Julia Watts - Wedding Bell Blues

by Julia Watts

  Lily sat down on a green vinyl chair. Mimi stood at the waiting room’s coffee table, clearly fascinated by the lamp that sat on it. A ginger jar lamp, its clear glass base was filled with dog biscuits.

  The old lady, who had disappeared into the back of the trailer, returned to her post at the desk. “The doctor’ll be with you in a minute.”

  Moments later, Lily looked up as she heard the sound of boots clomping down the linoleum-floored hall. Looking down the dimly lighted corridor, Lily saw that Dr. Jack was a muscular but short man, wearing blue coveralls and a pair of dirt-caked brown cowboy boots.

  In the full light of the waiting room, however, Lily saw that Dr. Jack wasn’t a man at all.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m Dr. Jack Jennings. How you doing?” She extended her hand to shake. Her close-cropped brown hair and square jaw made it easy to mistake her for a man at a distance. But close up, the smoothness of her cheeks made it clear she was a woman. Lily shook her hand, which, while big, was too soft to be a man’s.

  “You okay?” Dr. Jack asked.

  “Um... yeah. Fine.” If Lily had seen a woman who looked like Jack at Piedmont Park in Atlanta, she barely would have noticed her. But here in Versailles, where most premenopausal women were hyperfeminine slaves to Mary Kay cosmetics and the tanning bed, seeing a butch was shocking — like seeing a bull-mastiff in a litter of poodles.

  “You thought I was gonna be a man, didn’t you?” Dr. Jack sized up Lily with clear blue eyes.

  “Um... yeah, I guess so. Just from the name and all.”

  Dr. Jack looked stern suddenly. “Now I hope you don’t think that being a woman makes me less of a vet.”

  “Oh, gosh, no,” Lily said quickly. “I mean, I minored in women’s studies in college.” What an idiotic thing to say, she thought. But it was too late; she’d already said it.

  “So... Mordecai’s out in your car?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, it looks like you’ve got your hands full with your little girl there.” She looked down at Mimi. “Hi, doll face.” She smiled at Mimi for a second, then looked back up at Lily. “So, if you’d give me your keys, I can just run out and get ole Mordecai for you.”

  Lily handed over the keys.

  Jack flashed her a gap-toothed grin. “I’m not a car thief, I promise.” She propped open the screen door and disappeared outside. In a couple of minutes, she was back, carrying the one-hundred-eighty-pound dog as if he weighed no more than Mimi. She nodded at Lily. “Why don’t y’all just follow me back to the exam room?”

  In the examination room, Dr. Jack set Mordecai down on a long metal table. “I’m not exactly Mordecai’s favorite person, but he knows he’s hurt and needs help, so he’ll listen to reason.” Mordecai emitted a low growl as Dr. Jack cleaned his injuries.

  “How bad is it?” Lily asked.

  “Could be worse. He’s gonna need a few stitches, though. We’ll numb him, sew him up, give him a tetanus shot. He’ll be all right.” She looked at Mimi, then at Lily. “The sewing part’s not pretty, though. You can wait outside if you’re squeamish.”

  Lily reached out to pat Mordecai’s big head. “I’ll stay, if it’s okay. Just in case he wants me here.”

  “Sure.” Dr. Jack opened the refrigerator in the corner, which was full of medicine bottles. She selected a bottle and closed the door. “So, if you don’t mind me asking, how come you’re the one bringing Mordecai in? Big Ben or Jeanie usually brings him.”

  Lily realized she hadn’t introduced herself. “I kind of. . . inherited Mordecai. I married Big Ben and Jeanie’s son, Benny Jack.”

  “Benny Jack McGilly finally got married?” She squinted at a syringe as she filled it with medicine. “Huh.” She slipped the needle into a fold of Mordecai’s flesh. He didn’t even flinch.

  “You’re good at that,” Lily said.

  “I practiced that a lot in vet school ... giving shots so they wouldn’t hurt so much.” She scratched one of Mordecai’s ears. “Poor feller’s already hurting, no need for me to make it worse. Actually, y’all are lucky I was in this afternoon. I got called out to the Weaver farm at four o’ clock this mornin’ to help a cow in calf. I was so beat at lunch today I thought about not coming back to the office this afternoon. I do large animal calls in the mornin’, small animals in the afternoon.” She gave Mordecai another affectionate scratch. “Not that you’d really call ole Mordy here a small animal.”

