by Lee Lynch
Maddy leapt from her seat again and moved to Annie. “Don’t be such a downer, Heaphy, you’ll be okay. We’ll disarm those het mines together. This may be the best thing that ever happened to queers in the Valley.”
Annie said, “I don’t want to be too ageist, but remember how crazed we were to change the world, Peg? Remember, Elly? That was a long walk down a dead end road.”
“But don’t you see? It’s so cool,” exclaimed Maddy. “You guys opened the road up.”
Gussie laughed. “I’ve a feeling you’re going to lead the way now, child.”
Maddy grabbed Gussie’s arm. “You know what I bet, Gramma Gus? I bet if we’d had a contingent from Morton River at the March on Washington and showed our faces at a press conference, people around here might think twice about pushing us around.”
“Get real! We’re talking about one job here, not taking on the world,” objected Cece, glaring at Maddy with one eye while the other, which was always unmoored, seemed to survey the group. “These people don’t like queers, never have and never will.”
Maddy ignored her. Her cheeks were flushed and she raised her arms over her head in a gesture of victory. “We’ll have a press conference to announce that we’re fighting back!”
“Press conference?” Annie repeated. “I’ll stand up for my job, but I’m not into seeing my face on TV with some guy in a rug calling me an accused molester.”
America said, “You know what I’m going to do? I’ve been thinking about this a long time. I’m starting a chapter of PFLAG. We’ll have the press conference.”
“Sign me up!” Venita said, almost loudly.
Annie looked at them. “You’re right. PFLAG could do this.”
Maddy said, “Excellent, but I want in too.”
“You want trouble—that’s what you want,” accused Cece, snapping her fingers and pointing at Maddy.
“Being dumped and not fighting is collaboration,” argued Maddy.
“Hey, I came here to simplify my life,” Annie complained with a sigh. “Not to start Valley Gay Pride.”
“But you did, Heaphy,” said Dusty. “You just started it.”
Chapter Four
The next morning at six-fifty, Annie tucked her cap under her front seat, squared her shoulders and marched across the Medipak lot toward the measuring stares of Cece’s coworkers.
Before the Farm, discrimination had been only a faint possibility in her life, now it felt inevitable.
The heavy night rains had cleansed Morton River. Each leaf on the nearby trees sparkled in the early sun. Annie saw Cece park her candy-apple red motorbike next to Annie’s purple Saab. Cece had a barreling walk and rumbled past Annie, helmet under her arm, saying, “Come on. And remember, you used to date my cousin Tyrone in New York.”
“Hey, hold on. Date?”
Cece wore a Nelson Mandela T-shirt today. She fixed one eye on Annie and relented, “All right. You worked with him.”
A few of the smokers gave Annie encouraging smiles as she followed Cece up a steep staircase to a simply furnished, painstakingly neat office.
“Kurt!” Cece barked.
Kurt was a slight white man of about thirty-five, with precisely parted early grey hair and a tie. He turned to them and shook Annie’s hand, surprising her with an engaging smile. “Ever done this before?”
“No,” she replied, her voice strong considering the night of worrying she’d put in. “If I can keep track of the streets and the traffic in the five boroughs of New York City, though, I don’t expect any problems learning your products.”
“No drug record?” he asked, scrutinizing her with blue eyes that held an unsettling mix of kindliness and doubt. “I’ll know by the end of the week if you have one and you won’t get paid if you lie.”
“Not even a traffic ticket, Kurt.”
“Good. I’d like to try you out. Cece, get your friend a jacket and let her follow you ’til break.”
“Hey, that rates foreman pay.”
Kurt gave Cece his stunning smile that belied a jocular threat. “If you’re lucky it’ll wipe out some of the stunts you’ve pulled and keep your job for you next time you’re late.” He turned back to Annie. “Fill out an application at the personnel office on your break. She’ll set up a drug test for you. I hope you’re not a clown like this one.”
Cece laughed. “Count your blessings, Kurt. Everybody around here’d be curled up on the shelves sleeping if it weren’t for me.”
“You and that deafening bike of yours.”
