Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  “Now that I think about it, I do remember,” Meg hears herself saying in a loud, bright voice. “Yes, that’s it—it was Anna Lisa’s 20th birthday, and our friend Jody brought some champagne to our little house to celebrate. Anna Lisa and I were roommates, you know. Anyhow, Jody brought a bottle of French champagne she’d been saving for a special occasion. We were all quite excited about it, naturally, but we realized we didn’t have any glasses, not even one plain old wine glass, let alone a champagne flute. So there we were, drinking French champagne out of juice glasses!”

  The ladies laugh enthusiastically. The story is tame and silly and specific, just what they were hoping for. It’s so easy. People’s faces are etched with longing, telling you the stories they want to hear without saying a word. Al shoots Meg a sheepish and grateful glance.

  Suzy throws out the next question: “Who’s the first boy Anna Lisa ever kissed?”

  “Suzy, good grief, can’t we just eat lunch now?” Al moans.

  “Nope. Come on, girls, who is it?”

  “The first boy?” Meg repeats. She sits with her back straight and her hands on her knees. She blinks her long false eyelashes.

  Again, no one can come up with an answer. Finally the girl with the headband says, “Um, was it what’s-his-name… Kevin Zacky?”

  “No, Marla, that was me,” Suzy hisses. This time the round of laughter is nervous.

  “His name was Caleb,” Meg volunteers when the hush that follows becomes unbearable. “It was very tame, just a little peck, but you know how shy Anna Lisa is. And Caleb, he could barely talk to girls.”

  “Did you girls go to college together?” asks the aunt.

  “Practically,” Meg says with a wave.

  “Okay,” Suzy says, “here’s an easy one. What’s Anna Lisa’s favorite dessert?”

  Al seems to relax a bit, but no one has a quick reply.

  “German chocolate cake?” Nancy-Jane says hesitantly.

  “Apple pie?” says a woman on the other side of the room.

  “No, pumpkin pie!”

  “Peppermint ice cream?”

  The women are as sticky-sweet as the desserts they’re naming. Meg feels like a sour lemon next to them. Like a chili pepper. Like tea so hot it burns your tongue.

  “I do like all those things,” Al says amiably. She defers to her mother and sister, the judges.

  “But butterscotch pudding is your favorite. Right, sweetheart?” Mrs. Hill says.

  Meg doesn’t have a story ready this time. She doesn’t have a truth to cover up. She has no idea what Anna Lisa’s favorite dessert is.

  “Actually, I mean, my most favorite dessert is strawberry ice cream,” Al says. Her face writhes, as if she has done something terrible to these women by liking strawberry ice cream over the desserts on their menus. Meg fidgets on the ottoman. She wants to be back on the road, driving through fields that smell like onions, pungent and harsh.

  The group breaks into smaller circles when lunch is served. The ladies cluster in the backyard with plates of tea sandwiches and Swedish meatballs. Meg has trouble balancing her glass of too-sweet lemonade and the delicate china plate that holds her food. She feels oafish and unfeminine. All the ladies smile politely and walk past her. Her red sweater is hot and prickly beneath the early October sun. Give her a dark bar and a leering butch any day.

  Al approaches her, green pants brushing the green grass as she walks. Meg doesn’t know how to act around this new girlish Al.

  “What are you doing here?” Al asks. It doesn’t even sound mean the way she says it, just scared. Meg wants something to push against. So she pushes first.

  “Suzy invited me. What, you didn’t want me to see you prancing around with the Fresno Knitting Club?”

  “They’re just relatives, my mom’s family. Most of the younger ones are Suzy’s friends. Some of them drove up here from L.A. with her for the weekend. I hadn’t even met them before.”

  “What’s he like, Al? I bet he lives in a really nice house that no one ever throws things at.”

  “Don’t call me—”

  “Is he the first boy you ever kissed? Is he a good kisser?” Meg’s voice is rising.

  “What are you trying to do?” Al hisses miserably.

  Meg doesn’t know how to stop herself, “Do you like getting fucked with a dick now?”

  “God, Meg, my mother is ten feet away, can you be a little quieter?” She looks so desperate, curling up in a ball at the first sign of conflict. “Can we go somewhere and talk?”

