“You bring her back for Christmas,” Ivy instructed when Clio was already out on the porch.
“We are not staying in town for Christmas!” Clio called back over her shoulder.
“We aren’t?” I asked, as I slipped down the hill after her.
“I have seen my brother and I have seen the homeplace,” Clio said. “Why would we stay?”
At the car, I glanced back up the hill, where Ivy was poised in the doorframe, waving.
“What about Mrs. Threatt?” I asked, nodding toward the house as I held the passenger door for Clio. She harrumphed and settled in without waving back, so I lifted my arm and gave Ivy a proper good-bye wave.
Clio’s question about why we would stay was rhetorical, but when we had crunched along Threatt Way and reached the paved Crab Creek Road, I answered it just the same.
“Because it’s Christmas,” I said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“What?”
“We would stay because it’s Christmas, and you spend Christmas with your folks. And my folks are expecting me. I’m not sure what my mother would do if I took off back to New York now.” She was facing the window, and I wasn’t sure if she was listening. “Besides, I don’t see as we could change our flight that easily. There would be a penalty, and I’d need Bea’s charge card to do it.” I wasn’t sure that last part was true, but it sounded authoritative coming out of my mouth, and Clio had already mistaken me for a jet-setter.
She crossed her arms over her chest, like she was cold, and I cranked up the heat a notch. “This place gets to me,” she said. I sensed her eyes boring into me, but I kept mine on the road. “No one appreciated my ambitions. I didn’t want to marry, so I was odd. I would have been just an old maid, really, relegated to teaching girls their ABC’s at that fancy academy in Hendersonville, I forget the name. That school would have been my coffin. You heard Ivy. All these years gone by and still, ‘It can’t be a grandson, can it?’ Like children were the most fulfillment a woman could have.”
It was the first I’d heard of a teaching job in Hendersonville, but I had read only a few chapters of the thick biography of Clio that Gerri had lent me. Clio turned her head and focused elsewhere, and my hands relaxed on the wheel. After the fierce emotion of her last words, I was surprised by what came next.
“I don’t suppose you’d want to drive me all the way back to Crab Creek on Christmas Day and then pick me up, too.”
“I’d be happy to drive you, Miss Hartt! I would welcome a break from my nieces and nephews playing, and from all the adults teasing me about New York.”
Her eyes turned toward me again. “They don’t understand you any more than my family did me.”
“No Bliss has ever left,” I said. “Well, my Aunt Sass tried. She went to New York, too, for a couple of years, but she got tricked into coming back.”
“And you’ve been pressured to come back, too.”
“Not in so many words.” I paused to gather up my thoughts. “They get in a lot of digs. They think I’m questioning their way of life.”
“Aren’t you?” Clio asked. It was the most she’d ever asked me about my North Carolina exodus, and I found it both uncomfortable and strangely comforting at the same time, to be a fellow ex-pat of Clio Hartt. “My leaving questioned the narrow box my family, this culture, put me in.”
“I take it no one in your family read your work.”
“Rufe read some stories in the Saturday Evening Post. He wrote to me in Paris saying he liked them. He was still young. I’m not sure he’d married Ivy yet. Later I signed a copy of The Dismantled and sent it to him, but he never even told me he got it.” I wondered if Ivy still had that valuable edition.
“If we’re staying, I will need to call Ivy about Christmas,” she said, rummaging through her purse. “I have her number in here somewhere.”
“Oh, you would be very welcome at my folks’, if you’d rather,” I offered. Selfishly, I wanted her there as a distraction and a buffer. “They’re curious about you.”
Clio chortled. “That is the biggest lie I’ve heard in quite a while, young lady, and I’ve heard a few in my day. No, I will go to the homeplace since Ivy invited me.”
“Then we’ll call as soon as we get back. You’re making the right choice, Miss Hartt. About staying.”
“I don’t know as I have much of a choice, Miss Bliss.”
