Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  “You can take longer if you want.”

  “No, no, it’s fine.”

  They wait in silence for the waitress to put out her cigarette and give them the bill.

  Coal has a vet appointment Monday afternoon, and Anna Lisa asks Felix to drive the poodle to Lilac Mines Elementary, where Anna Lisa is on duty for summer day camp. Then they’ll all go to the vet together. Felix would like to be treated as a bit more of a guest, but she tries to pretend that this is Europe and she is one of those travelers who forgoes snapping pictures in front of the Eiffel Tower for picking grapes at a vineyard with locals and fellow adventurers, the ones who want the real experience. Eva could be tangled in vines right now, scratches on her arms, Frenchmen flirting with her. Germany is a beer country, but if Kate’s on tour, they could have moved on.

  Eva, I know you made your decision. You made that really clear, Felix emailed before she left. Not to get all psychobabble on you, but I need some closure—can you just write back and let me know how you’re doing? As for me, some crazy shit has been going down. If there’s any way that you could give me a call, that would be cool.

  She hit “send” and the message zipped into the abyss, along with her where-are-yous and her what-is-it-about-Kates and her do-you-think-there’s-a-chances. The arc of her breakup floats somewhere in cyberspace.

  In this case the “real experience” involves chasing Coal, who wants to play with a chewed-up tennis ball, around the house until she can lasso him with a nylon leash. Coal looks like a dog who would relish riding in a Volkswagen, but he growls and twists and distracts. By the time he’s inside, he’s covered in dust, as are Felix’s silver-studded jeans.

  The school looks like most schools, gray and fortress-like, and Felix feels her outsider status acutely among the waist-high children jumping rope and greeting parents. She’s drawn to the one unique feature of the donut-shaped campus, the one-room schoolhouse in the middle of the schoolyard. Maybe because it’s older than her. A bronze plaque announces that this is the original Lilac Mines School, built in 1881. But a length of chicken wire stretched across the schoolhouse’s sagging porch tells her that this bit of history is for looking, not touching.

  “I never knew there would be so much paperwork in divorce,” an older woman’s voice is saying. Felix rounds the corner of the nurse’s office and finds a big woman in an honest-to-God muumuu talking to her aunt. A wispy little boy sits on the bed across the room, gnawing on the pale pink sheet. Anna Lisa is refilling a jar of Q-Tips. The smell of rubbing alcohol makes Felix queasy.

  “You hear about ’divorce papers.’ You hear people say, ’I got the final divorce papers’ and you think, y’know, it’s just a symbol,” the woman booms. Her thin hair is pulled into a tight bun that seems to anger the rest of her head. “You figure they’re really happy or sad about their divorce. But it’s not true, Anna Lisa, it really is the paper that makes you sad, the paper that makes you happy when it’s the last one. You know your marriage is over long before anyone says ’divorce,’ so all that’s left to torture you is paper, paper, paper!” She throws up her flabby arms in a gesture Felix finds embarrassing.

  Anna Lisa looks up from her cotton swabs and sees Felix and Coal. “Blanca, this is my niece, up from L.A. till Halloween. Felix, this is Blanca Randall. And her grandson, Telly.”

  “Telly’s in a little bit of trouble,” Blanca stage-whispers. She winks, but Felix doesn’t know what the joke is. She does not want to be complicit with Blanca Randall; in the minute Felix has observed her, Blanca appears to be the exact opposite of everything Felix strives to be. She even wants her own heartbreak to be different from Blanca’s. She recoils from the woman, until she is pressed against the balloon-printed wallpaper alongside Telly.

  “I know what you mean,” Anna Lisa continues to Blanca. “It was the same with my ex.”

  Felix holds her breath. Will her aunt play the pronoun game? It’s easy to be out-and-proud in a world of adults. In kid worlds, you risk the wrath of grown-ups who think the little ones should be fed neat and wholesome narratives. She wants Anna Lisa to accept the dare.

  Felix feels her summer hinge on whatever her aunt says next. If Anna Lisa resists the urge to be vague, Felix’s bones will knit. The woodsman will make capes out of Guy Guy and Eva Guy’s pelts, and Felix will wear her inheritance with ass-kicking confidence.

