by Julia Watts
Dee shrugged. “Well, my mind was all for it, but my body had other ideas.”
Chrys was already out of her chair. “Well, I love your mind, but I think we’d better defer to your body on this issue.”
“Agreed.”
Standing next to the table, they met for the kind of kiss Chrys had wanted to give Dee when she walked in the door: a long, lingering liplock, their arms pulling their bodies tighter and tighter together. When they drew back, they were both out of breath.
“Well…let me get the wine and dessert,” Dee said. She opened a cabinet and pulled out two stemmed champagne flutes.
“Wow, you own champagne flutes. I’m impressed.”
Dee rolled her eyes. “Wedding present. I got rid of the husband but kept the presents.”
“Good plan.”
“I thought so, too.” Dee opened the fridge and handed Chrys a chilled plate covered with wax paper. “No peeking. The dessert is a surprise.”
Chrys followed Dee upstairs. Was there anything sexier than following a woman upstairs with the knowledge that the destination was her bedroom?
Dee’s bed was old-fashioned and iron-framed, piled with pillows and draped with colorful throws. It looked exotic and inviting, like something in a gypsy caravan. Dee set the glasses on the bedside table and took the tray from Chrys. She opened the Prosecco and filled each glass with the fizzy golden liquid. Then she pulled the wax paper off the plate.
“My God,” Chrys said. On the plate were a dozen plump, red, chocolate-dipped strawberries. “Now those are sexy.”
“And,” Dee said, “they’re very juicy and messy, so maybe we’d better take off your dress so it won’t get stained.”
“How thoughtful of you.” Chrys’s heart pounded as Dee worked at the tiny buttons that ran down the front of her dress. Soon she was wearing only her peach-colored bra and panties.
“I’d better take mine off, too,” Dee said, slipping her dress over her head. Her underwear was the same red as the strawberries.
Dee held a strawberry to Chrys’s lips. When Chrys bit into it, the juice ran down her chin and throat, and Dee leaned forward and licked it off, starting at the base of her throat and ending at her lips. The pleasure was intense—the sweet chocolate and berry pulp, the warm wet of her lover’s tongue, the sensation of tasting and being tasted at the same time.
Dee took another strawberry from the plate and tucked it into Chrys’s cleavage just above the V of her bra.
“Oh, my,” Chrys breathed.
“I had a fantasy about doing this.” Dee nuzzled Chrys’s breasts and bit the berry. She took the last of the berry in her mouth and unhooked Chrys’s bra. “I want to do to you what you did to me before,” Dee said. “But I’m not sure I know how.”
“You’ve certainly given me no reason to doubt your skills.”
They kissed, Dee pushing her on her back until she was lying on a pile of pillows like a lounging harem girl. Dee’s mouth was warm, her tongue slippery and sure, stroking rhythmically, slow, then fast, then slow again until Chrys felt ripple upon ripple of pure physical joy.
When Chrys finally caught her breath, she said, “Well, there’s no doubt about you knowing what you’re doing.”
Dee laughed and snuggled close. “I’ll tell you, I had no idea what I’d be doing when I moved to Kentucky, but I never would’ve guessed I’d be eating strawberries from between a beautiful woman’s breasts.”
A beautiful woman. She’d said it like it wasn’t a compliment but a fact. “I didn’t think I’d be finding something like this here either.”
Dee propped up on her elbow, smiling. “‘Something like this’ meaning something like me?”
“Well, something like…” She couldn’t let herself say “love.” Not yet. “Something like what I’m feeling right now…especially so soon after a bad breakup. I mean, it wasn’t my intention to feel this way, but I couldn’t make myself stay away from you.”
“That’s good. I don’t want you to stay away.”
“You know,” Chrys said, “we’re in that situation again where one of us is naked and the other isn’t.”
Dee grinned. “Should we remedy that situation?”
“I think we should.” Chrys reached around to unhook Dee’s bra. “And after what you did to me, I think I should return the favor.”
Dee lay back on the pillows. “Please do.”
Chrys did.
They lay in bed, legs entwined, nibbling strawberries and sipping Prosecco. “I have to ask you…” Dee lazily traced circles on Chrys’s belly. “This isn’t just some kind of summer fling rebound thing for you, is it?”
Chrys looked into Dee’s eyes. So blue. “No. Am I a brief, post-divorce lesbian experiment for you?”
“No.”
“Good. Our worst fears are allayed, then.”
“Yep.” Dee rested her head on Chrys’s shoulder. “But still, you’re just here till what, August?”
It was a grim reminder. “The fall semester starts August twenty-fifth. I guess I have to go back since there’s the small matter of earning a living wage. Of course, we’ll have to find somebody reliable to stay with Nanny before then.”
“I’m working on that. Though maybe I shouldn’t if it’ll make you stay.”
Chrys kissed Dee’s forehead. “If I stayed here, I’d have to join the ranks of the Appalachian unemployed. My brother can’t even find a labor job here, so what chance do I have? The only college for miles is Southern Baptist, and I don’t think they’re going to be clamoring for a faculty member with a lesbian studies background.”
