Outsiders

by Lynn Ames

  The woman looked at her three friends. “Do we have any money left?”

  Laurie caught Taj’s eye and they both sighed. “I won’t charge you twenty dollars. I’m just stuck in the city and I’m out of cash. If you can spare a few bucks you can have a copy.”

  They talked among themselves, looking into wallets and bags, then produced sixteen dollars, which Laurie gratefully accepted. She signed the book for the first woman, then wrote down the names and addresses of the other three, promising to send them complimentary copies once she got home. She walked over to Taj and said, “Well, that only cost me about forty dollars. I’m gonna have to buy copies from my publisher.”

  “Yeah, but we’ve got sixteen dollars. That’ll buy us…something.”

  ***

  They decided to walk to Central Park, even though it was so hot they had to walk in the shadow of buildings to keep even marginally cool. Once they reached Fifty-ninth Street, the whole city seemed to cool off by ten degrees. They entered the park at Columbus Circle, and immediately spent five of their scant dollars on a bottle of water and a giant pretzel, which they consumed in seconds.

  “I’ve never known water to taste so good,” Laurie moaned. “It’s like rare wine.”

  They found a shady spot under a grove of trees and sat on Laurie’s yoga mat, just watching people wander around. No one seemed to have an agenda. “I’ve never seen New Yorkers amble. No one’s in a hurry for a change.”

  “They’re probably worried about sunstroke,” Taj said dryly.

  “Hey! That guy’s Blackberry is working.” Laurie got to her feet and approached the man as soon as he hung up. “Is there any chance I can use your phone? Just for a minute?”

  He eyed her for a moment, then asked the question that identified him as a local. “How much?”

  “Two dollars.”

  He shook his head. “No deal.”

  “Okay. Five.” She took out the bills and showed that she had them.

  He grabbed them and handed her the phone. “Make it snappy.”

  She turned and called one of the few numbers she knew by heart, spending a good five minutes speaking. When she hung up, she said, “Someone’s gonna call me back. You get another five if you let me take the call.”

  “How long will it take?”

  “Not too long. Why? Where’ve you got to go?” She delivered this with her best New York attitude.

  He nodded and sat back down on a bench. When Laurie went back to Taj, she said, “I might have had a brilliant idea.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll let you know if it turns out to be brilliant. I don’t like to advertise dumb ideas.”

  ***

  They sat on their mat, watching people roller blade and bike ride in the blazing sun. As she looked around, Laurie noted that the cell phone holder was wearing a suit, obviously one he’d slept in. She started to feel a modicum of sympathy for him, but when he waved the phone at her, she jumped up and ran back to him, holding out the five dollars, which he took and pocketed.

  A few minutes later she walked back to Taj, clearly with very good news. “Guess where we’re going?”

  “Brooklyn?”

  “Better.”

  “Riverdale?”

  “No. Even better. Even closer.”

  “Tell me!” Taj was on her feet, holding Laurie by the shoulders as she resisted the temptation to shake her.

  “An apartment on the Upper West Side. One of my fans is letting us crash there. And,” she said, delivering the news with the authority it deserved, “we can eat everything she has in the place!”

  ***

  During the fifteen-block walk, Laurie told of calling Libby and having her use her Blackberry to place a notice on Laurie’s internet chat group. A fan from New York was traveling, but she offered her place and the contents of her cupboard.

  “That’s really remarkable,” Taj marveled. “She doesn’t know you at all, but she’s gonna let you use her apartment.”

  “She knows me.” Laurie blinked, surprised at her own statement. “My readers know me pretty well. Heck, there are thirty writers I can think of that I’d let use my place. When you really follow someone, you know them better than you know most of your friends.”

  “And you say you’re a hack,” Taj scoffed.

  “No, I’m not really a hack. I write good stories. I can just do more. That’s what’s been bothering me.”

  “Then do more.”

  “My publisher will only publish three books a year for me. Even though I could easily write four or five. As a matter of fact, I’ve got four books ready for editing right now.”

  “Then write under a different name. Find another publisher.”

  “You make it sound so easy,” Laurie said, smiling warmly at her.

