Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  “So why’d he get rid of them?” Tawn says, arms crossed. She’s cute when she’s skeptical—one dark eyebrow raised, T-shirt pulled tight over young-girl breasts.

  “He moved into this apartment building and lived above the woman who had the best hearing in the world. Like it was actually measured by the Guinness Book of World Records. And she could hear him tapping away on his wood floors, even in these normal, non-tap shoes. So he had to switch to sock feet.”

  “That’s still kind of sad.”

  “No,” Felix assures her. “It’s not, because he and the woman hooked up. They had, like, really amazing sex. Both of them in their sock feet. She said she could hear his heartbeat when she put her ear to his elbow. It didn’t work out in the end, but that’s okay, ’cause it wasn’t really love anyway. The woman moved to a different building, and the man moved into her apartment, and it was on the first floor. The first first-floor apartment he’d ever had—because New York is like that, you have to take what you can get—and he finally got to tap in his actual tap shoes. He bought a new pair to celebrate, and sent this pair to Goodwill.”

  Tawn has paused in the middle of putting knee socks on a female mannequin. The look on her face says she’s not sure if she buys it, but she’ll play along.

  So Felix tells her about how the socks belonged to a girl who bought her entire uniform for the prep school her parents wanted her to attend, and decided at the last minute to go to public school with her friends instead.

  “On the first day of class,” Felix says, “she tore off her socks and stuffed them in her backpack. She ripped the sleeves off her stiff white shirt. But she kept the cute plaid miniskirt because those get trendy every fall anyway.”

  “You’re really into what’s trendy, aren’t you?” says Tawn.

  “No,” Felix says, “but the schoolgirl is.” She smiles, volleying Tawn’s mischievous look back to her.

  They dress the mannequins in plaid. Tawn looks a little green when they discover a brown stain on one of the skirts. They give their school kids backpacks and books. A romance novel for the boy and a coffee table book about hot rods for the girl. Felix tells Tawn about the pants that starred as the “before” pair in a weight loss commercial before being donated by their newly svelte owner, and the golf cap given up when its owner discovered a hidden talent for gymnastics.

  The store is open now and Matty helps the customers, who are few and low-maintenance. By the time their mannequins are ready for school, Tawn is ready to try her own story.

  “So this ugly purse,” she begins, picking up a shapeless leather satchel, “was actually used, uh, to carry three little kittens—”

  “Who lost their mittens?”

  “Shh, I’m trying. Fine, four kittens, from under the overpass on Washoe Street to a lady’s house. And she took care of them and everything. But got them fixed when they were old enough, of course.”

  “Kittens,” Felix nods. “That’s good. You can’t go wrong with kittens.”

  “Are you making fun of me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Anyway,” says Tawn, flinging the golf cap at Felix like a frisbee, “the kittens peed all over the purse. So the lady couldn’t wear it anymore, which was a good thing for everyone. The end.”

  “Much better.”

  When Felix gets back to Anna Lisa’s house, there are corn muffins cooling on the counter. Crispy on the outside, cakey inside, flecked with little bits of real corn. She wonders where her aunt learned to bake. Felix’s mother is an add-some-real-cheddar-to-the-mac-and-cheese-mix cook. But Anna Lisa, once again, is not around to ask.

  After rinsing her plate, Felix retreats to the guest room. According to Crane, Robbie adores Genevieve, the subletter. Apparently, Genevieve makes marinara sauce to rival her namesake. (The residents of apartment 414 are hopelessly branded: Genevieve Barilla, Crane Mitsubishi, Robbie McCormick, and Felix Ketay share their last names with a pasta, a car company, a mortuary, and a literary agency, respectively.) Genevieve has Betty Page bangs and crazy art school friends. Genevieve makes abstract papier-mâché sculptures because she believes in the return of beauty.

  Felix vows to make her reluctant sublet a little more her own. She retrieves the stack of old postcards from the nightstand; she could tape them around the dresser mirror. It would be a start. Flipping past a black and white landscape and a portrait of a stoic Native American man, she selects one of the oldest looking postcards, an illustration of a poppy, as intricate and vulnerable as a page from a sketchbook. Unlike the others, it has writing on the back. The handwriting is heavily slanted, anxiously pushing forward.

