Girls Next Door

by Sandy Lowe

  I nodded.

  She slid the chair toward the window, and the bat took off flying again. It swooped around Rae’s head. She stood very still in the middle of the room. I, on the other hand, was bobbing and weaving like a prize fighter out in the hallway.

  The bat clung to the handle of a kitchen cabinet. Rae picked up the tennis racket and the box and took two steps, brought the box up with one hand, and shimmied the bat into the box with the tennis racket. She kept the racket on top of the box as she moved toward the door. I held the door open for her, ready for her quick retreat from my apartment, and slammed it behind her. I sank to the floor next to the door, forgetting that Rae was still out on the rotten back deck.

  “Crap!” I stood up and opened the door. “I’m so sorry, Rae.”

  Rae stepped into the hallway and deposited the bat-catching paraphernalia in the corner, along with her floppy hat and gloves. She stepped out of her yellow boots.

  “Got a root beer by any chance? I’m a little sweaty.”

  I put my hand on her arm.

  “Yes, I do. And ice too. Thank you so much. I don’t know what I would’ve done.”

  “Can I wash up a bit?” She held up her hands.

  “Sure thing.” I pointed to the bathroom and got a mug out of the cabinet.

  “How are you doing?” she asked over the sound of running water.

  “Better. So much better. A little afraid to turn out the lights again, to be honest.”

  Rae walked out of the bathroom and stood in front of me. She reached forward and tucked a piece of hair behind my ear.

  “Rae, I don’t know how I can go to work tomorrow and not think about you in your outfit.” I hoped my words would distract me from the tingling sensation that went from my ear where she touched me and into the rest of my body. It’s Rae, I reminded myself. It’s probably just a reaction to fearing the bat.

  “Well, I don’t think I want to get the picture of you in this outfit out of my mind.”

  Rae’s eyes traveled over my body.

  “You don’t?” I whispered. I could feel my body respond to her gaze.

  She shook her head slowly, and stepped closer.

  “I don’t, Jess.”

  Her lips were inches from mine. In one motion she wrapped one arm around my waist and cupped the side of my face, drawing my lips to hers. She kissed me like she knew everything about me, and my knees buckled. She pulled me closer, and I wrapped my arms around her neck.

  She kissed the corner of my mouth, waiting for my answer.

  I pressed the full length of my body against her and found her mouth with mine. Her lips were perfect. My tongue parted them and she let me into her mouth. I backed up against the edge of the bed, and her body never left mine.

  She brought her hands up to either side of my face, and our kisses slowed.

  “I told you my heart was particular.”

  “Yes, and…”

  “Jess, I fell for you the first day I met you. When you sat next to those petunias and asked me if I thought it hurt them to be pinched back—my heart was yours.”

  “And I thought that you weren’t interested in me at all.” I reached up and touched Rae’s temple. “You’re so beautiful,” I whispered.

  She ran her hand down just below the small of my back. I arched in response.

  “I’m still a little leery about sleeping here tonight.” I kissed her earlobe, then drew it into my mouth.

  “I wasn’t planning on letting you sleep.” Rae’s voice was raspy.

  I took her hand and sat on the bed. “Come here.”

  “I’ll come when you’re good and ready.” Rae’s laugh was soft.

  I love her laugh.

  The Aisle of Lesbos

  Allison Wonderland

  I know the folks who run this food pantry like the volunteers to say Excuse me when shoppers bump into them—especially if they get rear-ended—but I’m in the market for a more creative apology.”

  “Um…I like the way you make ends meet?”

  To show her appreciation, Yvette steps forward and hugs me.

  To show mine, I reciprocate, wrapping my arms around her like a label on a soup can.

  But as quickly as I’m overjoyed, I’m overtaken by a feeling of anger. “How long has it been?” I demand, because I’m aware of how long it’s been: six months. Before Yvette can correct me, I continue, “One day you’re standing beside me in the fruit-and-breakfast aisle commiserating about the total absence of female cereal mascots. The next I’m standing alone shelving crushed pineapple—emphasis on crushed.”

