Toothpick House

by Lee Lynch

  Synopsis

  Irrepressible Annie Heaphy, a cab driver from the bars, meets Victoria Locke, a feminist Yale student, and the love story of the era—and for the ages—ensues. A classic romance introducing many of Lynch’s iconic characters who captured the hearts of generations of lesbians and remain among the most popular today.

  Toothpick House

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  Toothpick House

  by

  Lee Lynch

  Toothpick House

  © 1983 by Lee Lynch. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-204-7

  This electronic book is published by:

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.,

  New York, USA

  First Bold Strokes Books eBook Edition May 2010

  This is a work of fiction. names, characters, places, and Incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Cover Design By Bold Strokes Books Graphics

  By the Author

  From BOLD STROKES BOOKS

  Sweet Creek

  Beggar of Love

  From NAIAD PRESS

  Toothpick House

  Old Dyke Tales

  The Swashbuckler

  Home In Your Hands

  Dusty’s Queen of Hearts Diner

  The Amazon Trail

  Sue Slate, Private Eye

  That Old Studebaker

  Morton River Valley

  Cactus Love

  From NEW VICTORIA PUBLISHERS

  Rafferty Street

  Off the Rag, Edited with Akia Woods

  From TRP COOKBOOKS

  Butch Cook Book, Edited with Sue Hardesty and Nel Ward

  Author Bio

  Lee Lynch has been writing about lesbian life and lesbians from the time she came out 50 years ago. She was first published in “The Ladder” in the 1960s. In 1983 Naiad Press published her first books, including Toothpick House and Old Dyke Tales. Her novel The Swashbuckler was presented in NYC as a play scripted by Sarah Schulman. Lynch’s play “Getting Into Life” caused consternation when performed in Tucson, AZ, due to its realistic portrayal of lesbians. Her newest novel, Beggar of Love, is available from Bold Strokes Books. Her recent short stories can be found in Romantic Interludes and in Read These Lips, at www.readtheselips.com. She has twice been nominated for Lambda Literary Awards and her novel Sweet Creek was a GCLS award finalist. Her reviews and feature articles appeared in “The Lambda Book Report” and many other publications. Lynch’s syndicated column, “The Amazon Trail,” runs in numerous venues. She is a recipient of The James Duggins Mid-Career Author Award, the Alice B. Reader Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Golden Crown Literary Society Trailblazer Award and has been inducted into the Saints and Sinners Literary Hall of Fame. Her earlier books are also available through Bold Strokes Books at www.boldstrokesbooks.com. She lives in rural Florida with her sweetheart and their furry ruffians.

  For Deborah Pascale

  I thank Debbie Pascale for sharing her life with me as I wrote Toothpick House, and for the great patience and strength she offered me throughout.

  I also thank Barbara Grier for believing in me these fifteen years; Caroline Overman for being my “stylistic conscience;” Tee Corinne for her enormous support and inspiration; Michele Cliff and Adrienne Rich for suggesting I could write this novel and giving me direction; Carol Feiden, Judy Sloan and Carol for their help with the first draft; and Linda Anderson for typing.

  Chapter One

  Annie Heaphy walked along the beach, picking up flat stones. Fog horns sounded their hoarse, lonely cries while the morning haze began to lift under one of the last hot suns of fall. Annie, oh Annie, she hummed to herself, when you going to come to rest, when you going to lay down your nasty habits, your hassling, hustling job and feel good? She stooped to pick up a stone that caught her eye at the edge of the water, then skipped it across the surface only once before it fell in. Sighing, she looked back toward her tiny home, the battered beach-house that was her root as well as her fragile shelter from the world. Peeled and stripped by salt and wind, it looked from a distance to be no more than a bundle of delicate sticks propped tentatively against one another. It was as bare, as barren as the three lonely willows leaning into the curve of the beach road beside it.