“You could be world’s most erudite Walmart greeter. I know I’m being silly. I can’t make you stay.”
“It’s not just the job thing, though. I spent so much of my life feeling like I couldn’t live here and be the person that I am. Now it’s better, but still, coming back to stay, there’d be a lot of baggage, you know?”
“I kind of figured you didn’t want to add another trailer to your parents’ backyard.”
“I don’t, but I can’t say I’m too excited to be returning to a classroom full of texting, eye-rolling freshmen either.”
Dee poured the last of the Prosecco into the glass they were sharing. “Are all of them texting eye rollers?”
“Not all of them. A few of them are older—moms going back to college now that their kids are in school. Some are vets on the G.I. Bill. The older students are the ones who really want to learn.”
“Then focus on them, and ignore the texting eye rollers the same way they ignore you.”
“You’re right. It’s so easy to focus on the things in life that annoy us, though.” She laced her fingers through Dee’s. “I’ve been thinking, too, about something else that might get me stimulated in a way teaching comp doesn’t.”
Dee grinned. “You mean like what we just did?”
“Well, that, too, but I meant intellectually stimulated.” She was almost afraid to say it. Even though she’d been thinking about it a lot the past couple of weeks, she was scared the admission might be some kind of jinx. “I think I might have an idea for a new book.”
“Really? What about?”
The idea had been simmering in the back of her brain for a month now, but this was the first time she had said a word about it. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Appalachian language. I’ve been writing down things Nanny says like ‘crazy as a bessbug’ or ‘ain’t got bat sense’—all these expressions that are dying out as people talk more and more like what they hear on TV. I’ve not figured out the angle all the way yet, but I think it’ll be a work of scholarship but also of preservation. I don’t know…it’s about as far away from writing about lesbians on the Left Bank as I can get, but I’ve never written about anything that reflects where I come from, and I think I’d like to try.”
“That’s exciting. I can’t wait to read it.”
Chrys laughed. “Well, you’ll have to. It’ll be a long project. But I figure I can teach m
y classes and work on the book, and you and I can see each other on the weekends.”
“Every weekend?”
“Every weekend.”
Dee rested her head on Chrys’s shoulder. “And what if, sometime down the road, we decide that weekends aren’t enough?”
“We’ll see from there.”
Chrys couldn’t believe she was in bed with another woman, talking about the future, but somehow it was right where she wanted to be.
Chapter Sixteen
Nanny was waiting in the glider on the porch. “Did you get enough to make us a cobbler?”
“I think so.” Chrys held up the half-full bucket of blackberries. At Nanny’s request, she had walked into the edge of the woods past Porkchop’s pen where Nanny had correctly guessed the berries were getting ripe and juicy. “And my arms are scratched up enough that nobody can accuse me of buying the berries at the store.”
“Didn’t get bee stung, did you?”
“No.”
“You’ll want to check for chiggers, too.”
Chrys laughed. “You know, I always used to complain about having to buy blackberries since I grew up picking them for free. But I guess picking them comes with a price, too.”
“It does,” Nanny said, her eyes crinkling as she smiled. “Especially if them chiggers gets up in your privates.”
Chrys shuddered, then opted to change the subject. “So are you going to teach me how to make your famous cobbler?”
“Well, there ain’t much to teach,” Nanny said. “Just stir the berries up with half a cup of sugar and put ’em in a pan with some biscuit dough on top. You can sprinkle sugar on the biscuit dough if you want it to look fancy.”
“You’re making an assumption,” Chrys said.
“How’s that?”
“You’re assuming I know how to make biscuit dough.”
Nanny’s mouth dropped open in shock. “You mean you’re forty year old and don’t know how to make biscuits?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Chrys said.
“Well, lawsy mercy, no wonder you ain’t never got married. We’ve got to get you into the kitchen.” Nanny reached for her walker and pulled herself out of the glider with a grunt. “I thought you helped me make biscuits when you was a little girl.”
“I did, but just the rolling and cutting part.”
Nanny shook her head as if this disservice from Chrys’s childhood explained everything. “And your mommy never taught you?”
“She was always working. When she fixed biscuits, they were usually the canned kind.”
“All right.” Nanny sank into a kitchen chair. “You’re gonna need to get out the flour, the buttermilk, the baking powder and the lard.”
This last ingredient was disturbing. “Lard? Won’t that stuff kill you?”
“Well, I’m eighty-nine years old, and I’ve been eating it all my life. You know how everybody always goes on about how tender and flaky my biscuits is?”
Chrys nodded.
“That’s the lard.”
“Lard it is, then.”
Nanny gave orders from her chair as Chrys sifted and mixed. Her hands were goopy from dough, and her clothes were so whitened from flour she looked ghostly.
The phone rang. Chrys figured that by the time she got the goo off her hands, it would be too late to answer so she ran to the phone with doughy paws, leaving a trail of flour.
“May I speak to Mrs. Dottie Simcox?”
“Just a minute, please.” Chrys carried the now-doughy cordless phone into the kitchen, mouthing “sorry” to Nanny as she handed it to her.
After Nanny said hello, she was silent for a minute. Then she said, “Well, that was about what we thought would happen, ain’t it?”
