Bingo

by Rita Mae Brown

  “It may have blocked your bowels, Louise, but it damn near scared the shit out of me.”

  If I’d said that, she would have swatted me again. Instead she started to laugh and then he laughed and I laughed and for a few moments I forgot about the paper and remembered to be glad I was alive on this spring day with my loony old aunt and her boyfriend—well, kind of boyfriend.

  23

  SECRETS

  THURSDAY … 16 APRIL

  Maundy Thursday has been one of my favorite days since I read The Divine Comedy. I was fifteen at the time. Dante, writing at age thirty-five, feels he has reached the halfway point of his life and this happens on Maundy Thursday. Also, I know that Easter is only three days away, and I’m one of those people who likes Easter far more than I like Christmas. Surely the Devil invented the Christmas card.

  This Maundy Thursday, I rose at six-thirty, fed Pewter and Lolly, worked out, and prepared my approach to Charles Falkenroth, who was still displeased with me. By the time I returned to the office yesterday Charles had left and although my concern was of dire importance to me it might not be of dire importance to him. I am a great respecter of other people’s priorities and schedules.

  Mother is not, and at seven-thirty she called. “Work out yet?”

  “Just finished.”

  “Steer clear of my sister today. She’s been so mean that she’ll break a stick just because it has two ends.”

  This Southern expression seems to make no sense except to other Southerners.

  “Thanks for the warning—and what did you do to her?”

  “I like that! I did nothing. You know how irrational she can get. I think she’s still addled from her episode in the car yesterday.”

  “Maybe she’s trying to be good but having one of her bad days.”

  “I don’t care if she can fart popcorn! Wheeze is childish and I don’t want to be bothered with her. I’m not even sure I want to be bothered with you.” Mother hung up.

  In her mind I had taken Louise’s part against her by suggesting Louise was not the lowest wormfucker that ever lived. So now Mother was mad at me and my aunt was lurking out there in Runnymede with her own grudge. It wasn’t even seven forty-five yet, and I prayed this beginning was not an indication of things to come.

  Fortunately the morning picked up steam. I caught Charles the minute he strolled into his office. I told him everything that happened between Diz and me concerning the Clarion. Then I flat-out asked him to carry a note for $250,000. I explained that he’d be walking away with a great deal of cash, and holding a note was not such a bad investment at eleven percent interest for ten years with a balloon at the end. After I exhausted what I thought were good reasons, Charles stood up and put on his hat and coat.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Foster Adams. I don’t know what your chances are but I’m willing to take a shot at it, even if you did fudge on a story to save a friend.”

  Foster accepted our idea and promised to make a strong presentation in Baltimore on April 23. The day appeared to be leveling off into a solid, productive one. When we got back to the office my phone rang and I picked it up. It was Louise, burning. I flatly told her I could not talk to her and I would call her after work.

  We were in our daily editorial meeting. John was ripping up Roger’s idea about an article on taxing church property. Most people don’t know why church property is exempt from the rolls and Roger thought it might be interesting to explain, again, what our founding fathers had in mind. I didn’t think John’s criticism was fair but I tempered my desire to get even with him when he outlined his proposed series on real estate developers and alleged kickbacks to zoning board members. Charles, as usual, leaned back in his chair, his bow tie untied, and offered suggestions or politely batted down ideas. Michelle had become fascinated by bingo and wanted to expand her piece.

  In the middle of this, Aunt Louise charged through the front door. “Nickel Smith, get out here!” She startled us.

  I stuck my head out of Charles’s door. “I’m in an editorial meeting. You’ll have to wait.”

  “Family is more important than work.” The veins in her neck bulged.

  Lolly barked and Pewter scampered out of sight. My aunt was on the verge of a rampage. I turned around and Charles made a shooing motion with his hands. I was excused from the meeting and Aunt Louise was all mine.

  I closed the door behind me and walked over to her. “Now, Aunt Wheezie, you can’t do this to me.”

