print story

Medea in the Garden - Part One

By Jincy Willett

By midnight all the men were asleep. My Kenneth was upstairs in bed, Bert and Joe had each gone home, and Di's husband, Adam, was out like a light on the love seat. By then the fire was roaring and the snow falling in big fat clumps. And after onion soup, veal roast, artichokes, creamed new potatoes, Double Gloucester, stewed Anjous, Leah's blackberry pie, and every color of wine, we four women were wide awake and ravenous. So I went to the pantry for breadsticks and Liederkranz and came back instead with cognac and my precious new 20-pound bag of plump, salty, premium, natural-color Escondido Nut Farm pistachios, which my mother sends us every Christmas.

This was one of those subversive impulses that flash and stun without warning. The sort which when you're young compel you to blurt "I love you" when you certainly don't, as a kind of insane courtesy. The happiness you spread never offsets the cost. Until now, I had shared the pistachios only with Kenneth, and that just since two years ago when he discovered them in a hatbox under the bed and threatened to rat me out to the children. It was some small compensation, that evening, to please my friends, to watch them reveal their fine natures through food play, but not enough. Never enough.

We had been talking about Baghdad and the polar ice caps, and about Caroline's new drapes which she made herself with no previous sewing experience, and then on to how uncanny I was to have found a Sanredaam print stuck in an old book on party stunts, and so on, when Di leaned forward with that constipated expression she sometimes gets and asked, "Why do men like to slap women on the ass?" You can always count on Di. "No, seriously," she said.

"What a wonderful question!" Caroline, bony as a chicken foot, scooped yet another mound of pistachios from the communal bowl and funneled the nuts through her cupped hands into an ashtray already choked with shells. She knew we were watching. "This way I get to... rummage through the empties and sort of... come upon the full ones. Then I sort of... pounce on them and wrestle them to the ground."

Caroline's little pistachio drama, hyperbolic and fey, is in keeping with her overall comic style. Like certain theater people, she is always "on," her mannered dottiness at once wearying and contagious, so that in her company, and against our will, both Di and I often catch ourselves chattering in unconscious imitation, adopting as our own her clichés and the rhythm of her speech, and even the fluttering mock-genteel gestures of her hands. Only Leah, the rock, huge and solid, imperturbable as Buddha, remains intact, amused but unseduced, true to the classic ironic style: the majestic, straight-faced understatement. Leah objects at length and often to all the sort-ofs, quites, and wonderfuls.

Leah ate slowly, contemplating each nut throughout its progress from random selection to obliteration. "I like the closed ones," she said. "I like to crack them with my teeth. If anyone finds any..."

"They won't," I said, keeping my voice light. "These are premium triple-grade-As, sifted and resifted by hand, for a guarantee of absolute perfection."

"Quality control!" cried Caroline. "How wonderful. Of course I must say I do miss that bright rosy color, the telltale fingertips, the sort of--"

"Stigmata," said Leah, continuing darkly, "nothing this pleasurable should be guilt-free." Once upon a time, Leah claims, she made these pronouncements in all seriousness. She ruminated and blinked in Di's direction. "Has Adam been spanking you, dear?"

"What? Oh! No." Leah, who has a genius for catching you on the wrong foot, had startled our Di into a blush the color of a dead-ripe Freestone. Di is a newlywed, younger than the rest of us by forty years, slim and straight as a wading bird; an intense sharp-witted young woman, and a treat for the eyes. Usually spirited company, she had been throughout this evening listless, preoccupied. An ominous little bundle in our midst, ticking quietly away. Like my own moody daughters. Like me, once a moody daughter. She was laughing now, with us, uncomfortable and pleased, at the center of attention. "Not exactly," she said, provoking more laughter.

"And why not, I'd like to know?" Caroline brandished a fist. "Good God, what have we come to, where will it all end?"

"It's not a personal question," Di said. "It's a theoretical question. I just suddenly wondered."

"Of course you did," said Caroline, "but the more interesting question is, why do women like to be slapped on the ass?"

"I don't," said Di.

"I sort of do, once in a while," someone said. Actually it was me.

Leah cleared her throat. "They slap us on the ass for the same reason that compels them, when they are young boys, to run up and touch the Witch's House."

"Ah," we three said in unison. Di was especially impressed. She added, "Wow."

"Bravado, is all," Leah said, shattering a nut with her back molars.

"Do you really think so?"

Leah pondered, ponderously, assuming at last a benign, abstracted smile. "No," she said.

"You do, too," I said, and continued before she could protest. "When I was a child, our neighborhood Witch's House was the only stucco house on Columbia Avenue. It was pink with red tile roofing, and round rooms and turrets like a castle, and an ugly oak out front with all its limbs amputated."

"They are often hideous, with round rooms and turrets," Leah said.

"Our Witch's House was just an ordinary old barn with a fat lady in it," Caroline said. "She was so enormous that she couldn't wear clothes. In the wintertime she wore blankets fastened together with safety pins, and in the summer she wore sheets. She kept pigs. On windy days, when she came out to slop the pigs, the sheets would loosen and billow and snap, and the pigs would scatter, and I used to pray for one great big gust to come and blow those sheets away. One day, at high noon, this actually happened."

"Ah," said Leah. We were all quiet for a while, listening to the crackling of fire and pistachio shells, and the stertorous breathing of Adam; contemplating the solid, glistening apparition of the Naked Fat Woman, who appeared, at least to me, to rotate serenely within the fire itself as if on a vertical spit, glowing red like the center of the earth.

"I'm pregnant," said Di in a low voice. "I haven't told Adam yet."

Caroline opened her mouth to say, "How wonderful," but didn't and probably would have caught herself even without warning looks from Leah and me. For Di looked at no one, her expression aggressively noncommittal.

---

To join the FiveChapters mailing list, send your email address to editor@fivechapters.com.