Beggar of Love (34 page)

The kids were so skinny. Had she actually been as thin in her twenties and thought it attractive? They wore so much makeup now and did strange things to their hair. She’d never been particularly attracted to bleached blondes or women with frosted hair, but couldn’t imagine why the baby femmes dyed their hair that dull black color or thought henna red made them what they called hotties. Green streaks or dreads, those didn’t bother her; they fit better with her idea of rebellion. But the eyes of the kids, they slid away as if she were a future they would not acknowledge and a past that shamed them. She could see that they were convinced not only of their immortality, but of their superiority, as she had been of her own, back then, and, to tell the truth, now.

It wasn’t that there weren’t women her age out there. She never thought that no one would want her. There were enough needy single—or not single—lesbians—or not lesbians—that she had no fear she’d hold no attraction for someone. Angela had two Dutchess County femmes she wanted to introduce Jefferson to, but Jefferson fretted that she would never want anyone but Ginger. She was surprised to realize that when she saw a face on the street that interested her, it was always the face of a woman within a few years of her own age. She’d smiled—her attractions had aged with her and beauty had become something different for her.

In the spring after Ginger walked out Jefferson wandered through the lakes region of New Hampshire, in a rented car she picked up at the Manchester airport, and drove into Pipsborough without Ginger, expecting to experience all the ambivalent feelings she had about her self-absorbed parents and her lonesome tomboy childhood. Instead, she grew excited, drawn to the sites of her memories.

Snow still covered the great green lawns of estates and inns alike, but the roads were clear. Under the sunny daylight, pines and birches shed snow like women dropping pure white shawls. Instead of going to her parents’ place, she checked into a large old cream-colored inn, tasting the area as a stranger might, and wanted to stay forever.

When more snow fell, she called the school to say she wouldn’t be in the next day or the next. Each night she went down to the mostly empty dining room for dinner. Every morning she walked a mile to the Pipsborough Café for breakfast with the locals. Later that winter she spent another week, and three more times in the spring she came up for long weekends, once as a treat for Lily Ann, who was upset that Jefferson wanted to leave the city, but by the end of the weekend looked better for the break.

“Could you find a place any whiter than this?” Lily Ann had asked with the old snap in her tone.

“I take it you don’t mean the winter snow? I’m planning to recruit some color to the area. If I move up here. If I get a real-estate license.”

She’d always liked to look at other people’s apartments and houses. It fascinated her the way everyone had different ideas about how to use space and how creative they could be. Pipsborough didn’t offer much in the way of employment, but when she made the move to the lake, the cheerful sixty-something guy who ran the real-estate agency in downtown Pipsborough, Marion Buckleback, had been glad to talk to her. They had coffee at the café a few times, and Buck put her in touch with the state agency that administered the exam. “If you taught New York City high-school kids,” he told her, when she’d confessed to having no sales experience, “you can sell a tent at the North Pole.” He’d added, “You’re not without charm, Ms. Jefferson. You cut a pretty smooth figure, as a matter of fact. There’s something about you buyers will trust. You look young, but you talk like you’ve been around long enough to know a good thing when you see one.”

His wife Serena was the other realtor in the office and she wanted to quit, pushing her husband to hire someone. She’d had several brushes with skin cancer, which had left her face and hands scarred. “I don’t want to frighten the buyers away,” she said, sadness plain in what had obviously become an old joke. Jefferson thought she sensed some resignation too. Serena Buckleback was getting ready to be sicker, maybe to die soon. Buck never dropped his salesman’s good spirits or whined about having a wife who seemed to age a decade in the first month Jefferson spent with them.

Dawn broke in on her memories. “I think you’ve got this driving-in-snow thing down, Ms. Jefferson.”

She realized she’d been completely absent as she followed Dawn’s instructions. She announced, “One more run, though.” Conscious of what I’m doing this time, she thought.

She eased out on the road and drove them to Dawn’s house in town, maneuvering over two ice patches and parallel parking on about two inches of snow, to show off.

“Ginger would be amazed,” she said.

