Something True (21 page)

T
ate blinked as several men in formal tuxedos surrounded her. One knelt down by her side.

“Can you hear me?” He had a very high voice despite his massive girth and heavy beard.

Her body felt numb. She tried to breathe. It felt like her lungs had been crushed.

“I can't breathe,” she gasped.

“What happened?” someone else called.

Tate felt a sharp pain radiating from her foot up through her leg and into her groin.

“Get that bike off her,” the man said, his falsetto at odds with his authoritative demeanor. “I'm a nurse. You're going to be okay.”

A moment later the pain in her leg subsided.

The nurse squeezed her hand.

“Can you feel this?”

“What happened?” Tate whispered. “Where am I?”

“Can you feel this?” the man repeated.

He squeezed harder.

“Yes.”

Somewhere through the rain and the crowd of legs, Tate thought she saw the puff of a tutu in the crowd of black-and-white suits.

“Am I dreaming?” she asked.

The man reached over and pulled one of her eyelids open.

“Someone get me a phone light!” he barked.

A moment later, the bright light of a cell phone's flashbulb seared her retina.

“Stop.” Tate struggled in his grip.

“Don't move,” the man said. Then, as if by habit more than to communicate with anyone, he announced, “Normal pupil dilation.” He squeezed her other hand. “Can you feel this?”

“Yes.” Tate pulled her hand away. The bridge was coming back into focus.

The man was not deterred. He touched her leg at the thigh, the knee, and the foot. Tate yelped when he touched the foot that had been trapped beneath the bike. Then he asked her to push against his palm, pull his hand toward her, and resist as he pushed his hand against hers.

“Okay. I'm going to take your helmet off. Let me know if you feel any pain.”

Carefully, the man removed her helmet.

“Follow my finger with your eyes.”

“I'm fine,” Tate said, although her leg throbbed with a hot pain. She watched the man's finger move back and forth across her field of vision. “I really am okay.”

“Now stick out your tongue and move it side to side.”

“Really!” she protested.

She struggled to a sitting position. Behind the nurse, she saw several of the other tuxedoed men directing traffic. One was indeed wearing a tutu over his tux. It was surreal.

“Where are you all going?” she asked.

“Just stick out your tongue.”

“I told you, I'm fine,” Tate said over her extended tongue.

“No sign of brain injury,” the nurse said, “but we'll want to check you for concussion.”

A couple of cyclists had also stopped nearby, as well as an old woman in a pickup. She got out of her truck and stood over Tate, her wiry gray hair emerging from beneath a John Deere baseball cap.

“What happened?” she asked.

“She must have spun out in the rain,” the nurse said.

“This bridge is hell.” The woman took a cigarette pack from her shirt pocket and lit one, shielding it from the rain in her cupped hand. She offered the pack to Tate, who shook her head.

“How's the bike?” she growled.

“Oh, God, I don't know,” the nurse said. “Those things terrify me.” He straightened his bow tie.

“Why y'all dressed up?” the woman asked.

“Portland Gay Men's Choir.” The nurse gestured toward his van. “We're on the way to a concert.”

The woman sniffed.

The nurse turned back to Tate.

“We should get you to a hospital,” he said. “We don't mind. My boys and I'll take you.”

Tate shook her head. She felt battered. The pain in her foot made her eyes water. But she was lucky. She hadn't been going fast. She flexed her arms gingerly.

“I'm okay.”

“That was a nasty spill. I saw it. One minute you were up, and then bam!” the nurse said.

Now that the immediate emergency was over, he had the delivery of a cooking-show host.
I just throw the garlic in and bam!

Tate rose, holding on to the guardrail to steady herself. Once on her feet, her vision blurred for a moment, then returned to normal. Her foot hurt, but she could put weight on it. She looked over the edge of the bridge. The smell of the river rose to meet her, cool and dark. On either side of the bridge, the lights of the city glittered.

“I'll be okay.”

“You should really be checked out by a doctor,” the nurse insisted.

She put her hand on the nurse's shoulder.

“You're sweet. Thank you. But right now a doctor's bill would hurt a lot more than this.”

“Oh, no honey,” the man said, putting a massive arm around Tate's waist to steady her as she swayed in the breeze that came up through the metal grate of the bridge. “You're looking awfully pale.”

“I was only going ten miles per hour, if that,” she said.

Behind the nurse, the choir had formed a worried circle. The woman in the John Deere cap urged them off the road.