Chapter 20
My whole life, Aunt Sass and Uncle Emmett lived about a quarter-mile from my folks. When I was young and my mother kept the books at Daddy’s hardware store, I’d head to Aunt Sass’s after school to do my homework. They had four boys to match our girls, and I grew up playing with Cash, who was a year younger.
Sass had yearned for a daughter, “for company,” she said. Her past was appealingly mysterious to me, what with those months in New York, so I latched on and became the next best thing to her own. She spotted my independent streak from an early age, and as I grew up I confessed dreams to her, like wanting to work with books somehow and live in another place. Years before she gave me money to help fund my move to New York, she was whispering subversive wisdom to me like, “You don’t need to get married to be happy, Livvie. A husband’s just another kid who can’t take care of himself.” Not that Uncle Em wasn’t a sweet guy, but he couldn’t have made his own supper if his life depended on it.
I didn’t want to miss the chance to drop in on her after I deposited a weary Clio at her cabin. I’d written my aunt regularly since moving away, especially after I got my job and started working with Clio— I saw it as reporting to her on her investment— but she was not much of a correspondent and there’d been no letters from her in return. That didn’t mean she hadn’t missed me. The bear hug she gave me at her front door forced all the breath out of my lungs: She was my height, and almost twice my weight.
“Oh, honey, it is so good to see you!” she said between squeezes. “Let me look at you! What’s this jacket you got on? Looks like something your daddy’d wear to go out in his truck.” As much as she appreciated my independence, she had never really approved of my chosen attire.
Uncle Em, a plumber, was out on an emergency job. “Somebody’s poop broke their toilet again,” was how Sass said he’d put it, and we had a chuckle over that. We sat in her yellow kitchen at the built-in maple breakfast nook that had been there since I could remember, and she offered me coffee and a cigarette. “Thought you might have taken it up in the big city,” she said, when I refused the Newport. “That’s where I got started. Everybody did it.” She smoked when my uncle wasn’t around to scold her, and I noticed that her smoker’s cough was hoarser than when I last saw her.
She was eager for news of my life, and she lobbed questions at me that felt good to answer, like I was actually being seen by someone in my family. What did my job entail? (“You like all that filing? I was never much for it.”) How was my apartment? (“You moved again? I can’t keep up!”) You got some nice friends? (“Sounds like you found every girl in the city who likes to read.”) How was it working for a famous author? (“She related to the Threatts over in Bat Cave?”)
And then: What was my favorite part of living in New York?
That one tripped me up, and I cast my eyes down into my coffee mug while I mulled my options. Without a doubt, my favorite part was being openly gay, not just with my friends or roommate, but at work, too. I hadn’t come to Sass’s house to out myself, but I’d always been honest with her. When I looked up again, she was staring at me with an expectant look.
“I never knew Livvie Bliss to search for words,” she said, after a long drag on her cigarette.
I drew in a breath. “What I like best about New York is that I can be open about myself all the time,” I said, as preamble. “With everybody.” I paused, and she held my eyes through the cloud of smoke that hovered between us in the nook.
“I’m—” The admission wouldn’t surface, and I shifted uncomfortably on the wooden bench as I struggled to pry
it loose. “I’m gay, Aunt Sass,” I said in a rush. And then I burst into tears, the weight of telling the first person in my family lifting off me.
She extinguished her smoke and reached over to pat my hand. “Oh, honey, I figured that. I never heard you talk about a boy, not in all these years. Your sisters? They just couldn’t stop with all the Jimmy this and Ray that.” She motioned toward my flannel wool shirt, which I’d bought in the young men’s department at Macy’s. “And those clothes of yours—”
I laughed, wiping my tears with my sleeve, but her face remained serious. Just because she knew didn’t mean she was happy about it.
“It’s a hard road you’ve chosen,” she said. “And I can see by those tears you know that’s true.”
“Oh, no, Aunt Sass!” I said. “I’m not unhappy. My life doesn’t feel any harder than the next person’s. I’m just crying because I’m so relieved! It’s like I’ve been bottled up. Imagine you got a Coke, and you shake it and crack it open and it all comes spraying out.”
