Toothpick House

by Lee Lynch

  “Oh, Victoria, it wasn’t a matter of suspecting myself,” Rosemary said quickly, snapping her head up.

  “All right,” Victoria said. She didn’t really want to know. “What was it then?” she asked despite herself.

  “Oh,” Rosemary sighed, “it was such a feeling of relief to know I could love women completely!”

  “You weren’t uncomfortable with it at all?”

  “As I said in my poem—and I think you should admit that I won our poetry duel,” Rosemary winked at Victoria as she rose to adjust the roses again, “‘Not racked so much by dreams as by/ the aspirations I might fill with you. . . .’ How could I be uncomfortable? It’s the right thing to do. And already we have a future far beyond what I had imagined. One of the women in the poetry group is an assistant in a lab where they’re working on cloning,” she looked at Victoria expectantly.

  Victoria felt annoyed again. “Yes?” she asked shortly, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “With cloning we don’t need men.” Her eyes sparkled. “No woman will need a man. We can love each other and reproduce. Men will become vestigial organisms!”

  Victoria wondered why she was even flirting with the idea of lesbianism if it had made Rosemary this crazy. “What’s wrong with men? For the women who want them I mean.”

  “I can’t understand how anyone could tie herself to an oppressor. You don’t want a man.” Rosemary bore down on Victoria. “Join us! We’ll support you.”

  Victoria looked at the excited eyes, the limp braid hanging in front of Rosemary as she leaned over Victoria. Some kind of crazy rapture seemed to possess Rosemary and Victoria knew that whatever she decided about Annie Heaphy it would bear no resemblance to this politicized love, this sexual exercise of a philosophy. This was not real; it was passion, but not love. As little as Victoria knew about love, she recognized its tenderness, its need to revere the loved one and to be held special by her. Love could not derive from politics, nor could it survive and provide the sustenance humans needed from it if its energy was directed, as Rosemary directed hers, away from the lover. Claudia seemed almost irrelevant for Rosemary, except for the statement their relationship made.

  “I don’t know if I’m a lesbian, Rosemary, but I will think about it,” Victoria concluded. “I really think I’d like to be alone now.”

  Rosemary straightened. “All women are lesbians, Victoria. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” She walked toward the door, looking over her shoulder as she opened it and stepped out. “Come out, Victoria!” and was gone.

  Victoria sighed in relief wondering why in the world she had asked. The answer, she was sure, was in herself and not in Rosemary. Although Rosemary might be hiding her feelings behind her rhetoric, hers was not the face of love Victoria envisioned. Annie’s face assembled between her eyes and the light of the candle. She remembered the hopeful look on her face at the bottom of the steps and her own panic as she turned and fled. The face swam, grew larger in the flame, the yellow of its hair a halo whose light warmed Victoria. She lay carefully, gracefully upon the ice blue spread of her bed. A few moments for myself, she thought as she fell further into a heated fantasy, then I’ll start work on that paper.

  * * * * *

  The winter sun slipped around the edges of Annie Heaphy’s green, cracked window shades to bother her eyes. They hurt somewhere where they attach to my brain, she thought as she picked her head up and forced her feet to the floor. Foghorns sounded distantly, as if in the dreamworld she was leaving. It wasn’t as cold as she expected and she went through her morning routine hardly waking until she stepped out of the shower. Then she heard pounding on the door. “She found me,” was her first crazy thought and she remembered in a flash the dreams in which she had foolishly indulged yesterday before drowning them. Running to her bed, she pulled on last night’s pants and shirt as she yelled, “Be right there!” Her heart beat faster, then her face fell as she opened the door to her landlord. “That time, huh?” she asked, turning from him as he followed her into the living room.

  Annie began to search for her checkbook, hoping the rent check would not bounce again, while the landlord sat on the edge of her desk. “Don’t forget,” he said, chewing his cigar. Annie sat and looked up at the tiny bald man who was so devoted to disturbing his clients that he kept his father’s habit of collecting rents himself. “I like to keep an eye on my property,” he’d explained once to Annie, peering into her bedroom, bathroom, surreptitiously inspecting the papers on her desk. Annie remembered thinking disgustedly of his property, most of it run down like her own shack. She felt utterly at his mercy, helpless to protest his probing. She remembered to put on her cap and pull it tight over her wet hair.

