Zami

by Audre Lorde

  One weekend, Ginger stole a lobster claw for me. It was a make-up present that Charlie had bought for Cora’s dinner, and when Cora found out she threatened to throw Ginger out of the house. Ginger decided then that this was all getting too costly. Long goodnight kisses on the back porch were definitely not enough; so she finally made her own move.

  By the beginning of November, autumn was closing down. The trees were still incandescent colors, but the edge of winter was already in the air. The days were getting shorter and shorter, and this made me unhappy. There was very little time after work before sunset. If I went to the library, it was dark by the time I walked back to Mill River Road. Keystone was a daily trial that did not seem to get better nor easier, despite Ginger’s warm-hearted attempts to cheer me up during our frightful days.

  One Thursday after work, Ginger borrowed her brother’s old beat-up Ford and we went downtown to cash our checks alone, without Cora, or Charlie, or any of the boys. It was still light when we were through, and I could tell Ginger had something on her mind. We drove around town for a while.

  ‘What’s up?’ I asked.

  ‘C’mon,’ Ginger said. ‘Let’s go up on the hill.’

  Ginger was not much of a nature lover, but she had taken me to see her favorite spot, a wooded hill on the west edge of town where, hidden from view by the overgrown bushes and trees, we could sit on two old tree stumps left from long ago, smoking and listening to Fats Domino and watching the sun go down.

  I found ma’ thrill-l-l-l-lll

  On Blueberreeeeee Hill—lllll.

  We left the car and climbed to the top of the hill. The air was chill as we sat on the stumps to catch our breaths.

  ‘Cold?’

  ‘No,’ I said, pulling my ragged suede jacket, inherited from CeCe, around me.

  ‘You ought to get a warm coat or something, winters around here ain’t like in New York.’

  ‘I’ve got a coat, I just don’t like to wear it, that’s all.’

  Ginger cut her eyes at me. ‘Yeah, I know. Who you think you kidding? If it’s money, I can lend you some till Christmas.’ She knew about the two-hundred-dollar phone bill The Branded had run up that summer at Spring Street, which I was now paying off.

  ‘Hey, thanks, but I don’t need a coat.’

  Ginger was walking back and forth now, puffing nervously on her Lucky Strike. I sat looking up at her. What was going on, and what was Ginger wanting me to say? I didn’t want a coat, because I didn’t mind the cold.

  ‘You really think you’re slick, huh?’ Ginger turned to face me, regarding me with a slight smile and narrowed eyes, head up and to one side like a pigeon. Her voice was high and nervous.

  ‘You always say that, Ginger, and I keep telling you it’s not true. What are you talking about?’

  ‘Slick kitty from the city. Well, kiddo, you don’t have to keep your mouth shut around me, because I know all about you and your friends.’

  What was it that Ginger had discovered or invented in her own mind about me that I would now have to pretend to fulfill? Like the time I promptly downed two straight vodkas to fulfill her image of me as a hard-drinking New York Village girl.

  ‘About me and my friends?’ I was starting to get the drift of her conversation, and beginning to get acutely uncomfortable. Ginger butted her cigarette, took a deep breath, and moved a few steps closer.

  ‘Look, it’s no big thing.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Are you gay or aren’t you?’ She took another deep breath.

  I smiled up at her and said nothing. I certainly couldn’t say I don’t know. Actually, I was at a loss as to what to say. I could not bring myself to deny what I had just this past summer decided to embrace; besides, to say no would be to admit being one of the squares. Yet, to say yes might commit me to proving it, like with the vodka. And Ginger was a woman of the world, not one of my high school girl friends with whom kissing and cuddling and fantasizing sufficed. And I had never made love to a woman before. Ginger, of course, had made up her mind that I was a woman of the world and knew ‘everything’, having made love to all the women about whom I talked with such intensity.

  I stood up, feeling the need to have our eyes on a level.

  ‘C’mon, now, you can’t just not say anything, girl. Are you or aren’t you?’ Ginger’s voice was pleading as well as impatient. She was right. I couldn’t just not answer. I opened my mouth, not knowing what was going to come out.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. Maybe it would all stop there.

