The Predictions (25 page)

“I’ll be really careful.”

“I know you will,” said Hunter. “But I still don’t think you should go.”

Against his advice, I tried to get down to the beach. With Zachary in the sling, I got as far as the forest path, now washed out and crisscrossed with fallen tree trunks. The way ahead was even more treacherous than Hunter had warned, and I turned back to the commune, thwarted. We spent the rest of the day cleaning up, returning objects that had blown away to their right places and throwing out stuff that was broken. By the end of the day, I was beat, and went to bed early.

Sigi made sandwiches for the drive to Auckland. Hard, sour bread smeared with a thin layer of tahini and raw chopped garlic, so raw that it writhed in my mouth like a live thing. When we stopped in Pokeno to buy gas, I threw mine out and secretly bought a steak-and-cheese pie, the first meat I had eaten in weeks, scarfing it down in the ladies’ loo, dropping crumbs and tomato sauce on Zachary’s bald head.

Back in the truck, driving over the Bombay Hills, getting closer to Auckland, Susie and Katrina discussed tactics. They had been tipped off that the Christians would be out in force today, not just the usual hard core of picketers but a larger contingent of family members and supporters as well. There might be reporters, a television crew.

I had been cagey about my reasons for going to Auckland, and Susie and Katrina assumed I would join them in the protest. On the motorway, approaching the outskirts of the city, I tried to suggest that I didn’t think attending the
protest would be such a good idea, not with a baby in tow. They were miffed.

“It’s a peaceful protest—if that’s what you’re worried about,” said Katrina.

“I know, but even that might be too much for a baby.”

“Don’t you worry,” said Susie. “If any of those bastards tries to lay a finger on him”—she pounded her fist into the palm of her hand—“boom! They’re toast.”

Exactly,
I didn’t say,
that’s what I’m worried about.

We pulled into the car park of National Women’s Hospital, an ugly collection of imposing concrete tower blocks and a dozen unassuming, redbrick low-rises, the smallest of which was the day clinic where abortions took place. A handful of women were gathered on the front steps, all short haired and wearing army fatigues, all on “our” side. Over the next hour, this group swelled to number about three dozen, a motley collection of women and a few older children, teenagers, a couple of dogs. The day had started out soggy, overcast, but now it was warmer, almost muggy, and I had peeled off one or two layers of clothing. The plan was to wait for the Christians to arrive, then to form a blockade, linking arms in a line around the front of the clinic. We got into position. I had been sent to the end of the line, furthest from the clinic, while Susie and Katrina took the middle, ready for a fight, if there was one.

Late morning, someone sent word they were coming. A big group—singing hymns. To match their zeal, to keep up morale, we began to chant: “Not the church! Not the state! Women must decide their fate!” A few rounds of that
and I was converted to the cause, shouting as loudly as any of the women. Strapped to my chest, Zachary gurgled his support.

A crocodile of men and women approached along Green Lane from the west. Some held placards; others flashed pictures of bloodied fetuses. A few held aloft pink plastic dolls, more fetuses, which looked out of place in their big adult hands. They sang a traditional hymn, very fundamentalist, then stopped in front of us, their expressions stern and self-righteous. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a police squad had arrived, but they hung back, assessing the situation, batons twitching.

For a few minutes, the Christians’ singing and our chanting canceled each other out, then further down the line, toward Susie, the women started whispering. All eyes were on a white van that had just pulled up to the curb, a few blocks down from the clinic. A TV crew climbed out, led by a woman in an electric-blue suit, her red hair pulled sharply back in a ponytail. She marched toward us, pushing her way between the two groups, instructing the cameraman where to stand, where to point his lens, and then held up a cartoonish microphone.

The instant she started speaking—loudly, so she could be heard above the din—it was like someone had thrown a match among the protesters on both sides. The Christians surged forward, growing louder, jockeying for position, while the women linked arms, chanting with gusto and bracing for what—a Bible bashing? I tried to move back, to stand behind the line, and had almost managed it when
Susie appeared out of nowhere and started to wrestle Zachary out of his sling.

