Saxon Bennett - The Wish List

by Saxon Bennett

  “She just arrived by taxi,” Celia said, looking at the clay-covered, half-naked women.

  “Amanda, what are you doing here?”

  “I should ask you the same question, only I think I’d rather not know the answer. I came to see what keeps you here and why you won’t come home.”

  “It’s not like I disappeared. You know where I am. I’m coming back, and then I’ll straighten things out. But not until I’m good and ready.”

  “How much time do you need? Christ, you’ve had the whole damn summer.”

  Maggie felt her anger rising. “And I’ll take the whole damn rest of my life if I so desire. You’re a big girl now. You certainly don’t need me around. What do you want me to do? Sit around that stupid old house and wait for you to have a crisis so I can be there for you? I have a right to a life of my own.”

  “That stupid old house is our home. Your home. What about your family? What are we supposed to do?”

  “The same.”

  “So this is what hanging out in the desert does for you. It obviously boiled your brain. Great! A houseful of lunatics.”

  “I resent that,” Olivia replied, scooping up more clay and rubbing it into her short hair and making it stand straight on end.

  “Me, too,” Anna chimed in.

  Maggie looked at them and smiled. She looked at Celia, who shrugged her shoulders in helplessness. Maggie started to laugh, and the others joined in. Amanda stormed out of the studio, letting the screen door slam behind her.

  “Does she remind you of anyone we all know?” Maggie said.

  “Well, now that you mention it...” Olivia replied.

  “I tell you, get rid of one uptight nazi queen and another takes her place. Nazi here, nazi there,” Anna said. They all burst out laughing. Celia was amazed that Maggie was taking the whole episode so lightheartedly.

  “Aren’t you going to do anything about Amanda?” Celia asked.

  “Have you got any suggestions?” Maggie asked.

  “You should probably talk to her.”

  “And say what? I refuse to tell her what she wants to hear.”

  “She’s just confused about why you aren’t coming home.”

  “No, she’s selfish. She thinks that by coming here she can make me pack up and go back home, that puppy-dog eyes and temper tantrums will make mommy behave like she wants her to. I’m not going to play that game. If she’s pissed off, so be it.”

  “Still, you two need to talk.”

  “No, we don’t. I’m going back to settle my affairs when I damn well please and not a moment before.”

  “Maggie, come on. Be reasonable.”

  “No, Celia, you don’t understand. I’ve spent my entire life putting my ambitions and desires behind everyone else’s. I’m through. I already gave. Now it’s my turn, and the sooner Amanda understands that the better.”

  Celia looked at her and nodded. “Okay.”

  Celia found Amanda sitting on the porch looking lost and forlorn.

  “Do you need someone to talk to?” Celia asked.

  “Yes, my mother, but she doesn’t want to.”

  “I might prove a better substitute.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, Celia. I just don’t understand why she is here and doesn’t want to come home. She won’t explain anything to me, and it hurts. I feel like I’ve lost my whole family, both my parents. Dad dies, and Mom runs off. What am I supposed to think? Doesn’t she care about me?”

  “She cares, Amanda. I think this is just her way of dealing with your father’s death. Maybe she needed some space. She is staying here as part of a team of women who help me in the studio during the summer. It keeps her busy, and she’s made some new friends. Give her some time, Amanda. She’s not running away. She is just getting to know herself again as a single woman, and that takes a lot of effort. Try to be patient.”

  “I know Dad’s death has been hard on her, and I’m worried about her. She seems so different now. I don’t think she wants to come back. Tell me honestly, Celia. Is she going to stay here?”

  “Amanda, I’m not sure what she is planning to do. You two really need to talk. She’ll come around. In the meantime, let’s get your bags in the house. You can have a shower and a cool drink, and you’ll feel much better.”

  “Thanks, Celia. For everything.”

  “Where is she?” Maggie asked as Celia handed her a towel. Maggie showered in the outdoor stall that Celia had devised. The cubicle was walled by lattice and covered in thirsty desert vines.

