Vida (29 page)

“Let me see the map,” Tara commanded, wide awake now. “Ask somebody. Look, there’s a man shoveling snow.”

“I presume the shelter’s secret here, but I’ll ask him where the street is.” She rolled down the window to shout.

“What? … That’s on up the hill … You got a piece to go yet … But you’ll get stuck in the snow.” The wheels spun and they could not get started until they put Tara briefly at the wheel, nervous and bleating, But I can’t drive, and Vida and Joel pushed the car free. Then he climbed back into the driver’s seat and they inched onward. “Is that a road?” she asked, peering into the dark.

“Get out and look,” he said glumly. “How else can you tell?”

She read the sign. “Still not it. I wish they’d given us a better map.”

“Oh, she thought it would be fun. Hide-and-seek. Blindman’s buff. Find the needle in the haystack. Maybe it’s all a joke your—”

She poked him before he got the word out. “You’re tired, Sam. Very tired.”

“Gee, what else is new?” But he shut up.

“Stop. Maybe that’s it.” This road at least had been plowed, although not recently. It was the right one. She waded back to the car and climbed into the puddle she had created. Unfortunately, the new road immediately set out to climb a mountain. The car gained some momentum, labored up, labored, spun and then drifted into a four-wheel skid. It all happened quite leisurely. He even had time to say, “God damn” and she to warn, “Hold on!”

The car danced sideways, shimmied and thrust its nose into a snowbank partway into a ditch. It happened so slowly that no one was more than shaken. But when Vida climbed out to look, the car was stuck good. She experienced a moment of pure terror like a shot of ice in which she imagined the police appearing and questions, questions, questions. Gradually she tuned in to Tara screaming.

“Be quiet,” she said sternly. “You’re scaring the children.” That should fix her—standard guilt trip. “I’ll find the house. It has to be near. They can come back for you and help us get the car out of the ditch”

Joel started off with her, but Tara caught his arm pleadingly. “You can’t leave us here alone in the middle of nowhere!”

“Stay with her,” Vida whispered. “But if there’s trouble, run for it. We can meet in the next town south of here where the bus stops.”

She plodded off into the dark, hoping that if he had to take off, he’d be able to get their packs out of the trunk first. She felt naked marching off without hers. Her body ached with every step, and her nose was running with the cold. She was exhausted and hungry. She did not know whether to wish a car would drive up the dark road or not, but none did. She slogged on. Finally a mailbox said Crowder, and she turned into an unshoveled walk. The two-story clapboard house was completely dark. Now what? Was it the wrong house, wrong town, wrong place? Or was it just so late that everyone was asleep here in Ultima Thule in a blizzard?

Either way she was not pleased, banging on the door and brushing the snow from her shoulders, her wig. The damn acrylic wig smelled funny wet and seemed to be losing its curl much as hair would, exposing some of the plastic netting of the scalp. She tied her soaking-wet scarf firmly over her head. Banged harder. “Hello in there! Hello!”

A light went on upstairs. Impatiently she waited, stamping the snow from her boots on the wooden porch. The porch light went on just after the light in the hall inside, while a face peered at her through a window in the door. Finally the door opened on a chain. “Who are you? It’s the middle of the night.”

“You know who we are. We’re delivering someone to you. From Long Island.”

The woman glared, opening the door to let her in and standing aside clutching her plaid wool bathrobe together. “I sat up last night waiting for you. You were supposed to come yesterday.”

“The woman wasn’t ready. We had to spend two nights in a crummy motel waiting for her. We’re exhausted, and the car is in a ditch down the the mountain a little ways.”

“You’re wonderfully efficient, aren’t you? Upside down as well?”

“Now, look here, we’ve been driving since six thirty this morning and it’s been snowing all day. We were held up on Route 9 by a truck accident and this goddamn map is lousy and we’re exhausted. Now help me get her up here and give us a place to sleep. And we need help getting the car out of the ditch. It’s not ours. We borrowed it to make the delivery.”

“The car will have to stay put till morning” the woman said sourly, stomping off. “I’ll get dressed” She was buxom, with a high, shiny forehead under sawed-off light hair, and she was still mad.

