Best Lesbian Romance 2014 (5 page)

“You don't like it?”

“I do, I just wish—I don't know. For something new. New air.”

“It's overrated.”

“What is?”

“New air.”

I looked down the stairs to the glass sliding door that opened out onto the patio. There was Nancy's back, and the lit-up face of Poppy's friend Annabelle. They were drinking martinis and leaning in close to one another. I felt the warmth of Clara's arm near mine, the little blond hairs tickling me.

I stood, not steadily, and said, “I need to get outta here.”

Clara said, “Do you want to go to my place? It isn't far.”

Under any other circumstance I would have said no. But that afternoon did not feel normal. I felt like a fish that had suddenly grown legs, or a human waking to a set of gills—unsure of what to do with myself, afraid of the strange gift I'd been given.

I said sure. I motioned to Clara to follow me, and we slipped out the side door by the downstairs bathroom. Walking across the lawn, the grass long and lush and tickling my ankles, I felt a moment of urgency pass through me. I stopped abruptly and turned. Clara, not paying attention, almost crashed into me.

I said, my voice quiet though I knew it didn't matter, “I wonder how long it'll be till they notice we're gone?” And I giggled. The sound was foreign as it emerged from my mouth and filled the air. Clara raised her eyebrows and gave a sly smile.

“Maybe never,” she said, and I hoped she was right.

She whistled at the old maroon Volvo. I dug in my purse for my keys and when I unearthed them, she closed her hand around mine. “Could I drive? I love these old cars,” she said.

“Where's your car?” I asked, confused.

“I don't have one.”

“How'd you get here?”

“I walked,” she said.

I never let anyone drive my car. The old Volvo's clutch was loose and it frequently ground between gears or stalled out in second if it wasn't given the proper finesse. It had been my dad's before he died.

Maybe it was her hand around mine. Maybe it was the dying of another summer. Maybe it was the feeling of a petal or two loosening from the bud. I gave her the keys. She got in and leaned across the seat to pop open the door. She said, “Get in.” Coming from anyone else it would have seemed a command, but from her, it was gentle. Most everything about her was gentle.

All I really knew about her was that she worked with Dale (which department, had she said?) and that she lived on Wood Street and dressed like a dandy. Or at least, she had for the party we were leaving—pressed gray trousers and matching vest, a burgundy tie knotted over a white short-sleeved oxford.

I'd never been to Wood Street, in fact had no idea where it was. It wasn't like Northampton was a small town, but having been around for so many years, I figured I knew all the streets, neighborhoods, places to see or be seen. Wood Street, Clara told me, was at the edge of town, out by the highway.

It was only a few miles, but Clara took the long way, down the narrow back streets, turning right and left and left again. Her pants pulled taut over her legs as she worked the pedals—she was slender but solid, I could see the muscles in her thighs flex as she pressed the clutch—and her spoon-shaped fingers manipulated the gearshift with ease.

Stopped at a red light, she glanced over at me. Autumn hadn't peeled back summer's warmth, though September was almost finished, and we drove with the windows down, my arm extended and hand gliding the air currents. Poppy would wonder where I was when the party ended, but that was several hours away. She liked to recap the minutiae as she cleared dirty glasses and loaded the dishwasher. It was her favorite part of the party, or at least one of them. Her sweet round face would be flushed with more gossip, recounting the silly moments—
Did you see Max hit Greg with the croquet mallet? Priceless
—who'd been drunk and who'd not shown.

Clara and I drove past pastel Victorians and farmhouses with sagging front porches. She drove slowly, as if relishing each turn the wheel made, each time she downshifted. I stared out the window, saw my reflection in the side mirror—dark hair lifting in the breeze, the sharp curve of my nose. The
streets became unfamiliar, the houses and yards shabbier.

I lived near the college, in the opposite direction from which we were headed, in a second-floor apartment with refurbished wood floors and drafty windows. The apartment, beautiful and spacious, cost more than half my monthly income at the food safety nonprofit where I worked, but I'd reasoned it was worth it—given the location. I could walk to cafés and bars, there was a meticulous park only a few blocks away. Years ago, when I'd signed the lease, I'd reasoned that was enough. Now it loomed as a symbol of my inadequacy—sterile and stagnant.

As we got closer to the highway, she said, “I have a cat. You aren't allergic, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I have a cat too. Laurent.”

“Mine's Bell.”

“Like the translator.”

She looked at me as if I'd unintentionally caught her naked. Then she looked forward again, smiling. “Yeah, like the translator.” Her teeth were remarkably white but very crooked, both incisors jutting over the teeth in front of them.

She pulled up to the curb in front of a small white house with white shutters. She eased the gearshift into neutral, sliding it back and forth a few times before killing the engine. Noise from the highway filled the air: steel rushing, the peculiar long whine of cars passing through, the occasional horn or tractor trailer, the dissonance of movement.

“Here we are,” she said.

I sat staring at the house until she reached across me and opened the passenger door. She didn't touch me, but her arm so close to my chest made me hold my breath. I was suddenly afraid, as if the gills I'd imagined growing earlier could suck in air because of Clara's presence.

Clara got out of the car and waited for me to do the same
before locking it with the key. Most people didn't know that was how to lock those old Volvos, that just pushing down the button inside the door did nothing. She handed me the keys and we went up the walkway together.

“You have a house, but not a car,” I said. Agitation and desire bubbled in me.

“A fair trade, don't you think?” she said.

