by Ana Good
The Big Sugarbush:
A lesbian romance
A deeply superficial tale of lezzy, dyke, queer girls behaving badly*
Ana B Good
*If you are seeking something more substantial, we’d recommend Kafka.
The Big Sugarbush: A Lesbian Romance is a work of fiction. Any mention of real people, locations, towns, or historical events are meant to invoke authenticity and are to be understood as a part of the fictive process. All characters and events in Sugarbush are the product of the author’s imagination. Nothing in this novel is real, other than the great state of Vermont, the village of Stowe, and the fact that lesbians exist everywhere, in many varieties, colors, forms, and flavors. Everything else should be taken as a bedtime fable.
Chick Lick Books, an Imprint of
Hot Pants Press, LLC
4 Carmichael Street, PMB #2160
Essex Junction, VT 05452
E-mail: [email protected]
Web: www.TheBigSugarBush.com
Copyright © 2016 by Ana B. Good
First Print Edition: December, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9815678-0-8
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be copied or reproduced in any format now known or to be discovered except for brief extracts for the purpose of book reviews or critical analysis. Contact Hot Pants Press, LLC for information on reprint rights and licensing of this work.
Credits
Editor: Carolyn Haley, DocuMania
Cover Design: Dane Low, Ebook Launch
Acknowledgments
It takes a long time, and a lot of support, to create any creative work. I have a lot of people to thank in preparing this production. Please direct your applause to early readers of the effort. Cindy Yager, Linda Beal, Docie Woodward, Anne Stockwell, Suzanne Stofflet, bless your souls for reading the dirty first drafts and for your priceless suggestions. To the best friend ever, Gretchen Bryant, thank you, wherever you may be now, for all your love and deep understanding of the writer’s soul. I miss you, goddamn it. Thanks also to Kim Fountain and Josie Leavitt of the Pride Center of Vermont, and all the good peeps who hang out there in Burlington, Vermont, working diligently to make Vermont a safe and happy place for the LGBT community. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of The Big Sugarbush go toward helping sustain the Pride Center of Vermont, so read often, and read a lot. If you like this novel, please review it online, and be sure and buy a copy for your mother.
The Cast
Ten power lezzies — A-gays at their best (and worst) — have thirty days to kick booze, drugs, and drama and get their lives back on track. Sugarbush, a Vermont rehab center, seems just the place. Quiet, tranquil, and therapeutic … until the dykes arrive, and the drama begins.
Prepare to fall in love with
~ Dylan Redford: An installation artist whose Big Pink Pussy, a mammoth sculpture of her own genitalia, has the art world in an uproar.
~ Storm Waters: Petite powerhouse of CNN’s war correspondent team, and America’s chain-smoking, gun-toting sweetheart.
~ Candice Antwerp, M.D.: Surgical mastermind behind the best-sculpted bodies in Hollywood, and a real closet case.
~ Nan Goldberg: Queen of the Bond Market, until the market crashes and she loses a fortune along with her professional verve.
~ Bunny Van Randolph: Aging only daughter of Senator Van Randolph, and a one-woman Welcome Wagon for the East Coast Butch Brigade.
~ Poppy Zigfield: Lead singer of the all-girl British band, Poppy and the Pop Tarts, and a woman who isn’t shy about her sexual preferences.
~ Wee Gee Judd: America’s best-selling writer of bodice-ripping romance for hetero housewives.
~ Dirk and Thumper McGraw: Stud-muffin Olympic snowboarding twins with six-pack abs and a special talent for pleasing the society ladies.