  My Dear Cal, Why must you be all the way ’cross town? (I’m kiding with you of course, but its fun to write, is it not?) Father was in a bit of a mood to-day. I never thought I would say it, but some times I miss school. Time is slow as soup with out it, and with out you. But we’are going berry picking in just a few short days! I am praying for sun but not too much of it, and wilde straw-berries galor! All my love, L.

  Felix studies the last letter. It is a joyous loop of an L, written in faded pencil. And she can’t help but think, L is for Lilac. Of course she would think this, she reminds herself—the way Cookie Monster would think, C is for Cookie. The ancient postmark is local, dated August 1899. It would have been just a few weeks before she died. The handwriting is youthful—well formed but not yet set in its ways. Not weighed down by anything so dull as correct spelling.

  Who is Cal? Is he really such a dear? There’s no last name, just an address: 319 Washoe Str., E. Beedleborough, Calif. Felix thinks of the young, bare-chested miner. It’s just a hunch, of course, but today stories come easily to her. Maybe Dearest Cal invited Lilac to go berry-picking. Maybe he promised that the best berries were farther up the mountain, just a little farther still. The next thing Lilac knew, the air was thin, and the August sun burned a red line into the part of her hair. Dearest Cal took his shirt off. He seemed too perfect to be real, and she felt far away from him. When he suggested going in the mine, she agreed to it, hoping that in the dark, it would feel like they lived in the same world again.

  Felix shakes her head. Tawn is rubbing off on her. It’s just as likely that Cal was sweet and gentle, the kind of guy who takes his dates berry-picking. It’s likely that “L” is not Lilac Ambrose. And it’s very likely that Cal is not the scary-studly miner from the photo. What are the chances?

  The postcard becomes an artifact in Felix’s hands. Suddenly she feels guilty touching it, like she should be wearing gloves. But she can’t quite let go either. She holds it gently, Maybe-Lilac’s words between her own purple-glitter thumbnails. Out loud, she says, “All my love, Lilac.”

  A + M FOREVER

  Al: Lilac Mines, 1965

  Al assumes she’ll go back home and Lilac Mines will fade into a strange, distant episode, but she’s not quite ready to be sure of it. So she gives herself a few more days, another week, to pretend that Lilac Mines is real. She tries not to think about the fact that the days now add up to nearly two months.

  On Fridays and Saturdays, the women eat dinner in a hurry, dress in a drawn-out frenzy and head for Lilac’s, where they look at each other as if half of them didn’t walk over together. As if the butches’ DAs weren’t sculpted from spit on palms, as if the femmes didn’t have to pay for their own drinks. Al has consumed more beer in the past eight weeks than she has in her life up till now. She’s gone out more in the past seven days than during all of high school. She’s compressed a lifetime into a handful of weeks and, for now, it’s Fresno that is fuzzy and unreal.

  One night, she touches Meg’s hair. She’s playing darts next to Jody, whose arm slices through the air like a tractor-trailer rumbling through the hot valley—not quite graceful, but accurate and unstoppable. The frayed dart pricks a ring near the middle.

  “You should see her when she’s sober.” Caleb the bartender is sweeping coins from the bar into his palm. Al has learned that Caleb smiles only with his eye
s. At first she thought he was unfriendly, but now she knows she just has to look closely. This is a world of looking closely: handkerchiefs peeking out of men’s pockets mean different things depending on whether they are orange or green or light blue. A girl off limits yesterday might be available today, but you have to move in oh so slowly. Al has to still herself to sense the movement, like a rabbit with its ears up.

  Jody is frustrated that the dart is not closer to the bull’s-eye. She throws her head back and shakes out her arms. She takes bar games very seriously.

  “Your turn,” she says to Al.

  Al is less sober than Jody, and probably got worse marks in Phys Ed. Her strategy in dodgeball was always to avoid the ball at first, comfortable in the throng of fleeing students, then—when it was being thrown by one of the milder members of the other team—throw herself in its path and get tagged out before she became a real target. Jody probably played like a boy, actually trying to catch the ball.

