by Lee Lynch
“What else are we going to do?” Turkey shrugged.
Peg was silent for a moment, brushing off her slacks and straightening their crease. “I’ve gone to a few women’s liberation meetings at Yale.”
Turkey stared at her with her mouth open.
“You’ll catch flies,” Annie said, tossing a piece of crust at Turkey.
“My roommate?” Turkey asked. “A libber meeting? Do they let dykes in? I thought they were too scared they’d be called queers.”
“They let me in, but they were kind of distant. And it seemed like they wanted to ask all kinds of questions.”
“Like what we do in bed?”
“No, Heaphy, it was more like they wanted to ... ,” she paused, embarrassed, “to sleep with me to find that out. Some of them anyway.”
“Were they cute?” Turkey asked.
Peg ignored her. “They really believe in what they’re doing. In starting daycare centers so women can work; in getting abortion legalized so women have more control of their lives.”
Turkey grumbled, “All they got to do is stop sleeping with men.”
“Maybe that’s next, Turk. But anyway, there were no men at the meeting. And I couldn’t help but like them.”
Annie shook her head. “But what does that have to do with us?”
“I’m not sure yet, but there’s going to be a meeting for gay women soon.”
Turkey started clearing the table. “You mean you’re not the only one crazy enough to get mixed up with libbers?”
“I guess not. They were saying that we’re already feminists in a sense because we love women. They think they can learn something from us. So I was thinking of telling them what happens on the streets. How acting like we don’t want men scares people. I don’t understand it yet, but it’s all sloshing around inside my head.”
“Speaking of sloshing,” Turkey said, slamming the refrigerator door, “who’s for more beer?” She handed it around and proposed a toast. “To the Peg. Who’s beginning to understand what I’ve been saying all along!”
“Oh, I know all your theories, Turkey, but this seems more real. This is about you and me and poor Heaphy who got emotionally beat up today.”
Annie Heaphy scratched her head under its hat and mused aloud. “I don’t know, Peg. I don’t know if I want to think about it all. I’d rather build a little shack on an island and not let anybody but dykes live there.” She straightened her cap and looked into her beer.
“I think that’s what the libbers are talking about. Only they’re saying we’re already on an island and when a lot more women join us we can have the rest of the world too.”
“I don’t know,” Annie repeated, shaking her head slowly. “Sounds very hard to me.”
* * * * *
The train rolled out of the Stamford station. An older woman bustled into the seat next to Victoria. As soon as she was settled, the woman peered into Victoria’s face and asked her name. Victoria told her and put down the book which had been boring her.
“I’m Louise. Louise Barshov,” the older woman said. “I’m very pleased to meet you Victoria. Are you always called that?”
“Yes,” Victoria smiled. “I prefer it. How far will you be travelling?”
“All the way to Providence, I’m afraid,” the woman said, pulling knitting out of a bag and beginning to click her needles wth the sounds of the train. “Do you go to school in Boston?”
“No, New Haven. I was home for Thanksgiving. Am I that obviously a student?”
“My oldest daughter when she was in school,” Louise offered after extracting a photo from one of the shopping bags at her feet.
“We could be sisters, couldn’t we?” Victoria asked, shaken by the similarity of the daughter to herself.
“Then yes. Not now,” Louise answered brusquely.
Victoria noticed the set of the woman’s lips. They made her mouth look sharper, almost cruel. Louise shook her head. “Marriage was not good to her.” She sighed and pulled at her white curled hair as if to straighten a patch of it. She picked up her knitting again. “That’s her beast of a husband in the picture opposite her, and those are her kids.”
“They’re lovely.”
“Not any more.”
Again the woman’s tone of voice had changed and her lips became a narrow slash in her face. Victoria began to get apprehensive about the fate of the daughter and the mother’s changing manner. “What happened to them?” she asked. She felt a tie with this look-alike.
“He happened to her,” she said cryptically, stabbing at the wool with her needles.
“Doesn’t he treat her well?”
