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Giving Blood
by Kirie Pedersen

Jana waited for her boyfriend, Marco, to arrive for his first visit to her new home, a one-room shack on Snee Oosh Road. “In the period before a breakup, the partners demonstrate an attitude of politeness, passivity and detachment,” Jana read. “One or both is resistant to argument or discussion.”

Jana was increasingly hopeless about salvaging their shipwrecked union.

“You don’t blink when I tell you I might sleep with someone,” she told him on the phone. “Your attitude seems to be Oh that will be good for you, dear. What can I do to help?”

“All I care is that we remain friends,” Marco said. “I don’t own you. I want what’s best for you.”

“What’s best for me is for you to give a damn.”

“Let’s talk when I get there,” Marco said.

Jana debated whether to tell him about Terry. Her second morning in the shack, she huddled on the single mattress. A car pulled into the driveway. She ran to the window, and there was Mazie’s gray Volvo.

Only it was Mazie’s husband, the minister, climbing out.

“Hello Jana,” he said as though continuing a conversation they’d never had.

Terry had seemed nice enough the day before when she met him at Mazie’s, but once he was inside her cabin, she felt nervous and awkward. Terry settled himself into her one chair. “When I met you yesterday, you seemed to have this maternal energy,” he said. “I don’t get much of that from my marriage. I’m sure you could see that.” Jana wanted to laugh, but he seemed serious. “I need be held right now.”

“I’m sorry,” Jana said. And she was. “I’m not the kind of person who touches people I don’t know.” She didn’t want to say she wasn’t maternal, because what woman admitted that.

“Thanks for being straight with me,” he said.

And he was gone.

But that wasn’t even the strangest. A few hours later, her phone rang. “Terry tells me you two are getting close,” Mazie said.

“He stopped by,” Jana said.

“I want you to know I’m glad you two are becoming friends,” Mazie said. “I want you to know it’s all right with me.”    

GIVING BLOOD

In the graveyard beneath the bridge that joined the island to the mainland, half the gravestones were for babies dead at birth. As the native population dwindled, white artists flocked to the island. Painters, potters, poets, and musicians built lean-tos and shacks. They claimed the island as a kind of Findhorn or cusp to which they were drawn by invisible forces.
 
STRING OF IMAGINARY BEADS

When she heard Marco’s Volkswagen pull into the driveway, Jana flung open the door to greet him. She threw her arms around him, kissed his neck and face. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” he said. “Though things have been in a real uproar. Your parents are upset you moved out without talking about it with anyone.”

“I talked it over with you.”

“They feel you just ditched out. Your father says you’ll ruin your career.”

“I’m not leaving my career,” she said. “I didn’t quit my job.” She moved to the one chair, watched as Marco lit the propane burner to make coffee in her little pot. “I don’t want to talk about my parents. What’s it been like for you, being apart?”

“We need to talk,” he said.  Jana counted on a string of imaginary beads. “I want to have other lovers,” he said. First, Jana felt as if she been injected with lidocaine. Then she wanted to fall to the floor, screaming.

Someone knocked at the door that opened off the bathing porch, and Jana hurried to open it. It was Mazie. “Don’t look at me,” Mazie said. “My hair’s greasy. I need a shower.”

“You look beautiful,” Jana said. She gathered towels, hung a blanket over the cubicle that held the shower. When Mazie emerged, her hair curling around her face, Jana introduced her to Marco. Mazie glanced at their faces, and then turned back to Jana. “I’ll come back later,” she said.

GROUP

Jana grew convinced she was, after all, as crazy as Marco said she was.

In particular, it seemed, Jana was crazy for clinging to the archaic notion of monogamy.

Marco suggested Jana try therapy, only you couldn’t call it that. It was called Group. You couldn’t even say “I’m in the group” or “I’m going to my group now.” And heaven forbid “I’m in therapy.”

No, it was strictly “I’m in Group,” the word an amber-colored womb.

The therapist was Martha. Then she changed her name: Sapphire. Then she was to be called facilitator. Finally, Martha-cum-Sapphire announced it unhip for her to be present at all. Her presence held implications of power, which fostered dependency. Henceforth she would appear only on alternate weeks. The other week, the group would be peer-facilitated.

So we pay half of what we pay now, right?” For Jana, finances were always a problem. She was so poor she was selling her blood plasma. “Hey, why are you all staring at me?” Jana said. “Did I ask an unhip question?”

“Declare leaders anachronistic,” Jana told Marco later. “And then charge clients for leading themselves.”

“How long did Marth-Saph say you’d require therapy?”

“Three or four years, and then she’d see,” Jana said. “I’d like to leave, but I’m afraid of what might happen. A moral miscarriage. A spiritual sinking. I might start drinking and drugging again. You might leave me.”

“Or you might leave me.”

Jana remained in Group, and that was the night Felix showed up. And Sapphire announced Mandatory Cuddling. Cuddling was henceforth the Group’s foundation. “You’ve all been denied cuddling as children,” she said. Now they would become children again and spend their nights cuddling with each member of group, one at a time. It would be safe.

“Only,” Sapphire said, glancing around the ring of dependent faces, “There is, of course, a no-sex rule. We don’t believe in rules here in Group. But if anyone sleeps together and becomes sexual, one of them must leave Group.”

What about you and Billy, Jana wanted to ask. Billy was in Sapphire’s group when she was still Martha, still called a therapist. He wasn’t even trained as a therapist. Now he was co-facilitator. Now he lived with Sapphire.

His eyes fixed on Sapphire, Billy sat cross-legged and silent.        

NEW MAN 

The night Felix showed up, Jana wrote in the small notebook each Group participant was required to carry: New man. Handsome. Quiet. Presenting problem inability to get close to people.

“He just sits there with his mouth shut looking so intelligent and wise,” Mazie was to say after she moved in with the rest of them. “But when I try to draw him out, and he never comes up with anything, I have to conclude there’s nothing there.”

So yes. Felix was handsome. Was that sufficient motivation for what Jana was to do? He had red hair, lots of it, unlike poor Marco, nearly bald at twenty seven. His features were even, and although only a few inches taller than Jana, his body was well proportioned and muscular. Later, as Felix and Jana reclined across the drab-grey coverings of his bed, he told her how smart he was.

“I never worked in school because it was all bullshit,” he said. “I always knew more than my teachers, and that pissed them off, so they’d flunk me.”

“I’m also psychic,” Felix continued. “When I meet a woman, I read her mind and tell her about herself. That freaks her out, and then she becomes dependent on me.”

Jana could claim she ended up with Marco and Felix because she was jealous of Mazie. Or perhaps it was because Vick, Jana’s first palliative for pain from Marco’s desire for open love, was training as a Red Paint Dancer and needed to be celibate.

Whatever the reasons offered or believed at the time, most of all it was because the denizens of the art colony found their way out of one bed, sometimes, by finding their way into another.

Sometimes, for whatever reasons, for better or worse, that’s just the way it was.