Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  “Look,” says Crane. She thumps her pink cast against the tile floor. “It’s not like people say, ’I’m going to go rob someone, but I’m going to really respect their sexual orientation.’ Or, ’I’m going to go commit a hate crime, but when the chick’s wallet falls on the ground, I’m going to let her keep her money.’ ”

  The deputies circle and circle. The nurse gives her a pill. People begin to slide away. Dr. Muto’s voice chirps on, but Felix stops listening. At the foot of the bed, there is a folk art print of multicultural children holding hands. Lederhosen next to kimono next to some kind of Rastafarian poncho. The last thing Felix thinks before she falls asleep is, What a bunch of bullshit.

  Moments later, someone is nudging her awake. The nurse’s face is inches away. Pink plastic beads click at the ends of her black braids. “You have to wake up, you sleep too long.” She has an accent, maybe Caribbean. “We need this bed. Your mama take you home.”

  Her body creaks when she tries to move it. Felix can’t quite turn her head to look around the room, but she sees that the nurse is right. Her parents are both here, two worried faces at the foot of her bed. Her friends are long gone.

  “Oh, Felix, honey,” her mother, Suzy Ketay, whispers. Her dyed brown-blonde hair sticks out at odd angles. Martin Ketay blows on a cup of coffee.

  They help her to her feet. Dr. Muto breezes in, hands her a prescription and some instructions and takes off again, smiling like it’s not four in the morning.

  “I don’t get to stay the night?” Felix slurs. Her tongue takes up too much space in her mouth, making her sound drunk.

  Her father scratches his beard with his free hand the way he always does when he’s annoyed. “I thought this was supposed to be a good hospital, but obviously they’re cutting corners just like everyone else. Someone’s going to hear from me about this.” His arm still around Felix’s shoulders, he looks around for who this person might be.

  “Where am I supposed to go?” Felix whimpers.

  “Home,” Suzy Ketay says with forced brightness. She sounds like she’s doing a bad impression of Dr. Muto. “First we’ll stop somewhere and fill this prescription, though.”

  Felix doesn’t know which home her mother means. Her apartment or the house where she grew up in Hermosa Beach. Both places seem wrong. The hospital does too, with its too-bright lights and freeway-loud hallways, but now that she’s being kicked out, she wants to stay. She could find a small white space and crouch there forever.

  But now her parents are leading her to the street. Her mother’s blue nylon tracksuit crinkles as they walk. The sky is too tall out here. Every step hurts. Getting in their big Ford Explorer, which she has always referred to as The Smogmobile, requires an act of contortion. Her father drives too fast and honks at every other car between Cedars-Sinai and the Koreatown Walgreen’s. Felix’s stomach lurches. She lays down in the backseat while her father sprints toward the drugstore.

  Her mother twists around to face her and says what she has probably been waiting all night to say. “I told you L.A. wasn’t safe.”

  “Mom. Not L.A., West Hollywood.” Her side aches at the emphasis. “Do you know what that means? I mean, like, about the world?”

  Her question is only half rhetorical. If what happened tonight (last night?) can happen in West Hollywood, where is she supposed to hang out? In college she read essays about how the whole world was a construct, a big lie everyone told themselves to cover up the fact that the only truth was that there was no truth. It sounded glistening and mysterious, a conspiracy theory. Felix would trip out for a while, then close her course reader and go sing Spanish karaoke with Jia Li at a semi-scary bar on Hollywood Boulevard. They’d stop at In-N-Out for hamburgers-sans-burgers on the way home, and sometimes they would see movie stars there. All of this, too, seemed to have something to do with postmodernism. She wasn’t sure what because she didn’t read that carefully.

  But tonight (or last night), her big, colorful adventure turned sour and real and unbearably old. She’s been sentenced to walk the dangerous streets of a land that is suddenly as foreign as a dream.

  Suzy answers Felix’s question. “It means I have to worry about you! I already worry about you. I know you won’t even consider coming home and staying with us—I know that would be horribly ’uncool’—”

  “Mom, I’m not in sixth grade. I’m not really worried about looking uncool.” Although Felix does feel very uncool at the moment. Her head and neck throb, and all she can see from the car window is a billboard inviting Korean people to move to Valencia.

