“How much do you have to do on them?”
“I’ve got some notes.”
“Have you written anything?”
“Not really.”
There was a silence, and Jaqe wondered if she should get mad at Laurie, maybe shout at her, something like “I didn’t leave my exam early and fight off bag ladies so you could sit there like a lump.” Or maybe she should shake Laurie’s shoulders, even slap her, so Laurie could say, “Thanks, I needed that.” But she knew she could never do any of those things, never touch her except to stroke those long muscles, that wonderful springy skin. She wanted the perfect fit of Laurie’s mouth against hers, the feel of Laurie’s nipples slippery under her fingertips, Laurie’s fingers sliding inside her, with her body so light, light as a bubble, that Laurie could hoist her in the air, above the city, above the clouds and into the sun.
“Why are you smiling?” Laurie asked, her voice belligerent, as if Jaqe were laughing at her for bringing her papers home. Eyes downcast, Jaqe shook her head. Against tears, she thought of how Laurie sometimes crouched down so that her small breasts came just below Jaqe’s larger ones, and then she’d stand up, pushing Jaqe’s breasts toward her chin.
When they’d finished dinner they made love, or pretended to. Many of the usual moves were there, but Jaqe knew that Laurie and maybe she herself were doing it because they were expected to (by whom she couldn’t say). She was glad when Laurie stopped in the middle, saying she had to piss. Lying in bed, Jaqe wanted to scream or to bite something. She turned over to lie on her belly. Near the bed, where she and Laurie had piled their clothes, she saw two objects which must have fallen out of her pockets. One was a stone, and when she reached over to pick it up she recognized the rock she’d found the year before, with the tree on one side and the ferryman on the other. She laid it in her palm and looked at it. She hadn’t seen it in months. The other object was a brown bottle with a label that proclaimed itself “Dr. Root’s Revival Massage Oil.” Where had that come from? She certainly hadn’t bought it. The man in the caftan at the bus station must have slipped it into her pocket. She unscrewed the cap and sniffed. It smelled sweet, like flowers. Was it safe? Maybe Dr. Root had slipped toxins or dope inside it. She sniffed again. It sent a slight tingle along her skin, and she smiled.
Laurie came back, looking like someone determined to go through with a difficult task. For a moment anger pushed Jaqe away from her. Jaqe thought how Laurie was treating her like one of her term papers. No, she thought, Laurie was her project, and if she failed the exam the remedial course would get a lot tougher. “Lie down,” she said, “I’m going to give you a massage.”
Laurie did her best to grin lasciviously. (Jaqe thought of those movies where some kind of fake, a robot, or a pod person, or a Martian, takes over people’s bodies but can’t fake the emotions.) Laurie said, “I thought you were welcoming me home.”
“This is part of it,” Jaqe said. “Come on, do what I say.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Laurie said, and saluted. She lay down on her belly, with her face turned toward the wall. Jaqe rubbed some oil on her hands and started smoothing it in long strokes down Laurie’s body, beginning at the shoulders and sliding all the way to the toes. Jaqe had never given a massage before. Many of the women Jaqe knew assumed all women could do massage, as part of an inborn talent for nurturing and sensuality, the way an older generation assumed a woman automatically knew how to diaper babies or make men feel superior. All Jaqe could do was try things out and hope they worked. She thought you were supposed to find the tense places and work at them until they loosened up. As far as she could tell, everything was tense. She worked at the hips for a while, then the shoulders, then the thighs.
After some time Laurie began to sigh, then moan. Jaqe thought it was a good sign, but she wasn’t sure. She rubbed more oil into her hands and went back to stroking. The more oil she used, the more her hands really did seem to know where to go, now rubbing the muscles on the upper arms, now pulling on the fingers. She poured out some more oil and touched her fingertip to her own lips. The oil stung slightly but otherwise tasted sweet, like peppermint. She dotted the oil between Laurie’s shoulders and in spots along her spine, smiling when Laurie jumped at the touch of Jaqe’s finger to a place just below the center of her back. As Jaqe resumed her long rubs, a pair of birds began to sing in the maple tree just outside the bedroom window. The birds were speaking, Jaqe realized, speaking actual words. She could understand them just as if they were girls in the dormitory talking just outside the door. Only, when she tried to work out what they were saying, she couldn’t seem to capture the words and line them up into sentences. Something about treasure, something (or somebody) hidden somewhere, on a mountain or inside a cave.
