“You have never been to a lesbian bar before?” Agnès asked in French. She motioned for Deirdre to slide in along the banquette covered in cotton cloth, pillows tossed at infrequent intervals. Agnès followed and sat next to Deirdre, offered her a Gitanes.
“No,” Deirdre said, and waved away the cigarette.
“I am surprised,” Agnès said, flicking on her lighter. “You are lesbian, no?”
“I . . . I . . . don’t know,” Deirdre replied.
Agnès laughed. “But of course you are. And in any case, it does not matter, no? We are here. We are relaxed. We will have a drink and you will see if you are lesbian or not.”
It seemed both exotic and familiar, sitting in the bar with Agnès, drinking a Belgian beer and watching the women—beautiful, long-legged women who looked like models; women in leather pants, in short skirts. Women in stiletto heels and boots. Women in jeans and T-shirts who were unmistakably French, who had that elegance that Deirdre had first noticed in Agnès back when she was Deirdre’s student teacher; women who were clearly not American, who were Ahn-yes and not Agnes; women who showed Deirdre there were other ways to be than what she knew, ways different from her mother, from her own self. It would take Deirdre a few years to make the connections between her early crushes and the sense of comfort and familiarity she felt in that bar, but she had known immediately that she wanted to be like these women.
Back in the States, Deirdre found college social life confusing. As she became more certain of her sexual orientation, her relationships with women grew more difficult to decipher—which ones were strictly friendships and which ones might be budding romances? Or, more correctly, because many of the women Deirdre met were straight and not interested in a romantic relationship, which of the women did Deirdre truly want to establish friendships with and which one was she secretly in love with, settling instead for a friendship, since that is what was offered? Certainly, Deirdre wasn’t attracted to all of them, but there were several instances when she couldn’t tell whether or not she was about to embark on a friendship or start a relationship, and she didn’t like the confusion.
So when she started teaching at Brandywine, Deirdre had been immediately grateful for Forest’s friendship because of its uncomplicated nature. As first-year teachers hired at the same time, they became instant friends and confidantes, and work buddies, helping each other navigate the private school politics, complaining to each other when colleagues seemed resistant to their new ideas—a book club Deirdre tried to organize, or Forest’s idea of running mini-courses during activity period—because what they proposed wasn’t “the way we do things here,” and why change what was working? Deirdre had found it easy to come out to Forest, and though he rarely socialized with Deirdre and SJ, he didn’t seem to mind hearing about their squabbles or weekend adventures over beers at Tony’s on an occasional Friday night, or coffee at the Blue Moon after school.
Teaching at Brandywine without Forest was unimaginable. But now it seemed that Deirdre had lost her best, and possibly her only, ally.
Field Hockey
At Brandywine, it was assumed that all the girls would play at least one sport—field hockey, volleyball, lacrosse, or tennis. Sports were required—if not varsity or junior varsity, then intramural.
The best games, the girls all said, were the ones with Ms. Murphy on the sidelines, cheering them on, her voice growing hoarse as she yelled, Go! Shoot! And, Play your position, for God’s sake! If Ms. Murphy yelled Anna’s name, then Anna felt every cell in her body vibrate.
On this early September afternoon, a day before the field trip, Anna had sat in the locker room next to Joanie, the goalie, a senior.
“So, I heard Ms. Murphy’s got a thing for you,” Joanie said. She bumped Anna’s shoulder with hers. “You cool with that?”
Anna scowled. “Don’t be a jerk.”
“No, it’s the story around school. You two are tight.”
Anna bent over to tie her cleats.
“Ah, Anna-banana, I think you’re blushing!” Joanie poked her in the side, then leaned in closer. “I didn’t think you played for that team.”
Anna felt the heat rise, her skin pulsate. She said nothing, kept fussing with her cleats, knotting and unknotting her laces.
Joanie was one of those girls everyone liked and looked up to. She had an aura—not the popular-girl thing, not exactly, but something cooler, a spirit that said, I’m above all this. That spirit is what drew the other girls to her, what made the hairs on Anna’s neck shiver when Joanie noticed or talked to her. Anna-banana.