“What are you doing?”

“I need to borrow him,” she said, tugging at the material. “It’s only for a minute. Then I’ll bring him back.”

“No,” I said, adamant. “He’ll get hurt.” I wrapped my arms around Zachary’s tiny body, held him tightly to my chest. “He’s just a baby.”

Susie said, “I’ll protect him,” and began to prize him off me, using force. She was so robust, so strong, more—she would hate this—like a
man
. “Come on, Poppy—it’s for a good cause,” she said, untying the strap of the sling.

I was distracted for a moment by Zachary himself, who had started crying, and in this moment, Susie took advantage, gripping his body firmly with both hands.

“Please don’t do anything stupid,” I said, easing my hold so he wouldn’t get ripped in two.

She took him from me and charged off in the direction of the TV camera, head down, shoulders squared, bulldog style, for battle.
Please don’t hurt him,
I prayed, holding my breath, cursing myself for being weak and handing him over. I tried to follow, but the women on either side had taken hold of my arms and forced me back into the chain. “Hold fast!” they said. “Don’t let the bastards in.” I did as I was told for a minute or two, then saw my chance to break free. A skirmish had broken out near the TV anchor, and while the women craned their necks to see what was going on, I managed to wriggle out from their tightly clamped arms. I had lost sight of Susie and Zachary but fought my way through the crowd to where
I hoped they would be. Each step of the way, the crowd fought back. No one wanted to give up their hard-won position, and I was elbowed and heckled and abused by Christians and lesbians alike. I couldn’t see Katrina anywhere.

In the distance, Susie appeared on the clinic steps, holding Zachary aloft like a trophy. His face was red, his little mouth open in a scream, but whatever sound he was making was lost in the far louder noise of the baying crowd.

“Over here!” shouted Susie. “Or I’ll drop the baby!”

A few gasps rose from the ranks below her, but I had been traumatized into silence. Wielding her microphone like a machete, the TV reporter slashed her way up the steps to get to Susie, followed by the cameraman. When the microphone was within Susie’s reach, she grabbed it off the reporter, holding Zachary in a football clutch under one arm. The TV reporter tried to wrest back the microphone, but Susie deftly held her at arm’s length and nodded to the cameraman to start rolling. He obeyed, and the reporter signaled him:
I give up.

“I’m a lesbian and a mother!” Susie bellowed at the assembled crowd, keeping one eye on the TV camera, to make sure it was filming. She maneuvered Zachary to hold him up in front of her. “And this is my grandson!” He obliged with a curdled scream. “We are not trying to stop other women becoming mothers. We are not driving the human race to extinction. We just want women to be in control of their own bodies!”

The women around her cheered, while, with equal passion, the Christians booed. The TV reporter snatched the
microphone out of Susie’s hand and turned to the camera to try to deliver her piece over the deafening furor. Susie remained by the reporter’s side, leaning toward her trying to stay in the shot.

I plunged through the crowd, reaching Susie just as the reporter was signing off. She let go of Zachary easily, discarding a prop that she no longer needed. He was red faced and whimpering but unhurt. I, however, was livid. “How could you use him like that? How could you take him from his mother?”

Susie didn’t register what I was saying, or even that I was mad with her. “That was fucking dynamite,” she said, gazing beyond me at the crowd of cheering women. She raised her fist triumphantly, shouting, “Down with the patriarchy!” then rushed into their waiting arms.

I walked back to where the truck was parked, realized it was locked, then sat in the back tray to feed Zachary. All that crying had exhausted him, and halfway through, his sucking slowed, and his eyes drifted shut. His face was still blotchy, his hair damp, and I longed to share my outrage, to tell someone what had happened. A few people walked past, but most were preoccupied, doctors and nurses on their way to work, or patients caught up in their maladies. For the first time, I understood how vulnerable we were, what life as a single mother might be like. I could not protect Zachary physically, any more than I could provide for his material needs. I didn’t want to stay on the commune indefinitely, but finding a house, getting a job, when he was so young, would be out of the question. My savings were running out
and the only reason I
had
savings was that Lukas had paid for everything since I had finished work. There had been no discussion. He just did it. And in return for his generosity he had been pushed out of the circle.
I
had pushed him out. The intimacy that went on between mother and child, the obsessing and loving and fretting and all the minuscule routines that made up our day, was above all exclusive and didn’t involve anyone else. Even if Lukas
had
been home more often, would that have made a difference, or would it just have been more obvious that he was shut out?

