Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  But the woman walks straight to the front of the classroom. She takes her place behind the wooden podium, and clears her throat. Slowly, the buzzing kids quiet down. “Hello, welcome to Anatomy 64. I’m Professor Rettig. We’ll be learning many interesting things this semester—the human body is a fascinating machine. I trust that you’ve all purchased the textbook for this class, Introduction to Human Biology? You’ll be able to use it in Nursing 10 as well, so don’t let the price panic you too much.”

  Anna Lisa takes her book out of her bag and puts it on top of DONNY ’67. She can’t believe the professor is a woman. It makes the class feel more like high school, which is both comforting and disappointing. She’s immediately intrigued by this Professor Rettig. A. Rettig, it said in the schedule of classes. Her own Aunt Randi taught at Pepperdine before retiring last year, but that was music, not science, and she wasn’t a full professor. (Suzy is still in L.A. She works for a company that manufactures party supplies. Anna Lisa pictures her in a warehouse surrounded by balloons and streamers and paper hats. It seems about right.) All of Anna Lisa’s own jobs have been out of necessity, and haven’t demanded any skills she couldn’t learn on the job.

  Professor Rettig unrolls a screen above the blackboard. On it there are two transparent figures, one male and one female. Anna Lisa feels slightly bashful. A woman up there with those exposed bodies—it seems too intimate. But she supposes she’ll have to get used to these things if she’s going to be a nurse. There are so many things she’s afraid of, but she doesn’t mind blood or dirt or standing up for a long time. She thinks she can do it.

  “Who can tell me what the biggest organ in the body is?” Professor Rettig asks.

  “The liver,” a boy in the front row says confidently.

  “Good guess, but no. Anyone else?”

  “The lungs?” says the Women’s Collective meeting girl. “Are they one organ or two?”

  “Actually,” says Professor Rettig, “it’s the skin. Your skin is one big organ, with three distinct layers. These guys”—she gestures to the bodies on the screen—”don’t have any. But it’s an extremely important organ.”

  Anna Lisa writes down “skin.” She studies the palm of her hand, with its tiny crosshatches and deep destiny lines. It makes sense: the thing that covers you and holds you in, the first thing people see. Of course, it is huge.

  “Your skin, for example, is not just a body part—it’s made up of many small cell bodies. And the organs work together to form ten systems. Who can name a system?”

  Anna Lisa likes how Professor Rettig throws questions at them. So many teachers hog the spotlight, asking questions only to find out whether students did their reading or not.

  “Muscular system,” says a well-built young man.

  “Musculatory. Good, that’s one.”

  Anna Lisa tentatively raises her hand. She’s almost surprised to see it there, as if her nervous system sent a message directly to her arm without telling the rest of her.

  “Skeletal system?” she says.

  “I’m sorry, Miss, could you speak up?”

  “I’m Anna Lisa Kristalovich. I said, um, skeletal system. Bones.”

  “Of course—the great clothes hanger of the human body. Thank you, Miss Kristalovich.”

  “The beauty of the human body—well, at least to science types like myself—is that all the systems are interdependent. If your digestive system is impaired, what happens? Your stomach aches—because pain receptors send messages to your brain, following the avenues of the nervous system.”

  Anna Lisa likes the words Professor Rettig uses: clothes hanger, avenues. It’s strange to think that she is not just one thing, just Anna Lisa Kristalovich. She is cells that could live on their own in a Petri dish. She is maps of veins and nerves. She is her father’s brown eyes and her mother’s need to nest. She is the black-framed glasses she’s recently started wearing. She is every scar and freckle that the world has etched onto her since she first ran barefoot through her prickly childhood yard. If she gains the key to all these maps, she’ll be able to heal people. If other people and organisms are a part of her, does that mean she’s part of them, too? That the things she does—or doesn’t do—create who they are?

  Anna Lisa is studying for her first test a few weeks later when the phone rings. Fibula, she memorizes, fib-you-lie. Professor Rettig explained that first they would learn basic anatomy, then they would zoom in to the cellular level, then pull back again and take the systems one by one.

  “I’ll get it!” Anna Lisa calls out. Terry is in the family room, a world away. Anna Lisa has made the spare room her study space. The cradle is full of books.