  Meg stalks over to the card table and slams down her plate and glass. Lemonade sloshes onto a tray of shortbread cookies. She can feel people staring, although she doubts any of them actually heard the exchange between her and Al.

  She returns to Al. “Fine, let’s go talk.”

  But Mrs. Hill reaches them before they can escape, carrying a pitcher of pink punch. “Meg, you’re the one who drove Anna Lisa home after her father’s heart trouble, isn’t that right?”

  The word “home” pinches the back of Meg’s neck. “That’s right.” She tries to smile, but she just bares her teeth.

  “I can’t thank you enough for that.” Mrs. Hill puts both hands on Meg’s forearm. Her fingers are cool and dry and comforting. She has short nails and thin blue veins that push against her skin. Meg wonders if this is what her own mother’s hands would feel like if she were still alive, strong and delicate at the same time.

  “A girl needs good friends like that,” Mrs. Hill continues. The corners of her eyes—pale blue but the same round shape as Al’s—crinkle as she studies Meg. “And it’s been so nice having her home. Would you like some punch, dear? I can get you a glass.”

  Meg feels tears well up. Shit. How is she supposed to deprive Al of this kind woman who only wants to feed people? Just for a minute, she wants to put on a sundress and curl up in a patch of light in a backyard that is not blanketed in pine needles.

  Suzy announces that it’s time to open presents. Meg and Al don’t find a place to be alone, or a time. Figures, Meg thinks.

  Everyone gives Al vases. An aunt gives her a pearly ceramic vase. An older aunt gives her a showy crystal vase big enough to hold sunflowers. The redhead named Marla gives her a cobalt blue vase, and everyone exclaims that cobalt is the color this season. When Al opens her fourth vase, a cloudy glass bud vase, Mrs. Hill assures her daughter, “Don’t worry, you can never have too many vases…”

  “Because you can never have too many flowers!” chorus the ladies. They all laugh and nod. Did they rehearse this? Meg wonders. Is this a common phrase in Fresno? Al, at least, looks slightly unnerved.

  “Thank you, it’s so thoughtful,” Al says again.

  Then she takes Meg’s gift from the pile. Meg is already regretting her present. It made sense at the time, seemed deep and right, but she failed to see it in a larger context. Al removes the bright red tissue paper and tosses it gently on the pile of white wrappings at her feet. She turns the gift around in her hands. It is a mason jar, full of broken bits of glass in various shades of purple. Lavender and lilac and dark purple-blue. Shards and bottlenecks. Broken vases, maybe. Meg has been collecting them since she came to Lilac Mines. She takes long walks through the sun-scorched hills, and they wink at her in the treeless light. They remind her of butterflies, how they can turn from one thing into another.

  “What is it, exactly?” says one of Suzy’s friends politely.

  That’s the problem, of course. It isn’t anything. It doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t even hold flowers. Meg feels heavy and useless, too, beneath the ladies’ cheerful gaze. “It’s, um, just a decoration, I guess,” Meg mumbles. Her ears are hot. She’s sweating fiercely. She can’t even come up with a good story this time. She hates them all. More silence. What was Meg thinking? That she could come here, present Al with a jar of broken glass, and whisk her back to Lilac Mines, all while making small talk with the knitting club?

  Finally, the girl named Nancy-Jane says brightl
y, “Oh, like arts and crafts?”

  “Well, um…” Meg begins. But then she quickly agrees, “Right, yes, like arts and crafts.”

  Mrs. Hill announces a little too loudly, “Well, I think that’s lovely, Meg. That’s how we used to do it, back when I was a girl. We all gave each other handmade gifts, every holiday. It’s nice to see a young lady who understands tradition.”

  Meg nods. Maybe she doesn’t hate Mrs. Hill. Al looks like she’s going to cry. Meg will hate her if she cries because Meg feels like crying herself. “Thank you,” Al whispers. “I’ll keep it.”

  As soon as the last curl of ribbon hits the floor, Meg says, “I have to go.”

  “You have a long drive ahead of you,” Mrs. Hill nods. “Back to… where is it, dear?”

  “Lilac Mines.”

  “I’ll walk Meg to her car,” Al tells her mother.

  “But sweetheart, your guests…” They’re standing at the edge of the parlor. The women are clustering again. It must be something in their genes. Even most of the bar femmes do this.