  “I got canned,” Yvette informs me, and there’s no hint of mirth or worth in her voice. “Some volunteers are former clients paying it forward. But future clients paying it backward?” Her eyes dart toward her shopping cart. “That’s not cutting edge. That’s chopping block.” After a moment, she meets my eyes. “Well? Aren’t you shocked by my demotion?”

  “Actually, I’m more shocked by your devotion—or lack thereof.” I pluck a box of macaroni and cheese off the utility cart and give it a sinister shake, causing its contents to rattle roughly. But there’s a shopper coming down the aisle, so I abstain from decking Yvette and instead place the box onto the shelf where it belongs.

  “We’re running a food pantry here, not a gauntlet,” Yvette sasses me when the client passes us. “Besides, you’ve never mac’ed on me before.” Her eyes narrow until they resemble slits in a piecrust.

  I copy the compression. I’d ask what she means, but—

  “Don’t worry. That’s just another one of my cheesy jokes,” Yvette assures me, and her elbow-noodle smile, which normally causes an identical curve to form on my face, only makes me angrier.

  “Worry? Why would I worry,” I wonder, yanking another box of processed pasta off the utility cart, “that you’re hundreds of days late and thousands of dollars short?”

  “Thanks for making a federal charity case out of it,” Yvette huffs. She slouches against the ketchup-red handle of her shopping cart, which causes her shirt to pucker and her hair to hunch against her rounded shoulders.

  I’ve missed her hair. It has the tint and glint of black olives and is so perfectly curly it makes rotini look like spaghetti. It’s not that I’ve ever wanted to noodle with it or anything. It’s just a welcome contrast to my own convoluted curls, which always obscure the letters on my name badge when I wear my hair down, creating a weird Wheel of Fortune puzzle that is hopelessly unsolvable.

  Well, almost hopelessly unsolvable.

  Hearing every word I haven’t said, Yvette looks up from her cart.

  In unison we grin, thinking back to that day a year and a half ago when she came in for volunteer orientation. As the manager guided her through the aisles of sparsely stocked shelves the color of scratching posts, I watched Yvette from what was my post that afternoon: the fridges and freezers along the rear wall. She froze when she reached me and trained her eyes on my chest. I knew right away what she was looking at—since there’s nothing to see in that area except my name tag.

  “Volunteer Greer,” Yvette read, and something about the way she said it made me feel like one of the Garbage Pail Kids.

  But not in a bad way.

  On her first day the following week, I forgot my badge at home and she forgot my name. “Yo, Gert!” she greeted me.

  “Blueberry or plain?” I queried, and cracked a smile.

  Yvette cracked up. “Neither. It gives me culture shock.” She fastened her badge to her blouse. “Garson, right?”

  “Greer.”

  “Like I said—Garson. That’s your namesake, isn’t it?”

  “Yes!” I bellowed, then quickly mellowed. “Sorry. It’s just that no one under the age of eighty-five has ever made the connection before.”

  “I wasn’t even made until eighty-five,” she shared. “You?”

  “Eighty-two.”

  “Close enough. Oh my goodness, I love When Ladies Meet,” she enthused, and I must have l
ooked confused, wondering whether I’d misheard or misread what she’d said. She could just as easily have declared I love when ladies meet and I’d be none the wiser, since lowercase letters are undetectable by the human ear.

  But Yvette put me wise. “Have you seen that movie with her and Joan Crawford?”

  “No, but I’ve seen it with at least two dozen members of the senior center.”

  Yvette chuckled. It sounded pithy and posh, just like Joan’s.

  “That’s where I work,” I added, worried she’d think I had some sort of old fogey fetish.

  But to my delight, Yvette was equally elderly oriented: She worked in a nursing home.

  “Let Us Be Gay,” I exclaimed, and from her expression I could tell she thought I was flakier than instant mashed potatoes.

  “That’s another old movie I like,” I clarified, wishing I were in black and white so she couldn’t see me turn red. “It’s not very well-known. Norma Shearer is in it. Maybe you’ve seen her in The Women?”

  “Gotta love The Women,” she said.

  Gotta love the women, I heard.

