by Lee Lynch
“You’re kidding me, right?” She raked her fingers through her hair.
“Hell, no.” Shannon looked shocked, as if everyone should know the deal with gay soldiers. “Each queer they send over means some straight boy doesn’t have to go. And if I tell them, then I might have a less-than-honorable discharge.”
“So you think there’s more of a chance you’ll go.”
“I know they’re still kicking some of us out, but at the rate the enemy’s blowing up soldiers? I think we’ll all go.”
“Have you thought about Canada?”
“I don’t much want to live up there. But I got my cat’s papers from the vet in case. It was one thing when Vietnam draft dodgers went north. Canada’s not taking in AWOL Americans this time around.”
She wondered what Dawn’s father would say to this dilemma, given his illness, his daughter’s disability, and his marriage to the enemy. “I don’t know what to say, Shannon. It kind of sounds like you signed a contract you can’t renege on.”
Shannon hung her head like one of Jefferson’s kids in trouble for daydreaming in the outfield. “Not while I’m alive.”
“Hey, you could meet the love of your life over there.”
Shannon’s face was solemn, but her eyes looked as if she was savoring that imagined meeting, and soon her deep dimples began to show like little shadows on her cheeks. “With my luck she’d be Iraqi and her fundamentalist brother would catch us in bed.”
“Or you’d be with her when your company is attacked.”
“I can’t believe we’re over there at all. I wouldn’t hesitate to go if they were landing at Hampton Beach.”
What did this youngster want from her? Maybe nothing. What could she give her? Maybe nothing.
Shannon stood, rag dipping. “Listen,” she said with her brawny New Hampshire accent. “If I disappear, to wherever, would you do me a favor?”
Here it came.
Shannon Wiley had a desperate look. “Would you look after my cat? And Dawn?”
Jefferson thought she could see the conflict flashing like a danger signal in her eyes. Would Jefferson steal Dawn? Of course not, Jefferson thought. She and Dawn Northway talked as she and Ginger never had, even in the beginning. The words, like storms of memory, that she’d never shared with anyone, poured out of her: the women, her grandparents, drinking, her bare-bones career…
She drew them all for Dawn with words. She never knew she had such a need to talk to someone. Not even with Lily Ann had she opened up this much. Something about Dawn, the feeling of Dawn, some gladness of spirit, relaxed Jefferson. Was it because they weren’t lovers? She wanted Dawn to know everything about her, bad and good, before—before what? Becoming lovers? Before losing her to someone else? Before she lost her because of her terrible confessions? Before she lost the impulse to lay herself bare? Yes and no. It was because she had that same gladness of spirit. Dawn knew how to be happy. She liked being happy. Nothing had crushed that spirit.
She never felt ashamed when she shared stuff with Dawn, nor did Dawn ever blanch. Dawn responded with stories of her own, mild in comparison though they were. She might even, Jefferson suspected by the flush of Dawn’s face and the quick cascade of her words, be turned on by Jefferson’s lustiest escapades.
And then there were the other stories. Jefferson’s and Dawn’s: Jefferson’s sports failures and triumphs; how Dawn’s father rescued her mother’s family, risking everything himself. How her mother and father fell in love at first sight, she cowering in her hooch, shielding her younger siblings with her body, he appalled by orders to shoot everyone and following the family down the tunnel in the floor of their home. Dawn said she expected the same for herself. It was as if her parents recognized each other from some forever time ago when they were locked together in some way. One day Dawn confessed that she’d had the same feeling the night Jefferson walked into that church basement, and she followed it with a quick joke about having a gene for underground love.
Dawn said she hoped that confiding in Jefferson wouldn’t chase her off. She told Jefferson how much she valued their friendship and companionship above all else in her life. She asked for nothing more, would accept nothing more. Jefferson admitted that sometimes she’d gone with women because she didn’t know how to say no. Dawn was looking for love, not kindness; a soul mate, not sex. If it turned out right between them, if Jefferson came to feel as she did, they’d know because they would combust in passion, there would be no mistaking it. Meanwhile, Jefferson, for once in her life, was content to wait. Talking was proving to be as gratifying as physical seduction.