  “She’s getting cleaned up. Maggie, she’s pretty upset. Be tender.”

  “It doesn’t matter how I say it, Celia. She’s not going to like what it means. I am not going back. I am going to live here and make pottery, and I don’t care who likes it or doesn’t.”

  Celia shook her head. “This is not going to be pretty.”

  “No, it’s not. So hang on to your hat because here I go.”

  Amanda combed her hair in front of the mirror. She had her mother’s thick, curly hair and she hated it because it wouldn’t do what she wanted. She saw her mother’s reflection in the mirror as she stood in the door frame.

  “Can we talk?” Maggie asked.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Amanda replied, setting the brush down and turning around to face her mother.

  As Maggie sat on the bed she felt an odd sensation of calmness. She knew she was doing what she had to in order to make her life what she so desperately wanted—hers.

  “You’re not going back, are you?”

  At least her daughter wasn’t stupid. But she took the bang out of Maggie’s intended rabbit-punch approach.

  “No, I’m not going back.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there is nothing there for me anymore.”

  “And you like it here better, I suppose.”

  “Yes, I like it here better.”

  “But what about me? About how I feel about all this, this sudden change of heart.”

  “I wouldn’t call it sudden,” Maggie replied. She thought, I’ve spent my whole life waiting for this moment, the moment when I could say good-bye to a life of compromise.

  “How can you say that? You leave me a message on the machine, rush off to Phoenix, and stay away the whole of spring and summer after you said you were only staying a week. And now you’re never coming back, and you don’t call that sudden? No, maybe you’re right. It’s not sudden, it’s crazy. You’re acting crazy. Grown women do not run off and leave everything behind.”

  “But desperate women do.”

  “Now you’re desperate?”

  “No, not exactly. I simply am making some much needed changes in my life.”

  “Which means excluding me.”

  “I’m not excluding you from anything.”

  “You think that you can just relinquish all your ties with a swish of your hand and owe nothing, that you can just pretend nothing before existed.”

  “What could I possibly owe? I’ve paid my dues. What do you want me to do? Spend the rest of my life creating a shrine for your father? He had his days of glory. What could I possibly owe you? I raised you. I loved you, and now you’re grown. Why do you need me?”

  “You’re my mother.”

  “I can still be your mother and not live two doors down. I’m not abandoning you. I’m taking hold of my own life. You shouldn’t begrudge me that, Amanda. I gave you twenty-six years of my life. I’m entitled to the rest.”

  Amanda sat on the bed next to her mother. Their identical eyes met.

  “Do you regret those years?”

  “Only when you’re being a pain-in-the-ass.”

  “What!”

  “I’m kidding, Amanda. No, I don’t regret any of them, except maybe when you were thirteen. You were really a pain-in-the-ass then. You have improved. I love you. I’m not leaving. I’m just relocating.”

  “What about the house?” Amanda asked.

  Magg
ie looked down at her hands. This would be the truly hard part, and it was going to hurt. Amanda loved that house. Maggie would give it to her, but she couldn’t afford to do that. It would have to be sold.

  “I’m going to sell it.”

  “You can’t!” Amanda said, standing up.

  “I have to, Amanda.”

  “It’s all we have left of him.”

  “He was more than the house and the things in it. You have your feelings for him, your memories.”

  “But it was our house. I grew up there. You can’t sell it.”

  “It needs other people, another family to grow up in it. It’s too big for one person.”

  “How can you even think of someone else living there? It’s our house. How can you want to get rid of it?”

  “Amanda, I don’t need it anymore. It’s time to move on.”

  “You don’t need it, you don’t need me. I think you’re sorry you ever married Dad or had me. We were nothing to you. Well, you don’t mean anything to me either,” Amanda said, running from the room.

  Celia was on the couch reading. She saw Amanda run down the stairs with tears streaming down her face.

  Maggie followed her. “Amanda, wait.”

