Read an Excerpt
Notes from Nethers
Growing Up in a Sixties Commune
By Sandra Lee Eugster Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2007 Sandra Eugster
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-89733-908-7
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
My mother is always one of the last people off the airplane. Dozens of others greet their loved ones, children run happily to returning fathers, couples kiss shyly or passionately, that momentary uncertainty of reunion safely bridged, solitary travelers look around to get their bearings and then head off toward baggage. Then finally, my mother appears at the end of the corridor. She is, predictably, engrossed in a lively discussion with a fellow passenger.
My mother has been getting slighter and shorter in recent years, the hunch at the back of her neck is more pronounced. She looks small. Her cropped dark hair, well mixed with gray, is askew on her head, a product of the frequent gesture of running her hands over her head in enthusiasm or intellectual consternation. Her face is heavily lined, but its animation keeps it mobile, and directs one's attention away from her heavy cheeks and prominent nose to her bright eyes. She is utterly without cosmetics. Never once has she colored her gray strands, moisturized her skin, or plucked a facial hair. She is dressed in layers, to assist her constant taking off and putting on of jackets and sweaters in response to shifts in temperature. The loose layers are piled on heedless of how they fit together, resulting in a shaggy profile. Her perennially too-long blue jeans are rolled up at the bottom, exposing wrinkled ankle socks above tattered "boys" tennis shoes with their laces untied.
My mother does not tie her shoes.
"No," she corrected me in a recent conversation. "I do tie them, they just never stay tied. I guess no one taught me how to tie my shoes right." The result is the same, loose strings flapping around her feet, shoes half slipping off.
Thus the tying of shoes is added to the list of things my mother says she was never taught; along with how to dress well, apply makeup, or cook anything more complicated than scrambled eggs. I think skeptically of my grandmother, who was meticulously dressed in hose and heels every day well into her 90's, was famous for her beef brisket, and would never be caught with untied laces. My guess is that my mother went to some effort to avoid learning these arts.
"I could be raped or murdered on a street corner," she will declare, to my ear emphasizing the raped with a kind of sexual relish, "and no one would take any notice. But let me set foot outside the door with my laces untied, and the world comes to a screeching halt in its efforts to set me straight. People will dash across four lanes of traffic, hurdle walls, chase after me for blocks to let me know that my shoes are untied." I am sure she persists in this eccentricity largely because of the response it elicits.
She is carrying the usual assortment of paper bags, knapsacks, extra jackets, and whatever curious receptacle is currently posing as her "purse." Unkindly, my sisters and I went through a phase of calling her a "bag lady." I know that the first thing she will do, once I have greeted her, is to count her items to be sure that she hasn't lost anything. We will wait while she thinks she has lost something, and discovers that she has not.
My mother spots me, and waves wildly with both arms, burdened as they are, as if I were across a channel, not twenty feet ahead of her in a hallway.
"Sandra, Sandra, come meet Marjorie, I think she might be your neighbor!" she calls loudly. This used to embarrass me to no end, that my mother was so loud.
I shake hands with Marjorie, who is a pleasant but anxious-looking person, supposedly living not more than three blocks away from me.
"What is the name of your neighborhood again?" demands my mother. "I never can remember it, but I described it to Marjorie, and she thinks she knows where it is. It's on the west side, right?"
"Yes," I say, reluctantly naming the area, wondering what my mother has signed me up for. Friendship? Membership in some organization? Participation in some cause?
"Oh, I'm so glad to meet you," says Marjorie. "Your mother and I have been talking, and she's just fabulous. I wish my mother was half as active and interesting! I wish I was! And she's been telling me all about you girls, and life at Nethers! What a fantastic place that must have been to grow up in, with all that freedom, and the goats and the gardens! It sounds like paradise. I'm so impressed! What was it like, really?!"
How many times have I been asked that question? And felt the clash of knowing how different my answer would be from my mother's.
"Oh," I say flipply, "just your basic hippie commune."
Even as I say the words "hippie commune," I feel guilty. We went to such pains to avoid that phrase and all its connotations. I use it now partly for shock value. How can I possibly explain? How can I convey to Marjorie in this brief moment the truth about growing up in a communal setting, about the reality of what it is like to share a bathroom — or outhouse — eat at the same table, sweat, cook, make music, dig holes, dance, build, weed gardens, play, and argue with seventeen or twenty other people on a daily basis? How can I get across to her that the idyllic-sounding freedom was, in reality, often terrifying and disorienting? Or reveal that as the commune grew and flourished, I became increasingly unsure and constricted? That is sort of embarrassing. Here is all this groovy open-mindedness, this free school, this culture of acceptance and tolerance, and I am so worried about everything I start getting headaches and develop this freaky nervous habit of contorting my mouth that makes me look like I have Tourettes. What the hell was wrong with me anyway? To this day, I can't think about that mouth thing without cringing, and can't be teased about it, however gently my husband does it. Truth be told, it was so hard to stop that I am still afraid, decades later, that I might again start grimacing, scowling, popping my jaw and screwing up my mouth just as I did all those years ago.
