Rafferty Street

by Lee Lynch

  Chapter Eleven

  “It’s rough coming back to Family Valuesville,” Maddy complained. “How about finding something on the radio? I could use a Violent Femmes tune about now. They kick.”

  “A what?” exclaimed Gussie.

  They had been to Maddy’s Gay Alliance meeting at Yale. The ride home under the just dark May sky was a straight shot on Route 83. The quarter moon was still faint. Gussie and Chantal were tired and needed the heater on, but Maddy had enough energy for all of them.

  Annie laughed and tooted her horn. Maddy Scala always lifted her spirits, even when she pushed beyond where Annie wanted to go.

  In the spring night, as the four of them drove back into the dark Valley, Annie wondered aloud, “Maybe this right wing hullabaloo is the last rallying cry of a losing culture. I can’t picture their kids carrying on like this.”

  Maddy agreed. “I wish the straight adults in this town were half as bright as their rug rats. It’d be nice to live somewhere people don’t write ugly things about queers in the letters to the editors. This place is getting surreal.”

  Chantal asked, “Did you see that disgusting letter last night?”

  “Didn’t people learn anything from World War II?” asked Gussie. “It should be illegal to talk about exterminating anyone.”

  Maddy answered with a cynical snigger, “They learned that genocide’s easy. Anybody want some excellent gum?”

  “Grape?” asked Chantal, as she took a piece. “I was out of my mind when I read that letter. I tore the paper into a million pieces. When Merry came over with the baby, she said the writer was not a well man and I should ignore him.”

  The car began to smell like spilled grape juice.

  “Easy for a straight to say,” Maddy burst out.

  “That’s what I told her. If they can get away with threatening to kill us in the paper, what can we expect next?”

  “Laws against us,” Maddy told them. She’d talked at Yale about the upcoming meeting of the Board of Selectmen. The right wing petitioners planned to fill the chambers with people who supported what the New Haven paper had dubbed gay screening. Maddy’s group was discussing arriving en masse and giving them some competition.

  “I was afraid all these years of marching in the streets for gay liberation would come to no good,” Gussie said.

  Maddy, with manic youth, declared, “Hey, Gramma Gus, it’s not over till it’s over.” She popped a large lavender bubble.

  Only once had Annie seen Maddy discouraged. Annie remembered looking out the kitchen window at a late winter rain, her arms plunged to the elbows in sudsy dishwater, when Maddy had appeared outside Gussie’s house, hurling down her old lavender cruiser.

  Maddy had flung herself into the kitchen. “I’m tired of being shot down!” she’d cried. She wore her usual ripped and faded jeans and a rugby shirt frayed at the collar. “I mean, it’s not like I’m asking for the solar system on a platter.” She tore off her soaked jean jacket and flung it on the back of a chair. “Oh, mama!”

  “Want to dry your buttons?” Annie had asked, offering a dishtowel, amazed as always at the variety of slogans festooned on Maddy’s jacket. “They might rust.”

  “Get a life!” squealed Maddy just before she burst into tears. “Shit. I didn’t want to do this. I’ve been down at the river for two fuckin’ hours trying not to act like a baby about it.”

  Gussie picked up her teacup, lips drawn into a long narrow line.

  “I know, I know,” Maddy said. “You don’t like my language. I’m sorry.”

  “If crying makes you a baby, then I should be in diapers.” Gussie said.

  “You don’t have to tough it out, Mad,” Annie added. “What happened?”

  “He shot me down. The principal won’t let me start a gay youth group.”

  “Crap.” Maybe nothing had changed since she’d first come out. “One more reason to launch an attack.”

  “We need a gay youth group big time!” Maddy said through her tears, pacing now.

  Gussie shook her head. “I should have known better than to have high expectations. It seemed like the world might be ready.”

  Maddy blew her nose into a lavender bandanna. “It is ready, it’s just in denial.”

  “And after all the hoops they put you through.”

  “It’s the pits. I finally got an advisor last week.”

  “I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts it wasn’t a gay one,” Gussie said.

  “No. America Velasquez.”

  “Your principal said he’d approve if you came up with a willing soul. What excuse did he give this time?”