  “He was out of my life by… good God, by 1974, I guess,” Anna Lisa says. “I moved to another town, but the mail followed me to my new post office box. There were so many documents, it kind of made him bigger than he actually was.”

  No, Anna Lisa will not sprinkle her speech with “they” and “them” and “my ex.” She will straight-out lie. She will just stand there, not even looking ashamed, her face serene and memory-glazed. She won’t even drop a Q-Tip. Felix’s legs bend beneath her.

  Blanca turns to her grandson. “Take that sheet out of your mouth, Telly. Are you a baby or are you a young man?”

  “Neither,” whispers Telly. The wet sheet falls to his lap. “I’m a little boy.”

  “Little boys grow up to be young men,” she snaps. Then she speaks over the top of his head to Anna Lisa. “Why can’t he just get in fights like other boys? Why does he have to get in trouble for coloring in a library book, for goodness sakes?”

  Felix is breathing hard and fast, trying to think. There is something to be said here, but Blanca gathers up her grandson quickly and adjusts her purse. On her way out, she seems to see Felix for the first time, despite Anna Lisa’s introduction.

  “Don’t let our moaning and groaning get you down, dear. We’re just a couple of bitter old broads, God help us. There are lots of nice men out there, and if you’re lucky, you won’t make the same mistakes your aunt and I did.”

  Felix and Anna Lisa drive home from the vet’s in their separate cars. By the time Felix has a chance to talk to her aunt, the incident is far away, a debatable history. Maybe Anna Lisa said “she” and Felix misheard. But Felix’s stomach remains rubbery, and she spins this feeling into a pearl of anger. How is she supposed to transcend gaudy, rainbow flag-waving parades if Anna Lisa hasn’t even worked up to them?

  “I couldn’t believe you lied to that woman,” Felix says as her aunt changes from her comfortable nurse shoes to even more comfortable sneakers, like a lesbian Mr. Rogers.

  Anna Lisa looks up, perplexed. “What are you talking about?”

  “Saying your ex was some guy you divorced.”

  Anna Lisa stares for a minute. “Wow, your mother hasn’t told you anything, has she?”

  “My mom told me you were gay.” Actually, she’d talked about “your aunt’s husband” when Felix was little, but she explained the truth when Felix was in junior high. That was the first time Felix paid attention—fascinated, horrified—to a story about one of her dull and distant relatives.

  “It’s the 21st century, you know,” Felix says defensively. “People, like, died and stuff so we could be out.”

  “I never asked anyone to die for me.” Her aunt is clearly annoyed. Is she belittling Felix’s injuries? Not that Felix’s sacrifice was intentional, but she wants someone to tell her she is brave, even if it’s a lie.

  “Who’s Blanca Randall, anyway?” Felix retorts. She leans forward for emphasis, which makes her side hurt. “Some loud woman in a muumuu? You don’t need to be afraid of her.”

  “Some of my best friends wear muumuus, Felix.”

  “I’m just saying it’s not like she can judge.”

  “Only supermodels have the right to judge?” Now the conversation has been hijacked—it’s about clothing and attitude.

  “I’m just saying you should tell the truth!” Felix is surprised by the volume of her voice. Her face is hot and tears hover at the corners of her eyes. She waits, silver bracelets clinking on her shaking wrists, for Anna Lisa to respond. She wants her aunt to tell her that there is such a thing as truth, but Anna Lisa just gives her a parental look that says, You clearly cann
ot be reasoned with.

  “Look, don’t assume you know everything,” Anna Lisa says quietly. “If you go through life jumping to conclusions, you’ll never get the real story.” She pads out of the room in her quiet shoes, a promise that, no, Felix will not get the real story, at least not from her.

  THIS AINT SAN FRANCISCO

  Anna Lisa: Lilac Mines, 1965

  There were no direct buses from Fresno to San Francisco within Anna Lisa’s price range. This one curves up the arched spine of the state into towns with names like Angels Camp and Lilac Mines. At each stop they pick up a few more people until, by Lilac Mines, Anna Lisa feels like an old timer. The girl next to her—who got on in Modesto—bounces a red-faced baby on her lap. She sings songs and plays pat-a-cake, but the child keeps crying. A few people grumble, but most shoot mother and child looks of tired sympathy. Anna Lisa doesn’t feel sorry for them. The world loves you, she thinks. The woman is doing what women are supposed to do. In Lilac Mines, a barely-there town at the foot of a mountain, she steps out to give her ears a break.

