“So! Shall we take a look at the site?”
“Oh yeah!” Jennifer barked. “Howsabout…the kiosk…first?”
“That will be fine.” Jennifer picked up the gloves, one set in each hand, and trotted with them over to the door Happy had just come through. Happy turned to follow. “Your sons…box?” she asked.
“Naw,” Jennifer said, and stepped out into the snow.
Steam came up off her as they walked around the garage and across the parking lot. Happy caught a dismayed glance from Bud, who had rolled up the magazine and was clutching it in his hand. She smiled at him but he didn’t seem to notice.
The ice cream kiosk was an octagonal hut about fifteen feet in diameter, its shingles stained reddish-brown. They entered through a door in back. The interior space was separated into two semicircular rooms, with the retail counter, in front, being the smaller of the two; Happy and Jennifer stood in the storage and prep area, where the freezer, fridge, cones, toppings, and soft-serve machine were kept. These, however, had been pushed awkwardly to the side, leaving a roughly eight-foot circular area of cement floor which had been demarcated by black electrical tape. Jennifer pointed to a nail on the wall by the door, where a pair of red satin shorts were hanging. She said, “If you want shorts, those’ll fit you. They’re Bud’s. He’s got kind of a bubble butt.” And she tossed Happy one of the pairs of gloves.
Happy caught them by the knotted strings that bound them. They hung from her hand like a pair of shrunken heads. She looked up at Jennifer, over to the shorts, back to the gloves. And here came the first burst of adrenalin. The mountain lion stood, stretched, paced. She let out breath.
“What is this?”
“This,” said Jennifer, with obvious delight, “is you…fighting me…for the privilege…of buying my gas station.” It had the quality of a much-rehearsed phrase, like her only line in the school play. Happy had to admit, it did sound good.
“I don’t know,” Happy said, “if I want your gas station quite this much.” But she felt the corner of her mouth twitching, her fingers clenching and unclenching.
Jennifer seemed to have ample breath to laugh. “Sure you do. Lose the sweatshirt, it’s just going to get in your way. I’d go for the shorts, too, if I were you.”
Happy stood for a moment, watching Jennifer hop and jab and parry, and waited for her thoughts and emotions to resolve themselves into some familiar, actionable configuration. She wanted to respond immediately, decisively, as she was famous for doing, but the ability seemed to have deserted her, and she stood very still and commanded her face to manufacture a suitable expression: fierce, courageous. Unfortunately, she could feel something else coming: a wave of debilitating weariness, the likes of which she hadn’t felt since she left Astoria thirty-five years before. She had always felt it when her cousins descended upon her, this desire to give up, give in, and let them exhaust their perverse desires. They would have left her alone sooner if she did.
But she never could. She always fought back. That was a long time ago, though, and this was now. She was fifty-one—no, fifty-two, as of this week—and softened by her affluence, her possessions, the people who surrounded and served her. She thought that, just this once, she might give in. What kind of woman gets into a fistfight? What would it accomplish? If she waited, she could still get what she wanted; people like Jennifer Triesman, when the chips are down, would always come begging.
Or maybe not. Because a look came over Jennifer’s face, a look of triumph, of lunatic jubilation, and Happy realized that even the Dalai Lama himself couldn’t bludgeon her with peace. Fuck that, Happy thought: if this bitch is gonna get all smug about it, I’m gonna reduce her to fucking pulp. Her temperature rose, her hair stood on end, and she made for the door.
It was priceless, the flash of delight that illuminated Jennifer’s crooked face, and she noted with satisfaction the collapse it suffered when Happy reached not for the doorknob but for the pair of shorts hanging on the wall. She shucked off her sweats, pulled on the shorts, and cinched them tight. Then she put on her gloves, smacked them together, and spat.
“Get in the circle, slut,” Jennifer croaked.
Happy stepped over the tape. “No tits, no kicking.”
“Fair enough.”
Outside, the oily toll of the Crim Hall bell sounded over the town. “Now have at me, trailer trash,” the doll mogul growled, and she socked Jennifer Triesman right between the eyes.