  Dr. Jack’s grin was contagious, and Lily felt herself miling, too. “So do any of the local farmers act surprised when they see the vet’s a woman?”

  “Aah, I reckon they’d be surprised if it was any other woman, but my daddy was the county vet before me, and I used to go out with him on farm calls when I wasn’t any bigger than a minute. Daddy raised me by himself, so he never wanted to leave me alone in the house when he took off in the middle of the night to help birth a colt or somethin’. So I always went with him. I was helping deliver farm babies when I was practically a baby myself. People just always figured I’d take over Daddy’s practice when he retired.” She lightly touched Mordecai’s wounded foot. “He’s numb. Time to sew him up. ’Scuse me if I don’t talk during this part.”

  Dr. Jack’s big hands worked deftly, neatly stitching together Mordecai’s torn flesh. Mimi was getting restless, so Lily walked her around the exam room, pointing out the posters of puppies and kittens.

  “Okay,” Dr. Jack said, “one more shot, and ole Mordy’ll be good to go.” She looked down at Mimi as she went to retrieve more medicine from the refrigerator. “Is little doll face there Benny Jack’s?”

  “Uh-huh,” Lily said, reminding herself to preserve the myth.

  “Well, whaddaya know?” Dr. Jack cackled. “I wouldn’ta thought he had it in him.” Her smile faded. “I didn’t mean anything by that. I just meant —”

  Lily smiled. “I think I know what you meant.”

  Their eyes locked for a moment, in the straight-forward way that only gay people look at each other. I know what she is, Lily thought, but she’s still trying to figure out what the hell I am ... trying to reconcile the gaydar with the husband and baby.

  Dr. Jack broke her gaze, rifled through a drawer, and produced a roll of bandages. “You’ll need to change his bandage in the mornin’. Be sure to check that there’s not any unusual discharge from the wound. If there is, call the office right away. He’ll probably be in some pain today and tomorrow ... you can slip in an aspirin in some hamburger meat, and that oughta help. If he seems to be doing okay, call me at the end of the week just to let me know how he’s healing up. We can also set up an appointment to take out the stitches.”

  Their facades were back in place: professional and appropriately distant. “Thank you, doctor.”

  “I’ll walk you out.” Dr. Jack lifted Mordecai down from the table and gently held his collar as he bobbled, three-legged, down the hall.

  “Okay,” Dr. Jack said, as she sorted things out at the front desk, “Mordecai, you get a Milk-Bone. Mimi, you get a lollipop, and you, Mrs. McGilly”— she banded a computer printout to Lily — “get the bill.”

  Lily smiled. “Gee, thanks.”

  Dr. Jack returned her grin. “My pleasure, Mrs. McGilly.”

  As she wrote the check, Lily marveled at the direction her life was taking. She never thought she’d live to hear a butch — or anyone — call her “Mrs.” anything.

  After Lily finally agreed to let Mordecai in bed with her, he dropped off in a fitful sleep. Lying awake while Mordecai snored beside her and Ben snored in the next room, Lily had her first moment of enlightenment since Charlotte’s death.

  She was thinking about the story Dr. Jack told, about going with her father on vet calls when she was a little girl. There was a picture book in that story —a picture book about farm animals, so simple that even very young children like Mimi could enjoy it. But the pictures of the farm animals could be framed by the story of the little girl and her father — and how the little gi
rl wants to grow up to be a vet.

  Lily had never written a book for such young children before, but she liked the idea of writing something for Mimi. It would be a lasting gift for her daughter — even if things in the courtroom didn’t work out.

  She wanted to draw the animals in accurate detail, something along the lines of Garth Williams’ wonderful illustrations for Charlotte’s Web, but she hadn’t been to a farm since a field trip in first grade. Lily wondered if Dr. Jack might agree to let her go along on a few farm calls, so she could sit back at a safe distance and sketch the animals. She would ask her on Friday, she decided, when she called about Mordecai.