  Maddy’s voice went nasal and mocking. “First he said, it’s just me and it’s silly to have a group and an advisor for one little student. I told him the rest were in hiding, waiting for their chance. Second, he says it’ll look like he’s promoting homosexuality and he reminded me how important family fucking values are to the Valley. Shit.” She winced and looked up under her eyebrows at Gussie. “Sorry.”

  Annie went to her and kneaded her shoulders. Maddy honked into her bandanna again and said in a voice still squeaky with tears, “Do you think if there were five of us, twenty-five, a thousand, he’d care? He probably wishes we’d all get AIDS. What’s the big deal about starting with me? We need a place to find each other. I think I’ll go home and cry into my Janis Joplin tapes for a while.”

  Gussie suggested, “Can’t you have your group outside of school? You could use the kitchen here. What do I have to lose?”

  Maddy stood abruptly and threw her arms around Gussie. Annie grabbed Maddy’s chair to stop it from clattering to the floor.

  “Thanks, Gramma. You’re a good buddy. We talked about meeting somewhere else, but then we lose the school’s protection. At least in a school no gang of skinheads is going to come beat up on us. Outside, we’d be a direct target. And I wouldn’t put you in danger for anything.”

  “So you need more kids.”

  “Up front. It’s like, I know this dude Esteban who’s gay. He said he’d join if I started it. And Trang, that outrageous girl in black boots and short skirts I was seeing.”

  “For two weeks,” Annie reminded her.

  Maddy scowled and plunked her baseball cap on the table. “Chill, paisan. She’s a babe.”

  “Maddy!” chorused Gussie and Annie.

  “It’s just an expression,” Maddy said with a whine. “Anyway, Trang doesn’t know what she is, but she’d come to our meetings just to dare the school to tell her what she can’t be. And there are others. Maybe the girl who turned red when she saw my ’How Dare You Assume I’m Heterosexual’ button. There’s that football player John saw cruising. If only they’d all come out.”

  “If only,” echoed Annie.

  Toothpick chose that moment to join them. Maddy lifted her high in the air. “How’s my main feline?” she asked. Toothpick got her paws in Maddy’s dark curls and started chewing.

  “So what do I do now? Come on, we have to come up with something—the conservatives are coming.”

  Gussie rubbed her chin. “I wonder if your Yale meeting would be a safe place to get together.”

  “I can’t get to New Haven. The last bus leaves to come back out here way too early. Plus, I want to make my stand here.”

  Gussie nodded in her judicious way. “And even God didn’t create the world in a day. Just let the other kids know you’ll be there. When you have three, or ten, go back to your principal en masse.”

  Maddy pouted, Toothpick still kneading her head.

  “It could work, Mad,” Annie said. “It’s taken a year to get turned down. What’s another month or two if you pull it off?”

  “I’ll be graduating in another month or two.”

  “Don’t you need to plan your graduation action?”

  Maddy snickered.

  “If you get enough kids to do one good action this year,” Annie said, “and teach the juniors what you know about organizing, the next class could carr
y the torch.”

  Maddy’s eyes had grown crafty. “Speaking of the next generation,” she said, “you wouldn’t be willing to give me a ride to the meeting at Yale to plot my great revenge conspiracy, would you?” Maddy had asked.

  “In The Trojan Grape?”

  Annie snapped back to the present, to driving what had indeed become the Trojan Grape, when Maddy shouted, “I’m jazzed, gang.” The kid bounced on the back seat of the Saab as if to demonstrate the resilience Annie envied.

  “I can’t wait for graduation day.”

  “You’d better,” Annie advised. She yawned, always bored at this long dark stretch of 83, and gave the Grape more gas. “If you get kicked out of school now, dingbat, you won’t be able to zap them.”

  “I’ll wait, don’t worry. This is too good a chance to blow. Besides, I’ll need the rest of the term to write my speech.”

  “I can’t get over how you sat on this for so long, mum as a clam,” said Gussie, her voice thin.

  “I was figuring the angles,” Maddy admitted. “I want to get the most I can out of it politically.”

  “How do you get to be salutatorian anyway?” asked Chantal. “I was thankful my kids didn’t try dropping out of second grade once the thrill was gone.”

