Pages for You

by Sylvia Brownrigg

  “He couldn’t see that you were a woman, though. He wasn’t sure. It was our being on the path that upset him. Fornication in public: he didn’t like it.”

  “No, it wasn’t just that. He knew we were two women. Why else would he say ‘freaks’?”

  “He wasn’t sure,” Flannery insisted. “He couldn’t see you, or even me, really.”

  “I don’t usually get mistaken for a man.”

  “I’m sure you don’t. I don’t, either. But when people don’t know—it’s not the first thing they guess.”

  “I think you’re being naïve.”

  It was an odd thing to be arguing about. What difference did it make?

  “We’re not freaks,” Flannery said. That was the main point. “We’re just a couple of girls who got a little overexcited. We didn’t mean to hurt anyone. We’re nice girls, really.”

  Anne turned to watch Flannery. Poor pink Flannery. Anne brushed fond fingers through Flannery’s sun-lightened hair—one of the few parts of her that did not hurt.

  “You may be,” Anne said gently, “a nice girl. I’m not.”

  Flannery leaned her head into Anne’s hand, gratefully, like a cat inviting the caress. “Sure you are,” she said. Around them the rain and wind drama continued, but it no longer had their full attention. “Sure you are. Ask Murphy. He agrees with me on this one.”

  “Oh, Flannery.” Anne sighed, with the conviction of someone of a different generation. The cast of her voice made her seem older. Something about its new regret-hinting depth, its tenor of well-traveled tiredness. “I don’t think so. I think Murphy knows otherwise.”

  Afternoon crept into evening, and they were still in the car. Talking.

  The storm got them talking, and as it tantrumed on, the car became the calmest and most comfortable refuge in the world, warmed by their voices. Their new home’s windows clouded with their condensed conversation, and the storm grew dark and night-blurred beyond them, a distant stampede outside.

  Anne and Flannery spoke with a seriousness they had never attempted before about being two women in love. About what drew each of them toward a passion that was not the done thing: the kind that might or might not provoke the word “freaks.” Anne knew all about how Flannery adored her, and Flannery had come to believe that Anne found her charming and cutely beautiful; but they had never, since the very first days, gone over the ground of being two women together. Lesbians, if that was what you cared to say about it. Anne had teased Flannery about going to the gay student group—she once said, “That’s part of being an undergrad, babe: going to meetings”— but Flannery chose not to attend. She did not want to sit in a room with that labelous name; she was not ready for that yet. So far, she just wanted to shelter in Anne. She could worry about the rest later: the group talks and protests, the specialist bookstores and specialist books. She could read all about it later. As Anne was forever telling Flannery, she had plenty of time.

  They talked about being women and not being men. They shared notes on their younger years: the joys of being a tomboy and the creeping dismay when you passed the age when that word still worked. They traded stories of early crushes (a tall, talkative librarian; the sexy girl on the swim team; a tough woman cop on some old TV show). Anne, unlike Flannery, had enjoyed a girlhood fumble with a friend in her father’s pickup truck, a detail that had great vehicular romance for Flannery. They spoke of being—nominally—the same as each other, and the fallacy of assuming this meant deeper understanding or closeness than in the standard heterosexual arrangement. (“You, for one, are illegible to me half the time,” Flannery admitted honestly, under the guise of banter. “I’m still working on my semiotics of Anne.”) They acknowledged their situation’s inherent unsafeties, and the mildness of their Everglade encounter compared to worse possibilities. Anne narrated a night when she had come home from a bar with a girlfriend and was chased the last two blocks by drunk men calling them fucking dykes.

  Cautiously, Flannery voiced a few of her own untried thoughts on the matter. She mentioned her nascent curiosities about women, and also about men, and what either might have to do with the new and changing shape of her self. She and Anne talked some—sketchily, hesitantly; biography was still not Anne’s forte—of mothers and fathers. Then: boyfriends. Flannery had little to say on that point beyond brief high-school stories, but Anne mentioned a man whom she had loved, deeply. A man she had spent a good deal of time with, a man who . . .