“Didn’t he, you mean.”
Victoria pulled back her hair and fingered her book, tempted to move away from this frightening woman. She noticed that the woman was dressed in shades of black and grey. “They’re no longer together, then.”
“Nor would you be, if he hit you like he did her.”
“He hit his wife? Why?” This was something outside Victoria’s experience. People made jokes about husbands beating their wives, but it didn’t happen to anyone she knew. Louise seemed respectable enough, with her hair professionally set, her suit a nice cut and her daughter a college graduate.
“Why do men do anything? I certainly don’t know. Now she’s a skinny woman’s rightser or whatever you call it in New York. New York! Providence is too small for her and Boston too close. He might find her. I say kill him. If he finds her take a gun and shoot him. I’d like to shoot mine.”
Victoria watched, fascinated, as Louise became more fanatical. Like a Jeckyll-Hyde character she became increasingly sinister. Each time they went under a bridge more shadow seemed to have settled across her, making her look darker and smaller, as if she was shriveling before Victoria’s eyes. She sounded as if she really meant what she said about her husband. “You want to shoot your husband?” Victoria asked in disbelief.
“Dirty thing. I’ve cooked and cleaned for him the best part of my life and there he sits, sweating into his undershirts. Hairy old man. I wish he’d die and leave me in peace. I dare him ever to lay a hand on me. I should have left him years ago.” Then she asked, her hands moving even faster on her knitting, “Why should I?” her voice suddenly loud, her eyebrows raised. “Why should I let him off so easy and go scrub floors on my hands and knees?” She looked accusingly at Victoria. “He’d be sitting pretty, let me tell you, with his pension and without me to feed. No, I earned that and I’m keeping it. You’ll see. I’ll outlast him and then I’ll live in comfort. Take a cruise somewhere. Go out on the town.” She looked slyly at Victoria. “Maybe find a boyfriend. How about you? A pretty girl like you must have a boyfriend.”
As terrified as she had become of the old woman, Victoria knew now that there was something wrong with her. How inconsistent to hate men one moment and want a boyfriend the next. Or is that real, she wondered. Is that how women really are: torn between wanting marriage and fearing to live with men. “No, Louise, I don’t have a boyfriend,” she answered quietly, afraid to upset her.
“Well, good for you, then. You’re better off. Look at my poor daughter.” Again Louise was calm and motherly. “She gave her two sons up to him just like that. Said they reminded her of him. Said she wants to be free. I can’t understand her, can you? A lovely girl like that getting all skinny and sickly looking. Running around the streets in sandals in the middle of winter. All her friends have their hair chopped off and look like men. I suppose she’ll cut all hers off one of these days. Imagine, a grown woman, a mother, in blue jeans, not eating meat. Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous?” Louise had become menacing again.
Victoria, frightened into silence, shook her head noncommittally and picked up her book. “Tsk, tsk,” she heard Louise say, but did not look over again. She was as much afraid that the woman was not crazy as that she was. So much of what she had said made sense. Louise was simply looking at reality and talking about it. Most people found it too pa
inful to do so. Was the frightening shadow that had settled over Louise simply something Victoria had cast over her so that she could call the woman crazy and stop listening to her?
After pretending to read for awhile, Victoria set her book down and went to find the water fountain. She looked for another place to sit, but the train was crowded. Louise looked up when she sat next to her. “And what about yourself, dear. Tell me why you don’t have a boyfriend.”
Oh, no, Victoria groaned to herself. But she answered politely, “I suppose I haven’t found a boy I really like.”
The old woman surveyed her and Victoria thought she looked like a witch or a fortune-teller. Then she demanded, “Who was the last man you liked?”
Victoria considered telling her to mind her own business. Instead she felt impelled to answer against her will, “Michael.” When the woman lay down her needles and continued to look at her she went on. “He was a mechanic where my parents used to spend their vacations in New Hampshire. There weren’t many children there and he used to take me fishing. He taught me to fish.”