  Chantal played with the hairs on the back of her neck. She felt herself respond even as knew she should pull away. Was she going to use Chantal, just for comfort, until the real thing came along again? Was there any such animal as the real thing? Surely, this plump grandma wouldn’t turn out to be—

  “They give salutatorian to the student with the second highest rank,” explained Maddy. “You know, the meat and potatoes of school—dumb grades. That’s why I worked so hard, so they couldn’t ignore the numbers and shine the queer on. They’ve got to give me my turn at the microphone. And am I going to let them have it! I’ll guilt trip them into letting the gay kids meet next year.”

  “Say, Annie,” Gussie said, reaching over to slap her knee, “let’s throw a graduation party at Rafferty Street and invite everybody—the Yale group, Maddy’s mom. What do you think, Maddy?”

  “Way to go, Gramma Gus! Thanks! I can’t believe how much more fun it is to live out than in the closet. Look at all the goodies I’m getting for being little old pervert me.” She pulled the bill of her Mets cap down further on her neck. Her springy curls made it hard to keep in place. “I wonder if the gay Yalies really can get me a late acceptance and a full scholarship. I never even thought of applying there. Maddy Scala at Yale. Can you picture it?”

  “There’s no doubt you got your Gramma’s brains,” teased Gussie. “But would you last? Can you stop being an agitator for four years?”

  “Nope. Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke. Sorry. I was planning to go to the community college anyway so it’s no big deal if that’s where I end up.”

  “But how wonderful if you could get a Yale education free. It was never in my mom’s Green Stamp catalogue,” said Chantal.

  “It may not be so free, Chantal.” Annie rubbed against Chantal’s fingers instead of discouraging her. “I remember how rough it was on Vicky. The price may not be in money.”

  “That was twenty years ago, dude. They try to change me and I’m out of there,” Maddy promised. In the rearview mirror, Annie saw Maddy cross her arms. “You know, I have to hand it to you older dykes. If you hadn’t started marching there’d be no student groups and without the groups we wouldn’t be helping each other now.”

  “It’s getting to be a regular old gays’ network out there,” Gussie joked.

  Maddy and Chantal sang a giggling improvised duet of “When the Gays Come Marchin’ In.”

  Annie basked in this one-big-happy-family feeling. By the time the flashing lights caught her eye it was too late to slow down. She eased her softball cap from her head—no use antagonizing the state trooper.

  She slumped in her seat while he checked to make sure she wasn’t a mass murderer. “This is humiliating,” she groused.

  Chantal said, “A purple Saab does sort of catch the eye.”

  “He’s taking a long time,” Maddy said with an ominous tone.

  “They’re probably sending him Annie’s life history.”

  Annie groaned. “Don’t even think it. There’s most likely some form of tag placed on the records of troublemakers. Am I considered a troublemaker?” She lowered her voice. “Watch out for the bulldyke in the purple imported job.”

  “Why not be truly paranoid,” Maddy teased. “They’ve been told to harass you till you resign from the Farm...till they can arrest you for something and then, WHAM, the old what-is-it-a-boy-or-a-girl routine?”

  “I can see it all now,” Annie predicted. “At their mercy in jail—you know it wouldn’t be good for my health. Am I nuts to stay in the Valley, where too many minds are stuck back in the 1950s?”

  Citation in her glove box, driving slowly toward the valley, she half-listened to Gussie entertain them with a tale about her one brush with the highway patrol, out in Kansas.

  “I’ll bet it wasn’t so funny then,” Annie sulkily accused.

  Gussie taunted her. “We’ll laugh about this night one of these days, Socrates.”

  Maddy lived way up on the hillside. Annie dropped her off first, then swooped down to Rafferty Street. She watched until Gussie locked herself in the house and waved from the front window that all was well. A clump of cars was gathered at the end of the street and kids, wine and beer bottles in evidence, were gathered around the cars.

  “What address is that?” one yelled.

  “Sixty-nine!” shouted the group.

  Annie revved her engine. “Damn them.” She screeched into a u-turn and, ticket or no, sped out Railroad Avenue to the parking area by the dam.