  “I can do anything I want.” She swung at me with her purse, her favorite lethal weapon. “Ed’s taking Julia out tonight by herself and it’s your fault.”

  “Put that purse down. I am not talking to you about anything until you put it down!”

  The purse, bald in spots from wear, was placed on my desk but, I might add, within easy reach should she want to whack at me again. “Now tell me what this is about.”

  “Ed doesn’t want to go out with me. Not since I ran off the road yesterday and that was your fault.”

  “There wasn’t another car on the road.” “I don’t care.” She pouted. “I saw myself coming and going. I told you that. It scared me. I thought I was in the twilight zone.” “Hey, I’ll take you over to Mojo’s for an early lunch. You’ll feel better.”

  “No. Half the BonBons are there and they know Ed’s going out with Juts. I’ll be humiliated.”

  “Aunt Wheezie, he’s being courtly to both you and Mom. You’re making too much of it and you certainly aren’t being humiliated.”

  “Ha! You weren’t the one with popcorn covering you head to foot. I tell you the lights were on in the kitchens of Runnymede over that story.”

  “Come on, it’s not that bad. He laughed.”

  “At me!”

  “At the situation.” I scribbled a note and put it on Michelle’s desk telling her that I was at the drugstore with Wheezie. “We’ll get a fountain Coke.”

  “I’d like a strawberry ice cream soda.” She was weakening.

  “Okay.” I handed her her purse.

  She said in a small voice, “It’s because she’s younger and prettier. Julia’s the pretty one.”

  “That’s nonsense.” I suspected that Mother was a bit prettier than Louise. “Besides which you told Ed you were younger than Mom.”

  As I escorted her to the drugstore I wondered about Ed Tutweiler Walters. Both Mother and Louise worried me. I liked Ed. He sure was handsome, and in his youth he must have been devastating. They were nuts about this guy who showered them with politeness, but I didn’t take his attentions seriously. They did. I don’t know what it’s like to be old. I hope I get to find out but I think being an old heterosexual woman can be very painful. This volcano of emotion over Ed showed me how lonesome the Hunsenmeir girls were. After a certain age—maybe the middle forties or fifties, I don’t really know—men turn to younger women, and their own generation of women is left out in the cold. It’s cruel but it’s a fact. I never thought of Mom or Wheezie as old or unattractive but I saw them nearly every day of my life and I had learned to love—and occasionally hate—them for what they were, for the unique individuals they were. An outsider, a man, saw a package, not the person. How many years had they felt snubbed or pushed aside? Mother generated more male attention than Louise, but in Runnymede people went two by two like the animals toward Noah’s ark. There weren’t any men available to either of them, except Mr. Pierre, and I was grateful he was gay. Had he been straight I think they would have killed each other over him. What were they going to do to each other over Ed? Half of me wanted to laugh at Louise for displacing her fury on me and half of me wanted to cry, it was all so desperate.

  After lunch I went back to work, calling for quotes on zoning variances on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. I’d wanted to write a time-frame breakdown of the alleged Iran-Contra deals but gave it to Michelle instead. She deserved the plum and I can’t say that I wasn’t interested in zoning.
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  Ursie, wearing a chocolate-brown suede skirt, high suede boots, and a suede jacket to match her skirt, swept through the front door. I was afflicted by her presence as she towered over me.

  “Give me a second here, I’ve got Tinker Finster on the line for a zoning quote.”

  She dumped papers on my desk as Tinker, a true lawyer, hedged his bets by saying that we had to maintain our town’s integrity while fostering growth.

  The receiver was not in the cradle before she started. “I forgot to give you these.”

  “What are they? ”

  “The scores, division by division, of the Hanover ‘A’ show.” An A-rated show was more important than a B-rated show, and riders wanting to move up in the world of hunter-jumpers needed points from “A” shows to do so. Many of our hunt club members or their children rode in these shows.

  “Ursie, why’d you wait until now to give this to me? The newsletter gets printed tomorrow.”

