by Cheryl Klein
Petra says, “Lilac Mines. I don’t ’have a girl’ there, but yeah, I know someone. Meg. She grew up across the street from me in Kerhonkson. After her mom died when she was 10, she spent a ton of time at our place. She was kind of like my big sister. She moved to Santa Clara, which is kind of near San Francisco, I think, for college, and wrote me letters. I was just a kid and I thought they were about the neatest thing in the world. Then when I went to college and wrote to her—she was probably the only person from Kerhonkson who didn’t think I’d gone off the deep end.” Petra laughs.
Petra slips off her flowered nightgown. She’s not about to be out-nuded. “I went back and reread some of her old letters and it was all there—stuff about the women she was with. How she got kicked out of Santa Clara University for an ’indiscretion’ in the dorms. I thought that meant her room was a mess,” she laughs. “It’s so trippy, looking back from an enlightened perspective.”
The woman who opens the door of the shabby wooden cottage looks like a secretary. She’s wearing a yellow polyester dress and high heels. Her sculpted brown hair is clearly the product of curlers. She is a catalog of oppressive beauty regimens. They’ve arrived in Lilac Mines on a Friday afternoon after two and a half weeks on the road. Petra’s stomach is doing flip-flops. She’s not sure if it’s from the mountain roads or the anticipation.
“Meg?” It comes out as a squeal.
“Petra! God, you’re a full-grown woman!” Meg pulls her in for a bone-squeezing hug. Then she stands back and takes in Petra’s patched bellbottoms, Madras plaid shirt, and tangled blonde hair.
Over the last few years, Petra has reconstructed Meg in her mind, from the teenager who told her ghost stories about the abandoned cattle barn on Abel Drive while braiding her hair, to a frontier-living rebel. But the woman in front of her looks like a nice lady enjoying smalltown life. Petra prays to goddess that she hasn’t come all this way for nothing. Meg shakes Agapi’s hand and helps them with their suitcases. She gestures for them to sit down on the sagging couch and brings them tea in mismatched cups.
“I didn’t know you’d be bringing a friend,” Meg says. “I don’t have room for you both, but I have some friends you might be able to stay with. They live in an old church not too far from here. Well, it’s not a church anymore…”
“Right on!” Petra enthuses. A big, abandoned building is exactly what she needs. She will paint her perfect world on the walls.
“But it’s freezing in the winter, and no one has their own bedroom,” explains Meg, puzzled.
“Rooms just keep people apart,” says Petra. “They’re meant to divide people.”
“What is it you girls want to do here, exactly?” Meg asks.
“New York has too much negative energy,” Petra says. “ I just have this sense that things could be perfect out here. We could build a whole new society.”
“A whole new society?” repeats Meg. “Um, you know this town is basically two bars, one hotel, and a post office, right?”
Petra nods. “Room to grow.”
“Petra’s mama and papa give her a big chunk of money,” Agapi adds.
“Just enough to get started,” Petra says quickly. For former communists, Dr. and Dr. Blumenschein earn good money; and because they are still semi-communists, they are generous about sharing it.
“I am bored,” Agapi announces. “Before the new society, let’s go out, no?”
“I could take you to Lilac’s,” Meg offers. “It’s the gay bar. Officially, this town only has one bar, Lou’s.” She smiles, revealing big teeth with a small gap in front. “I’ll make dinner while you change.”
“What do you mean?” Petra looks down at her rumpled shirt and jeans. She sewed the patches—a turtle and a duck—on the pockets herself.
“I just figured you’d want to dress up a bit. I can loan you some clothes if you don’t want to unpack yet. Agapi, I bet Sunny—she’s my butch—has a jacket that would fit you. Anything she’s left in my closet is yours.”
Meg’s face radiates warmth, and Petra almost wants to return the favor, to say Yes, we’ll wear your dresses and suits.
“Why you say I’m butch?” Agapi doesn’t sound offended, but stares with her round, dark eyes.
“Oh… well, I guess I don’t know,” muses Meg.
“It’s just that we don’t believe in gender roles,” Petra says politely. She likes the way it sounds, as if this is one of the rules of their collective. She feels it forming inside all of them, a bead, an idea, a baby.
“Suit yourself. Or don’t,” Meg laughs.