“Shannon,” she began to caution, then remembered that when she was Shannon’s age, everything felt this important. Shannon wanted her to keep anyone from horning in on Dawn. She could see how she had fooled herself into thinking she could control anything now that she watched Shannon make the same thinking error. “Does Dawn need looking after?”
“Everybody needs looking after.”
It wasn’t her place to open Shannon’s eyes to her ulterior motive. She wanted her to know she had no designs on Dawn. Who knew what life would bring while Shannon was away? It was very possible she wouldn’t come back, or would come back missing limbs, crazed by heat and violence and fear, needing care herself. Did lesbians have a way to help their own veterans? She’d never thought of this before. Wasn’t Shannon really asking Jefferson to take care of, to save PFC Shannon Wiley? She shook her head. Most of her adult life had been about taking care of women. Right now Jefferson, finally sleeping through some nights and eating better, was numero uno for Jefferson.
“I can be her friend,” she told Shannon. “And yours.” She thrust with her putty knife to emphasize what she was saying. “But I’m nobody’s mother and I have fewer answers every day.”
Shannon gave her a wide-eyed look, like she knew Jefferson did have the answers and was withholding them. “If anything happened to Dawn,” Shannon explained, “I might as well go over there and let them do me in so I don’t end up doing it all myself.”
When Jefferson was alone again, thinking about young Shannon, she felt like she’d learned nothing in her whole life and all of a sudden she was expected to be this expert on everything. Didn’t it show that she was all hollow? Shouldn’t she be able to at least come up with a way to think things through? Why? She’d never thought anything through in her life. Her decision to leave the city itself had been nothing more than a reaction to Ginger’s illness, maybe a belated reaction to 9/11. She was always running from pain. How smart was that? Pain hadn’t beaten her yet. Her spirit was as strong as Dawn’s and always would be.
“Don’t try to escape the pain, Shannon,” was all she’d been able to advise, gesturing to the lake with the knife. “It’s like trying to drain the lake dry.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
On Jefferson’s forty-ninth birthday in August when she had no prospective buyers or new listings, and to celebrate her first house sale, she went with Dawn to see her parents’ farm. As she drove, Dawn pointed out her personal landmarks and told funny stories about each. They skirted Lake Winnipesaukee south, then headed west for another twenty minutes, climbing and descending the twisting roads, bouncing over frost heaves, coming suddenly on wide-open views of meadows and the mountains beyond. Dawn exclaimed at the purplish red clover and the light blue yarrow flowers. Occasionally they came to an intersection that boasted a predictably white church and an out-of-business gas station with the original red pumps or an open general store/postoffice/video-rental shop, also white, often peeling. Large grayed houses offered living rooms and front porches converted to antique shops or junk heaps. Between intersections the houses were rare and usually white, sometimes red or cedar shingled.
Dawn drove without haste. Jefferson, fighting to stay awake after another night of insomnia, asked questions. It occurred to her that she seldom got to know women in this way. Pillow talk had always been her style. She missed the touching and dipping in and out
of a woman, interrupting life stories with lovemaking.
Women loved to tell their stories and Dawn Northway was no different. That was one of her appeals: despite everything that attracted Jefferson to Dawn—her sunny energy, her prized Asian heritage, the way she would give a sudden shout and leap to a tree limb, then climb and grin back down at her friends, her passion for women’s basketball—the woman was a regular femme. She shopped at the malls and primped before going out; she could whip up a tasty stir-fry and folded her laundry in thirds, patting it even.
Jefferson’s phys ed background made her sensitive to the way people moved. It hadn’t taken her long to notice that Dawn’s left leg was less flexible than her right. Dawn didn’t so much limp as have a slight hitch to her step. This seemed like a good time to ask whether she had been injured.