  “Don’t forget what?”

  “You be ready to leave by June thirty, dear. In case I got summer people starting that weekend.”

  “Christ, it’s only February.”

  “Just don’t give me no trouble. You find someplace else to take your girlfriends,” he warned as he slid off the desk, brushed the back of his coat, and tucked Annie’s check inside it.

  “How much would it cost me to buy this place?” Annie asked on impulse.

  The landlord looked at her suspiciously. “Where would you get that kind of money?”

  “It couldn’t be that much for a four-room, falling apart shack.”

  “With a porch facing the Sound,” he shot back. “But it might be worth more to me sold than it would keeping it, the way I have to fix it up every year. I’ll let you know kid, but meanwhile, don’t forget June thirtieth.”

  “I’ll be out,” Annie answered nastily.

  She slammed the door on his tiny, sauntering back. “Damn your beady rat eyes,” she finished and turned to face her home. How much I’ve given up for this, she thought. How little it is after all. She walked to the window, wondering if it was last night’s liquor that made her feel so depressed. The landlord was next door and his long white car obscured her view of the beach. Her hair blended with the heatless light at the window when she took her hat off and flung it to the floor. She gripped the window frame. “Shit,” she whispered, breaking out of the light as she shook her head. “You bastard-this is all I have!” she shouted at the house into which he had disappeared. She drew back her fists and pounded the wall with them one heavy, loud time. She felt so attached to the house and let herself remember for a moment the good times she had in it with her roommates. I need to fill it again, she thought, with someone close and with more of myself. She pictured Vicky in the living room, trying to fit her in. Well, she decided, it’s all I had, but it ain’t all I’m going to have.

  Surely it meant something that Annie had found Victoria once more. Fate? No, that sounded too much like the aunts back in Chelsea. But something—perhaps some kind of energy-Peg called it woman energy—drew them to each other. Could it be real? She knew she felt something the first time, that first night, when she looked at Vicky. There was some passion beneath Vicky’s reserve, some great desire like her own to reach the depths of experience, the heights of emotion, some burning, burning to have it all, but—Annie felt Vicky’s greater discipline, now too much in control. Annie knew she herself lacked the power to shape her energies and that Vicky held such a power. Her own life had become self-destructive, and Annie felt, in the intellect that was so obvious on Vicky’s face, in the calm, graceful way she moved her woman’s body, in the considered way she spoke, a way to learn control. Annie wanted as desperately to feel productive in what she did as she wanted to live to her limits.

  Unlike her attractions to some other women, attractions which had seemed so strong, Annie did not feel an end in this attraction to Vicky. Other relationships had a kernel of self-destruction at their core, a feeling that made Annie want to take what she could and run. From Vicky, Annie felt no ending, but an opening, a doorway to a path. She sat on her desk and looked past where the landlord’s car had been at the sand. She pictured Vicky and herself hand in hand on a path in the mounta
ins, barefoot, the grasses and clover tickling their ankles. They climbed higher and higher. At each new elevation they became giddier from the purity of the air and their feelings. They never let go of each other’s hands, and they lay down in meadows along the way. For a love like this what would Annie not do! She sighed. Full of peace and passion, she began to assemble her things for work before she walked on the beach. She would look into making this house her own and find a way to make Vicky love her, she determined again. Her own convictions would seduce her if her lesbian body could not. If she could love Annie for herself, so much the better, but Annie did not think of herself as lovable. And when she loves me? Will the circle stop there? Will I really stop going round and round? She returned to lean her forehead against the window and looked sadly again toward the shore. Virginia Woolf had stopped her circle by walking straight into the sea, she thought. Maybe I’m going to drive around in circles all my life just to be safe. Who the hell knows what’s straight ahead?

