Lilac Mines (10 page)

Felix shakes her head. Tawn is rubbing off on her. It's just as likely that Cal was sweet and gentle, the kind of guy who takes his dates berry-picking. It's likely that “L” is not Lilac Ambrose. And it's
very
likely that Cal is not the scary-studly miner from the photo. What are the chances?

The postcard becomes an artifact in Felix's hands. Suddenly she feels guilty touching it, like she should be wearing gloves. But she can't quite let go either. She holds it gently, Maybe-Lilac's words between her own purple-glitter thumbnails. Out loud, she says, “All my love, Lilac.”

Al assumes she'll go back home and Lilac Mines will fade into a strange, distant episode, but she's not quite ready to be sure of it. So she gives herself a few more days, another week, to pretend that Lilac Mines is real. She tries not to think about the fact that the days now add up to nearly two months.

On Fridays and Saturdays, the women eat dinner in a hurry, dress in a drawn-out frenzy and head for Lilac's, where they look at each other as if half of them didn't walk over together. As if the butches' DAs weren't sculpted from spit on palms, as if the femmes didn't have to pay for their own drinks. Al has consumed more beer in the past eight weeks than she has in her life up till now. She's gone out more in the past seven days than during all of high school. She's compressed a lifetime into a handful of weeks and, for now, it's Fresno that is fuzzy and unreal.

One night, she touches Meg's hair. She's playing darts next to Jody, whose arm slices through the air like a tractor-trailer rumbling through the hot valley—not quite graceful, but accurate and unstoppable. The frayed dart pricks a ring near the middle.

“You should see her when she's sober.” Caleb the bartender is sweeping coins from the bar into his palm. Al has learned that Caleb smiles only with his eyes. At first she thought he was unfriendly, but now she knows she just has to look closely. This is a world of looking closely: handkerchiefs peeking out of men's pockets mean different things depending on whether they are orange or green or light blue. A girl off limits yesterday might be available today, but you have to move in oh so slowly. Al has to still herself to sense the movement, like a rabbit with its ears up.

Jody is frustrated that the dart is not closer to the bull's-eye. She throws her head back and shakes out her arms. She takes bar games very seriously.

“Your turn,” she says to Al.

Al is less sober than Jody, and probably got worse marks in Phys Ed. Her strategy in dodgeball was always to avoid the ball at first, comfortable in the throng of fleeing students, then—when it was being thrown by one of the milder members of the other team—throw herself in its path and get tagged out before she became a real target. Jody probably played like a boy, actually
trying
to catch the ball.

Al rolls the dart in her fingers, the dartboard swaying like a happy moon. She lets go. Suddenly Meg is where the moon was, and the dart is heading toward her neck. Meg turns, her lips forming a dark red O.

But Meg must have been a P.E. ace as well. She puts her purse up as a shield. The dart pierces it with a
thwip.

Al lunges toward Meg. Her vision has proved untrustworthy, so her fingers take over. They land on Meg's dark hair—shiny, somewhere between ash and chocolate. She's wearing it down tonight, and it falls just below her shoulders. Somehow Al is cupping a handful. It is so heavy it feels slightly obscene—hair this thick should be regulated. It's just a little wet. Bordering on coarse. And the combination of weight and texture is undeniably real.

“Careful there,” says Meg, and Al lets her hair drop and bounce. “I want to keep both my eyes if you don't mind.” Her voice is smooth and wide, like her lips. She's smiling.

“Sorry. That was some move. With the purse.”

“Likewise. Except for the purse part.” She plucks the dart from her bag. There's a pinhole in the satin.

“Did I damage anything?”

Meg snaps open her purse and peeks inside. “Dildo's okay.”

Al feels her ears turn the color of Meg's lipstick.

“I'm just joking around,” Meg says. “I didn't mean to embarrass you. Butches can be such prudes.”

Does this mean there
isn't
a dildo in Meg's purse? Al has only recently heard about them. Maybe butches use them but femmes carry them? Al is happy to be called a butch, one of the gang. She's less happy to be called a prude. But gangs are slippery like that. There are benefits and consequences of membership.

“But—well, I think you're sweet,” Meg clarifies. When Al fidgets, Meg plants a kiss on her cheek, as if to prove it.

Now Meg's lipstick takes over Al's whole body—the red, the heat.

Al fumbles, drunk and floating toward the old tin ceiling. “I want to keep both of your eyes too,” she says.