Meanwhile, my mother is standing there, immersed, as always, in her own experience, and what she thinks of as mine. She knows by now that her version of my childhood is very different from my own, but she still hopes to hear me rhapsodize about it, about the innocence, the lack of restrictions, the opportunities to exercise free will and thought. I can't muster it. The effort of explaining to Marjorie, much less to my mother, what it was really like feels insurmountable. I am reduced to platitudes.
"A commune," sighs Marjorie. "That's so cool! Did everybody sleep together, and hold hands, and smoke grass all the time?"
"Well, it wasn't exactly like that," I answer. "Anyway, I was only eight years old when it started." I can see her picturing lots of big zucchini, fine dope, and easy sex in exotic combinations and locations. She is off and running, rapt in her visions of utopian hedonism and young people with long flowing hair and headbands, communing with one another. And of course, we did all that as well, and sometimes it was wonderful. But that was only part of the story.
Marjorie is a good fifteen years older than I, just the age to have gone to live on a commune herself as a young woman, or to have known someone who did. If nothing else, I can be sure she has seen the movie Woodstock. But her picture of communal life has little to do with what I experienced. The stereotypes of an adult's imagination are simpler and more one-dimensional than my childhood reality. I expect this from her, but it is more troubling to know that my mother's version of my childhood is every bit as stereotyped and divorced from "reality" as hers. My version of the story speaks to the intensity of growing up with multiple parents — or none, depending on how you look at it — and the sting of the ever-present, ever-repeated transience of both friends and strangers. It is about a young girl feeling lonely and alienated much of the time, despite the best intentions that surround her, a tale of chaos and confusion mixed with love and joy and good will. It is a story of the loss of the integrity of my nuclear family, of being a child adrift in an adult's idealized venture. It is a tale of what it's like to be a child among adults who are striving to unloosen the fetters of conventional behavior. My hold on what to expect from people was a little shaky to begin with, but this put it over the top. It was the late '60s and early '70s — a time of great experimentation, historically and personally, and ours was an experimental style of living. But for me, it was no experiment. It was my unchosen life. Prisoner to my eccentric mother's determination to work for radical social change while raising her three daughters in the country, I spent nine years growing up in a "utopian" community. My first eight years had been passed in a relatively traditional middle-class home in Baltimore. I had had just enough experience with mainstream life to know that I wasn't in it anymore. Where I was, was another question. I didn't grow up in a foreign country; geographically, no oceans demarcated my land from others; no mountain range or river defined its borders, yet it could hardly have been more alien. It was a world apart. The commune set me off on a long struggle to fit in, and an initially Herculean effort to "pass" in mainstream society — to at least appear "normal," that elusive quality.
One thing I have since learned is how commonplace the feeling is of not fitting in, of alienation, of being different. Deep in many hearts lies a sense of fundamental unlikeness. My efforts to "fit in" began early, and have never really ended. Why is it that at 8 or 11 or 13, it was such a struggle for me to "be myself," to "go with the flow" in the warm balm of a group of well-meaning adults? Why was I so troubled?
Maybe it had to do with how often I didn't feel what it seemed I was supposed to feel. My reactions turned out to be off-kilter and hopelessly un-hip. Captive to visionaries, I was in a constant mad scramble to get with the dream. And it was something of a moving target, because I wasn't the dreamer. Nearly all those at Nethers had chosen to be there for idealistic reasons, and they promulgated an ethos of love and tolerance that I took literally and very seriously. I didn't know that they hadn't themselves necessarily arrived at their espoused states of grace, I just knew that I fell short. Because I occasionally felt judgmental, jealous, or distrustful, I was often resentful and aggrieved, and sometimes I even lied. I didn't love and accept everybody, as I was supposed to, I did feel competitive, even though we rotated under the net to prevent team unity when we played volleyball. I didn't feel free and uninhibited when naked with others, even though I was still an "innocent child." I longed for hamburgers and milkshakes, and I ultimately felt undermined by the "right" to singlehandedly block a decision from going through in our interminable weekly meetings. And witnessing the home birth was a lot of things, but it wasn't wonderful. Go figure.
"I just think it's wonderful," declares Marjorie. Her husband awaits her, and there is a tumult of greetings between them, and leavetakings with us. Marjorie impresses on me again how much she wants to "hear all about it," and how lucky for her that she got the seat next to such a fascinating person as my mother.
