The Bride of Catastrophe

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  “Cream and sugar,” she replied, perplexed at my urgency.

  “Please pass the cream and sugar,” I called. She must have the cream and sugar immediately. Her coffee must be perfect; I stopped just short of testing a drop on my wrist. I would fill every one of her wishes—she would have no choice but to love me.

  “They’re in use,” Pat said, shooting me a derisive glance. At the other end of the table, Barb was refusing the bowl of grapes—hadn’t we heard the boycott was on again?

  “Could you send them down here?” Reenie asked. “I love grapes,” she confided.

  “Have mine,” Lee said to her. “Do you want mine?”

  “Well, okay,” Reenie said, and giggled. “I mean, there’s plenty,” she said.

  “Well, have these for now,” Lee said. Her voice was quiet and certain, like a heartbeat or a metronome. She stood up, piled her plates together, and carried them into the kitchen, stepping softly and self-consciously, almost on tiptoe. I watched her the way I’d have watched a sunset, turning back to the table only when she was completely out of sight, shivering and pulling my sweater in around me again.

  “Beatrice will do the dishes; she didn’t bring anything,” Pat announced, and I leapt up; Lee was still in the kitchen. But she passed me in the doorway, pressing herself against the frame lest our arms brush, and returned to the table to take my seat, and when I came back, she was talking to Reenie about the ball team. I gathered up the dirty dishes. When in Rome one must follow the dictates of the Romans. And one way or another, I always seemed to be in Rome.

  When I turned off the faucet for a second I realized they were discussing me.

  “So po-lite!” Pat said. “It’s the way they appease men,” she added, “another way of wheedling, really. I mean,” she said, with a little snort, “it’s fine if you’re that sort of person, like, a debutante. Okay then, purse your little lips and do-si-do, or whatever, and Daddy’ll take good care of you. But for me, I don’t have the luxury of mincing words.”

  I was scraping the last plate—the lima bean and barley soufflé, whose comprehensive protein everyone had extolled, sagged wearily into the compost.

  “Sure,” Pat said, “everyone’s welcome here, but let her pull her own weight. Ginny, can I get you something else? More cake?”

  “I’ll go,” I heard Reenie say. “Anyone else?”

  She came into the kitchen and did a stagey doubletake when she saw me at the sink. “What are you doing?” she asked. “You’re not actually washing all those?”

  “I didn’t bring a dish,” I said.

  “So what?”

  “Pat said those were the rules,” I said.

  “Aw, don’t go listening to Pat,” she said.

  Then I saw Lee in the door—or really, felt her presence. Most people are like children’s drawings, the color flaring out beyond the boundaries all around, and least of anyone did I manage to keep myself inside the lines, but Lee was perfectly tranquil. My mother, I thought, would despise her, and at this, my pulse began to race—she was so wonderful and there she was, setting her cup on the counter beside me, so close I could almost have touched her.

  “Are you all right?” she asked Reenie.

  “Sure,” Reenie said, sounding exasperated, and Lee tiptoed out again.

  “Hey, it’s eleven o’clock!” Reenie said, “We’ve got to go!” she said, taking my arm with the easy intimacy of a child, pulling me back into the living room. “Pat,” she called, “this girl is actually doing your dishes for you!”

  “Is she getting dishpan hands now?” Barb asked, with mocking solicitude.

  I saw myself in the hall mirror, flushed and disheveled, my face pursed like a chipmunk or a squirrel: some anxious, hoarding creature that would bolt at the snap of a twig. No wonder they all despised me. Even my disappointment was proof that, unlike the others, I still lived in the luxury of expectation. Pat had been right, in a way, when she called me a debutante: I’d so completely adopted the protective coloration of a Sweetriver girl, you couldn’t tell who I was anymore. I thought of Sylvie, smoking in her trailer, dropping her g’s, picking up the ways of her adopted people—such as working too much for too little and wondering when the car would give out. And Dolly, the little cowgirl. We had this notion that we could choose a life, walk into it through the front door, and make ourselves at home. But they sure did fit peculiarly, these lives.