  * * * * *

  “Time passes slowly up here on the mountain,” Victoria sang to herself. She generally listened to classical music, but she had been restless through the last long weeks of winter, visited with Rosemary and Claudia and some of the other women in the poetry group, listened to the music which they played for her timidly, wanting her approval. She had always moved among them aloof, wearing her scholarship and her talents like a gown she did not want soiled. They knew her by reputation, admired or rejected her from afar, but welcomed her warm charm when she offered it. So Victoria sang a little of their surprisingly moving music as she walked across campus toward the Core restaurant. She was to meet Rosemary and Claudia there and go on to a Women’s Poetry Group meeting. Victoria knew they would try again to interest her in joining, in sharing her own poetry. But poetry was such a private thing and she was still frightened of the women’s politics in which they were involved. It was not what Victoria was looking for, not what would soothe her unaccustomed restlessness. She looked up as she crossed the street to the Core. No cars were coming, but she felt a faint thud of excitement in her chest as she noticed a yellow cab turning the corner on the next street up. She had not seen the cab driver again, though she still came into Victoria’s fantasies irritatingly often. Except for that, Victoria had decided lesbianism and love were passing phases for her and ignored their brief intrusion into her ordered days. Even the constant reminder of Claudia and Rosemary’s relationship had faded in importance.

  The Core was warm. She moved down the cafeteria-style line to get a mug of coffee, paid, and stood looking for Rosemary and Claudia. They were not along the bare brick walls or by the window which was bright with the late winter sunlight. She carried her mug to a dark corner table and sat on the old wooden chair, glad she had brought a book and hoping no one would approach her while she waited. She did not touch her coffee, wondering again why she was exposing herself to a situation like this when she could just stay in her room or on campus where people did not question her inaccessibility. She heard the door open and looked covertly up to see if Rosemary and Claudia had arrived. Against the bright doorway a dark figure stood peering across the sawdust-covered floor. The cabdriver started walking toward her.

  As she walked toward Victoria, Annie’s head hurt with the knowledge that what she was doing was real. She was not having a fantasy, but acting it out. A few moments ago she had been grinding her cab and herself through the day, thinking about finding another job, moving to another town, cleaning up her house. Then she had spotted the long-haired figure moving gracefully across the street. She had had to turn the corner because of the traffic, but maneuvered her way through a maze of one way streets until she was on the one Victoria had crossed. Half expecting her to have stopped and waited, Annie went into reverse and labored the bulky cab into a portentously lucky parking spot, beating out another car which had been poised to take it. She called in to the dispatcher that she was going to lunch and heard, “Who do you think you are, the Queen of England?” before she shut off the set and locked the cab. Sweating in the still cool air she paused at the curb to think. Victoria could have gone into any shop or around the corner or into a Yale building she couldn’t check! And here was Annie, marching along the street confident she would find her. With no clues at all, she decided for once to be methodical and went to the beginning of the row of businesses.

  She could not picture Vicky in The Core, but then she did not know her at all and here she was again suddenly, miraculously, as if the curves and angles of her face had always been near and almost touchable. Now what? Annie asked herself, but had no time to wonder for suddenly she was shuffling her scuffed shoes in the sawdust, making patterns with the toes, painfully aware that she had never since she bought them polished them. “How have you been?” she was asking as if she saw this woman every night at the bar.

  “Fine, thank you,” answered Victoria, with an amused and haughty expression on her face. Then she leaned forward, offering her limp hand to Annie. “It’s Annie Heaphy, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Annie. Listen, if you’re going to be here for awhile, let me get a beer and I’ll ... I mean, if you’re not waiting for someone. Or busy. I mean, if you don’t mind.” Annie was feeling desperate, awkward and out of place, as if she had made a terrible mistake. All of that first feeling was gone, replaced by this awful pleading she was doing. “I need,” she paused, improvising, “I need to talk to you,” she finally blurted out, knowing she was putting a one-sided strain on any conversation that she could not fulfill, but knowing also that she would not be turned away.

  “Of course,” answered the cool Victoria. Victoria, what a name, thought Annie as she went to the counter for beer. I would die of embarrassment with a name like that. She tried to think of a subject she could pretend she needed to talk to Vicky about. Besides her chances of getting into bed with her immediately. Wouldn’t Peg holler at her for being so sexist, but damn it, wasn’t that what this pursuit was all about? Of course I want to go to bed with her. Annie chuckled and the kid in the dirty white uniform behind the counter smiled back at her. But, she sighed, the butch in her melting, she wanted so much more than that.

