Lilac Mines (7 page)

She glares at the shirtless miner.
Watch out, fucker. I'm going to track you down.
It feels good. Looking at a real photo, not a pencil sketch. It's a little like that coming-out rush: the sense of a world unseen but knowable.

Gossip reigns at Lilac's. After a few hours in the bar, Anna Lisa will learn its name and many others. Imogen links up with a half-circle of skirted women peering out from beneath their eyelashes near the jukebox. Anna Lisa wants to join them—they seem as if they're exchanging important information, and Anna Lisa is full of questions:
Who are you all? How did you get here?
The bar seems like an oasis, lush and improbable, but she knows its patrons were not just conjured by the desert. Before Anna Lisa can float over to Imogen's crescent of girls, Jody pulls her to a table with two other trousered women. There are more rules at work here than the ones Jody announced, but Anna Lisa would need a pad and pen to begin to make sense of them.

“She's not gonna show up. She wouldn't dare,” says a square-jawed woman named Shallan.

“Why not? I showed up,” says Jean, who has sloping, sorrowful eyebrows and shoulders to match.

Anna Lisa tries to keep up without intruding too much. “Who?”

“Jean's femme,” Jody says.

“Former femme,” clarifies Jean. “Well, she's still a femme, she just ain't mine.”

Femme
means
girl
in French, Anna Lisa remembers. Are they French? It doesn't quite add up, but nothing tonight has.

“Meg's a gutsy broad, though,” Jody says. “If anyone would show up, Meg would.”

“This place is too damn small,” says Jean. A wispy beer-foam mustache lingers on her top lip. “I guess I can't stop her from finding a new butch if she wants, but I don't want to
see
it, you know?”

Once Anna Lisa's father found a tortoise in the road and named it Butch. Anna Lisa and Suzy fed him lettuce and dog food and called him Butchy. They assumed the tortoise was a him, but really they had no way of knowing.

“You'll find someone before she does,” says Shallan. She's as tall as a man, with dark hair slicked back into a tiny ponytail at the nape of her neck. She has green, green eyes and long black lashes that look wrong on her boxy face. Her voice nearly shakes with loyalty. It's sweet even as it etches invisible lines across the bar. Butches. Femmes. Couples. Singles.

“That's Shallan's girl over there.” Jody gestures with her chin to a compact, black-haired woman dusting her face with powder. “Edith. She's a catch. Never says a bad word and likes low-cut dresses.”

“Watch it,” laughs Shallan.

“Do You Want to Know a Secret?” is playing on the jukebox. Jean is watching the door, and Anna Lisa is watching Jean. When Jean's worried expression cramps even further, Anna Lisa follows her gaze. Her pain is Anna Lisa's initiation: this is what loving a girl can do to a girl.

The woman who crosses the doorway and beelines for the bar is not quite pretty, but still the word
gorgeous
enters Anna Lisa's mind, because gorgeous is big bold colors, a little over the top, a bird of paradise. Meg is taller than Caleb, and he leans forward on his toes to take her order. She jingles a key chain on one finger. She's dressed in a pleated plaid skirt, a loose, sleeveless blouse and high heels that tilt as threateningly as the mountain. Meg is a femme, clearly, but she doesn't immediately join Imogen and friends in their designated area. She takes a long, slow sip of her drink, rolling her keys in her free hand.

With a clatter, the keys hit the floor.

“Shit,” says Meg. When she bends down to get them, a strand of shiny brown hair escapes the twist at the back of her head. Anna Lisa sees a night not going according to plan, and she wants to tell this woman everything. About how three days ago she was weighing oranges and thinking about how, if the world were the size of a fruit, it would be smoother than an orange and rougher than an apple (a distant fact from school). At the table with Jody and Jean and Shallan, Anna Lisa wishes she could drink her drink faster. She wishes she had boots instead of worn loafers. But for Meg, she wants to peel an orange and put it in her smooth, slightly trembling hands.

“Just ignore her,” Jody says to Jean, but it might as well be to Anna Lisa.

