Rafferty Street

by Lee Lynch

  They both watched the women. “It’d be a great coup if it worked for them, wouldn’t it?” Chantal mused.

  “For any of us,” Annie said, turning to study her.

  Chantal’s smile had gone a little sad. Her chin rested on a dimpled hand. The dreamy light blue eyes, when they turned to Annie, belonged to another lonely person looking for the same thing Annie wanted. Companionship, maybe love down the line. Not quite as far down the line as Jo seemed to be headed. Annie didn’t want to be pushy about it, but Jo seemed about as interested in her last night as Mrs. Kurt. It looked as if Jo didn’t want to share her closet any more. Not with Annie Heaphy.

  Chantal interrupted her gloom. “So what brings you to the Sweatshop tonight, Sugar?”

  “I usually hang out at the diner, but when there’s all this tension between Elly and Dusty, the service gets crummy and the customers are crabby. Not to mention the staff. I wouldn’t have thought Maddy’s sister Giulia could get any snippier. I don’t need the extra stress.”

  “You’re meeting someone here?”

  “Only you, unless you’re booked.”

  “Oh, I have so many beaus, you know, but I pencil my dates in. Consider them erased,” Chantal announced with a dismissive flick of her hand.

  “You’re a joy to run into, Chantal.” She relaxed in her chair and looked around.

  The Sweatshop was an enormous space, converted from a factory. Jimmy O’ and Jimmy Kinh had purchased it with the idea of refurbishing cars full-time, but first they’d given Jimmy O’s other dream, a gay club, a chance. Weeknights like this a lot of straights came in and weekends they got gays from Upton and New Haven, more than enough customers to keep the place going.

  She told Chantal, “It’s nights like these when a gay watering hole is a lifesaver. I need to be with my people. I never felt like a skulking pervert before.”

  “Sugar! You’re the most worthwhile thing to hit this town in about five years.” Chantal straightened the table where her two friends had been sitting. She mopped up a minor puddle with a napkin.

  “Right,” she scoffed. “Is that when you moved here, five years ago?” she asked. The table of straights next to them was noisy. The men dressed like Rafferty Street’s vacant lot crowd. Annie turned her chair away.

  “Not me,” Chantal answered. “I was born and raised and condemned to stay in this old ghost of a town.”

  “I thought things were picking up.”

  “You mean industry? If I’m employed, they must be. I’m talking about high society in Morton River. The same old faces year in and year out. It gets dreary, dearie.”

  “What ties you here?”

  “My kids, for one.”

  “Kids? You?” Chantal wore just enough eye makeup to draw attention to her eyes. Her cheeks were pink without makeup and made her look like a kid herself.

  “Wait, I want to enjoy this. I have a twenty-year old and a twenty-two year old.”

  “You don’t look old enough—” Annie said, starting to laugh.

  “I love it! I love to hear this part! Keep going!”

  “—to have kids in their twenties.”

  “I made my mistakes young. It takes time to be perfect.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Seriously. And they’re the loves of my life. Ralph is the oldest. I think he’s going to decide to go gay too. And Merry, my daughter, has a pretty nice husband. She started as early as me, but she was smart enough to stop after my granddaughter Merrilyn was born until they have some money set by. If you think it’s hard for whites to get work in this town, you ought to talk to my son-in-law. He might tell you a thing or two about being hated for loving.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “And I peeked at your personnel file—not that there’s much in it—but I learned that I did all that in two years less than it took you to do whatever you’ve done.”

  “Are you really forty?” Chantal’s face looked completely unlined. Maybe she was good at makeup. “It’s hard enough to accept that I’m forty-two, but to hear that women my age can be grandmothers? Grandmothers are supposed to look like Gramma Gus.”

  “Doesn’t it get to you to see the kids graduating from high school? They look like they might be thirteen, tops.” Chantal leaned to her, smiling eyes probing. “So fill me in on what you’ve done with your life. And don’t leave out the sexy parts.”

  Annie exaggerated a sigh. “I can’t wait to be an old-timer in Morton River. Do you know how often I’ve told my story since I moved here?”

  “Then leave out everything but the sexy parts.”

