Elisabeth and back again. “Only the most important part of your anatomy,” she said, addressing me. “But I’ll leave the details to your mother.”

“I’m not her mother,” said Elisabeth, sharply, while I backed this up with a shake of my head.

“I’m sorry,” said Shakti, perplexed. “It’s just that you two look so much alike.”

Elisabeth said, “What a person looks like is of little concern.”

Shakti said nothing.

“We do things a little differently around here,” said Susie, trying to patch things up. “You’ll get used to it.”

“I guess I’ll have to,” said Shakti, her smile broader than ever.

Elisabeth began to clear away the teacups and wipe the table clean.

Footsteps sounded on the porch of the mess hall, and then in walked Paul and Hunter, sheened in grease and sweat.

“I was right about the car,” said Paul. “It’s rooted. But we’ve moved the bloody thing to where it won’t cause any more trouble. And the caravan—”

“Under a willow tree down by the river,” said Hunter. “We thought it would be nice and quiet for you there.”

“Thank you,” said Shakti. “That’s kind.”

Katrina offered to show Shakti the way to her caravan.

“I’ll take her,” I said, my heart beating faster at the tiny lie I was about to tell. “I’m going down to the river anyway—to clean off this pig shit.”

IT HAD RAINED SO
much that spring that the area down by the river was a bog, and we made our way cautiously around
it on narrow mounds of dry earth. I kept apologizing for the terrain and once or twice thought of offering Shakti a piggyback, as though she was some kind of princess, and I was . . . what? Her manservant?

The caravan had sunk about a foot into the soft, buttery mud. Shakti was thoughtful on the walk and had barely spoken, but now she turned to me and said, “Elisabeth—she
is
your mother, isn’t she?”

“She birthed me, yes.”

“She gave birth to you. Then why did she deny it?”

“Because we don’t say ‘mother’ and ‘father.’ We call the adults by their names. They raised us in a group.”

“Of course. It’s a commune. They brought you up together.”

She hadn’t exactly understood my meaning but I was reluctant to explain. The few times I had explained to outsiders that we were raised without knowing who our parents were, they had reacted with shock or disapproval, and I had learned to keep quiet about it, to let people assume whatever they wanted.

Shakti walked around her caravan as best she could, inspecting it for damage, while I studied the symbols painted on the side. Next to the moon, there was Saturn, and one of the blue planets; I didn’t know its name. Signs of the zodiac were dotted about, a few constellations, and some symbols that looked like letters of a foreign alphabet.

“She’s a beauty, huh?” said Shakti, completing her circuit and climbing the steps at the front to stand on a little wooden porch. “Whenever I find symbols that mean something to
me, I paint them on the outside—kind of like a patchwork quilt for the soul.” When she opened the door, an upside-down stool and a stack of other items blocked the way. “Oh dear,” she said, stepping over them. “Everything must have moved around in the crash.”

I craned my neck to see inside the caravan, drinking in the potpourri of books and macrame and sculptures of dripping candle wax.

Shakti deftly positioned herself in the doorway, blocking my view. “I’d invite you in but I need to sort out this mess before I have visitors.” She smiled, then closed the door emphatically.

I stood in the mud, not moving, wanting to get back the feeling I’d had a few minutes earlier, when I was with Shakti. In something of a daze, I climbed the porch steps and stood dumbly in front of her door.

“Dinner is at sundown!” I called out. “There’s a cowbell, but you might not hear it from here!”

When there was no reply, I wondered if I should knock on the door and hesitated a moment too long. Something at my feet caught my eye, a playing card of some sort, and I bent to pick it up. On closer inspection, it turned out to be not a playing card but one from a deck of tarot. Some of the women had tarot cards, but they hadn’t got them out for a while. This one showed a picture of a man and a woman gazing dreamily at each other, below which was printed “The Lovers.” I was studying it intently when Shakti flung the door open, giving me a fright.

“What was that about a cowbell?”

“It—it rings,” I said, stammering. “To let you know when it’s dinnertime.”

I had foolishly tried to hide the card behind my back, but of course Shakti had seen it. “What’s that in your hand?” she said.

Embarrassed, I handed it over.

Shakti examined the picture. “Very interesting,” she said, with a look that was filled with meaning. “Very interesting indeed.” She held the card to face me. “The Lovers,” she said. “Do you know what this means?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, not really.”