  “No, I’ll get it, you’re studying,” Terry calls back. Is there annoyance in his voice? Terry is encouraging, but he’s already asked whether she can take summer school and finish a year early. That way she’ll only be 28, still fertile, she supposes. She doesn’t like how he presents the timeline of her body, like forecasting sales figures for The Quill Pen.

  “I could use a break!” she says, but he’s already answered.

  In a few minutes, Terry is in the doorway of the spare room. “It’s someone named Michelle? She has an accent.”

  “Really?” Anna Lisa doesn’t know anyone named Michelle, but she picks up the phone in the master bedroom, sitting up straight on the edge of the double bed.

  “Hello, this is Anna Lisa,” she says. She hears a click as Terry hangs up the extension.The laughter on the other end of the line cuts through all the systems of her body.

  “Al. It’s me. Meg. Mee-shell,” she says with a French-ish lilt.

  Anna Lisa remembers the big logs at the sawmill, the ones that got sliced into huge discs, each with hundreds of rings. She feels as if that’s what’s happening to her body. Someone will pick up a cross-section of Anna Lisa, of Al, and see a bit of lung, a knot of vertebra, a slice of stomach. See, they’ll say, here’s how old she was. Here’s what happened to her. Here is the drought that lasted and lasted, and here’s the time, in 1971, that Meg called. “Oh my God,” she whispers. “I… how did you find me?”

  “I called your parents. Don’t worry. I told them I was your friend Michelle, too. Not that they remember who Meg is, I’m sure.” Anna Lisa can’t gauge Meg’s mood. For that, she would need to touch her. She would need bones and eyes and skin.

  “Are you okay?” Anna Lisa asks.

  “I should ask you the same. Was that your husband who answered the phone?”

  “Yes.” Anna Lisa feels ashamed, but when she thinks about Meg in Terry’s presence, she feels just as awful. She is a chameleon, matching the morality of whoever is in the room.

  “What’s he like?” Meg wants to know.

  Anna Lisa studies the bedroom, the comforter with its small brown flowers. They’re not the type of couple to bother with throw-pillows, but there is a painting of a sailboat at the foot of the bed. She does not want to talk about Terry. “He’s very nice, he’s… well, how are you?” Tell me you’re fine and that I didn’t abandon you, Anna Lisa thinks. Tell me you can’t live without me.

  “I,” says Meg, “am fabulous.” It sounds more like a trait, though, than a mood. There, Anna Lisa would have to agree. Meg’s fabulousness, her proud broken nose and loud laugh, washes over Anna Lisa. The quickness of her and the truth of her. The quilt on her bed was soft, and Anna Lisa—Al—loved to roll up tight in it Sunday mornings while Meg made coffee.

  “A lot has changed in Lilac Mines. Shallan and Edith moved to Chicago. Caleb the bartender got drafted.”

  “But I thought…xs I mean, they don’t let homosexuals in the army, do they?” Anna Lisa keeps her voice low and shuts the door quietly. She hopes Terry won’t take it personally.

  “I guess they’re getting desperate. Cradle to grave and all that,” Meg says. An edge creeps back into her voice. “And I guess some people would rather get shot by Communists than admit they’re gay.”

  Anna Lisa swallows. “What about Jod
y and Imogen?”

  “Oh, they’re still around. Jody’s still at the mill. They’ve let the old church be practically overrun by all these college girls who spell ‘women’ with a ‘y.’ ”

  “Yomen?”

  “No,” Meg laughs, “instead of the ‘e.’ ”

  “Oh.” Anna Lisa laughs at her own ignorance as loudly as the thin walls of their house permit. She wants to keep Meg laughing.

  “You should see these girls, Al. They dress like Indians, and everything you do or don’t do is symbolic of how you’re oppressed, or how you’re fighting oppression.”

  There is a tap at the door. Terry pokes his head in. He holds up his watch and mouths, “Sonny and Cher is on.” Anna Lisa nods. Terry closes the door. Why did she ever leave Meg and Lilac Mines? She honestly doesn’t remember. She wants to keep Meg on the phone forever. Each word she speaks weighs so much. If anyone could shatter a bowling ball, it would be Meg, the weight of her pressing down. But the longer Anna Lisa talks to her, the more questions from Terry she’ll have to answer.