  Mornings on the beach, her clearest time of day, Annie Heaphy marched off the nightmare of the day before. All day she drove her heavy yellow cab, at night she met her friends in bars. Only in the mornings could she expel it all and take in new fresh air off Long Island Sound. Now she skipped another stone across the waves, wishing she, too, would be rewarded after centuries of smoothing by this graceful flight over the waters. “And in me the wave rises,” she chanted aloud as another pebble faltered, then skipped once. Taking careful aim, Annie squinted toward the little waves. “It swells, it arches its back.” The stone flew twice before it fell. “I am aware once more of a new desire . . .,” she offered as she skimmed another stone three times across the surface of the rippling water.

  Annie Heaphy glanced at her watch and threw one last stone, her spirits lifting when it too skipped three times. She turned again toward her home, her short yellow hair standing up as the wind blew her cap off. Sweeping the cap up absently from the sand she began to run with a long, slow stride until she reached the Volkswagen in her front yard. The shack next door went alive with radios and kids slamming doors. It sounded like back home to her, and she missed momentarily the crowded Chelsea section of Boston. She turned the car key and swung backwards onto the beach road, her muffler shot, leaves settling in her wake. Her house stood alone against the will of the wind and the waves. The foghorns went on, as if they were the voice of the house itself, telling its story.

  * * * * *

  “Hiya, Annie.”

  “Hiya, hiya.”

  “Number forty-seven today, Annie. Get moving on that rush hour.” The dispatcher put his cigar back in his mouth and chewed on it thoughtfully.

  “Is it gassed, Mr. G.?”

  Mr. G. scratched his stomach, shouted an order into his mike and grinned, “Sure beats the hell out of me, tomboy.”

  Annie aimed a series of punches at him. “When you going to get rid of that cigar, Mr. G.? It stinks.”

  “Soon’s you take off that dirty old hat, kid.”

  “Never!” Annie shouted back as she ran down the stairs and into the yard. She went up and down the rows of cabs until she spotted number 47 and climbed in, relieved it was ready to go. She set her cap toward the back of her head and called in. “Ready and rolling, Mr. G. Thanks for giving me this crate again.”

  “Hey, forty-seven, you got no gratitude? Least you got brakes today.”

  “No thanks to you, buddy.”

  “For that you go to Branford, three-thirty Oakdale. For seven-thirty.”

  “That gives me minus two minutes.”

  “Better hurry, kid.”

  “Got you.” Annie settled into her routine. After a young mother with twins, a no-show in the ghetto, a businessman who tipped her well and two Yalies who angered her when they tipped her with all six cents of their spare change, Annie picked up an elderly woman. The midmorning sun was warm and she relaxed as the woman talked. Annie looked at her in her rearview mirror and remembered her own grandm
other, Nana Heaphy, sitting in an easy chair in her mother’s house, smiling and nodding at everything that went on. Like this woman, she wore dark, silky dresses. When she shopped for them with the aunts, there was a chattering and a nagging at the poor woman until you would think they were competing for a prize. It must have been even harder for her father than for the aunts. Never able to get a word in, he had become a taciturn, scowling man, unable to compete with his sisters. In contrast, Annie’s mother was so blonde and quiet she must have seemed like an oasis to him. All the aunts had brown, crimped hair and were, like Nana Heaphy, short. As Annie grew up she saw them widen and grey. Her mother moved among them aloof and young-looking.

  The aunts said her mother put on airs and warned Annie not to be like her, but to emulate Nana, her namesake. “It’s good to be proud,” Aunt Lily would say, “but remember your family is the salt of the earth, dear.” Annie resented their intimations. She looked a cross between both her parents, with their blue eyes, her mother’s straight, blonde hair and smooth, pale skin, and her father’s playful Irish features, full of dimples and a hint of baby fat. Annie wasn’t tall, but she was not as short as the aunts and would never let herself widen like them. Salt of the earth was all right, but it was not her ambition. If it was airs she had, then let them disapprove.

  Annie Heaphy liked fine things and admired people of a slightly higher class. She didn’t put the aunts down, or perhaps she had when she was younger, but now she was twenty-two. She saw them seldom, and no longer felt she was betraying them when she went to a museum or a concert. Still, the aunts walked in her and pulled her down. Else why had she quit college? Why was she driving a cab? Why did she hang around with low-life dykes in a bar? Something was holding her back. She wondered if it was a combination of her heritage and her gay-ness. Her family set limits on her ambitions, her sexuality made her socially unacceptable. Dykes weren’t welcome anywhere unless they dressed in sheep’s clothing; Annie was only comfortable in wolf’s clothing. All the rest of the morning in the cab she pondered it, hardly noticing who she drove where. A hunger pang in her stomach made her pull over.