“Well, your secret’s safe,” she said, sitting back in the nook in a way that felt distancing. I worried briefly that I had ruined everything between us in a momentary surge of truth, all those years of sharing my thoughts and hopes at this very table. Sass zippered her lips. “Your mama won’t hear it from me.”
I swallowed hard and offered a weak smile. Deep down, I had hoped Mama would hear it from her, but after I was safely back in New York.
• • •
I really needed to talk to another lesbian. With Thea unavailable, my best prospect appeared to be phoning Gerri.
Renee was Jewish, and they were in the city for the holiday, so Gerri had agreed to watch Remmie while we were away. But my reception when I first rapped on her door and asked for the favor had been chilly. “Renee’s not big on cats,” Gerri said. “And I’d be scared to have him around Alice.”
“Remington could stay at Clio’s, and Renee and Alice will never even see him. I’ll give you my key to check on him. He’s an easy cat and cute, too. Please? Forget that you’re hating me right now. You’d be doing a favor for a literary legend!”
The prospect of snooping around Clio’s apartment had won Gerri over. And after accepting the cat-sitting duties, my friend had made a peace offering that loosened something inside me, like when you finally get a stubborn screw to turn. “I could never hate you, Livvie,” she had said, before asking if we could make a date after New Year’s to “process” our friendship.
Now I had the perfect excuse to call her— to check on Remington and make sure he had adjusted to his sitter. And if I happened to add that I’d just come out to my aunt, well, Gerri might offer some needed words of support from years of experience.
Calling from my parents’ house was out of the question, so I collected a bunch of change and headed to Cowboy Jack’s, a local dive bar. The place was empty for a Friday night, with only a few sad drunks at the bar as Merle Haggard crooned, “If we make it through December we’ll be fine.” I knew the bartender— I’d drowned my sorrows there quite a few times after the split with Hallie— and waved to him as I made my way to the phone in the back, on the wall between the men’s and women’s rooms. “Please be there,” I whispered as I dialed Gerri’s number in Milligan Place.
Gerri sounded breathless, like she was either hurrying in or out when the phone rang.
“I just left Clio’s,” she explained.
“Lucky for me! I called to find out how Remington’s doing.” After a pause, I added, “Clio was wondering. I told her he’d be fine, but you know.”
“Sure. Well, he’s a good little guy. We’re becoming great pals. He’s eating and shitting and everything he’s supposed to do.” Her jocular tone lifted me up, like we’d never been estranged. “And he loves that catnip mouse. It’s kind of obscene.”
We chatted about her and Renee’s plans for Christmas. They had tickets for Silkwood: “I hear Cher plays a dyke! Isn’t that wild? We’re bringing Kleenex for the ending.”
The Kleenex comment provided an artful segue into the topic I needed to get off my chest. “Speaking of crying, you’ll never guess what I did today.”
“Ate collards?” she said.
“That’s an everyday occurrence at the Blisses’, and nobody cries about it,” I said.
“Eating collards every day seems pretty sad to me.”
“Think bigger. More . . . unexpected.”
“Beats me.”
A pause for effect. “Drumroll, please! I came out to my aunt. First person in my family to know.”
Gerri exploded. “You did not! That is great, Livvie! I’m so proud of you. This calls for a celebration!” Then my words sank in. “Wait, who did the crying?”
The details of my talk with Aunt Sass spilled out of me, down to the emotional moment of reveal. My pocket of change got lighter with each minute, but I was hesitant to hang up. The hardest thing about being home was that, although the place was familiar, I didn’t fit anymore.
“Who’s next? Your parents? Will you do both at once? I prefer the group method myself.”
“Oh, it’s not the right time. I’m not ready for them.”
“There’s no right time, Livvie.” She paused, and the sound of her lighting a cigarette traveled through the line. “But you’ve got kind of a good setup right now if you think about it. Wait till Christmas Day. Drop the bombshell, say, right after dinner. Everybody has a good cry or maybe a scream, and then the next morning you get on a plane and fly away. You seriously limit the length of the dramatics and knock them all off in one fell swoop.”