  “Because Harmony’s music recital was Monday and then Tiffany’s horse threw a shoe and I had to spend hours on the phone with the caterer for our alumnae meeting. I forgot. It won’t happen again.”

  “It can’t happen again, because I’m the person now collecting the information. Dammit, I did the layout last night too.”

  She feigned sympathy but I suspected she was enjoying my predicament. After all, wasn’t she saddled with the hunt club newsletter for the last three years? As she evacuated the Clarion her Joy perfume left a trace of her presence.

  “I’d help you if I could,” Michelle offered, “but I’ve got to drive over to Baltimore to pick up Mom. She’s flying in for a one-day visit.”

  “It’s nice of you to offer but you don’t have to—I’ll give you good assignments anyway, because you’re getting good.”

  “I didn’t think of it as a trade.” Her voice was dry.

  “Sorry. The sight of Ursie makes me cynical.”

  John Hoffman emerged from the back room. I wanted to say the sight of him made me cynical, too, but I didn’t.

  “Michelle, let me know if I can help you. Lot of facts to juggle.”

  “Thanks, John.” Michelle didn’t mean it. She thought she could do fine by herself.

  “I’ve got some theories about this Iran caper.” He leaned over her desk. “This is a perfect example of national security being more important than our domestic laws, if the law was broken.”

  “Bull.” I had the number dialed for my next quote and put the phone down.

  “Just what I expected from a bleeding-heart liberal.”

  “I’m no bleeding-heart liberal, John, and I don’t much appreciate your label. I’m a realist, especially where politics are concerned, and I don’t expect people to act like saints and I don’t expect them to scuttle their self-interest, but I do expect government officials to abide by the Constitution. We can’t have one set of rules inside the U. S. and another set outside the U. S.”

  “Fortunately, you are not a national security adviser.” He smirked. “Morality has nothing to do with international relations.”

  “Nor national ones,” Michelle volleyed. I was proud of her.

  “You’ll agree with anything Nickel says. Female solidarity.”

  The sight of Michelle taking on John brought Charles out of his office. He leaned against his door, and Roger wandered in from the morgue—the name every newspaper uses for its storage of back issues and pertinent information. The exchange mushroomed in intensity until John accused Michelle of being a dyke, at which point I blew up.

  “That’s it, Hoffman. Right now. Shut your fucking face!”

  He surmised I was bordering on the violent and decided to pull in his horns. “Don’t take it personally.”

  “I’m taking it very personally. Just because she has an opinion of her own and is becoming competent in our profession and, more to the point, does not agree with you, you call her a dyke.”

  “It was an unfortunate choice of words,” John replied.

  “I think so too.” Charles puffed on his pipe. He hadn’t moved from the door but I knew when he clenched his pipe hard between his teeth he was furious.

  “I’m sorry.”

  This calmed our group somewhat and we returned to our tasks. I called Regina and begged her to come down after supper and help me. I also got a quote from her on zoning. I identified her in my article as a lifelong resident and concerned citizen. Her quote was: “The Zoning Commissions for both North and South Runnymede have made inconsistent decisions concerning land use. We need to revamp those commissions or hold a referendum on the issue.”

  When she danced through the door, I showed her her own quote set in type. Then we got to work. We typed the show information in columns, then took turns at layout. Breaking off the affair with Jackson made me feel quasi-virtuous. I wasn’t but I was relieved. I didn’t want a barrier between me and Regina. I also told her about Michelle’s sparring match with John and we batted opinions back and forth.

  “There, what do you think of that?” She held up our front page. Our masthead ran the hunt club’s logo: crossed swords in front of a fox mask.

  “Better than what I’m doing. I’ve got zip talent for layout.”

  “What if we dumped the ‘out’?” She laughed.

  “Thanks, Gene. I appreciate that and how would you know?”

  “Wouldn’t.” She walked over to the hot plate and boiled water to make instant coffee for her and tea for me. “It’s odd, isn’t it, that people can be as close as we are but not know intimate things about each other?”