~ Betty Frump: Sergeant General of the Lesbian Thought Police, an icon of the feminist women of the 1960s and ’70s, and a real pain in the ass for the fun-loving queers of today.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
The Cast
Part I — The Gang’s All Here
1. The Real Sugarbush
2. The Big Pink Pussy
3. Poppy and the Pop Tarts
4. Dating Little Debbie
5. Bunny Yum-Yum
6. Storm Ho
7. The Midnight Sound of a Satisfied Woman
8. Eye Candy
9. The Lesbian Thought Police
10. Breakfast Not at Tiffany’s
11. Candy Irons Her Underwear
12. Grumpy Group
13. Packed Pants
14. Out of the Closet — Into the Pantry
15. Pumping Iron
16. Shoveling Shit
17. Gay and Disgruntled
18. Failure Not an Option
19. Daniel Boone Was a Dyke
20. Queer Girl Next Door
21. Coming Clean
Part II — Days of Wretched Reckoning
Interlude
22. Nose Out of Joint
23. Little Bunny’s Woo-Woo
24. Real Dykes Don’t Cry
25. Missing: One Pop Tart
26. Moonlight in Vermont
27. Seven Sisters Fur Pie
28. End of the Road Bar and Grill
29. Beyond Ecstasy
30. Liar, Liar
31. We Are Family
32. The Petersons’ Cat
33. Candy Unwrapped
34. Kinky Kincaid
35. All Hail the Queen
36. Mama McGraw
37. Trust Me, Dear
38. Homo-sex-u-all
39. Tele-Daddy
40. Queen of the Carpet Munchers
41. Jelly Doughnut, I Love You
42. Bad-Mouthing Baby Jesus
43. Love Yurt
Part III — Bush Whacked: Backsliding and Betrayal
Interlude
44. Trip to Jamaica (And Then Some)
45. Please Don’t Eat the Cucumbers
46. Queermobile
47. Girl in a Short-Bed Ford
48. Snow Job
49. Tinker Bell Gets Her Wings
50. Ski Kitty
51. Art Shop Angel
52. Betrayal in the Bentley
53. Missing in Action
54. Back-Seat Tongue Bath
55. Silent Night, All Is Bright
56. I Got My Sister and Me
57. Falling Star
58. Bad News BBC
59. Life Sucks
60. Gold Medal Muff-Diving
61. Angelic Blow Job
Part IV — Survivors of the Bush
Interlude
62. Old Lady Ass Bandit
63. Bad Hair Day in Baghdad
64. Cottage, Castle: Why Quibble?
65. Bush Baby Goes Down
66. Emotional Baggage
67. Little Lezzy Storm Trooper
68. The Things We Do for Love
69. Swan Song of a Lezzy Slut
70. Feel That?
71. Reality TV
72. Who Has to Ask?
73. Free at Last, Free at Last
74. Thumper Gets a Halo
75. The Fire She Lights in Me
76. You’re in the Army Now
77. Jane Wayne Rides Again
78. Lesbian Poker: All Hearts Wild
79. What Men Fear Most
80. Her Healing Touch
81. Lull in the Storm
82. A Different Kind of Fox Hunt
83. Operation Desert Storm: Code Blue
84. Coming Home
Epilogue
About the Author
Part I: The Gang’s All Here
1. The Real Sugarbush
Na
n Goldberg lit a Dunhill cigarette and inhaled until her lungs ached. She rubbed the foggy window of the limo with the tail of her Hermès scarf, hoping to see something other than the snotty sleet that had pelted the car since they’d left the airport in Burlington, Vermont, an hour ago.
No luck.
Nan Goldberg did not want to be fishtailing in a limo around Bumfuck, Vermont, in the middle of a snowstorm. She wanted to be in Manhattan, inside her cozy townhouse at Sixty-Seventh and Lexington, wrapped in soft, warm layers of angora. She missed her tiny, manicured bonsai trees. She longed for her toasty-warm, cedar sauna.
Plus, she could guzzle top-drawer gin in peace in her townhouse. A shot of Nolet’s Reserve for breakfast - maybe five or six shots, as she’d enjoyed that very morning - who’d be the wiser?
Nan shot a glance across the limo’s back seat. Her gaze fixed on the matronly woman in a tightly tailored blue tweed suit who’d forced her into another limo that very morning. Who’d be the wiser if Nan kept sucking on a gin bottle like the town drunk? Birge Hathaway, that’s who.
Birge, Nan’s partner of thirty years, tapped Nan’s platinum cigarette case, which lay on the tufted red-leather seat between them. “Can’t take those with you, dear.”
Nan clawed for the case. “Ohhh no! Not on your life, baby! I agreed to give up drinking, not smoking. Drinking, not anything else.” Nan fumed. She’d always had a short fuse, but this past year, with the stock market as flat as West Texas, and the bond market in the toilet, too, she’d dialed up to dynamite.