  “So won’t you reconsider what I said about visiting your aunt?”

  This has been a running theme of their conversations for nearly a year. Suzy wants Felix to spend time with Anna Lisa, who ran away from home at 19 to go be a dyke in some town in the elbow of California. Felix usually responds by accusing her mother of thinking that all lesbians are the same.

  “Just for a couple of weeks,” Suzy persists. “You’ll make her so happy. Lilac Mines is one of those safe, sleepy little towns. Nothing ever happens there.”

  “Exactly!”

  “Someone needs to help you change the dressing on your wounds,” Suzy continues. Felix hates the words ’dressing’ and ’wound.’ It makes her sound like a Civil War casualty. “And who better than your Aunt Anna Lisa? She’s a nurse, for goodness sake.”

  “Fine,” she says. “I’ll think about it.”

  She does not think about it. She does her best not to think about any of it. As soon as she can, she goes back to work. Her regular doctor, whom she has actually only seen once before, insists that she wear a hideous plastic-and-foam neck brace.

  “I think maybe I should do a write-up of the summer’s hottest medical accessories,” Felix tells her editor, Renee Salt. “This would be just below ’colostomy bag.’ ” She is wearing a loose embroidered blouse, but the bandage around her ribs makes her feel fat.

  “God, Felix, you shouldn’t joke about that stuff,” says Renee. She purses her fuchsia (magenta?) lips in concern. “What happened to you was really terrible. I hope you know how terrible we all feel about it.”

  Felix wants to tell her that she just used “terrible” twice in one breath. When Jessi Menaster, the West Coast photo editor, got a nose job last winter, it wasn’t nearly this awkward. Felix wishes she could tell them she was mugged instead. That would be very New York. But Crane called Renee the Monday after the attack and relayed every detail. Felix realizes that, until now, being out at work has meant being lesbian-chic. She wore leather wrist cuffs before anyone else did. Now she’s A Lesbian, a victim in a neck brace, and no one knows what to do with her, not even Felix herself.

  When she goes to the break room at lunch, Jessi Menaster and an editorial assistant named Shana are making fun of an actress’s dress at a recent awards show.

  “She looked like a birthday cake,” Jessi is saying. She is tall and slim, and always wears black pants and perfectly pressed, button-down shirts.

  “Or a porn star,” Shana says. “The star of, like, Bedtime for Boobsy.”

  “Oh my God, Shana, you are so fucking hilarious. Sometimes I wish we weren’t such a classy magazine. Then we could publish comments like that.”

  When they see Felix, they clam up.

  “Hey, Felix,” Shana says sheepishly. “Sorry.”

  “For what?” It’s not like they were making fun of her. Do they think that she’s too pathetic to have fun now?

  “Um, just, I don’t know…” Shana trails off.

  Felix feels her face turn red above the neck brace. She leans into the refrigerator. Her sack lunch is right in front of her, but she huddles in the cool air as long as she can. She wants to tell them that blood, when it is in your mouth, does not taste scarlet or crimson or carmine. It tastes metallic and evil. But, of course, they don’t want to know this. Maybe that’s why they don’t want to talk to her.

  After eating by herself, she slouches down in her cubicle, as far
as her neck brace and bandage-bustier will permit. She wishes she could call Eva. Eva would be fired up, ready to litigate. Felix doesn’t know which hurts more, the persistent ache of her ribcage, or the ache inside it.

  She tries to fact-check a piece on platform sandals, but her mind wanders, and soon she’s searching the Internet for flights to New York.

  SQUARES

  Anna Lisa: Fresno, 1965

  Anna Lisa climbs the ladder to the attic store room above Hill Food & Supply expecting to find what she always finds: crates of canned goods and complete silence, except for the train whistle she hardly hears anymore. When she and her sister Suzy were little, they thought the room was haunted, and somehow Anna Lisa assumed Suzy was still afraid. It wasn’t hard for Anna Lisa to claim the space as her own, since no one else wanted it.

  But today there is a red wool hat bobbing up and down between the window and a box of stewed tomato tins. And there is moaning. A ghost? Anna Lisa thinks. Oddly, the thought doesn’t frighten her. She could use some company.

