ISBN: 978-1-936558-16-2 * eISBN: 978-1-936558-17-9 * Paperback $16.95 * E-book $4.99 * Publication: July 19, 2011
I set myself a challenging premise, when I began Commune of Women: isolate an extremely diverse group of women in a tiny pressure cooker of a room, under terrorizing and life-threatening circumstances; then turn up the heat and see how they react. This original idea led into a labyrinth of possibilities: how would Heddi, a wealthy and sophisticated Jungian analyst, possibly interact with Pearl, an ancient, uneducated but streetwise bag lady; what could Ondine, a privileged and spoiled artist with an aristocratic home on the east coast of France, possibly have in common with Betty, from the suburbs of Los Angeles, whose biggest thrill is collecting plastic flowers; and how might Erika, a top executive with an impoverished past and a lust to make it big, find anything in common with Sophia, a powerful mountain woman who eschews money and believes in fairies? I had to find ways for these six women, trapped, fearful for their lives, eating from vending machines and sleeping on the floor with toilet paper rolls for pillows, to cooperate, survive and prevail, all while tiptoeing amidst the pitfalls of vast socio-economic, educational and psychological differences.
To do so, I had the women pass the time and become acquainted, during the four days of their entrapment, by telling one another their life stories, which become deeper, darker and more intimate as the days pass.
Heddi, the Jungian analyst, goes first:
She rummages around in her bleary mind for something that might catch their attention. The story she calls The Holly and Heddi Show might do it. It’s not exactly the stuff of Jungian analysis but it has a quality of low comic relief that might be...well...a relief.
“OK,” she says. “I’ll tell you this crazy story about my step-daughter, Holly, and me. But you have to promise that if it’s boring you stiff, you’ll stop me.”
“Ain’t lak the Chip ‘n Dale boys is about to make they appearance.” This from the Breugel, seated in her domain near the candy machine. She’s contentedly picking her teeth with the blade of a small pocketknife.
“OK, then. Here goes . . .”
She clears her throat, glances to see if anyone is interested and finds, to her discomfort, every eye, even Erika’s feverish one, fastened on her.
“Well, one day, Roscoe calls me, frantic,” she begins…
"They're gone!" he screams. Heddi holds the receiver out a little from her ear.
"Who?" she asks.
"Both of them!" he screams again.
She’s never heard him like this before, although Holly--Hal’s daughter by his first wife, Sharon--has told her often enough, in afternoon saga-ettes while Roscoe is out in the orchards on the spray rig, contentedly dousing every living thing with toxins, that he frequently falls into these hysterical rages.
If you have to choose between Holly or the soaps, Heddi always tells her best friend, Linda, choose Holly. No commercial interruptions and the quality of immediacy is compelling. Only Holly and Roscoe don't dress as well as their TV counterparts, their at-home attire being selected from a wide range of sweat pants.
So, there is a short pause while Roscoe collects his wits. She hears his heavy breathing--which may represent volcanic emotions or just the pumping up of his energies before a belch.
“Both of whom?” she asks, with what she hopes sounds like patience.
"Holly," he gasps. "And the wolf."
Followed by Betty, the Reseda housewife, fascinated by acquisition:
“Heddi says I should tell you my story and I don’t really know where to begin. I guess it should be with the flowers.
“Heddi says that flowers are a symbol and that flowers are my fetish. I don’t really understand that. I always thought the flowers just created a nice, homey atmosphere. Celebrated the seasons and holidays. That’s what I thought they symbolized--a nice, loving home. For whatever reason, though, what started out innocently has become a big problem. I don’t really know how it happened, it was so gradual . . .”
Then comes Ondine, the artist in search of her soul:
“Your only duty in life is to remain true to yourself,” Tante Collette wrote in response to Ondine’s ten-page howl of pain, when she discovered her husband Richard’s betrayal. She was the only person who could say something so trite and get away with it--she, who’d followed her own dictates for more than nine decades.
