Day 5

For Day 5, a short story. Not for the squeamish.

WOMAN

The symbol puzzled her. She turned it over, but it made no more sense upside down. What was this strange thing, and why was it here? A circle, a cross. The circle on top of the cross…unless the cross went on top of the circle…what did it mean? It was plastered all over the walls. A big sculpture of the same symbol dominated the room. It was like an optical illusion, and now the woman behind the big desk had handed her one, told her to take it with her as she joined the group.

“What group?”

The woman behind the desk pointed. “Out there. You’ll be in the C group.”

The C group. Lydia wandered out the door, not having gotten any of the answers she had come in for, but determined to find the person who could help. She found herself in a swarm of women, all of them holding similar symbols. The circle on top, just like inside. So at least she was sure she was holding it right. Some of the women were waving it over their heads. Some kind of magic ritual? Lydia tried it, but felt nothing. No sense of peace or happiness washed over her, no healing power cleansed her. She was still full of fear, pain, and anger.

Another woman approached her, a large woman wearing a crimson jogging suit and a big smile. Before Lydia could escape, she was wrapped in a giant bear hug by a woman she had just met.

“Excuse me.” She extricated herself with difficulty, trying not to hurt the woman’s feelings, but needing to breathe. She hated being hugged, and she didn’t feel comfortable about strangers. “Am I…in the right place?”

“Oh, my dear, of course you are. All of us…we’re all in this together. You’re scared, aren’t you? I could tell it as soon as I saw you. Never marched before?”

Lydia shook her head. She had certainly never marched before. She had walked plenty, but marching? No, that was something men did, soldiers. “I have to march?”

“Well, you don’t have to. This is totally voluntary. But…why are you here if you don’t want to march?”

Lydia thought about the question. She knew why she was here. She assumed everyone else would know why she was here. This is the place to come, that was what everyone said. You will be taken care of here, she was told. Go to The Women. They will understand. No one told her she would have a symbol thrust in her hand and find herself in a group of strange women.  “You don’t know?”

“I…oh, dear, you didn’t know there was a march today, did you? You came for something else…you want help.” The woman was staring into Lydia’s face, and she started to squirm.

 “I…everyone told me…come here. Go to The Women. I don’t know…what is this thing?” She thrust the thing she was holding toward the other woman.

“You don’t know?” Lydia shook her head. “It’s the symbol for woman. It’s the official symbol of our group, and we’re taking it out on our march today…but…you don’t want to march, do you?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Why? Oh, you mean, why march? Well, it’s the women’s march, dear. The march to try to protest all the ways in which women are prevented from achieving equality with me.”

“But…are women equal to men? I thought…we’re weaker, right? We don’t think as well? We’re…frenzied. That’s what someone said…frenzied.”

Her new friend frowned. “Damn.”

Lydia shrank. She’d said the wrong thing. Now the woman was mad at her, and wouldn’t help her.

“Come inside.”

Lydia just managed to prevent the woman from grabbing her hand, but she followed the woman forward, back into the building, through the room papered with woman symbols, and into a cheery office decorated with potted plants and strange paintings that didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen.

The woman settled behind the desk. “I’m Kathleen. And you are?”

“Lydia. Lydia…Holman.” Lydia thought it was time to stop lying, and give her real name. She couldn’t hide forever.

“Lydia Holman? You mean….?” The look on Kathleen’s face told her the name was familiar.

“Yes. I’m sorry…I won’t bother you. You…I’ll go…” Lydia stood.

“Oh, my dear, no, don’t go. You’ve come to the right place. You don’t have to be afraid of me…or any of the women here. We’re friends.”

Lydia trembled. She had no idea why she was here, or what she expected to happen. She just wanted to hide, away from prying eyes, away from camera flashes, away from nosy, snoopy people who asked too many questions.

“Lydia, I think this would be a bad time to spend in filling out paperwork. It’s beautiful outdoors. Why don’t we sit on the patio?”

Kathleen opened a door. The outside beckoned. Lydia hesitated, not conscious that her body was making decisions on its own. One step…two…three…she was in the sunshine, but not in that mad mob of women. It was a quiet patio, with tables and chairs, just like she’d seen in those old House Beautiful magazines Steve brought for her to read. She slid into one of the chairs and discovered they weren’t as comfortable as she thought. Still, she had dreamed all her life of sitting in a place like this, and now she was here. She determined to enjoy herself, at least as much as she could.

The chair beside her creaked as Kathleen lowered herself into the seat that was barely big enough. “Big beautiful body, they tell me”, her companion laughed. “Still, wouldn’t hurt me to lose a few pounds. No, I won’t insult my body around you…you have enough problems as it is, without the constant running critique we all seem to do in our heads, and all too often out loud.”

Kathleen motioned to a girl who was standing at a window watching. The girl disappeared, and in a minute arrived on the patio holding a pitcher and two glasses.

“You like lemonade?” Kathleen poured her a glass without waiting for her answer. “Here. You look hot.”

“I’m…sorry. It’s…a hot day, isn’t it?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say so myself, but…well, people handle heat differently, I guess. You look…more embarrassed than hot, honestly.”

Lydia nodded. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. I don’t know what I need.”