* * *
The mothers watched the girls play, each of them assessing her own daughter, measuring her up. They kept silent score—Anna, fearless, a gazelle girl who ran effortlessly, her stick an extension of her body; Joanie, fierce and relentless in goal. They were a wonder to watch, and each mother thought: Why can’t my daughter play like that? The mothers heard Ms. Murphy shouting encouragement. They watched her jump up and down when Anna scored. It was good, wasn’t it, that she was such a fan?
Chapter Nine
SJ cruised down East Main. Her car doors were locked—force of habit—and the windows rolled up. She drove past the baseball field and Most Precious Blood, all the way down Main, deep into the East End. When she passed the old brick mills and the East End Gallery, she turned left and slowed on 15th, a residential street packed tight with triple-deckers and chain-link fences. Empty lots and asphalt. Lights burned in windows, and some yards were littered with kid stuff: plastic Big Wheels, push toys, a bicycle or two. A skinny man with brown skin sat on a porch, smoking, the sleeves of his T-shirt drooping from his arms. He seemed to be looking directly at SJ, and she gave a little wave and drove on. She turned right onto Q.
Like the houses on the other streets, the windows were barred. Brazilian flags flew from doorways. Here was a house with golden mums growing out front, flowers that softened the concrete and asphalt, made the house look homey. Another triple-decker was freshly painted baby blue, and its front porch sported a couple of metal chairs and a hammock. More than one house had a pumpkin sitting on the stoop. People weren’t too cynical to put out pumpkins, even in this neighborhood where they were sure to be smashed well before Halloween—or at least that’s what the news would have you believe. SJ was inclined to believe it. If Leo Rivera could disappear from outside his grandmother’s house and end up in the bottom of the river, it was hard to count on much of anything.
She made a left onto 19th. Many of these houses were run-down, with sagging roofs and crumbling steps, badly in need of paint. But even here, curtains hung in front of windows, some simply tied in knots that dangled in the center. A well-tended garden bed bordered the edge of one aluminum-sided triple-decker. Several houses had garden plots, remnants of crops in some—squash, old tomato vines, gourds, sunflowers. Kids gathered on the steps of one house and a few more, boys mostly, spilled out of a white car parked in front, the stereo pulsing, reverberating against the asphalt. These kids were black and brown, Brazilian maybe, it was hard to tell. SJ looked at them, laughing together, their music loud, their bodies loose and at ease. She longed to feel that camaraderie, had never been part of a group, not even in high school, especially not in high school. She had wished for it, but she hadn’t known exactly how to make it happen. She had been too serious back then, and maybe even still now.
The odd thing was, until she met Deirdre, SJ could not even imagine herself in a relationship. Blame this on Mr. Freeman maybe, though that hadn’t happened until senior year. Sometimes she blamed her inability to see herself as part of a couple on the fact that she was an only child. She was used to living a certain way and she liked things just so. SJ didn’t know what it was about Deirdre that had made her feel differently, but she recalled with tremendous clarity the moment when she decided living with Deirdre was a possibility. Early in their romance, they were at dinner at their favorite Mexican restaurant. Drinking margaritas, nibbling on chips and salsa while the
y waited for burritos, Deirdre had been asking SJ about her family and growing up. She had asked something about being an only child, something about not being able to imagine going through life without another person. Wasn’t it hard? Deirdre had asked.
SJ had wanted to tell Deirdre that she yearned for someone to go through life with, at first anyway, when she was young, because she spent so much time alone. Her parents didn’t exactly neglect her, but they had their adult pursuits—their cocktail parties, their jobs, their trips abroad—and just as often as not, SJ was left to her own devices. She wanted to tell Deirdre what it was like to really need imaginary playmates because she spent so many hours alone. And at first, there had been the au pairs. The good ones—Mireille and Eva, a French girl and a blonde from Denmark—played with SJ, or at least came up with interesting projects for her to work on. The others—and there had been plenty of others—were useless as far as SJ had been concerned. None of them stole money from her parents or forgot to feed her dinner. They were all competent in their way, but for the most part, they did their household work and interacted with SJ only when necessary.