And so, after a dinner of beans and crunchy rice, they pile into Meg’s car, an ancient Ford that makes a troubling noise whenever Meg brakes, which she does suddenly whenever a stop sign pops out of the twilight. As if the town she’s lived in for a decade is full of surprises.
Calla Boulevard is so steep that Petra’s nails make half-moons in her palms as she grips the door handle. Quaint but ragged buildings line the street. Petra’s first thought when they enter the smoky, dilapidated bar is that they must have walked into Lou’s by accident. Or maybe back in time, to the ’50s or junior high school: men on one side, women on the other. But most of the men are women, of course. Dressed with precision in crisp shirts and ties, as if in defiance of the bar’s chipped glasses and weak yellow light.
This is not her whole new world. But it is definitely a world: it is Friday night and the bar is packed with gay men and lesbians basking in its Friday night-ness, safe in the rhythms of the bar. There are more people here than on Main Street when Petra and her friend drove into town.
“It’s so crowded,” Petra whispers to Meg. “How…?”
“I don’t know how,” laughs Meg. “A million reasons, probably. Not enough men to work at the mill? The town’s named after a girl? Who knows? That’s just Lilac Mines for you.”
Agapi walks up to the bar and orders a beer. Meg waves to a white woman in a suit and a black woman with relaxed hair that doesn’t look very relaxed.
A man leaning on the jukebox, glowing in the reflected neon, looks the newcomers up and down. “Ooh, hippies,” he purrs to the femme standing next to him. She chews her gum in agreement.
There are four other lesbians living in the church: Imogen and Jody—the black and white couple from the bar—and Jean and Sylvie, also frustratingly butch/femme. Sylvie is so quiet, Gapi says, that she wants to strangle the girl with her own omnipresent needle and thread. But Petra convinces her that Sylvie just needs enlightening. Meg comes to visit, but not as much as Petra would like. She spends a lot of time in San Andreas with Sunny.
By September, when Petra’s parents would like her to be starting graduate school, she has wooed another WEE exile from New York. Marilyn Joice, who has an IQ of 162 and glasses that cover a third of her classically beautiful face, helps Petra and Agapi string beads over the doorway of the church kitchen. They also draft a manifesto and install a new toilet.
“Wouldn’t it be more natural to use the outhouse?” asks Petra. There is nothing about revolutionary plumbing in the manifesto, but maybe there should be.
“I’m not sure, I think sewage has to be treated,” says Marilyn. “It might be worse for the environment.”
“When I am on the rag, I’m not crapping in shack,” says Gapi, and that settles it.
They’ve replaced the dangerous-looking wood-burning stove with a gas heater. They’ve planted a vegetable garden that has yielded two delicious tomatoes and a handful of stunted zucchini.
In October, Petra suggests a séance. The women have been bickering, and she thinks a good pagan ritual would bring them together.
“I have a theory that it’s Lilac Ambrose’s spirit—that that’s why there are so many lesbians in such a small town,” Petra tells Marilyn.
Marilyn is skeptical. She’s sitting on one of the church pews, and even though she’s wearing a flowered halter-top and jeans and Mexican sandals, she looks almost prim. “So you’re saying the little girl w
ho got lost in the mine was a lesbian? They didn’t even have lesbians in the 1800s. Women were considered their husbands’ property. They…”
“Don’t be so literal, Marilyn,” Petra says. “I’m just saying that Lilac is a spirit of female-ness. And that kind of… radiates.”
“Petra, you are trip,” says Gapi, coming in from the kitchen. It’s late afternoon and chilly outside, but the church is still warm from the sun. The stained glass Virgin Mary casts a long shadow over the women’s beds: her blue robe rippling over Gapi’s sleeping bag, her halo turning Sylvie’s white sheets golden, the baby Jesus resting on Petra’s pillow.
“I love séance, man,” Gapi concludes.
“Woman,” corrects Petra.
Marilyn has a college friend who sends some Afghani pot that allegedly possesses near hallucinogenic qualities. Petra and Imogen light candles and lay out an old army blanket in the mouth of a mine entrance. Not the main one, which Imogen says is frequented by high school kids and sheriffs with roving flashlights, but a smaller, more hidden entrance further up the mountain.