“Thanks for your welcome” Vida shouted after her.

“Keep your voice down. You’ll wake my lover and our kids.”

When the woman came back down in jeans and sweater, shoving her arms into a down jacket, she was just as grumpy. “ We have to take her to the shelter.”

”This isn’t it?”

“You don’t think we’d give out a map to the shelter?” The woman frowned, leading the way through the kitchen to an attached garage where a Jeep stood. “Don’t you people observe any precautions?”

For an instant in a blur of fatigue Vida was scared, a hot finger on her heart, thinking “you people” meant fugitives. Then she realized the meaning. “I’m not on the staff. My friend and I are just doing a favor.” You ill-tempered creep! She climbed into the Jeep and they lurched back into the snow. Finally the snow seemed to be less dense, flakes idling slowly. The woman drove too fast for the conditions, but Vida held on and said nothing. She was too tired to care. It was only a two-minute drive back to the car, still angled in the ditch. Joel had shut off the headlights, and they were all huddled in a knot of misery at the side of the road, Tommy crying, Tara pacing with the baby.

“All right, get in,” the woman barked from the driver’ seat. “Not him. We can’t take a man to the shelter.”

Vida leaned over and shut off the ignition. “Let’s get this straight. I don’t care where we go, but we’re exhausted. We have been on this case for three days. Now, you give us a place to sleep and do it soon, or I’ll take you on right now. I do not give a shit where you put us, but you put us someplace fast.”

The woman stared at her. Then she said slowly, “Okay. Walk back to my house. The door’s unlocked. You can sleep in the room off the kitchen. The bed’s made up. Now get out. I have to take them to the shelter.”

Vida got out. “We’ll load your stuff in the Jeep, Tara”

“Don’t forget the plaid carryall,” Tara said.

As Joel was loading the Jeep, Vida caught Tara’s arm. “Sorry about the trouble here. I don’t know how we’ll get the car out, but you’re safe, anyhow. And you owe us another hundred.”

“You got your nerve” Tara said. “You’re a cold one. Cold as ice!” She fumbled in her purse and counted out the money. The woman in the down jacket watched.

“Some favor,” she said.

“Yes, it’s been some favor.” Vida marched over to Joel. “Let’s take our packs. The house isn’t far. About ten minutes up the road.”

They watched the Jeep disappear. “A charmer” Joel said. “I thought she was going to leave me on the road.”

Hand in hand, they stumbled up the mountain to the house. At least, this time the lights were on.

11

“Well, off to Erie?” The woman was wearing the same plaid wool bathrobe as she fried eggs and dough for herself and her older lover, a tall lean grizzled greyhound of a woman who whistled constantly in pure birdsong snatches as she came and went on the morning’s chores, till her partner captured her and sat her bodily at the table for breakfast.

“Sure,” Vida said curtly. She felt painfully awkward tiptoeing around their unfamiliar kitchen trying to feed breakfast to herself and Joel, who hunched at the far end of the table trying to make himself invisible by drawing his head into his shoulders like a turtle. His refusal to move made her wait on him in front of the two watchful women. “If you could just help us get the car out of the ditch, we’ll be on our way” She set down a mug of tea in front of Joel. He bobbed his chin as if even to move give away some advantage. She felt like screaming at the women, screaming at Joel. They were forcing her to play a straight role out of their preconceptions, and he was sulking and acting helpless.

“Why don’t you call a tow truck?” the younger woman asked.

“I don’t think the car’s damaged, and we’d just as soon get it out and leave. Please help us. We can’t afford a tow truck”

“For what you charged her, you could call a fleet”

Vida said, “We’ve been waiting for her since Monday. So think again. We have to pay a sitter all those days. We have to return this stupid car before we can pick up ours. I don’t think the woman who owns it would like it yanked around by a tow truck—she was doing the shelter a favor by loaning it.” Self-righteous, judgmental moralist! Probably been working at the shelter a month, probably been gay for a year. Probably throw it all up next year and marry an insurance salesman.