  “Why did you call me?” Anna Lisa finally asks. “I mean, why now?”

  “Truth is I need your help. I was dating this butch, Kay from Beedleborough, and, well, she was alright at first, but then she got to be a drag. Real bossy and jealous, you know? She kept accusing me of seeing someone behind her back. I kept saying, ’Lilac Mines is so small—who would I be seeing?’ But she wasn’t the type to listen to reason. Finally I thought, what the hell, I’ll tell her what she wants to hear. I said, ’It’s true, Kay. I’m seeing a butch who makes you look like a fag, she’s so tough.’ I… I said her name was Al.”

  Anna Lisa remembers a few things about Meg. The way her voice can teeter at the edge of the world.

  “Aren’t you going to be flattered?” Meg asks, a little hurt.

  Anna Lisa looks at the avocado-green receiver. She looks at her sock feet and listens to the heat come through the overhead vent. It’s just started to get chilly in the evenings. She looks at her reflection in the mirror, her nearly shoulder-length hair and the crinkles at the corners of her eyes, as if she smiled a lot in her youth. “We both know I’m not actually tough,” she sighs.

  “But could we pretend?” Meg asks sincerely. “I mean, do you think you could come up for a weekend, just to give Kay a little scare?”

  “Meg, that’s absurd,” Anna Lisa balks. “What am I supposed to do, beat her up? I’ve never fought in my life.”

  “I know,” Meg says coldly. Then she turns soft and watery. She’s no longer an oasis but a flood of hot, salty tears. “Come on, Al, you’ve got to help me. It’s awful here. People leave and the ones who stay act like I’m some kind of situation to be dealt with, like I’m some old story they’re tired of hearing.”

  “Couldn’t you just ignore Kay?”

  “That might work in a big city. That might work for you, Al.”

  “She didn’t… I mean, did she hurt you or threaten you or anything?” Anna Lisa asks hesitantly.

  “Well, she threatens all the time. She only hit me once, after I told her I cheated. That’s when I broke things off. For good this time. I’m not afraid of her, if that’s what you’re thinking. I know she’s too much of a coward to really hurt me, and besides, I wouldn’t care if she did. I haven’t been afraid of death since I was eleven. All these butches with their motorcycles and their fights. I just keep thinking, ’That’s nothing. I could show you what it really means to not be afraid of anything.’ But I wear heels and carry a purse, so everyone just thinks I’m a drama queen.”

  “I don’t,” Anna Lisa says. But she’s not sure what to think. Meg’s voice is thick with tears, like the night the two of them broke up. Something is different, though—Meg’s plan is fanciful, not the work of a rational 27-year-old. And why didn’t she call for four years?

  For the first time, Anna Lisa sees her choices laid out like the systems of the body, each printed on a clear cellophane page and layered on top of one another. She could tell Terry she has a field trip for school. She could go to Lilac Mines and be the butch that Meg always wanted her to be. She could find out if Kay is a real threat, or if it’s something deeper inside Meg herself. But then what? She could stay in Lilac Mines. Again. Forever. But that would mean no family, no Terry, no money, no nursing school. School is the first thing she’s ever done that has made her excited about the future. The first thing that might help other people, but doesn’t put her at their mercy.

  “I can’t,” Anna Lisa begins. She hates how familiar this feels. Here she goes, getting ready to be none of the things Meg needs her to be.

  “But you can, you know you can.” Meg’s voice climbs higher, “That’s the problem with you, Al, you don’t know what you’re capable of.”

  “Why don’t you just tell Kay you lied, tell her you can’t see her anymore? Get Jody to come with you,” Anna Lisa says.

  “I don’t need Jody.” Meg’s voice is icy again. It boils and freezes over so quickly that Anna Lisa can’t keep up. “So that’s it? You’re not going to help me?”

  “I want to,” Anna Lisa says, but it sounds weak. “It’s just, I have a whole life here. And I like it. At least, I like parts of it. You make things sound so black and white, and they’re not.” But Meg is right. Anna Lisa is capable of making choices. So she makes one. She chooses black. “I can’t…” She stops and starts over. “I won’t save you. It’s your life, and this is mine. If you had a family, you’d want to…”

  “You don’t know anything about what I’d do.” Meg does not call Anna Lisa on her cruelty. She’s too proud to use her dead mother and estranged father as pawns, even if everything else is fair game.