  Ginger’s brown face broke into her wonderful full-cheeked half-smile, half-grin. Instinctively, I grinned back. And joining hands there on the top of the hill, with the sound of the car radio drifting upward through the open door below, we stood grinning at each other while the sun went down.

  Ginger.

  Snapping little dark eyes, skin the color of well-buttered caramel, and a body like the Venus of Willendorf. Ginger was gorgeously fat, with an open knowledge about her body’s movement that was delicate and precise. Her breasts were high and ample. She had pads of firm fat upon her thighs, and round dimpled knees. Her swift, tapered hands and little feet were also deeply dimpled. Her high putchy cheeks and great mischievous smile was framed by wide bangs and a short pageboy that was sometimes straightened, sometimes left to wave tightly over her ears.

  Whenever Ginger went to the beauty parlor she came back feather-bobbed and adorable, but much less real. Shortly after we met at the plant, she began to resist Cora’s nagging, and stopped going to the hairdresser’s altogether.

  ‘What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?’ Ginger turned back to me; our hands, still joined, fell apart.

  ‘It’s getting late,’ I answered. I was hungry.

  Ginger’s brow puckered and she sucked her teeth into the fading light. ‘Are you for real? What’d ya mean, it’s getting late? Is that all you can think about?’

  Oh. Obviously that was not the right thing to say. What am I supposed to do now?

  Ginger’s round face was a hand’s span away from my own. She spoke softly, with her usual cockiness. Her close voice and the smell of her face powder made me at once both uneasy and excited.

  ‘Why don’t you kiss me? I don’t bite.’

  Her words were bold, but beneath them I could feel fear belying their self-assurance.

  Oh, hell, I thought. What am I doing here, anyway? I should have known it wasn’t going to stop there – I knew it, I knew it and suppose she wants me to take her to … oh shit! What am I going to do now?

  Afraid to lose some face I never had, obediently, I bent forward slightly. I started to kiss Ginger’s cupid’s-bow mouth, and her soft lips parted. My heart went snatch-grab. Down the hill, the car radio was just finishing the news. I felt Ginger’s quick breath upon my face, expectant and slightly tinged with cough drops and cigarettes and coffee. It was warm and exciting in the chilly night air and I kissed her again thinking, this isn’t a bad idea at all …

  When Ginger and I got back to the house, Charlie had left for work with his Railroad Express supply truck. Cora and the boys had already eaten dinner, and the two younger ones were ready for bed. As we came in the front door, Cora was just coming downstairs with her husband’s dinner tray. Ginger had explained to me that her father never left his room any more except to go to the bathroom.

  Cora and CeCe had just come back from marketing, and Cora was tired. Her henna-red curly hair was caught behind each ear with a baby-blue ribbon, and untidy bangs almost covered her heavily made-up eyes.

  ‘We ate Chinese tonight to give me a break. And we didn’t leave any for you girls because I didn’t know if you were going to come home. Ginger, don’t forget to leave your house-money on the table.’

  There was only a hint of triumphant reproach in Cora’s voice. Chinese food was a rare treat.

  I usually spent the night at Ginger’s house on the Thursdays we got paid. While Ginger put away the dishes her brothers had washed, and made the boys’ lunches for school, I went up
stairs to take a quick bath. The morning started early, at 5:00 A.M., when Cora rose to take care of her husband before she went to her job.

  ‘And don’t leave that water running in the tub the way you like to, neither!’ Cora called out to me from the room she and Charlie shared as I passed by. ‘You’re not in New York now and water costs money!’

  Ginger’s room was downstairs at the front of the house with its own entrance. It was rather secluded from the rest of the house, once everyone had retired.

  By the time Ginger finished taking her shower, I was already in bed. I lay with my eyes closed, wondering if I could pretend to be asleep, and if not, what would be the sophisticated and dykely thing to do.

  Ginger took much longer than usual preparing herself for bed. She sat at her little desk-table, creaming her legs with Jergen’s lotion and braiding her hair, humming snatches of songs under her breath as she buffed her nails.