25. If a hermit lives in ecstasy
The library was empty by dinnertime, and unlike most days, it didn’t fill up again afterward. Indeed, by seven-thirty, the entire south end of campus was quiet, as if a cloud of deadly gas had just passed through to which only Ruth was immune. Ruth, that is, and a few male colleagues on the faculty and staff, who could be seen trudging across the snow-crusted grounds to their cars, their faces stricken by cold and by their first taste of gender discrimination. The Sally Streit lecture and demonstration was soon to begin, and the men of Equinox College were not welcome.
Those faces, however, were not empty of pleasure. Behind their beards and glasses, beneath their ski hats and furrowed brows, the men betrayed a secret satisfaction. They were getting to go home, to relax with a bottle of beer and a few hours in front of the TV. They were free from the possibility of humiliation, of unwanted arousal, of political dissent. They were happy that, for once, something in the world had nothing whatsoever to do with them.
Ruth would have loved to feel that way. Indeed, she didn’t consider Sally Streit to have anything to do with her, either, except insofar as they were both women. But Ruth had never held much stock in the idea of gender solidarity, or solidarity of any kind, other than that between one human being and another—and even that, she had to admit, could sometimes be a bit of a stretch. She had always envied men their permission to not be men at all, to merely be human, to do their jobs and raise their families and never once think about what privilege, if any, their dicks conferred upon them. She had long striven to embrace that blithe confidence, that quiet authority, and make it her own. But to be a woman was of itself an obligation; all that had changed in fifty years was that there were more obligations to choose from. And while Ruth had managed to forego the burdens of husband and children, she did have the students, who expected her to instruct them how to be independent women, unless of course her method of instruction happened to be exercising her own independence by ignoring them altogether.
No, she had to relinquish her solitude for the girls. If a hermit lives in ecstasy, Cocteau once warned, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. This is what had happened to Ruth; simplicity had become a new kind of luxury. Time to dive in and endure the stress and strain of controversy. She was already a felon anyhow.
She closed the library early and shrugged on her coat and gloves. Her hat she eschewed on all but the very coldest days; it inhibited her thoughts. She crunched a path across the quad and joined the queue of girls (there was no other reasonable way to regard them) leading through the police-protected double doors of Furman auditorium.
They were all there, her little group: April and Sara and Ty and Rain; the chubby girl with the red hair whose name she could never remember; those skinny butch chicks she couldn’t tell apart; the angry corn-fed girl who wasn’t quite as smart as she thought. They were huddled together in a circle like a football team, and every few seconds one or another head would pop up, as if a problem were in need of solving, to which some solution might suddenly come strolling by. And this, evidently, was exactly what they had been doing, because when April Cort saw Ruth, her face brightened, and her voice barked out in a noisy whisper, and they all looked up and grinned and came running toward her.
“Miz Spinks, Miz Spinks!” April said, stopping short a few scant feet away. The others crowded around behind her, their eyes expectantly wide. “Check it out,” the girl went on, and removed from the pocket of her leather jacket a small, elaborate, and, Ruth would have bet, expensive vi
deo camera. “It’s Susan’s.”
Susan was a pretty girl with a buzz cut and chipmunk cheeks. She smiled and nodded, embarrassed.
“That’s quite a camera,” Ruth said.
“Yeah, well, her parents got it for her. But we were wondering.”
“Yes?”
“She’s gonna”—a snigger, which infected the group and created a wave of conspiratorial laughter—“she’s gonna tape the thing! The lecture.”
“Is that allowed?” Ruth asked.
“No. And they’re searching people, like making them hand in their bags and stuff? But we were thinking…”
“I don’t think so, April.”
“No, seriously, it’s just—they’ll search us, but not you. I mean, you’re the librarian.”
“Some librarians,” Ruth could not help saying, “are deeply deviant.”
“Well okay then!” April cheered.
“I didn’t say I was one of them.”
