(Towanda!) Woman as River

“Let the river run.” The river is one of Carly Simon’s favorite songwriting metaphors. Woman as river.

What would Jane do? She had four different lives with four different men, and now she is living her fifth life cycle with women friends.

Showers.

Macramé plant hangers, grey and black and white and pastel green and purple. Alexandra makes them now, with a vengeance, and she wants to blow her mind right out to the stratosphere with her handicrafts special du jour.

But a macramé plant hanger is but an inconsequential idea without the plant, so she shops for house plants. Monstera deliciosa, Swiss Cheese plant; Chlorophytum colosum, Spider plant; Epipremnum aureum, Devil’s ivy; Sansevieria trifasciata, Mother-in-law’s Tongue; Calathea plant, Zamioculcas zamiifolia, the ZZ among friends, and Tradescantia, Wandering Jew. What imaginative, incredible names they have! (Grandma, what big eyes you have!) She is deep into her greenlife and delves into the know-how and specifics of plants. Like the ever faithful, talking to them. Like taking her plants to the shower with her to recreate the rainforest atmosphere, to moisturize their delicate leaves. Like keeping a journal on how often she waters them.

Sorcery.

In fact, she doesn’t keep a watering diary. If one does not count her documenting the tears she sheds, and how often. It is one of the family curses, the tears, one of the symptoms of being sick in the head.

She doesn’t cut tiny bits from the plants and put them inside a clear container and under her bed to exorcise demons from under there or to remove headaches or to stop her from worrying all the time. The house plants are like pets instead of familiars. There is no magic, they just clear the air, and look pretty. What a relief. Because she is trying to overcome those feelings of being lured into sorcery. Because she finds it hard to live by what is considered the all-loving, all-caring school of green witchcraft, and yet she doesn’t want to practice any other kind. Luckily, when the demon invades her, she is usually in a state of extreme distress, and thus unable to think clearly let alone cast.

Flood.

She was sorry because the saucer was one of her favorite ones. When he threw it on the floor during a fight, apple slices and all, and it broke into several sharp shards, she was sorry she hadn’t chosen a more everyday kind of china, and not the gilded, black-and-white Russian beauty from the Fifties.

She could no longer listen to Roseanne Cash because that was what she put on, panicking, after she had hit him. To stabilize the room. Only the room wasn’t stabilized. Nothing was normal for a while after that.

Only the old eye for an eye, eventually, normalized the power structure.

She used to practice it, in another life, when she was a more level-headed person, and capable of calm, deliberate thinking, but now all her plants are harmless, homeowner’s plants, to bring magicless joy and life to a space. Humorous, inoffensive, innocent, safe, pretty greenlife, interior designer’s artifacts. (Except for the herbs in the kitchen, of course.) She isn’t hiding a man-eating Dionaea muscipula in the back, she can swear to that.

It was that one time, and there had been a long interval between these two instances. When it happened, there was no music afterwards. She wasn’t so much physically hurt as she was taken aback, and there was actually a fleeting moment of I-knew-this-was-what-it-would-take and a second of insane hilarity, almost bursting into laughter, as if she had been watching some badly written soap opera on TV about a hot-blooded couple who couldn’t keep their fire in check.

She went outside, walked around for a while, sat on the tall rock where, in the summer, the sun shone until late. I am one of those women now. I just became one of those women. I can’t believe it. Above all, she was surprised to realize she felt nothing. No resentment, no hatred, she didn’t cry, she just sat. Am I in shock? Should I go run for cover? She thought hard about what had happened. She didn’t feel like shock, she didn’t feel frightened. She was free of animosity. Now we’re even. Now we are both bad. I won’t run. I’m going back home. The score is zero, now. No one can rage like I can, should there be any need for that in the future. The flood gates, once opened, are extremely difficult to close. Alexandra’s rage is not unlike the rush of a body of water on the video where Beyoncé smashes the water hydrant and the cars with the baseball bat, in her flimsy, gorgeous yellow ballgown. The water springs into the air in an orgasmic rush.

Menstruation.

The blood doesn’t flow as freely now, and Alexandra used to think it meant she would be losing the magic. But now she knows better. It doesn’t go away, it transforms into something more eloquent, more cleverly veiled, more complex. The blood is all well and good, but she had been one of those myriad women who violated herself with the use of the pill for years, before getting the good sense to rid herself from the curse of a medical fix. When one is young, things like how one’s body will endure in the constant influx, continuous attacks, of induced hormones and parabens and cigarette smoke and alcohol and what have you, never crosses one’s mind. One is immortal.

When the blood ceases to flow, that’s when mortality shows herself, if one has been too blind to see her before.