They went back downstairs, through the break room and into a room lined with shelves and lockers. A crescent-shaped industrial sink jutted from one wall, its communal spigots shiny.
“He’s an okay dude,” Cece told her, “for a part-time holy roller preacher.”
“There’s something creepy about him. He’s like on automatic seduction mode. He gave me the charm, scoped me out, but he already knows he can’t convert you.”
“That’s one place my black ass protects me. He’s got to hire some of us, but he’s not recruiting me to his church.” From a metal shelf, Cece pulled a back support and a jacket like Kurt’s. “Happy birthday. The brace is required. After about a week they give you a name patch that sticks on here.” She demonstrated by attaching a patch reading “Cecile” to the Velcro on her own jacket.
“This isn’t a jacket, it’s a lifesaver, but this brace feels like the bullet proof vest I used to wear. And the building couldn’t be more different from my grubby old cab company in New York. How long have you been here?”
“Me?” Cece squinted her good eye. “It’ll be six years July. I remember because they were due to take my bike from me just when summer hit if I couldn’t get some cash. Nobody messes with the Truth—Sojourner Truth—that’s my bike. I was planning to take off for parts unknown with her. Medipak saved my life.”
“Mine too, it looks like. Thanks, Cece.”
“Hey. Family has to stick together.”
She looked around. The workers were grabbing their blue jackets, slamming lockers, gulping coffee from thermoses and hurrying off.
“Listen,” Cece said, “maybe a quarter of the kids here are gay or bi, but we don’t talk about it because the rest are so straight they make rulers look crooked. Kurt only has a storefront church, but he likes to hire his people—and not all of them are very Christian if you know what I mean. So play it cool. Any questions?”
“Yeah. Where’s the john? Quick.”
She’d wanted some time alone in the bathroom, but Cece stood at the sinks filling her in on Medipak. Annie’s insides felt like a coffee percolator. Nerves, Gussie had declared. It’s just your nerves. All night she’d worried. Would she ever find a dream again if she took the Medipak job? If life was one big domino theory, what would fall next? If she did nothing, would nothing happen? Of course not. There was no such thing as doing nothing. She’d still have to choose not to act. Inaction had its own consequences.
She’d pulled her favorite old philosophy book off the shelf. Of all the thinkers she’d read, Bertrand Russell, kind of a pop liberal philosopher, was the one who’d stuck. Indecision, he’d written, is only due to conflict.
What conflict? She needed the income and, if the Farm took her back, there was nothing holding her at Medipak. Jo was the ticket. Judy would believe Jo.
She was light-headed as she followed Cece again, this time into the warehouse proper. Spring sunshine, not yet hot, but bright with the promise of good weather, streamed in through high windows over the eight-foot gunmetal grey shelving. The work was soothing. She was too busy to think about the Farm or her insides. It was also strangely gratifying to fill orders. She ran from one side of the big warehouse to the next, learned all the nooks and crannies, wrestled with the long-handled grabbers, skirted near-collisions with the other workers and slid full bins onto rollers for shipment.
“Wouldn’t it be more efficient to have each person fill from one section?”
“Not in
the long run,” Cece answered as she pointed to items for Annie to snatch. “See, this way you’re responsible for your own bin. And there’s too much down time the other way, waiting if the bin coming in doesn’t need shampoo. See what I mean? They keep you hopping and you get a quality control sheet at the end of the week telling you if your batting average is off: You’ll get a lot of errors at first, but after maybe two weeks they drop right down.”
Quickly, she learned to barrel down product-lined alleyways. The warehouse seemed to shrink as the morning wore on and she noted that she had been assigned, like most of the women, to HABA, health and beauty aids. The men worked with durable medical equipment—the urinals and wheelchairs and oxygen machines Medipak supplied to hospitals and rental outfits. Other men loaded and unloaded the trucks. Now and then, the route men dashed in from their vans.
At lunch, Cece led her outside where picnic benches lined the parking lot. The promising day had waned in the noon hour, as unstable-looking clouds drifted past the sun. Annie and Cece bought sandwiches from a truck.
