Heiresses of Russ 2016: The Year's Best Lesbian Speculative Fiction

by A. M. Dellamonica

  Francine nods. “One day I’ll be ready to open it,” she says. “I can’t do it yet. I need to but I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

  “Francine?” I say.

  “It’s harder than it looks,” she says. And then she gives me a task: tonight, after curfew, wait in the hallway by my room. Not too late—do it before the knock. And don’t stray too far from my room. I don’t want to be caught out.

  “Try it,” she says. “I dare you.”

  THAT NIGHT, I stand in the doorway of my room, looking out into the corridor. Everything is dim. Half the lights have burned out. The rest throw broken, fly-spattered shadows.

  A door opens at the darker end of the corridor; it’s another one of those extraneous passageways of which this place has so many. Some of the doors I’ve opened into closets or dead ends or narrow hallways that burp me up almost back where I started. Some I don’t open. That is one of them. I’m relieved to see a woman emerge. “Hello?” I say right away. I clear my throat. “Hey,” I say, louder.

  The woman doesn’t respond. She is slender and has long, smooth hair. She walks slowly down the hall. I squint, trying to see her face more clearly. Perhaps it’s one of the interns, sneaking in drunk. I still can’t see her properly. Her hair is draped over her cheeks. For a moment I think I glimpse a broad, featureless eggshell of a face, a thought that makes me flinch, but it’s only that her eyes must be closed, even in this light so low. Then she pushes her hand from her face and I see her smile, stiff and fixed, and she is about to step under a light and she is about to be much closer to me and then I see that it is not that her hair is so smooth and straight; it is that she is covered in something clear and oily—her skin shines with it—and I close my eyes but it doesn’t block it out (the filmstrip is playing behind my eyelids), and I say fuck, and fuck again, and I clamp my teeth together and fall back into my room and slam the door shut.

  My door doesn’t lock. Other doors do but not mine. My feet are braced; I push against the door with my whole weight. The knob shudders. I press harder and my hands begin to slip against the door. I look down. Something is seeping out of the wood. It dampens, grows tacky and icky and begins to give off a smell that is underground and personal and all too familiar and finally my feet slide too far and I fall on the floor and flail back up to run to my bathroom, where I puke all over the sink.

  In the morning, I sit up from the bathroom floor, where I slept all night with a bath mat wrinkled under my head. It felt safer that way. Last night I saw — The story sticks in me, jagged like a cough in my throat, and refuses to come out.

  I was—It was—Nothing, I will tell Francine. I saw nothing.

  FRANCINE HOLDS A secret little party in her room. She pours gin into wineglasses. I drink perfume and breathe acetylene. We’re all of us quietly, devastatingly fucked up. I have missed drinking, the marvelous sense of distance from my heavy flesh it granted to my mind.

  “I ate tissues,” the model is telling us. “Dipped in grapefruit juice. Apple juice or orange juice or coconut juice or pomegranate-acai juice, any juice I wanted I could have.”

  “It sounds like fairy food,” Francine says sentimentally.

  “Women are supposed to have curves,” says Mari. Her eyes blaze pink.

  Everyone leaves right after curfew. I stay to help Francine clean, lining the glasses up neatly on her desk. She’s sitting on her bed. That’s how narrow this room is.

  “You,” she says. “Go back to your room now.” Her face is red and wet, like she has been crying, but when was she crying?

  “Get off my butt.”

  “Young one, I am on your butt. Because I care!” Francine drifts off, one foot on the floor. “You know I care about you, but Mari has been a great comfort to me in this place. Mari’s very normal. Very achingly normal. It’s a pleasant reminder of the world outside.”

  “Mari is definitely not normal,” I say.

  “Mari is exactly who she’s supposed to be,” says Francine, “with this interesting touch of evil. There’s the sweet in the bitter, the bitter in the sweet. It’s all so discordant together that I don’t think she’s faking any of it. It’s very comforting.”

  “There is no way there is any sweet in Mari,” I say.

  “But there is,” Francine says. “However, we only get the poisonous version, because we’re weirdoes. We don’t deserve any better from her.”

