Hayley Gordon’s food truck drove up and parallel parked outside the elementary school playground, where she was more than likely preparing for her usual lunch rush. She shouted a hello to Karen, who briefly introduced Dahlia. The filmmaker also had little interest in Hayley.
So it went as they stood before the elementary school, which Karen described as a place where, “Over half of the parents are lesbian couples, and many of the teachers are members of the LGBT community as well.” Dahlia mulled over that information while Karen directed her to the nearby firehouse and then the craft store.
“Hello, Mayor.” Joan Sheffield sat on a stool behind the register. She was not in a hurry to get up and shake anyone’s hands. “Who’s that with you?”
After the brief introductions, Dahlia asked for a sneak peek into the quilts that would be on display during Fourth of July weekend. Joan told her they were still very hush-hush since even she wasn’t finished yet. All she and Karen could tell the documentarian was that the theme was “What Makes This Paradise.” Dahlia said she looked forward to it.
“Things will be much more exciting in the coming days,” Karen assured her as they exited the craft shop. “People are gearing up for the festivities right now. You saw those firefighters. Getting in their rest while they can, because it will be nothing but fireworks and dehydrations starting tomorrow.” Thanks, guys. Karen had not anticipated a whole firehouse sleeping on couches and cots. A stove burner had been left on, and the TV played at excruciating decibels. When she asked the nearest person – Krys Madison, of all people – what was going on, she got a sleepy shrug.
“I prefer to film and interview when things are a bit down, anyway.” Dahlia shielded her eyes from the sun and looked up and down the street. “It’s a cozy, quiet town. That’s exactly what I want to depict.”
Karen couldn’t help but grin. “We really are looking forward to your work. We’ve kept most of the townspeople in the dark about it, but don’t be surprised if some word gets out.”
“I’m sure we can handle it. For my last effort, we asked the tribal leaders to tell everyone so we could get a decent turnout for our meetings and interviews, but this is a different approach. I want to represent the town as it really is.”
There was something lurking beneath Dahlia’s words, but Karen was too distracted by the gleam in Dahlia’s eyes and the way her hair blew on the wind. The cursory look into her profile depicted a woman who had freshly turned forty and had lived an exciting life of various jobs before falling into filmmaking. No marriage. No kids. Not like Karen, who had two grown children tearing up her house at this very moment… and an ex-husband currently making merry with whatever new squeeze he discovered in Austin, Texas.
No, Karen hadn’t been in a long-term lesbian relationship since and moving to this part of the world, but she told herself it was better to be single and busy than coupled and bored. She saw plenty of both around town.
Yet she would be remiss to discount her immediate attraction to this cool woman cruising up and down the town, looking for stories to film. Karen knew nothing of Dahlia’s sexuality, but wouldn’t it be pertinent to have some connection to the LGBT community to want to do this? We’re about the same age. I’m only a couple years older than her… I’m a mayor, for God’s sake. Yet she seems so much cooler than me!
Was this what her children felt like at school?
By the time they returned to city hall, Tom had firmly sequestered himself in his office, and Wanda had regaled the male members of the crew with every sordid story she remembered from her tenure on the city council. Hence, Karen’s real work of maintaining the narrative of Paradise Valley began.
And Dahlia was always one step behind her. Or beside her. She was good at keeping Karen on her toes like that.
Chapter 4
DAHLIA
“Make sure you keep that tree in the shot.” Dahlia pointed Wayne down the street. The camera turned. Aaron, another guy on the crew, walked ahead to see how far they could test the shot. “We’re in a mountain town. We need to always make it look like we’re in the mountains. This isn’t the desert. We also don’t have an ocean to work with. So make sure viewers always get the feeling they’re strolling through an idyllic little forest town.”
Someone snorted. It was probably Wayne.
“What do you want me to do about the cars?” he pointed to the business vans, the old pickup trucks, and the beat-up compacts that typically littered these humble little towns. Granted, this was the first time they encountered a town where most of the trucks had gender-non-conforming lesbians hanging their arms out of the windows, but Dahlia thought that was part of the charm. “Are we doing backing shots or filler stock right now?”