The second kiss happens during the tenth week of Al's unemployment. She has already traipsed Calla Boulevard and Main Street in her black slacks and white shirt. Lilac Mines Green Grocer is not hiring, nor is Main Street Market. All Al knows how to do is work in a grocery store, but she has tried the butcher shop and coffeeshop as well. The latter had a “Help Wanted” sign in the window, but the owner studied her for a minute, then said, “Sorry, that sign's old. We filled that position two weeks ago.” Al suspects her clothing is to blame, but if she left the church in one of her schoolgirl skirts, Jody would call her a Saturday night butch.

Today she's trying Washoe Street, a less commercial stretch of town. So far the real estate office and tailor don't need anyone. It's late afternoon now, late fall. The air has taken on a crisp urgency. Exhausted, Al sits down on a wooden bench outside a two-story brick building with a faded ad on its side for Dr. Bell's Scientific Cough Suppressant. For the hundredth time, she contemplates returning to Fresno. She wants her father to direct her toward a case of canned lima beans and say, “Give us one of your eighth-wonder-of-the-world pyramids, kiddo.” She misses his voice. She misses not having to say anything herself, sitting for hours among the undemanding vegetables and earnest grains of Hill Food & Supply.

“You're not bad-looking in the daylight, either.”

Al looks up. Meg has appeared, like Glinda the Good Witch in her pink bubble. She's wearing a tight brown skirt and a yellow blouse, silk or at least silky. Her lipstick is even redder, if that's possible. She props a stack of papers and books on her hip like a baby and carries a paper cup of coffee from the shop that's not hiring in her free hand. She's not bad-looking in the daylight herself.

“Meg, hi!”

“Don't sound so surprised. I don't live at Lilac's, you know.”

“I know.” Al blushes. As much as she's heard Jody and Imogen and the other women discuss jobs and local landmarks, a part of her thought they
did
live at the bar; the bar and the church, maybe, but nowhere else. That they were magical enough to pull it off, while Al had to recite her cash register skills repeatedly. But now it appears that Meg is real. Al doesn't know if she wants her to be real or not.

“I work upstairs,” she explains. “For a crazy Indian named Luke Twentyman. I'm helping him research a book about Lilac Mines. At least, that's the idea. Really I'm listening to his stories and reminding him to pay the phone bill.”

“Wow,” says Al. Although Meg is nonchalant, her job sounds important, academic. She's never known a researcher before.

Meg gets a mischievous look on her face. “Want to see the place? Luke is down the street at the post office.”

Al follows Meg's curvy hips and muscular calves up a narrow staircase and down a hallway that smells like old newspaper. Luke's office is cramped and hot. Two hand-lettered signs lean against the bookcase: TWENTYMAN FOR MAYOR '62 and VOTE TWENTYMAN 1963. Two maps of Lilac Mines curl from the walls, one of the streets and one of the underground tunnels, which look like streets on paper. Luke's big desk is strewn with papers and sepia-tone photos. Meg's smaller desk seems to be growing its own junior mess. There are stacks and stacks of books, so much paper that it seems all the answers in the world must be stacked somewhere in this office. Meg is shiny and young in the middle of it. She smells like fresh coffee.

There is nowhere to sit—the chairs are piled high with papers, as well—and Al doesn't know where to stand. She leans from one leg to the other, hands in her pockets. “So, um, what are you researching? You know, specifically?”

Meg laughs. “Oh, who knows. Who ever knows with Luke.” She talks about him like he's her favorite eccentric uncle. “One day it's the mining days, another it's the Clarksons. Today it's the Clarksons.”

“The Clarksons?”

“The guys that own the mill. They bought up all the land when it was worth nothing, and now it's worth, well, more than nothing, I guess. Luke always calls them 'robber barons.' He uses words like that.”

“Jody would kill for a job at the mill,” Al says.

“What butch wouldn't? Hell, I'd work there myself if they'd hire me.”

As difficult as it is to picture Meg doing manual labor, it's just as impossible to imagine anyone turning her down. Everyone, it seems, would want to spend as much time in Meg's radius as possible. Right now Al is trying to figure out how to do just that.

“How come you don't live in old church with everyone else?” Al asks.