  “Francine, go to sleep.”

  “But I’m almost ready to open the door.”

  I feel a chill. I stop cleaning up and turn to look at Francine. Her eyes are closed.

  She murmurs, “If I could cut a deal. If one could negotiate. Leave me my mind, leave me my age, my memories…but then again I don’t even know what I’d want to keep. Everything should go.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  She’s asleep now. I study her. She would look so much younger if she were always this drunk, her skin lineless and illuminated by the blood rising underneath, but with the trade-off of not being able to speak or move. I pull the comforter over her, watch her for a minute longer. She’s done. She won’t be doing anything else tonight. I leave, closing the door softly behind me, and then—with no shame or grace whatsoeve —sprint the entire way to my room.

  THE NEXT DAY, Francine is gone. Ms. Lanphear looks at me with her eyebrow raised and says, “Not that her business is any of your concern.…” and then says something about a trip to visit relatives or friends, she’ll return in a few days, she’ll probably be much refreshed. Something lying like that.

  Every night now there is knocking at my door and every night it’s the same reaction: always the initial pull, the willies, the knocking that speeds up and begs the closer I get.

  I see Mari on a date. She has a man over—or, not really a man, and not a boy, but someone you might call a guy or a dude, a guy in a baseball cap and khaki shorts—nice body, but there’s something rather unattractive, very Labrador-doggy, about looking permanently poised to play a sport. Not my type. Men can visit and sit with the women in the beau parlors, sanctioned, and there they are like a natural history museum diorama of male-female relations. There are no doors on beau parlors; they are display cases.

  You normal ones. You may think you’re lucky. You sling-back it out the lobby doors, you eat salads at your desk, you grab drinks.

  But at night, you’re trapped in here with me.

  Meanwhile the puberty filmstrip runs backward. Gradually there is no hair where there was hair before. My skin softens. My zits dry up and die and there are fewer eruptions to spackle over in the mornings. Whenever I try to skip makeup, Ms. Lanphear says, “Where is your color? Your grandmother will think you’re being neglected.” Her fingers hover by my cheek. Under normal circumstances too classy to pinch, I’m sure, but she would pinch if pushed, and she lets me know it. So I stare at a point to the left of my left ear and put the makeup on someone else. The Residence is a burrow; the Residence lets you lick your wounds while you regrow your patchy pelt. But you are still so weak. It’s easy for the Residence to bonsai you into any shape it wants.

  I DREAM OF Francine. In my glimpse of her, she does not look like she is going downstairs so much as walking into a dark, permeable wall—a wall with a shape cut out for her to walk through, a shape that is slowly, gradually different from her own so that she will be transformed once she finally emerges on the other side. In my dream I am waiting for her to come out of the other side. My teeth are chattering and I am terrified and utterly unable to look away. I want nothing more than to see Francine when she emerges. I wake up before it happens.

  MY PERIOD RETURNS one day when I’m leaving the lounge—think of my movements as an Arthur Murray dance-step sequence, a pattern of soles tap-a-tapping from the lounge to the dining room to my room, back and repeat. So caught up in the dance that I’d been ignoring the warning signs for days: the knitting-needle stab in my lower abdomen, my breasts all bruised, and my waterlogged body sloshing like a canteen. I have my period a
nd it’s just like the first time when I started crying right away and I am crying because I have my period because that’s what women do, apparently, they get yanked one way and then another and cry all the while and I have my period and I take a pad from the bathroom cabinet in the lobby, someone’s always bleeding in this stupid place. In the mirror my crying face is soft and rosy. A tender pink sex organ of a face; I hate you. I want to fling my body away from me as far as possible. I wipe my eyes. The air presses against my eardrums. The walls undulate, appear to breathe, Mmmm, yes, Papa, and the floor shivers as though it’s trying to shake me out of the Residence already.

  Two years. Two more years. It feels like someone trying to shove a whole apple inside of my mouth. I try to breathe slowly, then lose control for a moment and beat my fists against my head. I stick the pad on over the bloody underwear and wipe my hands on my dress. I leave the bathroom without looking at myself again.

