Toothpick House

by Lee Lynch

  “Maybe he drank with my ancestors. Some of them were Irish stout drinkers. And probably from the same circles.”

  “Then where did you get such blonde hair?” Victoria gestured toward it, almost touching it, but pulling back when Annie felt that her heart could beat no faster.

  “Oh, Indian blood,” Annie joked, breathing again. “No, really, it’s a wig.” She tugged at a tuft of hair as if to slide a wig back and forth.

  Vicky laughed again, still shaken by the near touch. “You don’t know?”

  “I know all too well. My family’s from Chelsea. A grungy part of Boston. I grew up in a dark three-story house in rows of dark three-story houses all connected in the back by crisscrossing clotheslines and telephone wires and porchrails. The Irish hated the Italians and if you were Irish you were Irish—no further inquiry needed. If you weren’t, you were Italian. However, my mother is Swedish. And pays for it in that family. Now, I don’t have any Anglo-Saxon friends. It’s hard to in Connecticut.”

  “Unless you go to Yale,” Victoria sighed, pouring more wine.

  “You don’t like it there?”

  “They leave me alone.” She was silent, staring at her wine glass, her head bent forward so that her hair fell over her face.

  The restaurant was beginning to fill up. Sonny was scurrying around to seat people while the Hummer buzzed from table to table. The jukebox began to be played with more frequency.

  Annie looked puzzled. “That’s a lot of money to pay to be left alone.”

  “That, I believe, was their intention.”

  “Whose?”

  “My parents. I spent my first two years at Hunter College. It’s a city school and I was finally, slowly, meeting people, making friends, after all those private schools. My friend Etta was a one-of-a-kind in the high school I graduated from and was looked down upon. They’ve shuttled me from one posh school to another since I was five. But no matter where they enroll me, the girls were always the same well-dusted, personality-deprived mannequins. I would even have settled for transferring to Barnard—at least I could have seen Etta as I did once in a while. She went to school on Long Island.” Victoria picked up her wine glass and finished it. Annie split the last wine in the bottle between them. “Its taste reminds me of her, that’s all. I guess I’m nostalgic for high school and Hunter and our friendship, its richness, like you are for Thomas Wolfe and your discovery of magic in the world.”

  “Magic?”

  “That’s how I think of it. Etta was only at our school because her mother was the school nurse. They were from Queens, which, from what I saw of it in Jamaica, must be a lot like your Chelsea.” She smiled. “It’s only bad when you can’t escape. I loved it. Her family was all of it made from the same mold. Short and not fat, but fleshy, heavy. The way I always pictured the family in Mann’s Buddenbrooks.” Victoria paused until Annie nodded familiarity. “I have never seen anyone so mad for opera as that family. Their house was dark, wedged in a block of houses between blocks of new tall pink-brick apartment houses. Their father was one who had refused to sell his house to the developers. The inside usually smelled like a great German restaurant. I was always seated in the parlor and I’d visit with Etta there in the middle of a cluster of heavy dark furniture and spotless ceramic figurines that were never moved. But from all over the house I could hear such a confusion of operas! Everyone must have had a phonograph. Layer on layer of opera: can you imagine it? All that incredible drama just drifting in and out of rooms and up and down stairs and there we sat, like the figurines who couldn’t hear. Her brothers would come in to say hello very formally. Her mother and father would sit with us for a minute or two each and Etta would be wild inside her square, stocky body to leave for anyplace. But that, and my parents’ apartment, were the only places where we could be alone even a little bit.

  “Except the parks. And we walked and walked in them. One day in the spring of that year I remember Etta took me to a new park out in Queens somewhere. It was so woodsy and such a beautiful day. The birds, the flowers, just bursting, as you would say, with song and color and all of a sudden Etta stopped. She put her hands out in front of her and raised her chin so her throat was sharp and clear against the woods and she sang. I never knew she could sing so well, had been trained to sing. She sang a whole segment from Hansel and Gretel; did you know it was an opera?

