by Joan Opyr
“Just a second. I can’t seem to find a towel.”
“That’s because they were all in the laundry room,” she said. “I’ve brought you one hot from the dryer. Why did you lock the door?”
“Fear of burglars.” I shook off as best I could and dripped my way across the floor. I turned the lock, and, being careful to keep myself completely behind the door and out of view, I opened it just wide enough to allow her to slip a towel through the crack.
“What do you think I’m going to do?” she laughed. “Faint? I’ve seen naked women before.”
“You haven’t seen me.”
“Haven’t I?”
Our eyes met in the bathroom mirror. It was fog-free. Susan could see from Newport News to Chattanooga, as my grandmother would say. I snatched the towel from her hand and shut the door quickly. Much to my relief, there was no giggling in the hall, and her footsteps gradually receded. I wondered what she was thinking.
I looked pretty good with my clothes on. I looked long and lean and physically fit. But like most people, I looked better with my clothes on than off. My mother and Nana were master illusionists, hiding figure flaws with padded shoulders and girdles. I was equally skilled. I was built like a man, so I wore men’s clothes, men’s jeans and shirts. I was obliged to wear women’s underwear, jackets, and shoes because my grandmother, like the vice cops of old, insisted that I wear at least three items of women’s clothing at all times. I didn’t examine myself in the mirror very often because I found my body so appalling. It wasn’t a man’s body. True, I had no hips to speak of, and my straight, flat waist dropped down without contour to my legs. But I did have breasts. They weren’t large, but there they were, tacked onto my chest like an afterthought.
I wasn’t the sort of woman other women admired. I wasn’t pretty or delicate. I had strong features, good muscles, and straight, white teeth. There was a word for me—mannish. I didn’t want to be a man. Sometimes, I thought it might be easier if I were.
I put the pajamas on and hung the towel over the shower rail. The towel was the same green as the tiles in the shower. I wondered which came first, the tiles or the towel.
Susan pulled the covers back and motioned for me to climb over her so that I could sleep with my back to the wall. I was flattered that she remembered. If something came after me in the middle of the night, Dracula or Hunter and his cigarette lighter, I wanted to face it head-on. I wriggled down beneath the sheets, and Susan slipped in beside me. Stevie Nicks was still singing softly in the background.
“Lights out?” she asked. I nodded.
I was used to falling asleep with music playing. I often left the radio on in a vain attempt to drown out Hunter’s midnight serenades on the organ. This felt different. Susan was lying very still, breathing softly, and I began to get the feeling that I wasn’t supposed to fall asleep. Then I remembered what she had said about gossiping together. Perhaps she was waiting for me to start.
I said, “How did it go with Brad tonight?”
“Okay.”
“He didn’t burst into tears or anything?”
She laughed. “No, I think he was relieved.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Why?”
I didn’t know what to say. Susan wasn’t completely on her side of the bed, and between that, the dark, and the music, I was nervous.
“Are you going to leave the stereo on?”
“I thought I would. You don’t mind, do you?”
“No.”
“Poppy,” she said seriously. “I want to tell you something about Brad.”
“What?”
She rolled over to face me, her breath blowing warm and moist across my cheek. “He’s gay. I’ve dated three gay men since high school. I don’t want to do that anymore.”
Anymore? I didn’t know why she’d have wanted to do it in the first place. I said, “Three gay men? Did you know, or was it just bad luck or something?”
“I knew.”
“If you knew, then why did you . . .”
“Shh.” She put her hand on my arm, silencing me. “Did you hear that noise?”
“What noise?”
“It’s coming from the kitchen.” She sat up. “It sounds like someone scratching on the door.”
I heard the noise now, too. “I’m sorry. That’s Maurice. I put him in your laundry room. I’d better let him out before he tears down the door.”
“Wait a second—why did you bring Maurice with you?”
“Because Hunter tried to set him on fire.”