  Al rolls the dart in her fingers, the dartboard swaying like a happy moon. She lets go. Suddenly Meg is where the moon was, and the dart is heading toward her neck. Meg turns, her lips forming a dark red O.

  But Meg must have been a P.E. ace as well. She puts her purse up as a shield. The dart pierces it with a thwip.

  Al lunges toward Meg. Her vision has proved untrustworthy, so her fingers take over. They land on Meg’s dark hair—shiny, somewhere between ash and chocolate. She’s wearing it down tonight, and it falls just below her shoulders. Somehow Al is cupping a handful. It is so heavy it feels slightly obscene—hair this thick should be regulated. It’s just a little wet. Bordering on coarse. And the combination of weight and texture is undeniably real.

  “Careful there,” says Meg, and Al lets her hair drop and bounce. “I want to keep both my eyes if you don’t mind.” Her voice is smooth and wide, like her lips. She’s smiling.

  “Sorry. That was some move. With the purse.”

  “Likewise. Except for the purse part.” She plucks the dart from her bag. There’s a pinhole in the satin.

  “Did I damage anything?”

  Meg snaps open her purse and peeks inside. “Dildo’s okay.”

  Al feels her ears turn the color of Meg’s lipstick.

  “I’m just joking around,” Meg says. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. Butches can be such prudes.”

  Does this mean there isn’t a dildo in Meg’s purse? Al has only recently heard about them. Maybe butches use them but femmes carry them? Al is happy to be called a butch, one of the gang. She’s less happy to be called a prude. But gangs are slippery like that. There are benefits and consequences of membership.

  “But—well, I think you’re sweet,” Meg clarifies. When Al fidgets, Meg plants a kiss on her cheek, as if to prove it.

  Now Meg’s lipstick takes over Al’s whole body—the red, the heat.

  Al fumbles, drunk and floating toward the old tin ceiling. “I want to keep both of your eyes too,” she says.

  The second kiss happens during the tenth week of Al’s unemployment. She has already traipsed Calla Boulevard and Main Street in her black slacks and white shirt. Lilac Mines Green Grocer is not hiring, nor is Main Street Market. All Al knows how to do is work in a grocery store, but she has tried the butcher shop and coffeeshop as well. The latter had a “Help Wanted” sign in the window, but the owner studied her for a minute, then said, “Sorry, that sign’s old. We filled that position two weeks ago.” Al suspects her clothing is to blame, but if she left the church in one of her schoolgirl skirts, Jody would call her a Saturday night butch.

  Today she’s trying Washoe Street, a less commercial stretch of town. So far the real estate office and tailor don’t need anyone. It’s late afternoon now, late fall. The air has taken on a crisp urgency. Exhausted, Al sits down on a wooden bench outside a two-story brick building with a faded ad on its side for Dr. Bell’s Scientific Cough Suppressant. For the hundredth time, she contemplates returning to Fresno. She wants her father to direct her toward a case of canned lima beans and say, “Give us one of your eighth-wonder-of-the-world pyramids, kiddo.” She misses his voice. She misses not having to say anything herself, sitting for hours among the undemanding vegetables and earnest grains of Hill Food & Supply.

  “You’re not bad-looking in the daylight, either.”

  Al looks up. Meg has appeared, like Glinda the Good Witch in her pink bubble. She’s wearing a tight brown skirt and a yellow blouse, silk or at least silky. Her lipstick is even redder, if that’s possible. She props a stack of papers and books on her hip like a baby and carries a paper cup of coffee from the shop that’s not hiring in her free hand. She’s not bad-looking in the daylight herself.

  “Meg, hi!”

  “Don’t sound so surprised. I don’t live at Lilac’s, you know.”

  “I know.” Al blushes. As much as she’s heard Jody and Imogen and the other women discuss jobs and local landmarks, a part of her thought they did live at the bar; the bar and the church, maybe, but nowhere else. That they were magical enough to pull it off, while Al had to recite her cash register skills repeatedly. But now it appears that Meg is real. Al doesn’t know if she wants her to be real or not.

  “I work upstairs,” she explains. “For a crazy Indian named Luke Twentyman. I’m helping him research a book about Lilac Mines. At least, that’s the idea. Really I’m listening to his stories and reminding him to pay the phone bill.”