“I'm losing my job,” Tate said. She met the man's eyes. He had a big, black shovel of a beard and bright, little eyes. He was probably a bear, Tate thought. “The coffee shop where I work is being shut down. I've got about two weeks. Even if I get a new job tomorrow, I won't get paid before rent is due. The last thing I need is a thousand dollars in ER bills to say that, yes, I kissed the Hawthorne Bridge going six miles per hour. Look. I'm not bleeding. I'm standing up. I promise you. I'm fine.”

“Do you have someone you can stay with?”

Not really.

“Absolutely.”

“Hmm.” The nurse snorted. “I would too if I had your cheekbones.”

Then, with much negotiating, arm waving, and general discussion, it was decided that the woman in the John Deere cap would try to ride Tate's bike back to Tate's apartment. A baritone named Jeff would follow in her pickup, in case she didn't make it. The nurse, whose name was apparently Crown Princess Margarita, helped Tate into the van, where she was serenaded with an a capella version of Cyndi Lauper's “I Drove All Night.”

She looked out the window of the van at the grizzled woman trying to start her motorcycle.
I'll never see it again
, she thought, but when the choir delivered her to her apartment, she saw the bike parked in front, the keys tucked under the front tire as promised.

Reluctantly, she knocked on Pawel and Rose's door. She had planned on simply ignoring the nurse's advice and falling into bed, but Crown Princess Margarita insisted on talking to Pawel and Rose before he released his patient.

“We check on you every hour,” Rose said after Tate explained the situation.

Pawel turned up Lawrence Welk as though a good, loud dose of Welk was all she needed.

I'll never leave
, Tate thought as she drifted off to sleep. In her dreams she was flying high over the city, over the river and the ships and the leisurely traffic and the hookah bar and Out Coffee and the Church and the Mirage and the roses in Ladd's Addition. “I love you,” she called again and again. And this time it was not for Laura. It was for the city.

W
hen Tate limped into Out Coffee the following morning, the line was nearly out the door. For an optimistic moment, she thought Maggie had found some brilliant way to increase revenue. Then she noticed the customers' impatient stance.

Behind the counter, Maggie had lined up several cups with orders written on them, but she looked perplexed.

“I'm working as fast as I can,” she mumbled. “I'm trying.”

“If you can't appreciate quality,” Krystal added, “go to 7-Eleven.”

She had twisted her pink pigtails into little horns.

Very slowly Maggie tapped coffee grounds into a metal basket.

“Maybe you could all take a seat,” Maggie said as though the customers were a class of bad children.

A man broke rank and left.

“Don't bother,” he said to Tate as he passed. “You'll never get your coffee.”

“I've got this,” Tate said, pushing her way through the crowd and quickly washing her hands. “Maggie, go make sure the cream station is filled. Krystal, I'll get these orders out.” To the line of customers, she announced, “Give me two minutes. We'll get you all taken care of.”

An hour later, the morning rush had slowed down. Tate leaned against the counter and wiped her face, once again aware of the pain in her foot and the throbbing in her temple.

“What the hell happened to you?” Krystal squinted at her.

“Nothing.”

When she looked up, Krystal's face had fallen into a look of concern.

“What?” Tate asked.

“Did that girl dump you?”

“Have you ever considered not prying into my life?”

Krystal opened her mouth in a shocked little O, as though someone had just struck her.

“I didn't mean it,” Tate said. “I just…can't talk about it right now.”

Krystal threw her arms around Tate, and Tate was enveloped in the smell of her bubble-gum perfume.

“I love you, Tate.” Krystal squeezed harder, as though she could squeeze sadness out of Tate's rib cage. She certainly squeezed more pain into Tate's leg. “If she left you, she's a fucking idiot, and I'm going to call her, and tell her, and tell the whole world that's she's an idiot.”

“And I'm sure that will make everything better,” Tate said, trying to extricate herself from Krystal's affection.

“No, I'm serious,” Krystal said, still holding on. “I'll get one of those planes. I'll get one of those planes, and I'll write ‘Laura Enfield is a fuckup' all across the sky.”

Tate pulled away. “And I'm going to make the bank drop,” she said. “And you're not going to talk to Maggie about this or skywrite to Maggie about this, and we're both going to pretend none of this ever happened.”

But it did.
Tate tried to push the thought from her mind as she headed for the back room, where Maggie was folding a pile of clean dishcloths and looking shell-shocked.

“Where were you?” Maggie looked worried. “You were supposed to work yesterday. I called you. I thought you'd been killed on that motorcycle of yours. Or abducted. Or beaten. You know there are a lot more gay-bashings than the police want to admit. Human trafficking is on the rise, especially in Portland.” She sounded distracted, as though she were reciting a half-remembered list. She did not seem to notice Tate's limp or the fading bruise on her face.