  Anna Lisa looks down at her free hand. It too has a life of its own, trembling to the beat of a frantic and silent drum.

  “Well then, enjoy the pretty good parts of your life with your nice husband, Al,” Meg says, “Anna Lisa.” The way she says it makes it sound like the ugliest name in the world.

  Anna Lisa sits down on the couch, at the opposite end from Terry. A woman on TV is talking about soaking her hands in dish detergent. It actually makes her skin softer, she says, as if she is divulging a great secret. Anna Lisa wishes she could feel so happy about dish detergent. She wishes she could plunge her hands into boiling water till her body’s biggest organ was numb.

  “Is Michelle a friend from school?” Terry asks, without taking his eyes from the TV set.

  “No.” The easier answer would have been yes, but tonight Anna Lisa doesn’t feel like lying more than she has to.

  “Oh. Well, she sounded very exotic.”

  “Mm. She’s just an old friend.”

  “Really? Does she live in Fresno? Did she go to high school with you and Nancy-Jane and Walter?” Terry scoots closer to her end of the couch. Anna Lisa hates his skinny limbs, his hairy fingers, his eyes that look deep but have nothing difficult to contemplate.

  “No, okay? I’m not in the mood to talk about it right now.”

  “I’m just making conversation,” Terry says, dejected. “I’m just curious.”

  Anna Lisa glares at him. He should be better, if she is going to stay with him. If she is going to leave Meg crying and lost and maybe beaten up. They’re silent as the credits role. All those people to make one stupid show, Anna Lisa thinks.

  “Look, I don’t know about this school idea,” Terry says finally. “I was for it because I thought you might finally get excited about something—and it seemed like you were—but now look at you. Your first test and you’re a wreck.”

  “You know nothing about why I’m a wreck,” Anna Lisa says, doing her best to mimic Meg’s meanest voice. She wants a new word to hurl at him. One that she never heard her mother yell at her father during one of their squabbles. She wants to link Terry, instead, to all the larger, more terrible things in the world. “And you—you are just oppressive, Terry.”

  “To who? To whom?” he calls as she walks out of the house and into the backyard,
the sliding glass door closing behind her.

  She sits down in the middle of the vegetable garden. The mud soaks through to her skin in seconds. She is feverish and shivering. The squash turn their shiny yellow faces in the moonlight, like old, wise relatives. Her first test. It’s not Terry’s fault he doesn’t get it. How could he know when she’s worked so hard to keep him away, the particulars of his maleness, the rudeness of his curiosity? She will get an F when it comes to saving Meg. And what about saving herself? Is that what she just did, or what she doesn’t even know how to do? She picks a squash and takes a small bite. It doesn’t even taste like squash. It’s bland and turns to mush so quickly.

  Terry stays inside. He’s not the type to charge outside late at night. Neither is Anna Lisa.

  Something is poking her lower back. She touches her hand to her back pocket and pulls out the blue ballpoint pen she was using to underline tibia and fibula and femur. She pushes up her sleeve. Her arm is covered with goose bumps. The flipside of her forearm is paler than the inside of a squash. She uncaps the pen and touches it to her skin. She has to press hard to make a mark. Meg, she writes. Below it she draws a plus sign. The pen is a dull blade. Al, she writes. Around the two names, she draws a heart. She is a tree and her biggest organ is bark, and she can whittle it away. She presses so hard that her skin welts up beneath the blue lines even before she’s done with her message. Then she rolls her sleeve down. It’s not as if Terry will try to undress her tonight.

  INGA CLARKEI

  Jody: Lilac Mines, 1974

  “We’re dinosaurs, Jo,” says Meg. “You’re that one with the big teeth, and I’m a stega. what are the ones with the plates on their back? I’m one of those. Nice accessories and a small brain.” She tips her head back and finishes her wine. The argyle pattern of her sweater does resemble a stegosaurus’s plates, sort of. “More?” she asks Jody, picking up the empty bottle.