Sweet Creek

by Lee Lynch

R looked like she was sucking on a lemon. “He didn’t have to. Heterosexist society did a fine job. I remember Helen Reddy’s ‘I Am Woman,’ which I thought was more brassy seduction than radical challenge.”

  “I suppose ‘Natural Woman’ was about surrender, but what a great dance tune.”

  “Tell me about your name. Chick? How did that happen? It’s such a derogatory term for a woman.”

  “I was a preemie, so small my mother said I looked like a fuzzy chick. Dad insisted on crowning me with his mother’s name, Cicely, so it was either Sissy or Chick. It’s a reminder of how much they loved me so I’ve always liked it. I almost changed it when I was a teenager, but decided to turn myself into a high femme chick instead.”

  “When I moved here from the city, I took a name that echoed my inner self.”

  “R! You don’t see yourself as a poisonous reptile, do you?” That horn went off again. Not M.C. Chick’s stomach clenched with dread. It couldn’t be M.C., unless—had he made bail?

  R went on in her deep monotone. “The snakes live communally, at least in cold weather. Otherwise they’re solitary, even secretive. I’m told that I intimidate, or rattle, people. It’s an honest name.”

  Donny would be nodding her head a mile a minute. Chick’s wanton sympathy welled up with a warmth that replaced the chill of her recent sadness. She laid a hand on R’s arm. “You’re too hard on yourself, honey.”

  “Honesty is hard. And—” R turned her face away. Was she going to cry? Chick was horrified at the thought that this prickly, proud, and sometimes all-too-venomous community cornerstone might melt like a wicked witch right in front of her. “You’ve always been so accepting.”

  Chick took one of R’s cold hands in her own and felt herself jump at the third honk outside the store.

  R was too self-absorbed to notice. “I feel that you’re another powerful woman and my only real peer in this area. I know what some women think of me and of my name. I respect my namesake. Rattlesnakes wander. The females don’t go far, but they do go. It’s simply part of who they are.”

  There were tears on her cheeks. Chick hugged her again, rocking her slightly. She could see the store’s front window over R’s shoulder, but a floral fabric display was blocking her view of the street.

  “There are women who don’t care for me. I know that,” continued R, stiff in her arms and reeking of that fabric softener smell. She must have come to town to do her laundry. The thought of R using a fabric softener bugged Chick. It didn’t fit. “Yet occasionally one comes into my life who glorifies me.” She pulled back, but Chick didn’t let go. “Katie’s a glorifier. It’s flattering, but not enough. She only comes home late at night, and I need someone who’s there for me all the time.”

  R’s face was dark pink, almost the color of the spiral buttons Chick fingered on their card. “I’m surprised Katie puts her camera down when she comes home at night,” she said with a laugh.

  R gave her a surprised look. It occurred to Chick that she might have taken up with a journalist for reasons beyond Katie’s personal charms. Calculated reasons. R’s face relaxed into its accustomed passive expression, the one Donny called her what-me-worry? mask.

  “At first our connection felt so deep. Katie wouldn’t let me out of her sight. She claimed I was a lesbian land pioneer, that she wanted to document my life.” R sighed. “Katie documents everyone’s life, including her own. What I thought might at last be love as I’d never before experienced it was her unsustainable universal enthusiasm. She falls in love weekly,” she said, making a clicking sound with her mouth, “sometimes with a woman, but as often with an idea or a thing. Currently it’s this community profile she’s doing, interviewing anyone who’ll talk to a camera. She has no time for me now.”

  Chick closed the button drawer with more force than she’d intended. R hadn’t been worried about how things were going with Donny—she’d come looking for Chick today because of her own distress. This was rattlesnake honesty. She had to smile at the depth of R’s self-deception. What a character. “Where’s Katie during the day?”

  “She’s off somewhere, everywhere while I meditate, work on the land, write in my journal, weave, spend time with my land partners. Today she filmed the men and your Donny doing something to reinforce Kimama’s roof.”

