Julia Watts - Wedding Bell Blues

by Julia Watts

  On her right, exactly where Jack said it would be, was a small brick building with a large sign announcing TATTOOS BY HONEY. Smaller signs on the Store’s windows proclaimed, HEALTH BOARD APPROVED and TATTOOS WHILE U WAIT. Lily pulled into the small gravel parking lot and took a deep breath.

  Walking into a roomful of people had never been her favorite thing, and since Jack’s red truck was nowhere to be seen, she’d be walking into a room full of strangers. She considered going home for a dull evening alone with Mordecai, but finally said to herself, “Goddamn it, if I can do aerobics with a bunch of straight Southern Baptist women, surely I can find the courage to walk into a roomful of dykes.”

  She walked around to the rear of the building, as Jack had told her to do, and knocked on the back door. It felt so secretive. She wondered if there was a secret password, like Sappho or something.

  A full-figured, fortyish woman with wavy, naturally golden hair answered the door. Lily noticed right away that the woman’s arms were completely covered by tattoos: a medieval unicorn resting in a garden of vibrantly colored flowers, a fairy with diaphanous wings sprinkling stardust with her magic wand, and a frog in a golden crown squatting philosophically on a lily pad. The designs were more fanciful than what Lily would have chosen for herself, but the artwork was undeniably beautiful.

  “Hey,” the woman said, grinning. Her face was as round, flat, and wide-eyed as a Persian cat’s. “You must be Lily.”

  “Urn...yeah. I didn’t know you’d be expecting me.”

  “Jack said you might come by. I kinda recognized you ’cause I didn’t recognize you. We don’t see many new faces round here.” She opened the door wider. “Come on in and meet the gang. I’m Honey, by the way.”

  “Nice to meet you. Love your sleeves.”

  Honey surveyed her tattooed arms with genuine pride. “Thanks. Designed ’em myself. Here, let me introduce you to the usual suspects here. The ingrate hogging the La-Z-Boy over there’s Mick. She’s my old man.”

  “Hey.” Mick raised her Bud tallboy in a half toast. Her hair was cut in a salt-and-pepper dyke spike, and she wore a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt and a black leather jacket — a shocking fashion choice, given that Honey’s apartment was cooled only by two oscillating fans, which were doing nothing more than stirring the hot, soupy air.

  “And over here’s Dale and Sue.”

  On the overstuffed tan sofa sat a couple who were at least as old as Granny McGilly. The butch member of the duo — Dale, Lily presumed — had close-cropped, snow-white hair and wore a Georgia Bulldogs jersey and sweatpants. The femme’s silver hair was shampooed and set, and she wore a lilac shell top with matching slacks. She put a long cigarette to her lips, and Dale dutifully leaned over to light it.

  “Hey, babe,” Sue said to Lily, her voice a husky smoker’s rasp.

  “Lord, girl, how old are you?” Dale asked, her voice having all the subtlety and modulation of Big Ben McGilly’s. “Seventeen?”

  Lily smiled. “Twenty-nine, actually.”

  “What a coincidence!” Dale whooped. “Me, too!”

  “Don’t you pay no attention to her,” Sue said to Lily. “I ain’t heard a word she’s said in thirty years. I just keep her around ’cause she lights my cigarettes.”

  “Now, I’m good for a little more than that,” Dale teased, letting her hand rest on Sue’s knee.

  “Oh, that’s right.” Sue waved her cigarette for emphasis. “You do take the trash out. I forgot about that.”

  Lily laughed. Butch/femme, it seemed, had never gone out of style in northern Georgia. Lily had always enjoyed the butch/femme dynamic in a postmodern, theatrical, and mainly reserved-for-the bedroom kind of way. But these women played their roles without a trace of irony.

  Settling down in a nest of oversize floral-print cushions on the floor, Lily wondered what the hyper-politically correct women at Athena’s Owl Bookstore in Atlanta would make of these dykes. Would they think these rural women were living their lives according to oppressive patriarchal standards?

  Who cares if they are? Lily thought. The two couples obviously loved each other, and the sexual sparks between them were warming up the room faster than the Georgia summer heat. Lily ached for Charlotte.

