by Lee Lynch
Her search seemed to take forever, and there were times she regretted having left the Chicago snow behind. It felt more honest than the dry wintry fog somehow, an honest winter so windy and filled with snow that the whole city stopped. Here the trees turned to ice sculptures and the rain, when it fell, refused to turn white. Instead of the visible threat of snow-covered roads turned treacherous, on its shaded north side every pass was slick with invisible black ice. More than once as she’d hunted for home the light truck had spun out on her and she thought she’d lost her footing in the world altogether.
She’d found Waterfall Falls that way, driving the length of Stage Street—renamed Stage Boulevard when the casino went in, but none of the locals called it that—then nosing up and down the short side streets. The town looked western, with new facades to attract tourists, but facades tacked onto buildings that had stood since the late 1800s, often serving the same functions they’d served then. Even the doctor was in the old infirmary building.
Chick didn’t decide that first day, though. It wasn’t until the third Sunday, a wintry afternoon with a trace of falling snow and the service station offering to chain up her car because—the fellow pointed to Blackberry Mountain and she saw a line of cars barely crawling up the pass. “Black ice up there is bad today,” he told her.
She’d chosen the motor court north of town instead of that drag of a drive home and got to talking with the couple who’d owned it since the mid-sixties. They were too old for the housekeeping chores and were looking for someone to clean rooms and sit at the front desk. Once they broke her in, they planned to visit their grandkids out of state a lot. She could have the room closest to the office plus some wages. By the end of the week she’d bought their old car and they’d caravanned with her to the mill town down south to return the Bargain Wheels rental and fill the back of their pickup with her things. It was as if they’d found long-lost blood, the way they helped her and trusted her from day one. They hit the road two weeks later.
Her trailer court room got downright hot when she’d settle in at night, achy from the room cleaning, but filled with her own heat too as she imagined Donny on her doorstep, Donny stepping in the room, softly kicking the door shut behind her, arms open.
She would be standing by then, roused in a long flannel nightgown, half-listening for the rumble of Donny’s little motor home outside. No—she corrected her fantasy—she’d go to the dresser and pull out the slinky gown, the one she’d bought before Donny left, when they’d been so close to becoming lovers.
With the fabric at her cheek, she’d imagine Donny’s hands on it, snagging a little from sandpapery fingertips, because Donny worked those hands hard cooking for a living, fixing the motor home, driving the balky old thing. Donny wasted those hands on women who didn’t appreciate her beyond them. Would she touch Chick now? Why else was she headed back? Chick was so hung up on her, she sometimes wondered where she wanted Donny to touch her first. Times like that the image of Donny would come in so clear, be so powerful she thought she wouldn’t be able to stand the sensation of those strong brown fingers grazing her nipples or slipping into her so politely while her whole body sighed to receive them. She would hold the gown to her chest as she felt her insides clutch with anticipation of Donny’s fingers, release them, draw them deeper.
Of course it didn’t happen like that. Donny pulled in two days later, just as Chick finished cleaning a hairy mess of a bathroom, and was carrying a heavy basket of wet cleaning rags, towels, and cleansers. Her long hair was in a sweaty tangle, spots of water slopped all over the worn balloon-legged pants she should have retired years ago.
She looked up and there was Donny, backing out of the side door of the motor home like she’d spent the night and recently awakened. Donny, in a short black denim jacket she hadn’t seen before, black jeans, and a white turtleneck sweater. She turned, saw Chick, grinned, and started toward her. She looked too thin, like the trip had somehow chiseled her down to her essential self, naked now of city artifice, a woman on her own in a world with sharp edges. Chick loved to watch Donny move, all smooth and liquid saunter one minute, then leaping into a coordinated frenzy the next. Nobody could handle as many activities at once as her Donny, whether she was all at once cooking or driving/sipping coffee/telling a story/drumming a finger on the steering wheel/taking in Chick with quick glances stolen from the road.
Chick dropped her bucket, flung down her rags, and walked as fast as she gracefully could toward Donny, arms open. She could see Donny hesitate, like she might head back to Chicago any second, and then stand her ground. By the time Chick reached her, Donny was rooted and took her in her arms like a cottonwood tree drinking rain through all its surfaces.
“Ah,” she said. “Ah, my Chick.”
Chick felt a jolt of fire under her breasts at the word “my.”
They were the same height. When Chick leaned back she saw wetness around Donny’s eyes. Whatever struggle had brought her home was washing out of her. Chick had no doubt she was Donny’s home. Donny pulled her close again, body gone soft except for her arms which felt sturdy as branches.
Without more than a smile, they went together to pick up the cleaning supplies. Chick led the way to the laundry. The last dryer load sighed to its hot stillness inside the machine. The room was steamy and smelled like home. Chick pulled sheets out and wondered, as she let Donny help her fold, still wordlessly, eyes on each other more than the task, if they would be a good fit for lovemaking. It didn’t always come easily, she’d learned, and some women had rhythms so different from her own that touching became an irritant. She had a feeling she and Donny would be a match.