“This is so spooky,” breathes Petra. “Or at least it will be when it gets dark.” The sun is low and orange, giving the scrub oaks and manzanita a shadowy, burnt look.
“This is the best part of town,” Imogen agrees. “Sometimes I come up here to sit and think. It gets real quiet, and you feel like if you listen hard enough, the mountain will just tell you what to do.”
Petra likes Imogen. She’s more relaxed than Jody or Jean or Sylvie. Petra loaned her The Feminine Mystique and Imogen stayed up all night reading, curlers in her hair and flashlight in her hand. Tonight she wears light blue polyester pants and a striped, boat-neck shirt. She is thin with wide, graceful hips.
“Who all is coming tonight?” Imogen asks, taking a beer from the cooler in the Lavender Menace’s trunk.
“Well, Gapi and Marilyn, of course. Three of Marilyn’s friends from Berkeley are driving out. Don’t worry, they’re like us. Meg said she might come with Sunny from San Andreas. And we invited Jean and Sylvie, but Jean seemed a little… skeptical, and Sylvie seemed a little freaked out about the whole ghost thing.”
“Good old Sylvie,“ laughs Imogen. “You just gotta give ’em time. That’s a pretty good group, though.”
Not long after the sun goes down, Petra spots a pair of headlights bobbing up the hill, followed by another, closer-set pair. The first car opens and five girls in beads and fringe and pink and orange and red bounce out like clowns. Gapi and Marilyn and three women Marilyn knows from the days before she transferred to NYU. Essie and Emily are a couple, plump arms and wavy brown hair draped over each other as if they are trees planted inches apart. Linda is a short girl with short, dirty-blonde hair who flutters around Gapi like a moth all night.
Sylvie opens the door of the second car gingerly, and peers out at the group from behind a curtain of limp hair. Jean jumps out of the driver’s side and extends her arm for Sylvie, who is wearing brown pumps on her small feet. Meg arrives late, on the back of a motorcycle driven by a leather-clad butch who introduces herself as Sunny. She lives up to her name, helping herself to beer and joking around with Jody, who comes as soon as she gets off work. Petra hopes Meg will hit it off with Marilyn or maybe Linda, anything to lure her away from these stifling, archaic roles. Petra thinks of Meg as her older sister, and big sisters are supposed to do things first, not linger in the past.
The night is moonless, and Petra thinks about all the shrubs, rocks, and other things sitting in the dark, watching them with night-creature eyes.
“Who want to get high?” Gapi asks, waving her bag of tightly rolled joints.
“Gapi, you’re the coolest,” says Linda, reaching her arm around Gapi’s waist and putting her head to Gapi’s huge breasts.
“I’ll try it,” Meg says. She already smells like alcohol, warm and alive.
Petra cups her hands to block out the breeze as Gapi strikes a match, and takes the first hit. And the second, eleventh, and twenty-second as each joints makes its rounds. She loves the moist, scratchy feeling in her lungs. She loves how everything becomes a good idea. She loves Imogen’s long black eyelashes.
“Let’s get started,” Petra says. “I can feel something in the air and I don’t want to lose it.” She also wants to give the women something to focus on rather than each other’s miles-apart clothes and mannerisms. They duck into the mineshaft and form a circle on the blanket. Candles flicker from little pockets in the rough rock walls.
Petra crosses her legs and clears her throat. The women follow. She feels their bright eyes on her. Waiting, giving her power. A swirl of cold wind moves through the cave and sweeps out again. Petra takes the hands on either side of her—Imogen’s rough brown hand and Gapi’s short-nailed olive hand. Imogen gives her an encouraging squeeze. A candle winks, or maybe an eye. For the first time since being with Francine, Petra feels something deep, ancient.
“Spirits,” she says in her strongest voice, “we are the women of Lilac Mines. We are calling you on this sacred night, All Hallows Eve. We are humble, Spirits. We want to learn from your wisdom. Reveal yourselves, or yourself if there is only one of you.”
Petra checked out a book called The Dark Arts Through the Ages from the tiny library next to the post office. The librarian, who looked as if she might practice the dark arts herself, glared as she stamped the card. Petra read a few chapters, but it was unnerving to open the book in a church after dark, so she hopes the spirits will guide her in proper séance etiquette.
“Will you pass me a beer?” someone whispers.
