Dana Spiotta - Eat the Document

Mother G was an older woman, heavyset and sturdy. She wore her gray-streaked hair back in a bun, with a plain muslin blouse and skirt. She seemed every inch the religious reformer, unmade up and defiantly plain. The furthest thing, Caroline thought, from sexy. She felt garish in her hat and glasses. Caroline glanced at Berry, who appeared becomingly wide-eyed. It was funny to see them face-to-face, both large and fair, but Berry dripping with panels of diaphanous fairy materials and her tendrils of angel hair; Mother G, neat and tucked.

“You see, I am an empiricist. Out here we can try for some precision, eliminate variables.”

“Such as?” Berry asked.

“Well, men, for one obvious thing,” Jill said. Mother G looked at her. Jill scowled.

“You cannot base a community on subtraction, on mere opposition. It becomes reactionary and escapist. Cryptofascist. And people can fixate on the most sensational aspects of what is a much more subtle and sophisticated vision. Nevertheless”—and here Mother G paused and took in Berry’s swollen lip and Caroline’s odd hair color—“you are here for your own reasons, and I can offer some refuge, at least temporarily.”

“Great.”

“But if you want to stay more than a week, you have to petition for membership. No tourists, no freeloaders,” said Jill.

“We would invite you to partake in the governance of the community as well as its work,” said Mother G.

Mother G lived in the main house in a small private room. She put Berry and Caroline up in the dormitory on the third floor. There was a bathroom with a large claw-foot tub, and rows of perfectly aligned and spotless single beds. Built-in shelves lined the walls, along with peg boards to hang clothes and brooms. The first rule they learned — one of many — was nothing on the floor. There were drawers for shoes, and the brooms hanging from pegs were meant to be used. Nothing on the floor so everything could be swept clean.

Next Berry and Caroline were introduced to the work wheel, which assigned each woman in the community work credits for jobs of her choosing. Everyone, no matter how long she had been here, had to obtain a certain number of work credits each week. Jobs that people hated, such as cleaning the stables or washing the toilets, were assigned more work credits. Things people liked, such as baking pies or collecting eggs, were assigned fewer credits, until jobs had equal appeal and everything eventually had a volunteer. Unfortunately, it also meant that everyone did everything, instead of people doing what they excelled at. So although someone with Caroline’s experience and talents in the kitchen should be cooking and cooking often, the wheel offered no more labor credits to her than to Berry, who was an awful cook.

“This model is not perfect, but it is the most egalitarian way to structure things, I think. It’s an experiment. Each way of organizing creates its own repercussions. Simple things, like organizing work, can have dramatic social effect. We may, at a later point, encourage people who excel at something to do more of it, but then we will end up with people born to clean toilets who never get to do the good jobs. So at the cost of efficiency and quality, we have an extremely high level of fairness and equality,” said Mother G to Caroline over a breakfast of fruit preserves and sourdough bread.

Caroline enjoyed the possibilities of the community. She even liked the element of no men. Berry showed less enthusiasm. She spent her days up on the tech-nos’ ridge, smoking pot or hanging out in the sweat lodge. She found the tech-yes industriousness exhausting and a little suspect. She preferred to have fewer amenities at less effort. But she still slept at the dormitory with Caroline and did the labor assigned her on the wheel. After their first week ended, Caroline and Berry told Mother G they would stay and wanted to petition for membership.

Mother G explained that if you wanted to stay you eventually had to build your own house, and not in view of anyone else’s house. You could participate in community meals and decision making as long as you participated in the work wheel. If you wanted to fend for yourself, like some of the tech-nos, you could opt out of the labor credits.

Caroline learned that most of the women had dropped out from the Harvard Classics Department, where Mother G used to teach. Others were design and architecture heads from MIT. She also discovered that Mother G was the financial benefactor of the community. It would take years for actual self-sufficiency to develop, so she’d put up the money to buy the land and initial equipment. Many of the women were veterans of other communes, usually defunct, that had open-door policies and absolute freedom. These became overrun with drug addicts and social outcasts. This place was to be a revision of previous communities. Mother G wanted to have a space where basic cultural assumptions could be challenged. Such as what women were like without men. And whether we could escape the cultural paradigms we were raised with. She restored the old Shaker-style house, paid the taxes and often bought supplies for the community. Although they grew vegetables and kept chickens and cows, they were not anywhere near self-supporting. So in a sense Mother G was deeply in charge, and this too could not be escaped, no matter how many work credits she clocked in.

But Caroline liked her. And she liked the place despite its contradictions. She liked the cloistered effect, the way each woman reinvented herself. No one admitted to their past lives here. No one wanted to cop to anything but the moment and the future. It was the perfect place for someone like her, wasn’t it?

AFTER NEARLY two months, Caroline and Berry still hadn’t built their own house. Instead Berry managed to convince the cloistered women on the hill to let her move in with them. But she took frequent breaks — after a few days huddled with the tech-nos (open-fire cooking, barefoot basic farming, infrequent bathing, spell casting) she escaped to the tech-yeses (hi-fi players, refined sugar, clean water, Band-Aids, tampons). Caroline still saw her most days, in her floppy hat and granny dress, when Caroline decided she wanted a moment of sotto voce commentary or just an unspoken collusion of outsider feeling. Caroline still didn’t feel entirely comfortable at the commune. She had been living at the dormitory as discreetly as possible — certainly she should have moved out by now. But building a house seemed a big commitment for someone in her position.

After collecting her weekly work assignment, Caroline met Berry on the trail, and they took a walk out beyond the edge of the commune. They sat eating sandwiches on some rocks by the stream. Caroline turned on Mother G’s portable radio. The Beach Boys’ song “Good Vibrations” came on. Caroline turned up the volume, and the song played up into the hills around them.

“This was the song my junior year at high school. That fake end, when it segues into this whole other sounding song but still is connected, somehow, to the old one — that blew my mind.” Caroline talked as she braided Berry’s hair. She just began combing it and braiding it without asking Berry. Otherwise Berry would start to get dreadlock mats and knots that were impossible to remove. Berry didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

“This song is all right.”

“This is a great song,” Caroline said.

“Thing about the Beach Boys, it’s not that they’re too corny or whatever. I don’t mind that. But they are completely not sexy—”

“Yes, that’s true—”

“Utterly sexless, even. Unless you are twelve years old.”

“That’s not the point.”

“What else could be the point?”