“A-a-h,” I said, “Mom always liked me best.”
The joke could have backfired, and Ramona took a few moments to weigh the situation before she gave me the desired response: She smiled. Directly at me. A sliver of pimento had lodged in her front teeth, and I motioned to her so she covered her mouth with her hand again.
“Thanks, Livvie,” she said. My name came out silky, with none of the bite she usually gave it. I didn’t know if she was thanking me for the snack or for saving her the embarrassment of walking around with a pimento smile for the rest of the afternoon.
• • •
The pimento cheese threw Clio headfirst into nostalgia.
“This is as good as my Aunt Maylene’s,” she said. “Hers won a prize.” Pies and quilts and farm animals won awards, I knew. When I was in elementary school, my Brahma chicken picked up a Buncombe County 4-H prize for Best Show Chicken, beating out much flashier birds. But a prize for pimento cheese was news to me. I made a mental note to tell Sue. “There’s a jolt to it, just like my aunt’s. She was a real spark plug, my aunt. Ran a dairy farm all by herself with two sons after my uncle died. She lived to be well over a hundred.”
Clio ate two crackers liberally smeared with the spread and then settled into her chair with a sigh. “You bring out the Carolina in me, Miss Bliss.”
That was Bea’s plan. “I thought maybe it’d help with your memories,” I said.
“It does take me back. But I just . . .” Her eyes brightened suddenly, like a floodlight went on behind them. “I kept a journal when I was a girl. I started scribbling into it when I was no more than eleven. I wonder if that’s still around here somewhere.” She surveyed her mess, and my heart sank at the thought of picking through her piles and shelves for a childhood notebook. But the light disappeared with her next words: “Actually, I haven’t seen that book in years. I think I left it there. It probably got burnt up in the fire.”
My hearing perked up. “What fire?”
“I told you about the fire.” When I assured her she had not, she sighed again and relayed the story of the Threatt homestead burning in the 1920s. “Mama was a changed woman after that, all her photos and knickknacks up in flames.” She raised her hands, as if mimicking the rising smoke.
“But no one was hurt?”
Her face clouded. “I can’t talk about that,” she said, and an invisible wall went up, sealing off the topic.
“You know,” I started, “if the truth is too painful, you could always just make things up.”
She looked puzzled, like she might never have considered writing anything not securely fastened to her own life. “What if I got something wrong about the place?”
The plaintive question made sense. A woman who kept rewriting pages over and over was aiming to get everything “right.”
“If you need research, well, I could probably help with that.”
Clio pondered that, then said, “I wouldn’t mind another cracker.”
Chapter 12
November 1983
At our apartment on Fifteenth Street, Barb had become more a visitor than a resident, and our only contact was a series of succinct notes:
“If you see Jesús, tell him the bathroom faucet drips”— an understatement given that it had been full-on running after weeks of ignoring it.
“Help yourself to the rye,” which was already growing mold by the time she thought to offer it to me.
“How do you feel about blondes?”— a follow-up to our conversation of weeks back about my lack of dating action.
“Might get a message from a guy named Greg Smart. Give him this number, okay?” My stomach churned at that one, because I recognized Renee and Gerri’s shared number. I deduced she was pretty much living with Renee and, more important, that she wanted me to know. And to pass on the information.
I didn’t tell Gerri, though, even when she prodded me one night while we were at John’s Pizza after a screening of the new feminist sci-fi movie, Born in Flames. “You see the Source of All Evil much?”
“Nah. Different hours.”
“I just wondered if she was, you know . . .” Gerri didn’t need to finish for me to get her drift.
“I honestly don’t know what she’s doing or even care. And you shouldn’t either.” Even as I said it, the words sounded callous. Who was I to tell Gerri to get over an eight-year relationship in a few weeks? Especially when I still thought about Hallie, who qualified more as an affair or fling. “Sorry,” I muttered.
“No, you’re right. I’m better off not knowing.” She sighed. “I finally told my mom we broke up.”