Laurie moaned again, with her body half melted into the bed. “Do that again,” she said, and Jaqe discovered she was shaking Laurie’s buttocks. “The amazing vibrating woman,” Jaqe said, and laughed. Laurie’s moan settled into a steady purr. Jaqe gave Laurie’s ass a squeeze, then swooped her hands down to the feet where she rubbed each one and then wiggled and pulled on the toes. She whispered, “This little piggy went to a faraway country, ruled by an evil queen. But now she’s come all the way home.” She said the last word loud, and ran her hands up the insides of Laurie’s legs until they met. Once again, she could hear birds, now a whole forest of birds, the whole bedroom filled with birds, all of them speaking, trading messages. Laurie rolled over and pulled Jaqe down on top of her.
Later, Laurie was licking and kissing and biting Jaqe when suddenly she laughed. She laid her head on Jaqe’s thigh, with her face turned upward, toward Jaqe’s curious face. “You know,” Laurie said, “you’re the kind of masseuse that gives the profession a bad name.”
Jaqe laughed. Thank you, she thought, not sure who or what she was addressing. Dr. Root? She looked down at Laurie’s head moving between her legs like some small hairy animal. She laughed again and laid her head back on the pillow.
Jaqe dreamed she was a bird, or dressed in a bird costume, running through an empty shopping mall and knocking over racks of shoes with her outstretched wings. A single pair of red shoes lay in the middle of the floor among a pile of broken glass. She woke to the sounds of crying and disco music from the apartment next door. Boyfriend’s back, she thought. Sometimes she wondered if he beat that poor little kid. She listened a moment, then decided the crying sounded more like a child who just wasn’t getting enough attention. As she snuggled closer against Laurie she remembered a record player her parents had given her once. It was soft blue, with clouds and elephants painted on the sides. And she remembered her favorite record, a song about a rabbit who never learned how to hop. It wasn’t just the song she liked, but the color of the record, a bright pink. The song was good too, she thought sleepily. Silly rabbit mother, forgetting to teach her bunny how to hop. When I have a baby, she thought, I’ll make sure to give it hop lessons all day long. Her hand made hopping motions on Laurie’s breast. She turned to lie on her back, staring at the ceiling. I want a child, she thought. I want a baby. Stupid, she thought. Stupid idea. She turned again to curl her arm around Laurie and hug her until she woke up.
Four
The Three Papers
For two weeks Laurie tried every day to work on her papers. “No problem,” she’d tell Jaqe. “All I need is to find the right spot.” First she tried the university library, but the term hadn’t ended yet, which meant the library was full of students desperate before their last exams. Better to relax, she thought, and went to the cafeteria. Only, she always seemed to find old friends there, women who wanted to tell her about the LSU, a guy she used to go drinking with, former Frisbee partners. It felt good to go out on the lawn and just play for a while. She could strut again, catch the Frisbee behind her back with that flick of the hip which sometimes drew sighs from the younger women. In the cafeteria she would sit with her feet up and her hands behind her head. She felt like she’d gotten back something she’d forgo
tten; but she wasn’t getting her papers done. So she left the campus and went to a women’s coffee shop, and then a café.
“Sweetheart,” Jaqe said. “Maybe you should just stay here.”
“Too many distractions,” Laurie said, and kissed Jaqe’s shoulder, naked in a tank top. Besides, Laurie insisted, it was going great.
Four days before Laurie’s deadline, Jaqe’s parents called and insisted she come home for a visit. Jaqe didn’t want to go. Laurie needed her. Laurie wouldn’t eat without Jaqe cooking for her. Laurie needed Dr. Root’s magic massage oil. Though Jaqe had hid Dr. Root in the back of the medicine cabinet since that first night, she imagined Laurie’s back seizing up in the middle of typing her last paper. Jaqe would have to stand behind her, rubbing and pounding Laurie’s beautiful muscles while the sentences poured from her elegant fingers. Laurie, however, insisted she could work better alone.
