Night Work

hormonally ravaged pregnant self, “the whole anti-male paranoia just gets to me. I wouldn’t mind if this baby were a boy. You can’t just say that men are violent, period. It isn’t their sex that condemns men to brutality, it’s their history.”

“It’s not men I mind,” Lee noted. “It’s mankind I can’t stand.”

“Hey,” Kate objected, straight-faced. “Some of my best friends are males.”

Their laughter was interrupted by the doorbell, and Kate went to let in Mina, being dropped off by the neighboring friend’s mother. While the mothers chatted briefly, Lee got out an antique globe puzzle that had belonged to a great-aunt and showed Mina how it worked. When the mother left and with Mina in the room, the evening’s talk slid on to less loaded matters than abortions and the iniquity of men.

Before long, however, Mina abandoned her attempt at reassembling the various layers of the globe. She wandered over to sit on the sofa beside Maj, who put out an arm and drew the child in to her. Almost instantly, Mina’s eyelids began to droop, and her thumb went briefly into her mouth before she remembered that she was too old to suck her thumb.

“You tired, sweet thing?” Maj asked her. Mina’s head nodded against her adoptive mother’s shoulder. “Me too,” Maj said. “Can you help your fatty ma up?” With Mina pulling (and Roz behind her adding an affectionate but only half-joking shove), Maj maneuvered herself upright and waddled off to use the toilet for the fourth time that evening. Roz bent down and picked up Mina, who snuggled happily into her other mother’s arms and fitted the top of her head into the hollow of Roz’s chin. Roz’s arms went around the child with fierce affection, and by the time Maj came out of the bathroom, Mina’s legs were limp in sleep. Lee watched the family leave with envy in her eyes.

Chapter 4

LEE LOCKED UP BEHIND their guests and came back to the living room, moving in the careful rhythm of footsteps alternating with the tap of the rubber crutch ends that was such a contrast to her brisk, firm step of two years before. Kate was already seated at the dining table, pulling folders out of her briefcase, and Lee hesitated.

“Will it bother you if I watch the tape of that TV program Roz was on? I didn’t get a chance to see it earlier.”

“ ‘Course not. This is just paperwork, to keep me from getting too far behind. Was there any coffee left?” she asked, pushing back her chair.

“I think so. You want me to—?”

“You sit. You must be tired from cooking. Can I put that in for you?” Kate gestured to the tape sitting on top of the television set. At Lee’s thanks, she fed it into the player, carried the controls across to Lee, and stooped down to gather up the scattered pieces of the globe puzzle that Mina had abandoned, putting them on the low table in front of the sofa. When she came back from the kitchen with her coffee, Lee was on the sofa putting the world together and Roz was on the television preparing to set it aright.

The program was a panel discussion on, according to the sign in front of the moderator, women and religion in the 21st century. Kate had missed the introductions of the first two women, a nun with Hispanic features and light blue habit followed by a tall woman with long blond dreadlocks and a patchwork blouse. Roz was the third (Roz in a navy jacket and green shirt, with the white square of her pastor’s collar dominating her image). The fourth was a black Lutheran pastor, also in a collar, and the last panelist was described as a “neopagan follower of the goddess.”

“Any particular goddess?” Kate asked.

“All of them,” Lee explained.

“Who is the second woman?”

“A practitioner of wicca.”

“What’s that?”

“She’s a witch.”

“Oh. Right.” Kate watched for a minute, then settled down determinedly at the table with those two staples of a cop’s life, coffee and paperwork. She listened with half an ear to the far-ranging discussion, which ran the gamut from child care to radical feminist theology and from counseling a congregation’s menfolk to raising the inner Feminine. This last exercise seemed to be the prime interest of the witch and the goddess worshiper, and their descriptions of the empowering energies— which they called “raising shakti”—by chanting the name of Kali or Durga during the act of sex had Roz looking interested, the nun looking fastidious, and the poor Lutheran minister looking as if she might stand up and flee. Lee chortled at the moderator’s attempts to keep the subject a little closer to the audience’s sense of reality, until finally Roz took pity on the woman and stepped in to bring the topic back to a more manageable track.

“I think what my colleagues are saying is that women have an immense source of inner power, a strength and energy we rarely tap into, because from childhood we are taught to keep it closed inside, even to deny its very existence.” This was not at all what her colleagues had been saying, and Roz knew it, but she ruthlessly overrode their attempts to interrupt; Roz had the ball now, and she intended to run with it. “Because the energy—the shakti—is so tightly repressed, when it does find an outlet, it tends to blow, to erupt as rage. Come to think of it, that’s exactly what happens in the Indian stories about the goddess Durga—or Kali, who personifies Durga’s wrath: she gets drunk on battle, goes insane when she is finally released to shed blood. Which should, as myths are meant to do, make us stop and think: If we as women ever decided to stop being patient and forgiving and nurturing, to decide that it’s time to begin with a clean slate, it might well feel to men as if Kali had been loosed. It’s been said that if womankind ever truly sets her mind to freeing the shakti within, the blast of accumulated rage will scorch the earth.”

She was good, Kate had to admit, mixing together lessons in women’s psychology and Eastern theology but in a tone of light conversation, and managing to subtly correct the goddess worshiper at the same time. “Do you suppose that last remark of hers was actually a quote?” she wondered aloud.

Lee shook her head. “Not for a minute. That’s a patented Roz Hall trademark, issuing a pronouncement as if it’s some sage’s wisdom. You’ve got to love the woman.”

The moderator certainly did, and the Lutheran pastor. The nun stepped smoothly in when Roz paused for breath and made a remark about pacifism and Christian forgiveness, and the discussion rapidly shot off onto the question of whether a feminist could be a Christian, and vice versa.

Kate pulled her attention away from Roz Hall’s passionate espousal of the cause of feminist churchgoers and stuck her nose back into her reports, and although the tape ended before her work did, she had enough of her paperwork out of the way to feel justified in putting it back into her briefcase and turning off the lights as soon as Lee’s going-to-bed noises had died away in a last gurgle of water through the old pipes.

But the evening stayed with her, and behind the televised discussion of women’s rage lay that look Roz had given her, a look that said none of them were all that far from being an Emily Larsen.

Not even Kate.

THE NEXT MORNING KATE was in the kitchen with the morning Chronicle gathering crumbs beneath her plate, bent over a review of Song that was tied (as Jon had predicted) to a front-page report on the right-wing Christian protest outside the theater, when she heard the sound of a key in the front door, and looked up to see Jon breezing through. He was singing, some cheery and inane song of an early sixties girl group, and Kate’s heart sank. The door to his basement apartment closed on his chirpy lyrics, and Lee came in, her eyebrows up into her hair.

“Was that what I thought it was?”

“I’m afraid so,” Kate answered.

Jon was in love again.

Every three or four months during the entire time he had lived with them, Jon would meet The One. For a couple of weeks he would drive his housemates crazy with golden-oldie love songs, long murmuring telephone conversations rising from his rooms in the basement, and a return to girlish giggles and dramatic bouts of despair over his appearance, his clothes, and his lack of a future. More than once Kate had longed to shoot him.

The aftermath of these great passions would almost have been a relief, had he not been so pathetic and their guilt over feeling relieved so strong. He faded before their eyes into a small man with a brave mustache, who dove back into his increasingly unnecessary labors for Lee, cooking elaborate meals, urging his charge out so he could drive her all over creation, redoubling his efforts in the men’s choir and the gym and the volunteer work in the