  “Come on, Chantal, I hardly know you.”

  “All the more reason. No, really, I’m just kidding, Sugar.” She slipped the napkin out from under her glass, carefully smoothed and replaced it. “Am I coming on too strong? It’s just that when you came in you looked like someone burnt your supper and then told you your dog was terminal.”

  This sigh was real. Thinking of Jo was too sad. “I visited Jo, the New Way board member.”

  “I remember. The one who’s getting your job back. I hate her. Why don’t you stay at Club Med, Sugar? Don’t go where you’re not wanted.”

  “We’re not wanted anywhere, Chantal.” She shared the gist of her exchange with Jo and pulled out the clipping.

  Jimmy Kinh was serving the raucous table. One of the straight men flirted with Jimmy while the others laughed.

  “You know, my Mom’s a good Polish Catholic,” Chantal said. “She’s as conservative as those right wingers even though they hate Catholics almost as much as queers. She doesn’t know about me, but this makes me want to tell her she’s got a rooster in her own hen house. They all want to put sex in a big old box and leave it there. What they don’t want to face is we’re talking jack-in-the-box. Pop! goes the weasel.”

  “That’s what I want to tell them, damn it, and everybody keeps trying to shut me up.”

  “They wouldn’t hear you, Sugar. God told them they have to save us if they have to kill us to do it. We can protest till we’re blue in the face, but they only listen to God.”

  Annie shook her head. “You know, as much as I’d like to protect Lorelei and Errol,” she bit her lip to keep from getting teary-eyed, “if I don’t stand up for myself, what kind of teacher could I be?”

  Chantal nodded. “I kid around a lot, Annie, but whether you go back to the Farm or not, I really think something good can come of all this. The Valley’s big enough for all of us. Maybe you’re here to teach us that lesson.”

  “Why me?” she groaned. “Don’t answer that. I always said I wanted to do something good in this world. Maddy’s right. There’s a surplus of do-gooders in the city.”

  “When I read that you’d last worked in New York City, I knew what was exciting about you besides your irresistible shaggy butch femininity. Don’t tell me, you left because of some dopey dame who didn’t know how good she had it.”

  Annie let out a loud laugh. “Bingo! Sometimes I just want to run back to her on any terms. It’s been months and I’m still so goddamn mad at her for being who she is, for not being able to dig in her heels and stay put.” Then she grinned. “I don’t think I ever heard anyone call Marie-Christine a dopey dame before.”

  “If she’s what drove you to Morton River, I love the dopey dame. You don’t have to answer this—was she cheating on you?”

  She almost gagged on a swallow of Coke, “Not exactly.”

  “What a jerk.”

  “It was more complicated than that.”

  “Isn’t it always? Isn’t the bottom line that she wasn’t capable of appreciating you?”

  “That’s a little hard to accept, but I guess I need to hear I was right to tell Marie-Christine that I wanted a marriage, and damn it, some commitment, especially with AIDS raging. We’re all grown women, after all, more than old enough to know our minds, aren’t we?”

  Chantal looked skyward. “You’d think so, by now,” she said.

  “Well, I stuc
k my neck out and said that I not only wanted to, but would work at staying together through thick and thin for the rest of my life.”

  “Good for you, Sugar.”

  “Marie-Christine took months to decide she wasn’t willing to do the same.” She shook her head and crumpled a napkin. “I don’t want to, but I miss that wacky, enchanting, incurably selfish woman like crazy. I just couldn’t take her waffling. I felt like I deserved more than she was willing to give. I’m not cut out to live forever on crumbs from a lover. She just wasn’t the settling down type.”

  “And you are?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Chantal arched one pale eyebrow. “Never even a little fling when your heart isn’t looking?”

  “Yes, well,” she answered evasively into her Coke, her heart skipping with a charge of lust.

  “With this woman who’s supposed to be going to bat for you at the Farm?”

  She was surprised when the charge drained. “You mean Jo?”

  “Oh, I hear it in your voice. You’d never give her this much slack if your soft spot for her wasn’t bigger than your soft spot for yourself.”