  CHAPTER 11

  “The hearing is set for August fifteenth,” Buzz Dobson told Lily and Ben as they sat in his dingy law office, the decor of which consisted of half a dozen dusty football trophies and one bedraggled plastic plant. “Let’s just pray that the air-conditioning in the courthouse is working.”

  Lily sighed and looked down at Mimi, who was getting positively filthy playing on the law office’s unmopped floor. “I’m afraid the temperature in the courtroom is the least of our worries.”

  Buzz shot Ben a conspiratorial grin. “She’s the nervous type, ain’t she?”

  “Well,” Ben said, attempting a macho attitude, “you know how women get about babies.”

  Lily sat quietly with her hands in her lap, but her fists were clenched so tightly she doubted anyone would be able to pry them apart.

  Buzz pasted a condescending smile across his face. “Now, Mrs. McGilly, I don’t think you have a thing to worry about. We just need to establish that you and Benny Jack love each other and that you love Mimi and take good care of her. And if Benny Jack here is Mimi’s real father like he says he is, you’ve got no worries.”

  “Right,” Lily said, clenching her fists even tighter. “No worries.”

  “Now if you wanna do something that’ll turn the odds even more in your favor, I have a couple of suggestions for you, Mrs. McGilly.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Well...” Buzz shuffled some papers uncomfortably. “When you’re up there on the stand, you could try to look like a nice girl.”

  “A nice girl?” Lily looked down at her cutoff Levi’s and Doc Martens, which were separated by pasty white legs whose unshaven state was due to apathy rather than feminist politics. “Well, I was planning on wearing a dress, if that’s what you mean.”

  Buzz smiled self-consciously and reshuffled his papers. “Um, well, yes, that’s part of it. But I was also thinking you could take that ... that thing out of your nose and maybe do something with your hair.”

  “My hair?” Lily was proud of her hair. Very few white girls had such soulful braids.

  “Yeah, I mean ... somethin’ respectable.” He was still staring at his desk. “Look, Mrs. McGilly, I’m not a fashion expert, and the last thing I wanna do is tell a lady how she should fix herself up. I’m just saying that in these parts, a judge might look more sympathetically on a lady with a more ... conservative appearance.”

  Lily flinched at the sound of the word conservative but muttered, “I’ll see what I can do.” As long as she was the same person on the inside, it didn’t matter what clothes she wore or how she styled her hair. Or so she tried to convince herself. If the only way she could keep her daughter was by deceiving people with misleading appearances, then deceive them she would.

  At first Lily had been reluctant when Ben had wanted to invite Ken over for dinner. The facade of propriety they had created was so delicate that the slightest provocation could cause it to shatter.

  “Don’t be so paranoid, O wife of mine,” Ben had said. “Married couples have bachelor friends over for dinner all the time —just to make sure the poor single guys get a decent meal every once in a while. No one will think a thing of it. And besides,” he added, “Ken knows the truth. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to let your guard down for an evening — to spend a few hours not pretending to be my little woman?”

  Lily had to admit that it would.

  Despite the fact that she was not slated to play the role of little woman for the evening, Lily still got saddled with the cooking. She didn’t mind it, actually.

  Ben’s culinary abilities were limited to picking up the phone and ordering Chinese takeout, and there was no Chinese takeout to be had in Versailles.

  So now, they—Lily, Ben, Ken, and Mimi—were sitting around the oak dining room table, eating Lily’s vegetarian chili with cheese, sour cream, and flour tortillas. Mimi, in her high chair, was wearing a flour tortilla on her head.

  Ken, who was quite attractive in a just-stepped-out-of-a-Ralph-Lauren-ad kind of way, took an appreciative bite of chili. “Quite a little cook you got here, Ben,” he teased, winking at Lily. “You know what they say: The best way to a man’s heart is his stomach.”

  Lily swigged the Corona and lime that Ken had brought to complement their meal. “Actually, I think the most direct route to a man’s heart lies farther south.”

  Ben and Ken burst out laughing.

  Finally, Ben said, “You sounded like Dez there for a second.”

  Lily smiled. “I did, didn’t I?”

  Ken turned to Ben. “Dez was your ex, right?”

  “Yep.” Ben pushed his empty bowl away. “We were lovers for eighteen months, then friends for a decade. Dez could be maddening, but he was funny as hell. Lily, do you remember when he went to that faculty Halloween party dressed as Mae West?”