  Chick shook the buttons toward R. “Katie’s vibrant and ambitious. Did you really expect that she’d simply settle in your isolated world, adapt the schedule of a recluse? Of course she would make a life of her own. She’s used to a high-pressure career and a social life in the heart of gay America.” The horn rang out: shave and a haircut, two bits. Chick’s heart pounded. “Who is that out there?” A car lurched into sight. It wasn’t M.C. It was someone driving R’s Volvo wagon. An impatient someone.

  “And lately I’ve been spending time with—”

  “Abeo?” Chick exclaimed. “What’s Abeo doing out there in your car honking?” Since when did R tolerate someone rudely summoning her, not to mention commandeering her car?

  R’s face turned that spiral button dark pink again. She made a kind of fluttery gesture toward the window and turned back to Chick.

  “I didn’t want her with us at first, but I couldn’t turn away the only black lesbian I’ve ever had on the land. Yet nothing about her is lesbian. She isn’t really a woman, yet sometimes I think she’s more womanly than I am. I abhor her and—” she looked pleadingly at Chick, “she’s so profoundly spiritual.” She looked quickly away.

  “Abeo? Spiritual?” Chick stifled a laugh. “She’s got your number, Miz Rattlesnake.”

  In an excited tone R confided, “She sang with a church group before she transitioned. She sang for me. I was moved, thoroughly moved.”

  Wait till Donny hears about this. “Of course you were. Abeo’s playing you like a symphony. But I’m not sure that’s all bad. Look at you. You’re like a prism today, honey, flashing colors at me. I’ve never seen you so animated.”

  “I’m uncomfortable with these feelings of excitement. There’s no depth to them. This half-man in women’s clothing comes along and I’m rattled!” she said with a flustered laugh. The horn blasted. “I need to go.”

  “Ciao,” Chick said, envisioning Katie crying over an espresso when she learned she’d been supplanted. She’d have to have her over for dinner, let her know she had friends. “Enjoy yourself, sweetie.”

  R pressed her hand. “Thank you.” Her odd friend let go and hurried to the door. “I feel like a kitten chasing milkweed.”

  Kitten? Chick thought, knowing it was mean to laugh at the ridiculous notion of R as a kitten. Ah, but laughter was on her antigloom list, so, once the door closed, she let it explode out. Betty looked shocked.

  “Dynamite buttons!” Chick told her, holding up her find.

  She hoped to the Goddess R wasn’t thinking of changing her name to Kitten for the sake of honesty. Donny was going to wet her pants laughing over this. She took the pink spiral buttons and the plum corduroy yardage toward the cash register.

  “Outrageous,” she said.

  Poor R, always a little pathetically ridiculous in her dogmatic and pompous lesbian-feminism, was hung up on a trans woman. Chick stumbled over some loose linoleum, her insides reacting as if she’d nearly fallen down a long hole into an alternate world. Then she laughed aloud again. This was already an alternate world—her depression was missing. It had lifted before, so she expected that it would return, but maybe the ol’ happy list was doing what prescription drugs hadn’t. She was suddenly desperate to keep feeling this way. Cool it, lady, she told herself. R had simply reminded her how good it felt to be Chick.

  “Life,” she told Betty, “is a kick.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Familyville

  Jeep sat on Cat’s front porch in the fancy part of town. She’d gone with Cat to see the new film Pearl Harbor. Not for the movie, but for the air-conditioned theater; the trailer was sweltering. She fingered her bruised ribs to test for lingering pain,
lay her hands on them like their warmth would finish the healing. Doctor Wu had predicted six weeks of pain.

  “I almost fell over when I made the connection, Cat. Chick’s stalker turns out to be Luke’s dad? I mean, soap opera city!”

  “Welcome to small town living, Jeep. We’d have figured it out sooner or later, whether old M.C. skipped bail or not.”

  This was the first day the temperature had gone over ninety degrees, and they were catching whatever breeze they could in the old cushioned wicker chairs. Cat’s fat part-Siamese cat, Lump Sum, lay on his back, all four paws in the air, and George the gentle pit bull panted at Cat’s feet.

  “How could a mother and father just leave their kid behind at school like that?”

  “Luke’s better off running with a fugitive family? I’m sure,” Cat said, as she stretched her legs across the top step. She was sucking the fluid out of honeysuckle blossoms, one after another. “You positive you don’t want any, Jeep? Tastes like honey.”

