Beggar of Love (33 page)

“Oh, the big bad butch girl who can fix anything and is never scared.”

“Hey, I can power through most anything. It’s the skidding and spinning that gets me in a stew.”

“Don’t be such a control freak,” Dawn said. “A little four-wheel cross-country skiing is fun.”

She scowled, gripping the wheel as if she could keep the car from flying. “For daredevils like you, maybe.”

“Jefferson, you live in New Hampshire now. Either you let me teach you to drive in snow and ice, or you might as well move back to the city.”

“Good gravy,” she said, and got ready to send the car into a spin again. “Maybe I should have gotten an SUV.”

“Are you kidding? These Avalons are tanks.”

“Bless stability control. Drew said a sedan would be better for hauling around retirees who couldn’t get into anything high off the ground. He also suggested a little elegance, so I got the heated leather seats. And the GPS, of course, to find these places.”

Jefferson’s grandfather had taught her to drive a big sedan in Dutchess when she was ten. Up and down the long driveway, around the old house, in and out of the garage. That man trusted her with his shiny black Lincoln, but when she got her license her parents didn’t let her drive in snow or ice. They weren’t far enough upstate for it to be a problem very often, and in the city she bussed or took the train if there was a chance of bad weather, or asked Ginger to drive.

“Wow,” she said.

Dawn looked at her. “What?”

“I bought a grown-up car. And I hate snow now. When did snow lose its magic and become my enemy?”

“That,” Dawn said, “is what we’re doing here today. Taking the sting out of snow.”

“Good. I want it to be magic again.”

“Okay, brake hard.”

She did and her tail end spun out.

“Don’t brake again yet! Steer into it. Yes. It was almost automatic this time, wasn’t it?”

“Automatic heart failure,” Jefferson said. “I’m beginning to see that learning to drive in the snow is like learning to dance sober. You stumble a lot. It’s easy to feel out of control.”

She braked on her own this time and brought herself out of the skid without coaching, then crunched into a small snowbank a plow had left in the parking lot. She turned off the car and held up her hand to keep Dawn from talking. The world around them had become a perfect picture of peace. The evergreen boughs hung low under inches of snow. There was no sound other than the ticking of her cooling engine. She couldn’t see the lake, but she felt its calm, perpetual presence, icy-coved, harbor-bound, icicle-ringed. Here, she thought, she slept well.

She recalled that Ginger, whose life was about movement, had loved the stillness of winters at the lake. She would carry a plaid car blanket down to the dock and sit cross-legged on it, stillness herself, like an ice sculpture. After a while her breath would become invisible. Jefferson would make hot cocoa when she got back. They’d sit in the warm kitchen, refrigerator whining, icicles cracking off the windows, with her family’s red stoneware mugs, and grin at each other, plan dinner, share thoughts, some perky Schubert on the stereo, nap in each other’s arms. Thirty years had passed since that winter before they were roommates when Ginger drove the old Nova up to the lake most weekends so they had a place to be together. And now Jefferson had to learn to drive in New Hampshire winter weather. At least the car had safety features Chevrolet hadn’t dreamed of when they made the Nova.

The Avalon was fast losing heat. She started the engine, but the tires didn’t move.

“Not to worry, Jef. This time depress the brakes a little to get both wheels turning, but not enough to lock them. That back-and-forth business we tried with the car may be good in bed, but it’s hell on a transmission.”

She laughed. “Where did you learn all these Hints to Heloise on Wheels, Northway?”

“Oh, I learned from Drew Blair. Did he tell you his dad was a mechanic and his older sister, dandy Andy, the gay one, was an absolute artist at fixing up cars? She has her own shop in San Francisco now. Drew says he used to follow her around and she’d let him polish hubcaps and hood ornaments. He’s taught me a lot.”

Jefferson laughed. “She raised him right—the woman fixes the cars and the man washes up after her.”

It turned out that Dawn was comfortable to be with. They’d laughed together all afternoon, Jefferson banishing pangs of missing Ginger when they cropped up.

“So what makes a city gay girl choose conservative Pipsborough?” Dawn asked as Jefferson practiced driving.

She told Dawn about her family’s ties to the lake and her cottage.