  “Then I made her promise to take me to the opera, to share it with me the way she loved it. We went. To her section of it: standing room only. I’d only been in the orchestra where as many people twitched and fell asleep as listened. But in SRO the electricity in the air was amazing.” Victoria tossed her head and pulled her hair away from her face. Her eyes, on Annie’s, were like knives, and so sharp and intent on making Annie understand or perhaps be there with her that Annie looked impaled, she was so still.

  “And the people were more amazing. There were old people planning to spend hours standing to hear and see this opera. There were really young kids who barely budged during the performance. There was a ‘regular,’ Etta called him, wearing a black cape with a red satin lining and dyed black hair with a drawn-on widow’s peak and eyebrows penciled into sharp points. He looked like some sort of phantom of the opera. There was a midget who brought a stool to stand on. And there were just as many average, ordinary citizens who looked like Etta’s father, like construction workers or like her mother, housewives and nurses. And they all spoke to one another like old friends on a long-awaited outing. Anne, I could see how a child brought up in that atmosphere would not be able to escape being ‘an opera nut,’ as Etta called herself, no matter what else she was. She and one of her brothers had been saving money since he was ten and she was eight to go to operas in Europe. That I learned when Etta began to speak with two women next to us. They had been to Salzburg the year before and Etta wanted to know every detail. They told her, too. Then the two women held hands throughout the whole performance.”

  Victoria’s cheeks were flushed. Neither of them had paid any attention when the Hummer, matching her hum to the jukebox, set their dishes before them. “That’s when I knew what I was feeling about Etta,” Victoria said almost in a whisper. She sat up, pushed her hair back again and picked up her silverware as if to make her words more casual. “I went home that night and told my parents I would be going to Hunter when I graduated. I should have been devious. I should have said I wanted to be near Broadway or some man or the stores in New York. They criticized me and worried me so much about it that when, near the end of my freshman year, Yale announced it would be co-ed in another year, I agreed to transfer. ‘That way, at least,’ my father said, ‘I may get a son-in-law from the old school,’ his alma mater. If I had been more like you I suppose I could have withstood their disapproval better, but I’d been too protected and had too few resources of my own.” She shook her head slowly and looked down at her plate, her lips tight across her angular face, devoid of all the gloss of sophistication. She cut a piece of beef. “So here I am, pampered product of generations of polishing.” She put the meat in her mouth and began to chew.

  “I’m glad, Vicky.”

  Victoria looked up, the lines of her face all drawn down except for her tight jaw.

  “I’m glad for me that you’re here.”

  Victoria finished chewing thoughtfully. “Yes,” she said with a stiff smile. “Now I feel glad too. But there must have been an easier way.” She wondered what had just been said. I am glad, she thought in wonder. She looked at Annie’s ragged hair and her grubby cap, her army jacket thrown beside her on the seat and laughed a glad laugh, a suddenly loving laugh. “It hasn’t been easy for you, either, though, has it? I’m sorry. That’s me. Always full of myself.”

  Annie broke into her meat pie. “I guess growing up is hard for everybody. We’re always walking through the woods maybe not even looking for a clearing or a stream or a friend who’s going to open up the path for us with a song. We’re always getting scratched or catching poison ivy. Ho
w come, anyway,” she asked, laying down her forkful of meat and sipping some wine, “how come we’re allergic to the bad things and they spread so quick? How come we can’t be allergic to the good stuff instead so it comes jumping out at us and flares up all over us—joy instead of red itchy patches?”

  “You’re right. We’re constantly avoiding the things we’re afraid of. Sometimes so much so that we wander right off the path and miss ‘the good stuff.’”

  “Wander right off into your isolation?” Annie asked. “Into the stillness that you carry around you? And into the circles I drive around in all day, all night and again the next day, always moving in circles? And you know what they tell us? ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He leadeth me to lie down in green pastures.’ Bah. We’re a bunch of bumbling, half-blind fools almost losing the most important path of our lives. That man they call the lord doesn’t do anybody any good at all.” Annie had begun to eat, but stopped to watch Vicky. “Not hungry?” she asked when Vicky stopped also.

