Synopsis

When philosophy student Jayne Hart finds herself pregnant and alone in Santa Fe, she tackles the hard questions of CHOICE with scholarly intensity. Should she have the child or schedule an abortion? As an epic storm rages over the desert, Jayne's conflict with her lover, her family, her friends, and her fate, and her inner struggle with the dualities of ideas and reality, faith and reason, and the expecations of masculine and feminine, lead her to a new understanding of herself as a woman and a human being.

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 Reviews

"Loved it, loved it, loved it!" -- Kathryn Blume, The Accidental Activist, founder of The Lysistrata Project

"Above average prose.... A very intriguing first person point of view character is the hook... A literary-type novel with a slow pace but with lots of description and characterization. Would definitely appeal to the educated women's fiction reader." --Doris Booth, Authorlink

"Your book is so compelling. Even though I know the ending, I find myself in real suspense, and have to force myself to stop reading and go to bed. What a good writer you are, and what an interesting person. And how poignant to relive my own sad struggle so many years ago." --Jenny Israel, architect and mom

"You write like Monet...you do, really, creating a tranquil backdrop of mood and place against which the characters and actions float, with a holographic dimensionality and clarity." --Kilian Melloy, book critic, Wigglefish

"I loved your novel and would like to order 1/2 dozen copies! It is short, poetic, complex yet simple, full of surprises, and addresses issues all women (and men) relate to. The ending is powerful and satisfying, quite unique! Writing is definitely one of your many gifts; thank you for sharing it." --A. Stampfli, waitress

"I am so very impressed and proud of your opus. Your writing style is so very readable and the way you go about debating this very tough issues is thourough and enlightening. It both makes me feel fortunate that I haven't had to face that Choice, but it makes it more possible for me to empathize with others. I really didn't want to put it down. It was very intimate." --Alexandra Alisé, diva

"Anyone who reads the title might assume it's a gynological textbook. But it's so thoughtful, so tender, so personal -- and the thought of a treatise called "I, Uterus" by Aristotle's mistress is enticing!" --A. Montani

"What I experienced through Jayne was a profound transformation from her virginal innocence through the initiation and the anguish of self-awareness. You show the excitement of intellectual pursuit, the sacredness of sexuality - and the holiness implicit in the female sexual experience and Jayne's eventual connection to the Great Mother." -- Louise Hart, author

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 Excerpt

WITCHES

“Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle...”

A song floated up from far below and we recognized Ted’s schtick.  He and his girlfriend Mari were heading into upper commons. We descended from the heights  Olympus, we pushed through groups of students——mostly seniors——in the hall. Eavesdropping enviously on the conversations of these untouchable, mature people, I spied Beth, who was wearing a ponytail on top of her head, which dipped at me as we passed by. I slowed down to eavesdrop; the woman she was listening to was practically whispering about an apocryphal treatise on menstruation by Aristotle’s mistress. Apparently the hetaira, this woman said, the patrician prostitutes of Ancient Greece, were permitted to read and learn, and had more influence on their clients——senators and magistrates——than did their wives. Beth smiled and winked as Kevin dragged me onward.

Down the hall, a guy with the matted hair (we thought he never bathed——but he claimed they were something called “dredlocks”) was scolding a woman wearing a bandanna and a flannel shirt, who was blithely sucking the nitrous oxide out of a whipped cream bottle in the dorm fridge. “What are you doing? You’re denying someone their strawberry shortcake experience!”

Tonight was the night that all the seniors burned the rough drafts of their final papers, a mini-bacchanal designed to let off some tension before the crisis of final papers began for the rest of the school. Tomorrow was a Sunday that was traditionally marked by last-minute luxuries. Strawberries and cream. Trips to Ten Thousand Waves. Dinner at Molly’s.

Kevin and I walked in through one door of the commons room just as Mari and Ted were leaving through the other. They waved at us and Mari called out, “Ted’s room,” pushing a wobbly Ancel out the door ahead of her. Today Ancel’s hair was white——a peroxide accident, perhaps. Kevin elbowed me and pointed out Dave Garagan, who was sitting in a chair by the window with a blonde sophomore named Yana on his lap.

“Good for him,” I said, mixed feelings inside.

“He’s been after her since you gave him the ‘just good friends’ bit,” said Kevin.

“Yeah, right,” I laughed; Kevin’s theory on that speech is whoever gives it first wins.

We walked toward them to see if there was to be a break in the snuggling, but Garagan waved us away behind Yana’s back. Meanwhile, John Long had his sleepy eyes on her from the corner by the fireplace, where Gordo and his moons were having a heated discussion. That humiliating sexual encounter I mentioned?  It was with Steve Bone, who was not only alarmingly smart but drop-dead gorgeous. Bone and Gordo were listening to the slope-shouldered Al Honeycutt.

“Women can’t be philosophers,” Honeycutt was pontificating. “If they could, they’d be in the canon, they’d be on our reading list.” It was true, we hadn’t read the work of a woman writer all year.

“That’s bullshit,” said Bone, at least taking the proper side of the argument. “It’s an a priori argument that doesn’t account for social norms of history.” Then his dark eyes locked on me and I could see his wheels turning. A slow smile opened his lips. “What do YOU think, Jayne?” It had been six months since I’d heard him say my first name.

Kevin was getting a soda from the machine across the room.  He burst out stupidly, “She gets philosophical looking at the stars!” Gordo barked out laughing. I glared at Kevin, blushing. He didn’t know about me and Bone, but honestly!  With friends like that...?! I knew Honeycutt was wrong, but I couldn’t really think of an argument. There were other things I had wanted to say to Mr. Bone.

