by Cheryl Klein
“Uh, is Suzy around?” Roy wants to know. His Buick is a stretched-out summer cloud in their driveway. Roy is a sky-blue boy who likes a flower-pink girl.
“No, she’s at church. I stayed home. I’m sick.” She says it too quickly. She thinks, I’m sick.
“Okay, well, tell her I stopped by.” Roy returns to his cloud and floats off down the gravel road.
Anna Lisa makes her decision in the dark. A twin bed away from her, Suzy’s silhouette breathes up and down, a girl unafraid of her dreams. In the wicker hamper, the book waits. The shades of 3-B are shut tight, and Anna Lisa suspects this makes the girls sad. More than worrying that the book might be found, she begins to think of it as a lost puppy. She will rescue it, find it a home.
She puts her bare feet on the rag rug. The floor conspires with her, squeak-less, as if she were a ghost moving across the room. Mining her way through Suzy’s deflated church clothes and her own moist socks, Anna Lisa’s hands hit gold. As soon as she picks it up, she lets out a deep sigh.
But where will the book be happy? Greenwich Village? She likes the sound of this, a green witch specializing in something wilder than black or white magic. Even if she knew where this magical village was, though, she doesn’t have the money to get there. San Francisco is not so impossibly far away. She thinks of fog, bridges. They went there on a family vacation when she was little—she remembers cold wind. This appeals to her, the opposite of Fresno stillness, where the scent of onions lolls in the air for days after a harvest. She remembers the immense, frightening ocean and the sea lions that played there. I will be a sea lion, Anna Lisa thinks.
Before the sun can rise and convince her otherwise, Anna Lisa packs. The suitcase is half Suzy’s, but she imagines her parents will replace it. Suzy will get married and they’ll buy their good daughter a set of matched luggage for her honeymoon. There’s surprisingly little to take. Thin gauze of dress, arc of shoe. It’s as if she barely existed until now.
HUNGRY, HOMELESS, NEED A JOB?
Felix: Lilac Mines, 2002
Felix pictured a train station reunion. Somehow she would acquire a steamer trunk. The tracks would lead to Lilac Mines, a town of 2,000 on the eastern edge of Calaveras County. Anna Lisa would greet her with a doughy, dykey hug, and before long Felix would admit her mother was right: they did have a lot in common.
After perusing New York apartment listings online, Felix quickly realized there was no way to move there without a job or a hefty student loan. And as much as she tries not to fall for stereotypes, the thought of living in a city known for muggings terrifies her now. All Lilac Mines has going for it, really, is that it’s not L.A., but she’s determined to make the best of it. Somehow, her aunt will transform her from a middle class girl in an overpriced peasant blouse into a back-alley wrestler, passionate enough to do real damage with her steel-toed boots.
But Felix’s journey has been an endless stretch of chaparral punctuated by gas stations masquerading as towns. Not even the Best Road Trip Compilation in the World (as Robbie labeled the CD spinning in her car stereo) can glamorize the 7-Elevens and Burger Kings.
She insisted on driving herself, despite her mother’s protests. She crammed a summer’s worth of clothes into her baby blue New Beetle, and pasted a rainbow sticker on the bumper. She used to think they were lame, but she’s feeling militant at the moment. Nevertheless, every time another car tails her too closely, she worries her car’s ass has offended him. When she stops for gas, she looks around nervously.
The neck brace is gone, thank God, but her ribs are still bound and painful, and she moves stiffly. Still, it feels good to be out on her own. Eva won’t be the only one to spend her summer traveling. Felix has had enough of hovering, too-nice roommates and coworkers and doctors, and sheriff’s deputies who never have anything new to report. Felix described her attackers—again—to a hate crimes specialist and to a sketch artist, who drew two beautifully detailed portraits of two generic looking white men. Her words were so inadequate (blond, brown, straight nose… no, his eyebrows weren’t like that). If she spoke the same words to a different artist, a completely different person would appear on the page. And yet she knows she would recognize either guy in an instant.
Lilac Mines erupts out of nothing. The skyline promises snowcapped mountains, but the town begins in yellow foothills, as if to get a running start before climbing the mountain, which it does, impressively. She studies her map, printed from the Internet. It seems funny that the Internet and Lilac Mines know about each other, but look, there between the Gold Rush Tavern and Nugget Gifts, a sign that says “Internet Café, Cappuccino.” As if there might be a café that does not have cappuccino on its menu. Felix quickly surmises that this is Lilac Mines: one foot in the Gold Rush and one in 1997.