“No,” Dawn answered. “Agent Orange touched all of us in one way or another. One of my sisters had spina bifida. She died seven years ago because her urinary tract was malformed and there was not much they could do surgically. My brother is slightly mentally retarded, but he can do farm work. Mom had three miscarriages. The chemical can make babies more prone to infection, and that’s what I had, a bone infection. They had to remove some of the bone. My left leg is shorter than the right and the leg didn’t develop like it should. They said I almost died. Carrying this leg around helps me remember how lucky I am to be alive, despite Agent Orange. Both Mom and Dad were exposed to it. Mom has scars on her hands and back, and Dad has leukemia.”
She whistled and touched Dawn’s cheek lightly with her knuckles. “Yet you’re always laughing. Couldn’t have been much fun for a little girl. Or a big girl.”
“Years of exercise regimes right into my teens. But I showed them. I downhill ski, I water-ski, and two years ago I learned to snowboard. Some day I’ll get a wetsuit and drive over to the shore to surf. Read my blog. It’s the first place I’ve been able talk about it.”
“I don’t think I could read it. Blogs make me feel like I’m reading people’s diaries. Tell me why such an active person went into library work?”
“Oh, it’s exciting! I’ve always read a lot and I think reading is the cure for all ills in this society. Look at the prejudice against gays. It comes from lack of education. If we could get books about us into the schools and libraries it could be our era of enlightenment, Jefferson.”
“That simple, is it?”
“No, it’s not simple at all, but it can be done.” Dawn emphasized her point with a gentle touch on Jefferson’s leg. “My first job was as a worker bee in the NYC Public Library. I was only a page so I had a lot of public contact, and I saw all sorts of kids looking for books about themselves.”
“You were in the city?”
“I got my master’s from the School of Information and Library Science at Pratt. I interned at the Yorkville Branch of the New York Public Library. It was between Second and Third avenues.”
“I know it.”
“Do you?” Dawn gave a buoyant little laugh. “Everyone around here seems to think I made up this fairy tale about living in New York or else why wouldn’t I still be there?”
“Good question.”
Dawn looked over at her. “Why aren’t you?”
She thought for a moment of a way to say it all in a nutshell. “I’ve only known the city and our summer place. The city stopped working for me. I needed to start fresh, to leave some things behind.” She paused to see if she wanted to share more, but, no, talking about Ginger wasn’t in her game plan today. “I feel more alive here now than I do in the city, though when I was younger, I felt more alive there.” She checked herself for the truth of this and found she felt exactly that way. “And why didn’t you stay?”
“Oh,” she said, with that openness of hers that made Jefferson feel like she could trust her in everything. “My parents paid the tuition on the condition that I come back here when there was an opening I liked. They don’t exactly grow on trees, small-town library jobs. So it didn’t happen for a while. We tend to stay till we retire.” Dawn laughed again. Jefferson noticed that her blue eyes appeared streaked with light. “And on our wages, we don’t retire young, us stuffy old librarians.”
Jefferson laughed with her, all too aware that she was guilty of imposing the stuffy stereotype on fun-loving Dawn. She spotted a foal huddling near its mother.
Dawn cried, “Cute,” and, in her chatty way, launched into yet another anecdote about growing up on the farm, this one having to do with a kitten who thought a foal was his mother.
“I haven’t laughed this much in years,” Jefferson admitted. How could she not respond to such open expressions of joy?
“I have to say,” Dawn replied, “you’re easy.”
Laughing yet again, she said, “Tell me about working in the city. It must have been different for you, after,” she spread her arms to indicate the farm, “this.” She found herself missing the city or maybe missing her coaching days. She still had her national credentials. She’d have to think about getting back into it here in New Hampshire.
“In the city? I worked up from the circulation desk to collections development,” Dawn said as they rolled past a collapsed barn. “I did materials selection, programming, bibliographic instruction, community outreach, and helped patrons with the Internet. The volume of users and shortage of staff made me feel like a production worker in a factory. I got to know a few patrons, and I still get together with some of the staff when I go to library-association conferences and when I go to the city. Surviving that crazy busy job gave me the confidence to know I could run a rural library, even a small, underfunded one. It seems like I work all the time now, going to meetings at night to keep the town’s goodwill, filling in for volunteers who don’t show up, but I love my job.” Dawn laughed again. “If I move to Concord I’d work as much, but get paid better. And I’d be away from this board, or at least from the bitch on wheels.”