  The voice that says, “Oh God. Goodness,” however, is Suzy’s. Self-correcting, demure after the fact. “Anna Lisa, what—” Suzy sits up and pulls the hat further down on her head, even before checking to see whether her white sundress is covering the parts of her body it should be covering. Even before glancing at the moaning ghost next to her, a disheveled boy Anna Lisa vaguely remembers as Kevin Zacky. He was a sophomore when she was a senior, a kid whose white-toothed yearbook picture preceded him. He looks far less confident now.

  Suddenly the frozen Kevin Zacky and the flustered Suzy switch roles. He becomes a flurry of movement, as if executing a play on the football field, and she stares at Anna Lisa from beneath the brim of her hat. He mumbles his way to the end zone—the square of light above the ladder—and disappears. Anna Lisa hears herself ask, “Why are you wearing a hat?”

  “Why are you here?” shoots Suzy, as if the attic is hers.

  And it is, Anna Lisa realizes. The way Suzy leans against the splintery wall with just the right amount of caution gives her away. She’s been coming here for a while. Her sweat and perfume fill the air like tea in water.

  “This is my—” Anna Lisa begins, but it sounds stupid. “I was going to read,” she says. It sounds like an apology. She makes sure the back of the book is facing out, the cover tight against her chest. “Things were slow at the store.”

  Suzy pulls the hat off her head. Her blonde-brown hair, previously prone to schoolgirl braids and the occasional Swiss Miss crown, now stops abruptly just below her ears. Hence the hat in the 95-degree heat. For the first time, Anna Lisa notices her sister’s delicate shoulders, the naive pout of her chin.

  “Please don’t tell Mother and Daddy,” Suzy says.

  “About your hair or the boy? Because they’re going to notice the hair.”

  “About Kevin, obviously. Oh goodness, Nannalee, what am I going to do?” Anna Lisa hasn’t heard Suzy’s childhood nickname for her in years. She wants to melt into it, to protect Suzy from attic ghosts. But the girl in front of her is two severed braids away from Anna Lisa’s help. She’s suspected it since Suzy graduated in June. As her classmates got engaged and packed for college, Suzy began to stand taller. She started polishing her shoes. She stopped singing along (badly) to the radio, and started dancing to the songs instead—better and better, more hips and winks in front of their bedroom mirror. And the boys whose girlfriends were away at school picked up on her scent and edged toward their house, a phone call here, a slow-driving Chevrolet there.

  The haircut proves it. Suzy’s life is dynamic and sexual. Anna Lisa takes it personally. They’ve never quite been close, but people tend to confuse the two of them, or lump them together, which is almost the same thing. The Hill Girls. Squares with B- averages and home-cut hair. You can find them behind the counter at their parents’ store; they’re not going anywhere. Except now Suzy is. It wasn’t until Suzy’s graduation that Anna Lisa realized that she herself had not “just graduated.” She was 19, two years into the so-called real world.

  “Well,” Anna Lisa considers, “do you like him?”

  “I do… Not as much as Roy, though.”

  “Roy?”

  “You know, with the white Buick, the convertible? He works at the real estate office. He says Fresno is due for a boom.” Suzy glows. Her life is a convertible.

  “Then why were you… with Kevin?” Anna Lisa blushes, as if it were her indiscretion.

  “I don’t know, I just… oh God, I’m awful, aren’t I? I seem to like whoever I’m with. Not whoever, but, well, I keep thinking that it will all sort itself out. Please don’t tell Mother and Dad,” she repeats. This is her most urgent concern. This is what she wants from Anna Lisa more than advice on her over-popularity problem.

  “Fine,” Anna Lisa says curtly. “I’m not six years old, you know. I’m not some tattle-tale.”

  From there, they retreat to the safe territory of haircuts. Their mother came of age during the Depression and cannot imagine why anyone with a pair of scissors and a mirror would pay a stranger to do the job. Suzy skipped the Lovely Dove, she tells Anna Lisa, for fear of seeing someone who knew Eudora Hill, and ventured across town to Lola Felix’s Beauty Shoppe.

  “I think she was a Mexican,” Suzy whispers. “But it was amazing. She was so kind. I just love saying it, Lo-la Fee-lix. And her fingers in my hair during the shampoo part… glorious!”

  It’s several days before Anna Lisa is alone again with her book. She surprises herself by feigning illness and skipping church.