The light was suddenly switched on, and Susan loomed in front of me, her face only an inch or two from mine. “He did what?”
I blinked. “He didn’t actually light him up or anything. The dog growled at him, so he chased him around the room, waving a lighter in his face. You heard the noise. We had to leave in a hurry, so I brought him here. You don’t mind, do you?”
She shook her head. I tried to get up, but she pulled me down. “Forget about the dog. You can let him out in a minute. I want you to listen to me, Poppy. You can’t live there anymore. You’ve got to get out.”
I sank back down onto the pillow and stared at the ceiling. My mother had made this announcement about five hundred times over the last four years. She wanted to leave. She wanted my grandmother to divorce Hunter. She didn’t make enough money to pay rent on an apartment. In the end, my mother and I would talk about it, decide that Hunter wasn’t really that bad, or at any rate he wasn’t bad all that often, and we’d stay.
I said, “I’m leaving for college in the fall, but maybe I can get a job or something this summer and move early. I’ll be fine until then.”
She gazed at me sadly. “Your mother should have gotten an apartment years ago and moved you out of there.”
I felt a surge of irritation. Susan’s house looked like a fucking palace. She had a massaging showerhead and a green tiled tub with matching towels. Her family never had to subtract, they just added. “She can’t afford it. My mother doesn’t sell Cadillacs for a living, she files library cards.”
“My father,” she began, in a voice that reflected the anger of my own. Then she stopped herself, waited three beats, and started over. “My father doesn’t have anything to do with this, Poppy. We’re talking about you. When are you going to stop taking responsibility for everyone except yourself?”
This was a bolt from the blue. “I do take responsibility for myself.”
“Listen to me,” she continued. “I’m talking about getting what you need out of your family, instead of them taking what they need out of you.”
I flipped the covers off my legs and climbed out of bed.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ve got to let Maurice out.”
“You don’t like me talking about your family, do you?”
“No. And you don’t like me talking about yours.”
She let me pass. The kitchen tile was cold on my bare feet. I ignored it. I let Maurice run around the Savas’ back yard for ten minutes. As usual, he didn’t need to go out for any particular reason, and I spent another five minutes trudging through the wet grass, trying to catch him and make him go back in. The kitchen and dining room lights were still on at my house, but the blinds were down and the curtains were drawn. That meant that Hunter was awake but quiet, no doubt nursing a head wound and a grievance.
I wiped Maurice’s feet on the doormat and shut him up again in the laundry room. He whined for a moment or two before throwing himself down with a thud and a sigh. There was nothing subtle about Maurice’s emotions. I thought about flinging myself on the floor of Susan’s bedroom and doing the same thing. I owed her an apology. There was no point in being angry with her for having a rich family. Besides, she only said what I’d often thought. She didn’t have any idea what it was like to not have enough money. Her solutions made sense to her. That wasn’t what aggravated me—what I didn’t like was the idea that I needed rescuing. It made me feel weak
and stupid.
I schooled my face into a proper expression of chagrin and went back into the bedroom. Susan smiled at me. I relaxed. She’d changed the music on the stereo, as if she wanted to wipe out the last half-hour as much as I did. She said nothing as she slid out of bed to let me back in. She propped herself up on one elbow and looked down at me.
“Rumours,” I said. “You love that damn Stevie Nicks, don’t you?”
“I do. You don’t mind?”
“Of course not. She’s kind of a hippie, but . . . Susan, I’m sorry. I don’t want to fight with you.”
She brushed this aside with an impatient gesture. “Do you want to pick up where we left off?”
“Sure. I wish you’d lie down.” My eyes were level with her breasts. There was nowhere to look but across at them or up at her eyes, and the intensity of her gaze was making me uncomfortable. She obliged by dropping onto the pillow beside me, her head only a few inches from mine. She continued to look at me, however, until my skin began to tingle.
“Why did you lock the bathroom door?” she asked.
“Why do you date gay men?” I countered.