  “Wow,” says Al. Although Meg is nonchalant, her job sounds important, academic. She’s never known a researcher before.

  Meg gets a mischievous look on her face. “Want to see the place? Luke is down the street at the post office.”

  Al follows Meg’s curvy hips and muscular calves up a narrow staircase and down a hallway that smells like old newspaper. Luke’s office is cramped and hot. Two hand-lettered signs lean against the bookcase: TWENTYMAN FOR MAYOR ’62 and VOTE TWENTYMAN 1963. Two maps of Lilac Mines curl from the walls, one of the streets and one of the underground tunnels, which look like streets on paper. Luke’s big desk is strewn with papers and sepia-tone photos. Meg’s smaller desk seems to be growing its own junior mess. There are stacks and stacks of books, so much paper that it seems all the answers in the world must be stacked somewhere in this office. Meg is shiny and young in the middle of it. She smells like fresh coffee.

  There is nowhere to sit—the chairs are piled high with papers, as well—and Al doesn’t know where to stand. She leans from one leg to the other, hands in her pockets. “So, um, what are you researching? You know, specifically?”

  Meg laughs. “Oh, who knows. Who ever knows with Luke.” She talks about him like he’s her favorite eccentric uncle. “One day it’s the mining days, another it’s the Clarksons. Today it’s the Clarksons.”

  “The Clarksons?”

  “The guys that own the mill. They bought up all the land when it was worth nothing, and now it’s worth, well, more than nothing, I guess. Luke always calls them ’robber barons.’ He uses words like that.”

  “Jody would kill for a job at the mill,” Al says.

  “What butch wouldn’t? Hell, I’d work there myself if they’d hire me.”

  As difficult as it is to picture Meg doing manual labor, it’s just as impossible to imagine anyone turning her down. Everyone, it seems, would want to spend as much time in Meg’s radius as possible. Right now Al is trying to figure out how to do just that.

  “How come you don’t live in old church with everyone else?” Al asks.

  “It’s not everyone,” Meg says. Her whole face becomes smaller for a minute, pinched together. “This town has a really narrow definition of ’everyone.’ Anyhow, I did. I lived there for a while when I first moved here. But some people don’t like it if you don’t do every little thing their way. And I had enough money to rent my own place. My dad sent me a check for tuition every month. Or so he thought.”

  Half of her mouth relents. Her semi-smile lets Al know that she—Al, who is always the last to k
now—is in on the joke.

  Al nods. Meg is standing so close to her that she can see how her gold hoop earrings pull at her earlobes. Al wants to touch her dewy, end-of-the-day skin. Thumbtacked to the wall just over Meg’s shoulder is a photo of two girls holding hands. They are probably 15 or 16, but they wear serious pioneer expressions and busy, grown-up hats. Their slightly blurry, clasped hands are the only hint that they’re still young girls. Or maybe it’s a hint of something else.

  Al opens her mouth to ask who they are. But something stops her. They are already the thing she needs them to be, which is the thing that gives her the courage to lean forward and kiss Meg on her red lips.

  Meg’s whole body responds, her tongue and her breasts and her hands, which cup Al’s chin. They say, This is okay, this is good. Al has never kissed anyone before, but her body seems to know the story. Her hand knows how to reach around to the small of Meg’s back, to rest lightly on the waistband of her skirt. Her pores open up. Her tongue circles. She’s suddenly conscious of her underwear. But her ears pick up footsteps in the hallway, and her head pulls away.

  What was she thinking? This is an office, not Lilac’s. Meg looks at her as if Al is the person who could turn an office into Lilac’s. But Al presses her face against the frosted glass in the door. She can’t see anything.

  “Was that him?”

  Meg seems unconcerned. The sound fades. “Guess not. I took you for a goody-two-shoes, but wow.” She sighs happily. Her sepia-brown hair is trying to escape its up-do. “This innocent girl from… Fresno, right? But you don’t kiss like a goody-two-shoes.”

  Al shakes with excitement and nervousness. She wants Meg’s words to be true. She wants to disappear before anything can ruin what just happened. Before what just happened can ruin the rest of her life.

  “I should go,” Al laments. “He’ll be back any minute, right?”