“I feel worse than I did after the game,” she groaned, easing herself down to a picnic bench at the side of the building. “I may be too stiff to work tomorrow.”
“You won’t want to cook supper tonight,” said an extremely tall woman, a missing front tooth obvious through her warm smile. “Make him take you to McDonald’s.”
Cece looked a warning at Annie.
“Of course, even McDonald’s gets expensive if you’ve got enough kids?” half-asked a short, gaunt woman. She and her companion sat at the next picnic table with three other women. “Want some cookies? My oldest baked them last night.”
Annie took one with thanks.
“You’re married?” probed the short woman.
She felt like she’d stepped into a time warp where matrimonial status was the most significant characteristic a woman could have.
“You’ve gotta be kiddin’ me,” she said, lapsing into cabbie banter. “When I can be free as a bird? Good cookie.”
“You look familiar,” the short woman announced. “Where have I seen you?”
She forced herself to swallow. “I must have a twin because I’ve heard that before,” she parried. “I’m pretty new in town.”
“Then come to church Sunday. We have potlucks and Bible classes,” offered the tall one. Her smile was teasing now. “You might meet someone.”
She grinned back with gleeful wickedness. “Didn’t you hear? All the good men are taken and the rest are g—”
Cece broke in saying, “Hey, birthday-girl, here comes the ice cream truck—my treat.” She grabbed Annie’s elbow to steer her away. “Don’t be rocking the boat, babe, or we’ll all go down.”
“This closet stuff is going to get old real fast.”
“It’s that, Heaphy, or get poor real fast.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Come on. I’ll introduce you to some of our compadres.”
Ice creams in hand, they avoided the picnic table and drifted to three women and a man leaning on a tiny electric-blue car. In the distance, Route 83 wound through this newly industrialized zone. There was a sense of insulation out here, surrounded by trees, quiet clean businesses and suburban cul-de-sacs with well-mowed lawns far from the noisy railroad and the river. She could even hear robins, newly arrived, arguing over nesting locations and occasionally caroling out their joy.
“What’s happening, Louie?” asked Cece of a tanned young man with a curly black forelock, tight black slacks and a chest-hugging knit shirt.
“Not much,” Louie replied.
“It’s about time you introduced us to your new friend, Cece. I’m Chantal, after my French great-grandma, the only drop of non-Polish blood in my veins,” said a spirited white woman who had short blonde swept-back hair, careful makeup and eyes the color of the sky on a hazy day.
“This is Annie Heaphy. Annie, meet Chantal Zak from the office. You be nice to her, she does payroll. And here’s Nicole and Sheryl.”
“You don’t have to be nice to us, we’re just packers,” said Sheryl, dark-skinned, with close-cropped hair, plastic-framed glasses and a standoffish air. “I saw you on the floor today.”
Nicole, in dreadlocks, laughed, but had a compassionate look. “Almost creamed me once too!”
“Sorry,” Annie said with a grimace of contrition. “I’m not used to it yet.”
Nicole warned, “Maybe won’t ever be. The pace just gets faster every day, I swear. Where do you live?”
“Rafferty Street,” she answered.
“Mean little white neighborhood,” Sheryl noted. “There’s some folks tucked away down there by the river I wouldn’t want to be messing with.”
“I’ve got bike buddies on Rafferty. They’ll treat you right if you let them know you’re Cece Green’s friend. Meantime, this handsome honky dude is Louie. And this is his new sardine can.”
“Nice little jalopy,” Annie said. “What is it?”
Louie had an appealing kid-brother manner, and obviously, from his style, revered Elvis Presley’s memory. “A Geo Storm. I work at a car lot in Upton nights and weekends and this one came in with very low miles.”
“I’m trying to get him to take me for a ride,” said Chantal in a throaty voice, moving her head so her dangling earrings flashed in the sunlight. Chantal Zak looked soft, her cheeks plump, her breasts ample, and her hips generous. A comfortable sort of woman.
Cece whispered, “But he doesn’t let fee-males in his car, do you, Lulu?”
“Female? What’s that?” Louie asked, fluttering his lashes.
