Waking the Moon

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—”

“The way they want to control our minds,” added Lyla.

“But Othiym—I mean Angelica—I mean, she just makes you aware of this whole new way of looking at the world. A whole old way, really—”

She pointed at Annie’s Labrys T-shirt. “Like that thing there, the double axe—that’s a symbol that goes back to ancient Crete, to the Great Goddess religion there—”

Annie gazed at Virgie coolly. “I know what it means.”

“Well, you should come to one of her gatherings and see for yourself, Annie.” Virgie’s sloe eyes widened as she spread her hands imploringly. “Angelica Furiano gives you a whole new way of looking at the world! And there’s so many of us now! Somebody’s even making a documentary about her—”

“Oh yeah? Who? Leni Riefenstahl?”

Virgie frowned. “Is she the one who did that Bikini Kill video?”

Annie moaned and looked away.

“You have to admit, Annie, at least it’s a change,” said Martha. “I mean, she really does make you think about things.”

Annie stared broodingly out the window.

“I prefer to think of things on my own,” she said at last.

“Annie’s had some bad experiences with organized religion.” Helen looked at her lover fondly. “You know, that whole lapsed Catholic trip—”

“Othiym says the reason conventional Western religions have failed is that they don’t take into account the notion of sacrifice.” Lyla’s prim expression was at odds with her tattoo and cropped hair. “She says the problem with Catholics is that they don’t take the idea of sacrifice far enough.”

“We have to break away from all that,” agreed Virgie in a childish voice. “‘The New Woman will only emerge when she learns to commit every horror and violence that till now society has denied her as foreign to her temperament.’”

Everyone was silent.

“Gee, I never thought of that,” said Annie.

“It’s from the Marquis de Sade,” Virgie confessed. “I read it in one of Angelica’s books.”

Annie’s eyes flashed. “I think you’re all playing with fire,” she said, casting a poisonous look at Virgie and Lyla. “And I think it’s incredibly rude of you and your friends to interrupt my show yelling your stupid slogans —”

“They’re not slogans,” Lyla said. “It’s an incantation. Because all great music invokes the Goddess.”

“You should be flattered.” Virgie looked as though she might burst into tears. “I mean, that your music could invoke such feelings from us—”

“I don’t think—” Martha stammered, but Annie was already getting to her feet.