  She’s scared to leave her suitcase—the one that sat, packed, in her closet for three weeks while she worked up the courage to leave, saved her money, composed a note that explained as much as she could without explaining too much—in the bus, so she lugs it to the drugstore, where she scans the menu for cherry cola. It’s not there, so she settles for regular. Her throat and stomach welcome the icy sweetness. Even though she’s wearing her thinnest dress, blue-flowered and nearly transparent, the heat is sinister in its persistence. At the other end of the soda fountain, a young man takes his own soda from the shopkeeper. When he sits down next to Anna Lisa, she sees that there’s a cherry in his.

  “I thought they didn’t have cherry cola,” she says. “It wasn’t on the menu.”

  “Just gotta ask,” he says, smiling. She recognizes him from the bus. He has thick hair that grows in several different directions, or maybe that’s just the legacy of napping on the road. There’s a gap in his smile. “I’m John.”

  What a horribly dull name, Anna Lisa thinks. Boys so frequently have dull names. She likes the way girls’ names sound like flowers, even names that aren’t Rose or Daisy. Even names like Christine and Delia and Phoebe.

  “Anna Lisa,” she says.

  “Nice to meet you, Anna Lisa. Can I buy you cherry cola?”

  “Oh, no, thank you,” she says quickly. She’s only gone on one date before. She didn’t know what to do with her hands or where to look, afraid of what each gesture might mean to this creature who opened doors and twisted his class ring on his finger. She’s not sure if John is trying to turn their bus break into a date, but she doesn’t want to take any chances. She lifts her glass. “I’m almost done with this one anyway.”

  John is unfazed. The world is full of girls thirsty for cherry cola. “So why are you going to Eureka?” he asks.

  “I’m not, I’m going to San Francisco.” She didn’t pay attention to where the bus went after that. She hopes he won’t ask why she’s going to San Francisco.

  John frowns. “Not on this bus, I hope. This bus goes through a few more small towns and then on up to Eureka. I’m going to get a logging job.”

  “No, it goes to San Francisco first.” Her voice is thin, existing only in her mouth, as if her lungs have deserted her.

  Now John smiles with half his mouth. The look is part pity, part righteousness. “You can check at the bus station if you want.”

  Anna Lisa leaves her soda in its ring of condensation and runs out of the drugstore, slamming her suitcase into a rack of magazines that she doesn’t bother to pick up. It’s late Saturday afternoon; the sign on the single window of the tiny bus station informs her that it closed an hour ago and will not re-open until Monday morning. But a yellowed schedule confirms that John is right: the bus she’s on will snake through the Sacramento Valley and stop in Eureka, skipping San Francisco. The next bus to San Francisco departs Wednesday. She has enough money for a ticket, but not if she spends four nights in a hotel. The next bus to back to Fresno costs less and leaves Tuesday, which she can manage if she doesn’t eat over the weekend. She reaches into her purse and touches the stack of bills curled like a snail in hopes of divining an answer. She can’t believe her own stupidity. She replays her original ticket purchase over and over—her question whispered so low that the woman at the window made her repeat it three times.

  Maybe, Anna Lisa concludes, she is not meant to go to San Francisco. Maybe San Francisco is for girls like the girls of 3-B, girls who smoke and wear black stockings. Destiny is laughing at her for thinking she could have a big, wild life. She should call her parents now. She can hear her mother’s voice: I don’t know what got into you. Anna Lisa will repeat it back: I don’t know what got into me, affirming her mother in herself, her promise to live a life more like her mother’s from now on.

  But for the moment there’s no leaving Lilac Mines. She checks into the first hotel she finds, the Lilac Mines Hotel, quite possibly the only one. As soon as she rattles open the door to her room with a skeleton key, she flings herself on the bed. Her sweat-drenched dress clings to her torso and legs, and the comforter is itchy, but her lungs have returned to her. A giant sigh leaves her body. She relaxes into the secure sleep of a decision made for her, if just for tonight.