“Well, it can mean you’re going to be faced with a huge decision about an existing relationship—or that maybe you’ll face a temptation of the heart.”

At the word “temptation,” a hot patch flared on my neck.

“Or,” said Shakti, “it can signify the thing that drives us out of the garden—like Eve when she bit the apple.”

“We’re atheists,” I said.

“The card doesn’t care what you believe,” said Shakti. “The important thing is that you picked it up.”

“Only so I could give it back. I wasn’t going to keep it.”

“I know,” she said, smiling. “But there’s no such thing as coincidence.” She held the card to her chest and glanced above her, sweeping her free arm across the vast, empty sky. “The map is up there—written in the stars.” She fixed me with a cosmically charged stare. “All we have to do is follow it.”

Gaialands

1978

L
ESS THAN A MONTH
after her arrival Shakti had won over almost every individual on the commune. Not only had she charmed us, but she was made to do barely any chores, or only the ones she found pleasant and rewarding. I never once saw her with dirt-covered hands.

As far as the men were concerned, she needed to do no more than flutter her eyelids or glide by in a flimsy sarong, or better still, glide by in nothing at all, and they were bewitched. She was so startling to look at that even Paul, who was notably devoted to his life mate, Sigi, grew flushed and starry eyed whenever she was nearby.

Winning over the women required a little more time and attention, but at this she was no less skilled. Within a week or two, she had Katrina and Susie getting up with her at dawn to practice yoga by the creek, naked, the three of them lifting their buttocks high in the air for downward dog, oblivious to the huddle of teenage boys stationed close
by behind a large boulder. I hadn’t seen this with my own eyes, but I had heard the boys whispering late at night in the sleeping hut. That is, until Lukas told them to quit their gasbagging and go to sleep. I took this to mean Lukas was not a part of their spying, a fact I noted with a strange satisfaction.

When she was on the roster to help in the communal kitchen, Shakti was meek and subservient, which eventually got her on Elisabeth’s good side (or as close to it as was possible with Elisabeth). In the schoolhouse, which was Sigi’s domain, Shakti taught bits and pieces of American history as well as rudimentary Spanish she had learned from a Latino grandmother on her father’s side. But she always worked under Sigi’s direction, and never in a way that was showy or took away from Sigi’s lessons. Compared to Elisabeth, Loretta was a walk in the park, as easily won over as the men. She had always been into astrology and palmistry, which Shakti practiced, along with tarot and runes and just about every system of divination known to humanity. In fact, the two of them were soon in cahoots, planning some kind of mass astrology chart that encompassed every inhabitant of Gaialands, and probably some of the animals too.

One Sunday afternoon, after she had been with us about a month, Shakti spread the word that the women were to gather that night for a secret meeting—no men allowed. Along with Nelly (but not Meg, who was only fourteen), I was surprised and flattered to be included. Our instructions were to remain behind in the mess hut after dinner until all the males had left.

When they were gone, Shakti closed all the doors and lit
candles and incense that infused the room with the falsely sweet smell of flowers. It was a warm night. Many of the women had been hard at work all day, and beneath the floral scent was a punch of underarm odor.

“Next time, we’ll fashion some curtains,” Shakti said. “But this should do for tonight.” She cleared a space on one side of the room, scattering cushions in a random formation on the floor, and instructed us to sit or lie in whatever position we found most comfortable.

“It’s important to feel relaxed,” she said. “Because tonight is all about sharing.”

Rather than relaxed, a few of the women looked more uptight than usual. We sat about as we had been told, some cross-legged or with knees folded underneath, trying very hard to impersonate a chilled-out vibe.

Someone triggered a round of nervous laughter and over the top of it, Shakti said, “I can’t believe you’ve never done consciousness raising before.”

“We’ve heard of it,” said Katrina, “but I guess we never felt the need.”

“We’re hardly oppressed housewives,” added Susie.

At this statement, Shakti raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Well,” she said, after a long pause. “In that case, it might be a good place to start the discussion.”

Katrina said, “You want us to talk about housewives?”

“Sure, why not?” said Shakti. “What does the idea of a housewife mean to you?” She fixed her gaze on Loretta, who was trying to be invisible. “Loretta—do you want to start?”

Loretta looked around the room at the doors and win
dows, trying to find an escape route, before saying in a quiet voice: “Someone who stays at home, who looks after the children and does all the chores—the housework.”

“Anyone else?” Shakti studied the gathered women.