The statement was a marvel to me. Gerri was so out to her family, she even brought Renee home for holidays. I was a dinosaur still cowering in the closet, pretending I lived the life my family imagined for me. When Hallie was through with me, my mother merely asked why I didn’t see my “favorite teacher” anymore.
“I think Mom likes Renee better than me,” Gerri went on. “She said, ‘I hope you didn’t hurt that girl.’ Like I was a heartless slob! I mean, she raised me, right? I told her it was Renee who cheated on me, and she went all quiet, like she didn’t believe me.”
In my mind, it was better to have a mother who preferred your girlfriend than a mother who rationalized that you were just too picky to find the right guy. But I said, “Mothers,” like I could fathom what she was talking about.
“Thanksgiving’ll be tricky,” Gerri said.
“I thought you were staying in town.”
“Thea got invited to her cousin’s in Harlem, and she doesn’t know how to say no. Vern has family in New Jersey, and I couldn’t cook a turkey if you held a gun to my head. Renee was the cook.”
The “misfits” Thanksgiving at Thea’s was off the table then, and a stream of sadness washed over me.
“I guess I’ll be spending the holiday with a rotisserie chicken.”
Gerri eyed me with curiosity. “You could always go home.”
At that point, home was a baffling word to me. I wanted it to be New York, but the scaffolding still wasn’t set up. At the minimum, a sense of home required people who stuck around to buck each other up on holidays.
“Too expensive,” I offered as a plausible excuse.
Gerri gave her plate a push, but I grabbed another pepperoni slice. In the weeks since her breakup, she’d dropped weight, her round cheeks now almost convex. Even her nose seemed trimmer, her glasses often slipping down it. When I was with her, I ate more to compensate, and all my trousers were snug at the waist.
“You could come home with me,” she suggested, peering at me over her glasses.
“Where is home again?”
“Bethel. Western Connecticut.”
I’d never been anywhere in New England, and the only Connecticut cities I could conjure up the names of were New Haven and Hartford. “It’s not near either of those,” she said, describing Bethel as “small-town.”
“There’s this quaint town square and everything. Old-fashioned ice cream parlor. It’s cute, if you like that kind of thing.”
I explained that I used to like small towns when I was growing up. As a kid, I roamed the streets of Weaverville freely, my mom rang a bell for me to come home to supper, and everybody admired my dad, who ran a hardware store in Asheville. For lack of a better word, it was bliss— but then puberty set in and there was no hiding the fact that I was different from other girls, especially my three sisters. Then there were fights with my mother about my wardrobe, my haircut, my wanting to go to college, my working at the hardware store after school when I should have been giggling about boys. No one put a name to what I was, but my first weeks in college, I finally found myself, in Rubyfruit Jungle, when the character Molly Bolt came right out and called herself a lesbian.
“Your family still doesn’t know,” Gerri said, confusion plain on her face. “Man, Liv, it’s 1983, not 1963. What are you waiting for?”
“North Carolina isn’t Connecticut,” I said.
“And Bethel isn’t San Francisco,” she said. “Family’s tough everywhere. Still, we do what we got to do.”
I mulled that over, aware that she was staring at me, expecting something. “Maybe we should go to your folks’ instead. Do some anthropological research. I’ve never been south of Baltimore. I take that back— once my family went to Williamsburg.”
“That’s not the South,” I said.
I didn’t want to go to Weaverville with Gerri; that would only draw more attention to my difference. Not only was I a single girl who shopped in the men’s department for herself and had no apparent romantic interests, but I had a friend who was just like me. No one would say anything to my face, but polite suspicions would surface after. (“What’s up with Livvie and that Gerri?” and “She’s nice enough, but she looks like a man!”)
“Maybe we could talk Thea into staying. We could learn to cook.”
A stream of Pepsi squirted from Gerri’s mouth, and she mopped it up with her napkin.
