by Nell Zink
Before she can find the words to say Fuck Off, there is a knock at the door.
She opens it to find Jazz standing in the lean-to, holding a cigarette and a glass of red wine. “I was just leaving,” Penny says. “Sorry I got loud.”
“I overheard your conversation, and I wanted to tell you to stop being so hard on yourself.”
“You are kidding me.”
Jazz’s head wobbles tipsily, and she takes a drag off her cigarette with the side of her mouth. She says, “You shouldn’t leave. You should never leave. You should stay here with this freak and learn. You’re crushing hard on the Robster and thinking you want his dick, but it’s not his dick you want. It’s his mind. Get back in there and show the boy some respect, and you’ll see—”
“Don’t you think it’s pretty fucking sexist, telling me to let him set the agenda?” She moves forward, toward the door.
Jazz raises the glass of wine and cigarette in her hand to eye level. She sidesteps to block Penny’s escape. “Look at me,” she says through the smoke. “Do I have a dick?”
“Honestly? I don’t know.”
Jazz flicks open her quilted dressing gown to reveal a deltaic butterfly-like arrangement of Wedgwood-blue silk and ivory lace. It looks pricey. “Check it out,” she says, resting her left hand on Penny’s shoulder as she dandles her cigarette and wine in her right. “No dick. But I want you anyway, because I’m a sexual person. Not asexual like a certain vagina tease who leads women on because he likes the attention.”
Confusion sets in. Penny sees a possible hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-woman-scorned angle, but Jazz does not seem to be looking for sympathy.
“You’re hot,” Jazz continues. “Like a woodland creature in heat to get fucked, and so smooth and brown no normal person can stand it, and this sexless bastard over here does not care, because he wants to be your friend. But I care. I want to get all up inside you and make you come until your teeth chatter. Go ahead. Grope my crotch.”
Feminine beauty is not something Penny is used to seeing up close. Especially not beauty so reassuringly obscene. She had felt like a sailor on a life raft pelted by hail, and now Jazz is the mermaids, singing of life in caves under the sea. The obscenity is the neon sign flashing over the fairy-tale cave, telling her she’s in the right place.
The standoff is brief. Her pride—as a curious person not entirely conservative—bids her extend her hand and tap the underwear. The slight touch turns the silk a darker blue. Jazz is very wet. When Penny’s finger grazes her, she struggles to get her next breath.
“See?” she says. “We’ll never be friends.”
Penny touches the underwear again a little harder, in the interest of science. She puts her hand on Jazz’s birdlike hip bone and looks into her eyes. She feels more or less as though a trapdoor had opened and dropped her into the Matrix. She sneaks a glance at Rob. He has picked up a back issue of Popular Mechanics from the floor and seems to be reading.
Later he enters Jazz’s room to turn off the light (for privacy, because her rooftop greenhouse has no curtains). He sits in her armchair, watching the two women by the pinkish glow of mercury vapor streetlamps on atmospheric haze. He palpates his crotch once briefly and frowns.
THE NEXT DAY AROUND LUNCHTIME, over dry toast and tea, Sorry invites Penny to come along to the Friday potluck at Stayfree.
Penny says, “What, did you hear I’m a lesbian or something?”
“The whole neighborhood heard you’re a lesbian!”
She imagines herself making loud sounds and can’t be sure she didn’t. “I was so fucking drunk,” she says, apologetically.
“I was just busting your balls. We didn’t hear a thing. When Rob came down this morning, he said you were with Jazz, and I put two and two together. He didn’t look real ecstatic.”
Penny frowns. “Well, it’s not like he wanted—”
“What? Love, romance? He wants all those things. He’s just not ready to pay the price.”
“Well, if he doesn’t want sex, he doesn’t want sex. It would be really shitty to, like, rape him by humping his leg. And I was truly pretty drunk. And Jazz was so into it.”
She frowns at the memory. The symmetry of sex with Jazz is still vivid. Breasts discovering the softness of breasts. Her clitoris grinding against Jazz’s with inept abandon, pleased to find it equally indestructible. The silkiness of their faces. Their sweet little teeth.