  Honey was sitting on the arm of the La-Z-Boy, running her sky-blue nail-polished fingers through Mick’s hair. “You wanna beer, Lily?” she asked, when she caught Lily looking at her.

  “Yeah, a beer would be great, thanks.”

  Honey sashayed over to the fridge, which, along with a sink and stove, was in the far end of the living room. It was a tiny apartment. Lily could give herself the grand tour while sitting in one place and pivoting her head. A closed door next to the couch led to what she assumed was the bathroom. A door with a beaded curtain led to the bedroom, where Lily could see a queen-size bed covered with one of the chenille peacock bedspreads Jack had described. It really was gorgeous, in a garish sort of way.

  The walls of Honey’s apartment were hung with posters depicting dragons, unicorns, fairies, and wizards, and the small bookcase beside Lily housed a collection of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks.

  When Honey brought Lily her beer, Lily asked, “You like Marion Zimmer Bradley?”

  “Oh, lord,” Mick groaned, lighting up a Marlboro Red. “Don’t get her started talking about that crap.”

  “Mick’s not much of a reader,” Honey explained.

  “She don’t care about nothin’ but riding around with that big ole Harley-Davidson vibrator between her legs.”

  Suddenly there was a pounding at the screen door and a gruff voice yelling, “I heard there was a buncha dykes holed up in here!”

  Lily stiffened at the perceived threat.

  Honey rolled her eyes and laughed. “That’s just Jack. For somebody with a Doctor in front of her name, she acts like she don’t have a brain in her head.” She turned toward the door and hollered, “Get on in here, you crazy woman!”

  Jack swung the door open wide. She was wearing faded Levi’s and a crisp white, button-down shirt. It was the first time Lily had seen her wearing something other than coveralls and mud-caked boots.

  “Hey, y’all.” Jack yanked a can of Bud from the six-pack she was carrying and put the rest of the cans in the fridge. “Lily,” she said, grinning broadly. “Glad you could make it.”

  “Glad to be here.” Lily watched as Jack made a quick circuit of the room, shaking hands with Mick and Dale, giving Honey and Sue courtly kisses on the hand. To Lily’s surprise, Jack settled down on the floor next to her, making the room a study in butch/ femme pairings.

  Lily knew that Jack sitting next to her shouldn’t make her nervous — after all, Jack was the only person in the room whom she’d met before tonight—but it still did, and she found herself knocking back her beer a lot quicker than was probably good for her.

  “Hey, Jack,” Honey said, “you’ll never guess who I ran into over at the Piggly Wiggly the other day.”

  “Oh, I bet I can guess,” Jack laughed. “Was it Sandy?”

  “Sure was. She’s as pregnant as a cow, too.”

  Jack shook her head. “I’m not surprised. Sandy never does anything halfway. When she decided she was straight, I knew she was gonna be squeezing out pups as soon as nature would allow it.”

  “Sandy used to be a regular at these little get-togethers,” Mick explained to Lily. “Her and Jack was together for a while, but then ole Sandy kinda retreated to the enemy camps.”

  “She went back to her ex-husband,” Jack added. “Decided that what she was doing with me was just an ‘experiment’ ... like I was her chemistry project or somethin’.”

  Honey laughed. “I wonder what she did about that pink triangle I tattooed on her ass. I notice she ain’t had the guts to come back here and ask me to cover it up.”

  “Oh, I’m sure that dumb redneck husband of hers ain’t even noticed it,” Sue drawled. “And if he has, she probably told him it’s just a birthmark he hadn’t noticed
before. I’m sure he’d be stupid enough to believe it.”

  Dale laughed and draped her arm around Sue’s shoulders. “Lily, I bet you think we’re awful. You’re sitting there thinking, ‘These country dykes don’t do nothin’ but sit around and drink beer and talk bad about people.’ ”

  “Hey, drinking beer and talking bad about people are two of my favorite things.” To illustrate her point, Lily popped open her second tallboy.

  “Well, you’ll fit right in here, then,” Sue said.

  “Actually, Lily, being from the city, you probably don’t think we’ve got any educational stuff around here,” Dale said. “But right while you’re sitting here, you’re looking at a natural history exhibit.”

  Lily knew she was being teased, but played along. “And what’s that?”