  “Let’s order some coffee.”

  “Sure, but tea for me, not coffee.”

  “The Irish in you?” Victoria smiled weakly, looking drained.

  “I suppose. I remember the women in my family—one aunt lived on the first floor, another on the second, my grandmother on the third, and we were next door—they were always visiting to have a ‘cuppa tay.’ Or another aunt or a neighbor or a cousin or an in-law would come and it would be tea. I tried to break out of it at school, but couldn’t.”

  “Where did you go to school?” Victoria asked as the waitress hummed away with their plates of cold, uneaten food.

  “There wasn’t any money, but I lived at home and I got a scholarship to Boston College. So I commuted,” Annie shrugged.

  “What happened?”

  Annie shrugged again and muttered, “I lost my lover.” She held her breath, afraid to be bringing up the subject of lesbian lovers.

  “And quit school?”

  “Just that one.”

  The Hummer brought apertifs to their table. “Compliments of friends in the bar,” she smiled over her shoulder as she left.

  “Turkey’s trying to get me drunk as usual,” Annie said wryly and raised her glass for a toast. “To the woods—and the sky,” she added, remembering their toast at the Core.

  “And the path—and the tracks!” Victoria answered as they clinked glasses. “Did you flunk out?”

  “No. She wanted,” Annie could feel her heart stop again, but Vicky still looked into her eyes, “a world more like the one it sounds like you want to leave. She was happy as a Cliffey. I didn’t want to be in the same city if I couldn’t be with her. And you can see why I couldn’t be with her,” Annie gestured to herself, her hat, her hair. “I’m a low class bar dyke. Good for a thrill,” she went on bitterly, “not to spend her life with. She has ambitions. So I joined some friends who had rented a little shack on the beach and six months later they went back to Boston. With three paying we could afford the place during the summer, but when they left I couldn’t. I didn’t want to give up my shack so I quit school and started driving full time. I was working already, bartending at night. Now I just put all my hours in driving.”

  “Did you save your ‘shack?’”

  “Just barely. I still have it. I asked the landlord how much he’d sell it for, but I haven’t seen him since. It means a lot to me to have a home of my own to go to, even if I don’t always want to go home. I like having a place to call mine,” Annie said, a faraway look on her face.

  “And if you lost it?”

  “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “How about school?” Victoria asked to shift away from the obviously painful subject. “Did you keep it up?”

  “I finished with an Associates. I just couldn’t get into it, you know? I’m not aiming for that big pie in the sky stuff. I like driving. I can be myself. I liked bartending until business fell off last summer. We’re too close to Provincetown.”

  The wine was wearing off. They were tired from their intensity. When the Hummer brought coffee and tea and their check, Annie had her chin in her hands and was watching Victoria pour cream into her coffee so slowly it kept its swirling shape.

  “What do you think?” Annie asked. “Do you want to have a drink with Turkey and the gang? I know you said you had to get back to your books,” Annie added to protect herself from dashed hopes.

  “I do, Anne. I’m just so comfortable. I can’t face going out in the cold.” And being alone again, Victoria thought. And dealing with having said so much to this woman that I will probably hide now, hide for all I’m worth and try never to see her again. She felt guilty when Annie tried to help.

  “Maybe it won’t be too cold. Spring is coming, you know. Can I give you a ride?”

  “No, it’s not that far. You’d just have to find another parking space.”

  “And I have no heater. Can I walk with you?”

  Victoria smiled with some relief from the despair that showed briefly in her eyes. “That would be fine. Yes, let’s. I don’t even really want this coffee, do you?”

  “I’m out the door.”