I put up my hand, unsure if it was okay to speak.

“Go ahead, Poppy—your opinion counts as much as any other.”

“A housewife doesn’t go out to work,” I said. “So she doesn’t have her own money. She’s dependent on her husband for everything.”

“The only bargaining tool she has is sex,” said Susie. “So she has to use that to get what she wants.”

“These are all great points,” said Shakti. “But instead of describing this other woman, this ‘she,’ I want us to relate things back to our own experiences.” She rubbed her hands together. “Ladies, let’s get personal.”

“We’re lesbians,” said Katrina, gesturing to Susie at her side. “So we don’t have to put up with any of that bullshit.”

To everyone’s surprise, it was Elisabeth who piped up next.

“I don’t put up with any of that bullshit either. I refuse to use sex to get what I want.”

“I do,” said Sigi, and we all looked at her, shocked. “If I want to ask Paul to do something, I make sure to have sex with him first.”

“Really?” said Susie. “You actually do that?”

“Sure,” said Sigi, shrugging. “Men are simple creatures. It makes life easier.”

I was unsure if I wanted to hear any of this—if I was
ready to hear it—but at the same time, I was hungry for these insights into the strange world of grown-ups. It was like an initiation, or a warning as to what lay ahead.

“Let me ask you a question,” said Shakti, addressing the group. “All of you have fairly specific roles on the commune. How was it decided who does what?”

“It wasn’t,” said Susie. “We just started doing what we were good at—and I guess we got better at those things, and stopped doing the things we weren’t good at.”

“And what things were those?”

“I’ve always tended to the vegetable gardens,” Susie said proudly. “I love watching things grow from tiny seeds into flourishing plants and legumes that you can eat.”

Sigi said, “I run the school. I love teaching. The children are like my plants.”

Everyone nodded approvingly and said, “Right on.”

“I do all the cooking,” said Elisabeth, also with pride.

“Loretta, what about you?” said Shakti, singling her out yet again.

“I like sewing—and I also run the laundry. We don’t have an automatic washing machine, no electricity, so that keeps me busy. I don’t have time for much else.”

Katrina said, “I used to be in charge of the nursery. I was really good at that. Since then, well, there’s still plenty to do—cleaning and organizing and helping the other women—but I miss having small children around.”

Susie squeezed Katrina’s arm and smiled. “Don’t you worry, there’ll be littlies around again one day.” She glanced at Nelly and me and winked.

“You say ‘helping the other women’—don’t you ever help the men?”

“Not really,” said Katrina. “I guess they don’t need it.”

Shakti narrowed her eyes and nodded, processing this information. “And the men, do they ever help out with what I’d call the domestic chores—cooking, cleaning, washing, that sort of thing?”

It was Sigi who said, “They would if we asked them to.”

Shakti replied, “And have you?”

Sigi shook her head. “It’s like what Susie said. Things work best when we stick to what we’re good at.”

“But how do you know?” said Shakti. “You haven’t tried it any other way.”

Sigi laughed. “We don’t need to try it to know Paul or any of the other men would be hopeless at washing clothes. Can you imagine it? All the muddy clothes mixed together with our underwear?”

Loretta laughed loudest. “We’d have to wash everything twice!”

Shakti listened to all this, let the women have their joke. But when the laughter had died down, she cleared her throat. “I just wonder if women are naturally better at washing and cleaning, or if men do it badly because they don’t want to do it.” She paused. “I mean, I’m no good at it—and I don’t try to
get
good at it.”

Shakti’s words hung in the air while no one said anything. Nobody spoke, but the room was thick with the collective dawning of a realization, a thing so palpable that you could almost see it, even if no one was prepared to say it out loud.

When the silence became too uncomfortable for anyone to tolerate, Shakti spoke.

“Well, I think that’s enough for tonight, don’t you?”

Several of the women hastily agreed.

“For our next session, I want you all to wear loose-fitting clothing and bring a hand mirror.”

Someone gasped.

“What about the girls?” said Elisabeth, under her breath. “Surely they won’t need to bring one of those?”

Nelly and I looked at each other, utterly bewildered.

“No, I suppose not,” said Shakti. “They’ll be fine to just watch.”

“And will it be all right,” said Loretta, discreetly raising her hand, “if some others among us don’t bring mirrors either?”

Shakti frowned, or as close to that as her exquisite features would allow. “No one can force you to do anything you don’t want to do, but shared experience is one of the foundations of consciousness raising. We learn through taking part.”

