Sweet Creek

by Lee Lynch

  “And you’re still giving me credit for that storm. Just call me Father Nature.”

  What a contrast there was between Hector’s geniality and Clara’s disagreeable manner. Yet Clara kept their home so bright, with pink plaid curtains tied back from the big one-pane windows, gleaming pink and cream linoleum on the kitchen floor, and a cheerful red plastic tablecloth. Now that the suds had settled Katie smelled again the warm fruit of the pie Clara had earlier pulled from her freezer to heat.

  “How do you two do it?” she asked, her life suddenly in deep focus: R and Abeo, Clara and Hector, Katie halfway between the two. “How have you stayed together for so long? How did you know this is the one?”

  She’d been fascinated the first time she’d watched R sit in a circle spilling her struggles to the women around the bonfire. She’d thought, “I’ve finally found her.”

  Rituals were a really good idea, a seasonal review like TV sweeps, letting go of the bummer stuff and dreams and good intentions. It could be that preparing to talk was the most valuable part of the women’s circles, making a time to think about the season past. But the actual sitting in a circle—truth? The thought made her itchy. She wasn’t made to be still hour after hour like at school. It was bore-ing. If she could keep a camera in front of her face—then she’d be doing something.

  Smoke had stung her eyes at the equinox bonfire, but still she’d watched the gray-braided head. When the gourd had passed to her, R had intoned her loneliness, her struggle to accept that she would not again be partnered. She must have spoken of the triumphs and troubles of the season past—they all did—but Katie hadn’t heard that. She’d sprung into rescue mode, her liaison with Jeep doing a fast fade into ancient history even before she’d broken up with her.

  Her leap had ended in R’s bed. Before R, sex had been a romp. With her it was a form of holy exaltation, a spirit union that needed accompaniment by a slow trance music number. Gawd, she could not believe she was thinking such cheesy thoughts and that this walking bottlebrush of a straight woman, Clara, should bring them out in her.

  Clara patted her permed hair, her eyes on a crowd of photographs that sat on a small electric organ: babies, graduations, weddings, grandbabies. Katie counted twenty-six frames, and some were collages. “You don’t want to hear about all that nonsense before we were married.”

  Katie had finished dryings the dishes. Now she stopped sorting silverware to exclaim, “I do!” She tapped an index finger on the worn wooden drawer and wondered if Hector, loving Clara and the home they shared, had crafted it. “I have this huge need to know how so I can do forever myself.”

  R hadn’t wanted forever.

  Katie sometimes found herself wandering the land while Abeo consumed R’s attention. It was called women’s land, but R owned it like she’d come to practically own Katie. She remembered the tour R had given Jeep and herself when they had first arrived. R showed off the terraced gardens and sweat lodge as if they were her accomplishments and not built by volunteers. The women who were the land’s real caretakers now took care of abandoned Katie. The land women seemed fascinated and paralyzed by Abeo’s strangeness, difference. They were obviously trying not to walk on any politically sensitive eggs—or unborn chickens—and were like kids pretending so hard they weren’t staring at a disabled person that they never saw the person at all. They drew Katie in from the night, gave her chamomile tea, and chastely shared their beds. Their eyes turned mournful when they looked at her. She might have been widowed. She felt humiliated, an outcast taken in by a strange feudal tribe. On those days she did not leap out of bed eager for life.

  Katie dried the twelfth piece of silverware before she slid the drawer shut and went to the pictures. “Cool!” she said, pointing. This might get Clara talking. “Your wedding picture. You were way young.” Clara hadn’t exactly been good-looking even then. “That’s an excellent dress.” Casually, she aimed the Sony at her.

  “It wasn’t fancy, but it was white. Nowadays just anyone marries in white. Then it meant something.”

  “Meant a lot to Clara,” muttered Hector.

  “I can identify.” For the first time in her life she could. R had told her that their bodies were sacred, to be shared sparingly, respectfully. Remembering that, a few nights after Abeo had arrived, she’d stormed into R’s cabin, desperate with the pain of rejection, intent on reminding R about her beliefs. Abeo had quickly covered herself with an afghan, R shielding her as if Katie were dangerous.