Though she didn’t like to admit it, Jaqe was relieved at the thought of getting away; it also helped that she could see her parents without Laurie and it wouldn’t mean a surrender. “When you come back,” Laurie said, “everything will be done, and then we can celebrate.” She added, “Give your mother a kiss for me.”
Jaqe laughed. “On the lips?”
Laurie winked and said, “Anywhere you like.”
After Jaqe left, Laurie packed her notes and walked half an hour to a bar she knew where she could order a beer and sit all afternoon under the protection of the woman working the tap. In a kind of automatic action she stood for a moment leaning with her back against the bar with her elbows up, and turned her head, first left, then right, with the breeze of a smile and a raised eyebrow. Hardly much point. Though the bar was mixed gay and straight, the dykes didn’t come in much until evening. There were a couple of gay men at the end of the bar, three more men at a table, a woman playing pool in the back, and in the corner by a window, a small woman who looked old enough to be Laurie’s grandmother. She was reading a newspaper, but when Laurie looked at her she raised an empty shot glass, as if in salute.
Laurie ordered a beer and sat down at a table for two. She spread out her papers and looked out the window at traffic. Four days. Three papers. She shook her head and laughed. She’d have to stay up every night just to type the damn things. She knew she couldn’t do them all, of course, but she could write and ask for another extension for two of them. The important thing was to do one, just one, to prove she could do it. She looked at her notes on “Constants in the transplantation of rituals from Stone Age to present.” What constants? she thought. In the Stone Age, did people sit around in the sun getting tanned? If they did, they certainly didn’t worry about holes in the sky giving them cancer.
She looked at her hands. They looked good. A slight gold color, not too dark, a nice glow. She moved her fingers to watch the up-and-down ripple of the muscles fanning out from the wrists to the base of the fingers. She looked good, she knew. Cotton shirt, pale blue, with a low neck and loose cut that flowed gently over her breasts. White baggy pants with a wide black belt. Hair a little long but slicked back to accent her wide forehead. She glanced out the window at a woman in a pink sundress. Laurie thought, Why isn’t Jaqe here? She laughed.
For the rest of the afternoon Laurie tried getting a start on her papers. She wrote a first paragraph three times and crossed it out each time. She switched to a part she felt more sure of but after a while decided the idea needed to flow from the beginning. She ordered another beer, a turkey-and-onion sandwich, then another beer. She played pool for an hour or so, thinking maybe the exercise would loosen her mind. The woman—Pat was her name—could have passed for a man, Laurie thought, except for the large breasts. Pat knew the game; her attempts to play down to Laurie’s level were obvious. When she suggested they play for money Laurie laughed and said she had to work on her papers. Pat shrugged and went back to practicing. Laurie noticed, with surprise, that Pat’s nails were manicured.
That night, when Jaqe called, Laurie said she was making great progress and recited a list of points she claimed she’d put into her paper on rituals. When Jaqe said it sounded exciting and she couldn’t wait to see it, Laurie told her she’d met a woman that day who was either a pool shark or a stockbroker.
The next two days Laurie went back to the bar each afternoon and stayed until the bar started filling up with yuppie gays and dykes coming to celebrate their roots before dinner. Through the day she would sit and stare at her work, or try writing. She imagined writing a whole paper and then rubber-stamping “Bullshit” on each page and mailing it in. When she realized there was no time to get a rubber stamp made up she began laughing so hard she wondered if someone would come running up and slap her. The people in the bar changed, except for the old lady in the corner, who was there every day when Laurie came in.
On the last afternoon before her deadline Laurie knew she should write her letters asking for extensions. Instead, she just sat, thinking of heroic scenes from old movies.
She jumped when the hand came down on hers. Looking up, she saw that the old woman was sitting beside her. Laurie glanced down to the hand that still lay on top of hers like someone sleeping on a narrow bed. The skin had an almost translucent quality. “You look sad,” the woman said. Laurie shrugged. She pulled her hand loose, but instead of going away the old woman simply nodded at Laurie’s notes and crumpled sheets. “Term papers?” she asked. Laurie said nothing. The woman smiled. “You’re not much of a one for conversation.”