  “How could I forget it?. I helped lace up his corset beforehand, which was no mean feat, let me tell you.”

  Ben laughed. “Three mai tais, and Dez was sprawled on top of the piano singing Frankie and Johnny,’ to the utter mystification of the better part of Atlanta State’s liberal arts faculty”

  Ken laughed. “I take it that when he did this, he already had tenure?”

  Lily smiled. “You take it correctly. Dez was always flamboyant, but never foolish.” She looked over at Mimi, who had poked two eye-size holes in her flour tortilla and was wearing it as a mask. “And it was Dez’s kind sperm donation that helped create little tortilla face over there.”

  Ken smiled at the little girl. “Hmm...this is quite a byzantine ruse you’ve constructed here. I bet the whole thing’s exhausting.”

  “It is.” Lily didn’t realize how exhausted she was until Ken made that observation. It was only now, while she was relaxing in the company of a person with whom she and Ben could be honest, that she fully realized how strained and tiring their other social interactions were. It was only in the presence of other gay people that she and Ben could relax and be a family — the kind of family they really were.

  “Yeah,” Ben said, “in Atlanta I used to bitch all the time about the little dramas going on in the gay community ... all the backbiting and gossip. Now that I’m away from all the gossip, though, it’s like I’m dying for some. I find myself calling all the shallow queens I used to bitch about just so I can find out who’s lusting after whom.”

  Ken laughed. “I do the same thing with my friends back in Nashville. I also find myself voraciously reading those glossy fag rags I used to make fun of when I lived in the city.”

  Lily drained her Corona. “Where do you get those magazines around here?”

  Ken grinned sheepishly. “The mailman delivers them ... in a plain brown wrapper, no less. I save all the back issues. If you like, I could bring over the ones I’ve read.”

  “You know, I’m scaring myself, but I think I’d really like that,” Ben said, rising to clear the table.

  “Me, too.” Lily was helping Mimi out of her high chair. “I’m starved to death for news about my people ... even if it’s just idle chatter about who’s shtupping who.” A prickle of fear hit her. “Of course, we’d have to be careful not to leave those magazines lying around. God, I hate this! It makes me feel so self-loathing, even though I’m not.”

  They settled in the living room. Lily had to coax Mordecai off the couch with a Milk-Bone.
Since his injury, he had made the couch his own personal sickbed. He would make room for Lily or Mimi to sit with him, but he growled ill-temperedly at Ben or anyone else who tried to join him there.

  “You know,” Ken said, sitting on the couch next to Ben and draping his arm around Ben’s shoulders, “when Ben told me what you were doing, I really objected to it at first. It seemed to me that you were just catering to other people’s prejudices.” He watched Mimi stacking her wooden alphabet blocks. “But then I started thinking: If you fought the custody battle as an open lesbian, you’d lose your daughter. Mimi would lose her mother and be raised as some kind of psycho-Christian. Everybody would lose in that situation. And while I’m uncomfortable with this level of deception ... well, some things are just too precious to lose, even if it is to make a political point.”

  Lily nodded in agreement. “Yeah, sometimes I think I’d be a better person if I’d made myself a martyr for the cause of gay rights, but the thing is, I wouldn’t just be sacrificing myself. I’d be sacrificing Mimi, too, and sentencing her to the same miserable, oppressive upbringing her mother had.”

  Without warning, the front door swung open, and a female voice drawled, “Knock-knock! Hello?”

  Ben and Ken scooted apart just as Lily’s vapid sisters-in-law, Sheila and Tracee, walked into the living room. Each was wearing a pricey-looking pastel warm-up suit and had her platinum curls pulled back in a perky ponytail.

  “Hi,” Lily said, finding it difficult to feign friendliness. One of the numerous downsides to this faux marriage was that the McGillys dropped by unexpectedly any time they felt like it.

  “Ken,” Ben said, doing an even worse job of masking his irritation than Lily was, “meet Sheila and Tracee, my sisters-in-law. Girls, I don’t know if you remember Ken Woods. He went to high school with us.”

  Sheila nodded at Ken. “Your daddy used to work with State Farm Insurance, didn’t he?”

  “Sure did.” Ken was doing an admirable job of being cordial.