  “I don’t think it’s odd. You can’t sleep with everyone.”

  “You could try.” She laughed again.

  Regina enjoyed a robust sense of humor but I was now on guard and I didn’t like feeling that way, even if it was my own fault. “I haven’t time. I mean, how would this newsletter get printed?”

  “Maybe human relationships are like a clock. With most people the relationship is maybe fifteen minutes or ninety degrees on the dial. Just a quarter of what the relationship could be. Call it a social relationship. Sex would be part of that circle, part of that three hundred and sixty degrees. And what’s so strange is, you can sleep with someone and not complete the circle. Sex isn’t enough. It’s necessary for a full understanding but not enough. Get it?”

  “I don’t know.” I was standing next to her now, dunking my tea bag to make the tea strong. Pewter rubbed up against my legs. Whenever I was near food she became sticky-affectionate. “What are we?”

  “We’re forty-five minutes, three quarters of the clock. Close, but I don’t know everything and neither do you.”

  “Are you sixty minutes, three hundred sixty degrees with Jack?”

  “No. I don’t know if any woman ever gets the whole circle with a man. Maybe. But I’ve got forty-five minutes with Jack—a different part of the circle, though. He has what you miss and you have what he misses. Ironic.”

  “Have you ever slept with another man since you’ve been married?” Why did I ask that?

  “Nickie, I tell you everything—well, almost everything. Everyone has to have some secrets … and the answer is ‘no.’ ”

  I opened Hoffman’s desk drawer and gave Pewter a treat. Lolly wanted one too. The feeding hid my confusion. “Yeah, I guess, but maybe secrets are like stomach acid. They give you psychic indigestion.”

  “Ha. You make the truth a sacrament. Because you’ve told the truth about your sexual orientation you don’t have to tell it about everything else you know. Sometimes a secret can be rejuvenating and it doesn’t have to be sexual. Just”—she paused and her voice sounded like Regina as a girl—“private.”

  “Secrets make me feel dirty. You are as sick as you are secret. That’s what I used to say to closet queers.”

  “That’s different. You’re talking about cultural oppression and I’m talking about individual liberty, or the cultivation of secret gardens, if you will. Of course, I don’t expect you to keep secrets from m
e.” She laughed.

  I glanced at the time and walked back to the layout table. Regina didn’t follow. She slowly drank her coffee before she joined me.

  “What do you think of this page?” I handed her another one.

  She didn’t inspect it. “Nickie, you are so incredibly repressed that sometimes it hurts me.”

  “Huh?”

  “You share your ideas but you don’t share yourself. Your emotions are locked away somewhere. Even I don’t know where they are, and I want to. Your mother and I talk about it sometimes.”

  “Behind my back.”

  “Where else?”

  “I figure that people have enough to handle with their own emotions. They haven’t time for mine.”

  “That’s not true. You do this because you’re gay and because you’re open about it. Sounds like a contradiction but it’s true. You know and I know that you’re outside the approved social order. You’re well-mannered and thoughtful but you’re distant. What is it that you don’t want us to know?”

  “Me. I don’t want you to know me,” I blurted.

  “I love you. I want to know you.”

  “Straight people only want to know gay people if they act according to straight people’s rules. People don’t want to hear what I think about women—or men, for that matter. They don’t want to see the heat or feel the passion, although they’re perfectly happy to celebrate it in one another. But because I feel that for a woman, it makes them uncomfortable. Can you imagine if I walked through Runnymede Square holding a woman’s hand? It seems such a small thing and yet the cumulative effect of these chilling conventions is to drive you back into yourself, or at least it’s driven me back to myself. Hell, I’m not stupid. I know I’m repressed, to use your word.”

  “I’m not a straight person. I’m me. How do I know I couldn’t be in love with a woman? I met Jackson first and I didn’t think about it. Don’t lump me with the others and don’t sell your friends short.”