  She counted her tips and decided to treat herself to a Chinese lunch at a nearby restaurant. Annie gave her order and headed for the bathroom. As she was washing, another woman came to the door and stopped, gasping audibly. Here we go again, Annie said to herself, shrinking inside.

  “This is a ladies’ room, sir,” the woman said indignantly.

  Annie turned to her and glared. “I know,” she said.

  The woman flushed when she heard Annie’s obviously female voice. “I’m so sorry. I thought you were a, a . . . ,” she faltered.

  “I know what you thought,” Annie replied scornfully and walked out shaking, not wanting to wait for her order, ready to cry. She ground her teeth in hatred as she looked around the restaurant and saw all the straight people comfortable in their world. The woman from the bathroom returned to her table and animatedly described what had happened to her, looking all the while for Annie. Her companion craned his neck to stare. Annie wanted to kill, to rip and tear the restaurant apart. Then she noticed a small, very old Chinese woman through the kitchen door. The grandmother, she knew from previous visits. She remembered again her own grandmother and felt calmer as she watched the little woman intently making the next day’s wontons. Glad her eyes had rested on her, she turned back to find the straight couple had gone. Through the window she saw them entering a Yale building across the street. She hated Yalies. Like the two in her cab that morning, they were snobbish, self-centered and did not live in her world, the real world. She walked to her cab feeling vindicated that she had upset the smug life of a Yalie, but she wondered while she ate if she wasn’t somehow jealous of them. She could have stayed in school and made something of herself as they were doing. Annie finished her lunch and drove off, wondering for the thousandth time what she would do with her life.

  * * * * *

  A doorman opened the heavy, polished wooden doors to Victoria Locke’s apartment building. “The last of their kind,” he told Victoria once more. “Everyone’s putting in those glass doors. Easier to keep up. Myself, I like to keep them small panes of glass sparkling like your eyes, Miss, when you was a little one. Of all the little tenants you was the best, the prettiest. Now I hear you’re the smartest. You’ll be graduating Yale this year won’t you?”

  “In the spring, Dennis. And you know it’s not hard to be best when there aren’t any left but me,” Victoria smiled down to the bent old man.

  “Well, then I’m glad it’s you that’s left, because you always was my favorite.”

  Victoria stepped through the door onto the worn red runner. She would have liked to sit in the lobby and listen to Dennis as she had when she was small. Once in a while she had been able to elude her mother long enough to hear about the tenants who had lived there during his reign as handyman and later when he worked his way up to doorman. She wondered if Dennis understood her appreciation of him or if her shy wordlessness made him think she was becoming as condescending as her mother. She tried to smile warmly at him, but knew it looked like a pained grimace.

  “She’s gone shopping, your ma,” he told her. “Should be back any time now,” he assured her. Victoria didn’t want to hear another lecture from her mother on keeping up appearances, so she turned her back on the faded brown leather chairs in the lobby with their frayed patches and cracks, the bowl on the lace-covered table which had once held fresh flowers every day.

  Victoria went toward the sixth floor in the elevator whose wooden walls and brass handrails shone under Dennis’ polish. Amazing old man, she thought. I would be as loyal as he is if I had anything to which I could be loyal. She shifted her suitcase and smoothed the top of her long, wavy light brown hair. She left the elevator and faced a mirror hanging in the hall. There she was: two flat triangles of cheeks, a broad, rectangular forehead, a long nose almost sharply pointed at its tip. Her eyes were perfect almonds in the angles, the same light brown and shape. Prettiest I am not, she thought. But probably the most primped in the building. Her mother had brushed her hair a hundred strokes a night until she was old enough to do it herself and she had never been allowed to wear her glasses in public. Even today, the last Thanksgiving break she would have from Yale, she had her glasses well hidden in a case in the pocket of her camel’s hair coat. Her mother said they would make her narrow nose more so and would emphasize her full lips. It took going away to Yale, where she transferred her junior year, before she learned to wear them.