“A cottage on the lake,” Dawn responded, sounding impressed. “I’ll bet it’s no cottage. More like a lodge?”

“Maybe a small lodge. I spent summers as a kid swimming, waterskiing, and boating here. My father drove up weekends and Emmy’s reins were looser than they were in Dutchess, so Pipsborough always felt like freedom to me.”

It still did, she thought, and now she was beginning to be part of their little gay community, hanging out at Dawn’s, taking what she called a dyke break before returning to work. She had to get over to some woman’s house with a for-sale sign and paperwork. So far, she was only an assistant realtor, but she’d taken her agent’s test last week and knew she’d aced it. She’d been as scared of the test as she’d been driving on snow, scared she was too old to learn the minutiae required. She’d had to put in a lot more studying than she ever did in school, but she really wanted her new life and her new job to work. She’d thought about quitting teaching and selling property for years, anticipating that real estate could give her a freedom she’d never have in a classroom. New York was such a tough town to break into, though, that she’d never done it. Pipsborough was a whole different ball game.

She’d managed to get enough years in with the public-school system that she had a small pension. The interest from what her grandparents had left her when they died gave her a little more each month, and she’d socked away the $10,000 Emmy and Jarvy had been giving her every year for Christmas to save on inheritance taxes. She’d planned some day to buy a little condo at the lake. When she’d taken the leave of absence to bring Ginger to the lake last summer, her parents had surprised her—they wanted to trade the cottage for the apartment in the city. They went there so seldom now, they’d explained, and to tell the truth, Emmy said, her father wasn’t up to hauling wood and keeping the place shipshape, the way he used to. He wasn’t sober enough, she’d thought at the time. She knew they were furious about what the terrorists had done to their country and especially to their city. Moving into Manhattan afterward was the way they struck back and reclaimed their territory. Their minds were made up: the cottage was hers for the cost of taxes, insurance, and upkeep only.

Innisfree, she’d immediately dubbed it, after the poem Ginger had introduced her to all those years ago. Of all the dances Ginger had created, she’d most liked the one set to the song made from Yeats’s poem. She’d immediately recognized the spirit of Saturday Lake in the poem. Now, she remembered only one line, but it was enough: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow…”

If she’d loved the place as a kid, she grew even more attached as an adult. In summer breaks from teaching she’d come up for days at a time. She’d liked to watch the visiting grandkids of retirees belly-flopping off the end of docks as she once had and launching Sailfish from the beach. Old folks waded, skinny-legged, in the warm water or swam laps out to the raft and back.

Now she planned to overhaul her grandfather’s boat. She didn’t need one that powerful, but it was a beauty, an old Hacker Craft Runabout from the 1930s. It needed about forty coats of varnish to keep the mahogany looking good. Her father had everything rebuilt over the years—a total restoration from the frame out, with new gauges, new windscreens, and a 1994 six-cylinder engine. The boat, the
Maggie J.
, after her grandmother, could go 45 mph, but she only wanted it for tooling around the lake, exploring with more than a canoe as she’d longed to do when she was a kid. Her parents had been more interested in wine parties and the Barnstormers Summer Theater over in Tamworth than in entertaining a child. Now she could get a dog and train her to go boating. They’d pull into uninhabited sandy coves and swim in the warm water, then share lunch on the beaches. She’d throw sticks for Merry-Go-Round; she’d already named her, thinking if she gave her a fun name, she’d be fun. She had a heck of a lot of catching up to do on fun, now that she was here. Without Ginger.

Here—at the lake! She bathed her eyes in the vision of placid blue water and the green that outlined it. She’d never understood how stressful it was to live in the cacophony of urban life until she moved to the lake for good. After the horror years, as she thought of them, from 9/11 in 2001 to Ginger leaving in 2005, Ginger’s death in 2006, and quitting alcohol in the midst of all that, she needed a safe home. Nine/eleven had definitely started the whole sequence. She’d thought the whole city was going to blow, thought they’d been bombed and was waiting for the next attack. She’d shepherded the kids from her high-school hygiene class who hadn’t been picked up and escorted home to the auditorium, where many had waited into the evening, crying or giggling senselessly from nerves and fear; the teachers grim, holding themselves together for the students, but terrified, she learned later, every last one.

