Commune of Women by Suzan Still Page B

Sometimes, she can humor Holly into laughter, right through her tears. “What would freak Roscoe out, as much as he’s freaked you out?”
    Holly snuffles. “If I wrote 666 right over his damn crosses,” she answers promptly. “In blood.”
    “In menstrual blood!” Heddi yelps, really getting into this fantasy.
    “Yeah! In menstrual blood!” Holly chimes. And somehow, through the tears, she manages a giggle and before they hang up they’re howling histrionically enough to raise the Devil, imagining all the things they could do to subvert the Little Temple of Living Misogyny and send its congregation, en masse, to its knees, praying for deliverance from liberated women.
    So now, Heddi’s looking at the windows and her knees are feeling weak. The midday sun is streaming through, baking a mooshed-up mess of blood and oil onto the glass. It looks like a chicken was butchered on there.
    She tiptoes out of the room, goes down the hall to the bathroom. She looks in the wastebasket. Sure enough – Holly’s on her period.
    Heddi feels a little dizzy. She heads to the guest room, thinking she’ll lie down.
    Blaaghh!
    There’s blood and oil there, too, but not quite so dried out because it’s the shady side of the house.
    She pulls the blinds and lies down. Bit by bit, she fluffs out the wadded scraps of memory and tries to piece them together into a coherent whole.
    “So what kicked all this off?” she asks Holly during a lull in their commotion.
    “Oh...” Holly puffs. “It was that class I’m taking. Women’s Spirituality. He picked up my textbook and read a few pages. It was the part where the Hebrew god Yahweh speaks through the prophets and tells them to destroy the goddess and cut down her pillars and groves.
    “He made some remark, and I said that I thought we’d be better off if we still worshipped the goddess – and he just went ballistic! I mean, it was worse than when I said I thought Jesse Jackson would make a good president. He just went crazy. And then, he went to see the pastor.”
    Heddi gets up from the bed and goes in search of Holly’s textbook. There it is, stowed fastidiously in the little bookcase by her desk in the corner of the master bedroom. She opens it at random. Neatly underlined in yellow highlighter, she reads:
    Archeological evidence suggests that ancient goddess-worshipping societies were egalitarian and non-aggressive, the latter being inferred from an almost total absence of weapons at these sites. The monotheistic sky-god cultures that overran these earlier civilizations, however, were almost universally patriarchal, hierarchical, and dedicated to the arts of war. The subjugation of women, accomplished by rape, destruction of material goddess culture, and laws limiting women’s rights, was justified by the fact that the male godhead was the model of superiority, in which first the king and the priesthood, and then all other males, partook.
    Heddi closes the book and returns it to its shelf, thinking about the day Holly called, bursting with the amazement of her discovery: God used to be a woman! Heddi always has the women in her Jungian study groups read Neumann and Gimbutas, so these things are old hat for her, but Holly was so excited!
    That realization seems to have played an important part in unwinding the skein of Holly’s very conventional, very married life and setting her on the apostate road of feminism. Holly couldn’t wait to join a consciousness-raising group and to share in the empowerment that was going on there.
    This semester, she was beginning to see her role from new eyes – so new that Roscoe thought they might be someone else’s; someone Satanic.
    Heddi thinks about Rosebud, lifts the shade and peeks out at the yard through the hideous smear of blood and oil; the goddess and the patriarchs, going mano à mano across the sliding aluminum windows.
    “Holly, honey, the party’s getting rough!” she mutters, dropping the shade.
    That night, Heddi goes