“Stock.” Dahlia took a peek at the camera and nodded. “Good. Half trees and building. Half street. I want those cars ambling by. Every time we transition between topics and interviews, we better get a rippling view of small town life.”
“But gay, right?”
Dahlia narrowed her eyes at Wayne. How did he always read her mind so well? In another life, they would make good partners for a short-lived but rambunctious marriage. Except Wayne was a little younger than Dahlia liked. If she liked boyfriends at all, anyway.
There was a reason she had set aside a dating life to completely focus on her work. One of those reasons was seeing how quickly the guys on her crew devolved into all manner of roughhousing, like they were feral animals who couldn’t control their need to jump, claw, and sometimes bite each other on the shoulder. Dahlia wished she could say this was her first time ever seeing something like this. In actuality, it was about par for the course on every all-male crew she ever worked or hired.
These guys got bored, fast. Usually, filming in small towns meant they flirted with the locals and occasionally came out of it with a new short-term girlfriend. Not likely for that to happen here in Paradise Valley. If they tried flirting with any woman, they were likely to get shut down so quickly their balls would retract into their bodies.
Dahlia rather looked forward to seeing that.
Establishing shots of Main Street were completed by lunch of their third day in Paradise Valley. The sun had been the right amount of out that she figured they might not have to come back on a rainier day to get other views. Wayne was keen to get some shots of city hall before they put up the stages and booths for Fourth of July. First, however, Dahlia suggested they get lunch at the café. It was either that or wait for the food truck to amble by, and God only knew how greasy that was.
They packed up the equipment into their van, ensured it was locked, and walked two minutes down Main Street to hit up Heaven’s Café for lunch. While Dahlia had assured her crew there would be plenty of opportunity to cook their own meals and save out-of-pocket money that way, she also couldn’t deny that sampling a town’s soul was eating where all the locals went.
For brunch and coffee, that place was Heaven’s. When Dahlia stopped by the day before, she wasn’t as enamored with the place as Karen might have expected. Yet that wasn’t because it offended her any. It was simply… predictable. Of course a town like this had their preferred, cozy café where everyone could get a decent latte and talk about the next Butch Ball in the fall. The corkboard was filled with local events, missing pets, and offers to teach guitar. The music was always soft or alternative rock, with the occasional classical tracks streaming across the stereo. The rotating artwork focused on either town life or lesbian attitudes. For every picture of downtown, there was another of a shapely woman highlighting her womb.
Yawn.
Now, a place like Frankie’s Deli was real. That was a woman hustling at a gig one could find in any town. Frankie didn’t concern herself with rainbow flags, community events, and the delicate tummies of the townspeople. She was busy slicing meat, making sandwiches, and keeping her shop clean. While Dahlia admitted there were an equal number of men in both locations, she definitely noticed a change in personalities. She wondered if it would be the
same going from Wolf’s Hill Dive to Paradise Lost. Sure, there may be men in Paradise Lost, but were they anything like the guys at the other dive bar? That would be the kind of anthropological study to entertain Dahlia. If she had the time, anyway.
They sat at the front table by the window overlooking Main Street. The guys scoped out the menu while Dahlia stared at a photograph of Angela Davis hanging on the other wall. Two seconds later, she pulled up the demographic statistics she had on hand for Paradise Valley and confirmed some of her latent suspicions.
“You ever notice something about Oregon?” she asked the guys when they were quiet enough to listen.
Wayne looked up from the two-sided menu. “It’s rainy?”
“It’s got beavers on everything?” Aaron chided.
Kurt, who usually kept to himself, added, “You can drive for seven hours in any direction and still be in Oregon?”
“I mean about the people.”
They glanced around the café, as if that would solve the riddle. “If we’re talking stereotypes,” Wayne began, “we can either go with passive-aggressive or weirdly nice.”