“Of course you don’t. You just know…someone told you to come. I understand. We can help you.”

Kathleen started to touch her hand, but Lydia yanked it away. She didn’t like to be touched. Kathleen nodded, not upset by the motion. She leaned back in her chair and gave the younger woman a piercing examination.

“You need a place to stay.” It was more a statement than a question, but Lydia nodded. “And food, clothing, perhaps a bit of money.”

“No, please, I don’t want to be any trouble.”

“Isn’t any trouble, my dear. That’s what we do here. We help women just like you.”

“Are there other women like me?”

Kathleen nodded. “Unfortunately, the world’s full of them. Most people aren’t even aware you exist, at least not until a story like yours. I will admit, yours is more dramatic than the rest. How old were you when you married?”

“I don’t know for sure. I don’t remember. I…Steve…that’s my…husband…ex-husband, now, I guess…he says we married when I was three. He bought me, he owns me, I belong to him, and I should obey him.” Lydia felt like she was chanting now, the chants she did with her sisters…only, they weren’t really her sisters, were they? They were Steve’s other…wives…most of them younger even than her. She was the first. She remembered her sisters…that was the only way she could think of them…and bowed her head. She tried to hold back the tears, but it was hopeless.

Kathleen let her sob it out. Her heart ached for this young woman, not even out of her twenties, and already a woman who had known enough tragedy for a lifetime. She tried not to look at the scars on the younger woman’s face, the scars that said more than words could convey. She didn’t need to ask the hard questions. The newspaper had covered all that. The roomful of dead women…girls, mostly…eighteen women, one of them still breathing, lying covered in blood in that grisly room, doing her best to appear dead until the rage of her husband, the only male she had ever known, spent itself and he collapsed in a drunken stupor on the floor, stretched over the body of the women he had married, raped, and now killed.

Lydia had crawled to the door, crawled out into a world she had never seen, a world she was locked away from since the age of three, and found a crowd on the sidewalk. The sounds of chaos and murder had drawn the neighbors. One of them had scooped up the exhausted, bloody woman and rushed her to the hospital while the police descended on the scene, too late to save any of the others. The man gave no fight as the police led him away in handcuffs. The case dominated the headlines for the past two weeks.

 “I’m okay now. I’m sorry.”

Kathleen nodded. “No harm done. Cry if you need to. We’ve got time.”

“I’m keeping you from your march.”

“The march is started…it’s in good hands. I’m here to help you.”

Lydia trembled in spite of her earlier complaints about the heat. She didn’t know anything about the outside world. She was locked away at an early age, taught to cook and clean by a mother-in-law almost as mean as her husband. When the other girls arrived, Lydia taught them, the mother-in-law having left in a huff following a fight with Steve one night long ago. Lydia ended up being in charge of the younger wives by the time she was nine. It was all she’d ever known…cooking, cleaning, and pleasuring Steve. Pleasure. Did he really get pleasure from it? She’d never seen any sign he enjoyed it…it almost seemed like work to him. It was certainly work to her, as he sweated and thrust and cried out in the most foul language imaginable, language he would have slapped her for using.

Every morning, the Bible studies, the passages about how unclean she was, she and her sisters…co-wives…and how they were meant to serve their husband. The good wife…that was his favorite Bible passage. The good wife, who was virtuous, but hard to find. He always read that passage hard, glaring at her, letting her know she was failing. When she lost the first baby because she was too small to give birth, he threw her down the stairs. The second baby was born, but didn’t live very long. The third baby…the fourth…finally, the fifth baby lived. She loved him, that little boy, the only other male she’d ever known. She cuddled him and cooed to him and sang little songs that she made up, until Steve told her she was spoiling him. The boy disappeared. She had no idea what had happened to her son.

Kathleen waited patiently while Lydia relived her nightmare. She was all too used to this. For some reason, men in this town seemed to think that women were their possession. Girls were bought and sold, usually while still babes in arms, sold by mothers too poor to care for them, too desperate to keep them, and too scared to ask what the men wanted with them. She saw them all the time, but most people were unaware. Most people saw with eyes blinded to the women, living behind the scenes, not crying out, scared to make a sound. But this one…the brutal murder that ended the slavery of Lydia Holman was too much to ignore. For about a week, two weeks, the town was aware of the horrors the girls were going through. There was talk of a crack down, of cleaning up the town, of driving off the cult that bought and sold girls like so much merchandise. As quickly as the story rose, it died again, replaced by something else, some new wonder, and desperate girls once again showed up outside the door of the cult office, waiting for someone to come out who wanted to buy a girl child.

Lydia sat up and dried her eyes. It was time to rejoin the world, to learn about things she’d never seen…the woman symbol was just a start of the new life she was about to enter. Kathleen stood, and offered the woman her hand. This time, the small hand crept into her own hearty fist, and she wrapped her fingers around the other woman’s, holding tight until the trembling subsided. Then the two women entered the building, hand in hand, to begin the paperwork that would establish a new life for Lydia Holman.

Lydia watched Kathleen working, and for the first time felt safe. She looked at the symbol she still clutched, and marveled. Woman, she thought. Woman. That’s me.