“Did he beat his wife?” Victoria was startled by Louise’s non-sequitur. Still, she had to go on as Louise watched her unwaveringly, her eyes narrow.
“Not that I know of.” She pictured Michael’s house where he had taken her once when he had forgotten the bait. The small motorboat had skimmed across the lake and Michael eased it onto a beach, lifting Victoria free of it and onto the sand. She was ten and he took her little girl’s hand and they ran across the narrow road to a long white house whose porch looked like a storage room, filled with old furniture and tools. A girl younger than herself ran around the corner of the house, but stopped suddenly when she saw Michael.
“Are you being a good girl?” he had asked.
She hung her head and whispered, “Yes, Daddy.”
“Good, then I want you to meet Vicky.” He knelt between the two girls and pushed them together. “Hello,” they both said. While Michael went to get the bait they stared at each other. The little girl wore a grey dress and no shoes. Victoria was in white pedal pushers and a matching blouse. Feeling like a big city girl she had asked, “Do you like your school up here?” Michael’s daughter ran off.
“Was he your boyfriend?” Louise asked.
“Oh, no, I was small. He worked for the place where we stayed. I suppose he was paid to amuse me.”
“What in the world did you find in him to like?”
Victoria defended Michael. “He was different from anyone I’d ever met. He repaired boats and cars and had a farm. And he was wonderful to me.” She would not tell Louise that she had not been allowed to play with the only children there, the staff children. Michael had come as a savior during her loneliness when her parents noticed that she was spending all of her time following them around. “This is a vacation!” her mother had chastised her. “Your father and I want to enjoy ourselves. Don’t you have anything to do?” She had complained to the resort about their lack of programs for children and the next day Michael gave her a ride in a speedboat. He asked her what she would like to do for the summer.
“I want to catch a fish!”
“Then you will,” said the stout, cigar-smoking man with short arms and a rolling walk. Her mother had been horrified. “I told them that they needed recreational facilities for children. Not that I wanted my daughter made into a tomboy!” After another day of trailing after her parents because she was so bored, Victoria was sent fishing with Michael.
“I caught a fish,” she told Louise. “Several, as a matter offact. One of them was a foot long.”
“Ugh,” said Louise, returning to her knitting.
“We threw them all back. Michael said if we didn’t need them, there was no use killing them. After all, I remember him saying, if they didn’t enjoy swimming around all day they wouldn’t do it,” Victoria reminisced, smiling.
“But did you like the man or did you like what you could do because you were with a man?”
Victoria looked at the old lady innocently knitting, head bowed. She shivered to think that the old woman was probably right, it was not the man but the privilege she remembered so fondly. “He was kind to me,” she offered weakly.
“Was he kind to his kids?”
Victoria remembered his little girl’s face again. She had stopped short at the sight of her father.
“Or his wife?”
“I’m sure he was,” Victoria said firmly. “He was a kind man. I ‘m sure he was good to his wife and children.”
Louise chuckled and was silent, leaving Victoria alone with new thoughts, staring at the gnarled old body busy with its needles. What did the old lady care if she held a warm feeling about Michael in her heart? Why did she want to ruin it? Why shouldn’t she like men? Just because one old woman and her daughter had bad experiences with them? Yet it was true that Michael was the only man she really liked. How eerie that a stranger should bring this into focus for her.
Victoria realized suddenly that the landscape was more familiar and began to get ready. As she swung her suitcase down to her seat she noticed that Louise was looking less sinister and more respectable. Her white hair shone in the sunlight and her clothes seemed almost stylish. Victoria put her coat on, balancing in the aisle. Louise looked up at her. “I can tell you’re a smart girl like my daughter,” she smiled benignly. “I just think girls can be too smart sometimes and make mistakes.”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” Victoria said, swaying against the seat, suitcase still in hand.
“No, young people never hear what old people say. At least you were polite enough to listen.” She set down her knitting and raised her hand. Victoria took it reluctantly, remembering the fairy tale where the palm of the princess’s hand was pricked with a poisonous thorn. “It’s been lovely talking with you, dear. Good luck to you,” Louise said in a sweet, grandmotherly way.