“Someone’s bugging you?”
“Donna Green, the book-banner. She and her husband retired and built a gigantic McMansion over on Winnipesaukee. She doesn’t want a lesbian running her library. I’d rather leave than get fired for some trumped-up reason that covers up homophobia.”
“I remember going through that. You’re damned either way.”
“You are. She’s driving off other board members—they can’t work with her. Why don’t you volunteer for the board?”
“Me? Oh, Dawn, thank you for the compliment. They want respectable people on boards, not gays.”
“Jef.” Dawn used her nickname for the first time, a sign of warmth that gave Jefferson unexpected pleasure. “I hate to be the one to break it to you, but you are respectable. You’re a home owner with roots in the area, people know your parents, you’re a realtor, a volunteer coach—how much more respectable could you be?”
“It’s hard to forget, you know: getting fired so much, blowing my chance at professional golf, the drinking, all the women.”
Dawn was smiling with what looked like affection. “You sound more proud than worried about your sordid past.”
She realized Dawn was right and grinned. “I did relish certain parts of being the big bad wolf.”
“I’ll bet you did,” Dawn said with a knowing grin. “I think you’re trying to get out of being on the board.”
“I’m not much for sitting around listening.”
Dawn said nothing. This, thought Jefferson, is how femmes get me into bed. “I’ll give it a try,” she conceded.
“It would be so terrific to have one more vote. I mean, this woman was livid when she saw my banned-book-week posters. She wanted to burn them.”
“If she quits, I get to resign?”
Dawn smiled. “We’ll revisit it if and when, okay?”
She shook her head as Dawn changed the subject. “There’s Stillwater Lake. It’s always been too shallow and mossy for swimming, but it makes canoeing interesting.”
She imagined paddling with Dawn to the treed isla
nd she could see partway across the lake. But no, she had to get out of the habit of viewing every femme as a potential fling. That wouldn’t do in a small town where you were likely to see the woman the next day at Food Fresh or couldn’t borrow a library book without an awkward encounter.
What a bummer. She was free. She could see whoever she wanted and without guilt. Here was this lovely woman whose eyes, raised at the corners and narrow-lidded, hinted of her Viet-French ancestry.
Jefferson’s hands felt so empty these days. She spent parts of her wakeful nights longing to press her body against another woman’s, longing to hold her hands and to feel her lips, as she had longed for Ginger, sleeping beside her, but unattainable most of their years together. The need for a lover had an urgency like a powerful spring fever that consumed her. It had always been like this, from Angie on, and during the day her restless vision darted into shadows, searching. She felt like some sort of love missile, on fire herself, seeking heat akin to her own. She was reemerging after Ginger and was bowled over by the raging emotions and urges of a seventeen-year-old. She didn’t want to leave the cocoon of her safe solitude. It’s no wonder I drank back then, she thought. Was there no escape from longing?
At the same time she felt worn-out, too old for love games. Her body, once so like an adolescent boy’s, was breaking down. Her knees hurt when she walked. Lifting her grandmother’s heavy frying pan brought back her golf elbow. She was growing softer and rounder, but early arthritis limited the exercise she could do. She wasn’t golfing these days either. Who would want to be courted by someone turning gray in all the wrong places?
Dawn was explaining more about her job. Jefferson was trying to listen, but really was deciding that she was kidding herself. Being a lover was for kids, yet she felt like a kid. What was up with that? Was it menopause coming on like an enormous fast ball, messing with her hormones so she didn’t feel the urge one day and it slammed her the next? Its timing was good, given that she was going to live here, so far from cruise central, where she’d either be prowling every night or completely out of the loop, home moping. She sort of missed the edge cheating gave her. There was no getting away from it. She was still, when she was switched on, a compulsive lover and a chronic seducer. Ginger had been perfect for her: a permanent challenge and frustration. Jefferson lived in hope, always at the ready, seduction refined to something so subtle Ginger could not be offended at Jefferson’s overtures. Jefferson waited and tried and went elsewhere, but always came back, burning for Ginger.