Donny’s deft fingers pulled and tucked the sheets with the efficiency of movement that seemed to come so easily to her. When the linens were settled on their shelves Chick laid a hand high on Donny’s chest to stay, then hurried next door to the office to put up the Be Right Back sign. She was done until new guests arrived in the late afternoon.
Donny lounged against the porch rail, a somber look on her face. Worried, Chick reached out, watched Donny’s eyes roam her face, linger on her body. She closed her eyes to better relish the feel of that gaze. Going without a lover, her life had at times felt like a house on the plains, chilly winds stealing through the chinks of her walls. She needed someone to care for, to build her days with, or she felt a great gaping hole in herself. She’d heard this called relationship addiction, but she knew it was no addiction; it was the way she was made. The way most women were, she guessed, although the usual solution was to raise children, not something that had ever appealed to her—why bring another troubled little boy like her brother into the world? Even aware of Donny before her, she felt sadness threaten to overtake her, as it had so often before they met. She hoped that loving Donny would crowd out that creeping ivy, sadness. She wanted a companion who needed her too, who filled in the gaps in her walls.
Chick opened her eyes and recognized that Donny’s look was not somber at all, but intent with desire. Her breath caught at the thought and she stood, lips parted, shocked by the honesty of Donny’s want.
She laughed as she took Donny’s hand and led her across the gravel. Gotta have this woman, she exulted in silence. Gotta have this woman in my life. So Donny Donalds had decided. And on her—the fat, white, aging flower child who wanted a new life out West. The one who would lead her away from the city, the people, the life she had known.
Chick wasn’t kidding herself. She knew the attraction was a package, not only a person, and that, like herself, Donny wanted to marry a life, not just a woman. This might be a midlife crisis for both of them, finally striking out on their own, casting off the lives that they’d been handed for one that better suited their aging selves. Donny could no more keep up with the mind-bending night life she’d always led than she could deny the arthritis she’d confessed had settled in her knees and made dancing or cooking a full shift too hard on her. The why didn’t matter—the Don wanted to settle down, and Ch
ick was more than ready to be at her side. She had exhaled the last cloud of this sadness attack and gestured toward her door. Donny opened it for her, followed her in, and gave it the little backwards kick Chick had imagined. Now, she thought, her breathing going choppy with excitement, now it begins.
When Donny moved toward her all scheming for the future—the future itself—stopped. Her heart felt as if it was squeezing open and shut. This is surreal, she thought, steeling herself so she wouldn’t come the second poor Donny touched her.
But Donny didn’t touch her with her hands. She stopped, tilted her head, and leaned forward, eyes closed. Chick felt all her blood, her life, her soul flood to her lips for Donny’s first kiss: light, brief, broken when Donny pulled back and met her eyes.
Donny’s voice was hoarse. “This okay with you, Chick?”
Her eyes were an olive green, not brown at all, Chick thought with surprise as Donny’s arms went around her. She gulped air between kisses. Donny’s hands were, finally, on her. Her face, her neck, her waist, her shoulders and back. Donny pulled her closer until their bodies pressed together, mound to mound, and she knew she was losing it, lost it, ground into Donny and called her name, called it into her mouth.
“Chick. Yeah, Chick,” Donny breathed to her. “I’m sorry I took so long to figure this out. I’m here to stay if you want me.”
She felt like some quivering femme in a lesbian romance novel. “Want you,” she managed to say, and then said it, groaned it, whispered it as she kissed Donny’s face and neck and hands, oh Donny’s hands.
“You want me to close those curtains?” Donny, sounding breathless, asked.
“Oh, Goddess, I forgot.”
Donny pointed to the bed. “Stay put, I want to undress you.”
She sat, too stoked, too weak to do anything but comply.
Donny struggled with the old drapes and Chick prayed the phone wouldn’t ring, no guests would come early, no one’s toilet overflow. Donny returned, already unbuttoning her own shirt, flinging it and a white undershirt onto the chair. Her breasts were little, the pendulous kind, and for some reason a complete turn-on. Chick wanted to stroke them as she felt Donny pull off her shoes and long socks, then unzip the jumper down her back, but she felt shy as a bright, shiny new baby dyke.
Donny had raised an eyebrow and Chick stood to step out of her jumper. For a moment she felt horribly fat, but Donny was touching her immediately, covering her nakedness with her half-clothed body, praising her softness, her warmth, her wetness. She’d told herself to get over it, smiled and pulled Donny down to the bed with her. And Donny had stayed.
Now, eight years later, watching those fingers with the little fly, watching how she enjoyed teaching a baby butch, she thanked the Goddess for sending her Donny. Yet as always, as soon as she thought about how lucky she was, she feared the onslaught of one of her terrible sad moods. What were they about? Was she kidding herself, calling the status quo happiness? Sometimes these uneventful Donny years, both behind and ahead, got a little daunting in their sameness. At other times she was dazzled by the brilliant wild flowers that cropped up in what threatened to become a bleak landscape. What was the happiness everyone raved about if not this peace and contentment? So what if serenity held little excitement? When she’d craved and found excitement it had been no more than a Band-Aid over emotional wounds which still seeped. Was the sadness getting worse?