“It’s not that hard to follow a recipe,” I pointed out. “I made pimento cheese this week, and it was damn tasty.”
“How do you ‘make’ cheese? You running a dairy on Fifteenth Street?”
Even I had to admit that tossing together cold ingredients for a cheese spread was no doubt a lot easier than pulling off a turkey with all the trimmings, so I relinquished the idea with a sigh.
• • •
From the third-floor landing in Clio’s building, I heard ragged, dry coughing erupting from Eli’s apartment.
The handful of times I’d seen him since the night he turned down dinner, he acted as irritable as an old man whose gout was flaring up. If I asked something as simple as “How’ve you been?” he laughed with derision: “Well, if your friends were dying left and right, how would you be?” He flipped the mood off just as easily as he turned it on, though. Once he took my hand tenderly and asked me to accompany him to a memorial on the weekend, but funerals freaked me out. My excuse about work must have sounded contrived because he didn’t ask again.
I didn’t know how to deal with Eli’s anger, so I handled it like the immature girl I was, knocking on his door less, shrinking away if I heard movement inside his apartment.
But that particular day, I held my ear to the thick wood and put my eye to the peephole in vain hope of seeing in.
“What are you doing?” Clio’s voice was usually chirpy when I first arrived— I hadn’t done anything to aggravate her yet— but that day I’d annoyed her without even setting foot in her apartment.
“I need to check on Eli,” I said. “Can’t you hear him coughing?”
“Who is Eli?”
“Your neighbor? Skinny little guy with curly hair?” I pointed at the door, and the coughing ceased.
“The one with the inordinate interest in me and the Provincetown Players,” she said.
“I’ll just knock and see if he needs anything.”
“Well, when you see fit to do your job again, you let me know.” Instead of leaving the door open for me, Clio closed it with exasperation.
“Eli, you okay?” I called out. “Eli, it’s me, Livvie. You need anything?” I heard groaning from inside and couldn’t tell if that was his answer.
“Eli, open up. I could run to the store and get you something.”
I waited a long minute and finally heard the click of the deadbolt, accompanied by a hacking cough that was now just inches from my face.
Remington slipped past Eli out into the hallway and coiled himself around my legs. Eli’s cotton pajamas, with faded terriers printed on them, sagged off his frame.
“Oh, it’s you,” Eli said. “Go away, Livvie. I think I’ve got the flu. You don’t want to catch it.”
“I could fetch you some cough syrup. It wouldn’t be any trouble.”
“That won’t help.” He coughed into his arm.
“You need me to call you in sick?” He taught two watercolor classes at the Art Students League, but I wasn’t sure how he supported himself beyond that. The first night we hung out, he said he hadn’t scored a set design gig in months.
“They hired a sub already.” I would have panicked if I lost my job, but his look was more resignation. “You know, I guess Remmie could use some canned food and a bag of litter. It’s not an emergency, but maybe you could get it in the next few days, just in case. D’Ag has Friskies on sale. I’ll get you some mo—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said as I stooped to pet the cat. “We’ll get you all set up, Mr. Remmie.”
“OK, I owe you. He eats any flavor but beef. Now, seriously, Liv, run for your life.” With a wan smile, he coaxed Remington back inside and clicked the door closed.
From Clio’s apartment, I continued to hear the coughing. My eyes kept wandering to the door, and Clio picked up on my distraction.
“Miss Bliss, you have not heard a word I said,” she snapped. “What am I paying you for anyway?”
“You aren’t paying me,” I shot right back. My eyes held hers in a defiance I didn’t feel. Instead, my stomach was hopping like I’d swallowed Mexican jumping beans.
Shock filled Clio’s face, and her lips parted then closed again. “Well,” she said after a considerable pause, “I can’t remember when someone’s used such a tone with me. Certainly not since Flora.”
“I’m sorry. I just felt worried about him.”
“I didn’t know you were friends with that young man. What is his name again?”