Over by the clinic, the protest had broken up, and the Christians and their placards drifted off in the direction from whence they had come. Katrina and Susie soon returned to the truck, their expressions victorious.

“We kept the clinic open,” said Susie. “Every other time those nutters have shown up, they’ve had to close.”

“How’s the little guy?” asked Katrina, leaning over to pat his head.

“He’s fine now, but he was pretty shaken up,” I said with a look that was meant for Susie but went unnoticed by her.

Auckland

1989

W
E CLIMBED BACK INTO
the truck and set off toward the city. The women were spending the afternoon with friends at a house in Ponsonby, and I was going to visit Elisabeth, who lived close by in Freemans Bay. I had been planning on sneaking off to see her without telling Susie and Katrina where I was going but at the last minute I decided to just be honest. I was tired of Susie’s bullying, of tiptoeing around her in case she exploded. She and Katrina were surprised when I told them I had Elisabeth’s address, even more so when I told them it was Hunter who had given it to me. “I knew we couldn’t trust that bastard,” said Susie. “Who knows what else he’s kept from us?”

“I’m sick of his bullshit,” said Katrina.

“Maybe it’s time.”

“Maybe it is.”

I got out of the car. “See you later,” I said, while the two women exchanged meaningful looks, absorbed in some drama of their own.

The car was parked outside their friends’ villa, where I would meet them later. It wouldn’t be hard to remember which one to go into. Painted on the roof was a giant black women’s symbol. This was the area Lukas and I had lived in, and as I strolled down the gently sloping street crammed with run-down wooden villas, I was filled with nostalgia for how happy, even how poor, we had been. In the years since, some of the villas had been dolled up, their colonial trimmings fixed and painted in garish colors, and though there were still plenty of dilapidated houses like the one we’d lived in, with mushrooms growing in the basement, the neighborhood, as a whole, seemed less down-at-heel.

Elisabeth lived in the gully between Ponsonby and the city, in a block of flats next to a wide, sodden park and some tennis courts. The way the apartments were clustered reminded me of London welfare-housing estates. The front door was beveled glass, and I watched Elisabeth’s shadow approach before it opened.
Too late to leave.
She opened the door and we stared at each other. I didn’t recognize her to begin with; she had cut her hair from waist length to a short feathery style and she had on tons of makeup—blue eye shadow and frosted pink lipstick.

“Poppy!” she exclaimed, jumping forward for what I thought might be a hug but turned out to be a near miss. “Oh my goodness—is that a baby?”

“Yep,” I said, tilting the sling so she could get a better look. “Meet Zachary. Your grandson.”

She put her hand to her mouth, stunned. Were those tears in her eyes?

“I’m sorry. I should have told you we were coming.”

“He’s so . . .” She started to reach for him, then withdrew her hand. “I can’t believe I have a grandson.”

“Hunter told me where to find you. The others don’t know where you live.”

Elisabeth smiled, recovering her composure. “Even if they knew, they would never come to see me. I’m a deserter.”

She invited us into her flat, small but sunny, with sliding glass doors opening out onto a patio covered with plants. The space was much lovelier than I expected. On the patio, shaded by a grove of large trees in the communal gardens beyond, she served tea, nervously spilling some on the table as she poured. Unlike the women on the commune, who had fondled and kissed Zachary like he was their own, Elisabeth had not asked to hold him, and I put this down to what I had always suspected about her, that she didn’t like babies—or children of any age, for that matter. When she found out he was the father, we talked about Lukas, about his success, and then, when she asked why we weren’t still together, I hesitated. How had she known we weren’t?

“It’s complicated,” I said, reluctant to give too much away.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “I’ll bet.”