  “We’ll go up to the loft,” R offered.

  Katie had wailed, “I need to talk with you. Alone!”

  R, smiling with a frozen-looking sympathy, seemed to grow into her own looming shadow on the cabin wall. “Look at you.”

  It was hard to keep sharp, living from tent to cabin. The few clothes she’d come with had grown too large and too city for the land. Her leather jacket, belts, and shoes had finally gone into storage along with her TV drag. She wore clothing the land women shared with her—sweat pants in every shade of purple, layers of short- and long-sleeved political T-shirts, and at night, flannels and thermals, sweats, even a striped homemade wool watch cap because she was so cold all the time. She could have bought her own clothes, but she was doing a dissolve into an entirely new Katie, and she simply didn’t know what to buy.

  R said, “You’re letting yourself go, Kate, obsessing like this about my life. Why aren’t you working? You’re one of these people who is her work. Why are you haunting me instead?”

  Haunting! Was she a little girl with lice and hand-me-down clothes, ashamed of a new kind of poverty she couldn’t name? What a babe in the woods she’d been. No more, Goddess willing, was she going to let R twist her reality.

  Hector shot back his recliner. “It hasn’t been all hearts and flowers by a long shot. Look at this.” He held up one of his few tufts of hair to reveal the knot of a white scar over an ear. “A flying skillet.”

  “Clara?” Katie asked.

  “None other,” Hector responded.

  “Tell your part, Pa.”

  “I raised a hand to her. I truly never would hurt her.”

  “You never came home worse for the drink again, did you, Mister?” Clara turned to Katie. “The boy and his sister could have seen him stumble around here, reeking of it, pawing at me. I put a stop to that.”

  “You never thought to leave each other?”

  “You’d be a poor woman if you gave me a penny for every time I thought to drive him out of this house he built,” Clara answered.

  Hector thrust his chin up and his chest out. “She’s a little spitfire all right.”

  “So you just—”

  “Stayed,” said Clara.

  “No matter what.”

  “Maybe because,” Hector said with a knowing nod.

  “Did anyone ever, like, come between you two?”

  Clara and Hector did not look at each other. The room felt chilly. Katie hugged herself.

  Hector moved to the woodstove, opened the flue, then poked inside the heavy door with an iron rod, and set two pieces of wood on the coals. The house was so well insulated and shaded by carefully pruned, healthy trees that they kept the stove going even in summer. “There were months at a time I’d go logging in Alaska, Washington, Idaho. A person might make a mistake.”

  Clara scrubbed the sink, shaking Bon Ami like it was a fast-acting poison. “Men. He always came home.”

  “Say, I forgot to tell you this one, Katie. Which side of a church does a yew tree grow on?”

  She smiled at silly, irrepressible Hector. “I give up.”

  “On the outside!”

  “Don’t laugh,” Clara said. “It only encourages him.”

  Katie went to the window. A peacock was displaying the magnificence of his tail, and the peahens were ignoring him.

  It wasn’t simple. Even straight people had an uphill climb. Still, the way Clara and Hector were living had alerted her to dreams she hadn’t known she had, just as R had made
her aware of a startling passionate spirituality in herself that was propelling her beyond her old ambitions.

  Waterfall Falls was not the kind of place she’d imagined herself doing the discovery thing. Had she ever made a decision to stay in this place? It was so odd, how she’d gotten here—just a week off after all those interviews, on the way back to the Bay Area to find another job and get sucked into the expensive city life—just a week to visit Jeep’s friend Solstice, then another week. Then, because she was between jobs, camping out at the library in Greenhill and forcing herself to send out resumes, while the thought of returning to a studio became more and more repugnant, and the hold this place had on her got stronger. Her little radio ate batteries like a kitten drank milk. She’d thought she was in R’s thrall, but really it was the mountains, the beating heart of something, something they called the Goddess at Spirit Ridge. It was so close to the surface here she felt like every time she touched a tree or let icy water in a creek run through her fingers, she was touching the soul of the universe.