  “I’ll be right back, Mother,” Al says impatiently.

  They walk down the gravel road toward Meg’s old Ford. There’s a breeze, finally, although it is not cool. The big egg-yolk sun looks exhausted as it sinks into the flat horizon.

  “I never wanted to be normal, you know,” Meg says off-handedly into the hot wind. She doesn’t look at Al. “Not even when I was little. Not even when my mother was alive. I was always running away, just to run away. I never wanted to go to tea parties.”

  “I know,” Al sighs, “it’s what I always liked about you.”

  “But,” Meg adds, “it would have been nice to be asked.” When she was around Al, at the beginning, she felt like she was being invited to a hundred tea parties. Everything’s quiet. Here is Meg’s car that will not take them to the mine tonight, that will not bathe them in dusty yellow light while they devour each other’s bodies.

  “Why are you doing this?” Meg says finally. She is not afraid of being hurt. She is not afraid of knowing. Al squirms, but Meg can give herself over to the ache. She wants to put a shard of purple glass in Al’s hands and hold out her pale white wrists. Just do it, she silently dares Al. Just cut through my veins. Out of the corner of her eye, Meg sees someone running toward them. Soon the figure turns into Suzy, her gold hair floating behind her as her boots pound the gravel.

  “Meg! You forgot your party favor!” She thrusts a small flowerpot into Meg’s hands. It contains tiny, perfect pink roses. She knows it will die—she has no patience for the slow, finicky lifecycle of plants—but she thanks Suzy politely.

  “Goodbye, Meg,” says Al steadily, eyeing Suzy, “I’m glad you came.” She kisses Meg lightly on the cheek, and Meg can feel her lips quivering.

  Meg keeps her foot on the gas the whole way back, narrowly missing a late-grazing deer. She pulls into Lilac’s and orders a shot of whiskey. She likes the way the alcohol sizzles through her body like a threat. It’s a Sunday night, and the bar is sparsely populated.

  “Rough day?” Caleb asks when she orders a second shot.

  “Just let Jean know that I saw Al and she kissed me,” Meg says with a half-smile. She spent much of her drive reminding herself of her original plan. If Al didn’t know what she was missing, she would make sure Jean sure did.

  Caleb narrows his ale-colored eyes. “Is this one of your games, Meg, honey? Because Jean is back with Miz Sylvie. You knew that, right?”

  “Shit, Caleb, you’re kidding me, right? They’ve been broken up for a year.”

  “Well, they were in here last night, slow dancing and necking like the world was ending. And you know Sylvie, she doesn’t do that sort of thing with a butch who’s not her steady.”

  “Goddamn… She didn’t say anything to me.” Meg lights her cigarette and offers her open box to Caleb, who takes one and lights it off Meg’s. “Honestly, it was months.”

  “I guess there’s always hope,” Caleb says absently, wiping down the bar.

  “Bullshit,” says Meg.

  The wedding is in December, that’s what someone at the shower said. Winter comes but no invitation arrives.

  HALLUCINOGENIC QUALITIES

  Petra: New York City / Lilac Mines, 1970

  The letter is wrinkled from so many readings, and smells faintly of vanilla. Meg’s sprawling handwriting plainly states, You’ll be done with school soon. Why don’t you come visit me? This invitation has kept Petra going for months, through bitter meetings and irksome finals and her parents’ well-meaning graduation party.

  The only good thing about Kerhonkson, New York, Petra Blumenschein decides on her way back to the city, is their family’s long gravel driveway. The sort of driveway where (after your parents give you a generous graduation check and demand to know when you’re applying to PhD programs) you can paint your ’65 Thunderbird purple.

  “But that car’s a beaut,” Meg’s father had protested, “and only five years old!” Petra always nodded politely at his nosy neighbor comments. His wife had left the earth and his daughter had left town, and Petra could smell his sadness of burnt coffee and clothes retrieved from the hamper. It made her want to tell him, I know where your daughter is. She’s in a place with black mountains and gold-pink sunsets.

  “It’s more beautiful this way,” Petra grinned, but didn’t expect him to understand.