Jody and Imogen are dancing to “Paper Roses.” No particular step; they're just a knot of arms and legs swaying to the music. Imogen's chin rests on Jody's shoulder. Jody closes her eyes, and Anna Lisa can see the rest of the day drift away. One of Imogen's pink-nailed hands finds its way into Jody's back pocket. Jody touches one of Imogen's sculpted curls, and Imogen pulls her head back and smiles, as if to say,
I love you, but hands off the hair.
Together they are like a centaur, a mythical creature. Anna Lisa can't help but stare. Awkward and graceful and rare. By the time the song ends, she's a little in love with both of them.

Caleb has replaced her beer, and Anna Lisa is doing her best with her third drink of the evening, but the swiveling bar stool is starting to make her dizzy. Hoping for the curative powers of fresh air, she heads for the door.

Shallan grabs her arm. “You leaving?”

“No, I was just stepping out for some air.”

Shallan laughs. “You can't just stand out in the street, kid. If you need to need to fend off puking, go out the back door.”

Anna Lisa is embarrassed that her new and rocky relationship with alcohol is so obvious, but she turns around and heads out the back door, crossing beneath the red light bulb that has not yet flashed. The alley is narrow and dark, crisscrossed with telephone wires. The row of overflowing trash cans a few feet away do nothing for her cartwheeling stomach. She sits down with her back to the stucco wall, pulls in her knees, and bows her head.
Just stay still,
she tells herself.
Make it go away.
She's not entirely sure what “it” is. Breathing through her mouth, she imagines herself at home in bed. The house will have finally cooled down by this hour. She'll pull her hair off her neck and fan it behind her on the pillow she's had as long as she can remember. It's indented with the shape of her head. It cradles her through all her dreams, the pleasant ones and the ones that nudge her into a dreading wakefulness. Right now she wants to wake up in her ordinary life. She wants to see her mother in curlers, extending a glass of water, her head cocked in concern.

“Got a light?”

Anna Lisa looks up and sees pink and orange pleats. Above them a shelf of breasts, bare hands twirling an unlit cigarette like a miniature baton. She struggles to stand, bracing herself against the rough outside wall of the bar.

“Sorry to bug you. It's just there's no one inside I particularly feel like asking right now,” says the woman who is Meg, who is so close Anna Lisa can smell her shampoo.

“I don't smoke,” Anna Lisa apologizes. She wants to learn, she wants to breathe this air, even if it makes her sick.

Meg rummages through her white, faux leather purse. It seems to be a deep and messy place. She does not find matches, but she does pull out a wad of paper. When she unfolds it, Anna Lisa sees that it is stationery. A row of pink daisies runs along the top edge. She finds a pencil stub with a squashed eraser and begins to scrawl on the paper in big, oblong letters. Anna Lisa catches
Dear Petra, Do you remember how I told you that Jean
—before Meg looks up at her.

“I'm sorry,” Anna Lisa gulps. Bizarrely, she finds herself envying Petra, whoever she is. She wants Meg to spend five cents on
her
for a stamp. She wants that slanting, outraged handwriting.

“Do you ever feel like faraway people understand better than the ones close by?” Meg says. Her eyes are the color of rust. She looks hard at Anna Lisa and then past her, deep into the alley.

“Maybe,” Anna Lisa says. She doesn't know any faraway people. “Why did you come here?” she asks, meaning Lilac Mines. She's still in her dream—she doesn't know which kind it will be yet—and she wants to know what sort of real lives her fellow dream-world citizens left behind. Or were they here all along, waiting for her?

“I have a right to be here,” Meg says fiercely. She steels her free hand on her hip, and Anna Lisa finds herself thinking,
Yes, of course, that's all there is to it.
Her need for comfort recedes in Meg's tough, sleek wake. “Don't let Jean tell you otherwise.”

“Oh—no, she didn't. I mean—I'm Anna Lisa.”

“Anna Lisa,” Meg repeats. The letter and pencil return to her purse. “I'm Meg. That's a lot of name, you know. And kind of prissy. You could shorten it, say, to A.L. … Al.”

Anna Lisa's stomach begins to feel less like an impending storm and more like a flock of birds preparing for migration, preening their feathers before the flight south. She tries on the name. “Al.” In her head, she tries Al-and-Meg.

Meg looks more cheerful now, too. “Hang on,” she says. She slips back into the bar and returns with a glass of water. Her smile is full of answers and secrets. She dips her hand into the glass, a pale aquarium creature. When she extracts it, she flings a spray of water at Anna Lisa. The drops are ice-cold. She gasps, as if Meg herself put her fingers on Anna Lisa's skin. Did Meg know she was sick?