Significant emotional asymmetry, however, had been introduced by her increasingly intense desire to involve Rob, who kept sitting there in the armchair. She remembers his staying for at least an hour, sometimes touching himself (he touched himself only once, but the movement caught her eye, and she naturally assumes it was part of a series), and that when she made eye contact, he got up and left. That’s what she likes remembering best. Not the sexual ecstasies before and after. Just that Rob got up and left—that maybe, possibly, he was a little bit jealous?
“I take it you’re not in love,” Sorry says.
“Not with Jazz.”
Sorry nods and lights a cigarette. “So you want to come to Stayfree?”
“And meet dykes? I don’t know.”
“There’s no such thing as a feminist dyke. Not anymore. Stayfree is feminist men and women such as you and I.”
“I don’t know if I could eat much. But I could definitely stand to meet people. It’s not like I know anybody around here.” She tentatively touches the pack of cigarettes. She shakes her head.
“Go upstairs,” Sorry suggests. “You can lie down in my room. I’ll call you when it’s time to get up.”
Penny accepts the offer. As she relaxes, mounting the stairs, her head begins to throb.
Instead of the bed, she picks a spot on the rug in the sun. She curls up with her head on a pink-and-gold meditation pillow. Through the open window she can hear the clank of Rob’s tinkering in the garage. After the minivan revs up and drives away, she sleeps.
AROUND FIVE, HER PHONE RINGS with the promised wake-up call. She returns to the kitchen, where Sorry assigns her to help with their potluck dish, a lentil salad, by shelling every walnut in a very large bag—fully five pounds of walnuts.
“Where’d you get so many walnuts?” Penny asks, putting down the nutcracker to shake her aching hand.
“I found them in the pantry. Probably from the trash at the co-op. It’s a miracle they’re not rancid. It would be a sad waste if they were. They did some study that if you eat a handful of nuts every day, it’s as healthy as jogging. You can skip the exercise and eat the nuts.”
“So shouldn’t we be rationing them, to eat a handful a day?”
“Do I look to you like I believe in studies?” She taps an ash into a saucer next to the sink and returns to her task of grating carrots into a bowl. “Nuts are fat pills. I want them out of the house.”
Laughing makes Penny shudder involuntarily. She works in pained silence. She doesn’t have the appetite to try one of the nuts.
When Rob gets back from his outing, he comes into the kitchen.
“Hey, guys,” he says, clapping her on the shoulder. She sits up a bit to lengthen her contact with his hand, and he bends to kiss her neck. He shows them both a circular saw he found on a sidewalk in Hoboken. It lacks only a power cord.
“Great saw,” Penny says.
“I might build a gazebo out back,” he says.
They get him to taste the salad. He says it would be great if the walnuts weren’t rancid.
“Maybe we should have tasted them,” Penny says. “But there will be other stuff to eat. Are you coming along?”
“I don’t think so. People at Stayfree don’t really go for me. They think I’m a macho man.”
“That’s what I used to think, too. But haven’t they known you longer?”
“They never see me cuddling with a dude. I think that’s the problem.”
“They never see you cuddling with a woman who isn’t conventionally attractive,” Sorry says. “I’ve never seen y
ou with a woman taller than you. Or older, or fat, or with short hair.”
Rob puts his arm around her and says, “I’m a tragic slave to my genetic program. I have no choice but to go with it. It’s like being born trans. I was born liking plain vanilla T&A.”
“Who you calling plain vanilla?” Penny protests.
“You should be more upset he called you T&A,” Sorry points out.
“I don’t see you herding any llamas in a bowler hat,” Rob says. “You’re a biz-ad major from Morristown.”
“I was raised in Brazil by animist drug freaks!”
Sorry says, “Ignore him. He’s jealous. You think she always tag-teams him like that? No way.”
“Thanks, Mom,” Rob says.
“You shouldn’t take it personally. He’s never had sex in his life.”
“Hey,” Rob says. “Cool it.”
“Well, have you?” Penny asks.
“Have I what?”
“Had sex.”