  She looked at Celia.

  “That went well, don’t you think?”

  “Come sit and have some tea.”

  “I think I need something a little stronger.” Maggie sat next to Celia and took a long drink of her beer.

  “She thinks I’m deserting the family and Harold’s memory. I can’t live there. I won’t live there. I never should have lived there.”

  “What do mean you never should have lived there?”

  “I married Harold because I couldn’t have you. He was the next best thing. He reminded me of you. You might as well know that I loved you. I’ve always loved you.”

  “Oh, Maggie,” Celia said, holding out her arms. “I’m so sorry. I never knew. I didn’t think it was possible. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I won’t go back.”

  “No, you won’t. Not ever,” Celia said, nestling her face in her lover’s neck.

  Amanda watched from the window as the others packed up. A multicolored collection of backpacks were stuffed into the bed of the truck. They were heading for the canyon lands of southern Utah.

  Amanda could not be enticed to go. She was still angry and hurt. She barely spoke to her mother, yet she didn’t leave. No one pressed her. They left her sitting cross-legged in front of the television, apparently engrossed in a program. She muttered good-bye. She listened to the truck as it pulled away, and the ping and tick of Olivia’s bright orange Volkswagen bus.

  They headed for the Anasazi Indian ruins in the canyons of Grand Gulch. It was a trip Celia took at the end of every summer, never growing tired of the canyons and the ruins. The trip sealed the end of the season with a sense of spiritual renewal that she could get only by sitting in a kiva or a storage room built of earth and straw.

  The caravan arrived early the next morning. They had coffee and watched the sunrise across the expanse of southern desert. Gnarled juniper trees dotted the orange landscape. Each woman grabbed her pack, and Celia led them to the widening labyrinth of the canyon.

  Maggie thought about Amanda. Her daughter was right in accusing her of regretting her life with Harold. She had sold herself short, and now she knew it.

  “It taught you to appreciate this life, didn’t it?” Olivia had said on the drive to the canyons. “You don’t have to have totally abstained from men in order to be a lesbian. Lots of women find out later.”

  Maggie looked over at her friend.

  “I wish I had your confidence in the idea that things happen for a reason. I feel like it was all a waste. That makes me sad; I squandered something precious.”

  “I’m sure there were moments when you felt happy, or had some sense of being complete.”

  Maggie looked out the window at the black countryside as it whizzed by.

  “No, Olivia, it was more like this drive. Tunnel vision through a dark landscape, but with no apparent aim in mind. Unhappy, but not knowing why. I just staggered through.”

  “So feeling good about your life now, feeling full, makes the emptiness more acute?”

  “Exactly.”

  “My only advice to you would be, Chalk it up to experience. Don’t let the past fuck up what you’ve got going now. You served your time, now move on.”

  “Oh, Liv, if only it was that easy.”

  “Maggie, you can make it easy.”

  She had tried, but the past hung like a low-lying cloud. She no longer wanted or needed to go back to the house, to Amanda, to her mother, to all those responsibilities. Dread was creeping up on her. The dread of being away from Celia, of sleeping in that bed alone again, of going to the cemetery, of having dinner at her mother’s, of trying to explain what she was going through to people who wouldn’t understand.

  She pulled her pack higher on her shoulders, set her sights on the next curve in the canyon, and vowed to ignore those thoughts until she had to face them. I will get through this, and I’ll come back. I’ll stand on that porch and know I’m home, finally home.

  Setting up camp never felt so welcome. A seven-mile hike through the winding, sandy canyon floor carrying a heavy backpack was no easy task, and each woman took her pack off with relief.

  “Well, for an old gal you sure can hike,” Olivia said to Celia.

  Celia smiled. “This is our usual spot. It’s close to the stream, and there are three ruins not far from here that we can explore either tonight or in the morning. Everybody find a spot for your tent, and let’s get comfortable.”

