The women sit around in a school cafeteria or a church great room; white walls, large windows, linoleum floors that stick and shine beneath their feet. Wherever they are, it is after hours. The usual inhabitants gone. They sit in folding chairs, the hard metal seats reminding them of their difficult choice to speak instead of stay silent. They look out the windows and, instead of night sky, dark, tree-lined parking lot, they see their own frightening reflections in the glass. Disheveled, unkempt, fallen from grace. They wonder what happened to their voices, the sounds that come from between their lips sound foreign. It is a hard pill to swallow. Although they have swallowed harder ones, sharper ones, jagged ones.
How do you say, it didn’t start out this way? This is Daphne. Who doesn’t love attention? The attention was nice, but I wanted to be something when I grew up, not just some wife with a suburban and three kids. He never asked me what I wanted. She looks at her nails, painted a pale green, staring at her hand like cards, she considers her next move.
Europa, with her thick, milk-white thighs, nods. She’s been smoking a cigarette and her face is engulfed in a grey cloud. They are sure that smoking is prohibited in the church, as it is in any public building here, but no one points to a sign. Does anyone want to know how these women are without their cigarettes, their glasses of wine, the chewing gum they snap incessantly, the things that keep them sane? That’s how they all begin, Europa says. You like the attention, then you don’t. You want it, then you don’t. I couldn’t resist the blondeness of his hair, the pale sweep of it across his forehead. I touched his forehead and there was no turning back.
I’m not that beautiful, Io began. I’m just a normal woman. What is it about me? What made him choose me? Io was drawing on a pad of paper, sketching her name over and over again in schoolgirl doodles and bubbles. Her voice was deep and scratchy and coming back from a bad case of laryngitis. Ah, they said, but she was the most beautiful take-out girl at Golden Dragon.
Leda says, I didn’t get a look at his face, but something tells me he was wearing a swan mask. She caught a glimpse of a long, orange beak, just as something long and red entered her elsewhere. He was behind her, of course, and he told her not to turn around, so she didn’t dare. The costume was good, but she thought she glimpsed a thin line of skin at his throat. She knew the voice, like maybe she had been talking to her son’s high school principal, or it could have been the President of the United States, it was that kind of familiarity. All this she thought before she gave in, before she went limp.
Proserpina says she’s still living with him and will probably never leave. He’s good most of the time. It was just at first, at the beginning, that he kind of snapped and held her hostage, wouldn’t let her see her mother. She sort of laughs, as much as any of them do sitting there in the circle, and says shouldn’t say that. But – hey – it’s April now, she says. Aren’t you all enjoying the nice weather?
That bitch Medea had no idea what she was doing when she drowned those kids. Niobe has some anger issues. If I’d known, if I’d known what was going to happen to my kids, I would have kept my damn mouth shut. As soon as you say anything, those kids are gone. Shot down in some alleyway somewhere. You don’t even have to do it yourself, someone else does it for you. I wonder what she would give to have her kids back.
They wondered vaguely why Niobe was there, how she got to this group when she didn’t have a problem with a man. But they remembered they’d been taught not to judge a book by its cover. A man disguised as a swan or a bull or a god may not be as he appeared. He’s never just a man. There’s something sharp, something jagged beneath the surface.
Dido, who is but a thin caricature of herself, pale and nearly grey, nearly lifeless, scrolls through emails on her BlackBerry. She sighs to herself and when she looks up at the group, there is the sense that she hasn’t been paying attention. They all hope to be like her someday, coming occasionally, instead of once each week. She says she’ll never trust a man again. I had a job to do, I had a good life, and he kept me from it; from now on, work comes first. There is the quiet ping of an email being sent, or received. They hear her and they hear that she is doing work, she is capable, she is healed, the group meetings waning.
Philomela, the last, sits silent and picks at a scab on her knee. Her eyes dart from corner to corner. The windows are so large, she wonders if anyone can’t see in, see them all there in a circle, in their metal folding chairs. The windows make her nervous. She opens her mouth to ask, could they move farther away from the windows, farther away from view, but she has forgotten the loss of her tongue, the empty space in the back of her throat vibrates hot, like she was on the verge of saying something. Her scars are fresh.
Alexandra Sladky 