“I’m sorry,” Laurie said, and felt herself blush. Goddess, she thought, the great butch Laurie Cohen turns into a femme for little old ladies. She added, “I’m not feeling very well.”
A single finger tapped the pile of blank paper. “No wonder,” the woman said, “with all of this to do.”
“Well, since I’ve got so much to do,” Laurie said, “maybe you could leave me alone.” She pretended to study her notes.
“I could help.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Laurie stared at her. Instead of folds of flesh the woman’s wrinkles had become a network of tiny lines drawn across smooth skin. Laurie imagined a fortune-teller studying this face to learn the history of the world.
The woman said, “I often write papers for students in trouble. It gives me something to do.”
“And I suppose you know all about subject-object grammatical implications. Or matrifocal archaeology.”
“I can read your notes.”
“My notes are shit.”
“That’s all right,” the woman said. “I’m sure they’ll do fine.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence. Except it doesn’t matter. It’s too late.” The woman didn’t answer. Suddenly angry, Laurie said, “I’ve got to get these done—done and to the goddamn post office—by tomorrow. Think you can do that?”
The clear eyes settled on Laurie’s. “Yes.”
In the few seconds Laurie didn’t speak, it seemed to her that the whole world had gone silent, that outside in the street the cars had stopped, that here in the bar no one talked or poured beer or moved a glass. And then she said, “Oh, yeah, sure. You can just zip through all three in one night. I suppose you can guarantee an A on every one, right?”
“It’s not so difficult. I’m a fast study, and an even faster typist.”
Laurie made a show of setting her papers in order. “Excuse me, but I’m busy.”
“What have you got to lose?” the woman said. “You cannot do it yourself. You know this.”
“And what do you charge for this miracle?”
The woman waved a hand. “If you are satisfied with my work we can arrange a price.”
This is crazy, Laurie thought. Wait’ll I tell Jaqe. “Sure,” she said. “Why the hell not? Where do you want to perform your wonders?”
“We will work at your house. You have a typewriter?” Laurie nodded. “And enough paper?”
“Oh, I’ve got loads of paper.”
The woman stood up. “Good. Then w
e will go.” She was nearly out the door by the time Laurie had packed her book bag. Outside, the woman hailed a taxi. Soon Laurie was making coffee while in the living room the woman had already begun to type.
The old woman worked all night, scanning Laurie’s notes, typing, reading, typing again, always lining up the finished page face down in a precise pile beside the typewriter. For the first hour or so, Laurie attempted to ask what approach she was taking or to look over her shoulder, but the woman ignored her, and after a while Laurie went into the bedroom and tried to read or watch TV Later she found herself sitting in a chair and watching the old woman, who sat upright, completely motionless except for her birdlike fingers.
Laurie wasn’t sure if she was asleep or awake at the moment the old woman picked up the pile of papers and banged them twice on the desk. “Done,” she said. “Do you wish to look them over?”
Laurie rubbed her eyes. “Wow,” she said. “What time is it?” She lifted the windowshade. The sky was blue, the air warm and dry. “You really did it?” she asked. The old woman just sat there, her back to the desk now, her hands clasped in her lap. Laurie walked over and picked up the first pages. The paper concerned a radical feminist grammar, and as Laurie began to read she suddenly remembered the excitement she’d felt the first time she’d come across these ideas—the description of patriarchal language as the establishment of dominant relationships, the place of women as “others,” as objects, the possibility of language, and therefore thought, that did not require objects. It was all there in precise, smooth prose: the facts, the references, the arguments, the critique of academic positions within the correct academic framework. In fact, Laurie realized, the woman had written exactly what Laurie herself would have written if she’d overcome her paralysis.
She scanned the other papers. When she set them down she arranged them in neat piles, the way the old woman had done. “This is incredible,” she said. “They’re brilliant.” But they were more than brilliant. They were her. She said, “I can’t possibly pay you what these deserve.”
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