Thirteen Crucifixions, 99

Margery was still in a heightened kind of state.  This had been going on since this morning, when she and Dwight had several times caught themselves on the edge of quarreling, then returning into the silence together, only to end up bickering again.  She wondered if it might be sexual tension between them.  She was also approaching her period, and he was beginning to look to her a little bit tantalizing.  She felt that she should revive the ancient custom of the woman shutting herself away in confinement until the end of her mensus.  This subject had frequently come up in the women’s collective.  They were all quite divided on this issue.  To Megan, this business of women’s confinement simply smacked of old-time patriarchy.  Women should make the most of tampons and whatever other modern conveniences, without the worry of men being able to use biology as destiny as a convenient excuse for reinforcing the economic-industrial construct of the type of profit-driven capitalism that has come from patriarchy.  Women had been thereby duped into denying their bodies and their natural power as women by forcing themselves to live as pseudo-males, relegating their natural cycle as an inconvenience slightly more distasteful than farting in public.  Women must reclaim the power and the glory of their own menstrual blood, and celebrate its rich metaphor of fecundity and life, and thus smash the patriarchy.  She still wasn’t resolved about this.

            “What are you thinking?” Carol asked.

            “That I feel my period coming on.”

            “Oh good.  Me too.”

            “Again.  I guess we’re synchronized now.  But I was also thinking of going into confinement.”

            “Oh?”

            “I want to find some way of celebrating the life cycle.”

            “Well”, said Marlene, “I think it’s all a bloody nuisance.”

            Glen started laughing.

            Randall said, “God, I don’t know how you women can live with it.”

            “We get to have babies and you don’t”,  Marlene said.

            “Aw!”

            Stephen said, “But we get to pee standing up.”

            “You like to pee sitting down”, Pierre said. “Remember?”

            “Oh!  Don’t listen to HER!” Stephen said.

            “Well”, Doris said, “I’m happy to announce that I no longer have to suffer the inconvenience.”

            “I too”, Alice said.

            “For me”, Carol said, “It’s the PMS.   That’s the hard part.”

            “Tell me about it”, Derek said.

            “Oh, who asked you?”

            Maria had been looking around the room in horrified silence.  Then she rose up, showing the full glory of her pregnancy.  “I find it absolutely appalling”, she announced, “That Canadian women are so ignorant as to carelessly flaunt such matters in the presence of men.  And in front of my little girl!  I wish to leave.  At once.  I would like someone, please, to call me a cab.”

            “I can drive you”, Derek said.

            “I prefer to travel alone.”

            “Are you sure?” Carol said.

            “Yes.  I am sure.”  She stared them all down in silence, then went into the bedroom for her coat and shoes, dragging her daughter by the hand.  As soon as they came out, clearly ready to leave, Glen reached for the phone and dialed a taxi.