“It's not everyone,” Meg says. Her whole face becomes smaller for a minute, pinched together. “This town has a really narrow definition of 'everyone.' Anyhow, I did. I lived there for a while when I first moved here. But some people don't like it if you don't do every little thing their way. And I had enough money to rent my own place. My dad sent me a check for tuition every month. Or so he thought.”

Half of her mouth relents. Her semi-smile lets Al know that she—Al, who is always the last to know—is in on the joke.

Al nods. Meg is standing so close to her that she can see how her gold hoop earrings pull at her earlobes. Al wants to touch her dewy, end-of-the-day skin. Thumbtacked to the wall just over Meg's shoulder is a photo of two girls holding hands. They are probably 15 or 16, but they wear serious pioneer expressions and busy, grown-up hats. Their slightly blurry, clasped hands are the only hint that they're still young girls. Or maybe it's a hint of something else.

Al opens her mouth to ask who they are. But something stops her. They are already the thing she needs them to be, which is the thing that gives her the courage to lean forward and kiss Meg on her red lips.

Meg's whole body responds, her tongue and her breasts and her hands, which cup Al's chin. They say,
This is okay, this is good.
Al has never kissed anyone before, but her body seems to know the story. Her hand knows how to reach around to the small of Meg's back, to rest lightly on the waistband of her skirt. Her pores open up. Her tongue circles. She's suddenly conscious of her underwear. But her ears pick up footsteps in the hallway, and her head pulls away.

What was she thinking? This is an office, not Lilac's. Meg looks at her as if Al is the person who could turn an office into Lilac's. But Al presses her face against the frosted glass in the door. She can't see anything.

“Was that him?”

Meg seems unconcerned. The sound fades. “Guess not. I took you for a goody-two-shoes, but wow.” She sighs happily. Her sepia-brown hair is trying to escape its up-do. “This innocent girl from… Fresno, right? But you don't kiss like a goody-two-shoes.”

Al shakes with excitement and nervousness. She wants Meg's words to be true. She wants to disappear before anything can ruin what just happened. Before what just happened can ruin the rest of her life.

“I should go,” Al laments. “He'll be back any minute, right?”

“I could say you're my cousin, come to visit.”

“I should go,” Al repeats.

Meg puts her hand on Al's shoulder. It is a ten-colored tropical bird, perched there. “See you at Lilac's then?”

“At Lilac's.” Al slips down the empty staircase and onto the empty street before anyone can discover which world she has sneaked into, and which she's slithered out of.

Weeks later, the row of women at the bar goes: femme, butch, butch, femme, femme, butch. More specifically: Meg, Al, Jody, Imogen, Sylvie, Jean. So that each woman can be seated between her love and her confidante. It's been three weeks, 17 kisses and one half-naked romp. Meg and Al are official. So are Sylvie and Jean, Meg's ex. The two new couples slid together easily, and it feels like destiny.

Meg is tracing circles on Al's slacks with her red-polished finger. Al is finding it difficult to concentrate on what Jody is saying, something about President Johnson, how he will never measure up to Kennedy, who would have ushered in a new era if he had lived. “He understood young people, he thought the way we think,” Jody says.

“Sounds like he's got your vote,” Shallan jokes.

“Politics according to Jody,” says Imogen, rolling her eyes. She turns to Sylvie, who is ignoring Jean the way women ignore their husbands, and Jean is left dangling like a husband, drumming the bar with her fingers.

“I'll tell you what else about President Kennedy,” Jody says, fist meeting shiny wood bar in emphasis. “Everyone was so worried about him being more loyal to the Pope than to the Constitution, right? Well, this is what I say: they didn't need to worry because the Pope is overseas, far away, in Europe or wherever. And the Constitution is right here. I mean, maybe not framed in the presidential bedroom or nothing, but he was still surrounded by it. He woke up every day in the White House, met with Congress, maybe listened to a Supreme Court hearing now and then, ate some nice American lunch. You can't just
forget
all that, no matter how much you love Invisible God and Invisible Pope. You do what the people around you do.”

“I think you're wrong,” says Imogen. “I liked him too, but I think if he were still alive, people'd be picking on him same as Johnson. He'd be a little better looking, but he'd do dumb things, too. He'd mess with Asia and Cuba some more. It's just 'cause he's dead that everybody loves him. People like living in the past, especially white people. They can look back on five, ten, a hundred years ago and say, 'Aw, look how pretty and golden everything was back then.' And that pretty picture guides whatever they do in present times.”