  When she wakes up, the room is dark. For a minute she’s not sure where she is. Her hands grope for something familiar. They land on her watch. It’s 10:15. Outside her window the moon is a copper penny demanding to be spent. This may be her only night away. She can’t imagine sleeping through till morning.

  Downstairs the restaurant-and-bar is sparsely populated, but somehow it glows enticingly. She thinks of saloons in Westerns, swinging doors, girls in ruffles and garters. This must be what those bars look like in color, when you’re in one and not just watching. She has changed from her wilted dress to a pair of slacks. Now her thighs don’t stick together; she feels vaguely like a cowboy. She sits at a small round table in the corner, hoping the waiter won’t see her for a while, since she can’t order anything. She touches the round slump of her belly, wondering how long she can go without food. Already she is hungry, but maybe her body will give up hope of being fed if she waits long enough.

  Anna Lisa finds herself gazing at the broad back of a man at the bar. He’s wearing a work shirt; his hand rests on a bottle of beer the same light amber as his hair. Mushrooming over the barstool, his hips are large for a man’s. There are so many things Anna Lisa doesn’t know how to do: talk to boys, order a drink, buy a bus ticket apparently. Are these skills a matter of time or destiny? What would happen if she transformed herself into a person like Suzy? If she walked up to the man at the bar and said something friendly? She reminds herself that nothing will come of it—she’s returning to Fresno in a few days—and this emboldens her.

  She slides onto a stool near the man with the beer, leaving a stool between them. The bartender is on the other side of the square bar, twirling a rag on his finger with a blend of boredom and intense concentration. The man glances up at her, then back down. Anna Lisa wills herself to look at him. She takes in his profile: small straight nose, soft chin, freckles a shade lighter than her own. Blonde eyebrows that fade out at the edges. And somewhere in these details lies a revelation. The man is a woman.

  “Hi,” she says, which is what she’d planned to say to a man, too. She did not know a woman could look like this. She did not know that girl hips could find a home in straight brown trousers. As alien as the ensemble is, she’s the right alien for it; on her planet, this must be what women look like.

  “Hey,” she says. Her voice is dark ale.

  “Do you live here?” Anna Lisa needs to know where this planet is.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I just wondered…” Anna Lisa stutters. “I was going to San Francisco,” she adds, as if this explains her presence in Lilac Mines.

  The woman makes a face not unlike John’s, but it
’s just a stopping point on her way to a full smile. “Well, this ain’t San Francisco. But sure, I live here. It’s not so bad.”

  “I’m Anna Lisa.”

  The woman laughs. “Seriously? You sure don’t look like an Anna Lisa.”

  Anna Lisa has never thought about what she looked like, name-wise. It’s just something she was born into. Now she has a burning desire to know what she does look like, but she can’t ask; it would seem flirtatious.

  “Name’s Jody.” Indeed, Jody looks like a Jody: Irish, tough, friendly, boyish. “Hey, what’re you drinking?”

  “Um, I’m not. I’m too young, and besides—”

  “Gotta start sometime, right?” Jody waves to the bartender. “A Pabst for my friend, Anna Lisa.” She says it in that inside-joke way, and in this faraway bar with a woman who looks like a man, Anna Lisa feels like one of the girls. The warmth in her chest is so strong and rare that she can’t send back the bottle that lands in front of her, an uncapped twin to Jody’s.

  Is it possible that Jody is buying the beer for her? She’s not sure if she wants this to be the case or not, but when the bartender—his fingers tickling the rag at his side, promising to return to it—says, “Sixty-five cents,” Jody doesn’t reach for the wallet that bulges from her back pocket.

  So Anna Lisa extracts her coin purse, which she suddenly wishes were a real wallet. She touches the coins it would take to pay for the beer. She touches the sleeping bills next to them. Blood races past her ears. “Can I also get a ham and cheese sandwich?” she hears herself saying. The words make her hunger rear up, stomp its feet. “And a side of mashed potatoes?” she says. “And a strawberry shake?”

  “All right,” Jody says. “That’s what I call a real man’s appetite.” If Anna Lisa’s mother said she was eating like a man, she’d be telling her daughter to slow down, chew 20 times before swallowing. But from Jody it sounds like a compliment.