  ‘If I came home tonight, would you still be my …’

  ‘Come on a my house, my house a come on, come on …’

  ‘I saw the harbor lights, they only told me we were …’

  In between anxieties about my anticipated performance, I began to feel the rising excitement of the hill return. It challenged the knot of terror I felt at the thought of Ginger’s unknown expectations, at the thought of sexual confrontation, at the thought of being tried and found wanting. I smelled the little breezes of Cashmere Bouquet powder and Camay soap as Ginger moved her arm back and forth, buffing away. What was taking her so long?

  It didn’t occur to me that Ginger, despite her show of coolness and bravado, was as nervous as I. After all, this wasn’t just playing around with some hometown kid at the plant. This was actually going to bed with a real live New York City Greenwich Village Bulldagger.

  ‘Aren’t you coming to bed,’ I asked, finally, a little surprised at the urgency of my voice.

  ‘Well, I thought you’d never ask.’ With a relieved chuckle, Ginger shed her robe, snapped off the dresser lamp, and bounced into bed beside me.

  Until the very moment that our naked bodies touched in that old brass bed that creaked in the insulated sunporch on Walker Road, I had no idea what I was doing there, nor what I wanted to do there. I had no idea what making love to another woman meant. I only knew, dimly, it was something I wanted to happen, and something that was different from anything I had ever done before.

  I reached out and put an arm around Ginger, and through the scents of powder and soap and hand cream I could smell the rising flush of her own spicy heat. I took her into my arms, and she became precious beyond compare. I kissed her on her mouth, this time with no thought at all. My mouth moved to the little hollow beneath her ear.

  Ginger’s breath warmed my neck and started to quicken. My hands moved down over her round body, silky and fragrant, waiting. Uncertainty and doubt rolled away from the mouth of my wanting like a great stone, and my unsureness dissolved in the directing heat of my own frank and finally open desire.

  Our bodies found the movements we needed to fit each other. Ginger’s flesh was sweet and moist and firm as a winter pear. I felt her and tasted her deeply, my hands and my mouth and my whole body moved against her. Her flesh opened to me like a peony and the unfolding depths of her pleasure brought me back to her body over and over again throughout the night. The tender nook between her legs, moist and veiled with thick crispy dark hair.

  I dove beneath her wetness, her fragrance, the silky insistence of her body’s rhythms illuminating my own hungers. We rode each other’s need. Her body answered the quest of my fingers my tongue my desire to know a woman, again and again, until she arced like a rainbow, and shaken, I slid back through our heat, coming to rest upon her thighs. I surfaced dizzy and blessed with her rich myrrh-taste in my mouth, in my throat, smeared over my face, and the loosening grip of her hands in my hair and the wordless sounds of her satisfaction lulling me like a song.

  Once, as she cradled my head between her breasts, Ginger whispered, ‘I could tell you knew how’, and the pleasure and satisfaction in her voice started my tides flowing again and I moved down against her once more, my body upon hers, ringing like a bell.

  I never questioned where my knowledge of her body and her need came from. Loving Ginger that night was like coming home to a joy I was meant for, and I only wondered, silently, how I had not always known that it would be so.

  Ginger moved in love like she laughed, openly and easily, and I moved with her, against her, within her, an ocean of brown warmth. Her sounds of delight and the deep shudders of relief that rolled through her body in the wake of my stroking fingers filled me with delight and a hunger for more of her. The sweetness of her body meeting and filling my mouth, my hands, wherever I touched, felt right and completing, as if I had been born to make love to this woman, and was remembering her body rather than learning it deeply for the first time.

  In wonder, but without surprise, I lay finally quiet with my arms around Ginger. So this was what I had been so afraid of not doing properly. How ridiculous and far away those fears seemed now, as if loving were some task outside of myself, rather than simply reaching out and letting my own desire guide me. It was all so simple. I felt so good I smiled into the darkness. Ginger cuddled closer.

  ‘We better get some sleep,’ she muttered. ‘Keystone tomorrow.’ And drifted off into slumber.