“Of course I have. It’s hard time pressure. If you say you don’t want it, they take it as a challenge. Girls are like, ‘Of course you didn’t want my friend, she’s a ska-ank!’ Then they rape me. I’m hugging some girl and—bam—she’s on her knees. They think it’s going to be easy, like abusing a child.”
Penny is shocked into silence, and Sorry says, “You’re not any kind of child, Rob. Maybe you need to work on your communications skills—as in learn to say no—if all these women are taking it too far?”
“Now it’s my fault,” he says.
“Were you an abused child?” Penny asks softly.
“I just meant it’s so weird they think they can physically dominate me. I mean, it’s one thing holding down a five-year-old—”
“I get the picture,” Penny says.
“You just don’t like it when women make the first move,” Sorry says. “You’re a cis-het dude-bro on strike for better conditions.”
“A blow job shouldn’t be anybody’s first move. I like being friends with women.”
“You like worshipping size-queen starfuckers,” Sorry says. She turns to Penny and adds, “He’s in vicarious love with Jazz. He wants her more than anything in the world. Just not for himself.”
“Jesus,” Rob says, turning away.
“Are you a voyeur?” Penny says to him. “You get off living next to her?”
“I don’t get off!”
“Maybe women go for your dick because your mouth is full of tobacco?”
“Ask him where Jazz sleeps when it’s too hot or too cold or too loud in her greenhouse,” Sorry says.
Rob leaves the kitchen and stomps upstairs.
“We just annoyed the living shit out of him while acquiring no actionable intelligence,” Penny says to Sorry.
“You just don’t want to hear it,” Sorry says.
THEY BORROW HIS MINIVAN TO drive to Stayfree because it’s raining. The house is on a dubious-looking block, with several abandoned houses on the same side of the street. The marshy vacant lot opposite is overgrown with high reeds. The facade is black, with the squatter lightning-bolt emblem in lavender.
Penny follows Sorry inside. The dark living room is lined with books and posters. The only white objects are the smartphone and cylindrical loudspeaker playing pop songs from the mantelpiece. Husky men stand around the sofas, eating. Shrill women fuss over the arrangement of food on the buffet. Sorry plunks down the salad. “Is this good?” No reaction. She proceeds to the kitchen to take a serving spoon from a drawer and returns, via the buffet table, to the front porch, where Penny is standing looking out at the street.
“We’re the only girls here,” Penny whispers. “I mean, as in—what am I trying to say? Am I being trans-phobic?”
“Hey, I miss women feminists, too. But I’m not willing to move back to Jordan to see them again.”
Penny leans back, elbows on the railing, to look through the front window into the house. “I don’t get your Jordan thing. Tell me. How are you Jordanian?”
“Most people in the West Bank have Jordanian passports,” Sorry says. “Like sixty-five percent. They only started revoking their citizenship and making them stateless a few years ago. The king’s trying to turn up the heat on Netanyahu.”
“But you’re Jewish, and super American—”
“My mom’s from a really backward area of the Transjordan. She converted to marry a settler from Brooklyn. She thought Maale Nakam was the Paris of the Middle East. Now she’s not allowed to leave it.”
“Ouch,” Penny says. “But can’t you be American if your dad is?”
“He gave up his citizenship when he emigrated because he thought it would cancel his credit card debt. What can I say? At least I’m not stateless. But I had to get out of there. My whole family thinks I’m a radical feminist freak. And not for hanging out with trans anarchists. I mean like for thinking women should have the vote.”
“I wish I was from one of those cultures. You know? Where you can be a feminist badass by riding your bike or playing soccer or whatever. I’d be like the Sudanese girl with cleats and a ponytail who speaks at the UN and people would be like, wow, let’s give her NGO a lot of money. I’d have this NGO that teaches girls to interrupt boys when they talk.”
“Global feminism,” Sorry says. “Also known as back to square one.” She leans close and adds sotto voce, “Don’t mention sports around here. It’s more taboo than dieting. Never let a transsexual think you might have a negative body image.”
Penny laughs.
“Accept yourself,” Sorry says. “Find your tribe and burn your bridges.” She extracts an American Spirit from the breast pocket of her T-shirt and lights it.