  She paused. “One day I’ll tell you all about it. Some other time.” And as they were in the dark, Flannery could not see the rhythms that crossed Anne’s face then. If she had, she would have asked to know more right away. She would not have waited. But there in the car, in the innocent dark, she took Anne’s words at their invisible face value: one day, Anne promised, she would tell her all about it.

  Night fell, but their talk warmed them. Outside, the noises slowed and the rage retreated; the wind gave up its fierce chase. Why look for a hotel now? They were parked on an out-of-the-way street, a deserted place from which they had watched the storm. Surely no one would bother them? They agreed easily—as easily as on anything yet on this trip—to spend the night in the car. Friends now, lovers, and also two women who could speak to and hold each other, Anne and Flannery slept finally, half-reclined, in the post-storm of quiet, at peace.

  Till a 5-a.m. face appeared at the window, which woke Flannery into a fear so abrupt she was sure it had killed her.

  It became a funny story later. So much does. The two came to tell the story slightly differently, but since by then they were apart, they never knew the other’s version: where she paused for comic timing, how she earned the laugh. At least half of life’s humiliations and indignities, Flannery discovered, turned out to be recyclable later into routines that made you good company. In fact, perhaps the entire endeavor was to lurch from one misadventure to another, collecting the raw material for stories: in an older, cynical phase, as Flannery grew into her writing self, she considered this brittle possibility. If it was so, then Florida had, after all, served her well. Even getting caught “wet-handed,” the phrase Flannery coined for it, on a path in the Everglades, would one day make a good self-revealing joke.

  They practiced it on each other on the train ride back. They survived a few more days of shrimp, beaches, and gators, but those first days were the ones that produced the stories.

  “‘We were weaving on the road, Officer, and thought it would be safer to pull off. We didn’t want to cause an accident,’” Anne intoned again in her politest sweetheart voice, half an octave or so above her speaking register (a full octave over her smoking seductress). This replay of that pre-dawn encounter took place in South Carolina, over vials of Gordon’s gin Anne had smuggled back from the drinks car to her underage lover. It was late afternoon. The two women were sandy, unshowered, and plastered. They had returned the rental car with fifteen minutes to spare, to get back onto Amtrak.

  “‘Where are you two little ladies from?’” Drunk, Flannery finally let loose her most sprawling southern accent, which she had been desperate to try out for days now, ever since that nice buttery waitress in the bathroom of Shoney’s. It was all Flannery could do, by the end of the trip, not to ask buffoonishly at a restaurant or diner, “Y’all have grits?” She had become a great grits connoisseur.

  “‘Little ladies,’” Anne repeated. “If only he knew.”

  “You were the little lady he was most interested in,” Flannery said. “That’s the only reason he didn’t arrest us. He was dumbfounded by your beauty.”

  “Not at all. It was your virginal innocence that moved him.”

  “‘We’re just stray souls from a fancy university: look, Officer, here are our student IDs.’ I can’t believe we pulled that. It was shameless.”

  “It was more than shameless. It was freakish of us to pull the university card.”

  “Freakish!” Flannery nodded. “Now, see, he thought we were nice girls. The police officer.
I told you we’re nice girls. Or that we can at least pass.”

  “Sure we can pass as nice girls.” Anne took a hit of Gordon’s. “He very nearly killed you, Flannery. Even in the dark I could see you were blue with heart failure.”

  “I thought he was one of the panthers coming to wreak its revenge. I really did. I was still asleep. Plus his flashlight—it was so fucking bright, right in my face.”

  “You and that imaginary panther.” Anne shook her head indulgently. “It wasn’t a panther, babe. There are only about four of them left. It was a dog.”

  “It was a panther.”

  “It couldn’t have been.”

  Flannery stole a slow, greedy look at her girlfriend. Jesus. Even ragged-edged with sleeplessness, even in the murk of an air-conditioned gin cloud, the woman was beautiful. Flannery would have kissed her, then and there, if she did not have the reprimand of the Everglades loud in her mind.

  “Do you want me to pour gin all over your head?” she asked instead.

