A Thin Bright Line

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  She was being modest. The emotion in Rusty’s voice, as she gripped Lucybelle’s shoulder on the front porch at the Lorraine Hansberry party, told a much larger story. Lucybelle forced herself to picture Wanda: her long hair, drooping eyelid, red lips, regal bearing. Rusty said fifteen years.

  Lucybelle reached for the sheet and covered herself. “You better go now.”

  Stella slung the camera strap over her shoulder and nodded. “Okay. Thank you.” She paused and said her name. “Lucybelle.”

  “You can just call me Lucy. Most people do.”

  “I like Lucybelle.”

  She stood and with the sheet wrapped around her body, from the neck down to her ankles, walked to the front door and opened it a crack. “Thank you for the baseball game.”

  “I take it you’d like me to leave now.” Stella only half smiled.

  Lucybelle didn’t trust her voice. She nodded.

  Stella walked past Lucybelle and out the door without so much as a good-bye. A minute later, though, a soft clunking drew her attention to the window. Dirt clods burst against the glass, dispersing as smaller particles. She knelt, so that only her shoulders and head could be viewed, and pushed open the sash. Stella stood below, arm cocked back about to pitch another dirt clod. She lowered her arm and smiled her big unabashed smile. “Thank you,” she called up. “I’ll see you later.”

  No, Lucybelle thought, no you won’t.

  Tears! They came all at once, and hard, as if she’d lost a sweetheart of many years. She slumped to the floor, out of sight, and cried from a much deeper place than she’d ever cried for anyone. The sorrow she’d felt after Phyllis had been for herself, for the hollow prospect of loneliness, but this sadness was for that crazy smile and those able hands, cradling the camera and depressing the shutter release. For eyes that truly saw.

  How much time had she actually spent with Stella? Two baseball games, a long and troubled cab ride, ten even more troubled minutes in someone’s backyard while Stella’s lover waited inside for a plate of chicken and potato salad. And this past hour, here in her apartment, Lucybelle as naked as the day she was born, letting the woman photograph her. All of her.

  That evening Beverly and Ruthie did stop by with some chicken soup. Lucybelle had no choice but to pretend a sore throat so that they would leave quickly.

  July–September 1958

  The month of July passed with one hot, sticky day after another. When she joined the women for drinks on Friday nights, they talked about the crisis of Ruthie’s niece’s wedding. Though her parents had been kind and protective of their daughter when Beverly had been fired, they weren’t ready to have the pair at an extended family event. They insisted she come alone or find a male date. Beverly was all for the ploy, Dorothy thought Ruthie should find a gay fellow and have fun with the situation, and Ruthie burst into tears every time the topic came up.

  Lucybelle kept quiet, tried to listen to their endless machinations, but couldn’t stop thinking of Stella’s hoarse voice shouting at the White Sox players, the feel of the wooden floor on her bare skin, the soothing sound of the camera shutter opening and closing. The freedom in full exposure.

  At the end of the month, Dorothy’s mother took a bad fall while Dorothy was at work, which called into question caretaker Sally’s competence. After much discussion it was decided that she was still the best choice. She lived right across the street and anyway getting someone else would be next to impossible, especially now with the broken hip. All the women agreed that accidents happened and that this was the first time something bad had happened on Sally’s watch.

  To support their friend, Lucybelle suggested a Friday night in the hospital, so they brought a couple of flasks of whiskey into Dorothy’s mother’s room and had their cocktails bedside, eventually falling into terribly inappropriate and noisy laughter. The nurse came trotting down the hall and into the room, looking quite attractive in her little white hat and shoes, and they convinced her to take a few swigs of whiskey. Dorothy’s mother, who understood very little in her dementia, declared that her daughter had the best friends in the entire world. They all drank to friendship, and Dorothy held a flask to her mother’s lips, right in front of the nurse, for a swallow. It was one of their funnest evenings.