Jefferson and Lily Ann Lee had had plans for dinner the night of the attacks. Only when the last kids had gone home and she’d been walking the mile and a half to her apartment, looking around at the dazed people, some of them dusted with the fine light gray ash that she later saw blanketed Ground Zero and which she only recognized then had been more than incinerated structures, had also been the ashes of the dead; only on her long trek did she manage to understand that Lily Ann wouldn’t be meeting her for dinner. Her job was to procure whatever the crews needed. Jefferson hadn’t heard the news by then of all the trapped firefighters, hadn’t had time to start a vigil or to wait for news of Lily Ann. Her answering machine was miraculously blinking when she arrived home. Lily Ann, always thinking of other people, had arranged for her mother to call to say Lily Ann was fine and would be working as long as necessary so wouldn’t meet her for dinner that night.

A week after the attacks, on September 18, they met, mightily tall Lily Ann looking haggard and bent. Jefferson, by then aware of the extent of Lily Ann’s loss, had begged to do something to help. Lily Ann wanted to be held, so they got their lunch to go and went back to Lily Ann’s place, where she cried in Jefferson’s arms for almost half an hour before returning to what was by then being called Ground Zero. On the day of the attacks she’d been in her headquarters office. After fifteen years serving in station houses, and reaching lieutenant grade, Lily Ann had broken an ankle in three places. She hadn’t wanted to retire so, with her MBA, she’d gotten transferred to the fire department’s purchasing office. Her limp saved her life, but her guilt was a heavy pack she carried on her back instead of her gear as she expedited supplies for the rescuers day after day. Jefferson insisted on giving her a short, inexpert massage before Lily Ann left; then she cleaned Lily Ann’s apartment and went down to the grocery across the street to get her some frozen dinners and fresh fruit.

It wasn’t until she was vacuuming Lily Ann’s floors that she let herself think about what she needed to do for herself. She hadn’t been eating either. Café Femmes was open downtown, but it had been days before she had the time to get there for news of her friends. Everyone knew someone who’d been affected, and one of the kids who hung out there, a courier, was still missing. She got through AA meetings by being the convivial host, making coffee, listening, talking about how glad she was not to be drinking right now, when she’d be so vulnerable to obliterating herself with a terminal binge. Ginger’s brothers had gone rushing down there on an unauthorized rescue mission, but hadn’t gotten past the police barricades.

That week she’d lived through some kind of filter that made her feel far away, as if the shock of the devastating day had left her with a concussion. Voices sounded muffled, figures looked a little blurred, she made decisions she didn’t know she’d been contemplating, including looking into getting certified to teach in New Hampshire.

The 2001 school year had already begun, so she’d stayed until the following June and then kept going back. She was still there four years later when Ginger left. Then she used some sick time she’d accumulated and wandered in an uninformed way, telling herself she was not looking for Ginger and catching sight of her long copper hair everywhere. Where would she start a serious search? What if she found Ginger and was turned away? Ginger and Mitchell could have returned to New York, for all she knew. If she’d only gone after them she might…

That kind of thinking drove her nuts. Over the next few months, before Emmy offered her the cottage, she had visited some friends in Connecticut, but knew their promised land wasn’t hers. She’d been raised in privilege and felt drawn back to something greener, bluer, more a park-like setting than industrial towns or suburbs, more a lake than the unpredictable river up in Connecticut. She checked out Boston, but it looked ready to crumble even without a terrorist attack. The northern Maine coast was dramatically wild, but she wanted calm. Upstate New York, Vermont—neither offered what she wanted, though she didn’t have a clue what she wanted.

By the time Ginger left, she knew she didn’t want younger dykes looking at her like she was a troll when she danced with a silver-haired woman to a girl-group oldie. Good gravy, she was forty-six. Slack was showing around her neck, her face, and she was growing gray. Heaviness hadn’t been in her plans, but it was swallowing her like a second body. Actually, she didn’t see it herself. She still saw brown hair in the mirror, but her haircutter told her. She was not the lithe dyke sun god she saw in her mind’s eye. And she worried, a little, about who would want her, if Ginger didn’t come back; who she would be willing to expose her not-so-flat tummy to, her breasts, grown heavier. No one, was her immediate thought.