  “It is. If you want it badly enough, it’s easy.”

  ***

  They reached the apartment moments before they were ready to expire from heatstroke. The building was, blessedly, a brownstone of a mere four floors. A neighbor had been alerted and gave Laurie the key.

  When Laurie opened the door, the remarkably hot air hit them like a blow. She took a breath and dashed for the windows, flinging them open as quickly as she could. Then she leaned out of the nearest window and sat on the sill, smiling at Taj who did the same at the adjacent window.

  After resting for a few minutes, Laurie went to the refrigerator, pulled out two liters of water, and handed one to Taj. They drank until they were full, then Laurie said, “I call dibs on the shower.”

  “After you,” Taj agreed, flopping onto a loveseat. She stayed right there, trying to will herself to cool down. But in a few minutes Laurie stood behind her and dripped cool drops of water on her head. “Don’t stop,” she said, her head lolling on the back of the loveseat.

  “Go take a cold shower. You’ll feel fantastic.”

  Taj got up and saw that Laurie was wrapped in a towel that barely covered her hoo-ha. “I love blackouts,” she said, grinning lasciviously.

  ***

  After two showers each and clad only in towels, they sat on the loveseat, a repast of cheese, crackers and olives on a platter between them. A cool-ish bottle of white wine rested against the corner of the loveseat and they each sipped a glass, savoring the crisp sensation as though it were the finest French import.

  “This is the life,” Laurie said, raising her glass.

  “You’ll get no arguments from me. I can’t remember the last time I had a nicer day.”

  “Hey,” Laurie said, looking down at an olive that had fully caught her attention. “Why do you think you didn’t want to keep kissing me last night?”

  Taj put her cool hand on Laurie’s shoulder. “I did want to. But I’m…gun-shy, I guess. I get my heart broken easily.”

  Their eyes met. “Really? That’s really the reason?”

  “Yeah. Really. It would have crushed me to get…closer…and not be able to see you again. I try to keep my distance until I know there’s a chance of…something happening.”

  “Like what?” Laurie moved the tray away and scooted closer.

  Taj smiled warmly. “Like seeing what you’d say to having me stick around for a couple of weeks. I’d love to spend some time with you. Riverdale isn’t very far from Brooklyn, all things considered.”

  “You know what’s even closer?” Laurie scooted even closer, so close she could feel Taj’s warmth.

  “What?” Her voice was soft and tender.

  “Brooklyn. Come home with me.”

  Taj’s face lit up in delight. “Really?”

  “Definitely. I haven’t been this attracted to a woman in years…maybe never. I’m gonna find your passport and confiscate it so you can’t get away.”

  “Well, I don’t have an assignment lined up. I was gonna go to Mauritius for a little R and R.”

  “Mauritius? You say that like I say I’m going to the grocery store.”

  Taj shrugged. “I love it there. I know a place where
I can stay for about fifteen dollars a night. It’s right on the beach, no tourists.” She moved closer, closing the distance completely. “It’s warm and sunny and tropical. A nice rain every afternoon, cool drinks while you lie in a hammock with the wind rocking you. I’d recommend it to anyone who wanted to start traveling.”

  “I’ll give you two weeks to convince me,” Laurie whispered as she grasped Taj’s shoulders and pulled her in for a long kiss. “Then I’m going with or without you.”

  The End

  Billy Boy

  By

  Susan Smith

  It was all Achilles’ fault. Heel. Achilles’ heel was redundant, according to Joan. She, Joan, much against her own good will and sense, was suckered, shanghaied, press-ganged into covering Sheila’s class for her. Sheila had gone and diabolically done the one thing that Joan could not resist, she’d asked politely, backed up by more than twenty years of friendship. That was Joan’s Achilles’ heel; the sacrifices on the sacred altar of friendship had to be immediate, grand, generous and without thought, qualm or regret. A friend asked, an Old Friend, and it was done. Whatever it was. Now, it was Sheila’s summer writing seminar.