After the au pairs, there had been classmates, but even then, none who materialized into the longed-for best friend, no one who would sleep over at SJ’s and giggle long into the night, no one who passed her notes in school or saved her a seat in the lunchroom. Even by the time she was seven or eight, SJ had the reputation of being a loner. The other kids assumed she liked it that way and though they were all friendly enough, they didn’t go overboard in their attempts to include her. The girls in particular. Most of the time that was fine with SJ. She didn’t really want to be taken in a limousine to see The Nutcracker in downtown Boston or wear a fancy dress and have a tea party, activities the other third grade girls in her private school had organized for their birthdays. (When she admitted this to Deirdre, Deirdre had exclaimed, “Oh, I would have loved that!”) SJ might rather have attended the Red Sox games with some of the boys and sat in their fathers’ corporate skyboxes at Fenway, but the boys didn’t ask her. Not in third grade, or fourth, or fifth. Birthdays then were strictly single-sex affairs, and by the time the parties developed into boy-girl events, SJ wasn’t particularly interested in those, either.
In high school, SJ had thrown herself into athletics and clubs. She made the fencing team and edited the literary magazine. And she read. SJ had always been a reader, but in high school she was never without a book. And there had been Mr. Freeman, his presence palpable at this very moment as she sat in the car, though if she were experiencing an actual memory, Mr. Freeman would have been driving, SJ riding shotgun. There had been a time in the car, hadn’t there? Yes, a Saturday or maybe it was a Friday, a ride home from school. SJ had stayed after, talking as she often did, and Mr. Freeman had offered a ride. It was dark, winter, the heat on in the car. SJ remembered wearing mittens, remembered a hand, remembered—had she taken her mittens off?—felt again the finger, skin on skin, remembered again that rush, the pleasure, saw her mitten in Mr. Freeman’s hand, his finger tracing her knuckles.
SJ stared at her knuckles now, white, gripping the steering wheel. The fact that she thought of him as Mr. Freeman and not Aaron—that said something, didn’t it? Deirdre had tried to get SJ to tell stories of high school—“You didn’t have any friends?” Incredulous. “Not one?” Though she loved, too, she said, the idea of SJ being a bookish loner, destined to become a librarian, the very epitome of the word librarian. Deirdre loved having a “super-smart” girlfriend, bragged about it to their small circle of friends. Even in the early days, SJ shrugged off the idea that Deirdre loved the idea of SJ more than she loved SJ herself, because at first it was simply nice to be with someone at all. Maybe, she had thought back then, maybe it was enough.
At the end of 19th Street, SJ could only turn right. And there, on the next corner, Mickey’s auto body shop. Light shone from the office, though the shop looked closed, the garage door down. SJ pulled up next to the curb and turned her car off and waited.
She glanced at her watch—well past six o’clock. Deirdre would have been home for at least an hour, maybe more. She might well wonder where SJ was, but it wasn’t likely that she would worry or call the library looking for her. That wasn’t Deirdre. She might fume, she might be angry when SJ got home, but she wasn’t a worrier. Maybe if Deirdre worried more SJ might feel more compelled to come home after work. More crazy logic, but it seemed to SJ that she and Deirdre were little more than two people living in the same house these days. They were hardly lovers. Sex between them was infrequent—“Not on a school night, for heaven’s sake,” Deirdre said if SJ tried, which she’d recently stopped doing. School was the focus of Deirdre’s life. She might worry about her students, but worry about SJ?
“Errands to run?” Deirdre had said just the other night when SJ came home well after nine, after drinks with Florence and then a drive through the East End. SJ had driven up and down similar streets, looking at the houses, wondering about the people behind their windows, what their lives were really like. Whether they wished they lived elsewhere. Whether they were happy in this neighborhood. Whether their kids were scared to be out at night. Whether drugs were really a problem.