“I’m amazed. You were like a robot in an electrical storm when we started. All charged up and currents gone wild.” Dawn reached for her and they hugged.

Jefferson looked at her as she opened the car door. Something comforting about Dawn allowed her to breathe more deeply in her presence. Dawn had a Saturday Lake stillness to her. “Thanks for scraping me off the wall. Let me treat you to lunch?”

“I wish,” Dawn replied. “Drew and Ryan are running over to the Home Depot in Tilton, and I need some things.”

“You and this community—it’s like you’re married to it.”

“Married would be wonderful. I so envy all the years you had with Ginger.”

“Hey, you know, I did feel married. I don’t think Ginger ever did. I don’t know. It wasn’t like that with us. We had a different kind of marriage.”

“Maybe you can give us country bumpkins lessons.”

“Right. Lessons. Me. Did you want all your dyke friends to run off with your gay male friends?”

“Whoops.”

She managed a three-point turn on Dawn’s narrow street and drove to the real-estate office quickly, as if the roads were clear. She was afraid she would turn back and ask Dawn and the boys to invite her to go shopping with them, like some lonesome little kid.

The three-quarter moon hung over a hill across Saturday Lake. Jefferson was alone in the ancestral cottage long after even the hunting camps had run out of beer and gone to bed. The lake was not known for its nightlife. Her windows were open to the cool air. The silence reminded her that the loons were gone for the winter. Not even the loons for company, she thought.

She hadn’t brought all that much in the way of possessions, having been in a mood to empty her life of the old. She was spending time at the natural-food store in Wolfeboro, buying whatever would cleanse her abused liver of alcohol’s abuse. Sleep came at odd times and she almost always gave in to it. Daily, she went into or out on the lake. There was something peaceful about a lake: the waters were still, the encircling land was a calming green. She loved the sounds of a boat on water and the occasional shout, slammed door, or honk of a horn on shore. The sky seemed to surround her in a protective embrace.

Her new home was larger than the apartment in New York, but it seemed easier to keep neat, with its smoke-darkened, wooden walls and big windows that looked out at water or trees on both sides. Her queen bed seemed to dwarf the master bedroom. She felt incomplete without her bouts of melancholy. Would a dog help? Its needs would give a structure to her days. Then she ran into a little kid shivering outside the grocery store who had been trying to give away six tiger kittens all day, with no luck, and expected her father to arrive soon, prepared to do away with them. He’d had the mother fixed, the little girl explained, and was picking her up now. She got to keep the mother, but these kittens were so cold. Jefferson carted them all home with a promise to return their blanket to the kid’s family. So much for a dog, she thought.

Timid at first, they turned into little ruffians. My gang, she called them, and gave them the names of graffiti artists she’d noticed in the city. Little Star, Dust, Risky, Crunch, Doze, and Lionel did fill up the bed, not only with their own fuzzy bodies, but with kitten spit-up and other mistakes she hadn’t anticipated. She could have had an animal back in the city if she’d been sober enough to feel she’d be there to give it enough attention, and if Ginger had been interested. Now not only did the kittens have a home, but with them around, she felt like she had one too; she couldn’t remember a lonely night. Maybe this was what she and Ginger had needed, little beings dependent on them.

Dust clambered over one foot now, grabbing for the ends of her running-shoe laces. Doze lay, paws up, on her grandfather’s easy chair next to the front window, where she could see beyond the porch to the lake. Jefferson loved these things right out of her childhood; better she have memories of her family than of Ginger. Like she could deny memories of Ginger. Risky was batting at the vertical blinds that lay open to the night. Lionel and Crunch were boxing on the couch and Little Star was feinting at Dust’s tail. She laughed aloud. She was making up for all those kittens Jarvy wouldn’t let her have, all those puppies she’d yearned for. Damn, she should have done this years ago. There was no question in her mind that alcohol had taken almost everything from her. Look how long it had been since she’d stopped drinking, and she was only now finding what she really liked in her life: the lake, the kittens, her home, her new friends. She was one of the lucky ones who’d been able to stop drinking.