  “That’s Iggums, and Poppums, and Missus Itsy Boodles,” Pat was saying, introducing her collection of stuffed rabbits to Ginny, who seemed as nonplussed, for a moment, as I was. “We buy them for baby showers,” Pat confided, “then we can’t bear to part with them,” and, succumbing to a wave of affection for one that had the big sad eyes of a thumb-sucking child, she picked the thing up and hugged it mightily, saying, “Oh, widdoo Poppums isa goodest girl ever, is she.”

  Then: “Eleven o’clock, ladies, let’s go, please. The lights are out, Susan? All right then, let’s not leave the door open please, very good, after you, Ginny.”

  * * *

  KINGDOM COME was a former warehouse and Hartford’s only gay bar. The men there were perfectly turned out, costumed for yachting or motorcycling or roping cattle, or some other little boy’s fantasy. The one thing they did not look like was real people—genuine facial expressions with all their intimations of longing and uncertainty would have wrecked the presentation. Beside them we women shuffled like a herd of undersized buffalo, heads down, hands in our pockets, ordering in whispers from bartenders who handed us our drinks and took our money, looking past us to the gods on the blacklit floor. It seemed as if the two genders were such different species, we could occupy the same space at the same time without ever colliding, almost without seeing each other.

  Everyone seemed different under the strobe. Pat leaned on the cane and danced, from the waist up, with abandon, shaking her index finger in parodic caution, throwing her head back and crying “Yowsah!” whenever the rhythm reached a certain pitch. Ginny had withdrawn into a corner; her black cowl blended into the wall so her pale face hovered eerily over the table. Lee leaned against the wall, as laconic as a farmhand, drinking straight bourbon, watching. I felt pulled toward her by a physical force, so it surprised me to see people walk between us: Weren’t they defying the laws of physics? When a man lingered in front of her for a moment, blocking my view, my instinct was to knock him down.

  “You know, you just don’t look like a lesbian.”

  This, which would have been the harshest criticism from any of the rest of them, came from Reenie in a tone of amazed reverence, as if she were addressing the moon. I loved the version of myself I saw reflected in her smile: all dumb, slow, womanly flesh, swaying like eelgrass among the various currents. I remembered, bitterly, that I’d once hoped a man might see something like this in me.

  Now I wondered if Reenie could help me become the way she was; like Tom Sawyer—someone who would never be mistaken for a girl. She was a welder at Ziptronix, which, she told me proudly, was a union shop—even the sweeper made sixteen dollars an hour. She’d just bought a house, a two-family in East Hartford across the river, and was fixing it up—maybe I’d like to come by sometime? Talking to her felt like talking to a man—not a Sweetriver man but a real one, a carpenter or a landscaper or something. There was the same pride: “See what I can do, to take care of you?” And I turned my nose up just the same as if she had been a man—I didn’t believe in them, not even the female ones.

  But I’d managed to angle her around so I could look at Lee over her shoulder. Sure, I said, I’d love to come over—meanwhile, did she want to dance? I wanted Lee to see us.

  “Aw, I guess not,” Reenie said. “But, buy you a drink?”

  “Sure,” I said, taking on a slight twang of my own. I could see Lee drawing on her cigarette, which she held between thumb and forefinger as if smoking was a very serious matter. She was drawing that smoke deep, deep into herself, and that must have been the way she felt about everything,
and I wanted to absorb her, all her feeling and thought, just that way.

  “So, how do you like living in Hartford?” I asked Reenie.

  “I’ve lived here all my life,” she said. “I mean, I went out to Chicago for a year a while back, but it wasn’t for me. I liked Milwaukee, though. Milwaukee felt more like home.”

  “Have you been friends with Pat and Barb, and Lee and everyone forever and ever?”

  “’Bout ten years, I guess, for Pat I mean, and Susan. We started the support group just to meet some other women, really. We’ve only been meeting for a year.”

  “And Lee?”

  “She’s brand-new,” Reenie said. “This is her third or fourth time.”

  “Did she just move here?”

  “No. I guess she just kind of realized…”

  “She just came out!” I said. A fact about her, gold in my sieve!

