Annie stared at them enviously. Everyone looked so bouncy and cheerful, as though they’d all just come out of the same Frank Capra movie. She always felt slightly dazed and suspicious when she visited P-town, just as she did in Key West and Palm Springs and the Berkshires, any place where gay couples could act just like everybody else. Any place, really, where people made being happy look so easy.
Face it: you’d feel like this in Disneyland, she thought. Too many years in Nebraska, too many years singing and starving; too much time spent being afraid, remembering Lisa and Oliver and Angelica and now Hasel—
She stiffened, and her fingers tightened around Helen’s.
“Those girls tonight?” asked Helen softly. Annie looked up at her, shaking her head as though awakening from a dream.
“How’d you know?”
Helen smiled. “I have magical powers and the gift of sarcasm.”
“That’s my line, girlfriend. But yeah, I was thinking about them.”
“It’s not such a terrible thing.” Helen twisted one of her braids around a finger, playing with the rows of striped trade beads. “How bad can it be, for women to learn how to stick up for themselves, to be assertive and all that stuff? I think your friend Angelica is onto something—I mean, there really is this dark aspect to goddess-worship that everyone has ignored for all these centuries. It’s like being a Christian and refusing to acknowledge the Inquisition.”
“She’s not my friend.”
Helen smiled wryly. “Boy, you must have had it bad, to still get so worked up over her.”
“I’m not worked up over her, this has nothing to do with my feelings for—”
“Hi, guys! Sorry I’m late, I had to go home and feed the dogs. I brought a couple of friends—I hope you don’t mind, Annie—”
They looked up to see Martha, resplendent in an African-print dress, her hennaed hair looped in extravagant braids and her ears hung with gold circlets. Around her throat she wore a thin gold chain heavy with little charms: a lambda, a dolphin, a crescent moon, a tiny silver image of the faience Cretan snake-goddess, serpents like two lightning bolts dangling from her raised arms. “This is Lyla, and this is Virgie—they were just at your show, Annie, I turned them on to you years ago and promised I’d introduce you to them someday—” Martha sank into a chair and reached for Helen’s drink, took a sip. “Oooh, that’s good. I’ll try one of those.”
At the sight of the two strangers Annie stiffened.
Moon-girls. She recognized them from the club earlier, shouting their goddamn mantra while she was trying to sing. Young, in their early twenties—so many of Angelica’s girls were young, it must have something to do with having missed that whole first wave of feminism and liberation, of growing up under the conservative cloud of the eighties, of being desperate and cynical and incredibly naive all at the same time. Virgie was coffee-skinned, with long thick black hair and tilted black eyes and a Hothead Paisan T-shirt. She wore crescent-shaped earrings and a crescent-shaped pendant around her neck, a bad copy of Angelica’s necklace made of cheap Mexican silver. Her companion was slight and short, wiry as a young girl, with auburn hair clipped close to her skull and a small tattoo of a crescent moon on her left cheek. When she extended her hand in greeting, Annie saw that she had another tattoo on the ball of her thumb, the tiny perfectly rendered image of a honeybee.
“That must have hurt,” said Helen. She pulled two extra chairs from another table and scooted over to make room.
“Not really,” said Lyla. She slid into a chair, her grey eyes never leaving Annie. “You let yourself flow into the pain. It’s over pretty quick.”
“I always thought body mutilation was the sin against the Holy Ghost,” said Annie.
“What?” asked Virgie.
“Nothing. Obsolete cultural reference.” Annie reached for her club soda and sipped, staring warily at the newcomers. “Enjoying your vacation?”
“Your show was fantastic, as always,” said Martha. She inclined her head toward her two friends. “It was the first time they’ve seen you—”
“First time we’ve seen you live. Your video is great,” broke in Lyla.
“Your music is so fantastic,” gushed Virgie. “It cuts so close to the bone, I mean it’s really amazing how you get so much out of your own pain and sense of loss, how you’ve managed to heal yourself and turn it all into those intense songs—”
“It’s a living.” Annie crunched an ice cube. She leaned back in her chair, staring at Virgie’s throat with narrowed eyes. “Nice necklace.”
“Thanks! I got it at one of Angelica Furiano’s Waking the Moon workshops. Have you ever been—”
“No.”
“Oh, but you must! I mean, she is so incredible, you can just feel the power emanating from her, I mean it was just the most incredibly intense experience of my life—”
“Wow,” said Annie dryly.
“It was pretty intense,” said Lyla. “We live in Northampton and we’ve started a group there, there’s a lot of us who took the workshops and were awakened. We get together every week and the energy level is just amazing, and—well, you just wouldn’t believe it, that’s all. You really should check it out.”
“Annie’s pretty busy touring these days,” Helen said. “We don’t have a lot of free time—”
“Angelica really is rather remarkable,” said Martha. She gave Annie an apologetic look. “I know you think it’s all kind of dumb—”
“I don’t think it’s dumb. I’m not a separatist, that’s all.”
“Oh, but all kinds of people are into Angelica!” Virgie leaned across the table to stare earnestly at Annie. “I’ve even met guys there. I mean, most of the women at our workshop were straight, and it was so amazing to see how they blossomed! Most of us—”
She fluttered her hands, indicating the women at the table, the crowds outside. “We’re used to feeling outside the mainstream, but for them it was like the first time they ever truly realized just how marginalized women are, how totally dependent on this archaic obsolete patriarchal system that enslaves us—”
Annie was silent. Martha and Helen exchanged a glance; then Martha said quickly, “I don’t think she really meant that women were literally enslaved—”
“Oh, but she did!” exclaimed Virgie. Lyla nodded; the crescent moon on her cheek caught a stray mote of candlelight and seemed to flicker. “That’s her whole thing, how we’ve been so incredibly conditioned we don’t even know that we’re nothing more than chattel, I mean look at the way they want to control our bodies—”