“Past tense, why did I date gay men. When will you be eighteen?”
“In five months. Are we going to keep asking each other questions?”
“No,” she said, and she kissed me. I never saw it coming. Her lips were soft but insistent, and I could feel every muscle beneath the skin, moving against me, forcing my mouth open. I wasn’t aware that I’d reached out for her until I found that my fingers were tangled in her hair, pulling her head down. Then she was above me, her hands on my shoulders, her knee pressing down between my legs.
“Poppy,” she whispered, fumbling with the buttons on my pajama top. I panicked, covering her hand with my own, tightly grasping her fingers. She looked at me for a moment and then sat up, pulling the tank top up over her head and tossing it onto the floor. She kissed me again. This time when she began to unbutton my top, I didn’t stop her.
I closed my eyes and pressed my lips against her ear. “I don’t know what to do,” I said softly, not sure I wanted her to hear me.
“Yes, you do,” she said. “Yes, you do.”
And I found that I did know. In a moment, my lips were on her breast, and the blood was pounding in my ears. I swam up only once, in that amazing moment when she pressed hard against my fingers, but I was soon lost again in the rhythmic motion as she rocked back and forth against the heel of my hand.
Hours later, I fell asleep with her face pressed against my shoulder, her arms wrapped tightly around my waist. Rumours played on the stereo in an endless loop, and I dreamt about women in gauzy white skirts dancing around a bonfire on a foggy mountaintop.
Chapter Thirteen
I woke up with my head on her chest. The sun was streaming through the window blinds, bathing us in horizontal lines of light and dark. I held very still, not wanting to wake her but wondering how I might contrive to put my pajamas back on. Everything was different at night. There, it was our secret, and it all seemed right. In the morning, it was a fact to be examined and analyzed. What would she say when she woke up? Would we talk about it? What did it mean? Did it mean anything?
I knew what it meant to me. Confirmation. Affirmation. Joy and fear.
From the other end of the house, I heard a scratching sound followed by a whine. Maurice. If I didn’t get up and let him out soon, he’d destroy the laundry room door. Then Susan would have to tell her parents what he was doing in there, and they’d wonder what we were doing in here, and why I didn’t just get up and let him out. Maybe they’d talk to my mother, and she’d suspect, she’d know, she’d see it in my face. I couldn’t hide it. If I didn’t grin like an idiot, I’d weep. All my suspicions and clues, my half-dreamed awareness, it was all there for everyone to see.
Beside me, Susan moved slightly, shifting into a more comfortable position. I lifted my head, and she rolled over, facing me, but she didn’t open her eyes. I watched the light move through the blinds from her shoulder to her elbow. Slowly, carefully, I slid off the end of the bed and made my way to the bathroom. I put my clothes on quickly and quietly and tiptoed down the hall. I opened the back door and let Maurice out of the laundry room, pausing only long enough to check for damage. There was none. I closed the door behind me, walked across the wet grass, and hopped the fence into my own backyard.
The house was quiet. I sat on the back porch and put my shoes and socks on. Over in the Savas’ yard, the sprinkler switched on, scaring seven kinds of hell out of Maurice. It scared the hell out of me, too, until I remembered that it was on a timer. Maurice, trapped between the jets of water, was running back and forth, trying to find a way out. Any minute now, he would start barking and wake up the whole neighborhood. I crossed the yard again and whistled for him. He couldn’t figure out how to get around the sprinkler. I had to go in, pick him up, and lift him over the fence. I got drenched in the process.
I checked Susan’s window to make sure she wasn’t watching. Then, I leaned my head over the sprinkler and let the cold water blast me in the face.
My mother was the only one up. She sat at the kitchen table, eating a fried bologna sandwich and reading the Sunday paper.
“Your hair’s all wet,” she said. “You’re all wet.”
I nodded quickly and turned my back on her to open the refrigerator door. “I got caught in the automatic sprinkler. Do we have any orange juice?”