Jefferson bent to pick up Crunch, the puniest cat. He’d had such a hard time eating dry kibble at first. Every bite was a stretch for his little jaw, but he’d insisted on chewing it like the bigger kittens and made the loudest crunches imaginable when he succeeded. Crunch’s tail was still a little spiky, slow to fill out like the others’ tails. He was responsible for putting Jefferson back to sleep when she came wide-awake in the dark, only to remember that Ginger wasn’t beside her. Crunch would climb to her chest and settle at the base of her throat, almost singing, he purred so heartily.

“What kind of life are we going to have together, Crunch? Will it always be calm and quiet like tonight, the seven of us hanging out together?” Crunch wriggled to get free and she set him on the couch. “Are you my way of keeping all possible girlfriends at arm’s length? Who would want someone with six cats?” She wondered if that was why she’d gained all this weight. Being attractive to women had been its own high; she didn’t know if she wanted to go there again. Maybe the kittens and the weight were anchors, exactly what she needed to be self-sufficient, untempted by the liquor and sex in which she’d tried to drown herself. She had become a victim of her own myth: too many women, all too welcome in too many bars with her free-spending ways, craving the attention good looks engendered.

One Saturday afternoon she heard a rough knock on the heavy wooden front door. Little Star looked up at her with wide eyes, then vanished back under the bed.

“I came to meet the kittens,” Buck said. He held out an icy-cold leather-gloved hand.

Jefferson sat Buck on a stool at the breakfast counter and filled two heavy mugs with hot chocolate and miniature marshmallows. She told him to help himself from the chipped gray pig that had been her grandmother’s cookie jar. She stocked it with macaroons. Risky was already sniffing Buck’s shoes, and Doze was sniffing Risky’s bottom. “Chocolate. My last addiction.” She raised her mug in a toast to her guest.

“If I’d known you wanted a cat, I could have given you some of ours.”

“Part you and Serena from your babies? No way.”

She collected the kittens and took them all, in her arms, to Buck. Only Crunch stayed on his lap, looking up at Buck’s neat silver beard in what appeared to be wonder. He finally climbed up Buck’s jacket and tried to cuddle with the beard, but lost his footing. Buck held Crunch against his cheek.

“How’s Serena?”

Buck brushed his beard back and forth against Crunch. “You know she had another treatment this week. She’s always pretty unhappy after one of those. Our oldest daughter arrived to help out. They don’t think much of my cooking.”

“Cooking? What’s that?”

She opened the freezer and showed him her collection of Lean Cuisines. The refrigerator closed, rubber on rubber. The seals were dried out; she’d need a repair soon. Buck laughed in his neat, quiet way. He was so much like Pipsborough itself, classy without being pretentious like so many of the people who lived over on Lake Winnipesaukee, which they seemed to think was not only larger than Saturday Lake, but better quality. Properties went for less on Saturday Lake and tended to be like the Jeffersons’: big enough for the family that owned it, but not a country estate or one of the newer, wasteful McMansions that were replacing so much of the forest.

There was a crash from the bedroom. Quickly she scanned the room. “Risky,” she called. She got up and peered into the bedroom. The green-shaded banker’s lamp was on its side on the night table, but hadn’t broken. Risky charged out from under the bed and grabbed her foot.

She carried Risky in and settled in the easy chair. Buck carefully checked the couch for kittens before he sat.

“I see that the Conservation Trust is getting the Kents’ land.”

“Thank goodness, yes.” Buck’s sweet smile grew wider. “The Kent kids are keeping the house and an acre around it. They almost sold the whole piece, intending to give a percentage of the proceeds to the Loon Preservation people over in Moultonborough.”

She considered. “This is better, right?” She’d always been vaguely aware of environmental issues, but beyond contributing to a fund for Central Park, she hadn’t paid much attention to them. “Better than one of these second-home zillionaires who are driving out the natives and the little people and the cabins on the lakes to rip out trees and build five-thousand-square-foot homes?” Like Pipsborough, Buck was a strange mix of Republican and conservationist.