THAT NIGHT, NELLY AND
I were too worked up to sleep. Our beds were next to each other in the sleeping hut, but still we had to whisper very quietly so as not to be heard by the other kids.

“What do you think the hand mirrors are for?” said Nelly, squeaking with excitement.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But whatever it is, I’m glad we don’t have to do it.”

“Don’t have to do what?” said Timon, from one of the other bunks.

“None of your beeswax,” I said.

“We heard all about your secret meeting,” he continued. “In fact, we had a grandstand view.”

“You creep.” I picked a book up off the floor and hurled it into the darkness around his bed.

“Ouch,” said Fritz. “You missed!”

“Sorry, Fritz.”

Timon snorted with laughter. “You all looked so serious, like somebody had died. Were you having a séance?”

“Rack off, dickhead.”

“Poppy!” said Nelly, close by. “You don’t need to swear.”

“Oooooh!” said Timon, imitating a girl’s voice, which always made me want to murder him. “
We had an itty bitty séance and talked about our titties.
”

“Timon,” said Lukas. “That’s enough.”

But it wasn’t enough for Timon—not even close. He could keep this going for hours unless somebody physically stopped him. I had a glass of water by my bed, and as he launched into what he thought was a hilarious monologue about periods and fannies and how girl farts smelled like flowers—all in that same high, grating voice—I picked it up, crossed the room, and poured it over his head.

Timon batted at the wet bedclothes. “Fucking hell, Poppy! You’re going to pay for that!”

He didn’t need to remind me. Halfway over to his bunk bed with the glass of water, I had, in fact, imagined the revenge he would take and had almost turned back. The
last time I’d picked on him, about two years earlier, Timon had spent a week collecting native cockroaches, which grew to about two inches long, and had filled my bed with half a dozen of them. Sometimes, even now, when I climbed into bed in the dark, I recalled them scuttling against my skin, and my legs kicked out in fearful response. But then I had thought,
At least the worst thing has been done
.

The following Sunday, after the evening meal, Shakti unfolded several large swathes of Indian batik fabric and began to drape them over the half dozen windows of the mess hut. The joinery had been salvaged from old houses and churches and some of the windows were oddly shaped, bowed, arched, even circular, and defied the hanging of curtains. The gaps around the edges troubled me, and I remembered what Timon, the peeping rat, had said about his grandstand view.

As before, Shakti laid out cushions, but this time they formed a more defined circle with an empty space in the middle. “Don’t be shy,” she said, before placing the plumpest cushion in the center of the circle and seating herself upon it. Slowly and hesitantly, the women took their places around her, with Nelly and me hovering at the edge of the group. Each woman took out the small mirror she had brought and placed it beside her, every last one with the glass facing down. Most had brought plain squares of mirrored glass, like the ones we had tacked to the walls of the communal bathroom.

Shakti, in the middle, removed a series of items from an orange string bag. The first was a small bottle of oil with a
cork stopper; the second was a hand mirror, a professional-looking thing that propped upright on its own metal stand; the third was a flashlight; and the last was a book, which she held up so we all could read the title. “
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
” she said. “The foundation of the women’s self-help movement. Make sure you all take a look afterward.”

“I’ve read that,” said Susie. “It sure is an eye-opener.”

“Is that the one with all the drawings?” asked Sigi.

“Yes,” said Shakti. “Drawings of women’s bodies as they really are—not as they appear in medical textbooks.” She took the last item out of her bag and it was unlike any object I had ever seen before. It looked, at first glance, like a pair of plastic salad tongs, joined together at one end in a beak, like you might find on a sea bird, a gannet or shag. Shakti propped the mirror on its legs in front of her and reclined on the cushion, gathering up the folds of her long Indian cotton skirt and hitching it above her waist. She was not wearing underpants. Her legs she bent to form two triangles. I was behind her, to the left, and stuck with a bad view. But then she adjusted the mirror, tilting it up, and I saw everything, magnified and framed.

The room fell very quiet; all rustling and moving ceased.

“This is my vagina,” said Shakti, matter-of-factly, as though describing the contents of a kitchen cupboard. “At the top, under here, is the top of my clitoris, and these are my labia majora.” She drew a line down, nearly to the crack between her butt cheeks. “The muscles of the clitoris go right down to here. It’s much larger than everyone thinks.”