After sleeping for so long against my skin, Zachary woke up hot and deranged with hunger, his little fists grabbing ineffectively at the fabric of my shirt. I took him inside to where I had seen a more comfortable lounge chair and Elisabeth followed me in, at first hovering nearby, tidying up, then standing quite still and openly staring.

“Ouch, that takes me back,” she said, wincing in remembered pain. “Though I can see it doesn’t hurt you.”

“Katrina told me you didn’t enjoy breast-feeding.”

“Is that what she said?” Elisabeth shook her head. “I loved it, in fact, but breast-feeding didn’t like me.”

“So you gave up?”

“I had to. I was in so much pain that the milk dried up.”

“It
was
painful at first,” I agreed. “But I’m glad I persevered.”

“And I’m glad I didn’t,” said Elisabeth. “Months and months of cracked, bleeding nipples—one infection after another. Have you ever had mastitis?”

I shook my head.

“Lucky you.”

“It must have been a relief,” I said, “when the other women took over.”

“A relief?” she repeated, incredulous. “No. It was
not
a relief.”

She got up, agitated, and went into the kitchen, while I worked out what I’d said to offend her. The kitchen was a galley, open to the lounge, and I watched her fill a glass of water at the sink. I thought she was going to drink it herself, but instead she brought it out and set it on the table next to me. “It’s thirsty work,” she said, trying to smile.

“I didn’t mean to upset you—I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. The other women thought they were doing me a favor too.”

Zachary was full, and I sat him up and patted his back until he made a froglike noise that made us both laugh. Elisabeth reached out and timidly patted the top of his head, the downiest part, just beyond the soft, pulsing fontanel.

“Would you like to hold him?”

“I’d love that.”

I stood up with the baby, and Elisabeth took my place on the lounge chair, settling in and smoothing her clothes to make way for Zachary. She formed a cradle with her arms, saying, “I was never very good at this.”

Her hands, when I lowered Zachary into them, were trembling.

“He’s so warm,” she said, sitting very still, and staring, awestruck, at the human in front of her. Zachary stared back intently, then reached out to try to swat her face. She leaned a little closer, letting him touch her nose. He looked very serious for a moment, his little brow creased in a comic-book frown, then broke into a smile that was so ecstatic and so guileless that it made Elisabeth gasp with delight.

“He likes you.”

Elisabeth nodded, and I noticed she really was crying this time.

“He’s so much like you were at that age,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It takes me back to those early days, holding you for the first time—before I realized I would have to share you.”

“Didn’t you
want
to share me?” Growing up, I couldn’t remember a single time when Elisabeth had tried to hug me. Out of all the mothers, she was the least warm, the most detached. “I thought you all agreed to raise us in a group.”

“It’s what we agreed on before any of us were pregnant,” said Elisabeth. “But once you were born, and I held you in my arms, I changed my mind. I felt so much love for you—and I couldn’t bear to share you with anyone. Every bone in
my body told me it was wrong. I thought we were making a terrible mistake, and I said so. But Hunter, and the others, they’d made up their minds and I had to go along with it—or leave the commune.” She paused. “And maybe I would have done that if I’d been able to breast-feed.”

“But you couldn’t—so you stayed?”

Elisabeth looked wistfully at Zachary. “Once I stopped breast-feeding, I didn’t know how to bond with you—or any of the other babies—and I suppose, after a while, I stopped trying. All that love—it had nowhere to go, so it dried up. When Fritz came along, I didn’t even try to feed him. I just let the other women get on with it and pretended he wasn’t
my
son.” She smiled. “It was around that time I took over all the cooking. It kept me busy—kept my mind off you and Fritz.”

“You couldn’t love us the way you wanted to so you stopped loving us at all?”

“I know what it sounds like.” Her voice cracked. “The other women seemed to be happy to love all of you to the same degree. Maybe feeding you created that bond. But I didn’t feel like that. I loved you and Fritz with all my heart but I wasn’t allowed to show that I preferred you to the other children. Whenever I comforted you, the other women told me off. ‘You can’t do that, it isn’t your turn.’ Of course, they were just keeping me to our pact. But I couldn’t love you and share you at the same time. It tore me in half.”