“I hereby baptize you,” says Meg. “Al of Lilac Mines.”

Anna Lisa doesn't know what to say. But she knows the answer to one secret: it's just as hard to talk to girls, the flirting kind of talk stitched with meaning. But she wants more. Whereas John from the bus made her tired and nervous, Meg makes her want to try. Anna Lisa rubs her wet face. Meg mines her purse again and this time finds a single, splintery match. She lights her cigarette: a tiny, bright fire in the dingy alley.

“How do you feel about used clothes? Do they ever, um, scare you?” Until now, all of Tawn Twentyman's questions have been fairly normal: Do you have retail experience? Can you work Saturdays once in a while? Felix responded cheerfully and confidently, suppressing her vague annoyance. Wasn't it obvious to this girl that she was overqualified on all fronts? Felix is wearing an old jean skirt that has been merged with an old patchwork skirt by a Melrose seamstress. There's a small astroturf heart sewn on her tank top, just to the right of her real heart. All this
and
a college degree.

Having a job will get her out of Anna Lisa's house and, she hopes, give her night-brain something better to dream about. The frat boys are always more sinister than they were in reality, because in her dreams she knows what's coming. As for Dream-Eva, she's perfect: she never stresses out or rolls her eyes the way Real-Eva did. Felix hates her subconscious for idealizing her.

Tawn, the thrift shop's manager, is wearing a baggy T-shirt with a stretched-out neck over black jeans that do not flare in the least. The regulation blue smock doesn't help. Her waist-length black hair is tangled in a manner that might be interesting if Felix could be sure it was the result of a style choice, not a misplaced hairbrush. Tawn looks like she could be gay, in a frumpy sort of way, but the rules are different in Lilac Mines.

“What do you mean by 'scare me'?” Felix asks.

“Well, would you be comfortable doing intake? Unloading and organizing all the stuff that comes off the truck?”

“Oh, sure, that's the best part, I bet,” Felix says. “I'm not all prissy about clothes that are old or smelly. You have to sift through a lot if you want to find the treasures, right?” She reminds herself that she's interviewing, not shopping, and adds, “And I would love to help with window displays. Have you ever read
Confessions of a Window Dresser
by Simon Doonan? It's really smart.”

Tawn looks at her blankly. It figures, but Felix hopes she wins points for research. The Lilac Mines Goodwill is not Barney's, but Felix vows to find the realistic mannequins lounging in too-big togs as bizarre and ripe as Simon does.

“I really love vintage,” Felix continues. “There's such an art to it, compared to, like, mall shopping. I'm a total thrift store hound. Every time I see something kind of interesting, I immediately start thinking about how I could work it into my wardrobe. My roommate has one of those old BeDazzlers—remember, from the '80s? She found it at this flea market. And we both had our own BeDazzlers back in the day, but of course we got rid of them when rhinestones went out of style the first time.”

“But you're okay doing intake?” Tawn repeats.

“Yeah.” Is there something Felix should know about this task?

“You wouldn't have to price stuff or anything, just kind of organize it.”

“Oh, I'm really organized. It's just my personality.”

Tawn looks down at her clipboard. “Okay, lemme see if there was anything else I was going to ask you.” She's Felix's age, maybe younger. She has a round white face, significant cheekbones and dark eyes that open a little too widely, as if everything Felix says is troubling or surprising. It makes Felix feel like even more of a city girl, as if she has a full-face tattoo instead of just a small silver ball below her bottom lip. These big-fish possibilities please her, but she's also struck with a desire to make those scared eyes laugh.

“Nope, those are all my questions,” Tawn concludes. “Is there anything you want to know?”

Felix swallows. “Well, it's not really a question, but I should probably mention… I had, um, an accident before I came here, I broke a rib. So I'm not supposed to lift anything heavy for another few weeks. So I probably shouldn't rearrange the furniture area or anything for a while.” She usually goes to the gym three times a week—well, at least twice a week—but feels like an 80-year-old, talking about her aching bones during a job interview.

“That's okay,” Tawn assures her. “I make Matty do most of that stuff anyway.” She scratches her head. “I should probably think it over a while and then call, but I think I'll just hire you now. Can you start Friday? That's when the truck comes.”