  With the windows down, her wavy blonde hair whips in the wind and cool air rushes over her bare arms, but she’s not fooled. The city is about to begin another hot, writhing summer. For four years now, she’s joined her fellow NYU students in protesting the war, racism, pollution, and patriarchy. They’ve screamed all day and smoked all night. Now New York announces itself once again, a charcoal silhouette on the horizon beyond the matte-purple nose of her car.

  Lately she’s gotten tired of championing everyone else’s cause. Even her women’s group, Women for Equality on Earth (a.k.a. WEE), has fragmented like a building going co-op. Most of the girls are focused on legalizing abortion, and Petra just can’t get into it. Ever since she abandoned sleeping with guys, she hasn’t had to worry about that. When she pulls into Soho, it’s almost dark. By the time she finds a parking place and walks up the five flights of stairs to her apartment, the WEE meeting is over. Only those too zealous or too stoned to go home remain. And Francine, of course.

  “Where were you?” Francine greets her at the door. “You said you’d be back by six at the latest.”

  “I had to wait for my car to dry. Fran, it’s so cool. I wish you could see it from the window. I painted it purple. I’m gonna call it The Lavender Menace. Get it? Then we can run over those…”

  “Sshhh,” hisses Francine, “some of them are still here.” Her lips are pursed, a tight asterisk.

  Petra sighs, “So no kiss?” She steps inside and tosses her big cloth satchel on the bed.

  The two remaining WEE women, a reformed sorority girl and a jaded communist, shoot sharp looks in her direction. Petra glares back. This is her apartment… well, hers and Francine’s and their Greek subletter’s.

  “Is that a letter from the girl you grew up with?” Francine asks, all friendly-cuddly, the fringe on her blouse tickling Petra’s bare shoulders. Petra smiles at the person she first encountered six months ago, back when they were breaking up with their male chauvinist boyfriends, back when they discovered each other’s soft girl-skin.

  “She wants me to visit her,” Petra replies. “I’m going to do better than that. I’m going to move out there, to California. And you can come with me.”

  Francine takes her arm from Petra’s shoulders and rakes her fingers through her wild brown hair, frowning.

  “Come on,” Petra presses. “It will be fun.”

  “I don’t know,” Francine says reluctantly. “There’s really so much going on here.”

  “That’s the problem. Too much has already happened. We can’t have a meeting without arguing about some theory from some other meeting. I nee
d to be out west, Fran, where the air doesn’t turn your lungs black.” Petra perches on the window ledge by the fire escape. “I’m smart, Fran. I know that’s blasphemy in WEE, saying you’re actually good at something and not just a worker bee for the movement, but it’s true. And I’m sick of them not listening to us because we want ’too much, too fast.’ They call it strategy, but it’s just another way of calling us queer.”

  Francine is glued to the bed. Her round face is shadowy, anguished. “Let me think about it,” she says softly. “Let me think about it. Give me some time.”

  Petra leaves the next morning. She wakes up sweating, wearing the summer humidity like a too-small shirt, and she can’t take it one second longer. She kisses Francine’s sleeping face. Fran’s peanut butter-brown hair is fanned out on the pillow like sunrays. Her mouth is slack, a sort of stoned smile. Francine is so beautiful when she’s relaxed. Petra will try to remember her like this.

  Surprisingly, the Greek subletter wants to come along. Agapi has attended a handful of WEE meetings and is now nominally a feminist. She’s just in it for the pot and free food, Francine had said. But that seems cynical, especially when Petra watches Agapi rope her suitcase to the roof of the Lavender Menace. She’s a thick-trunked girl with wiry copper-black hair that’s always hovering dangerously close to her lit cigarette. She is happy to pump when they gas up at the Esso station on Broadway. When they pass the shoe repair shop where she works, Agapi waves to the dark window and shouts, “Fuck with you, Mr. Theophilus.”

  They reach Pennsylvania by lunchtime, Cleveland by nightfall. Petra is glad to have a travel partner, even if it’s not Francine. The dingy motel where they’re staying would make her nervous on her own, despite the six judo lessons she took in an East Village basement last year.

  “You have a girl in the Lilac Town?” Agapi asks. She’s stretched out on the bed in her white cotton underwear. Her blouse is open, revealing an equally no-nonsense bra and olive-colored breasts as big as grapefruits. Agapi is definitely a go-with-the-flow kind of girl.