She clutches the print-out. Her hands are chilled from the car’s air conditioning, her armpits are sweaty. She hopes the map will not lie to her.
But the meandering, pixely lines don’t match up with the roads unfolding in front of her. She’s supposed to be on North Main Street, but the signs say West Main Street, suggesting an entirely different orientation. Is this like Little Santa Monica and Big Santa Monica, something only locals know? Is the key to her map trapped in an oral history?
Felix punches Anna Lisa’s number into her cell phone. In the weeks Felix spent planning the trip—quitting her job, subletting her room, shopping to the point of numbness, emailing Eva and not getting a reply—she and her aunt spoke on the phone twice. Short, cordial conversations. Felix told herself that it would be different in person.
Anna Lisa picks up in the middle of her own recorded voice. “Sorry, I was gardening,” she says, slightly out of breath. Felix is somehow surprised that her aunt’s day had substance prior to Felix’s arrival.
“Sorry to bug you, but I think I’m a little lost,” Felix says.
“You’re what?” The phone crackles and skips.
“Lost!”
“Where are you?”
“West Main and, uh…” She cranes her neck to look for a sign. “Inga Lunaris Road? Who’s Inga Lunaris? The map says I’m supposed to be on North Main.”
“There are two Mains,” Anna Lisa says. “I know, it’s strange. The north-south one used to be called—” Her voice sputters out, and Felix can only catch dashes of words.
“HOW DO I GET TO YOUR PLACE?” Felix shouts.
Anna Lisa talks her through it, with much repetition. She turns left at the intersection of Main and Main, passing an art deco theater with a marquee that reads: “JUNE: LATE NIGHT CATECHISM, AUGUST: LOVE LETTERS, EVERY SATURDAY: GOLDRUSH MELODRAMA.” She supposes that Gold Rush Melodrama is to Lilac Mines what Rocky Horror is to the indie theater on (Big) Santa Monica Boulevard. North Main propels her uphill. Usually, driving a stick shift makes Felix feel tough. Now she hopes she won’t roll into the mudfreckled truck behind her.
On the right side of North Main, there is dust. Thick, Steinbeck-style dust turns the bald half of the hillside into a sepia picture: small brown houses, trailers, structures that appear to be frozen on the verge of collapse. The other side of the street is like a giant Christmas tree lot. Some of the pines grow straight up out of white desert sand, as if they don’t need water or soil or any of the things that trees need. And as her gaze travels west, the mountain turns a preppy green. Lush and still as a wall calendar.
Anna Lisa’s house is just a few blocks into the green side of town. Like the other houses on Juliet Street, it’s a sort of a modern cabin. The structures Felix passes are naturally colored and pimped out with un-cabin-like amenities: satellite dishes, air conditioning boxes, mail boxes built to match the homes. Felix is thankful that Anna Lisa has limited her decorations to a “Beware of Dog” sign and a bush of yellow flowers. In the window, a motley row of purple glass bottles do their best to shimmer in the 6 p.m. sunlight.
Gripping the smaller of her suitcases and fighting her fluttering stomach, Felix knocks.
The sound of furiou
s barking makes Felix snap her hand away from the door. Anna Lisa opens it with one hand, wrestling a black standard poodle with the other.
“Stay, Coal,” she says sternly. The dog reluctantly obliges.
Her aunt’s hug is light, but it still aggravates Felix’s bruises. Afterward, Anna Lisa stands in the doorway for a nervous moment. She’s wearing jeans that hug her sizeable hips, a T-shirt advertising “Lilac Mines Festival 1997.”
“You’re here,” she says. “That was fast.” She has that lesbian voice, not quite deep but flat where a gay man’s would be punctuated and italicized. “Well, uh, come in. Dinner’s almost ready.”
She shows Felix to the sparse guest room at the back of the house. There is a bookcase stocked with gardening books, and a twin bed. Felix turns in a slow circle, the dog’s black eyes following her. She feels like she’s standing in a museum, in an installation called something like, “Anonymous Slept Here.” She unpacks her hats and shoes and hurries to rejoin Anna Lisa in the kitchen.