  Dale grinned. “Why, you’re looking right at the oldest known lesbian couple in the history of Faulkner County, Georgia.”

  “That’s great,” Lily said, her insides aching as she thought of all the times she’d imagined growing old with Charlotte. “How long have you two been together?”

  Sue squeezed Dale’s age-spotted hand. “We met at the WAC training base in Fort Oglethorpe in nineteen and forty-four. I had a boyfriend back home, but when I first saw Dale, I knew I was through with the boys.”

  Dale smiled slyly. “Our first weekend pass, we checked into a hotel in Chattanooga and didn’t come outta that room for two whole days.”

  Sue slapped Dale’s leg. “Now don’t go telling that!”

  “A while back,” Dale said, “when all that gays-in-the-military foolishness was going on, I couldn’t help laughing. The military’s brought more dykes together than any of them silly women’s music festivals has.”

  “Hey, I went to one of them once,” Honey protested. “It was fun.”

  Dale shook her head. “Not my kinda music.”

  “Not mine neither,” Mick added. “When Honey dragged me to that thing, I thought I was gonna die of heat stroke or boredom, one. All that guitar strumming and singing about sisterhood ... I had to play nothin’ but Allman Brothers records for a week just to get all that strumming outta my head.”

  “You liked Glenda Mooney, though,” Honey said, playing with the collar of Mick’s leather jacket.

  “She was all right. At least she played somethin’ that had a beat to it.”

  “Say, Honey,” Sue said, “speaking of music, why don’t you put on that record Dale and me like?”

  “Oh, lord, not that thing,” Mick grumbled.

  “Don’t be rude, baby.” Honey rose, sorted through a stack of LPs, and pulled out one marked “Love Song Canteen.”

  “I’ll Be Seeing You” began to play, and Dale and Sue rose and began to dance. They held each other close and moved together in a light two-step. Dale led.

  “Come on, Mi-ick.” Honey was trying to drag her girlfriend out of the recliner.

  “This ain’t the kinda music I can dance to.”

  Honey rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Damn it, Mick, there ain’t no can or can’t to it. It’s just hugging set to music.”

  Mick knocked back the rest of her beer and reluctantly stood up. Soon, though, she was resting her hands on Honey’s ample hips, and Honey’s hands had disappeared beneath Mick’s black leather jacket.

  On one level, it was comforting to be in a place where women could dance together — a safe place (albeit a hot and tiny place) where dykes could be dykes together. On a deeper level, though, watching those women dance just made Lily more aware of her own loneliness. Looking at Mick and Honey, she wondered what her life would have been like in ten years, had Charlotte lived. And looking at Dale and Sue only reminded her that she would never have the pleasure of growing old with the only woman she had ever loved.

  The song “I’ll Be Seeing You,” a wartime ballad about how love lives on even after the loved one’s death, wasn’t exactly helping Lily’s emotional state. She wiped what she thought was sweat running down her face only to discover it was a tear.

  She jumped when Jack nudged her.

  “Say,” Jack whispered, “you wanna dance?”

  Lily was grateful that Jack didn’t ask her if she was okay, which was an obvious question with an even more obvious answer. “Uh ... I don’t know.”

  “I promise I’ll be a perfect gentleman, what with you being a married lady and all.”

  Lily felt herself smile. “Oh, okay. What the hell?”

  Lily stood up with Jack, who rested her hands on the small of Lily’s back. Lily draped her arms over Jack’s shoulders, and they began to gently sway.

  “I haven’t danced like this since high school,” Lily said.

  “Did you dance like this with boys?”

  “Yup — pimply-faced little Beta Club boys.” Lily laughed self-deprecatingly. “I didn’t have a clue about myself back then. Once I got to college, though, I caught on pretty quick.”

  Jack laughed. “I was different than you, I guess. I always knew what I was, but I had the good sense not to do anything about it till I was in college.”

  “That was probably wise. I doubt that Faulkner County would be too tolerant of a sexually active teenaged lesbian.”

  “Lord, no, particularly since that was, what? Twenty-four years ago?” She grinned. “Of course, I might have showed good sense waiting till I was in college, but as soon as I started dating, my good sense went straight out the window. I went out with anything with a pair of tits and a homosexual urge—all the way through college in Chattanooga, then through vet school in Knoxville. Sometimes I think the entire population of Tennessee consists of my ex-girlfriends.”