“I thought those were the same thing?” Kurt asked.
“No, that’s not what I’m talking about.” Dahlia didn’t expand upon her thoughts. If her crew couldn’t pick up what she was thinking, then she’d wait a little while longer for it to click. If it ever did. Sometimes her crews weren’t the brightest people on the planet. Other times, they caught on to things long before she did.
She had a feeling that Paradise Valley turned a few things on their heads.
“Hey.” Heaven, dressed in a pink gingham apron and with her frizzy hair pulled back into a sensible ponytail, greeted Dahlia with a smile. “What can I get you and your friends?” She kept one eye on the three men sitting at the table up front. They had almost forgotten to return the menus to the container at the front of the shop.
Dahlia had memorized most of their drink orders, but wrote down what foods they wanted. Wayne and Kurt asked for sandwich sets. Aaron wanted a cup of soup. Dahlia decided on a salad and scone. By the time she finished ordering, a small line had formed behind her.
“It might take up to ten minutes for those meals,” Heaven warned Dahlia. “The coffees will be right up. By the way…” she waited for Dahlia to pull the company credit card out of her wallet, “weren’t you in here yesterday with the mayor? Thought you look familiar.”
Did it help that Dahlia wore a white T-shirt that said HIBISCUS FILMS on the front? “Yes, the mayor took me on a tour yesterday. We’re a film crew doing a small spot on the town. We’re doing establishing spots along Main Street today, so if anyone comes in here freaking out about us, do us a favor and let them know we’re good?”
Heaven chuckled. “Give me more info than that, and I might tell them you’re the second coming of Melissa Etheridge. Or, you know, do me a favor and make sure my café is nice and easy to see in some of those shots.”
Dahlia shared that chuckle and knowing look. Shrewd businesswoman. I like it. Maybe Heaven had established the premier lesbian hangout spot in town through no accident. It certainly changed some of Dahlia’s perceptions of this brightly-lit café.
“…After we’re through with Main Street, I think we’re supposed to head to that park with the playground equipment.” That’s what Dahlia caught Wayne saying when she returned. “I’m guessing we’ll want to hit it when there are actual kids playing, but that means…”
Everyone groaned. “Model releases. With kids.”
Dahlia shook her head. “Hold off on that. Going through those motions will mean half the town knows exactly what we’re doing here, and we need some element of surprise. We’ll save it for later in the month. Today, we focus on establishing shots that don’t need releases.”
“Sounds good. When do we get the grub?”
They ate while going over the Fourth of July itinerary. Dahlia cared most about filming parts of the parade and the pop-up farmer’s market and festival booths littering main street. When she explained that there was a “quilting experience” going up at the library, the guys snickered. Dahlia quickly checked that.
“Are you kidding? It’s perfect. If there’s anything we want, it’s the creative side of these people’s minds. We came here to get their feelings toward their own town, didn’t we? What better way to get unfiltered access than at a craft show about that very thing?”
The guys exchanged looks and shrugged. “You would know better about crafting things than us,” Wayne said. Was that a reference to her short stint in crocheting a few years ago? Why had she ever told him about that? “But sure. Sounds great. Haven’t filmed a good quilt show since my grandmother’s birthday three years ago.”
“You guys laugh, but I’m dead serious.”
Not many of them knew this, but Dahlia once came from a place not too unlike Paradise Valley. Sure, it wasn’t primarily made up of LGBT people of any flavor, but many of the same markers were there. The tiny schools. Few staples around town. Higher prices because of “shipping costs.” For every person driving a mediocre vehicle, there was one in a real stinker that needed to be hauled away to the landfill. People were polite on the outside, but inside, they gossiped about who you were and what you were doing in “their” town. The highlight of the Fourth of July celebrations was a small farmer’s market and the quilt show at the library. If people wanted fireworks, they drove two towns over in the evening. Otherwise, it was barbecues as far as the eye could see. (Now, another difference between Paradise Valley and most other small towns? Those barbecues could be nothing but hamburgers and hot dogs. Or they could be pure vegan fare. The town seemed to be split on that, based on the number of restaurants advertising their vegetarian menus.)