“I don't really want to talk about it,” Tate said.

Back at the coffee shop after going to the bank, Tate didn't realize for several moments that Krystal was not waiting on the man who stood at the counter; she was fighting with him. It was not always easy to tell the difference with Krystal, but Maggie's defensive stance alerted Tate to the problem. That and the man's protests.

“Will you tell this teenager to get out of my face?” His voice rose several decibels louder than the space required.

Behind him, two other men stood sentinel, their white T-shirts and khakis contrasting with the man's dark business suit. They looked like security guards flanking a politician. For a brief moment, Tate wondered if it was Laura's father come to exact revenge for the deflowering of his daughter.

“How 'bout you go stick it!” Krystal countered. She held up a sheet of paper and slowly tore it in half. Then she tore the halves.

“What's going on?” Tate asked.

Krystal held up the paper, now torn in four squares. She ripped the stack in half again. The man grabbed Krystal's wrist and wrestled the paper from her.

“Ow!” Krystal yelled.

“Stop,” Maggie said.

Tate marched up to the counter and clamped a hand on the man's shoulder.

“Let her go!” she said.

Slowly, the man withdrew his hand and crossed his arms.

“What's going on?” Tate asked again.

“We are serving a twenty-four-hour eviction notice,” the man said, slapping the shredded paper down on the counter.

“You can't do that.” Maggie stepped in between Krystal and the counter. “Don't use your patriarchal privilege to try to intimidate us. You're not going to kick us out of our own business.”

Tate cleared her throat. “Our lease specifies one month notice, minimum, for termination.”

“With an exception for reckless and wanton behavior,” the man said.

“When?” Tate demanded.

The men in T-shirts seemed to get larger.

“Well, we could start with that little production you staged the other day: your protest,” one said. “Let's see, you had people handcuffed to the building in the heat. You called the police. There was a fight. You endangered your customers. You utilized commercial property for political activities.”

“That was a peaceful protest,” Maggie said. “Those were citizens exercising their freedom of speech.”

“Why didn't the landlord tell us?” Tate asked.

“The building has been sold,” the man said. “The Clark-Vester Group owns this building. You have twenty-four hours to vacate the premises. Mr. Loeb and Mr. Duneo are going to stay here to oversee your departure. Be very careful how you leave and what you take. All assets belonging to the former title holder are now property of the Clark-Vester Group. Anything damaged or removed from the premises not belonging to individual employees or to Out in Portland LLC by proof-of-purchase receipt will be considered theft and prosecuted as such. Anyone left on the premises after…”—he checked his watch—“three thirty tomorrow will be arrested for trespassing.”

“We have a right to a lawyer and a right to talk to your supervisor,” Tate said.

“You have the right to shut up.” He poked a finger at Tate's breastbone.

“We haven't done anything wrong!” Tate protested.

The man took a step back.

“Can you afford the lawyer who's going to tell the court that?”

With that, the men strutted over to the airpots, helped themselves to coffee, and took up residence at a table by the window.

Tate looked around.

“Should we leave?” a woman seated near the counter asked.

The other customers were packing up their books and laptops and heading for the door.

“Yes. I think so,” Tate mumbled.

A few minutes later, the customers were gone. Tate switched off the machines and took her books from underneath the counter. Krystal gathered up the assortment of lipsticks and hair ties she had left in the employee bathroom. Maggie bundled the Mariah Lesbioma dioramas into the back of her station wagon.

It was strange to close at three in the afternoon. It was strange how much of their lives had been lived in the shop and yet how little there was to take.

Tate caught one last glimpse of the shop. Except for the two men sitting by the window it could have been any sleepy Sunday, one of the many days Tate had worked there alone, not really thinking of the future or the past, but idly dreaming about the beautiful woman who might walk through the door at any moment.

Look where that got me
, she thought as she flipped over the
CLOSED
sign.

Outside on the street, Krystal consulted her phone and said, “Maybe I should go to class tonight,” but after that she stood expectantly staring at Tate.

“They can't just do that,” Maggie said. She held a diorama to her chest. “I'm going to call Basic Rights Oregon. We'll do a phone campaign. We'll go door-to-door. We'll paper this city. Every bar. Every coffee shop. If they can do this to us, they can do it to anyone.” She looked down at a diorama that involved a rubber tarantula sitting inside the papier-mâché folds of a green vagina. “Mariah will be devastated,” she said, her voice suddenly maudlin. “This was her first exhibition. But she hasn't sold one piece, and now it's all over.”