  “I—” It was true, she realized with a shock. Her voice came out as a squeak. She cleared it. “I wouldn’t?”

  “This is your reputation on the line here, your future in the Valley that Jo Barker’s been holding in her white-gloved little hands. If it was me on that board I’d be raising hell, demanding your job and a public apology.” Chantal studied her nail polish. “Of course, that’s why nobody’d ever ask me to be on their board.”

  Even talking about the Farm, Chantal made her laugh. “You can be on my board any day! Meantime, Jo’s gotten my job back. It’s just a matter of when.”

  “She’d better be quick. I don’t like Miz Hotshot’s idea of soft-pedaling you to the old boys’ network. If you wait too long on something like this, word gets out and you’re the one who’s up the creek without a paddle.”

  “But is my reputation more important than letting the Farm get on with its business? Besides, Lorelei was coming on to me in her own way. Sometimes I wonder if I had the responsibility to hear the alarm bells long before I did.”

  “Annie, I’ve known retarded kids,” Chantal said with a sudden passion, “watched a couple of them grow up. They like sex as much as the rest of us. They feel attractions just like we do. How about Lorelei? How about a lesbian softball team being the only one that’ll make room for her because we’re special people too? Give up your own rights if you want, but don’t speak for her.”

  Annie just stared at Chantal, “Crap, what a dummy. I never thought of it that way.”

  “What if Lorelei is a dyke? Shouldn’t she be able to love? There’s so much going on here it’s way out of your hands now, Annie.”

  “I have a sinking feeling you’re trying to tell me I don’t get to just walk away from the whole thing.”

  “Maybe I’m not one to talk, as closeted as I’ve been at work, but I like to think if Kurt did fire me, I’d shout it from the hillside—for all of us.”

  “So while I’m trying to figure out what to do, you think I’m betraying every queer in the galaxy.”

  Chantal just smiled.

  “Maddy’s the activist, not me, Chantal,” Annie pleaded. “What am I supposed to do, run for mayor?”

  “I don’t think so, Sugar. Just don’t run.” Chantal studied her face and nodded. “No, I don’t think you will.”

  Annie drained her Coke, put down the glass, checked out the loud straights from the corner of her eye. They made her nervous.

  “Do you see me running? I love the Valley,” she told Chantal. “It’s full of crazy old houses and miles of old brick factories. It’s got a soul of its own. All those years in New York, I thought being anonymous and uncommitted was so tough and cool, when really I had a mega-hole to fill. That’s not something you can ask one person to do, Marie-Christine or anyone else. Here, I started to fill the hole. Then I’m laid off and, boom, there’s the hole again.”

  “So it’s the end of the world? Haven’t you always bounced back from this kind of thing in the past?”

  Annie flung her arms high. “I’ve never been forty-two before. The crazy right wing never felt like a threat before. I never felt this middle-class, middle America craving for settling down before. And I never had work that made me feel anything but drained at the end of a shift.”

  Chantal said nothing, just held Annie’s eyes, like she was watching her thrash it all out inside.

  “Want to dance?” Annie asked, not waiting for an answer, but recklessly swinging Chantal into a fast number. She laughed as Chantal shimmied, then led her into the old bump, each of them careening off the other like wildly swinging metronomes. When the music stopped, they fell into their seats laughing.

  “You’re right,” Annie admitted, “I’m not going anyplace. I’ve waited long enough for my life to start. Those crazies are not going to get in my way.”

  “That’s the best news I’ve heard since Merry had a girl,” Chantal announced, fanning herself with a napkin. They were both sweaty. “This friend of yours may be a pretty lady, but she doesn’t sound like she has any more idea of your worth than the one you had in New York. But then, I’ll bet you always chase pretty ladies that give you a hell of a time. Being comfortable is what girlfriends should be about.” Chantal paused for a moment, and then asked, “Want to come over to my place and get comfortable?”

  She felt her face blaze red. Wasn’t comfortable just the word she’d pinned on Chantal? “I’d—”

  “Scared the socks off you, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah,” admitted Annie, pulling the brim of her softball cap over her eyes. Was the game really over with Jo? Was she ready to step up to the plate again so soon?