So Dahlia knew what the underlying words and looks meant. She also knew how much pressure places like these put on the peoples who lived there. Her own mother… well…
Once upon a time, my mother fancied herself a lesbian. She left my dad, left me, and ran off with a woman ten years younger than her to live in some New Mexican village that had a uteri-only rule. Dahlia’s mother had flitted in and out of her life ever since then, sometimes with a new woman, but always with new excuses. She loved to crow about how much better life was in the southwest, where nobody but the sun bothered her. Apparently, Arizona and New Mexico were big places for the discerning middle-aged lesbian ready to leave her family and start all over again. This time without the kids underfoot.
Dahlia got it, to an extent. Especially as she grew older and felt the constraints of life upon her shoulders. That didn’t mean she agreed with what her mother did, however. Child Dahlia? The one left wondering how her mother could leave her so easily? Let alone a man who had been nothing but nice to her although they both knew the marriage was on the fast track to Divorceville? That child was still pissed the hell off that a woman could be so selfish. She didn’t try to take me with her. She was so enamored with her new lesbian life that she high-tailed it for New Mexico as soon as she could afford a bus ticket.
Dahlia knew she couldn’t hold it against every woman of a certain sexuality. That was silly. Lesbians weren’t responsible for her mother abandoning her family. It could’ve been anything. Could’ve been a cult, for God’s sake! Or maybe a traveling circus looking for a new woman to clean the lions’ cages. Child Dahlia had spent many nights trying to understand what was so appealing about the lesbian lifestyle that it could pluck women out of their homes and into the unknown.
She supposed that was a giant lure for her to take on this project. She wanted to understand what towns like these were like. What were the stories of the people who lived here? What was really in it for them? Did it bother them that men lived among them, or was it a safe space where they didn’t worry about what women in other small towns fretted over on a daily basis?
I bet the mayor has a lot of interesting things to say about her life. Oh, Dahlia had done a little digging. Karen Rath had an easy-to-research history.
Such as her first marriage going down in flames and her… taking the kids to Paradise Valley.
Interesting, wasn’t it? The mayor didn’t seem to be in a relationship, but she had chosen Paradise Valley as her eventual place to live. At least she brought her kids with her, though. Was Karen gay? Was she bi? Did she have any real stake in life in this small town, beyond how easy it was for her to become mayor? After she won her first election against another local, Karen had run uncontested for almost seven years. Before that, she was on the city council, so it wasn’t like she had come completely out of nowhere from somewhere else.
Except she had chosen Paradise Valley for a reason. She immediately got involved with the community. She bought a recent Victorian-styled home and raised her two children to adulthood all on her own. A woman could make a documentary about just Karen Rath and have compelling stories to share with a willing audience, but she was only a small piece of the Paradise Valley puzzle. Dahlia wasn’t above looking around the room and seeing a million other stories waiting to be told.
She figured most people would want to talk about the horrible lives they left in their old small towns and families. Or they’d gush about meeting the love of their lives. “Finally having a place to settle down and feel normal.” They would gas her up with so many feelgood, triumphant stories that Dahlia would struggle to see the truth in their positive fogs. There was no way a town could be comprised of completely good people. Somewhere, in the depths of Paradise Valley, there was a woman who had abandoned all of her responsibilities, the people counting on her, and the experiences that had made her who she was. She had come here to “start all over again,” because to some women, exes and children were things to forget.
Her colleagues would warn her that she treaded dangerous trails. Allowing such bias into her work – let alone consciously – would color the film. She had pitched it to Mayor Rath as a tourist-building exercise that could leave Paradise Valley on top. If she released a film that demonized half the residents, she’d not only be in hot water with this tiny city council… but, quite possibly, the people beyond these city limits.
July Skies Page 3