“Eli. Eli Pruitt.”
In our months together, she’d rarely fished for even innocuous personal information like how many siblings I had or where I attended college. Now her eyes lit with a question.
“Are you . . . interested in him?” She didn’t have to add the word romantically— it was implied in the tone, almost like one schoolgirl asking another about a crush.
“God, no,” I said with a firm shake of my head, then threw in a frown for good measure. I considered leaving it there and letting her intuit the rest, but when I had sassed her it was like I’d already stepped off a ledge in our servant-served relationship. So I added, “Neither of us bats for that team, Miss Hartt.”
She seemed to consider that for a moment, then nodded. “Does he have the disease, do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Since Eli first mentioned Curt, AIDS had played like the background score of our new friendship. We never spoke the acronym out loud, though.
“Well, I pray that’s not it,” she said. “Now, shall we get on with the work? I’ve been looking through the stories and trying to pick the best ones.”
“Don’t you want me to make you some coffee?”
She didn’t answer, and so I sat next to her at the desk and tried to focus. Eventually, as she talked, I stopped hearing Eli’s cough, either because he’d gotten some relief or because I’d simply become inured to it.
• • •
The reconstituted Women’s Academy convened at Thea’s apartment for the first time on a Thursday evening instead of Sunday afternoon. We made the concession for her roommate, Vern, who worked at a restaurant on Sundays.
At that time, I had no idea where Manhattan Avenue was and I was embarrassed to ask Thea for directions. When I exited the A train at 110th, farther north in the city than I’d ever ventured, I found myself at the tip of Central Park in a neighborhood lined with bodegas. I knew Thea worked at Barnard, so the location made sense. Rents were apparently cheaper, too, and in the break with her ex she’d kept the lease on their rent-stabilized two-bedroom.
The apartment was a palace compared to mine and Barb’s. The front door opened onto a long hallway that could have passed for a bowling alley. The walls were lined with framed black-and-white photographs of Manhattan street scenes— Thea’s work, I guessed. Even the ones depicting homeless people were hauntingly beautiful. Multiple rooms ran off the hallway (a “classic railroad apartment,” Thea observed as she led me down the hall), and at the end was a decent-sized living room w
ith arched windows, where Gerri had been camping out. Although Vern’s room fit only a twin bed, a bureau, a narrow desk, and her bike, Thea’s held a full-sized futon with two nightstands, a comfy-looking armchair, a light table, and a dresser. And more photographs— in passing, they looked like female nudes. A separate kitchen was equipped with a round cafe table and chairs.
The salon was reincarnated as a potluck dinner plus literary discussion. “I don’t read much myself,” Vern said as she eyed the egg rolls I’d brought and the calzones from Gerri, “but I’d like to learn more about what Thea reads.” Vern was a head taller than me, and several times wider. She had a young, honest face with flawless skin, and her eyes followed Thea around the room hungrily, like she was just waiting for the word that they could be more than roommates. Everybody’s looking for something, the Eurythmics sang in my head. Thea treated her more like a kid sister, though, and I felt a pang of empathy for what looked like unrequited love.
“Don’t put yourself down like that, girl,” Thea said. “You know more about comics than anybody I ever met. Even my little brother!”
Vern cast her eyes down at the compliment. With her man-sized Knicks sweatshirt and close-cropped ’fro, she could easily pass for someone’s brother.
“Oh, yeah? What’re your favorites?” I asked, even though I knew nothing about comics and was unlikely to appreciate her choices.
“Red Sonja,” Vern answered without hesitating. “Spider-Woman. Wonder Woman. You know. All the girl stuff. But I know about the guys, too, if you want to ask me something.”
I smiled, not having anything to ask.
“Vern draws comics, too,” Thea said, taking the seat next to me. Vern blinked a few times, her long eyelashes sweeping her cheeks. “With a black lesbian superhero. You know anybody who publishes comics?” Thea asked, tapping my leg lightly.
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