  Victoria turned toward her parents’ apartment feeling a chill of anxiety. She had stopped wearing makeup this semester and her mother would not like that either, but without it Victoria felt much better. More like herself as a child, she thought as she turned the key, remembering how a maid used to open the door to her as she returned home each day from her private school across Central Park. The maid’s name was Heidi and, as in the children’s book, she had long blonde hair rolled on top of her head, pale skin, and clothes she had brought with her from France where she lived near Switzerland. She was hired for three reasons and thus, Mrs. Locke had rationalized, was a bargain. She cleaned and did some cooking, she spoke French so Victoria could practice, and the family could refer to its “help.” Heidi left after several years to marry and Mrs. Locke thought her terribly ungrateful. Victoria was not allowed to show grief over the loss of a maid, but she still remembered the empty feeling.

  All this nostalgia must be because graduation is so near, she thought. Still she wished she could see Heidi again as she opened the door to high ceilings, large windows and sunny rooms. She set down her suitcase and took a good look at the living room which opened from the foyer. The furniture had been there since the Lockes moved in. It was an inheritance from Mrs. Locke’s family. Old-fashioned pieces, all in a style the name of which Victoria fought remembering because her mother boasted of it so often. Elegant, her mother called it. She sighed. Her poor mother, never able to repl
ace it because they didn’t have the money to buy the quality on which she insisted, almost never asked anyone to dinner anymore. It is an empty address, Victoria thought, a hollow, pretentious, fancy address.

  She walked to the window, half-covered with heavy brocade draperies, and looked across the park. At least she still has this. She can still say, “My view.”

  “Ah,” Mrs. Locke said coming in the front door and startling Victoria. “My Yale senior is home. I’ve just come from Bonwit’s. They were having such a wonderful sale and I got so many Christmas presents. You’ll be impressed with yours.”

  Victoria, bored with the prospect of another unwearable tea dress, accepted her mother’s quick kiss on the cheek. “How are you, Mother?” She asked as she had been trained to do.

  “Exhausted. We went to the theatre last night and saw something awful off-Broadway. I’ll never be lured off Broadway again and would recommend that you beware too. No taste, Victoria, none,” she clucked as Victoria hung her coat in the foyer closet. “I see those flannels are holding up. That’s a good girl. Make them last.”

  “The zipper doesn’t work well.” Victoria showed her mother as she turned.

  “And you wore them like that? Oh, my dear, what if someone had seen you? I’ll take that to the tailor’s in the morning. Meanwhile, freshen up and dress for dinner. I’ll change and make the cocktails. Your father will be home very shortly.”

  Victoria took her suitcase to her room and unpacked the books. She carried few clothes as her wardrobe at school, though conservative, was still not one her mother would approve. She turned on the light at her desk and fingered the expensive desk set sent her at high school graduation by her aunt and uncle whom she saw once a year at Christmas. Already I feel hemmed in, she thought. If she weren’t so frightened of her parents she would enjoy New York, but she might as well live on a desert island for all she knew of the city around her. The libraries, the museums, theatres, concert halls: they were her city. Not the expensive stores in which she could shop only when there were sales and the park she could visit only with a companion. She used to date not because she liked any of those preppy, well-scrubbed boys at high school, but because she might see something of the city with them. Well, it’s only two days, she comforted herself, tripping on the skirt around her vanity. “Damned useless piece of furniture,” she whispered when she heard it rip. “More moaning about how much it’ll cost to get sewed or replaced.” She looked through her desk for something to patch it, closed her door and lay on her back with a stapler to reach the tear. When she surveyed her handiwork she felt proud of herself and resourceful, though she knew she would be chastised if her mother found it. Glue might have been less obvious, she thought. Her discomfort increased as she changed into the clothing she was unused to wearing. She heard the clink of glasses down the hall and knew it was time to play at cocktail party with her parents. Not feeling able to invite guests to their home, they treated their family like guests.