  “Poor dear,” says Eudora Hill, pausing as she fastens her pearl necklace. “And the day we’re planning the picnic, too.” Her expression tells Anna Lisa this is something she should be sad to miss. Anna Lisa wishes she liked the things she was supposed to like. The first time I saw

  your father, in his crisp white shirt…. Eudora has told them the story many times. How she met Gerald Hill at the annual Fresno Presbyterian picnic. Anna Lisa knows she will never find love at a church picnic, no matter how much she loves cold fried chicken, no matter how starched the boys’ shirts are. For her mother’s sake she tries to be disappointed.

  Her parents tell her to drink plenty of orange juice, and leave with Suzy, who looks as wholesome and sinful as a white orchid in her blouse and skirt. Despite the fact that Anna Lisa has the house to herself, she does not feel safe. The old farmhouse sits in the middle of fallow fields (lettuce or wheat once grew there, depending who you listen to) without a single tree to provide shade.

  Anna Lisa settles for the west corner of the room she shares with Suzy. She unfolds the pink nylon nightgown that one of her spinster aunts gave her for Christmas. It shimmered in the sentimental tree-light, but now it just seems flammable. From its pink yards, Anna Lisa rescues her book. Beneath “Valerie Taylor, Author of WHISPER THEIR LOVE,” red block letters announce “THE GIRLS IN 3-B.” Beneath that, the girls: the jaded blonde with the cigarette watching the brunette in the black slip pull on a stocking, and the girl with her back to the reader. Anna Lisa likes her best. She has wavy black hair and is about to pull off her sweater. The pale valley of her back shows, just a few inches.

  Since buying the book at Secondhand Sam’s—her heart pounding as Sam scrawled the receipt she would immediately shred—Anna Lisa has not read more than the back cover. She knows that the story takes place in Greenwich Village. Apartment 3-B, apparently, contains a number of potted ferns and windows that the girls don’t bother closing when lounging about in their lingerie. Maybe that’s how it is in Greenwich Village, which Anna Lisa thinks is in New York or London. She will wait to see whether “favorite” is spelled with a U. Apartment 3-B looks cramped—the girls may even share a bed—but somehow it is the most spacious place Anna Lisa has seen. A place where things happen. She logs the necessary ingredients for such a life: a tall building, a possibly-velvet bedspread, ferns. Fresno has none of these things. Only whores have velvet bedspreads, Anna Lisa can hear her mot
her saying. Are the girls in 3-B whores?

  She doesn’t know what she’ll do if it turns out she is just like them—a girl who could fall for her own roommates. If their red-lettered desires are just like hers, whatever hers are. And she doesn’t know what she’ll do if the girls of 3-B are nothing like her.

  The book is dog-eared, its spine creased to the point that the title is almost obscured. Who else has read this book? Everyone she knows is upstanding; their outer lives mirror their inner lives, Anna Lisa is sure of it. She corrects herself: Suzy has proven capable of rebellion, and she wears it like a new dress.

  Maybe there is a way. Anna Lisa opens the book. But before she can even find out what the girls’ names are, her gaze is snagged by a black splotch in the middle of the page. When she flips to page two, she sees its cause. A large square of ink has taken up residence over the third paragraph. Nervously, she fans through the pages. Black square after black square jumps out until it’s like a flipbook, a cartoon about a dancing box. The girls of 3-B are lost, a blur of text.

  Her stomach clenches. The crossed-out passages confirm what she is: a pervert who dared to wonder what was underneath. The strength of her wanting has revealed her to herself, more than if the main girl were named Anna Lisa and had thick brown hair and loved strawberry ice cream.

  The doorbell rings. Her parents! Anna Lisa becomes a tidal wave of obliteration, clapping the cover shut, smothering the book with the nightgown and plunging the bundle into the hamper in one movement. She will erase, she will deny.

  She pounds down the stairs, not realizing until she opens the door and sees Roy that her parents have no reason to ring the doorbell.

  “Hi,” he says. His hands are in the pockets of brown dress slacks. He extracts one to raise his palm. “Anna Lisa, right? We were in the same geometry class. Three years ago, can you believe it?”

  Boys blend together for Anna Lisa. Roy could have been in her geometry class. Circles and parallelograms dance in her head.