  It is important to have a place where emotion carries against all sense, where it is honored and respected and let run free. For Joan, that was friendship. Relationships, for her, never seemed to touch that profound intimacy. Something about the flesh ruined everything. Friendships—we ride out into the hail of bullets together, we fight back to back, I will die in your place, blood brotherhood—were central to Joan’s heart. She just didn’t have many male friends. That was complicated by the severe case of lesbianism she’d discovered in grade school. Girls were mystery and excitement and terror. Boys were safe, nonsexual, staunch friends without complication or threat. Until later.

  It was this growing up that gave Joan her only taste of acceptance and relief, male friendships. Before high school, they were her saving grace. They were devout, uncomplicated, robust, and doomed to end in tragedy. For what is adolescence, for those unready and without place to hide, but a tragedy? Adolescence, the poverty of puberty, threw into high relief the differences she’d been trying to suppress. Her male friendships, as staunch and joyful as she’d imagined them, as bold and free as she was sure they saw her, changed forever. Once the secondary sexual characteristics hit, Joan’s world ended. No more playing outside with the boys, in a tank top and shorts, just as they wore. No more running around in the woods until well after dark. No more riding bikes deep into the wilderness, into the farmland and away from everything manmade. No more. Outside the boundaries of civilization was danger. No longer was she the gay, bold adventurer. Now she was a girl, and the boys noticed.

  Joan was gob smacked. What was wrong with them? Why did they keep staring at her shirt? Why didn’t they touch her as they used to, hand clasps, shoulder slaps, punches, and now try to touch her in different, side-eye ways? Like there was something sly and ugly, but deeply interesting about her now. And she, the center of her, no longer mattered. They stopped talking to her. You can’t look and talk at the same time, Joan thought.

  So her refuge ended with puberty. Girls got more mysterious and terrifying, and boys became drooling predators. Joan did what many fine queers faced with the same intolerable situation did, she retreated into a passionate interest and pretended that sex, and sexuality, dating, boys, girls, and all that sweaty horror didn’t exist. She rejected the experiences that had pre-rejected her. So in adolescence, when most are stewing in the hormone bath, Joan became a monk.

  A bookish monk, which helped her sail into college and later, grad school. She was a professor of classics by the time she was thirty-two. She was intellectually brilliant, driven, reserved, arrogant, or so it was whispered. Joan had learned her lesson in high school and stopped trying to be friends with men, or please them at her own expense. The severe, exacting precision she radiated kept everyone at arm’s length, and what was insecurity at the core got interpreted, as it often is, as arrogance. The monkish look suited Joan, with the subdued, tailored clothing, the uniform simplicity. The lack of any makeup or jewelry gave her face a strange naked impressiveness, a mountain crag washed by rain. If her eyes were too shadowed, if her lips were held tight from habit, it added to her grim dignity. Pain, well tamped down, reads as strength. Her dark hair was first cut into a Caesar when she was twenty-three, and never varied from that. Gray now, at forty-two, crashed against her widow’s peak and temples, but the stability of the cut remained. This was an area of her life where long ago she’d achieved a sense of peace, or armed truce, and she wasn’t about to threaten that.

  There were other areas like that, sealed off places, airless, in her that she’d learned to brick over and retreat from. Rarely did she take a pick axe to those doors. Friendship had been one of those airless places, until Joan hit eighteen and went away to college. Freshman year, she’d roomed with a girl that ended up becoming her best friend. Sheila. In those days Sheila was a vegan Marxist radical lesbian feminist. Now she was a Democrat pescetarian yoga enthusiast married to a lovely man, Chris. The span of time between eighteen and forty-two, those twenty-four years, had welded Sheila and Joan together.

  When they’d first met, Joan had been astounded and thrilled at Sheila’s in-your-face boldness and activism. At her prodding, Joan joined the campus gay and lesbian alliance and dipped a toe into political waters. Experimentations with recycling, not shaving, Patchouli oil, and sex followed. Joan ended up liking the sex best.

  As a brand-new, young dyke impatient for life now that she’d caught a glimpse of it, Joan decided to kiss Sheila. Sheila was her roommate, which made things potentially disastrous, and Sheila was her friend, which seemed more complicated still. So, one night, after smuggled bottle of Rolling Rock, and because she was sure despite how she felt about it, that this was a cultural imperative, Joan kissed Sheila, who promptly giggled hysterically. This did nothing for Joan’s budding romantic sense of self.