  Reenie laughed at my excitement. “It happens,” she said. “Now Pat, I got to know through the Women’s Shelter, we’re both volunteers.” How she could have changed the subject from Lee to this matter of no importance I couldn’t imagine. My attention faded and Reenie went off to get our drinks.

  The minute she went to the bar, Lee approached me. It was what I’d been waiting for, what I expected. Once you were a lesbian, dreams came true. The other stuff—the misunderstandings, cruelties, broken hearts—came of the struggle inherent in heterosexuality, that bizarre process through which two antithetical beings attempt, over the course of a wretched lifetime, to fit themselves together. Lee set her hands on me with firm confidence—I thought with a thrill that this must be her nature: commanding, self-assured. We’d keep a salon like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; soon Philippa would be coming down to visit.

  The song was “Hot Shot,” and it was a signal for the men: the night was reaching its climax, it was time to abandon their languid postures and immerse themselves in the beat. Around us, they danced by striking poses, passing poppers, and recoiling at each sniff like whips cracking. The back of a large, flat hand struck me in the mouth but its owner seemed not to notice, and I took it with pleasure—we were all swept up in the churning wave. Imagine, a few hours ago, I hadn’t known Lee existed, and now here we were, moving together to the very same rhythm, though she danced without conviction, as if to deny her complicity with the throbbing music, its sexual vision. In the midst of her quiet assurance, I’d found it, a timidity, a need that would cling to me, draw like a soft mouth at my strength. I sang along—“Gonna be a hot shot baby this evening, hot shot baby tonight.” Who cared if it had no meaning? It had a pulse, a pulse I felt in myself, and Lee would feel it in me and want me all the more.

  It ended, we were dashed on the shore. “Thank you, thank you!” I said to Lee, laughing. “Oh, but let’s not stop yet.”

  She was hardly smiling, I realized suddenly. Her expression was ninety percent tension, with some kind of entreaty just beneath.

  “You were talking to Reenie,” she said in my ear as a new song, a heavy, joyless pounding, began.

  “Well, as much as one can,” I laughed, happily disdainful of my one ally, now that I was with my heart’s object. I remembered how Lee had looked at dinner and I wanted to set her fears to rest, to assure her I had no interest in Reenie at all.

  “Did she say anything?” Lee asked.

  “That she likes Milwaukee better than Chicago,” I said.

  Lee laughed, shy and happy. “She’s so funny,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder. “I’ve got a terrible crush on her,” she admitted.

  “Reenie!” I said, turning reflexively to look at her, so I could figure out her attraction and master it for myself. What can she see in Reenie? I thought, and at the same time: Reenie sees plenty in me.

  “Don’t stare,” Lee said, and out of fear of my “staring” pulled me in tight. We waltzed for a moment like a couple of prom dates, in time with some old song in our heads, while the disco music slammed on.

  “Oh,” Lee sighed, “it’s such a relief to tell someone.” She smelled so sweet, of laundry detergent, I wanted to gather her in and bury my face in her shoulder. Reenie was so natural—she said into my ear—like a colt, didn’t I think?

  “Yes,” I said, thinking furiously that Reenie probably had about the intellect of a colt, and at the same time, that Reenie was at least perceptive enough to recognize my charms. I held Lee tight, tight as if I’d had a knife at her back. I already wanted her, but now I had to have her.

  Five

  I KNEW one person who had studied love in its every incarnation, from the time of immense, waddling fertility goddesses to the advent of leather and chains. One person who could have been curator in the museum of love.

  “Philippa?”

  “Ye-es?” (This spoken with her characteristic wary irritation.)

  “It’s Beatrice,” I said, trying to sound as if I thought this would please her.

  “Beatrice.” Her wariness ticked upward: she thought she’d gotten rid of me.

  “I wanted…” I said, but my voice caught in my throat. I wanted to show Philippa I was in love with someone else, so she’d know I didn’t need her, wouldn’t fear me and run away.

  “Now, Beatrice, I thought we’d settled this.”

  “I wanted to ask your advice about something,” I crashed in, but I was so hurt at her assuming I was calling to pester her, when I’d been so good, put my tail between my legs and fled the minute she told me to go, hadn’t called her all summer even though I was lost and she was my guiding star, that my accursed voice broke and I felt a wave of tears rising.