“You’ll have to make some. There’s a can in the freezer. I wish I’d gone with you last night.”
I knocked the butter dish to the floor, shattering the glass lid.
“Careful,” my mother said. “You’re as jumpy as a cat. What time did you blow out of here last night? Was it before or after he lit the drapes?”
“Before,” I said, picking up the pieces of the butter dish and dropping them into the trash can. I sniffed. “Is that what I smell? I left when he tried to light the dog. How long were you up?”
“I haven’t gone to bed yet,” she replied, taking another bite of her English muffin. “He passed out about four-thirty. Mama and I dragged him off to bed. If it had been up to me, I’d have left him on the living room floor, wrapped in burnt chintz.”
I wiped the butter off the floor with the dishcloth. I’d been planning to make a big production number out of yawning and surprised myself by doing it for real. “I think I’m going to go to bed now myself. I’m really tired.”
“Didn’t you and Susan sleep?”
My heart pounded up into my throat. “No, no, no, we slept.”
“Oh. I thought you spent the night catching up on gossip. I assume you took the dog with you. I hope her parents didn’t mind.”
“They weren’t . . . ,” I began, and then stopped myself. “They don’t care. It wasn’t a problem.”
“I think we should get rid of him,” my mother went on. “This is no kind of life for that poor dog. We need to find him a good home.”
“We should keep the dog and find Hunter a home.”
“There’s no pound for drunks.” She folded up her newspaper and took her reading glasses off. “Poppy,” she said, looking at me closely, “I’ve been thinking. You graduate in two months. I know you want to go to college . . . ”
“I want to go to UNC,” I said firmly.
“I know that, but I was thinking if you went to N. C. State, you could live at home. Not here. You and I could get an apartment together, someplace near campus.”
I turned on the tap and let the cold water run. “An apartment? But what about Nana? We can’t just leave her here with Hunter, not by herself.”
“She’s married to him,” my mother said. “That’s her choice. She could divorce him if she wanted to. I can’t live here anymore, and I don’t want you to, either. If you go to UNC, you’ll have to pay for room and board. It’ll be cheaper to live with me and go to State. Besides, I don’t know that I want you off in Chapel Hill.”
I stopped chopping a
t the frozen lump of orange juice I’d dropped into the pitcher and looked up. “Why not?”
My mother sighed and shook her head. “Because it’s full of weirdoes.”
“It is not!”
“It is. Just think what happened to your cousin Sammy when she went. She had a full-ride scholarship, books, tuition, everything. They even gave her spending money. She wasn’t there a year before she dropped out and became a dirty pot-smoking hippie. Next thing we knew, she was living in a shack with ten other dirty pot-smoking hippies.”
“There aren’t any hippies anymore, Mom. It’s 1984.”
“Try telling that to your father,” she replied. “He doesn’t know what year it is.”
“Lucky Eddie’s not a hippie. According to Hunter, he’s a greasy bohunk.”
“Are you going to invite him to your graduation?”
“No way.”
“He’s expecting it.”
“How do you know?”
“He called this morning, just before you got home. Don’t ask me why he was up, and on a Sunday as well. He asked when your graduation was, so I told him.”
“I don’t want Lucky Eddie at my graduation. I don’t want anyone to meet him.”
“Well,” she shrugged, “he says he’s coming. I’ll tell you what else—he also says he’s bringing you a car for your graduation present. I asked how he could afford it when he was so far behind in his child support. He said that’s why he’s behind. Can you believe it?”
“No, I can’t believe it, and I won’t count on the car.”
“That would be wise.” She put her reading glasses back on and picked up the newspaper. I saw now that she was scanning the classifieds, apartments for rent.
“I want you to think about N. C. State,” she said. “Together, I think we could afford a nice two-bedroom apartment. You’re planning to work part-time, right?”
“Poppy.” Susan draped her jacket over the back of the chair. “You’re here. What are you drinking?”