So that was Elisabeth who tried to comfort me when I fell off the fence post. “But growing up,” I began, not knowing if I should continue, “I thought you didn’t even like us.”

“I regret that,” said Elisabeth. “Deeply.”

“And even after we knew who you were—you didn’t try to get close like some of the other mothers.”

“I saw how you looked at us. You didn’t want that. Not anymore.”

“And when Fritz disappeared . . . ?”

“I was broken. I am still.” Elisabeth struggled to go on. “To lose my son when I had never been able to show him how much I loved him . . .” We sat for a few moments in silence. “It was the same for Hunter but he couldn’t admit it to himself. He was a stubborn, bloody-minded fool. And then, when you all started leaving—well, I knew you hated us and hated the commune, because of what we’d done to you.” She handed Zachary back to me. The sudden movement unsettled him, and he started to whimper. When she spoke again, she sounded annoyed.

“Do you know how I know that?”

I shook my head, listening to her and soothing Zachary at the same time.

“Because I hated the fucking commune too. I couldn’t stand to be there. So I left.”

“Except that I
don’t
hate it.”

“Well, you should,” said Elisabeth. “After what we did to you.”

“You didn’t mean to hurt us.” Only a few days earlier, I’d read in the newspaper about the leader of a commune, north of Auckland, who had been arrested and charged with molesting his own children, and worse. “You didn’t abuse us or anything.”

“But we did,” said Elisabeth. “We emotionally abused you.”

It was the same phrase Lukas had used.

“I don’t feel abused.”

“You probably don’t know what you feel.”

My first reaction was to refute her, followed by a jolt of recognition. She was right. And then I cried.

“I’m sorry,” said Elisabeth. “I didn’t mean to be cruel. I’m angry with us, not with you.” She paused. “It’s taken a lot of therapy for me to be able to say this to you but man, we were such fucking hypocrites.”

I blew my nose on Zachary’s burp cloth, a piece of damp, sour-smelling muslin that needed a damn good wash.

“You were?”

“Big-time. We all believed in free love—Hunter especially. It was why we started a commune. We tried it but we couldn’t make it work. Everyone was consumed with jealousy, and before we put a stop to it, quite a few of us were badly hurt, myself included.”

“You never told us that.”

“It almost destroyed the commune. So we decided to stick with monogamy. But Hunter and some of the others got it into their heads that free love was the ideal, the way forward. He thought that if you children were raised outside the nuclear family—if you were taught from the beginning to love without being possessive—then you would grow up to be less selfish.”

“He thought we would be better at free love than you were?”

“Yes.”

“That’s insane.”

“I know.” Elisabeth frowned. “Everyone has the same need for intimacy, to love and be loved, and I think all we did was destroy your trust—not just in us but in love itself.”

A queasy feeling came over me and I felt sure I’d made a terrible mistake, but I didn’t know what it was yet—only that it was bad.

“This whole time,” I said, “I thought everything that went wrong between Lukas and me was happening because of my prediction.”

“Your prediction?” Elisabeth was staggered. “That was another crazy thing we should have put a stop to.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“We were under Shakti’s spell, I guess—and it was the seventies. There was nothing we wouldn’t try.
Nothing
.”

Elisabeth cleared away the tea things and carried them into the kitchen, where she stood at the sink with her back to me, washing up. She wore pink rubber gloves, and jabbed at the dishes with jerky, irritable movements, like she wanted the task, and our visit, to be over with. I took it as a signal to leave, though it may not have been—she had always washed dishes like that, and hadn’t I, after all, just learned that her behavior did not always reflect her thoughts? Even if she had not been allowed to show it, and had since forgotten how, it was comforting to know that the same all-consuming love I felt for Zachary, Elisabeth had once felt for me. I had been unaware until now of how badly, growing up, I had wanted to be loved by one mother exclusively, not passed around, but held close to her heart and cherished beyond reason.