  “Ooh, baby.” Anne laughed. “I love it when you talk that way to me.” She tilted Flannery’s vial-threatening hand back from her. “But, since you ask—not especially.”

  “Then take my word for it. It was a silver panther. Dead, by the side of the road,” Flannery said, then took a long swig of gin, like some old guy rocking on his porch, telling far-fetched stories from his wild, long-ago youth.

  “You know that telephone call I made?”

  Outside was rattling and black, Delaware or Maryland. They had more or less fallen off the train in D.C., made a failed effort to sober up, then retrained at Union Station for the last leg north. A few readers or all-night talkers hunched under the faint overhead lights as the train crossed back into Yankee territory. Flannery was passed out and drooling, unobtrusively, when Anne’s serious voice reached her and staggered her back into consciousness.

  “What?” She wiped her mouth of its sleep spit. One day Flannery would learn how to keep herself together, as Anne did.

  “You know that call I made?” Anne repeated. “The day of the storm?”

  “Oh. Yeah?” Flannery had no idea what Anne was talking about.

  “It was UNM. I got the job.”

  “You got it?” Flannery sat up straighter. This was news. “That’s great. Congratulations.” She gave her a sloppy hug with stiffening, hungover limbs.

  Anne seemed surprised by the embrace. “Thanks.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I just wanted to think it over first. Quietly,” she said. Quietly. “But also, you know—I thought you would be upset. I didn’t want to spoil the trip.”

  So you acted like a witch for the first two days instead, Flannery was by now awake enough to think but not say aloud. Her sense of the chronology of those hot days was bleary. When had Anne known? Before or after the Everglades? When was the storm? Her brain was too gin-drowned and oxygen-starved for Flannery to work out the timing. Anyway, it didn’t matter. Anne had the job now, that was the main thing.

  “That’s terrific, sweetheart. I’d toast you, but I can’t possibly drink any more or I’ll die.” She gave her lover, instead, an affectionate ruffle of her head. It was an uncharacteristic gesture: Anne was not the sort of person whose coiffure you ruffled.

  “Thank you, Flannery.” But so formal and somber; as if accepting Flannery’s condolences at a memorial service. Why should the newly employed be so sad already?

  The real slide started then, and it happened fast. Everything was changing and being busily arranged, and Flannery—who at points that year had felt the first thrilling taste of being in control of her own life, and having a hand in its shaping—fell back into the familiar lull of passivity. Anne organized her final trip to Albuquerque a few weeks after their return; final, she kept calling it, final, as if it were an end and not a beginning. Her metabolism altered: she became more impatient and twitchy. She pleaded work as a reason to spend fewer nights together; she had a new load of papers to grade (was Flannery wrong to think she said that pointedly, as if to underline their difference in status?) and a crucial edit due soon on the near-done dissertation. Besides, she reminded Flannery in a teacherly way—were there not papers Flannery should be writing? Books she should be reading?

  There certainly were. There were all manner of books Flannery had to make her own, intellectual territories she should conquer and colonize. She read a novel about the internment of Japanese Americans in the Second World War and was duly appalled. For her philosophy class, Mortal Questions, she thought about what it felt like to be a bat, along with other ponderables of consciousness, under Thomas Nagel’s provocations. She avoided Physics for Poets, because although she wanted to be the kind of person who understood what quarks were, she was too intimidated actually to find out. And Intro to Drama was coming to an end with Caryl Churchill.

  There was nothing for it but to read. Flannery read in early-morning dining halls and in her dusty, neglected dorm room, where she unearthed clothes she had forgotten she owned. As spring made the air kinder and everyone’s eyes reopened at the possibility of warmth, Flannery even read outside again—on damp soft lawns and across benches, and sometimes, even, a few last sentences on her way in to class. As the days lengthened and the new light invited, Flannery kept her head down, and busied it loudly with page after page of printed words.

  Spring! It’s a time of renewal and rebirth. Buds and new growth, kittens and lambs. Isn’t that right? If you live in a place where winter seriously damages and deprives you, drives you inside off the hard, iced streets—spring and its blossoms arrive to cheer you, coming over all feminine and nurturing. We are supposed to love it, to feel joyful. Warmed back to life. It’s spring at last! Let the unfurling begin!

