‘eight women’
Flock Literary Magazine, summer 2020
For their issue on the theme ‘Kith and Kin’, my creative non-fiction essay on caring for someone with cancer and the role of female friendship. It was published only in hard copy so it’s republished below.
eight women
six women come the first time. six plus you so that’s seven. you have always liked the number seven, so this seems auspicious. it’s the colours of the rainbow and often the number of years a fairytale character must remain in a grim, enchanted place. it’s the day of rest in christianity and the number of higher and lower worlds in hinduism, and guess how many steps buddha took when he was born? it’s a prime number, too, but you’ve never really understood math so you prefer to stick with the seven of myths and holy books.
a crimson offcut from the fabric stall at the market turns the coffee table into an altar. red-shaded lamps. the hue of a womb. you open the front door for a moment before they arrive and look out at the empty street. this time of year always feels portentous, dusk coming before you’re ready for it, drizzle slick on your skin. it is an in-between time, leaves no longer falling but not yet really winter.
one by one they arrive.
you have lit large candles, and they flicker now as all seven of you find your seats on cushions. seven smaller candles wait with wicks bowed. you will each light one after you have said your names by way of introduction.
welcome, you say, and the candle nearest your mouth quivers
to the first women’s circle.
*
i look like a dandelion
she says, and it’s weird because she’s not usually poetic. maybe the cancer’s in her brain, too.
look
she says and lightly she runs her fingers through her white hair. tufts float down to the kitchen floor.
see?
you can’t really notice it unless you’re up close
you say and then wonder why you’re saying it because you both know it’s all going to fall out so shouldn’t you be saying it doesn’t matter either way?
*
all the candles are lit now. silence. eyes low. trust needs a slow birth. becky speaks first, talks about how she’s been somewhere really dark for a while but can feel things turning now and it’s good. maggie says she finds fall a hard season and you nod. inhibitions drip down with the wax until most of you find your voices. speaking in turn. picking up the smooth stone which you found on a beach once, the signal to the group that you have something to say. at the end of each woman’s offering of herself, you all say thank you in chorus. this is something you have required. you have not made many rules because really you have no idea what you’re doing or what they should be. what is a women’s circle? you’re not sure, but some instinct said you might need one. you did read a bit about them online. mostly it was annoying. too hippy, too esoteric, too many motivational quotes. when your mom has cancer, everything does not happen for a reason unless it’s a very shitty one, and the collective tuning of chakras is not going to save anybody. but you watched a video of a woman on youtube talking about hers and how they had a word they said collectively after anyone spoke, and you thought about how churches work and how weird it is to push your voice into a space, and so it seemed a good idea to find a way to make it feel safer.
thank you
you all chant together, seven voices rushing at the flames in the middle of you. it feels good when you do it, little smiles break out around the circle. you might not know what to say to your mom, but maybe you can get some things right.
wax has dripped onto the red cloth, and you know you won’t wash it out because amongst all the hospital visits and the suck of grief, you don’t wash or clean much anymore, not even your teeth most nights. it’s ok because lately you’ve learned to prefer things a bit tarnished. some of the women share things that are hard to say; others toss out something more easily. kate stays quiet all the way until the end, and then suddenly she is crying and she takes the stone in her hand and she is crying hard and she says that all she will say is that she is really really sad. every eye is wet, and every voice says thank you, and her sorrow lands in the space between you all. together you hold it there. you’re grateful for her tears because you can’t seem to find yours anymore. you imagine them washing your eyes clean, too.
after the sharing of words, you eat together at the large table. you cleaned the whole house earlier but forgot the chairs around the table. there are crumbs from a meal you don’t remember on some of the seats, and some of the six discreetly sweep them away. everyone seems to have brought hummus. you start opening cheese, and fingers scurry across carrot sticks. someone drags a knife through the farmhouse loaf. the rhythm of talk becomes less staccato, but the tone is still uncertain. you fall back on prescribed womanness: contraception, partners, sex.
at the end you say
thank you for coming to the first women’s circle
and you want them to hear those two words. the first. you want them to believe that there’s something worth creating here, even though you’re not sure what or why. more than that, you want them to come back. you want them to come back because, although it looks to them as if you are spreading your palms wide enough to hold the space, actually you are trying to distract from the emptiness into which you’re on the verge of falling.
*
you are not sure you knew what loneliness was before.
you wonder about it as you watch her sitting on her sofa. she’s not a dandelion clock anymore. just the stub. the skin across her bald head is incongruously youthful. earlier you helped her buy turbans online, and she chose a blue one with a flower on the side which, yes, could look like a hat to anyone who didn’t know, you confirmed.
she seems so much smaller than she used to be.
she sits almost in the middle of the sofa because she has lived alone for fifteen years, and there is no other body to consider. try not to think about her alone here every night. try not to feel guilty that you haven’t moved here to be with her. she’s ok. she can walk at the moment, talk eat take trash out do laundry go to the shops. she wants to exist in a false normalcy while she can, so you feel guilty for nothing because you’re not wanted, not more than you’re already here. but all the same. the dry fact of someone’s life turning from plans and motion to sofas and hospital beds,weeks and months anticipating the end. it is this which makes you feel lonely. mortality is banal. it comes without apocalyptic flames or grand moments of clarity, no appropriate fanfare to announce to the world that everything feels like it’s rotted overnight. just an insidiously growing tide of shit and vomit and doctors looking you both in the eyes less and less.
when you go home, you get into bed and feel like an old shoe which has had its tongue ripped out.