  There was an hour or so before the alarm went off and I lay awake, trying to fit everything together, trying to reassure myself that I was in control and did not need to be afraid. And what, I wondered, was my relationship now to this delicious woman who lay asleep on my arm? Ginger by night now seemed so different from the Ginger I knew in the day. Had some beautiful and mythic creature created by my own need suddenly taken the place of my jovial and matter-of-fact buddy?

  Once earlier, Ginger had reached out to touch the wet warmth of my own body and I had turned her hand aside without thinking, without knowing why. Yet I knew that I was still hungry for her cries of joy and the soaring wonder of her body moving beneath mine, guided by a power that flowed through me from that charged core pressed against her.

  Ginger was my friend, the only friend I had made in this strange town, and I loved her, but with caution. We had slept together. Did that mean we were lovers?

  A few months after Gennie’s death I walked down Broadway late one Saturday afternoon. I had just had another argument with my mother, and I was going to the A&P to get milk. I dawdled along the avenue looking into shop windows, not wanting to return to the tensions and misunderstandings waiting for me at home.

  I paused in front of Stolz’s Jewelers, admiring their new display. In particular, I marked a pair of hanging earrings of black opals, set into worked silver. ‘Gennie will love those,’ I thought, ‘I must remember to tell her …’ and then it hit me again that Gennie was dead, and that meant that she would never be there ever again. It meant that I could not ever tell her anything more. It meant that whether I loved her or was angry at her or wanted her to see a new pair of earrings, none of that mattered or would ever matter to her again. I could share nothing at all with her any more because she was gone.

  And even after all the past weeks of secret mourning, Gennie’s death became real to me in a different way.

  I turned away from the jewelry store window. And right then and there in the middle of Broadway and 151st Street on a Saturday afternoon at the beginning of the summer of my sixteenth year, I decided that I would never love anybody else again for the rest of my life. Gennie had been the first person in my life I was conscious of loving. And she had died. Loving hurt too much. My mother had turned into a demon intent on destroying me. You loved people and you came to depend on their being there. But people died or changed or went away and it hurt too much. The only way to avoid that pain was not to love anyone, and not to let anyone get too close or too important. The secret to not being hurt like this again, I decided, was never depending on anyone, never needing, never loving. />
  It is the last dream of children, to be forever untouched.

  I heard the oil-burner in the basement at Walker Road kick over at 4:30 A.M. and Ginger shifted and sighed softly in her sleep. I started to kiss her awake and stopped, as the smells of our loving and the moist top of her sleepy head engulfed me in a sudden wave of tenderness so strong that I pulled back.

  ‘You better watch out,’ I said to myself soundlessly in the darkness. The alarm went off, and Ginger and I, galvanized by the hectic morning routine of the house, grabbed our robes and raced upstairs to the bathroom.

  One more minute and we would have to stand in line with the boys. There was just time for a hurried hug and a kiss over the washbowl, as Ginger brushed out the tangles in her hair that had become unbraided during the night.

  Charlie dropped us off on the other side of the railroad tracks, a block away from the plant. Ginger stopped in and bought buttered rolls and coffee for us in the luncheonette across the street from Keystone.

  ‘We gonna need something to keep us awake today after last night,’ she grunted, then grinned, nudging me under the cover of pushing through the mob at the entrance to the plant building. We winked at each other as we waited in the crowd for the freight elevator to take us up into hell.

  All day, I watched Ginger carefully for a lead as to how we were going to treat the extraordinary events of the night before. A piece of me was invested in her image of me as the gay young blade, the seasoned and accomplished lover from the big city.

  (Later, Ginger told me that it was my questioning why she always had to make school lunch for the boys every morning before her work that made Cora conclude one day, ‘She’s got to be a bulldagger!’)

  I enjoyed paying court to Ginger, and being treated, in private, like a swain. It gave me a sense of power and privilege that was heady, if illusory, since I knew on another level it was all play-acting. On one level it was play-acting for Ginger, too, because she would not allow herself to regard a relationship between two women as anything other than a lark. She could not consider it important, even as she sought it and cherished it.