  “Greer!” I hear, and veer back to the present. But it isn’t Yvette who’s trying to get my attention. It’s Richard, another volunteer, specifically the one who replaced Yvette. “Line’s backing up,” he calls from the front of the pantry, where a long table is set up for bagging clients’ groceries.

  “You’d better go help those folks put food on the table,” Yvette suggests.

  “Just call me the Bag Lady. No, don’t, actually. That was…”

  “Insensitive?” Yvette supplies, rolling her eyes. Her shopping cart goes next, down the aisle, taking her with it.

  I head up front, the utility cart thoughtfully screeching in protest because it knows that I can’t. When I reach the table I begin sorting the clients’ selections. I have to ensure they’ve taken only as much as they’re allotted: two beverages, two breakfast items, eggs or butter but not both, etcetera. Whenever I can get away with it, though, I let shoppers take a little extra, if they need it. I’m Volunteer Greer, after all, not Two-Can Sam.

  Yvette was the same way.

  When it’s her turn to check out, whatever’s in her cart, I’ll let her take everything.

  But I won’t let her take off.

  So when the line thins out enough to require only one volunteer for the job, I ask Richard to take over the task of shelving the dry goods. Now if Yvette wants to leave, she’ll have to get past me first.

  From the front, I can see her from the back. She’s in the soup aisle—where else would she be, considering that she’s in the soup? I wish she’d said something. I mean, I knew she wasn’t well-off, but I didn’t know she was borderline on-the-breadline. What, did she think I wouldn’t care? Or worse—that I would?

  When Yvette approaches a few minutes later, she has this leaden look about her: a cross between chunky peanut butter and pears in heavy syrup. Or, in classic movie-speak, Apple Annie and Stella Dallas. I wish I could lighten her mood.

  And her load.

  “You know I didn’t come here to see you,” she says, setting a box of saltines onto the table.

  “I know,” I reply.But how come you came when you knew I’d be here? I almost add, but I can tell from her averted eyes that she’s anticipated this logical add-on and wishes I wouldn’t mention it.

  Yvette looks up, and when she sees a smile instead of a smirk, I see her relax a little—smoother peanut butter, lighter syrup.

  She hands me a plain canvas bag, then a large blue one, the kind that’s constructed from recycled plastic. Front and center are parallel equality bars—yellow, like pineapple tidbits.

  This time, only a smirk will work.

  “See? The bag says it all: We’re equals. So if you’re embarrassed because you think there are overwhelming class differences between us now, don’t be. I’m not. I know you have class and I don’t.”

  Yvette responds with a blunt half-laugh, the kind people use when they want to acknowledge you but not encourage you.

  “How’s your mom?” I ask, bagging a canister of quick oats with all the speed of a movie on pause.

  “Well, as much as I’d like to restrict the letters MS to feminist magazines, I don’t think I’ll ever be that empowered.” She lowers her eyes, picks at the label on a can of alphabet soup. “My boss sure didn’t mind when I worked overtime at the nursing home, but when I started doing a lot more nursing at home? I shouldn’t be there. And I definitely shouldn’t be there for her in her hours of need. So he cut mine—down to zero.”

  Her shrug is casual.

  As in casualty.

  “I guess ‘It gets better’ are words to live by, but they’re not exactly words to live on. Unless you can, you know, eat your words.”

  A smile jiggles her lips. “It’s a good thing we’re not both suffering from ‘food insecurity,’ because I have no words for you, Greer.”

  “You will when ladies meet again,” I assure her, setting the packed sack of parity into her shopping cart.

  Yvette studies the equality sign, which, thanks to the selfless contortionist act the bag performed to protect the provisions, is now an approximation thereof. “How do you know?” she asks eventually.

  “Because,” I answer immediately, “aisle be seeing you.”

  Yvette looks at me. I look back. Her eyes are the color of a treasure chest, and the gold in them reminds me of the wrapper on a Twix bar.

  Or an almond Kiss.

  After a moment, she returns, “Aisle be back.”

  *

  “I text and ask if you want to get together and watch Barbara Stanwyck in To Please a Lady and you text back: Can’t, sorry, I’m going through some stuff right now. Then I never see or hear from you again, so apparently, you prefer to displease a lady.”