  “It won’t work, Joan. We’re friends.”

  Joan, stung, humiliated, sat down on the bed with her hands hanging between her knees. “But how do you know? We’re both gay. We get along. Aren’t we supposed to date?”

  Sheila allowed that this was likely true. So they tried for a week. The anemic handholding added nothing to the conversation, and tension over the eventually dared kiss kept Joan from enjoying Sheila’s company. They agreed to give it up and went back to being friends, to a much-relieved Joan.

  After that, Sheila started introducing Joan to every girl she knew. Sheila and Joan worked out the standard tie-something-to-the-door-handle-to-indicate-mating-rituals code. At first it was a rainbow plastic lei, carried back from a protest against Army recruiting on campus. Joan liked that signal. She giggled every time she put the rainbow lei on the doorknob.

  So her second adolescence began, and at eighteen, brilliant and monkish, Joan became a fourteen year old boy. Girls were still a paradox, but now they were individual paradoxes Joan could touch with her hands, with her lips, try to decipher the questions of why this sweet wet destruction of her dorm bed was so incendiary to her. Flesh and friendship were still separate realms.

  Joan’s devotion to Sheila was threatened, over the years, but always held true. When, at thirty, she’d been confronted with her weeping friend’s coming out to her as bisexual, Joan had stood by her when many in the dyke community tossed her off. Joan felt the initial denial, the stab of sadness that Sheila was leaving her, leaving their whole world, jumping the fence and grabbing fistfuls of that heterosexual privilege. She’d escaped the prison. Thinking of her life as a prison made Joan recoil internally, so she shoved the whole uncomfortable mess aside and reduced her reaction to the simple, classic. Sheila was her friend; therefore, whatever Sheila did was to be understood and defended. That was what Joan did…eventually. There were awkward moments along the way—getting used to meeting Sheila’s boyfriends, double-dating, realizing, even as she didn’t want to be right,
that Sheila wasn’t coming back. She was with men.

  This sawed at Joan’s deepest convictions. If Sheila was with men, she wasn’t with Joan or their people. Joan smothered the reaction when around Sheila, but was convinced, convinced, that Sheila would keep going away, piece by piece, now that her loyalty had shifted. If that could shift, anything could, and there was no certainty or security in the world. Joan was left alone on the shores of a world Sheila had guided her into. Her friend was leaving her. Joan tried not to let that show, but how could she not to the one person who knew how to read her? The one person who knew how to interpret pained silence and false, determined smiles?

  It put distance into their friendship. That shoving away was needed; it let in air, movement. They took jobs in different states. Joan learned to make friends on her own of a sort, a painful, awkward stage to be in when you are in your thirties. Eventually, Joan learned humility, when she called Sheila and told her that she missed her. The friendship grew closer again, and Joan made such an effort to like and get to know Sheila’s boyfriends that eventually, she liked them. It was an effort that needed much soul-searching and determination on her part, to climb back over that fence to her younger self, even a little. She’d stood apart from men for years. It wasn’t like her early friendships; there were too many chasms to breach at one leap. Yet, this was for Sheila; therefore, it would happen. Chris, thankfully, she’d liked from the first, bonding with him in a simple, masculine way. They never got particularly close; their friendship was good, but not the fiery romantic adolescent blood brotherhood. When Chris and Sheila got married, Joan stood as Sheila’s best man. Pleasant years followed, jobs taken back in the same state, same city. Houses purchased nearby. Long-term relationships came for Joan, two that gave an added stability to their time together. Joan relaxed into her own open-mindedness—even congratulating herself on it—forgetting the early years of wrestling like Jacob with her soul. What was more important, belief or love? Love asked compassion and understanding. Not forgiveness, as there was no need. What had Sheila done, really? Shown great courage as she always did, faced things head on, been true to her own desire, and trusted her friend, Joan, to be an adult. Eventually, Joan earned that trust and their friendship thrived. Joan hoped that she’d covered her early turmoil.