  “You know, if Muriel did that, I wouldn’t be tempted, but you make it look like such a decadent thing. I’ll bet some of those politicians Donny hates would ban honeysuckle.” She took a flower and touched the tip of her tongue to its nectar, then started laughing. Cat joined her. “It’s like we’re playing a joke on familyville. Doing this totally erotic thing in broad daylight.”

  Cat drank from another flower. The cat waddled over and yowled. Cat said, “Come on, Lump Sum, cats don’t like honeysuckle.” He flicked his tail at George, then collapsed down onto one hip and watched them pick blossoms and lick.

  “Shouldn’t he be on a diet?”

  “I’ve tried. He doesn’t let me sleep. He doesn’t allow me to have any privacy. I always give in. He’s not my fault. I inherited him from Mrs. Schmidt across the way.” Cat was rubbing Lump Sum behind the ears. “I promised to take the beast if she died. I was sure she’d outlast him. Wrong.”

  Jeep gave him a vigorous back scratch, thinking about poor Luke. “Seriously, he’s the only one they left, Cat. Didn’t they know a little kid would feel geeky?”

  “Hey, maybe you’re identifying too much.”

  “Maybe I am. And maybe that’s what it takes to care.”

  Jeep stood and surveyed the street. It was dinnertime and she could smell all-American food smells—charcoal-grilled beef, onions, some kind of potatoes. Cat lived alone in this big western home built by her great-grandparents, founders of the local bank. Jeep imagined the other houses peopled with happy, happy families.

  Thinking of her own and of Cat’s disrupted family, she said, “It’s always a lie, isn’t it? Even the alternative family’s bullshit. If the family’s the basis of our civilization, we’re in deep doo-doo.”

  “Watch what you say, we’re inside familyville.”

  Cliff Street had kids in almost every house, and Jeep knew that under those blonde corkscrew curls of hers, Cat had dreams of filling her house with some of her own.

  “You know what I wish? I wish one of these families wanted to adopt a little kid, adopt Luke or at least be foster parents. The children on this street, you know they’ve got a head start in life. Or the woman up the hill, Gretchen’s mother. That family could use a son. What about it, Cat, you could talk to her.”

  “They already have a couple of boys. I don’t know where they were the day we bought the bass.”

  “Then who?”

  “How about you?”

  “Right. I was the one who changed the subject every time Sarah got into naming our kids.”

  “You’d have to make some big changes yourself. And like you always say, your trailer isn’t big enough for you and your laundry.”

  “Keep dreaming.”

  Then, with even less inflection than usual in her country-slow speech, Cat added. “So you and Luke could move in here.”

  First she laughed, but a glance at Cat told her she was serious. “Uh—hello?”

  “You could, Jeep. It’s so big George and Lump Sum and I rattle around like jumping beans in a giant’s hand.”

  George’s ears picked up at his name, but she never opened her eyes. Cat was always so practical in her drawling purposeful way, like she knew the Rules of Life. But the truth was that Jeep had been kind of peeking at scenes of living with Luke in her imagination, kind of poking at herself to see how that might feel. And she might, once or twice, have pictured herself as the perfect roommate Donny had told her Cat was looking for. If she did somehow figure a way to get the authorities to let her raise Luke, could Cat be right? She seemed so certain about what she wanted.

  “They’d never let me have Luke. Besides, I don’t know if I want to live with a child. A boy-child.”

  “You want him.”

  “No, I don’t. Yes, I do. I’m incredibly nuts about Luke.” Jeep became aware that she was spinning a wheel on her skateboard and stopped. “You think they’d let a dyke raise him?”

  “It’s about two dykes, girlfriend.” Cat held up two fingers.

  “Two dyke friends and a little boy. The state would swallow that?”

  “You might need to get a haircut.”

  “Ditch the buzz?” Jeep said with alarm, feeling the prickles of hair with her palm.

  “Maybe some nice, conservative, anti-gay family will take him in and teach him hymns.”

  “Okay, okay. I’ll cut it.”

  “We’d take Luke to parades. You’d teach him music. I’d play softball with him. We’d feed him.”