  A woman carrying a suitcase is walking out of the lobby. She pauses to glance at her phone. I recognize Francine’s trench coat, her thin ponytail. I almost call to her but stop. The woman’s hair is slicked back, her ponytail almost dripping with moisture. Her posture, her tensed legs, the slope of her shoulders—they all see me. They make a greedy smile, avid and poised. Don’t turn around. Please don’t. Please. I freeze there, waiting for, hoping against.

  Someone whispers into my ear, “Just stay away.” It’s Mari. “Come on, we’ll get out of here. I need a smoke.” She glances at Francine neutrally before turning to leave, confident that I will follow.

  In the garden out back, the breeze furs Mari in a light haze. She exhales. “The Residence knows that there are different kinds of women,” she says. “It’s not trying to make us into clones. It’s making us into different happy women. Like, look at you right now. I don’t want to make any assumptions about anything, but your body seems pretty hard to live in.”

  Mari dies in ten or twenty horrible ways in my mind.

  “Oh, honey,” she says, pitying and wanting me to know it, “your secrets aren’t yours here. House full of women, you feel me?” Mari pulls a face, a quick and goofy grimace that turns her words so ironic they come back around to truth and then veer away again. “Ms. Lanphear was saying—Well, maybe you’ll get your heart’s desire. You never know what could happen. You could come out on the other side a—”

  “What’s the point?” I say. “It’s not you who gets to come out. It’s something else, or it’s a copy.” I want Mari to fight with me. I want her to prove me wrong.

  “See the darkness in everything much?” She laughs. “Who knows? What if you did come out a copy? I bet it’d be fun to think about the nice life that other me is living.”

  “You are the other you,” I say bitterly. “You live just fine in the world.”

  Mari shakes her head. “There’s tons wrong with me,” she says. “Sadly I’m not brave enough to fix it. Francine, now,” her voice deepens with respect, “she was brave.”

  “Can I borrow your phone?”

  “Girl, you can do whatever.”

  While making the call, I am beset with cramps. I hunch, closing myself like a fist around the pain.

  “Oooh, cramps?” says Mari. “Want some Midol? A heating pad?”

  I shake my head and toss the phone back to her. As I kick off my shoes and climb the fence, she’s still talking, her voice shrinking.

  “Chocolate? A magazine? A box set of Anne of Green Gables? A DVD? A vibrator?”

  LOLLI’S RESPONSE WAS: “Sure, you can hang out with me tonight, little weird one. Any enemy of your asshole grandma is a yada yada yada.” She drives an orange Toyota Corolla with no muffler and invects against my grandmother, who fired her last month, the entire way to her apartment. “You’ll love it. I’m having a party.”

  A party panics me. I wanted to speak with one human being, not a hundred. To escape prying eyes, not climb into a display case. I’m in Lolli’s bedroom trying to wrap up my chest with only a too-tight sports bra and putting on a pair of her jeans, which don’t fit so I have to leave them unzipped, the fly surrounding my, you know, parts like a picture frame, a T-shirt pulled over the whole thing, when the doorbell rings fire-alarm loud. I seek an exit, enter a crowd.

  Lolli likes substances. They make her creative, she says. She tells different people that I am different people’s sisters—Henry, Anna, Una. I’m Una, says Una. Hi, bitch, meet your sister! Lolli shouts, and she grips the backs of our necks and attempts to smash us together, until she sees someone else she knows and bounds away, the happy pet dog that accidentally kills the other household pet without noticing. Una and I are free to look at each other. I’m not your sister, I say. That’s okay! says Una. Ha ha!

  People keep arriving. Artists, dancers, actors: in this one room there appear to be more people doing those jobs than there are jobs. One guy talks about being in the chorus for a show in which movie stars cycle in and out of the lead role. “Her skin is just awful. Lunar. But nobody ever really sees it up close, do they?” Lolli relinquishes two of the five senses and turns out the lights, ups the music. People begin to dance until there is no room for dancing, only standing and yelling, until still more people arrive and the apartment is so crowded that everything begins to feel like dancing once more, our bodies pressed so tightly together that my movements cause theirs and theirs mine.