“I don't think she was ever going to sell anything,” Tate said carefully.

Tate glanced down at the curb, then up at the telephone pole covered in band flyers. The Screaming Helicopters. The Fascist Lanterns. The Deep Oak Grove Mystery Band. Around the base of the telephone pole, the honeysuckle was withering.

“I have to call Lill,” Maggie said, almost dropping the diorama in her haste. “She has to know. Tate, what am I going to do? I'll lose my house. Where's my phone? I think I left it in there. Tate? Tatum?”

But Tate was wrestling with something far greater than a missing phone. She was surveying the coffee shop door, the plastic
CLOSED
sign on its dirty string, the stillness of the shop where she had come for refuge as a teenager, where Maggie had fed her when no one else would, where she knew every piece of equipment as well as she knew her own hands. And she thought,
I'll never work here again.
And despite the pain in her foot and her concern for Maggie and the dawning realization that it was Laura who had shut down Out Coffee to hide her own involvement with Tate, Tate felt a moment of giddy exhilaration.
I don't work here anymore.

An hour later, they were installed in a booth at a tiny Thai restaurant with a blue-and-yellow equality symbol on the door. As Tate expected, Krystal had not gone to class. Maggie had gone farther down the path of her imagined ruin. Lill had arrived with a stack of business cards from attorneys she met at Namaste Yoga. Vita had joined them too, although the state of Vita's eye makeup told Tate she might not be the one to cheer the group up.

“We've got to think this through.” Tate sorted through the business cards Lill had handed her. “Do you actually know any of these people?”

Maggie tore her paper napkin into little shreds, declaring that hiring a lawyer was just giving in to the prison-industrial complex. Vita said she had slept with a couple of lawyers, but she couldn't remember their names.

Then Vita caught Tate's eye.

“You know who you should call,” Vita said.

Tate shook her head in a way that she hoped was sufficiently subtle to allow Vita's comment to go unnoticed, but Vita had silenced the table.

“Who?” Maggie asked.

“Go on. Tell her,” Vita urged.

“No.”

“What?” Lill asked.

“Laura Enfield,” Krystal sighed. “Duh.”

Vita reached out and patted Tate's hand. “She's the only one who can help you.”

“She wanted to help us before.” Lill nodded her assent.

“No,” Tate said.

“Why not?” Vita asked.

“Because it's over,” Tate said, staring into her jasmine tea.

“I called it from day one. Why don't any of you listen to me?” Krystal said.

“What are we talking about?” Maggie asked.

“Tate's shagging Laura Enfield,” Vita exclaimed, as though they had been playing a game of twenty questions that had gone on long beyond reason.

“But she's a developer!” Lill protested. “She's probably a conservative. She's probably right-wing!”

“Did you?” Maggie asked. “That Laura woman…she is a pawn of the patriarchy. She's trying to destroy everything we've worked for.”

It hurt Tate to see the tears trembling at the corners of Maggie's dark eyes.

“Why would you share your body with someone who doesn't share your values?” Maggie asked. “Why would you do something like that?”

“Because she's hot!” Vita jumped in.

“Because I like her,” Tate said. “…Liked her.”

“You don't even know her.” Maggie glanced out the window. “Is she even gay? Is she a bisexual?”

“There is nothing wrong with being bisexual,” Krystal interjected.

“Maybe this is all part of her plan.” Maggie turned back to Tate, slapping her hand on the table. “Maybe you're part of her plan. That's what the patriarchy teaches women: to wear high heels they can't walk in, so they need a man to protect them, and then, when they need to take a little bit of agency over their own lives, what do they do? They use sex. The very thing they fear, the very thing that makes them vulnerable.”

“Um.” Krystal twisted a hank of hair around one finger and tilted her head. “I don't think Tate was trying to rape Laura 'cause she wore high heels.”

“Krystal!” Maggie said. Maggie did not joke about rape.

“That woman is using everything she has to ruin us,” Maggie said.

Tate spun her teacup around between her fingertips until the tea splashed on the table. “Laura didn't wake up in Alabama, throw a dart at a map, and say, ‘I'm going to ruin Maggie Davidson's life.'”

“But that's what she did, didn't she?” Maggie countered.

If she planned on ruining anyone's life it was probably mine
, Tate thought bitterly.

“Look, Maggie.” Vita wiped a smear of black mascara from beneath both eyes. “Put your personal feelings aside for a minute. Tate has a
significant in
with this woman.”