A cartoon image of the words “I’m gay” toppling one family member after another like a bowling ball striking pins crossed my mind. In reality, I couldn’t fathom telling my family as a group and watching nieces and nephews hurriedly transported to other rooms. Plus, it was hard to get a word in edgewise once all the Blisses were together. Still, I said, “Yeah, well, maybe,” just to shut down the conversation.
“Try it, you’ll like it!” Gerri said in a fake New York accent, mimicking the guy from the old Alka Seltzer commercials.
Her pushiness began to grate on me, like she couldn’t understand the hugeness of coming out to my aunt and wanted more. I pivoted into bringing the call to a close. “Anyway, thanks for listening. I really needed a lesbian ear!”
“My lesbian ears are all yours.”
I laughed, but for a few minutes after hanging up, I stood motionless at the phone, my hand sweaty from clutching the receiver. A call that had started off supportive ended by leaving me tense, almost as if I’d talked to one of my sisters instead of a friend. But I wasn’t sure if I was more upset because Gerri didn’t understand me, or because I lacked the courage to jump in and take her suggestion.
The bartender had popped open a Bud for me. “Looks like you could use some holiday cheer,” he said.
• • •
On Christmas Eve, Daddy relinquished his old Nova to me once again. The station wagon served mostly for church on Sundays, grocery shopping, and my mother’s Christian-duty visits, so the mileage was stuck at around sixty thousand. A used black Ford pickup he’d bought for his handyman job was his preferred transport because he could stash all his supplies in a truck box in the bed and be ready to slap up drywall at a moment’s notice.
“You’re helping me out, taking the old girl for a spin,” he said as he dropped the keys into my open palm that morning. Daddy was being generous, too, because Sue had called and invited me over to help her wrap presents for the kids after I’d fulfilled my duties with Clio. “You have a good time with your sister,” he added.
In fact, I was scheming to postpone going to Sue’s and to wander over to Peg Bailey’s art show, which was open for a few hours that afternoon in downtown Asheville. I didn’t mention the art show to Daddy— not because he would care where I went, but because I knew the gallery’s existence would pinch him like a tight waistband. He dismissed the artists and bohemian retailers in
downtown Asheville as “squatters” or “damn hippies.”
With a care package of food from my mother— homemade cornbread, a three-bean salad, and leftover chicken stew— my first stop was Clio’s cabin. Clio seemed tempted by the cornbread but then said she’d had a funny taste in her mouth all day and would put it in the refrigerator for later.
“You up for another visit to your brother?”
“I don’t believe so,” she said. “I was trying to work, but I started getting this tingle in my fingers.”
Open on a round table in the corner of her room was a clothbound notebook— the one she’d requested and I’d located for her at a stationery store in the Village. Her vintage Sheaffer fountain pen rested across its pages. Although I’d helped her pack for the trip, she must have tossed her writing materials into the bag when I wasn’t looking.
“Miss Hartt! Is that a new story?”
“Can’t say yet.”
“Well, it’s good news, whatever it is. But what about your tingly feeling? Do you want to see a doctor?”
“Lord, no! What a lot of fuss, really. I was just gripping the pen too tight.”
“I will leave you to it then. Get some rest, and I hope your taste buds get back to normal real soon. My mama’s cornbread is a thing of beauty.” We set a time for me to pick her up for Crab Creek the following day, and then I headed to town with Peg’s flyer folded into my coat pocket.
The 51 Gallery (named for its street number) was nearly empty when I showed up; even Peg wasn’t around. A young white guy with dreads was in charge and jumped up to greet me. He was one of the artists, he informed me as he showed off his oversized metal sculptures fashioned out of rusty machine parts. When I asked about Peg, he pointed to some pieces mounted on a wall that were no more than twelve inches square, some even smaller. There were six or seven in all, fabric and paper collages that celebrated women’s history. While each of the guy’s metal works was priced at four or five hundred dollars or more, Peg was asking only thirty apiece for hers. “She needs to go bigger,” the guy said with a dismissive air.
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