Dating without Novocaine
Chapter One
Sequins and Gossamer
Portland, Oregon
"Anoint your sacred body parts," Sapphire said, passing round a
small blue and white Chinese bowl. "I made this rose water with
the petals of flowers from my own garden, plucked under the full
moon to call forth the power of the Goddess."
I slanted a look at Cassie, seated cross-legged next to me on a
cushion on the wooden dance floor. She was wearing a short top
that ended just below her breasts in a row of dangling,
shimmering silver disks, her slightly poochy belly bare above the
heavy belt of coins around her hips. She narrowed her tilted
elf-green eyes at me in warning.
The bowl came to me, the rose water a dark burgundy that smelled
safe enough when I gave it a cautious sniff. I dunked my fingers
in the water and dabbed the stuff on my throat and wrists like
perfume, and passed the bowl on to Cassie.
With reverence, Cassie anointed her breasts and her crotch, then
bowed over the bowl and shut her eyes before passing it to the
next novice belly dancer.
"I never knew you had sacred boobs," I whispered to Cassie, as
Sapphire invited the class members to share their experiences of
the past week. "I would have paid them proper respect, if I had.
Shouldn't you be wearing a more expensive bra, if you're
carrying around holy orbs?"
"Hush!" Cassie scolded.
A long-haired woman with hurt-looking eyes started talking about
the telepathic conversation she had had with her dog.
"You're going to have stains right over your nipples."
"Hannah, be quiet. You won't experience the Goddess if you
don't open yourself to Her."
That didn't sound a particularly awful threat at the moment.
The belly dance/goddess worship class of ten women was sitting in
a circle around a small terra cotta sculpture of figures linking
arms around a lit votive candle. I'd seen the same piece in Robert Redford's
Sundance catalogue, that we'd gotten in the mail last week.
The psychic-dog woman finished, and a middle-aged woman with
about fifty extra pounds showing between skirt and halter-top
started to weep. "My fiancé had to go to court this week. My
neighbor says he flashed her, that he stood in our front yard and
exposed himself to her. But he wasn't naked, and he didn't do it
on purpose! He was wearing panties and gartered hose. He went
out to get the paper, that was all."
Sapphire made soothing noises, while the other women murmured
and cooed.
"If she's in touch with the Goddess, why is she dating a
pervert?" I asked Cassie.
"Hannah!"
I shrugged. It seemed a reasonable question.
"It's time for the mantra," Sapphire said, and everyone put
their palms together in front of their chests, fingers pointing
upward. Cassie hadn't told me there'd be a mantra. I put my
palms together and tried not to feel like I was praying.
"The Goddess gifts us with thought, with a voice, with a heart," the
women said in unison, touching their prayerful hands to forehead,
lips, and heart, "and the power to create." The hands inverted, pressing
down into bespangled crotches. Pervert-boyfriend woman parted
her thighs to get her hands down in there.
I lifted my hands away. I didn't want to create with my loins,
not while I was still single. Good God, that's what being on the
pill for the past eleven years was all about. Didn't the Goddess
know how to create with the mind or the heart? Or the hands?
How about the hands? Leave the womb alone, for God's sake, at
least until I got a husband.
And that, of course, was the whole point of my being here and
subjecting myself to Cassie's belly dancing class of Goddess
worshippers.
"If you get in touch with the Divine Feminine within you, men
will sense it," she'd told me. "You'll loosen up the energies in
your chakras, get them flowing. Men won't be able to take their
eyes off your lower belly, the center of your sexual power, and
they'll be swarming all over you."
Sounded good. I was twenty-nine, and it had been six months
since I'd had sex. Something had to be done.
I didn't know if warming up my chakras was going to help things,
but floating in the back of my mind was a vision of myself in a
gauzy costume, strings of tiny bells wrapped around my hips, the
faint shadow of my pudenda visible through the fabric, nothing
but heavy jeweled chains concealing my breasts. Some strange,
thumping, wailing music would be playing in the background as I
put on a private, belly-undulating show for Mr. Right, working
him into a froth of reproductive urges.