  Chantal reached to flip Annie’s hat up, adjusting the brim exactly in the middle of her forehead. “No hiding. Come on, no strings attached. We’ll have fun. Unless you want to go to your place.”

  “Not before you’ve met Gussie. And she’s gone to bed by now.”

  Chantal extended a finger and gently tapped Annie on the tip of the nose. “Is that anything like taking me to meet the family?”

  “Oops, caught me,” she answered with a laugh. “How about a lift home instead?”

  They both looked toward the dance floor. Chantal’s friends still danced.

  “That’s so inspiring. I don’t want to disturb them,” Chantal said. “I’d love a ride.”

  Chapter Nine

  Chantal wanted to stop at the diner to pick up a Boston cream pie she’d promised her mother. Maddy rushed at Annie and grabbed her coat as they stepped inside.

  “Annie! You’ve got to help! Dusty’s gone to kill Verne!”

  “Hush!” Elly said, joining them, steering the group into the kitchen, away from the haunted face of Maddy’s sister Giulia, who watched them with frank alarm.

  “What’s going on?” Annie asked against the clatter of pots being cleaned.

  Maddy looked to Elly in panic. Elly’s hair was disheveled. She held her pink and white baseball-style jacket together with her hands, the zipper torn loose. Her eyes were frantic, but she took a moment to speak, as if by choosing the right words she could hold her life together too.

  “Annie, thank goodness you’re here. I’ve been trying to think who to call. I stopped by on my way home from class to see how things were going. Dusty was still here, mad as a hoppy toad in a drought.”

  “There was no chilling her out,” Maddy said, voice filled with amazement, still wild-eyed. “I never heard Dusty yell before.”

  “This was how she acted when she drank. She hasn’t had a drink in, God, years!”

  “She wasn’t drinking,” Maddy objected quickly, darting a hand to Annie’s sleeve. “I would have seen her, or smelled it. I’m filling in for the dishwasher tonight.”

  “She said I smelled like Verne’s cologne. I was in Verne’s class all night—art teachers have to get cozy to check your w
ork—why wouldn’t I?”

  “Maybe tonight, Elly,” challenged Annie, “but everybody knows something’s going on. Dusty isn’t totally paranoid.”

  “If you don’t mind my two cents’ worth,” Chantal said, “even I’ve heard about you and the art teacher.”

  “This is Chantal Zak. Chantal—Elly, Maddy.”

  Elly frowned at Chantal and seemed to notice for the first time Chantal’s hand on Annie’s arm. Annie hadn’t been aware of the firm grip before either.

  “Look what happened when I tried to keep Dusty here!” Elly pleaded, displaying the tear in her jacket as if it could explain everything.

  “Where is she now?” asked Annie.

  “I’m sure she’s home.”

  Maddy’s voice was pleading too. “She sounded dead serious about hurting Verne. We have to do something!”

  Elly shook her head. “I know my Dusty better than that. And I can’t leave Giulia alone here crabbing at all the customers.”

  The anger Annie had swallowed hours before now burst out. “I love you, El, but you’ve driven Dusty nuts with your flitting around. If she’s not drunk on liquor, she’s drunk on rage and misery. You can’t keep acting like you have and expect her not to explode. Where does Verne live?”

  “No!” Elly said, covering her face with her hands. “Verne and I haven’t done anything, I swear it! I got so lonely these last few years, I had to have something. Just because I can’t spend every living hour here, Dusty thinks I’m wasting time and money, but I’ve never loved anything as much as drawing—except Dusty. And Verne, well, she’s more than a teacher to me, but only because she talks to me, about art and artists and the places she’s been.” There was a glitter in Elly’s eyes that Annie hadn’t seen since they’d barhopped together in their early twenties.

  “Where—does—Verne—live?” Annie asked.

  Elly’s eyes swung from Annie to Chantal and back. She looked cornered.

  Maddy, punching the crown of her Mets cap in and out with nervous hands, spoke up. “Verne has this cool loft in the old Cooper Rivets building. She converted it, like in Soho. Nobody else would live in that old firetrap except an artist.”