  “And he’ll grow to mongo proportions. What about puberty? Adolescence? Talk about majorly alternative lifestyles. It’d be like living with an alien.”

  Cat had the mockingest grin on her face. “You mean a big, smelly teenage boy with acne and a yen for girls?”

  “Gross.”

  “Even your fiddler hero—how do you pronounce his name?—Yitzhak Perlman was a kid once.”

  “Negative. He just started small.”

  Cat’s chuckle was appreciative. “Luke could turn out gay.”

  Jeep shrugged. “Or bi, or become a Buddhist monk. Do you think they’d let him stay with me?”

  “If you lived in a house like this, maybe.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  “How about a family?”

  “Wasn’t one family enough?”

  “Mine wasn’t.” Cat’s voice grew even softer. “Or maybe it was and I want more of what they gave me before Mom split with her aging Baja beach boy. Maybe a grandson other than Lump Sum would bring Dad back from the bank in Tokyo.”

  “Look, Teach, you may not have to worry about such minor matters, but I don’t earn enough coin to qualify as a parent.”

  “Together we do.”

  “It’d be like marrying you, Cat. I am through with love.” Oh, dude, she thought, those words will come back to haunt you. It was true. Though she harbored fantasies about Cat and every other appealing dyke in town, in the end she couldn’t imagine herself being lovers with any of them. After all this time she couldn’t imagine herself with Katie either.

  “This isn’t about hormones. Imagine raising a child with any of your exes.”

  “I was in bed too much to pour a rug rat’s cereal.” But as she said the words, she thought of Sarah again, of how she’d talk about all the kids in the world needing homes. She hadn’t wanted to hear it then. Sarah would flip if she knew I was even thinking about taking on a tiny tot, thought Jeep.

  With a sweep of her arm, Cat said, “It’s here for the taking, amigo. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time. I can’t do it with the woman I love, so it’s time I got some other kinds of love into my life. I have a home to offer, you offer companionship, help around the house, someone to share bringing up a kid with. It’s not perfect for either of us, but today, I like it.” Cat was silent for a minute or two, then said, “Who knows, maybe my s.o. might get comfortable enough to hang around a house that had more than one single woman living in it. Checking up on Luke, or something.”

  Jeep ha
dn’t been able to eat since hearing about Luke that morning, yet she felt like she would spew. “Cat, I’d be stuck here into the twenty-second century. Me, Jeep Morgan, in Waterfall Falls, the only place in America so backwards it never noticed the Y2K crisis. I couldn’t even go back to school for music therapy without a long commute in a phantom car. I couldn’t join a big symphony if I wanted to.”

  “You’d work it out. You already have a student training site. You said you don’t want the classical roadie insecurity, and in these parts old-time music runs a close second to country-western. Your audience would be right here.”

  “Say you’re right. Say I’ve stumbled onto the best thing in the world for me—palatial home, survivable job, ready-made audience. Where’s my life? I mean, how do I get to sow my wild oats if everything’s all settled? Hell, I felt like I was dying in Reno, like my life was a paint-by-numbers canvas all laid out.”

  She kicked the concrete step planter which was filled with pansies and more pansies, some in colors she hadn’t known existed. The two stupid madrone trees in the terraced front yard rustled, fully leafed in the middle of winter, but now nearly bare. Dry Creek ran through Cat’s property, and this time of year it tumbled swollen into the conduit that took it under Cliff Street. It was too hot here in summer and rained all the rest of the year. Law and order was big, too many of the dykes were downwardly mobile. Except for Cat.

  Slow-moving sexy Cat who’d never seemed inclined to make a move on Jeep because she had a secret beau she didn’t live with. Did Jeep want to be part of the family Cat hoped would lure her beau home? Did she want to eat dinner every night with a woman who was spoken for?

  Back in Reno, sitting at the dinner table with sweet Sarah night after night, the wildness would rise up in her, a taut straining as if she were growing wings and poised to use them. Instead she poured it all into her fiddle, like a live wire feeding the strings the juice of her personal riot. It had never occurred to her that anyone would pick up on her vibes when she’d landed a temp gig with a small all-boy band.