Ten years ago Nan Goldberg had been at the top of her game, the cover girl two times running for Fortune. Ten years ago The Motley Fool had sung her praises. Now the SEC had frozen her assets — not all, she still had over five million in Cayman cash accounts and her priceless Bar Harbor, Maine, estate — but she’d bet and lost a billion in bad bond calls. Her name was poison on Wall Street. Even Donald Trump, who had his own problems, was declining her calls.
Birge thought drying out might help Nan.
Nan thought the answer lay in switching drinks. The jewels of the juniper at seven hundred dollars a bottle were no longer sufficient. Maybe she should switch to Scotch with Prozac, an increasingly popular bear-market mix in the marble gutters of Wall Street.
Recognizing the desperation in her partner’s eyes, Birge launched into a reminder of the purpose of the trip. “This place is a rehab center, dear. They frown on all addictions. Smoking is an addiction.” Birge pried Nan’s manicured fingers from the platinum case and pocketed it in the outer zipper compartment of her own briefcase. “No more Dunhills or you from here on in.”
Nan locked her arms across her pink cashmere sweater and stared out the snow-pelted limo window. Sleet. Snow. Ice. No cocktail hour. And now no cigarettes? This rehab thing felt stale already. “Anything else you neglected to tell me about this little Vermont vacation?”
“Love you, dear,” Birge said.
Nan popped open the limo bar and busied herself mixing what might be her last cocktail in perhaps forever. She didn’t look at Birge. She didn’t have to look. She could feel her disapproving glare across the cold canyon stretch of the back seat.
Nan sipped a puddle of golden gin and tried to remember why she had ever fallen in love with Birge. They’d met three decades ago in business school, at Cornell, in the after-hours smoking lounge of the library. Birge had cool moss-green eyes, the color of the granite seabed in Bar Harbor, where Nan’s family had kept a summer home for three generations.
It wasn’t Birge’s eyes, though, that Nan had fallen in love with. It was her attitude. Her walk, more precisely, clipped, like a military cadet’s. It drove Nan crazy with lust, the way Birge, eldest daughter of a steel worker, walked: with a confident swagger that typically only men of their generation enjoyed.
Once Nan had Birge’s strident movement going wild deep inside her, she wanted more, much more. It had been a wonderfully wild thirty years. Hell, if Birge Hathaway, financial wizard of Wall Street, wanted her sober for thirty days, she supposed she could humor her. One day for each year they’d been together. Why the hell not. Humor her.
“We’ll get through this,” Birge murmured as she slipped a glossy lavender flier from her briefcase. She tapped the folder on the seat between them. “Sugarbush, Vermont. Run by a sassy old Yankee gal named Lily Rockworthy, who, for the record, has cured worse cases than you.”
Nan snorted as she mixed a second triple Nolet’s from the limo bar. “Sugarbush? You’re kidding, right?” Nan had been on the Manhattan pro-lesbian circuit long enough to know that sugarbush was Seven Sisters lingo for an elderly trust fund dyke. In her line of work, as a Wall Street bond broker, Nan had serviced many a sugarbush.
“Not what you’re thinking, dear,” chastised Birge. “Get your mind out of the Wall Street gutter. This is Vermont. Up here, a sugarbush is a stand of maple trees.”
Nan nursed her drink. “A stand of maple trees? Really?”
“Yes, really. Like those.” Birge slid her fingers along the sleet-smeared window, tracing a thick, dark, smoothly barked line of trees as they whizzed by on the mountain road.
“Those,” murmured Nan as she squinted through the storm, “are not maples. Those are oaks.”
Birge adjusted her trifocals. “Oak? How in God’s name can you tell?”
“I was a Girl Scout.”
“A Girl Scout?” Birge grunted. “I don’t think so. You hate camping. I’ve known you three decades and you hate camping.”
“Who said anything about camping?”
“You said you were a Girl Scout.”
“I was.”
“I don’t understand. No camping? How’d you become a Girl Scout?”
“The way we all did in the ’70s, dear. I ate my fair share of Brownies.”
Birge bellowed as the limo skidded to an uncertain stop.