  Flannery’s affections were different from other people’s; they always would be. She did not move in the seasonal step she was meant to. Many other students had also gone to Florida for their break and come back tan and healthy, while Flannery, after weeks of ugly peeling (skin rolling off whitely at the touch—“You’re like a snake” was Anne’s observation), had only a sallow ash to deepen her customary pallor. As the air lightened and people’s dispositions grew sunnier, Flannery’s heart contracted. She became Grinchlike. Sweet, benevolent Flannery might have kicked a lamb, if she’d seen one. Drowned a kitten. Even Susan Kim, over a Mortal Questions coffee, said, “You’re looking a little lifeless these days. Is having a free will getting you down?”

  She wished she could tell Susan: it was her lack of free will that was getting her down. It was her lover’s determined determinism to close the door on her life here that had Flannery worried. Mustn’t it mean that Anne no longer loved her? Flannery could not get her to say anything so clear. Anne was perfectly pleasant to Flannery, and their nights, when they spent them together, were still raucous and racy. But fast—as if there weren’t much time. Anne was on her way somewhere else. Flannery felt it happening, and tried to figure out how to fix it so that Anne would not leave her at the same time she left the university. How not to be the baby thrown out with that bathwater?

  Anne, meanwhile, was collecting herself to go to Albuquerque again for a brief confirming visit. She was buttoning herself back up, packing her bags. There was no question (Flannery checked, just in case) of her wanting Flannery to come with her.

  Anne was flying off, only for a few days. She would be back soon, she promised. In the meantime, Flannery could enjoy life here, among the bright T-shirts and new Frisbees of glorious spring.

  Flannery felt the oncreep of death all around her, even as she waved at the others, fellow youths who had no idea what was coming. Enjoy the Frisbee while you can, her immensely old, grizzled self wanted to tell them. It will all fade, faster than you know.

  Anne was gone. It was over. Their farewell had been both somber and perfunctory, and Flannery allowed herself the stagy, melodramatic conviction that she would never see her lover again. The night Anne left, Flannery slept in her dorm roo
m as she often had of late, but this time its small cramped shape seemed overlarge and echoey, as if she herself had already moved out of it. She briefly considered wandering over to sleep in Anne’s deserted, solitary apartment, far from the student fray, but rejected the desire as unhealthy and necrophiliac. “Necrophilia”: a word she had learned from Anne, of course. Flannery could not remember how it had come up. Dracula? Gothic literature? Or perhaps the evil-flowered Baudelaire.

  She was giving up, then. Was that it? And Flannery was willing to, too? Throw herself down on the grave, like a loyal dog, howling, till the cold finally claimed her and she could join her mistress in the great beyond?

  The metaphor captured her attention for a moment. She tried to pursue it. Flannery had scarcely had a creative thought all year, at least since her neophyte love poem and a scattering of notes she had written in various degrees of lyricism for Anne. It was a pleasure to feel her mind work over imaginative territory again, even if this was a cliché. So was it her lover who was in the grave, or the love that had flourished between them? And what of this image of the loyal pooch following its mistress?

  It gave her an idea.

  That was a possibility. Flannery sat upright in an indigo-lit dorm bed. Wakened by the bright possibility suggested by her metaphor—and the sounds, out in the courtyard, of drunken carousers.

  She would surprise her. That was it. She would surprise Anne. Flannery, bold, loyal soul that she was, would fly out to join her: there, exactly there, in the great beyond.

  She watched herself perform the adult tricks of travel, all those calls she’d left up to Anne for their Florida trip: airline, car rental, airport limo. How would she pay for this extravagance? She’d think about that later, back home in the summer, when all she would have before her would be money worry and melancholy. For now, she just closed her eyes and charged it. It was as Nick once said to her when he bought tickets to see his favorite band play a gig in New York. When Flannery questioned his means, he said simply, “But, Flannery—that’s why God created credit cards.”