  Lucybelle passed other Friday nights with the scientists, where ribald jokes were told and too much alcohol was consumed. Peter Hauser admitted to being kicked out of the house by Emily and sleeping on the roof of the SIPRE lab for four nights. He said the stars were magnificent. Bader told stories about Antarctica: the Russian scientist who’d shot dead a colleague over a game of chess; the time they became snowbound on a field trip and survived on penguin stew; the contest between Oscar, an American, and Philip, a Brit, over which “race” was the heartiest, culminating in a jump into the polar sea, accessible between great crusts of ice, coarse ropes tied around their chests and held by their fellow countrymen. Both lived, though barely.

  Early on the second Sunday morning in August, Lucybelle finished her coffee, put on her Keds, a pair of madras shorts, and a light-yellow, sleeveless blouse. L’Forte scampered down the stairwell ahead of her, excited about the promised long lakeside walk. Instead he and Lucybelle found Stella sitting on the curb, across the street, and not in her church clothes.

  Lucybelle held out a hand, and Stella shook it formally, without a smile, the need to touch so great that any ruse would do.

  “Why are you sitting on the curb?”

  “It’s early. I knew you’d be bringing L’Forte out.”

  “Why aren’t you going to church?”

  “Wanda went to visit her folks.”

  “In Jonesboro.”

  “Yeah.”

  A breeze blew off the lake. Their bare arms brushed, repeatedly, as they walked. Neither spoke much and when they did it was about anything other than what they were thinking and feeling. Lucybelle said she’d gotten a letter from her mother and that it was all about her brother and his children. Stella said she’d made a down payment on two new cars for Acme Transport. Lucybelle said that she’d written a short story and sent it off, foolishly, to the New Yorker. Stella said that Lorraine Hansberry had found a producer for her play and that A Raisin in the Sun was going to premier on Broadway some time in the spring.

  “Take me to New York to see it,” Lucybelle said, turning at last from inconsequential matters.

  “Okay.”

  Their words were shells, rough and gnarly on the outside, the pearly insides glimpsed but unreachable. Saying them felt good anyway, even if they held no attainable substance.

  “What did you do with the pictures?”

  “I developed them.”

  “Where? Couldn’t you get arrested?”

  Stella laughed. “I have my own darkroom. I do my own developing.”

  She ought to ask Stella to hand them over, or to destroy them, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so. The existence of those pictures projected her into that place of light and beauty, and she couldn’t bear to wreck it. “Well, we did almost get arrested together on Halloween.”

  “True. Did you find that exciting?”

  Lucybelle smiled picturing herself in the Djuna Barnes getup, sitting in the backseat of Stella’s cab.

  “Can I come up?”

  Lucybelle didn’t answer, nor did she stop Stella from following her up the stairwell. The Worthingtons came out of their apartment just as Lucybelle was keying hers open. L’Forte growled and then lunged at their basset hound, a dog that looked just like him but lighter in color and bigger in size. L’Forte had never exhibited aggressive behavior toward other dogs, and certainly not toward people, and Lucybelle could only imagine that he felt she needed extra protection just then.

  She tried to apologize to the Worthingtons but they were busy collaring the hound, looking outraged by the attack and downright undone by the sight of a butch Negro girl practically on their doorstep. Lucybelle hurled a smile at the elderly couple and pulled both L’Forte and
Stella inside. She threw the deadbolt and latched the chain lock.

  As she turned, pressing her back against the inside of the front door, Stella cupped her chin and looked at her. Saw her. Moved her hand down her neck, along her clavicle. Their lips didn’t touch on the first kiss, a sliver of air separated their mouths. Their hands too fell against their own sides, as if anything more would be too potent, impossible to bear.

  The tenderness stretched out time, making it transparent. In the beginning there was pure longing.

  Then, probably much sooner than it seemed, the tenderness snapped, split open, and they crashed against the door and fell to the wooden planking, grief already profound between them, snarled in with the love. It couldn’t be any different if it was to be true and Lucybelle wanted, more than she wanted anything else in life, true. They must have touched every part of one another, inside and out, and they probably talked, said words, maybe made oaths. That first time became sacred in their legend of themselves, and sometimes they tried to remember the chronology of touch and feeling, but the story changed every time they told it.