She opened the front door, letting me enter before her, and I was about to turn, about to say
I have to go,
because I wanted to go, wanted to put space between me and this woman I barely knew, whose hand was on the small of my back sending spark waves through my body, when I noticed the white. It was hard not to. Everything in the small front room was painted white. Not ivory, not cream. Pure white, straight from the can. The only furniture in the room was an overstuffed white chair, atop which sat a small white cat. Bell. She meowed and jumped down and ran into the house.

Fascination short-circuited my nervousness and pulled me farther inside. I followed Clara from room to room. Each yielded more white—floors, baseboards and molding, the entire bathroom, the bedspread and curtains and mirror frames. There were occasional splashes of color—a squat, curvy aqua-color vase on a little shelf, a deep purple throw over the end of the bed—but everything else was white. And there wasn't much of anything. Entire rooms were empty. Probably every piece of furniture in the house would have fit into her bedroom, which was not particularly large. I tried to think of something to say, but only inane sentences—
You like white
—came to mind. I kept quiet and tried to not let my mind run over with anxiety. We passed a door with a small square cut from the bottom—
The basement,
Clara said. Was the basement also white? I wondered. It was better not to know.

In the kitchen, the last stop on the tour, everything, as I expected it to be, was white. The refrigerator, the stove, the countertop and linoleum, the dishes sitting on the open shelves. It was a small space, as if it had been carved out of an old pantry as an afterthought, and for both of us to fit inside, we had to stand very close. Clara's body gave off a sweet heat—vanilla and patchouli and cherry cigarillos. She offered me a drink.

“Milk?” I said before I could stop myself.

Her lips curled in a wry smile. It was unbearably sexy. “No milk,” she said. “Water, whiskey, or wine.”
W
words, I thought. How strange.

“Whiskey.”

“Good choice.” She reached up and brought down two white handleless mugs and a bottle of bourbon.

By now, the sun was slinking downward in the sky and diffuse light fell through the curtainless window, suffusing the kitchen with an ethereal gilt. The whiskey's deep amber glowed. Clara did not offer ice, and though I would have preferred it, I didn't ask for any.

“Let's go out back,” she said.

“Clara,” I said.

“Sienna?” She turned to me, and the light coming in the window threw her face into shadow. There was, in her features, something so placid, as if she had never expected anything her entire life, and thus had never been disappointed.

“Sorry, nothing,” I said. I wanted to ask about the white, wanted to ask why she'd invited me home, wanted to reach my hand out and grab hers, feel her warm palm and supple fingers.

We went through the dining room and out onto the deck. The yard was a small patch of scrubby grass, and beyond that a line of evergreens bordered the incline up to the highway, where I could see the guardrails and cars as they zoomed by.

“You get used to the noise, after a while,” she said, sitting in an Adirondack chair. Painted white, as was the deck. I sat next to her in the other Adirondack.

“Are you tenured?” I asked, and then regretted it. What a weird thing to bring up out of nowhere.

“Tenure track, yeah,” she said.

“I didn't ask what you teach,” I said.

“Philosophy,” she said.

“Oh.”

“Not a philosophy person, eh?”

I shook my head. “A little abstract for me. I took one class in college. Practically failed.”

She laughed and sipped her whiskey. “It isn't like the real world. That's true.”

“Why Northampton?” I asked.

“Why not? When you have debts to pay and no one dependent on you, any new town will do.”

“Really?”

“No,” she said and lapsed into silence. After a while, she said, “I grew up in this house. And my parents gave it to me when they up and relocated to Phoenix. The position opened up at the college and I thought, Why not? I'd been gone seventeen years. Why not come home?”

“Why haven't we met before?” I asked. Poppy and Dale threw parties at least once a month. Certainly Clara would have been invited.

“I don't go out much. I'm pretty solitary.”

“Why'd you come to the party today?”

She stared off into the line of trees bordering the yard. “Hard to say. Needed a change of scenery, I guess. What about you?”

“I always go to Poppy's parties. She's my best friend.”

“Do you like them?”

“What? The parties or Dale and Poppy?”

“The parties.”

“Mostly,” I said. “But they can be—what's the right word? Under-stimulating.”

She nodded. The way the setting sunlight fell over her face exaggerated her sharp features. I wondered if it did the same for mine—if my neck appeared skinnier, my ears larger.

“Dale and Poppy seem very happy,” Clara said.

“They are. They've got the perfect life.”

“You think so?”

As soon as she asked, I knew I wasn't really sure. Poppy certainly pretended to be happy if she wasn't, and I went along with it, never questioning or pushing past the surface. Our friendship no longer plumbed the depths the way it once had, in college, and in that disorienting first year out of it. When she married Dale, Poppy entered a world I no longer belonged to, and though I had no real desire to follow her there, I missed the old her—the one that matched me.

But I'd been alone long enough to harness my often disturbing disorientation within the world. Those moments when the solid earth slipped out from under me and left me kicking in the ether. When I woke at night gasping for breath and wondering where I was. With my dad dead, it happened more and more often.

Even the seasons, those trusty indicators of time's passage, seemed to slip and slide away from me. This afternoon, the sultry warmth of it, the drifting, decaying smell of leaves and whisper of cool evening, something cracked open inside me. Nothing, I knew, was as it appeared. “I honestly don't know,” I said, answering Clara's question. I had no idea if Poppy's life was really perfect, and I would never dare ask. “Nothing's perfect, I suppose.”

Clara and I watched the sun descend. It had been a long time since I'd sat like that—with everything and nothing to say. As the thick gashes of magenta and orange striped the horizon, Clara became not a stranger, but a promise.