The kids, a boy Tommy’s age and a girl a little older, came clattering down the steps, and for twenty minutes Vida and Joel ate their granola as if on the edge of a racecourse. “Who are you?” the little girl asked, but didn’t wait for the answer. “Don’t put that crap in my lunch! I want peanut butter and apple butter, together!”

When the kids had been bundled off to the school bus—down the path already shoveled that morning to the road—the pepper-and-salt greyhound came and stood over them. “I’ll get it out of the ditch” she offered cheerfully, and slipped off to the Jeep whistling something tiddly and baroque, swarming with rapid notes.

It took all four of them, accompanied by a whistled “Anvil Chorus” from
Il Trovatore,
to get the car out of its snowbank and ditch. The older woman was as strong as Joel and a lot more patient, and she never lost her breath or the thread of her melodies. The younger woman fussed and muttered and complained, but she helped too. “If we can drive it like this, let’s clear out,” Joel muttered. He was banging out the metal so that it wouldn’t scrape the tire. “Get in and turn the wheel when I tell you, so I can see if it’s still hitting.” He used a crowbar to bang the metal free.

We aren’t exactly returning this car in tip-top shape, she thought. I have to report in to Kiley and to Leigh today. If I can just hold on to the car till tomorrow. After all, the kid’s been doing without it for a month at least.

When the car could be steered, Joel got in on the passenger’s side, nursing a scratched wrist. The Jeep went off at last, the older woman whistling Bach, the younger woman driving too fast, as if to make up for the lost hour. “Fucking creeps! They hated me. What did I do?”

“I didn’t think the musician hated anybody.” She headed north along the Connecticut River on 5, a road that used to be the big highway before the interstate was built paralleling it. Route 5 wandered through the old towns at water level or rode at the top of the first set of bluffs overlooking the wide water. “As lesbians they resent men who run this society and outlaw them. They resent the privilege heterosexual people have to get married, take good jobs, raise families legally, without fear of the courts or neighbors.”

“Legally, ha. We can’t get married. I’d love to have that house to live in … How come you say musician?”

She was about to say that she had never heard anyone but a musician whistle the
Goldberg Variations,
when she realized that would lead into one of their mined areas: best to avoid. “She whistled so much, and right on key”

“It didn’t sound so hot to me. Damn dykes!”

“Joel! I have been a dyke. I lived with Eva for
three years”

“Not a real one.”

“What’s a real one?”

“You like men.”

“Not in general. I like you. In fact, I love you.”

”Ha!” He gripped her shoulder. “That’s the first time you ever said that when we aren’t in bed”

She felt a qualm, because she was thinking under the conversation about Leigh, who loved to live in an atmosphere of music. He would be at that cabin in Twin Mountain by afternoon. The sky did not remember snowing. The road had been plowed and sanded. A foot of snow lay mounded over everything in a glitter too cold to melt except for banks at the road’s edge that wept and froze again under the onslaught of the sun. “It feels funny to walk around saying it. It’s been years since I was in that stage where you keep wanting to say it to somebody. Makes me feel silly.”

“A stage, I see. Because you’re ashamed?”

“I just can’t believe it easily, at my age.”

“You ain’t so old and tough yet” He snickered.

About an hour north, Joel told her to stop at a garage with a couple of Getty pumps outside where some mechanics were working on a flotilla of partially dismembered cars. “I’m going to take a better look and see what happened. It doesn’t feel quite right” he said. “Why don’t you take a walk and see if you can find some coffee to bring back?”

When she came back from the bathroom, Joel was already talking intently with the young guy who was filling the tank. He pulled the car off to the side and together they sauntered past her, ignoring her without decision. Grinning wryly, she took Natalie’s thermos and marched off in search of an open café or diner. She had to walk a mile, from the southern end of town, where the garage stood, to the northern end of town, where the local breakfast place, John’s, was open. John, or whoever the guy was behind the counter, refused to pour the coffee into the thermos. He would sell her coffee only in plastic cups to take out, and she had to pour those into the thermos. “But there’s a lip on the pot,” she argued, realizing as she yanked at her hair in disgust that she still had the stupid acrylic wig on with the green scarf. “It’s hard to pour from cups.”