“Lilac, is that you?” giggles someone else.
“Shh!” hisses Marilyn.
Petra decides to get to the point. “Lilac Ambrose, we, the women of the town of your namesake are calling you.”
Of the, of the, of the. She likes the chain, how the world contains them like a big Russian nesting doll. The wind plays the crannies of the cave like a harp. Petra’s eyes are squeezed shut, and she can hear the wind play her body, too, plink-plinking her heart and strumming her ribs.
“I can hear her!” someone exclaims. Petra snaps her eyes open. It’s Sylvie, of all people, her mouth an O like a cave.
“They’re planting ideas in your head,” Jean grumbles, or maybe she just thinks it. Petra might be able to hear thoughts right now.
“No, ssshhh, I heard her, I swear.” Sylvie lets go of Essie’s (or maybe Emily’s) hand and grips Jean with both hands. “She said… well, it was this long, low noise, like ohhh. But I think she was saying love. She wants us all to love each other.” She looks around with green, green eyes. Petra wants to cross the circle and touch her.
Petra stands up, swaying a little. She walks outside the circle, past Gapi and Linda and Emily (or maybe Essie). She reaches the Lavender Menace parked inches from the mine entrance, and its long purple cat nose and chrome grill smile at her. Then she looks up at the windshield. Lilac is there, in the passenger seat, staring straight at her. She is a hardy-looking girl in a calico dress. She has thick, banana-blonde hair that falls in waves over the mutton-sleeves of her dress, and wide-set, light brown eyes. She puts her feet on the dashboard and smiles. She looks like the kind of girl to raise six kids and live to 80, not get lost in a mine at 15.
I will sit next to her, Petra decides, I’ll just ask her, once and for all. She opens the driver-side door, but as soon as she’s in, Lilac is gone.
“Lilac! Lila-la-la-la-la.” Petra lies on her stomach across the glove box and tries to peer under the car, where there is only night. The Lavender Menace is floating. When she sits up in the driver’s seat, her head swirls. Meg and Imogen stand in front of her. Their bodies merge together, into one coffee-and-cream-and-curves femme, then pull apart again.
“You okay?” Imogen asks.
“Yeah, yeah. I saw her. Then she disappeared. Got pulled under the car, actually. I think she’s trying to say… I think she was murdered. Someone mowed her down and threw her body in t
he mine. She just wanted to live this long, great, fun life, and outside forces—patriarchal forces—wouldn’t let her.”
“This is too much.” Meg puts her fingers on her temples.
“No, I’m serious, I saw her. She was wearing one of those old-fashioned dresses and she had blonde hair. well, she looked a little like me, actually.”
“No, I mean this is too much.” Meg waves to the flickering mine and the broken circle of women, all waiting. “I can’t be here. This place is just too. Al and I came here… “
Sunny is behind her now, hands on Meg’s shoulders. “Good lord, not again. She left you, what, five years ago? Don’t be such a drama queen.”
Meg yanks herself away from Sunny’s grip. “Fuck you.” She reaches in the pocket of Sunny’s leather jacket and pulls out a silver jingle of keys. She gives the bike a few kicks as Sunny moves from shock to annoyance to calculated nonchalance.
“Meg, come on, stay,” Petra protests. She touches the sleeve of Meg’s green sweater, and Meg shakes her away. “We need you.” Petra hovers in the sky above them. From that height, she and Meg are little girls in play clothes. Meg with her curled ponytail and drama-plagued Barbie dolls, Petra dancing around her, thrilled that this important older girl wants to spend time with her, wants to tell her why the girls in her own grade are ugly witches. Meg takes off down the mountain, and Petra thinks she can see something filmy and blonde following her. Lilac or Little Petra.
“That girl should not be driving,” Imogen says seriously. “She shouldn’t even drive when she’s sober. Jody, you better follow her in the car.”
“I know,” Jody says, extracting herself from the circle.
“No, no, it’s okay,” Petra assures them. She puts her hands on Imogen’s worried face. Her hands look like pink stars. They could all be friends if they’re quiet and listen. She’s sure of it. The bead inside her head rolls into her throat, cold on her tongue, out her mouth and into the world. Everyone has one bead and together they form a necklace. “She’s fine. Lilac is watching over her, I saw her.”