Reinventing Mona Read Online Free PDF Page A

finger-down-the-throat during the Womyn’s Forest Walks where the moms and younger girls sang “Siyahamba” in three-part harmony. Jess nearly died of embarrassment when her mother hosted a “Red Party” when she got her first period. All of the women and girls blew some goofy hollow animal tusk and shouted these crazy guttural chants at the full moon. The men served us all tea and fruit bars they actually baked, and kept calling us Goddess Jessica, Goddess Mona, Goddess So and So. When I think of it now, their baking for us really was kind of sweet. Really. I don’t just want it to be sweet, it really was. At thirty years old, I can see this with greater ease than I could as a teenager trapped on a commune.
    As Jessica and I churned the compost, we fantasized about what it would be like to live with normal families. We’d never met any mainstream families, and we didn’t own a television so the Cosbys were strangers to us, but somehow we knew they were out there. Our parents acknowledged the people of “Babylon” (which Jessica and I actually thought was somewhere in Montana) with thinly masked disdain. They valued things instead of people, my mother told us. They had become a culture of disposability, said Freddy. They were out of touch with their human capabilities, said Asia. They watched too much television, Morgan said. Francesca was the only one who’d interrupt these self-righteous tirades with, “Oh, let them be. You chose your lifestyle, now be happy and live it.” I always took great comfort when Francesca piped in with these comments, because it showed that our parents weren’t always right. Someone older and wiser could—and did—chide them for judging others. She never knew it, but Francesca always equalized the ever-present, taxing guilt I felt about desperately wanting to take a field trip to Babylon, not to attend a nuclear disarmament rally, but to go to the mall, flirt with boys who watched TV, and drink half of an Orange Julius from a Styrofoam cup.
    The night I spiked a fever of 104 degrees, guilt was the furthest thing from my mind, though. I felt only a shivering, painful delirium with spoonfuls of joy about getting to sleep in my very own room. Normally, I slept in a large dorm room shared with other kids from age four-to-Todd, the wavy-haired seventeen-year-old son of Asia and Morgan. The babies slept with their parents until they were weaned, which was just fine by the three of us teenagers. We heard enough sniffling, moaning, and giggling as it was. My father and Freddy built bunk beds for the boys, and for some reason, all of us girls had futons on the floor. On the ceiling was a sky blue, sheet-thin tapestry with cotton clouds that my mother made after our first year in Montana. When she tacked it to the bedroom ceiling, the sheet billowed down, creating a soft illusion of natural sky. My mother said ceilings were oppressive. She even wove threads of gold subtly into the sheet so in the daylight it looked like the thinnest rays of sunshine. For the four days I was sick, I got to stay in my very own room, which was really the sewing room, but I didn’t care. It was such a luxury to spend my days in absolute silence that I decided to extend my illness for just a little longer.
    “So what are we going to do today, Miss Camille?” Francesca asked after the school bus filled with anti-nuke protestors had pulled out of our driveway.
    I smiled at the reference to the film.
    “We have time to braid your hair if you still want,” Francesca offered. I nodded, went upstairs to grab my brush, and returned with a skip. It was liberating to be able to walk with the energy I felt instead of pretending to drag sluggishly in my attempt to ditch the protest. “Now I can’t do it like that Bo Dudley character, mind you, but I’ll do what I can.”
    The thing I remember most about Francesca is her set of reaching and nimble fingers. Her hands were older than she, bony with blue veins pressed