Her aunt removes a pot roast from the oven with lobster-shaped mitts.
“Wow, check those out,” Felix says.
“From a student,” Anna Lisa explains. Felix remembers that she’s a nurse at an elementary school. The elementary school, Felix supposes.
The pot roast sits in the pan, a big brown lump steaming angrily. Felix can’t believe anyone still eats pot roast. Even her mother makes things like chicken-and-black-bean burritos. Even her friends on all-protein diets eat cheeseburgers wrapped in lettuce. Disgusting and cruel, but contemporary.
Actually, the pot roast smells delicious. Heavy and savory, carrots and onions swimming in gravy. It smells like her childhood, which takes her by surprise. She sees the old black and gold linoleum, the plates bordered with rosebuds. There must have been pre-burrito days, she realizes. What other dishes have been lost?
Unlike many of her fellow vegetarians, who claim that a sip of chicken broth will make them ill, Felix loves the smell of bacon and fish sticks and, apparently, pot roast. She eats so many veggie burgers and pseudo-sausages and fake McNuggets that she occasionally forgets that other burgers and sausages and nuggets are made out of real dead animals. She has nearly ordered them from menus by accident. There’s relatively little process involved in pot roast, however. There’s no forgetting here.
“Um, Aunt Anna Lisa, that looks great, but—well, I don’t know if my mom mentioned that I’m a vegetarian?” She’s not sure why this should be her mom’s job, but that seems right. Grown-ups feed, kids eat.
“Oh. Well, shit.” If Anna Lisa were Felix’s mother, this is the part where she’d apologize and offer to grill up a cheese sandwich. Anna Lisa just stands there thinking, lobsters on hips. “There’s one health food kind of place in town, but they close early on Sundays. Could you find something to eat at a lunch counter-type joint?”
“Sure, yeah, no problem,” Felix says eagerly. Anna Lisa is butch in that older-woman way. Short hair, the same brown as Felix’s, clothes you could change a tire in. You can’t quite tell if she’s fucking with gender or is just fed up with pantyhose. And really, should anyone have to wear pantyhose more than five or six times in a lifetime? Felix wants to make her aunt feel as comfortable as white-kneed jeans would, even as she wants to be the newcomer in moon boots, footwear no one here is advanced enough to understand.
The lunch counter place has a tin ceiling, a dark-wood-and-marble soda fountain and, Felix counts, 32 wall-mounted signs saying things like, “Hungry, Homeless, Need a Job? Call the Sierra Club & ask about Their no-growth Policy.” Felix bristles at the sentiment and the sloppy capitalization. Over a bowl of limp spaghetti Felix asks her aunt, “What are the politics like here?” She’s learned to call the red parts of the map “fly-over territory.” That way she can dismiss them before they can hate her.
Anna Lisa shrugs. “Like anywhere, I guess. A little of everything.”
The shelves behind the counter where they sit are stocked with canned soup and different types of ore, labeled with kindergarten-teacher handwriting. Silver. Gold. Copper. It’s hard to tell what’s for sale and what’s not. What Felix meant was, How are you a lesbian here?
The only other person here is the waitress, who leans against the soda case, smoking. Felix is pretty sure that’s illegal, but she’s not about to call her on it. She looks older than she is, 40 going on 50. She has stringy orange hair and penciled-in eyebrows. She watches them, and Felix tells herself that the woman is probably just bored. Still, it makes her nervous. Now that the rules have changed, anyone might turn on her—say something that will cut into her, pull her down a dark alley.
Felix says, “That dog of yours wasn’t very happy to see me,” meaning, Why do you have a poodle when you’re so butch? And, But you’re happy to see me, right?
“Coalie? Oh, he’s not as bad as he sounds. Or as goofy as he looks. He’s great at hunting mice, and he chases rabbits out of the yard. He’s smart, too. I got him at the shelter when he was six weeks old, this little fluff-ball. No one knew where he came from.”