  Lily laughed. “I guess you had to slow down after you moved back here.”

  “Oh, yeah, that was probably the best thing for me, though. It made me grow up — have real relationships instead of flings. Honey and I were together for a while years ago, before Mick rode into town on her Harley.”

  “Oh, yeah?” One of Lily’s favorite things about lesbians was their ability to turn ex-lovers into platonic family members —and to welcome the ex-lover’s new partner into the family as well.

  “And then, of course, there was Sandy.”

  Lily smiled. “You were her experiment, I believe?” “Yup, that’s me. And then she cast me aside like a frog she was finished dissecting.”

  When the record of 40s music ended, Mick hollered, “Thank god that’s over! Honey, why don’t you put on some Allman Brothers — I’ve gotta get the taste of that sweet stuff outta my mouth.”

  When the evening began to turn toward heavy beer drinking and rock ’n’ roll, Dale and Sue rose to leave. “Well, we’d better take off,” Sue said. “We old ladies like to get to bed early.”

  Dale grinned. “Of course, that don’t mean we always get to sleep right away.” She ducked as Sue playfully slapped at her with her purse.

  After they left, Lily said, “God, I guess it sounds condescending to call them adorable, but they really are.”

  “Oh yeah, they’re great,” Honey agreed. “I always call them my lesbian grandmas.” Honey grabbed more beers for the four of them. “So,” she said, fishing a tin cookie box out of a kitchen drawer, “now that the grannies are gone, anybody want some weed?”

  “You know I do,” Mick said.

  “And you know I don’t,” Jack said just as decisively. “Can’t get myself too muzzy-headed. I could get a farm call in five hours.”

  Honey laughed. “Well, you could never smoke no how. The one time I did manage to get you stoned, you kept getting up to look out the window, to see if there was cops outside.”

  Jack laughed along with her. “Dyke or not, I guess I’m pretty much a law-abiding citizen.”

  Honey took out a packet of rainbow-striped rolling papers. “These are so cool. Mick found ’em up in Chattanooga.” She folded a tissue-thin paper in half and began distributing pinches of green flakes across its length. “How ’bout you, Lily? Can I offer you some homegrown hospitality
?”

  “Not tonight, thanks. I think I’ll just stick to beer.” Lily had liked pot back in college; it was arguable that she had liked it too much. And now, when Honey offered it, she felt a tug of temptation to surrender to the weed’s friendly, familiar oblivion. But with the trial coming up, there was no way she was going to have the dregs of an illegal drug floating around in her system. What if the Maycombs’ deranged right-wing lawyer ordered her to take a drug test as evidence of her debauched lifestyle? Any risk that might cost her Mimi was a risk not worth taking.

  Getting stoned, as Lily remembered it at least, wasn’t boring. But watching other people get stoned sure was. Mick was already the silent type, but under the influence of marijuana, she was practically a mute. The only phrase she uttered for thirty minutes after smoking the joint was, “Honey, we got any of them Chee-tos left?”

  Apparently sensing that the evening was slowing down, Jack said, “Well, I reckon I’ve sobered up enough to drive.”

  “Yeah, I guess I ought to be heading home, too.” Watching Mick and Honey laughing and feeding each other Chee-tos, Lily surmised that they would like to be alone together — that as soon as the company left, they’d be making a beeline for the chenille peacock-covered bed.

  Honey switched back to hostess mode. “Well, Jack, I know we’ll be seeing you soon, but Lily, I hope you’ll be coming back, too. I’m sure this is pretty boring compared to what you’re used to in the city —”

  “Not at all. Actually, this is one of the most pleasant evenings I’ve spent in a while,” Lily said, meaning it.

  In the tattoo shop’s gravel parking lot, Lily suddenly shouted, “Goddamn it!”

  “What is it?” Jack asked. “You too drunk to drive?”

  “No, I had my last beer over an hour ago. It’s just that it dawned on me...I can’t go home tonight.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m supposed to be out of town ... on a romantic overnight trip with Ben.” She had to stop to laugh. “I know it sounds crazy, but what if I went back to the house and one of my nosy sisters-in-law drove by and saw the lights on? They’d know something was up.”