  Maggie helped Celia put up their tent. Water was located, dinner started, and soon the bottle of tequila was making its way around the small campfire.

  Maggie took a swig from the bottle and shoved the lemon into her mouth quickly. She winced, and Olivia laughed.

  “You’re so butch now,” Olivia said.

  “Am not.”

  “Are too.”

  “Am I?” Maggie asked, suddenly thinking about going back to the Midwest and about her reception there.

  “Do I look like a lesbian?”

  “I don’t know. What do lesbians look like?” Olivia asked.

  “They come in different sizes, a variety of shapes, different colors, some dress like boys, some like girls, and some don’t dress at all,” Anna replied, smiling.

  “Very funny. What I mean is, things like short hair and no makeup. Are they going to know by looking?” Maggie asked anxiously.

  “You look the same to me. You look like Maggie,” Olivia replied.

  Maggie wasn’t convinced. Amanda had commented on her appearance. She acted like Maggie was committing some atrocity, as if she wasn’t upholding her end of the feminine bargain. Amanda attributed it to peer pressure, happily assuring her mother things would change. She would feel different when she got back home. Maggie just smiled, wondering if Amanda had picked up on the fact she was surrounded by lesbians. It probably hadn’t crossed her mind. Not yet at least.

  Maggie was lost in thought until Celia touched her hand. She looked up at Celia. They smiled, knowing that what they had was right.

  “I’ve been thinking. Maybe I’d like to get a tattoo,” Maggie said.

  “Why?” Celia asked.

  “It’s the lesbian thing to do,” Maggie replied.

  “Are you afraid you’ll go back and forget you are one?”

  “With you to remind me, never,” Maggie said, squeezing Celia’s arm.

  “Oh, how sweet,” Olivia said facetiously.

  “What kind of a tattoo?” Celia asked.

  “I want the Kokopelli right here on my ankle, the flute player, the trickster playing in the desert. It will be a reminder of all the things I want to be.”

  Celia looked at the seriousness clouding Maggie’s face. She hadn’t thought that going back would be so hard for Maggie. She felt a pang of guilt f
or being insensitive.

  “I’m sorry. I hadn’t realized how difficult going back is going to be for you, that you are worried.”

  “It’s not the going back so much as saying I’m packing up permanently to live somewhere else. Amanda is not going to make things easy, and who knows what she’s figured out? She is not one to keep quiet.”

  “Maybe you should visit my mother,” Celia said, laughing.

  “That would go over big. I’m sure there has already been talk. Can you imagine how well it will go over when everyone figures out that we’re lovers?”

  “Another tried and true lesbian corrupts a perfectly good heterosexual,” Olivia said.

  Kate and Madeline laughed until they began to roll about the sand with tears streaming down their faces.

  “I don’t find it that amusing. That’s exactly how everyone is going to see it.”

  “Didn’t you?” Olivia asked slyly.

  “No, I did not,” Celia replied, her feathers more than a little ruffled.

  “I guess we know who seduced who then, don’t we?” Olivia said, taking another drink of tequila and passing it to Maggie.

  “I would have grown old waiting. Somebody had to do something to get the ball rolling,” Maggie said, smiling at Celia.

  “I still don’t understand what’s so funny,” Celia said.

  “That straight people always think it’s the dyke who does the seducing. It’s usually not, but straight people always think so. They’ve got it all wrong. That’s what is so funny,” Madeline said.

  “That may be true, but it doesn’t help my image. I’m still going to look like the one who corrupted Maggie,” Celia said. She was suddenly beginning to appreciate the gravity of Maggie’s situation. “This is going to be ugly.”

  “You really think so? It is the nineties, you know. People change,” Olivia said.

  “You haven’t met our mothers,” Celia said. “My mother thinks I’m some sort of oversexed seductress. She’ll talk Josephine into believing I poisoned Maggie.”

  “I’ll try to set them straight, no pun intended, but you’re probably right. You’re going to look like the bad guy, regardless,” Maggie told her.