Penny says, “Wait. If this is so totally not your crew—why are we here?”
“I used to live here. I love this house!” Her hand perches casually on the railing so the ash falls into an azalea. “All my friends moved out around the time I did, but the house lives on. And I love it. And now I’m going to stand right here and party on until our bowl is empty and we can take it home.”
“Where’d they move to?”
“All different houses with projects that weren’t explicitly feminist. We decided to take the fight to arenas where we wouldn’t be fighting women all the time.”
“Any of them here?”
“Yeah. One. She’s a man. We don’t fight, because we stopped talking.”
“Is there an asexual house?”
“No. Why would they band together? They just want to be alone with their TVs and squee over Benedict Cumberbatch.”
Penny nods. “I’m getting hungry. I’m going to go find something bland and stuff myself.” She drops her bag at Sorry’s feet and goes back inside the house.
She drifts along the buffet, looking at the food, sneaking glances at the people. Between the peach fuzz and the push-up bras, it reminds her of junior high. People seem uneasy and a little too excited about their new and unfamiliar bodies. She hears the sound of maternal instincts being vigorously applied to cats on the Internet. Another conversation, pitched deeper, revolves around grants available to emerging filmmakers. It all seems rather gender-polarized.
She searches in vain for her favorite feminine gender (tomboy).
To the extent that she can pull it off, her gender is babe. But at Stayfree her babe outfit (long hair, big shirt, leggings, flats) makes her feel like an interloper—like some rude woman-born-woman intent on boycotting femininity because she can take it for granted. The girly-girls on hand have spared no pains. They are as polished as knights in armor, bodies pierced, coiffed, tattooed, shoehorned into heels and dresses. The manly-men are gruff and earnest in word and deed. She’s the only babe in sight. She lacks an audience. It’s not her gender that’s underrepresented. It’s her species. Like a dog at a party for birds, or a hip-hopper at a party for Pagan bisexuals.
She is thinking too much. The air around her, thick with music and conversation, starts to thrum.
She takes a vegan brown
ie and sits down in an armchair, tucking her feet up under her without taking off her shoes. Her nerves are loud enough to block out the noise, and she thinks vivid thoughts: Sorry’s mother trading her veil for a wig to keep house for an American. Her own mother, earning her keep from the day she was born. Norm’s feminism—his not wanting her to be a girly-girl—that dovetails so neatly with Amalia’s traditional culture, where women labor day and night. The workaholic-Disney-princess model of femininity that makes all the tomboys stay home with Sherlock. Is emergent filmmaking so very unlike chewing coca leaves and smearing it on a gourd? She finishes the brownie. It’s good. Vegan brownie technology has moved on, she thinks.
She still has spoken to no one but Sorry. She returns to the buffet. Their salad is doing well—already nearly half gone. Maybe people are eating around the walnuts. She piles two plates high with pasta and pesto and takes them out to the porch.
They fall into girl talk. She entertains Sorry for half an hour with a succession of podgy and squirrelly local men on a GPS-enabled dating app.
IT IS SATURDAY. PENNY SITS at her mother’s kitchen table in Morristown. She has a plan.
“I want to thank you for looking after that house,” Amalia says. “I tried so hard to forget the whole thing. I didn’t want to think about all the work it will take, and then to sell it for nothing. How bad is it? Is there much water damage?”
“I don’t know where you guys got the idea that the roof is gone. The house is in terrific shape.”
“You mean livable?”
“With a couple exceptions. The plumbing is an issue, and the heat, I don’t know.”
“Did you get an appraisal?”
“We’d be fools to put it on the market now. Jersey City is changing fast. There’s high-rise condos going up, and art centers and stuff. Who knows where the prices will be in five years? And that’s why I wanted to ask you something. Remember how Matt suggested that I could live there and fix it up? You know, keep it in shape with fresh paint, until the time is ripe to sell? Keep the yard nice?”
“You know I would prefer to settle the estate.”
“But, Mom, there’s a question of equity. It’s your fault I lost the lease on Dad’s apartment, and now I have nowhere to stay. You won’t let me stay at the summer place, and you inherited a big empty house. Doesn’t it make sense?”