  Yvette tilts her head back, face pinched like a paper airplane. We’re sitting in front of my TV and she’s resting on my lap, elbows propped atop my knees, the way Lucy leans on Schroeder’s piano in the Peanuts comic strip.

  “I wish I were at the food pantry right now,” Yvette grouses. “Then I could shop till you drop the subject.” Her curls swish against my thighs and she sighs.

  Bette Davis eyes us from the screen.

  Please, I’ve prayed to no designated deity ever since Yvette stopped coming to the pantry, let us be gay again. But “I don’t know why I thought we could just pick up where we left off,” I resume rambling. “They don’t call it recon-silly-ation for nothing.” I didn’t realize it at the time of our reunion, I guess because I was too delighted to feel slighted, but in the two weeks since, I’ve found that I need closure before I can be open to repairing our friendship.

  “Come on, Greer—you may love when ladies meet like I do, but I doubt you love when ladies don’t make ends meet. Like I do. Or don’t do.”

  “Volunteerism is not a form of discrimination,” I reply, plucking a pretzel from the bowl beside us. “You actually thought I wouldn’t want to associate with you just because you got…pauperized? I don’t buy it.”

  “Why not?” Yvette snaps. “You can afford it.”

  Suddenly, she sits up, then gets up.

  For an instant, I’m tempted to channel Joan Crawford’s hardened harlot in Rain and let her leave, because I’m tired of being on her well-to-do list.

  But when I see the tears jerk at her eyes, I stand and grab her hand, thrusting my perspiring palm against hers.

  Yvette doesn’t look at me, instead presenting her profile as a compromise. I see her throat ripple as she swallows hard, and I wonder if her mouth feels as dry as graham crackers the way mine does.

  Behind us, Bette utters her character’s coquettishly convenient excuse to eschew intimacy inCabin in the Cotton: “I’d like to kiss you, but—”

  “I fell on hard times,” Yvette interrupts her. “Then I fell for you. Well, not in that order, but you get the picture.”

  And what a queer picture it is. “Wait a minute,” I implore
, reaching toward the floor and fumbling for the remote. Eager to trade in the familiar black and white for a modern Technicolor rainbow, I press pause. “Yvette, are you giving me closure and an opening?”

  Gradually, she comes into soft, sharp focus.

  I watch as the fear in her eyes shades into relief, then upgrades to affection.

  I wish I had better…not gaydar, but…affection detection? Yes, because I can tell it’s been there a while—maybe as long as mine.

  I feel my lips twisting like a wire coat hanger as I swing like Mommie Dearest’s ax betweenIt’s about time and It’s too soon.

  A lengthy and lovely silence follows—the kind that lets us look at each other, lets us listen to each other’s heartbeats, lets us be gay together.

  Yvette’s thumb twitches, and when I look down at our allied hands, I realize I’ve been holding hers so hard, it’s gone ghostly. I let go, watch, wait until the color comes back. She looks much prettier in apple butter brown than potato soup white.

  She’d look even prettier in a close-up shot.

  So when the silence quiets down, I query, “Hey, Yvette, where do Bette Davis fans go when they get scared?”

  “Hmmm…The Petrified Forest?” Yvette ventures.

  “No, they go straight—” I stop, snicker, start over: “They go gaily into my arms.”

  For a moment, she simply stands there, like an actress frozen in a publicity still. But then the image leaps to life as the cerise crease of Yvette’s lips stretches into a smile, and her smile zooms in on mine.

  From the film canister curve of her hips to her lips’ sweet surprise—tangier than Lemonheads and juicier than Starburst—Yvette’s kisses are worth their weight in Harlow gold.

  And worth the wait.

  Her hair smells of summer rain and autumn leaves, and I plunge my hands into the rich curls.

  Meanwhile, my insides have begun melting like scorched celluloid and my thoughts now reflect those of a fallen woman as opposed to those of a little girl lost.

  As the kiss fades out and proud, a wealth of colors flickers behind my eyelids: jungle red, Oscar gold, marquee orange.