*
they keep returning. the third thursday of every month, seven women sitting in a circle, quiver flame and loosen tongue. at the third circle you talk about inspiring women. writers, artists, politicians, pilgrims. wild women. wild because they did what they needed and not what others wanted. women who put up boundaries around their arts and urges. at the table, there is less hummus. georgia has baked scones, someone has diversified into guacamole, and you remembered to dust off the seats. you all talk about the things you want to be and do, instead of sex or love or dating. when you come back together in january, there are hugs at the front door and at the end, when each of you says one word about how you’re feeling to close the session, something else you stole from youtube, lots of women say grateful. you are becoming something. this is what it meant. the women’s circle. the need for one.
*
doreen doreen drink some water
your mom’s fingers curl slightly, but she doesn’t stir.
doreen doreen drink some water
you can’t see doreen because she’s on the other side of the curtain dividing the ward bays, but you can damn well hear her the wailing; it’s guttural, and it’s been going on for two hours.
doreen just have a sip
doreen
clearly doreen doesn’t want any water, but for some reason the nurse won’t stop trying. he is called prosper, and he is from the philippines. he smiles a lot, which you appreciate because he seems to do it as a natural quirk of the muscles in his face rather than because he wants something you can’t give. the sides of your mom’s face have grown fuzzy like the fur on a cactus, but her skull is still bald and pink. she has lost 20 kilos since she came in, says the whiteboard at the foot of the bed, and you haven’t slept with your phone on silent for five weeks, just in case the call comes. each morning you come to see her before work, and you shower her. she can just about stand for the three or so minutes you need to circle her body and windscreen wiper the suds then spray across her. you are glad you can do this for her, more lovingly than a harried nurse, lifting each breast to dry underneath so that she doesn’t get sores. you have never been more grateful for something and at the same time more desperate for it not to be happening.
doreen just a sip
surely doreen wants some fucking morphine instead of a sip of water. you want some fucking morphine.
your mom is sleeping soundly as a bald outgrown baby, and so you pick up your bag and go downstairs to step out into the sunshine. smoke a cigarette under the no smoking sign. a doctor leaving his shift gives you a dirty look, and you stare back at him, challenging him to say something to you. he walks on. you take out your red notebook and ferret a pen from the bottom of your bag. sand gets up your nails, which must be from a long time ago because you’ve not had a holiday since this all began. the women’s circle is next week, and you need to work out what to say. how to introduce the theme. it is love because it is february. can’t even write the word on the blank page. rejected it ferociously as you’ve lain down alone with your phone on loud every night, waiting for the horror call. knowing no one’s arms are coming to encircle you. railing at how the only orphans the media ever depicts are children so your misery feels illegitimate. try not to think about the vomit and the nappies and the distention of her belly and the way she stands with her feet slightly turned inwards in the shower like a small child and the way if you let yourself think about love you will crack.
*
six types. or maybe a later imposition of order on them by historians but either way, people talk about the ancient greeks as having had six types of love.
agape
philia
eros
ludus
philautia
storge
together, you discuss which ones you are drawn to, which you need more of, less of.
thank you
you chant collectively when each woman has spoken. your voices move together now. the hesitation is gone. you don’t say much. you are thinking about doreen and prosper. about the dandelion stub. about how the hell people decide what words are loving enough to go on a tombstone. about how it has seemed for a very long time that there is no such thing as love because there are only strings of spittle and cannulas and drip pumps and so many fucking types of chemo and a sad body to wash which you want to hold and hug and, above all, make well.
swallow it down. blink it away.
try not to cry because generally the other six are having a wonderful time discussing how to get more ludus in their life or how they struggle with philautia, and they are giggling because it sounds like fellatio, and it’s really not appropriate in this context to start bawling.
swallow. blink it away.
the laughter calms, and becky starts talking about philia, friendship love. she starts talking about the women’s circle. what it has meant to have this space. sisterhood, she says. and you realise that’s why you made it, even though you didn’t know about all these rivers of love. that’s why you started this weird experiment with red cloth and candles and a surfeit of hummus. because there is love. and it’s spreading all around you. it’s in the bodies of these women and the spaces between their bodies and the decision they have been making every month for six now to return and to share and to hold whatever each of you spills out in the space between you.
*
she’s home for a bit, but no one knows for how long. or what will happen next. life is utterly unpredictable. or maybe it’s death. you exist somewhere in between the two. hinterland of the almost lost. but every third thursday of the month, someone else will cover your mom’s care for you, and you will open your front door to six women. six plus you so that’s seven. you have always liked the number seven so this seems auspicious.