Pool balls clacked, and a short laugh came from the pool table, where a junior named Philip Willits was playing with a guy in a red sweatshirt I’d never seen before. Philip——or Philwil as he preferred to be called——was to out-Gordo Gordo before long.  He was tall and had bulky muscles and might have been handsome but for his crooked teeth and his abrasive sensibilities. He was tuning into the conversation for amusement.

Yana untangled her face from Garagan’s and glared. Everyone was waiting to see what happened. Still watching her, John Long spoke up. “What about Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen? Read them senior year.”

“What about Diotima?” asked Garagan, who couldn’t resist a good question, even with a friendly blonde on his lap.

“Sure,” said Honeycutt, enjoying the attention of the crowd, “there have been a few good women writers, women thinkers. But look at what they write about: romance, love and friendship, raising children, social status, domestic issues. They are more concerned with the private sphere. Social norms bear this out.”

“Case in point,” ventured Philwil in what he thought was sotto voce to his pool-partner, a jerk of his head indicating Yana. She scowled and whispered something in Garagan’s ear. He smiled. I just stood there with my mouth open.

“Like Gordo says,” Honeycutt continued, “It’s in women’s nature to serve. They don’t have the ability to sustain ideas the way men do.” My jaw must have hit the floor. Today, of course, I could have stomped over to the PC that’s in that room now and Googled up Hipparchia, Theano, and Hypatia of Alexandria. I could have told them most of Pythagoras’ work was ghost-written by women, and that Mary Magdalene’s reputation had been systematically besmirched after the Council of Nicea.

But we were still in the dark ages of the early eighties, before Hildegaard of Bingen was re-discovered by the New Age movement, before we had women at top levels of government. I just opened my mouth and stared, teetering on the emotional edge between my mother’s generation and what would be my daughter’s. Mom would have internalized the judgment. My kid would have laughed at it.

“No wonder you can’t get laid, Honeycutt,” joked Bone with a dark laugh, doing the guy thing and capping on his buddy. But he was looking right at me when he said it. His eyes were teasing me, too.

Those eyes. Those penetrating brown eyes with the dark lashes. I remember them so well because I’d stared into them a lot during our two or three intense coffee-shop conversations last October. I don’t even remember what we talked about, I just remember how fun it was to follow his intellectual acrobatics. One night he walked me home so we could keep talking.

At the end of high school, my girlfriends and I would fantasize about “college men”, as opposed to the annoying stream of “high school boys” who were more interested in how things would look to their friends than feel to us. So being able to luxuriate in witty conversation with such an attractive male felt like a dream fulfilled, but even though it really turned me on when he started kissing me between sentences, I wasn’t ready to go to bed with him. He said he understood, and offered me a back rub instead. Fine. As I explained, that’s what we did here.

But this “college man” was not like sweet Garagan. He rubbed my shoulders, great. He rubbed my spine, fine, talking all the time--he appreciated his brilliance as much as I did. He eased my pants around my hips to reach my lower back, which was new but didn’t seem unreasonable. Then a quality in his voice changed and his hands caressed my butt.  He edged my pants down farther and said I had a beautiful ass. “I thought you liked my mind,” I joked, stiffening a little but curious where this was going.

“Oh, your mind, you have a beautiful mind. A beautiful mind, I love your mind,” his brilliant banter turned to babble as he begain to rub himself against me. I didn’t know what to do. It was just too weird for words, especially when he asked me to hand him some tissues. By the time he left my virtue was technically intact but something had certainly been violated. I had a tang in my mouth for weeks, and we never resumed our interesting conversations. He was always too busy in discourse with other girls in the coffee shop, never the same ones twice, and I could see clearly now that he used his gift for brilliant conversation strictly as a seduction device. The irony was, I might have actually opened up to him the next time, had he asked and not taken. College man, indeed. Soon after that he began revolving around Gordo.

Bone raised an eyebrow at me now, the first acknowledgement that anything had ever happened between us, or perhaps a judgement that nothing actually had. I remembered one thing he said to me while we were kissing: “I’m not as good a guy as you think I am.” I had thought it was a dramatic line, but he was telling me the truth, and after all, I do appreciate honesty. I had learned my lesson and moved on. But in his eyes, I now saw, I was to remain a piece of beautiful ass.

But that is more than enough about Mr. Bone. I was far more concerned with Honeycutt’s point of view. I felt naked, at a loss. Like, just for having tits, I should be an expert on this. Gordo, Philwil, and all the other guys were looking at me like I represented all women, and I was supposed to know better, to straighten them out. I’m sorry, I thought. I’ve read the same books you guys have. If they mention women at all it’s almost always in the objective. I was trying to think of a way to make a point about Aristotle’s mistress.

“I don’t even think of myself as a woman most days,” I said instead. “I think of myself as a person.” Everyone just looked at me.

Pool balls clacked.

Philwil’s pool partner casually broke the silence. The guy in the ratty red sweatshirt was directing his words to Philwil, but everyone could hear. “So I read this amazing book while I was on break about nature and women. Did you know that in the year Newton published Optics,” he said, “400 ‘witches’ were burned at stake in one town in Spain?”

Philwil leaned over to take a shot. “Oh, come on. You don’t really think there was a connection, do you?”

The stranger looked at him quizzically. “A question of vision, perhaps.” Then he glanced my way. Wow.

As Kevin and I left the commons room, John Long was still staring at Yana on Garagan’s lap. Pushing the door open with his butt, Kevin looked at me fondly and said, “Women are all witches, you know.”

“Excuse me?” I stared. Now this from Kevin?

He held the door open for me. “I mean, if I bled for a week every month, I’d be dead.”

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