  Lucybelle didn’t even try to talk herself out of the affair. She knew she’d fail. She wanted this: making love with Stella, talking for hours afterward, then making love some more. She was going to have it. She just was.

  Stella came when Wanda was at work or at church or just at home. She drove one of the cabs, meaning she kept it off the street and from earning income, if that was the best way to get to Lucybelle. Sometimes she took the train. They walked L’Forte, they made love, they talked, and they ate dinners in the park, lying on a blanket, using their fingers to pry pickles out of jars and to peel sliced roast beef off the deli pile. They made each other sandwiches and drinks, handed over the creations and concoctions with raw affection.

  People sometimes stared. Maybe they saw that the two women were more than casual companions. Maybe they were curious about Stella’s boyishness. Maybe they disapproved of interracial friendship. Lucybelle and Stella laughed so hard their sides hurt at the looks the Worthingtons gave them. They didn’t care what people saw or thought they saw. Love is a painkiller and nothing, physical or psychic, could touch them.

  Thankfully Wanda hated baseball, so they got to go to all the games, where they shouted for the White Sox and for themselves. Lucybelle loved how Stella loved baseball. They managed, but just, to not get arrested. They kept their hands, but not their eyes, off of one another in public, and twice they had to move seats at the ballpark before other White Sox fans reported the vibrant aura surrounding the two women.

  Lucybelle was the happiest she’d ever been in her life.

  She hadn’t forgotten her agreement with Bader, or his warning in June. In fact, in her lust-warped judgment, she viewed the agreement and warning as justifications for having the affair. Stella was not free to be in an open relationship either. They both needed the secrecy, and that shared hiding created a stasis of its own, bound them as tightly as their desire. One evening, as they lay in Lucybelle’s bed at dusk, she made the mistake of telling Stella about her arrangement with Bader.

  She’d only seen Stella angry two other times, the first with the cop on Lake Shore Drive and the second when she’d shown up at Tiny and Ruby’s club, but neither of those times compared to this one. Stella flung her feet to the floor and sat up.

  “What?” she asked as if Lucybelle had said she’d committed herself to an insane asylum.

  Hearing her own words through Stella’s ears shamed her. It had made sense, before she said it out loud, but now she couldn’t unscramble even her own understanding of the commitment she’d made to Bader.

  “Why would you do that?”

  Lucybelle pulled the sheet up to her chin. “My relationship with Phyllis was over. I needed to get out of New York. It seemed like an opportunity, one that took care of a lot of things at once. Anyway, I can always leave my job. It’s not forever.”

  “Everything I know about you goes against this thing you’ve told me.”

  She hated Stella knowing. Yet she didn’t wish she’d kept silent.

  “And if he finds out that you are in fact ‘acting on it’?”

  She shook her head. Out loud it did sound absurd.

  “Answer me,” Stella said roughly. “I really want to know.”

  “You’re hiding as much as I am.”

  “I’m not hiding my character, my soul. The whole world knows who I am. They just have to look at me. I’m my own boss.”

  “No, you don’t have to lie on the street or at work. Only to your life companion.”

  “The point is,” Stella continued, undaunted by Lucybelle saying what they’d never said aloud, “you would never actually be with me, would you? Open and free?”

  “You’re the one who’s not free. It’s not a fair question.”

  “Answer it anyway.”

  I would, Lucybelle thought. But the question hurt too much to answer because Stella did have Wanda at home. Instead she threw out, “Would you take me to Tiny and Ruby’s?”

  At last she’d damped Stella’s indignation. “What do you mean, would I now? Or would I if ?

  “Either.”

  “You don’t belong there.” Stella paused. “Not because of color. You’re a sophisticated lady. You read the New Yorker.”

  “That’s ridiculous. And you’re not sophisticated?”

  “Bulldyke and sophistication will never go together.”

  “Don’t use that word.”