“Mrs. Spinks?” Susan piped in. “It’s not like I’m gonna sell it or anything. It’s just I was thinking it would be useful. Like taking notes, except on tape?”
“Yeah,” April said, “for further study.”
“She’s not gonna do it,” drawled a voice in the back of the group—Sara’s, the girl in black. Ruth knew the tactic—Sara got what she wanted by being disappointed in people. Well, she wasn’t going to fall for it.
Except that—except that she was. Because why not? She had broken ranks already with the forces of order and obeyance—this was a mere drop in the reeking bucket of her criminality. Besides, somebody probably sneaked a video camera into every single one of the woman’s lectures. She was not going to be an old fuddy-duddy tonight, and disappoint these girls. This is what Cocteau meant. Let other people into your life.
And so she said, “Well, all right,” and there was a stunned silence before the group erupted into a little cheer, swiftly suppressed so as not to alert the authorities to their impending transgression. Ruth accepted the camera from April and secreted it in her fur-lined pocket—real fur, though the girls had evidently chosen not to notice this offense against nature.
Did Ruth observe, in the moment before the girls got into line behind her, Susan’s face register a deep, desolate unhappiness, a sudden and fleeting dismay? Did Susan look, ever-so-briefly, as though a hoped-for reprieve had been torn from her grasp? Perhaps. Ruth would certainly feel bad about it later, but now she perceived only the girls’ rebellious delight. And if Susan seemed unhappy, how was Ruth supposed to recognize it as a warning?—here, at Equinox, where random and fleeting misery was a fact of life, and the holidays were approaching, and the weather was unpleasant, and at the front of the line lay an experience of dubious educational worth and almost certain emotional upheaval? The fact is, Ruth could not possibly have foreseen what consequences this simple act of apparent generosity would precipitate—and so, she ignored Susan’s frown and moved forward, through the double doors.
The girls were right, of course; nobody stopped her, nobody so much as asked her to open her coat. And when they were safely inside, she loitered behind a post and waited to turn the camera over to its rightful owner; and by this time Susan had managed to smile, and accepted it with a gushing torrent of thanks. There—a good deed done for the forces of—well—for whatever forces motivated her girls, far be it from her to know what they were.
* * *
Sally Streit took the stage to frenzied applause, her muscled arms pumping, her large head nodding, her grin like a battle flag on her round, comical face. She was wearing, of all things, a floral-print long-sleeved cotton dress, pearls, and pumps, and only the very tip of a tattoo could be seen peeking up over the neckline: the head of a hummingbird, the top half of its flower. She stood at the foot of the stage, between two of its lights, in front of a high curtain of black damask, and she continued to pump, and to nod, and to grin, and soon the cheers took on a rhythm, a kind of Dionysian pulse, and the floor was shaken by sneakers and boots, and the air torn by the sharp report of claps, and the room filled up with the unexpectedly masculine grunting that had overtaken the world of sports and television talk shows: OO!-OO!-OO!-OO! the girls of Equinox College chanted, four hundred strong, and soon Sally Streit herself was clapping, applauding the applause, for it had pleased her. “All right!” she exclaimed, “All right!!”
In time, she held up her hands in a desperate plea for calm, her grin never for a moment subsiding, her legs set far apart like a conquering warrior’s. “What a crowd!” she hooted, and that set it all off again, some of the students actually getting up out of their seats, jumping, stomping and clapping and whistling with renewed fervor. Sally Streit, feigning astonishment, put her hands on her hips and shook her head. Wow, her mouth said silently. Wow!!
When the applause began to die down, the “wow“s became audible, conversational, and Sally Streit breathed a sigh of exhaustion, and said again “What…a…crowd,” before silence, more or less, finally fell over the auditorium.
“Take it off!” came a voice, and in the very back of the room, in a far corner, in the shadow of the mezzanine, Janet Ping was embarrassed to discover that it was April Cort’s. She slid a little more deeply into her seat and covered her face with her hands.