  They stopped to pay their check and Victoria pulled her gloves on. Annie threw her coat over her shoulders, then jammed her arms into it, knocking off her cap with the coat’s hood. She stooped to pick it up and felt Vicky’s hand ruffling her hair as she got up. She straightened slowly, Victoria’s hand resting on her shoulder. Two gay men pushed in through the door, chattering, unseeing, and separated them. Annie set the cap on her head and led the way out the door. Outside, Victoria shivered. Annie ran her hand heavily across her back saying, “You’ll warm up as we walk.” Victoria looked at her, nodding, then seemed to pull the cold night like a protective cloak around herself.

  So they walked, Victoria slightly taller, moving smoothly with a long measured stride, her arms swinging quietly by her sides; Annie, with shorter, choppier steps, putting her hands in her pockets, then out to turn her collar up, then to her hat, back to her pockets, as if she wanted to be doing something with her body in addition to walking, as if it were not enough to walk down the deserted college street in the frozen night next to this once again cool, stately person. She kept looking up at Victoria, trying to meet her eyes, seeking a smile. Victoria looked straight ahead as if to prepare herself for loneliness. At the gate to her dormitory Victoria turned suddenly and enveloped Annie in her arms, whispering, “Goodnight.” Annie got her arms halfway up to return Victoria’s embrace when Victoria turned away and, key somehow ready, opened the gate, then locked herself inside. Her back to Annie, she walked under the short archway and turned out of sight into a courtyard. Annie leaned against the ornate black gate, pressing her lips against it, gripping it with her gloveless hands and shook it. “Shit,” she said, turning away. “Locked me right out again. Shit.”

  * * * * *

  Annie Heaphy next saw Victoria at the women’s dance. The New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band was playing feminist songs, intent on an expertise whose absence did not deter the excited crowd of women from wild group dancing. Annie and the rest of the group from the bar, girded for the dance by several rounds in anticipation of a dry or punch-filled evening, made their raucous way into the room only to stand about on the edge of the crowd as if they had reached a cordon. They watched the women dance in threes or more and looked at one another, rolling their eyes at these women who did not have the courage to dance in couples. Peg had told them the political arguments against couples and they still thought what they thought, while willing to participate the “libbers” way because, wow, those were some beautiful women. Annie, like the rest, could not quite believe that these women were gay or would remain gay once the cause was no longer popular. They had never run the risks of being caught or suffered the ostracism of straight peers as the bar women had, and it was as hard not to resent them for the newness of their coming out as it was to resist joining them in this atmosphere of limited accept
ance or at least acceptance on their own grounds.

  When Annie Heaphy noticed her, Victoria was seated alone in a window seat, wearing a dark turtleneck sweater and jeans and fitting right in. Annie felt like a slob in her army gear and went looking for a bathroom to at least comb her hair. When she found a mirror she saw that her hair was all flat from her cap. She put her whole head under a faucet, hoping her hair was still short enough to dry fast. She found gum in her jacket pocket and tried to mask her beer smell with that. Leaving her jacket off, she returned to the hall and stood with her friends who had barely moved since she left. She stared at Victoria, ruffling her hair to dry it fast, remembering how Vicky had ruffled it the week before. Someone handed her a paper cup of punch and she downed it immediately.

  Victoria saw Annie too. She had been sitting and watching, letting Rosemary or Claudia introduce her to women and bring her punch. They wandered off only to return to take care of her, Victoria thought, as if I have not always been alone. Still, she was glad she had come. She did feel the “spirit” they had told her about and she wished she could just abandon herself to it and join in, but it was easier, safer, just to watch.

  Now she watched Annie and her friends. They looked like poor relations, uncomfortable in an alien atmosphere. Some wore hats, one had a tie, a couple carried beer bottles. They stood aggressively, almost belligerently, and seemed to be criticizing what they saw. When she saw Annie Heaphy with them she recognized Turkey and two others who had been at the bar in New York. And now Annie was running her hand through that short blonde haircut and looking at her very seriously. Victoria tossed her chin toward her shoulder to get her own hair away from her eyes and gazed back at Annie Heaphy. Maybe it’s the punch, she thought; I ought to look away. She was even more frightened than she had been at their dinner.