  Someday, she had dreamed, she and R would tell young women in pain about how they’d “just stayed,” meaning together. Now she would tell them how it was to have stayed on alone, how she’d begun to feel bigger and even powerful, and had prepared in Waterfall Falls to take her place in the big world where, like Chick, she would neither cower nor pretend to be something she wasn’t. But imagining that day, she felt a pang of such aloneness she had to sit back down. Goddess, she needed—what? who? These two could show her the way if she could get them to open up a little more.

  “You’re not giving me much of a game plan here,” she urged.

  Clara barked, “Could be because life’s no game.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Silk-hand Butches

  Donny and Jeep burst through the door of Natural Woman Foods like puppies playing. Their clothes and pants were soaked. Donny’s fragrant string of fish dripped on the floor as she and Jeep fenced along the aisle with their rods.

  Chick, inspecting the ears of corn balanced on her lap, laughed so hard an ear went tumbling to the floor. Donny feinted around Jeep and rushed back to kiss Chick full on the mouth, picking up the corn and depositing it in her lap in one economical swoop as she did.

  “You taste like cinnamon roll, Donny Donaldson. Is that why I was two short this morning?”

  “Yo, R!” Donny said over her shoulder by way of a greeting, as she clattered after Jeep up the old wooden stairs in the back to the apartment. For a moment there was quiet in the store except for whirring refrigeration units. Then she heard the blast of music upstairs. Donny had fallen in love with the singer Mary J. Blige and had to hear her every minute of the day.

  “They bring the spring inside with them,” R said softly.

  “Butches are outrageous! You can’t help but love them.”

  “Where does Donny get the energy at her age?”

  “She’ll live to a hundred. Her mother’s seventy-six and still working. I plan to be around as long as Donny. I don’t want to miss a minute of her.”

  “I’m glad Abeo slowed down before she got to me.”

  Chick studied R’s pale face and the dark smudges under her eyes. “Do you feel as dragged out as you look?”

  “Tired, very tired.”

  Chick had told Donny as they lay late in bed this last warm summer Sunday morning, “R’s not someone I love being around. She reminds me too much of my mom and her tight-lipped don’t-let-the-anger-show depressions. I’m drawn to R’s spirit. She’s like some kind of bird that’s not born to fly, yet keeps trying. I think it’s why she’s such a good teacher. No one knows the mechanics of flying better than a creature without working wings. Even if we didn’t connect that way, R’s so melancholy, how could I turn my back on the poor woman?”

  “You’re all soft underbelly right now, Chick. You don’t have enough ups in you to be giving any away to that downer. You watch your precious self, okay?” Donny had advised.

  She could hear Donny and Jeep scraping chairs and dropping shoes overhead. “I suspect there’s plenty of fish for dinner. Can you stay?” Donny would never forgive her if R took her up on it.

  “I don’t eat flesh,” R said, pulling her chin back as if offended. “Abeo’s with Dr. Wu getting her shots. Afterwards we’ll go back up the mountain.”

  “Shots?”

  “Her hormones. She’s difficult to be with when they start taking effect.”

  Chick laughed. Donny was right. R was draining, but spending time with her made Chick more sure of her own mental health than anything else she did. “It must be like PMS. What a trip for her. In the old days, when I still got PMS and did dope, I’d get stoned and clean house for hours or eat nothing but sweets for days—or both. If I had acid, I’d save it until I started bleeding. Mellowed me right out. I was Sweet Creek, my cramps were the point in the pond where the waterfall hits—heavy water, but it whirlpooled like coming. Did you ever notice how close cramps feel to orgasmic spasms?”

  “I had a total hysterectomy at thirty-two after my second caesarian. And a husband who demanded my orgasms in a way that took the pleasure out of them. He wanted to think of himself as a good lover.”

  “Wow, heavy shit. I can’t imagine you under some man’s thumb, or believe you did that whole era as a housewife while I tie-dyed American flags. Now you’re living the revolution and I’m a capitalist pig! Life is too strange. Don’t you love it?”

  “All too much,” R said without explanation. She had few words during her visits. She always sat at the small scratched maple table by the window, hands locked around a mug of organic coffee, a weary look on her face.