Sally Streit feigned shock. “You don’t like my dress?” she demanded, and the room erupted in laughter. Clearly it was a much-uttered gag line—April, evidently, was not the first of Sally Streit’s admirers to set it up. The joke went on, melding into monologue: the shtick was underway. A rustle and exhalation filled the room as four hundred young women made themselves comfortable in their seats.
“I can’t believe it, they don’t like my dress!” said Sally Streit, shaking her head. “Do you know how much I paid for this? It’s Laura Ashley!” A few chuckles. “And these are 100% genuine cultured pearls, and these stockings are pure silk, and these shoes—well, don’t get me going on the shoes!
“Girls, I used to dress like this every…single…day.” A murmur of astonishment. “Back in my youth, I used to be married—that’s right, married—to a prominent man, a television personality. He wasn’t a bad man, or a mean man, but he expected things to be a certain…way. And one of those things, I’m sad to tell you, was me.
“Oh, he loved me, I believe that, but along with his love came rules. He went shopping with me, to pick out my clothes. He was the one with the money, and so he decided how, when, and where it would be spent. He bought me these pearls, and this dress, and these shoes. And I was happy—or at least I thought I was. I went to parties, to banquets, to events of every stripe, and this is how I dressed. And at night, when my husband and I came home from these parties, I got undressed the same way. By him.”
An ominous ooooo of displeasure circled the auditorium, which Sally Streit tried without much enthusiasm to dismiss. “Now, now, it wasn’t all that bad. He loved me, after all. But even once I was undressed—once my pearls and stockings and Laura Ashley came off”—another ooooo now, of a different tone—“there were new rules. Rules about—you guessed it—sex.
“Of course we didn’t call it that—we were good, wholesome, middle-class Americans. We called it making love. It wasn’t sex, or, God forbid…fucking!”
A pause here, for the hoots and cheers to die down.
“No, we made love. And we did it by the book—his book. He undressed me. And then he undressed himself. And then I had to stimulate him in a manner that some of you girls are probably familiar with”—a titter—“and then I lay on my back, and then he saddled up and took me for a ride.”
Booooo, went the crowd, Ruth Spinks among them, standing in the opposite corner from Janet. She couldn’t help it—her experience of married sex had not been appreciably different, though she wouldn’t have been caught dead in those clothes. Several girls who hadn’t known she was there turned around in their seats and giggled. She wanted a cigarette.
“Aw, don’t worry, girls. I kind of liked it, a little. I figu
red that’s what sex—sorry, making love—was all about. And then something happened. I had a daughter.
“I loved that little baby girl with all my might. I suppose I felt a little guilty, because I’d been a little bit dissatisfied with my marriage, despite having all the advantages: a nice house, a nice car, and these lovely clothes. So I decided to make up for it by loving my little daughter more than any mother had ever loved a child. And let me tell you something, girls, I did. I did love her, and I still do. She grew up into a beautiful young woman, and we sent her away to college—a place very much like this. And then I went to visit her. It was parents’ weekend, and my husband had too much work to come along. But I was just a housewife, so off I went to parents’ weekend. And do you know what I found?”
A murmur of expectant huh-uhs.
“I found that my beautiful daughter had cut off her beautiful hair! And had gotten a ring in her nose. And was dressed like a man! And I said to her, What has happened to my beautiful daughter? And she sat me down and said, Mom, brace yourself, I have to tell you a few things about me that you don’t know.
“I didn’t think it was possible, girls. There was nothing I didn’t know about my daughter. But it turns out I was wrong. Over the next two days, I learned that my daughter was a lesbian—and that, not only was she something different from what I believed, but so was sex. And so was marriage. And so was I. You see, my own daughter told me that sex didn’t have to be fine—it could be wonderful. And it didn’t have to be…with a man…either.”
Applause. Hoots. Stomps.
“My own daughter made me realize that I was a lesbian, too. And it wasn’t long before I’d left old hubby and all his megabucks behind, and I hit the road with my own brand of heart-to-heart girl-to-girl talk. And along the way, I learned a few things that even my daughter, the lesbian, didn’t know.”
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