  “Beatrice, Beatrice Wolfe,” she said. “Stop this at once!”

  “You’ve already rejected me, Philippa,” I said—drily, because I had a glimpse of some absurdity here that I’d never quite recognized before. “You don’t have to repeat yourself. I’m calling for romantic advice—there’s a woman here that I—well, Philippa, I’ve met someone wonderful.”

  “You’ve … you have? In Hartford?”

  It did sound unlikely. “Yes,” I said, smugly. Philippa might need Rome; let me show her what I could make out of the insurance city. “I wish you could meet her, Philippa, she’s wonderful. So self-contained, so authoritative.”

  “Hmm, authoritative,” she said. “That does sound piquant.”

  “But Philippa, she’s in love with someone else,” I moaned.

  “Not insurmountable,” she mused. I heard ice cubes—she was pouring herself a drink. Settling into her chair, ready for the next chapter. Now my eyes really did fill with tears. “She only just met you, you can hardly expect her to drop everything right away. In fact, you wouldn’t want it—you need that tension.”

  “I do?”

  “Yes,” Philippa said, with sharp pleasure. She was an encyclopedia, she only wanted to be opened to the right page. “Of course! You want her to yearn, you want her to suffer the distance between you, so she’ll feel the relief when you cross it! If she doesn’t suffer, she won’t know the strength of her own feeling.”

  “How can she have any feeling for me? She just met me last night!”

  “You just met her last night, too!”

  “But that’s different.”

  “What’s her name, what does she do?”

  “Lee Schuyler, she works for the Aetna.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I don’t know. What does anyone who works for an insurance company do? They go there, thousands of them, every morning, and they don’t come home until night. They must be doing something.”

  “It is mysterious,” she conceded. “Where does she live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well,” she sputtered. “Do you have a phone book? Look her up, for God’s sake.”

  “Willbrook,” I read. “That’s way south of here.”

  “You’ve got to go down and take a look at it,” Philippa said. “Research is always the first step. Then you’ll know how to proceed.”

  “I�
��ll go down tomorrow, if I can find the right bus.”

  “And keep me informed!” she said. “Okay. ’Bye.”

  Keep me informed. I was just repeating these words to myself, in triumph, when she called me back.

  “Where was she born?” she asked. “What sign is she? What does her father do?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know!” I said happily. I had Philippa back, what did anything else matter? I had Philippa back and I was going to make a good story out of Lee Schuyler for her.

  * * *

  AND THE next day, feeling for the first time in months as if I was doing something for a good reason, I left the hospital after my shift and walked straight past my usual bus stop to catch the number twenty-one for Willbrook. Dietary aides did not live in the suburbs; I waited with a couple of nurses, half expecting them to recognize my motive and turn me in to some authority. This fear—that I would overstep one of the boundaries that everyone else held sacred, and be discovered as an impostor, ridiculed and cast aside—would ordinarily have paralyzed me, but now I didn’t care. My duty was clear; I had to keep Philippa informed.

  Here it was! QUAIL RUN TOWNHOMES, A PLANNED COMMUNITY. A bank of steel mailboxes (Schuyler, 32B), a winding road with yellow speedbumps, parking spaces with stenciled numbers. I was at her door (dove gray, with no nameplate, no wreath of dried flowers, just a door). She was on the first floor, though, so I could look in through the slider, heart in throat, to see: white drapes, with a sensible thermal backing, an aspidistra, a round table on which stood a conch shell whose glossy inner surface scrolled open invitingly, and a photograph in a Plexiglas frame.

  We’d had an aspidistra once, a gift from my father’s sister. They’re not very attractive plants, they never flower, but nor do they wither—to own one is to be certain that one thing in your living room is really alive. Ma saw hers as a bourgeois menace that would attract other conventional objects to itself until our world filled up with them and we became like everyone else. She’d tried to drown it but it only bloated, so she tried to parch it, but the water it had absorbed in the drowning attempt held it for months. Finally, she put it in the basement, and a year later it was, miraculously, dead, dry, and brown.