Before she leaves, Felix buys a preppy V-neck sweater and a stack of old postcards. Tawn gives her the employee discount.

“I could have gotten you a job at the school,” Anna Lisa says. Felix is still angry at her aunt, but she'd half hoped that Anna Lisa would be impressed by her new blue-collar job. “It would probably pay better, even though it would just be clerical, most likely. At least you wouldn't have to move around too much.”

“I'm not
that
delicate,” Felix protests.

After a day that melted her eyeliner, giving her a sad clown look, it's finally starting to cool off. They're on Anna Lisa's balcony with the lemonade of Felix's fantasies and strawberry ice cream, handmade by her aunt. Felix thinks of ice cream like she thinks of pasta, candy, and almost any kind of sauce—as elements that cannot be broken down into simpler parts. But knowing that the pale pink ice cream sweating in her bowl did not enter the world fully formed, that it took milk and sugar and salt and labor, makes it delicious. Still, their week of monosyllabic exchanges is bitter in her mouth.

“I can pay rent now, and buy groceries and stuff,” Felix offers, thinking about Anna Lisa's free-room-and-board comment the first night.

“I'm doing fine, you know,” Anna Lisa bristles. “I've supported myself for 40 years.”

“Right, but you've never had to support an invalid niece.”

“Felix, I said it's fine,” Anna Lisa snaps. “Buy yourself some records or something. CDs.” She looks over Felix's interview ensemble. “Some new clothes.”

Felix takes a long swallow of lemonade and wipes her hand on her skirt.

“Hey, Anna Lisa?”

“Mm?”

“Do you have, like, a girlfriend?” She's never sure what older gay people call their significant others. You have to outgrow “girlfriend” at some point, but “partner” is so serious and “lover” is scandalous and “ladyfriend” is comical, though fun. Felix doesn't really know any older gay people.

Anna Lisa doesn't look uncomfortable, but she also doesn't seem like she plans to answer. She just focuses on the patchwork mountain in front of them. Eventually, she says, “No… No, not now. There was—”She pauses and seems to switch directions. “There was a woman I met at a nursing conference. We dated for a little while. But nothing recently.”

“What was she like?”

“It was really just for a short time.”

Felix waits for Anna Lisa to ask if Felix has a girlfriend. The story of Eva's disappearance waits just behind her teeth. She wants Anna Lisa to sympathize and promise her that there's a new love on the horizon, that pain will make her grow stronger and all that. Crane and Robbie and Jia Li promised those things, but they were all in their mid-20s too, blindly guessing what might be around the corner. Anna Lisa just keeps taking small bites of her ice cream, shaggy brown hair blocking most of her profile.

On her way to the library Wednesday morning, Felix drops three postcards in the mailbox. She hasn't looked through even half of them yet, but she did address a few of the blank ones. She's not sure what to say to her friends or even her parents and sisters. She knows they need to know she's okay, so she peppers the cards with sarcasm and exclamation points.

This morning, as Anna Lisa searched for the pooper-scooper, Felix told her she was going to check out a book. Summer reading. The truth is, she's beginning her search for Lilac. Maybe it's the rosebud hair ribbon. Maybe it's the miner's white smile and brown chest muscles that stick in her head, merging with Guy Guy. Lilac doesn't even get a photograph. Doesn't even get a dress, just one lonely accessory.

The library is in the brown, treeless part of town, just above East Main Street. It's a prefab structure that looks elegant compared to the exhausted trailers and shacks fanning out behind it. The yards here are marked by sun-cracked Big Wheels, fence posts adorned with inverted purple bottles, dishwashers put out to pasture. When you're poor you live in the open, a life exposed.

A library window poster promises, “Reading answers all your questions!” Below the slogan, children clutch books, looking satisfied. But when she tries the door, it's locked. As far as she can tell, the hours aren't posted anywhere. She sits down on the top step. It's too hot to begin the walk back right away. She was excited that the library was so close, but Lilac Mines miles are longer than regular miles. Sweat drips between her smallish boobs, the bandage makes her hotter. For the first time since she cut her hair, she wishes it were long enough to put in a ponytail—the inch that rests on her neck is far too much. The dust has turned her black toenail polish to gray.

“It's not open Wednesdays.”