  As Annie turned back with her beer she saw that two women were sitting with Victoria. Holy Christ, she thought. What an idiot. Of course she was waiting for someone. Then she recognized “Sister” and her friend. Would Victoria expect her to talk in front of her? Annie stopped short and drank half her beer. They had not gotten anything to eat, so they might just be meeting. Then a miracle happened. The women rose and scurried away from Victoria as if they had been dismissed. Annie felt a little less of a fool as “Sister’s” friend knocked over a chair on her hurried way across the restaurant.

  Laughing softly to cover her embarrassment, Victoria asked herself, “What am I doing?” She watched poor Claudia pick up the chair she had tripped over in her rush to leave Victoria alone with her “dyke.” Claudia looked back at Victoria with an embarrassed smile. Then Annie stood above her and Victoria felt her face torn away from Claudia to look directly into the pain-filled eyes that pleaded at her from under Annie’s cap. They looked away from each other, trying to hide, and looked at the window. Rosemary and Claudia were passing slowly outside, looking in toward them in a proprietary way. Victoria imagined that Rosemary gave herself full credit for bringing herself and Annie Heaphy together again. When Victoria had said she would join them later, after a beer with the little blonde woman from the bar in New York, nothing would have kept Rosemary there. If she could, Victoria suspected, she would have escorted the two to the nearest bedroom and stood outside the door until Victoria could announce that she had come out. Claudia had tripped when Rosemary swung back to stage whisper to Victoria an urgent message about a woman’s dance. Surely she did not expect Victoria to ask a strange woman to go to a dance. But perhaps she would, Victoria smiled to herself, feeling as if Annie’s presence made anything possible.

  She watched Annie wipe a mustache of beer off her uppe
r lip and smiled more widely, shaking her head.

  “Is something wrong, Vicky?” Annie asked as if ready to fight a war to fix it.

  “That looks good. What do you ask for, a glass of beer?”

  Annie relaxed and smiled back at Victoria, then asked, “You never had a beer?”

  Victoria thought she had never seen a smile so light up a person’s face. “Yes, but I’ve never ordered it for myself.”

  “A draft, then. That’s all you have to ask for. Or should I get it for you?”

  “No, no. I want to do it myself. How else will I learn?” Victoria asked, laughing as if to mock herself.

  “Get two, then, please,” Annie said, reaching to her pocket as she drained the other half of her mug.

  “Let me pay. You’re my guest.”

  “I am?”

  She looks like a little child with the weight of the world on her shoulders, Victoria thought, amazed that this person was in her life. She thought of the child’s face, so familiar in her room, hovering over her in bed. The child’s lips which she had remembered so accurately from those first meetings. Then she was carrying two overflowing mugs back to the table and they were both laughing at her clumsiness in setting them down.

  “Anne, Anne,” Victoria marvelled, shaking her head back and forth.

  Annie looked up at her puzzled, her soft blue eyes asking for an explanation. “Here,” she said, “let me take one of those.”

  “With anyone else, I’d be cross by now and probably leaving,” Victoria confessed. The flood of warmth and the sudden feeling of relaxation she felt had loosened her. She smiled a wide brilliant smile at Annie, looking into her eyes.

  Annie felt a blush rise up her neck and into her face. She thought she would be blinded by Victoria’s smile. All she could do was smile back, feeling as if she had been hit by a wave. They sat frozen by their smiles too long. Annie felt she had to cover the frankness of her own gaze or tell Vicky she had fallen in love with her. Or touch her. She laid her index finger gently on Victoria’s wrist, half expecting her to jump away. “Did you ever feel like the sea opened up and you were the naked wet thing that emerged?” she asked her, wondering at her boldness. “Did you ever feel the earth disassemble around you and then feel the pieces slowly fall back into their new places and know the world would never be the same again? Did you ever wonder if you were real?”