The dog conversation runs out quickly, and Anna Lisa seems content to sit there eating her cheeseburger. Forks clink against plates. The noise reminds Felix of movies about unhappy families. She wants to make pithy comments about the plaques on the wall, but what if Anna Lisa does hate the Sierra Club? They haven’t talked about the attack. Suzy told Anna Lisa, but when Felix and her aunt talked directly, they spoke of the trip as if it were strictly a vacation. Felix doesn’t know what to say. Her questions are too big, and she feels tiny, ignorant. A stupid Red Riding Hood who spent too much time talking to wolves about nightclubs.
“I’m thinking of going to New York after this,” Felix volunteers.
“After this?”
“After, you know, after staying with you for a while. I’m going to send away for some applications to fashion design programs and apply at the end of the summer.”
Anna Lisa brandishes a pickle spear. “So you could use the free room and board, and the peace and quiet?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Felix says hurriedly. No-bullshit people scare Felix. They seem capable of anything. And Anna Lisa is proving to be a no-bullshit lady. Felix likes a little bullshit; she likes her conversations safe and accessorized.
After another pause, Anna Lisa says, “You healing okay?”
Felix swallows. “I’m still kind of sore. Really sore, actually. And I think this thing on my lip is going to leave a scar, but, yeah, I’m okay.”
As soon as she says it, though, her eyes fill up with tears. Before she can put her crumpled napkin to her face, they spill over, and she’s making gulping sounds that echo throughout the store. Is it her imagination, or does the waitress roll her eyes?
“It’s freaking me out,” she admits between sobs. She glances at the waitress and lowers her voice. “I thought those times were over. I mean, maybe not in, like, Wyoming, but at least in West Hollywood. Every place I go in L.A. reminds me of my ex-girlfriend, and now, to top things off, I’m looking over my shoulder all the time for guys with baseball bats.”
“They had bats?” Anna Lisa raises an eyebrow.
“No, but….” She’s avoided talking about any of it with her roommates and coworkers, but with Anna Lisa, it all comes rushing out. She wants her aunt to see the attack as a badge of courage. She wants to fall into her arms and be saved. “I was trying to be useful! I was suggesting some good clubs to go to, and then they just turned on me.”
“Yeah, well, people do rotten things,” Anna Lisa mutters uncomfortably. She squints at something outside of the window. “Don’t try to be useful, that’s my advice.”
Felix nods. She feels like she’s just been kneed in the stomach again. When Felix catches her breath after an interminable awkward silence, she throws out a new topic. “When was the last time you were in L.A.? I must have been six or seven.”
“You were pretty little. Leigan wasn’t even born yet, and Michelle was potty trainin
g, I remember.” Felix’s sisters, now a freshman at Caltech and a hostess at a pseudo-French restaurant, respectively. “Your poor mother was so frazzled. You were in your button stage.” Anna Lisa wipes mustard from her hands with a thin paper napkin.
“My button stage?” Felix rubs her eyes.
“Mm-hmm. You would only wear clothes with buttons. The bigger and more colorful, the better. You had a little shirt with plastic, whale-shaped buttons that you wanted to wear every single day. And Suzy just about tore her hair out trying to get you to wear elastic-waistband pants.”
“Really? I don’t remember that at all. Buttons?”
“Number-shaped buttons, fake pearl buttons, you name it. You were an obsessive kid, that’s what your mom always said. When you were in fifth grade or so, she wrote me about how you were obsessed with the Titanic. Every report you did for school had to be about the Titanic. You wanted to change your name to Molly Brown.”
Slowly, it comes back to Felix. She used to lie awake thinking about how terrible and romantic it would be to lie at the bottom of the sea. She didn’t know that her mother thought she was “obsessive,” though. But now that she thinks about it, there were other phases. When she was in seventh grade, girls started greeting their friends in the hallway with dramatic hugs instead of shy smiles. Felix would keep a tally—small and coded in the back of her notebook—of how many hugs she could accumulate from popular girls in a given day. Her record was 13. In college, long before it dawned on her that she might be a dyke, she became obsessed with gay male culture: dance music, drag queen fashions, anything ironic. It seemed a tad pathological in retrospect. Felix is embarrassed to discover that these passionately adhered-to trends were, apparently, a lifelong pattern. “Well,” she says breezily, “I’m just Felix now. Not Molly Brown.”
“And I’m just Anna Lisa.” She peers into Felix’s half-empty bowl. “Are you all finished?”
Why is she in such a hurry to leave? Trying not to sound insulted, Felix says, “Sure, I guess.”