Felix's muscles tense, ready to run. Some redneck from one of the trailers will slaughter her for trespassing on this forsaken land. She looks up. A man with a ruddy, stubbly face shadowed by a blue baseball cap peers down from the back of a tall, muscular mule. The mule pulls a handmade metal cart with a bumper sticker:
I brake for mules.

She exhales slowly. “I couldn't find any hours posted.”

The man shrugs. “Gary Schipp, the guy who runs it, pretty much keeps the hours he feels like. But he never feels like coming on Wednesdays, seems like.”

“What kind of library doesn't have regular hours?”

“This kind,” says the man.

Felix hasn't been to a public library since high school. She went to the university library in college and now she frequents bookstores because she likes to drink coffee while she reads. Now that she's made the effort, she believes the library should be open.

“Nice mule,” Felix says. “What's his name?”

“Lilac,” says the man. He removes his hat and wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. “Kind of a long story. When I got him, I didn't know nothing about mules. I was apprenticing with this old welder—that's what I do for a living, since raising mules don't pay much. I was apprenticing with this old guy, a Clamper, and he was just brimming with trivia about this town. The lost girl and the silver and all that. Most of it didn't interest me much, but I've always had a soft spot for animals and when he said that they used to lose a mule a day—or even two—in the mines, well, that really struck me. Said it took two more mules to pull the body out of the mine shaft, this 1200-pound animal dragged down the mountain by its own kin, like some kinda mule funeral procession. The thought of it just disturbed me, I guess, and I found myself wanting to do right by mules.” He looks up. “You look like a city girl… I must be boring you.”

“No, not at all. I mean, I am—I'm from L.A.—but I'm not bored.”

Lilac waves his ears and flutters his silver-brown lips. He appears a tad bored, but in an understanding way, as if humoring senile grandparents.

“Yeah? You don't say! I grew up in Hollywood.” The man looks like he was swaddled in horse blankets as a baby. Felix cannot picture him in Hollywood. “Never did anything but get in trouble there, though. It's not for me.”

“I'm not sure it's for me either,” Felix says. “So. the mules?”

“Right, the mules. Well, Lilac here was my first, this little runty baby, and I didn't know nothing about them then, like I said. I thought it would be cute to name her Lilac, like a whatchamacallit, an homage. I thought all mules were girls, like calico cats, so I didn't even think to ask about the sex. But the name had stuck by the time I found out he was a boy, and I couldn't bring myself to change it to Lyle or nothing. It's wild, though—'stead of thinking of my mule as a girl, I started to think of that little girl that got lost as a boy. Like Lilac was a boy's name. And when I picture her wandering around all lonely down there, I picture her as this tomboyish kinda girl.”

Lilac shakes his head. The man adds, “I'm Ernie Janss, by the way.”

“Felix. Ketay. I've got a boy's name, so, well…it's really spooky, the whole Lilac Ambrose thing.” Spooky is not the right word for the alchemy of loss and fever and mystery in Felix's stomach.

“I've heard people say they found bones up in the mine. Just here and there. I don't know about that—this place was fulla hippies in the '60s and '70s, and I figure that if there was anything to be found, they made off with it a long time ago. Probably left a lot of crap, too. Probably had barbeques and sing-alongs and whatnot up there.

“Nice meeting you, Felix,” says Ernie, touching his baseball cap. “If you ever want to take a ride on a mule, I'm at all the fairs. Me and my daughter'll be at the Lilac Mines Festival come spring. You enjoy your stay.”

“Thanks.”

Lilac and Ernie make a wide turn and crunch up the gravel road, the cart clattering behind them, toward a cluster of trailers.

She returns to the library Thursday afternoon; this time she called ahead. An old woman sits at a center library table with a stack of large-print mystery novels. When she finds a couple she likes, she checks them out and waves good-bye to the librarian, leaving Felix alone with Gary Schipp. She feels highly conspicuous, her Doc Marten Mary-Janes squeaking loudly as she crosses the floor. Everything here is on a small scale: the low ceiling, the narrow stacks, the miniature-golf pencils held by a juice glass.

In the back corner, there's a computer. A sign next to the monitor says, “Internet access: Visit the circulation desk to put your name on the waiting list.” Felix looks around the empty library. Gary Schipp, a 50ish man in librarianesque half-glasses and a loud, not-so-librarianesque Hawaiian shirt, hunches over a book. He has not acknowledged her presence.