Alexandra still gets her period, but it has morphed into something very different, after the years of her illness. Like her face that now bears the necessary lines of a hard life. The lines have appeared all at once, and while for the casual observer they might seem as normal signs of aging, Alexandra knows this isn’t the case. They are the lines of a hard life. Like Robert Redford’s face, seasoned and weather-beaten, but that happened slowly, during decades of outdoors life. Alexandra created her own wrinkles and headaches herself. She takes responsibility. It wasn’t so much done to her as she allowed for it to happen.

It was a long time ago, and the moment seems like a dream to her sometimes. More often than not it feels like it happened to someone else, in another era, perhaps hundreds of years ago. Stupidity. I will kill you, she had said. Meaningless threats. Don’t think I won’t. Words designed only to add insult to injury. Anger came in many forms, and that particular form turned Alexandra into a living frenzy of revenge. She wasn’t peace-loving at all then.

Orgasming.

Laughter. Friends. Peace of mind. Exercise. Safety. Love. Real downtime doing nothing in particular.

When you feel an intense emotion coming, try lying down for a while. Maybe you could benefit from thinking of yourself as the sky, and your emotions as the clouds. It might seem for a while that you will never see the blue sky again, but after a while, the clouds always, always, dissolve, or rain down, or get swept away somewhere else. Self-help. Self-help books. Advice from friends. Advice from strangers. Advice from psychologists, doctors, her mother.

Alexandra does it all. She has a list, cut from a magazine, on her refrigerator door, reminding herself how to not have a brain aneurysm.

When she bought her first vibrator, she was already in her thirties. Like with losing the pill, she was a late starter. Now she cannot imagine why. There is nothing more absolute, more intimate, more luxurious than that private moment of pleasure, that half-hour with herself, not thinking for once, just doing. In those moments, she is one of life’s great doers. She has heard orgasming regularly should help with one’s sleep, yet she has never noticed this particular benefit. But it is the only leisure activity of hers that doesn’t require any thinking and hardly any concentrating. The concentration builds up, on its own. The release is unlike anything else she knows. Because it is her own. Hers, and no one else’s.

Talking to a girlfriend equals a better night’s sleep. In her solitary existence, Alexandra seldom realizes she is desperate for company, until company finds her, and she is suddenly using her conversation muscles, so rarely in practice anymore.

She names her house plants. Names like Mr. Blob, Sequined Maya, Scruffy, Banshee, and Tropical Sue. She enjoys making up conversations with her green friends, and later telling her husband all about what is going on with the greenery while he is at work; who is in cahoots with whom, who is cavorting with the brooches in the bedroom because she thinks it will make her appear more dazzling, who is sulking, who has decided to end his days by shedding all his leaves all over, but Alexandra is not having any of that, Mr. Blob needs to report back to earth and stop being such a drama queen.

She has two vibrators and has names for them as well. They are named Belladonna, and Ms. Nin.

Woman as River.

You can’t change a man, but once in a blue moon, you can change a woman. Alexandra remembers this line from Sex and the City, and the older she gets, the more firmly she believes that in a more and more black-and-white world, for a woman to participate in black-and-white thinking is both perilous and misguided.

People are just trying their hardest to cope, and it is wise to keep in mind they are doing the best they can under often overwhelming circumstances.

Woman is more flexible by nature, she has to be, to endure the pains of childbirth, menstruation, menopause. Woman supports her entire surroundings by her magic touch. And it is alright. Alexandra used to think she had done enough compromising, she would compromise no more, the man was the one who needed to yield, change, negotiate.

But being the limber one can be seen as a positive attribute, not merely as a weakness. Men often flow with greater difficulty, they are slower to understand the sudden changes in emotional weather or landscape or breathing, they hang on to their anger and resentment without really knowing why, sometimes. And maybe that is okay, too. Women don’t always know why they are angry, either. It took Jane a decade to realize the roots of her anger. But she got there, eventually. Taking the long route is sometimes necessary. Sometimes it isn’t easy, sometimes it is very hard. But there is always stirring, always the movement, and the movement is still always forward. Women can flow as far as it takes, they flow mostly with ease, endlessly, like blood, like water, like tears, and like the sweat and moisture preceding an orgasm.

When her husband laughs at her silly plant stories, she suddenly loves him with a force so acute it almost hurts, and she remembers the crazy advice she got from someone to lie down. The route to get there was long, and filled with the crazy, the furious, and the unbecoming, but at the end of the day, it is the understanding, kindness, respect, and mercy, instead of judgment, grudges, disowning, or contempt, that really makes up a woman’s worth, as well as a man’s.

No more stones being thrown. She adds roasted black pepper to everything she makes now, even when she sometimes inhales it by accident while roasting, and the subsequent coughing fits are epic. Because the smell is wonderful, the taste beyond delicious, and the burning sensation causes her defenses to give, to melt down, and she becomes a happier person for a while. Not much magic at all, there.

Perhaps just a smidgen.

Inspired by:

Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic, 1995.

Jane Fonda, My Life So Far, 2005.

Sheila Weller, Girls Like Us. Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon, and the Journey of a Generation, 2008.