We head toward the escalators, and then my mother stops short, "Wait!" she cries. "I have to count my things! Here we go — my bag is one, my jacket is two, my purse makes three, my briefcase four, my suitcase five. But I started out with six! Where is number six? What have I lost?" She starts patting herself, feeling around her flat hips and her rounded stomach. She finds her glasses in the pouch of her windbreaker, her keys in her bra, and finally remembers her money belt. My mother pulls her jackets and sweaters up to her breasts, exposing the soft wrinkled skin of her loose stomach, and finds it still safely strapped around her middle. I take her bags, laden with her familiar musty smell, and we head out. Just as we reach the doors, a man loudly calls out from behind us.
"Ma'am! Ma'am!" We turn, inquiringly, and he races up to us breathless, his face red with urgency. "Ma'am, Ma'am, your shoelaces are untied!"
CHAPTER 2
Placenta Soup
The call came just before dawn. Suzanne ran through the house, upstairs and down, banging on a pot with a wooden spoon, proclaiming the news. In surprisingly little time, we had all piled into the van, which smelled faintly of the baby goats it had transported the day before. By first light, we headed out for the three-hour drive, easily sixteen of us crowded onto the seats, or sitting cross-legged on the floor in the back where bits of hay and the occasional raisin-like turd were evident. It was still early spring, raw and gray, and those of us in the back huddled together, sharing an opened sleeping bag Alan had thought to bring along. The van's heater roared, but no warmth ever got to us. Long anticipation charged the air and kept conversation to a murmur but, early as it was, no one wanted to sleep. I held my nose a little, the sleeping bag was kind of damp, and carried its own musty stink. The floor was hard and every bump in the road was translated directly to my rear end, which wasn't abundantly padded, but I was warm and safe and only a little apprehensive about this expedition.
In their neighboring commune, Kate and Marvin had turned a shed into their own private suite. There were straw mats on the floor, a potbellied stove, a cane rocker, and a big wooden chest under the window, covered with a cushion Kate had made. She had also made curtains from blue calico, and hung them over the windows. The bed — a thin foam mattress laid on a platform — was large, covered by an Indian print bedspread.
The room, as we entered, was sweltering. The wood stove had been burning so long and hot, it glowed. They must have kept it going all night. A pan sitting on top was filled with boiling water, and steam rose thick into the air. Someone had put eucalyptus leaves into the water, and the tang of it caught in my throat, burning simultaneously hot and cold. Several people were already there, sitting on the chest, the bed, and cross-legged on the floor. Now that our group had arrived, clustering around the doorway, there were about twenty-five of us in the room, not counting Marvin and Kate.
Kate seemed not to notice our entrance. She was sitting in the rocker, panting rhythmically, her fingers tracing small circles on each side of her belly, in time to her breaths, "Whoo Whoo Whoo Whoo." Her brow was furrowed in concentration, and her eyes were closed. Her shirt was hiked up to just below her breasts, displaying her belly in all its enormity. It was big. It was impossibly big. It was huge. The belly button protruded like a misplaced proboscis, and the skin was stretched so tight, I imagined it would echo if I so much as tapped it, or blew on it. Surely it would sing like a great drummed cello if drawn with a bow.
Marvin, long dark hair hanging sweat-soaked in his eyes, crouched between Kate's knees, breathing in time with her, his fingers tracing their own small circles on the self-same sphere, the bowl between them, the spoon-moon mandolin-bellied bubble-hilled mound. With the water steaming, and their rhythmic circles, they were like witches stirring a brew, or magicians summoning their common alchemy. I shifted back toward the door, unsure that I wanted to see what was going on.
Abruptly, the panting stopped. Marvin stood up, and Kate, arriving like a beclouded sun, looked up and smiled welcome. Marvin ushered us in, found us chairs and perches, all the time waving around a paperback manual he clutched in his hand, clearly no longer aware of its existence. How to Have Your Own Baby: A Partner's Manual for Home Delivery. I found a spot in the corner, and our group had barely begun to settle in, make chitchat, and inquire into the progress, when a shift in Kate's face signaled a return to intense concentration.
Throughout the long contraction, it seemed that she and Marvin had removed themselves, shielded by a curtain of common purpose that none could penetrate. The room became dimmer and hotter. Our sweat began to mingle with the steam from the boiling water, and the air was thick. After several moments, Kate again emerged, smiling and tucking her hair behind her ear in a gesture so casual and everyday that we wondered why we were all so tense.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Notes from Nethers by Sandra Lee Eugster. Copyright © 2007 Sandra Eugster. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