Whatever Sapphire wanted to say about belly dancing being about
getting in touch with the Goddess and discovering one's inner
self, I'd seen my Desmond Morris on The Learning Channel. I knew
that anthropologically speaking, this hip rocking was about
showing a man I was young and healthy enough to bear his
children.
That was fine by me.
Once the nonsense about the Goddess was finished and we started
dancing I started to enjoy myself. Sapphire demonstrated Snake
Arms, Egyptian Walk, Lotus Hands, and an unnatural, rolling wave
of belly muscles that for some reason came to me with ease.
There was nothing attractive about it, but I knew it would come
in useful at parties when others were showing off their ability
to move ears or wrap ankles behind their heads. "Sure, you can
touch your eyebrows with your tongue," I'd say, "but can you do
this?" And then I'd pull up my shirt and give them an eyeful of
rippling belly.
We stood in three staggered rows, facing a wall of mirrors and
copying Sapphire's moves. My movements looked stiff compared to
those of the others, my limbs about as loose and flowing as a
senator's. I've always been one of those dancers who loses the
beat and has no natural sense of rhythm. Maybe my sex chakra
really was blocked.
We repeated the mantra at the end of the class, Sapphire gave us
a homework assignment of watching for circularity in our daily
lives, and then we were out the door and headed to the car.
Sapphire's house and dance studio were at the outer edge of
southwest Portland, where suburbs give over to pockets of
country, and we could hear a concert of frogs croaking in the
spring night air.
"So what's with that blue rhinestone Sapphire had glued between
her eyebrows?" I asked Cassie as we were driving home.
"I knew I shouldn't have brought you. You're going to make
cracks about this for the next week and a half, aren't you?"
She knew me well. "And how about those little dots and diamonds
beside her eyes? Suppose she used organic eyeliner to draw them?
I mean, what are they supposed to signify? They make her look
like a playing card."
"You don't have to come again."
"I don't think my chakra got any looser."
"It's not the only thing about you that's blocked," Cassie said,
and turned on the radio so she wouldn't have to listen to me yak.
The dance lesson hadn't been a complete waste of time. Watching
pervert-boyfriend woman move with sensuous grace, I'd imagined
her fat-folded belly transformed from a disfiguring burden into
some sort of symbolic representation of Mother Earth, ample and
giving. Despite the woman's lousy taste in men, the flowing way
she moved showed she was in tune with herself in a way I
decidedly was not.
I didn't want to admit that to Cassie, though--it went against
the firm stand I had taken against New Age flakiness and
vegetarianism. I also didn't want to tell her that while looking
at myself in the mirror amidst those other women, I'd realized I
was neither as fat nor as tall as I'd thought I was. I was
altogether smaller than in my own mind, and I didn't know if that
said something good or bad about the inner me.
It occured to me that I had been unfairly obnoxious about the
class, in my quest not to admit to kind of liking it.
"Sorry,
Cass," I said above the noise of the radio. I had been making
fun of her religion, after all. "Want to stop at Safeway and
pick up some Ben & Jerry's? I'll treat."
"Cherry Garcia?"
"And Chunky Monkey."
"Kewl."
That was the great thing about Cassie. She never held onto her
pique, and any difficulty could be smoothed over and forgotten
with a bit of ice cream. A girl could do worse in a housemate,
and the Goddess knew I had.
I'd known Cassie since my first year of college, down in Eugene
at the U of O. Three years older than me, she'd already been at
the school off and on for four years when we met. She'd joked
she was on the five-year plan, then a year later on the six, and
finally she'd abandoned all pretense of finishing her degree in
sociology and turned her talents to her boyfriend's
scented-candle business.
She'd spend her Saturdays sitting in a
stall at Eugene's open air market, candles arrayed around her, a
book on how to awaken your intuition in her hand. To the right
had been a booth selling incense, to the left one selling little
pewter sculptures of dragons and wizards holding crystals.