  Across the room, through the tight, shifting weave of people, I see a man. He has wide shoulders, a jawline clean as paper, a certain thickness in the thigh. Chin held high with a peacock intensity. I realize that I know about this Charming Man. The crowd shifts and I move with it, so I can keep looking at him. He’s both born into manhood and newly arrived to it. Like me, but an unfathomable distance ahead. I’ll never reach manhood. I’ll never arrive.

  I stare and stare. This man frightens me to death. I desperately want to ask him what it’s like, what it’s like when people can tell, what it’s like to have people think that you’re not sexy or important or a person. All I want is to be a person. I don’t want to be adjectival; I don’t want anyone to know I was ever cursed.

  Another thing I want to ask the Charming Man is what it’s like to hold your chin up high. To feel good and right, to be proud of the way you were born and proud of what you have done to construct and create yourself, until the join between the two is seamless—or if there is a seam, it is a beautiful one.

  But the Charming Man won’t see me; he’ll just see some girl. I could never look like him. There’s no way I can go speak to him, push past his wall of friends, all of them so happy in a way that is inconceivable to me, about such mysterious things. I shrink back.

  Despite the jeans and the haphazardly compressed chest, a few men still look at me like I’m food—I’m a cupcake but I’m meat. I’m a cupcake you could hunt. Out of those who look, most try to hide it. One doesn’t. He is introducing himself when Una comes up to us. Sis! she screams. She sticks her tongue out at him. Stay away from him, she yells. He’s a perv and he never apologizes. How old are you? I say, Where’s Lolli? Una says, She left, maybe. I shout, But this is her apartment. Una is already slipping away. Clearly you know nothing of the ways of Lolli.

  She has decided that I am old enough to deal with the pervert, apparently, and then, in the middle of this crowded party, I’m alone with him again. He is not tall, but he is both wide and deep, and I now understand what people mean when they use the phrase “filling out.” He is not full of fat or air or something nameable. We’re having trouble hearing each other, and I put my hand where his neck slopes into his shoulder. Another thing I now understand: at least one facet of the young female obsession with horses. We could not be any more different. Just my type. The first drink he gives me is an actual drink—gin and tonic water and a drowned slice of lime. The ones after I make myself by adding liquor to my cup continuously before I’ve finished what’s in there. It tastes horrible, and then it tastes like nothing.

  Later on I pull him into Lolli’s empty
bedroom. At that point killing my self feels like a good idea, even a fun one. But it’s harder than I thought it would be. This is how I make it work: I concentrate as hard as I can. I loose my spirit from its moorings, become him while I’m fucking him, me and him, me as him, him on him. It works after a fashion. I push on his chest and it is my chest. Do you like that; do I? Everything he does is what I do. I sweat on a girl who looks just like me; I smell her old blood and laugh when I hold up a gory hand; I kiss her; I fuck her until I’m through (though I’m looking more at myself, god I just adore the solidity of my body and the span of my hands); I touch my lips to her forehead and offer her cab fare before I go, being a very gentlemanly pervert, and what’s wrong with that?

  As for the girl, I don’t know what happens to her. The man takes a taxi. Wait—she goes home. What you get when the party ends is that you’ll always be you, inside of lady jail, outside of lady jail. The house wins; I’ll never be right.

  The man rings the doorbell and kicks the front grate again and again until Ms. Lanphear opens up and shouts. He shouts; he escalates; he scores: I can’t live like this, I hate this place this place hates me, Ms. Lanphear I hope you get necrotizing fasciitis of the clit, I hate you, I swear to god I’ll be dead by tomorrow, come find me, I’ll make the biggest fucking mess you ever saw.

  Ms. Lanphear sneers as I squeeze past her. She informs me that she will allow me to stay the night, but if I’m still here tomorrow when she checks my room, she will send me back to my grandmother herself.

  “I hate you,” I tell her.

  She smiles like I have asked her to prom. “I hate you, too,” she says. “I so rarely get to tell a woman that. I hate you, too. Thank you.”