Both women rubbed at the windows trying to see if they’d arrived at their destination.
Nan saw it first. A simple, white farmhouse materialized through swirling curtains of snow. The two-story structure was nestled in a snowbank, the wraparound porch drifted in white. Two Adirondack rocking chairs sat quietly on the porch like a pair of snow-covered turtles. Buttery light leaked from the windows. A faded wooden sign that read “Sugarbush” creaked in the winter wind.
Nan grasped the limo door handle and sprang it open, not waiting for the uniformed driver to tromp back through the snowdrifts to assist. She had to flee before Birge said something sentimental, something that would surely make them both cry. She was way too old to cry or to throw a temper tantrum, though at the moment she desperately wanted to do both.
Thirty days without alcohol? No problem. Hell, she was a middle-aged lesbian. She’d survived an East Coast Jewish upbringing. The Reagan administration. The Bee Gees. Big hair. A year in electrolysis. And three decades of blue-collar Christmas parties with Birge’s cross-clutching, Catholic mother, Nona Francis Marie.
Nan Goldberg didn’t need gin to survive; what she needed was for Birge Hathaway, the love of her life, to believe in her once again.
2. The Big Pink Pussy
The Big Pink Pussy, San Francisco’s hottest new museum art installation, was Dylan Redford’s response to the Washington Monument. It bothered Dylan horribly that the father of the country had an five-hundred-foot erection dedicated to him in D.C., and that no one called the thing indecent. People paid, in fact, to climb it. But nowhere did American women have a public monument that celebrated the great nation they had literally birthed.
Precisely why Dylan Redford had spent two years handcrafting her Big Pink Pussy. The Pussy, eighty-feet tall, was scientifically accurate, molded from liquid latex stretched around a giant cast of Dylan’s own interior. Dylan had lovingly superglued a thousand steel-wool pads to the giant slit in representation of her own unruly pubic hair.
The day the Big Pink Pussy art installation opened at its permanent home in San Francisco’s fashionable South of Market district,
Dylan stood at the lipped entrance, handing out tour maps like it was a real estate open house. “Welcome to my pussy,” she enjoyed saying to the more attractive ladies. The more uptight they appeared, the more she enjoyed saying it.
When museum visitors toured the Big Pink Pussy, Dylan encouraged them to stroke the wiry wool before stepping through the eight-foot pink slit into her throbbing uterus. One stroke and the installation moaned. More than that and it shook with the fervor of a San Francisco earthquake, tossing spectators side to side like a carnival ride.
For one dollar, Dylan gave Americans the chance to see the womanly side of the birth of this great nation. “This is what the Statue of Liberty ought to look like,” she was quoted as saying in the arts and leisure section of the San Francisco Examiner. “The insides of a real woman, not that humble, horse-faced French lady they have parked outside New York harbor.”
Art Today had not wanted to cover Dylan’s new installation, but the damn thing was built with tax money, a National Humanities Grant. It was all the rage. No way to ignore it.
Dylan judged that the museum opening was going famously until Ginger Fitzgerald of Art Today had stepped inside the museum installation room in her red stilettos. Ginger had reviewed Dylan’s installations twice before, neither time favorably. Tonight she was in a mad hurry. Her copy was due at the office at eight a.m. and she’d already toured three unbearably bad installations.
Dylan gnashed her teeth as Ginger clicked up the raised platform in her Prada heels to tour the Big Pink Pussy. Dylan had read, indeed memorized, Ginger’s previous mudslinging reviews of her artwork.
Ginger squinted as she strolled inside the crinkly pink cervix. On the advice of her audio tour master, she peeled a paper tab off the slick pink walls. (The lick tabs were covered with a juicy ooze, which had been flavored peppermint for those bold enough to take a lick, which Dylan always encouraged.)
Unimpressed by the installation, Ginger brushed past Dylan, tossing a comment over her shoulder as she clicked out of the museum. “Disappointed, dear,” she sneered, “Très derivative of Judy Chicago.”
Dylan puffed up. “That bitch did suburban dinnerware. This is my vagina.”
Ginger sniffed the air, recalling the odor inside the installation. Peppermint and warm latex were not a pleasant mix. “And it smells like it, too.”