So then, how could she know how it is with Ondine, who has no idea what being true to herself might entail; who is as soulless as an old shoe?
“Imagine that your own genius is at hand,” Tante Collette fired back, this time by telephone. “Nothing comes into being without imagination. Imagine yourself with a soul! What would a woman of your age, with your talents--with a soul--want?”
“A bullet to the brain?”
“Oh, Child!” A rare burst of exasperation. “Don’t you know that pain and chaos always herald Eros? You have birth pangs, for heaven’s sake!”
“People die in childbirth,” Ondine intoned mournfully.
“Now, you listen to me!” Tante Collette’s voice was suddenly cold. “If it takes you through the very holds of Hell, you honor it. You honor this passage. Or you are a woman without honor--a thing which is an abomination to me.” And with more vigor than one would have guessed a nonagenarian arm could possess, she slammed down the receiver.
Now, the orchard lifts its un-pruned suckers like a wiry mauve haze in the westering light; wind soughs, indistinguishable from surf. All around her cindery trunks rise up, brandishing black branches that scrawl a calligraphic account of her sorrows on the evening sky. She has come here to this wild Atlantic coast--to Tante Collette’s, to Quatre Vents--to begin the search.
Next comes Erika, a high-powered business executive:
Sophia says she was shot by terrorists. That would make Erika laugh, if it didn’t hurt too much. That’s what they say about women over 40: that they have a better chance of being shot by terrorists than of finding a husband. And her, only 34!
That’s our little Erika: always exceeding the norm. Ever the over-achiever.
If they survive--and Sophia thinks they will--she’ll enjoy telling that one over lunch!
With the lights out everything’s quiet, except for someone’s snoring, over by the vending machines.
In a few hours she would have been in Berlin, in that Bauhaus hotel with the impossible name. All those clean lines and minimal furniture. Hot, hot shower. Duvet a foot deep in goose down. Dining room featuring an impossible number of ways to cook schnitzel. Nothing like a steamed vegetable or garden salad within the national borders of Germany.
She would have been tired, hungry, and bitchy at having to eat such heavy food.
Albert was right: everything’s relative.
Instead, she’s opted for a life-threatening wound and a steady diet of water and assorted meds, while lying in deep pain in a hacked-up thousand-dollar Donna Karan suit on a blood-crusted couch. Apparently, one half of an eight hundred dollar pair of heels is lying out in the hall, under a pile of dead people.
Another stellar career move brought to you by Black Girl Makes Good Productions.
All she wants is to get out of this fucking hellhole and get on with her life. Every hour she spends in here is costing her money.
Pearl, the bag lady, half Black, half Choctaw, is the next to share her story:
Now everone’s had a break an used the john, an that Heady gal, she’s turnin her eyes on Pearl, who espects she’s got ta do it, if only ta keep all them women from gabblin lak a gaggle a geese.
Well, Pearl laked her corner. Even on the coldest days it gots shelter from the wind an the afternoon sun keeps it warm, rat up til it goes down in the ocean. It’s betwixt a surf shop an a greasy spoon called Pop’s. Jes the way they built the places, both with angled front winders, makes a little V Pearl jes fits in, her an her pack an cart.
She spreads out her cardboard--the best is a water heater box, good an thick--an gets out her pillers an lap robe. Digs out her pipe an lats up. Sets out her can.
Don’t take long. Some bleached blonde young feller from the surf shop, or some old fart comin belchin outta Pop’s’ll drop some change in, an the day’s off ta a good start.
When it gets blustery--an it do, sometimes, bout three, four times a year--she goes ta the homeless lounge an cools her heels. But she don’t lak it cuz they won’t let her smoke. An them white bread an cheese samitches they hands out at lunchtime is a scandal. Pop wouldn’t a let such a puny thin cross his counter, she’ll tell you that!
She sure does miss Pop, since he up an died!
Sophia, the goddess-worshipping mountain woman, tells her story, next:
The smell of water in an arid landscape, of snow before it falls, of ozone just before lightning strikes--her nervous system dances with these, sings with them in ancient harmonies.