“It’s been nice talking to you, too, Louise,” Victoria answered politely.
“Has it? Then I’m sorry.” Louise’s face darkened as she scowled at Victoria. “You mustn’t have been listening after all,” she said, dropping Victoria’s hand as if it had burned her.
Victoria almost ran down the aisle in her haste to get away. At the door she was for once glad of the crowd of people. She felt safer. Her hand stung and she looked down at it, feeling as crazy as she thought Louise was. There was no stain; the barb had been verbal, the wound in her head. She could feel the woman’s words take hold with such ease they might well have been in her own mind to begin with. She wondered if she had been dreaming the whole time. “Can I be the witch? Trying to tell myself something I already know?”
The train stopped and the people behind her pressed Victoria out the door.
“Victoria! Victoria!” she heard on the cold and busy platform. It was her friend Rosemary. “I didn’t know you would be on this train. What is it? You look as if you had seen a ghost!”
Victoria stared at her. “Oh, it’s good to see you,” she sighed in relief, realizing she had never before been so glad to see the sharp-chinned, lank-haired woman.
“Would you like to share a cab?” Rosemary asked in her formal manner.
“That’s the best idea I’ve heard all day. Let’s go back to the real world, eh, Rosemary?” she laughed.
“I’d hardly call our ivory tower real, Victoria. You of all people should know how I feel about the enforced unreality of the environment with which the privileged classes surround themselves. . . .” And her voice droned on, as comforting to Victoria as the sun had been when she drifted in Michael’s boat, her fishing rod poised to catch whatever came her way.
Chapter Two
Annie Heaphy stumbled on the rug in Eleanor’s doorway.
“Those fags I live with have to be so fancy with their furniture,” Eleanor apologized. “I trip over that half the time myself.”
“It’s elegant, anyway,” Annie said sarcastically as she pulled off the army jacket which would have fit in be
tter at home in her own beloved shack.
Eleanor took it and hung it in a closet. “Everything has to be pretty for them, believe me. I mean, who ever heard of a white rug? My mom would have gone cuckoo with cleaning it. They’re forever renting a rug shampooer. Sit down and take a load off your feet. What do you want to drink?”
“Wow! They have a bar!” said Annie admiringly, sliding onto a stool.
“Why, of course, of course. Nothing but the best.”
“You know, you’re really lucky to live here.”
“Luxury has its price. I’ve told you guys what I put up with. The parties that go on all night—not that I don’t enjoy them. And they’re so bitchy sometimes—not that I’m not. They do take awfully good care of me, though, and the rent is cheap. Won’t you join me in some Southern Comfort?”
“Don’t you have any nice northern stuff?”
“Ain’t no such thing. All the best whiskey’s southern. Why, Jack Daniels comes from my home state,” Eleanor boasted.
“I’ll stick to beer.”
“Suit yourself, Yankee,” Eleanor said, handing Annie a beer as she walked to the couch. Annie watched her, knowing she was committed to making love now. “Come sit down over here, Annie.” Eleanor patted a cushion next to her.
Annie twirled on her stool. “This is fun,” she said to delay leaving the stool. She wanted desperately to revoke the course she set for herself when, balking at going back to her house alone, she accepted Eleanor’s often repeated invitation after Turkey and Peg had left the bar. In addition, she felt badly when Dusty had not shown up again. Eleanor had been very let down. Now she hoped that she was not throwing away a friend for a night’s companionship. Slowly, she walked to Eleanor on the couch, realizing how unattractive she found her lips, wishing she did not have to kiss them.
“You don’t look happy, honey. What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, El, nothing. Just tired. Thinking of getting up tomorrow.” Annie felt guilty that her reluctance was obvious to Eleanor and sat close to her, facing her and laying a hand on her shoulder. She clung to her beer with the other hand, although her fingers were getting cold and the beer warm. She gritted her teeth in a smile.