Cece lowered her voice. “You’ve met Louie’s friend, Heaphy. John works nights at the diner? Hey, what’s this about Dusty and Elly not hitting it off too good these days? My main woman, Hope, heard from her Aunt Venita that Elly’s got a thing for that new art teacher, Verne something?”
“And Venita Valerie hears it from her best friend Gussie who gets it from yours truly,” said Annie.
“Morton River’s a small world,” Chantal said.
Annie laughed, holding up her right hand. “That’s all the dirt I have.”
Cece crossed her fingers and with a solemn expression said, “They’re in my prayers. They give the rest of us something to shoot for.”
Then Cece pointed over her shoulder with her thumb and told the others, “Heaphy just got the third degree from Mutt and Jeff over there.”
“Like they don’t know just looking at you,” said Chantal, her voice a purr pitched to Annie’s ears.
Annie grinned and switched her hands from front pockets to back, rolling up and down on the balls of her feet. While Jo acted as if flirting was an intimate form of foreplay, Chantal was obviously a born flirt. “It was easier driving a cab. I gave the Kamikaze Cabbie treatment to anyone who hassled me over being gay.”
“Shhh!” said Nicole and Sheryl in unison.
“Crap!” Annie said, covering her mouth and stamping in a circle.
Sheryl explained, “Mrs. Kurt is here today. Every time you turn around she’s in your face with her church-lady smiles up front and her feet running back to Massa with tales.”
Cece explained with her snap-and-point finger aimed at Annie’s chest. “We call her Mrs. Kurt because she’s like his shadow, but it’s really Mrs. Norwood if you ever have to talk to her. She’s pretty nice as long as you don’t get her into a family-values frenzy. Talk about a one-track mind.”
“Mrs. Norwood? Not Paula Norwood,” Annie asked, clutching Cece’s shoulders. “Tell me it isn’t so.”
Cece asked, “Someone you know?”
“At the game? The complainer?”
“Uh-oh,” Cece said. “You didn’t mention her name last night. Sure, she’s a Rockettes groupie. Her kid plays.”
“I’m out of here. If that woman spots me—maybe that’s where Mutt and Jeff saw me.”
“Don’t you dare leave!” Chantal protested, holding Annie by the belt. “I went to parochial school, but Mrs. Ku
rt is screwier than the nuns about religion.”
“Paula Norwood is the reason I’m here.” This time when she told the story of Lorelei’s kiss, she let her anger out. “Damned ignorant hypocrites,” she ended, stopping herself from kicking Louie’s tire just in time.
“Man, oh man,” said Sheryl.
“Don’t be thinking about quitting though,” Cece urged. “You need the bucks just like the rest of us working gals.”
“Someday,” Louie said with a big sigh, “my husband will be rich and I’ll keep the sterling polished while I watch my soaps.”
They laughed, but Annie complained, “This is starting to get to me. I feel like a criminal who doesn’t deserve a job.”
Cece snapped her fingers and asked, “How’d you like being told you’re good for nothing but churning out little black welfare babies? Then getting your checks cut off because you think you’re not good enough to get hired on a job so you don’t try? Don’t tell me about no self-esteem trouble.”
Chantal’s smile vanished. “I don’t know who they think will take care of Lorelei and her kind if it isn’t the poor people and us you-know-whats. We’re the only ones who understand everybody’s the same inside.”
“You mean, we’re the only ones who’ll take shit wages,” scoffed Sheryl.
“Should I stay away from you guys?” asked Annie.
“And deprive us of your company?” said Chantal, hands on hips. “If you stay away from us they’ll know we’re the rotten apples. Just act natural, be friendly with everybody.” She smiled big. “Especially with me. You look like the sort of risk a single girl ought to take.”
“You’re one outrageous lady,” she told Chantal. “And I like it.”
Cece said, “Don’t you worry about Mrs. Kurt. She mostly stays up by the offices, bugging the shit out of Chantal. You may not run into her for months and she’ll forget by then.”
“How do you stand working with bigots like them?”
Nicole answered, “Some of us are used to it.”