  For a while Annie and Chantal were silent as they watched the water fall all over itself in its eagerness to reach the river below the dam. The moon was bright now and hung above them, a lover’s lantern. Annie cracked her window and a damp mossy fertile smell stole in, strangely sensual.

  She’d come to enjoy talking with Chantal. They spoke the same language was the way she’d explained it to Gussie, patting the area of her heart to demonstrate which language.

  “Originally,” she confessed to Chantal, “I invited Jo to come tonight but, true to form, Jo was busy. She’s been busy every time I’ve called since the night the Prelude was outside Verne’s. I know I should just give up on the woman. What’ll it take—a wedding announcement?”

  “Could be,” Chantal said.

  Annie looked at her, touched her hand. “Ah, Chantal. I shouldn’t be thinking out loud. It’s not that I wanted her to come more than you. I just can’t believe I blew it again so I keep trying to prove I didn’t. Two in a row. First Marie-Christine, then Jo. Am I losing my touch or what?”

  “Maybe,” suggested Chantal, looking at the dam, not at Annie, “age forty-two is about time to start looking before you leap, time to let your head—and more of your heart, less of those hormones—have a say.”

  “But,” Annie complained miserably, “the thought of Jo jumping into bed with Verne when I was practically a saint not to push her makes me even more hesitant about starting anything with—someone else. There’s got to be something wrong with me.”

  Chantal took her hand and used one finger to trace lines she surely couldn’t see in Annie’s palm. Annie felt that old melting feeling that traveled to her wrist, her forearm, her shoulder. She went as weak as the falling water, plummeting into she had no idea what. Chantal might be just what she needed, though not exactly what she wanted, especially the package deal that came with two kids and a grandchild. Then there was that hint of nervous neatness, the way Chantal squared every object on a table. She’d just centered the little mirror Annie had clipped behind the passenger visor in the Saab—could she stand that all the time?

  “I haven’t made out here since high school. Would you believe in a 1958 Edsel?” said Chantal, with her husky laugh.

&nb
sp; Annie closed her hand around Chantal’s and pulled her closer. “Gosh, I like you,” she whispered.

  Chantal looked up at her in the shadowed light of a distant street lamp. Annie had never had a lover shorter than herself. It made her feel magnificently butch. They rubbed noses, their lips like magnets about to draw together, just inside the safety zone. A millimeter closer and they’d pull together. Hard.

  Chantal lowered her head as Annie touched her light hair with her lips. “I think you’re pretty nice too,” Chantal said against her shoulder. “And your friends. Except for you-know-who-with-the-weird-pet.”

  “Aren’t they something else? Except for you-know-who-with-the-weird-pet. Who do you hang out with when you’re not seducing the new girl in town?”

  Chantal sat up. “Seducing…moi?”

  “Seducing, tu,” Annie answered with a smile, though inside she was torn. How could she even think of getting involved with someone in Morton River Valley when the Valley seemed intent on evicting her?

  “I’m not sure I like that.”

  “I do.”

  “Then I guess it’s okay.”

  “It’d better be.”

  Chantal took both Annie’s hands and nibbled on the fingertips one by one, planting lingering soft kisses on the palms. Annie squirmed, felt her underwear grow uncomfortably damp.

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t have many friends,” Chantal confessed. “Maybe there’s something wrong with me. That meeting tonight at Yale? I’ve never seen so many gay people together before, even at the Sweatshop. I’ve been pretty much a one-on-one queer.”

  “That’s the whole point, isn’t it, one-on-one?” Annie slipped fingers under Chantal’s sleeves to touch bare skin. Chantal shivered visibly. “It takes attacks to bring us out of the woodwork. You’ve never gone to a gay pride march?”

  “Only in my heart when I see them on TV. I spend my time working and keeping up my house and yard, visiting with Mom and my kids. I’m a devoted catalogue reader. It’s how I satisfy my shopping addiction—I make out extravagant orders and throw them away. The best part is adding up all the money I save. There’s my oldest and best friend Lynn. She’s married, a hairdresser. She likes to bellyache to me about her hubby and her job and she listens to me complain about my non-existent love life.” She looked up under her eyelashes at Annie. “That takes about all my time.”