“Eight years is a long time,” Jeep told them with somber respect. “An even longer time in lesbian years.”
“Lesbian years?” asked Donny.
Again Chick recognized Jeep’s open-mouthed, blank-eyed, lost-soul gaze as her way of concentrating. “Our accelerated relationships,” Jeep said. “Does a lesbian marriage last half as many years as a straight one that has society’s stamp of approval? Or is it so good it goes by twice as fast?”
“You do have a novel way of seeing things, Jeep,” Chick said. “Like my brother.” Donny gave her a sharp glance. “No, not exactly like him—he’s schizophrenic.” She felt her anxiety level spike like it always did when she told people about his diagnosis. She knew she talked about Martin too much, but by keeping him aired and exposed her fear of becoming like him seemed to lessen. He’d told her that he, too, was at times drenched in sadness. “It’s called depression, little sister,” he’d said, but she dismissed that term. Sadness was a little romantic; depression was a diagnosis.
“Original,” she told Jeep. “Your thinking is original like his, but you’re bright and funny, while he’s bright and down, down, down.”
Jeep looked as if she was working on thinking of something comforting to say.
“It’s okay, sweetie. He’s got it under control with drugs. He has a job again, supervising sorters at a recycling center. He’s a master collector, organizer, and sorter, always has been. He was studying botany in college when he got sick, so he’s okay with the job.”
“I was going to tell you that I had a special sister,” Jeep said, her voice strangely thin. “Jill was autistic. Not brilliant autistic, a little slow. She had these major, kind of like tantrums. One day in the middle of a tantrum—she was twelve, I was ten—instead of getting on the school bus she ran out into the street. Boom, right in front of a speeding commuter. No more Jill.”
“Poor Jeep.” Chick couldn’t stop herself from going to Jeep and enfolding her. She was interested in all these white-light, chakra, giving-energy-business ideas, but so far, there was simply nothing she could do for another woman that was better at transmitting love than holding a fragile head to her softest place. “Did you see it happen?”
“No,” Jeep said over her shoulder. “I was oblivious, practicing upstairs before school and only half-watching Jill. I wasn’t supposed to be watching her, but I always kind of did. I was the oldest of all normie kids, you know? And my parents never told me I was in charge of Jill, but I could tell they kind of expected it, always asking me how she’d behaved and if I was taking her along somewhere. I was in middle school. I mean, I loved Jill but she was a royal pain, and I escaped the house whenever I could. I was in the school orchestra and the glee club and the church choir. I did music for the school plays, and I played square dance music for the Dosey-Doe Club at fairs and demos at the mall and at retirement homes.”
Chick let her go on, but kept touching her hair. “You blame yourself, don’t you?”
Jeep was looking away. “My whole family blames me. I was supposed to be practicing, but really—” The thinness in Jeep’s voice was stifled tears. “Really, Dad had left for work and it was Mom’s week to get the little kids to the grammar school. I should have been at the bus stop with Jill, but I was really sneaking in time to play old-time music along with this old tape of Mom’s.” Jeep’s voice was almost a whisper. “For Mother’s Day, you know? I had to have it down by that Sunday so I could play it for her.”
“Jeep,” she said, “you had to have a life too.”
“I know, but everything changed after that. My dad still kind of won’t meet my eye and Mom…well, she had the three younger kids to take care of, and it seemed like after that she never asked me to baby-sit the others, not that I blame her. After Jill got killed, she kind of lost interest in music, in my playing.”
“So you took the blame on.”
“I kind of wondered a lot. If I’d waited at the bus stop with her, I mean, don’t you wonder if you’d done something a little bit differently, if Jill—or—”
“—Martin.”
“—might have been all right?”
“Yes, yes, yes. I used to worry that little rag of guilt to tatters. It’s only human to feel like that.”
“Or, like, what if I’d gotten twenty points less on my IQ, would Jill have been smarter? I could have gotten by fine, and Jill might have had a life. I get worked up thinking she’ll never see a flowering prickly pear cactus or eat a raspberry or hear old-time music again. She loved bluegrass. Jill and me were the only ones to get Mom’s bluegrass gene.”
Chick expected Donny to talk about her alcoholic twin brother Marcus Junior, but Donny had been keeping quiet about him since he was diagnosed with advanced cirrhosis of the liver on top of diabetes several months ago. As far as Chick knew, Donny hadn’t even cried yet. She used to act proud of his drunken antics, but the thought of losing him may have become too painful.
With an effort that made her realize how tired she was—and at only seven thirty at night she ought to be ashamed of herself—Chick pulled herself out of her funk again. “This wild woman didn’t make it back to the two-timer in Chicago. She came west and handed me every last cent of her winnings.”
Donny said. “Chick had a dream I could get behind.”
“Over the next two months we combed the area for a place to put Natural Woman Foods.”
“That’s when I knew I really loved the lady, not just the land,” Donny explained. “I wouldn’t have done this kind of shit on my own. Chick convinced me that only about two-thirds of the people we met wanted to run this dyke out of town.” Donny gave her quiet laugh. “I can live with two-thirds. What’s hard for me is sorting out which are the good guys. Chick tended my soul-bruises at night.”