And always, out in the woods at the periphery of sight and sound and touch and smell, the flicker of something deeper, wilder, older still. Beings armored in exoskeletons of old ivory, winged like butterflies, singing like the stars, powerful, uncanny and evasive, with the black, lustrous eyes of goats, sensual, amoral, humorous, vengeful and wise.
They could morph from the gnarled roots of trees, from rocks scaled in lichens, from shadows glimmering through the deep trees. Their songs drifted through the air of the woods like fishing lures sinking through the shallows. They sank their hooks deep in her flesh and reeled her in. She was theirs. They took her and changed her and taught her their ways and then threw her out again, to wander home in twilight or dawn light, dazed, blissful and only nominally human.
Heddi is staring at her with a look half hopeful and half profoundly dubious.
“If you think I’m crazy, Heddi, then so be it,” Sophia snaps.
Heddi just shakes her head but keeps on staring as if Sophia might suddenly grow horns, or vanish with a poof.
“Maybe I am crazy,” Sophia shrugs. “Sometimes I have doubts, myself--but then, madness must be an absolute form of truth, because sometimes I just know things.”
Pump her full of Thorazine; light her up with electroshock like a Christmas tree; paste her with labels from the DSM IV like an old steamer trunk: she will never recant!
She’s lived in alternate dimensions. Only a part of her soul belongs to what this world calls reality. The bigger part has colored wings and kites through the canyons, baying like a wolf!
And finally, Najat, the sole female terrorist, trapped alone in another small room, recounts her past:
When she first came to America two years ago she was so excited! She wanted to become an American--to think like one, dress like one and eat like one. She discarded all her mother’s notions about food and dress and instead consumed Big Macs and fries and wore jeans. She thought she was so chic, hanging out at MacDonald’s with her friends!
She cannot believe now that she was so naïve.
No one from the organization of Christian churches gave her any instruction. She just was brought here straight from her hiding place in Jerusalem. She knows certain people risked their lives for her, and that she was favored by luck or she would not be here now. Still, they just threw her in the water and no one really cared if she would sink or swim.
The first year was devoted only to study. She was determined to excel in all her courses because she was afraid to lose her scholarship. It was not until the Imam and Father Christopher brought them together that she began to see the error in her ways. When the Kultur Klub was formed everything changed.
First of all, she met Jamal. In the beginning it was so frightening. What would her parents say if they were alive? An Egyptian Copt and a Palestinian Muslim? She thinks she would be stoned to death.
But the entire point, according to the Imam and Father Christopher, was to break down the old prejudices that have left them all orphaned. It was only a fluke that she was included in the Klub. The Imam and Father Christopher located every foreign orphan they could find on campus and all the rest just happened to be male--or women too frightened to join.
But she doesn’t really want other women included. She’s proud to be the only one. She wants to be the token female and show how strong her gender can be. Even though, meeting after meeting, she had to go to the restroom and vomit, she made her spirit stronger than her body. She did it by overcoming the body’s natural prejudice for life.
She had to make herself willing to die.
When I brought these unlikely characters together even I had no idea how they would react, either to their plight or to one another. That’s the joy of writing for me, really. The creative process is a magical one and storytelling can be as spellbinding as if it were touched by one of Sophia’s fairies. It’s my hope that Commune of Women will cast its spell over you!
“A most amazing book! Reading the book you can almost absorb the energy of each woman’s telling. I would highly recommend this book to everyone”
“Commune of Women is one book you do not want to miss.... It is an incredible tale that will stay with you long after you read the last word. Pick up Commune of Women and be prepared to laugh, cry and gasp.”
“I very highly recommend this book. The writing is outstanding and the story is compelling with characters that are real and easy to relate to…. It’s entertaining, touching, and inspirational. It is full of drama, suspense, mystery, and even romance. This was the first book I have read by Suzan Still and I am definitely a fan!”
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