  “See? Your fear of that word makes my point. That’s why you’re not going to Tiny and Ruby’s.”

  “I’m not going to Tiny and Ruby’s because of your girlfriend.”

  “She knows about you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She knows I have a friend.”

  That hurt more than anything else Stella had said. “Just a friend.”

  Stella lay back down beside Lucybelle. They’d already said too much. She pushed her face into the crook of Lucybelle’s neck, but maybe that felt too vulnerable, too like home, because she quickly rose up to kiss her collarbone and breasts, grasping at the silky eroticism that bound them. If nothing else, they had that.

  They didn’t fight again. The balance was too delicate. But their lovemaking shifted slightly, became edged with hopelessness, as if each time was going to be the last.

  Baseball season ended and it began to rain. They went to the movies when they could, read short stories aloud to one another, and still walked L’Forte. A couple of other regular dog-walkers smiled and said hello, while still others made wide swaths around their path, scowled, caught on, or just disapproved of what they saw on the face of it. Stella and Lucybelle didn’t care.

  One time they held hands while walking along the lake. Their joined palms felt like a fuse in an outlet, as if their touch was the source of everything that mattered, as if by doing this, holding hands in public, they’d be able to make better photographs and write better stories. Make better love. The power of those few minutes of not hiding felt like it could fuel an entire country.

  Tuesday, November 18, 1958

  Daddy died of a quick heart attack in the courtroom. He was seventy years old but Lucybelle hadn’t yet considered the possibility of his death. She told her mother that she loved her, hung up the telephone, and wanted to call Stella.

  The only number she had was for Acme Transport. Wanda was the dispatcher. Lucybelle had never been to their house.

  Even before she felt the full impact of her grief at losing Daddy, she was hit by the realization that not only did she have no viable way for contacting Stella, her lover wasn’t available to her. At all. In any real way. These past three months had been an illusion of closeness.

  The double whammy near about killed her that night. She drank too much. She smashed some dishes. L’Forte ended up peeing in a corner of her study.

  In the morning she called Dorothy and asked if she’d keep L’Forte, then took a taxicab to the airport and booke
d a flight to Little Rock. The airplane bumped down on the tarmac, the wings wagging side to side, and the brakes screeched to a slow stop. Her brother, John Perry, having flown in from Portland, met her flight and they drove together to Pocahontas.

  They found the house full of women, Mother on the couch holding tightly to her Bible, casseroles and cakes covering the dining room table. The smell of the lard-rich food made Lucybelle nauseous. She went directly to the little yellow cube that was her girlhood bedroom, closed the door, and sat on the small single mattress. Her arms and legs felt as brittle as sticks. Her face ached. Home without Daddy was impossible. If no one before Stella had truly seen her, at least Daddy had glimpsed her. He’d struggled to fit her into his picture of the world, the small-town Christian life he believed in with all his might. He’d viewed her intelligence as an anchor she’d have to forever drag, could not conceive that it might be her ship out, but he’d seen it. He had loved her.

  Lucybelle was shattered.

  She wanted a cigarette with a level of desperation that felt life-threatening. She had to smoke or she would die. The only feeling stronger was her shame: neither her brother nor her mother knew that she smoked. What a stupid thing to hide. But it felt like the nadir of her self, indicative of her lack of discipline, her vulnerability, her unworthiness.

  John Perry had married a smart and beautiful woman, Helen, and they had four wholesome children. They took hikes after church on Sundays and talked politics at the family dinner table. She, by contrast, was involved with a woman who was cheating on her lover of fifteen years, a woman whom she couldn’t call even when her daddy died. She smoked cigarettes and didn’t even own a dinner table. She’d lost eight pounds since she began seeing Stella.

  By the end of the week, she felt so diminished she seriously considered staying in Pocahontas. Someone had to care for her mother. John Perry had his family in Oregon. If Dorothy could do it, she could too. For that matter, there might be an available hog farmer. What would it be like to not have to fend for herself ? To live in a place where people trusted her?