Now, sitting in front of Mickey’s shop, looking at the light on in there, SJ realized too—and this was a hard one to admit—that maybe she wanted out of her relationship with Deirdre. SJ craved passion. She wanted to be somebody’s lover, not a housemate. She wanted to be with someone who cared as much for her as for a job. SJ wanted a life, not the semblance of a life she had with Deirdre, a façade, a cover-up, not the real thing.
SJ unlocked her car door and got out. She shivered a little in the September evening and grabbed the hoodie she kept in the backseat, locked up the car, and headed across the street to the garage. She pulled on the hoodie and took a deep breath. She knocked on the office door and peered in; she didn’t see anyone. Just a metal desk covered with papers and a heavy-looking cash register, old. Shelves of car products—oil and lubricant, SJ wasn’t sure what all was up there. There was a red clock with the Coca-Cola logo painted across the front. A vending machine. Two metal chairs with green leather seats. And in the corner, what looked like a kid’s bike. Old and beat-up.
SJ knocked again, harder. She thought she heard something, but wasn’t sure. Radio? A voice? “Mickey?” she said and knocked again. “Are you in there?”
The evening breeze blew across the back of her neck. She shivered and zipped the hoodie. Before she could turn to leave, Mickey cracked the door.
“SJ? What are you doing here?” He looked tired.
“I . . . was kind of worried about you when you didn’t show up today.” She laughed a little and wrapped her arms around herself. “Can I come in? It’s cold out here.”
Mickey hesitated, then stepped back.
“You didn’t call to cancel.”
He followed SJ’s gaze around the office until it rested on the newspaper clippings.
“Practicing?” SJ said and took a couple steps toward the desk. “That’s great!” Several articles were scattered across it. She glanced at the ones on top, both recent articles about the investigation surrounding Leo Rivera’s murder, as the police were now calling it. She riffled through a few others in the pile—all about Leo Rivera: when he first disappeared, after he’d been missing a couple of days, and a front-pager from the day his body was found.
“Did you know him?” SJ put down the article with ten-year-old Leo Rivera smiling from beneath his Red Sox cap, the same picture the TV flashed each night during the local news. By now, everyone in town felt as if they knew him.
Mickey didn’t say anything.
“He lived near you, right?” SJ replayed her drive through the very same streets where Leo Rivera had disappeared, just a couple of blocks from where she now stood.
Mickey looked up. “Yeah,” he said. He rubbed his hands together, cleared his voice. “He, uh . . . We were neighbors, you know? Good kid too, that Le
o.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and shuffled his feet.
The office felt suddenly hot and cramped and airless.
Mickey stood, his body loose and gangly, hands jammed in his pockets.
SJ wanted to know what he was thinking. She turned away, glanced at the bike leaning against the far wall, red and faded, with black handlebars, then at the articles on the desk, Leo Rivera young and smiling. Dead. SJ looked back at Mickey. “You know, there’ve been people in the library asking about you.”
“People?” He leaned back against the doorframe and folded his arms.
“Detectives, maybe, I’m not sure. Police.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“They say . . .” SJ took a deep breath. “They say you might have had something to do with Leo Rivera’s murder.” Beyond Mickey, through the doorway, she could see her gray-blue Honda parked alongside the curb on the other side of the street. Such a short, infinite distance.
“Well, they can come and ask me myself, why don’t they? Matter of fact, maybe I’ll go on down to the station, just tell them I got nothing to hide. Hook me up to a lie detector right now and I’ll show them.” Mickey, animated, paced the floor in front of SJ, arrogant and cocky.
“Listen, I know it’s ridiculous to think you might be involved.” SJ found herself on more familiar footing, in the role of mentor, comforter.
“Hell yeah. Like killing my own brother, man.” He stopped pacing and turned to SJ. “What’d they say about me, those detective people?”
“I didn’t talk with them. They spoke with my boss.”
The Year of Needy Girls Page 8