When the boyfriend started dipping his wick in other wax pots
than her own, Cassie moved up to Portland and went to work at
Shannon's Pub as a bartender. She'd been working there ever
since. Sometimes she sent away for brochures for career training
programs, but they sat on the coffee table gathering dust and
crumbs, until finally three or four months down the line, during
one of our rare cleaning binges, I'd hold them up in question,
she'd shrug, and they'd get tossed into the recycling bin.
She swung her hips to a wild and foreign drum, did Cassie, and I
couldn't decide if I admired her for it, or wished she'd grow up
and join the same concrete world as the rest of us.
Well, most of the rest of us. Sapphire and the woman who held
psychic tête-à-têtes with her dog obviously lived in another
realm entirely.
Later that night, as we sat on the futon eating ice cream and
watching TV, a question slipped out that by all rights should
have stayed tucked behind my lips. Maybe it was something about
the dance class that had stirred it up. I don't know.
"Are you happy, Cass?" I asked, as on TV a woman with an
ultra-white smile held up
tube of toothpaste.
Her slanted, lovely eyes glanced at me, the light from the
television reflecting off them in the half-dark of the living
room. "Happy? What do you mean? Right now, at this moment?"
She held her spoon motionless above her container of Cherry
Garcia.
"Happy with your life, with how it's going. Is this where you
expected you would be, when you became an adult?" I thought it
came out sounding judgmental, as if I had decided already that
she was not showing the proper drive and ambition of any
self-respecting American.
But the question wasn't truly directed
at her, and she sensed it.
"Aren't you happy?" she asked me, and if there was a Goddess,
she seemed to be looking at me with infinite compassion from
Cassie's eyes.
I felt tears start in my own, taking me by surprise, and I
tightened my lips against the sudden quivering there.
"Oh, sweetie," Cassie said, as the X-Files theme started
whistling in the background. "It'll be all right. You expect
too much of yourself, is all."
"But..." I blubbered, a vast blackness of want seeping up from
the dark depths, the ice cream in my hand a cold and empty
comfort. "But there's so much I--"
"So much you thought you'd have by now? Husband, children, SUV,
golden retriever? A house in the west hills?"
"A Volvo, not an SUV -"
"Hannah, you're so predictable," Cassie said, and somehow her
gently sardonic tone was comforting. "Everyone thinks they're
supposed to want those things, but I don't think you really do."
"Yes I do. Especially the husband."
"If you were ready, you'd have one. Maybe right now you're
doing exactly what you're supposed to be doing."
I looked down at my Chunky Monkey. "You think so?"
"It's your sewing business that matters to you. That's why you
moved up to Portland to begin with. Concentrate on that, and let
the universe handle the rest in its own time."
I wished I had her faith that all would come right in the end.
It seemed to come so easily to her, so naturally. I never saw
Cassie worry about anything. "Can't I have a little of the rest
right now? Like a boyfriend?" I asked.
"He'll come when you're ready." She smiled. "In the meantime,
there's David Duchovny."
I looked at the screen, where Mulder and Scully were arguing in
an old repeat, and sniffed back the remainder of my weepy
self-pity. "I don't want him."
"Why not? I'd do him."
"He never smiles," I said.
"You don't want a guy to be grinning while he's got your legs
over his shoulders. Talk about creepy." She shuddered, and I
gave a small laugh, glad of the change of topic and of mood.
"Can't be much worse than how they usually look." I squeezed
shut my eyes and groaned like I was in pain, straining out the
words, "I'm coming, I'm coming! I'm almost there... Can I come?
Can I come now?"
"They ask you that?"
"One of my ex-boyfriends used to."
"Did you let him?" Cassie asked.
"Depends how long he'd been going at it. Past a certain point,
I just wanted him to get it over with. I started thinking about
urinary tract infections."
Cassie winced, and I knew both our minds had gone to the
unopened jug of cranberry juice in the cupboard, kept there in
case of emergency.
"Maybe it's for the best that your sex chakra is blocked up,"
Cassie said.
"Maybe you're right."
Dating without Novocaine
Lisa Cach
Worldwide Library/Red Dress Ink
Publication date: 03/02
ISBN: 0373250142
Copyright 2002
by Lisa Cach
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