  Chick was drawn to her like a healing magnet, offering pastries, putting on the verbal equivalent of a floor show. “I talk too much when you’re here, R.”

  R’s laugh was so faint she could barely hear it over a Manhattan Transfer CD. “Your world amuses and comforts me. Somehow, I feel part of the stories you tell.”

  “I wish you could’ve been part of that kaleidoscope time.” Chick ran a fingernail through a shallow split in the table to clean it out. “From what you’ve told me, the Jefferson Airplane probably hurt your ears. There I was trying to keep Woodstock alive forever, and you thought Sesame Street was the revolution, right? I was freaking out on magic buttons because Jimi and Janis crash-landed, and you were taking tranqs so you wouldn’t fly.”

  R’s smile lingered as she sipped her coffee.

  Chick remembered younger photographs of herself. “I lived in two different worlds. During the days I hung out with long-haired bi girls, getting stoned in the sunshine, drinking wine, and watching the fog eat San Francisco block by block. They always left me by nightfall for their male musicians and dealers. I’d drift to a barstool, listen to Anne Murray, and dream that a real lesbian like Donny would lead me to the dance floor.” She clapped her hands once and laughed. “Now I’m the real lesbian, can you dig it?”

  R put down her mug and folded her hands.

  “They were something in those days,” Chick continued, “the bar dykes. Then it was passing butches. Now it’s Name That Gender.” Her insides fluttered with the grand memory of being a brand-new powerfully feminine lesbian. “The boys on the streets wore granny glasses and love beads and flowing manes, but the butch girls in the bars wouldn’t be caught dead in such sissy-wear. They’d curse out the draft dodgers and wolf whistle at the gentle generation. After all, gays have been into free love from day one, and we never got a Broadway musical out of it.”

  R’s laugh was more an exhalation of breath. She covered her mouth as the laughter became a cough.

  “I used to close the bars. There was one hole-in-the-wall near the Marina that held Christian services on Sunday afternoons using a drunken minister. The straight owners made up for supplying queers with a place to dance by offering us a way to salvation. Then there was the hotel bar in the Tenderloin where married ladies who dared wandered off from home while their husbands
worked late. You would have liked that one.”

  “I wish I’d known a little more about myself then.”

  “I was having too much fun for introspection. Were you dancing to “Bennie and the Jets” at straight living-room parties while I did tribal group dancing at gay-lib bashes? Did you even know Elton and Bernie were an item?” she asked, flicking a wrist, pinky first, in the air. “We loved it.”

  When R smiled at her out of intensely focused eyes, Chick went on. “I was selling classified ads at a newspaper. Practically our whole department was gay. I remember one holiday party when the manager, a tiny sassy butch who wore button-down shirtwaist dresses, got tipsy. We danced in the hallway to an eight-track of Isaac Hayes. The two queens from the mail room screeched with laughter. The few hets looked like they wished they could have a liberation movement and have that much fun too.”

  She looked away from her memories at R’s eyes and thought she’d never seen a sadder face.

  “I would have liked to meet one of your fairy-tale butches.”

  “They’re all around you. Sometimes, R, I feel like I got it on with one after another of those dynamite silk-hand butches back in 1969 and lay around stoned to Jethro Tull for ten years until it was time to disco with the gayboys under the light-throwing balls. Then I got up, found a disco-butch, and danced for another decade.”

  They both looked out the window at the sound of a police car. Joan Sweet sped by, blue roof light strobing. A century ago, she thought, the sheriff would have been a man urging speed from his four-legged mount. And she, Chick—what would she have been? A bar owner with a string of girls upstairs? She’d heard that had been the first use of this building, before it became a feed store.

  “Poor R, did you really miss the decadent decade? The Allman Brothers, Taj Mahal, Joy of Cooking. Who cared what was playing as long as it was slow. Or faster than the speed of speed. ‘I Will Survive,’ ‘Voulez Vous Coucher Avec Moi,’ the Village People—Goddess! The music never ended, and we ended the seventies with Meg Christian and Holly Near in Berkeley blowing us all away.”