This conversation was making Chrys nervous. The grammatically correct, non-Kentuckian voice on the other end of the phone definitely didn’t belong to any of Nanny’s friends. This call wasn’t personal. It was official.
“Yes, I’m sure,” Nanny said. “At my age, I don’t want to put myself through anything like that.” After a pause, she said, “I’ll pray on it, but I don’t think I’ll change my mind. Thank you.” She hung up and handed the phone back to Chrys.
“Nanny?” Chrys sank down in the chair across from Nanny. All of a sudden her knees had gotten weak.
“That was the doctor’s office. You remember when you took me to have them tests done? They was calling about the little old tumor I got, but it ain’t as little as it used to be.”
“You mean cancer?”
Nanny nodded. “I’ve known about it for more than a year. I just ain’t told nobody.”
“Why not?” Chrys reached across the table to take Nanny’s hand in her dough-sticky one.
“Well, you know how people get when they know you’re sick. They act like if they say the wrong thing, you’ll break like china. And you know what your mommy and brother would be like. They’d be on me to have the surgery, take the treatments…like my body could stand that at this age. But they’d want me to do it all, hoping for a miracle.”
Chrys blinked away tears. “So why are you telling me?”
“Well, it’d be kind of hard for me not to after you heard half the phone call.” Nanny’s expression was calm, accepting. She squeezed Chrys’s hand. “But I figured you could handle it because you’ve always had good sense. The rest of the family uses their hearts before their heads.”
“I’m not so sure I’m doing such a good job of that right now,” Chrys said, reaching for a paper napkin to wipe her nose and eyes. She knew intellectually that Nanny couldn’t live forever, but a world without Nanny seemed like a much sadder place to be. “Where’s the tumor?”
“It’s in my woman parts,” Nanny said. “If I was childbearing age it would’ve grown a lot quicker, but that train left the station a long time ago.” Nanny patted Chrys’s knee. “Now don’t be hanging no crepe yet, child. The doctor said I still might have another good year or two. And after that, I’ll be in heaven with Chester and Ma and Pa and my sister, and that’ll be even better.”
“Yes,” said Chrys, wishing she believed this were true. If there was a heaven, Nanny certainly deserved to go there and be joyfully reunited with everyone she had ever loved and lost.
“Now we’d better finish fixing that cobbler,” Nanny said. “I want me a big bowl of it for dinner. We got any ice cream?”
* * *
Chrys almost felt too sad to eat, but if Nanny could stare mortality in the face and still eat a bowl of cobbler, then she would, too. It was delicious.
Chrys did the dishes while Nanny lay down for her nap. As she washed the purple juice from the berry bowl, she started to cry. She cried because of Nanny’s cancer, because the day was drawing near when Nanny wouldn’t be here anymore. And she cried because Nanny had trusted her enough to tell her her secret when she wouldn’t tell anybody else.
When Nanny woke from her nap, Chrys asked if she wanted to have a glass of iced tea on the porch. They sat a while and watched the chickens peck.
“Are you feeling okay about spilling the beans to me today?” Chrys asked finally. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
“I know you won’t. That’s why I told you. The funny thing is, ever since I told you, I’ve felt so good—better than I’ve felt in a long time. It eats at you, having something inside that you ain’t told nobody yet.”
“It does.” It seemed so unfair—Nanny had trusted her enough to share her secret, and yet one of the main facts of Chrys’s life was still a secret from Nanny. “Nanny, I think I’d better tell you something about myself, too.”
“You ain’t sick, are you?” Her voice was sharp with worry.
“No, I’m not sick.” She took a deep breath. Once she hadn’t even been able to imagine having this conversation. Now she couldn’t imagine not having it. “So the reason I’ve never gotten married isn’t because I don’t know how to make biscuits.”
Nanny smiled. “I was just playing with you
about that.”
“I know. But the truth is that I’ve been evasive with you all these years saying I just haven’t found the right man. For me, there isn’t a right man. I’m a lesbian. I like women. I always have.”
Nanny’s eyes narrowed and she brought her hands together like she might be praying. “You mean you’re like that Ellen on the TV?”
“Yes, like Ellen.” Chrys mentally thanked Ellen for providing a likable lesbian public image.
“But you’ve got long hair and you wear dresses.”
“Yes, but lots of lesbians do. Not all of us are…” She almost said butch but instead went for “boyish.”
“Huh,” Nanny said. She stared off into the distance for what was probably only a few seconds but felt longer. “My sister was like that. Not Irma, but my oldest sister, Hazel.”
Today had certainly been a day for surprises. “Aunt Hazel was gay?” Chrys had never met her great-aunt Hazel, but she remembered her family getting a Christmas card from her each year. She knew her only as “Nanny’s sister that lives in Michigan.”
“She was. She was married to a man for a while. That was how come she moved to Detroit. He got a job up there after the mines closed. But she was unhappy, I reckon on account of being like she was. She ended up leaving him after about a year up there. After that she took up with a woman she met working in a restaurant. They stayed together till Hazel died, forty-some-odd years later.”
“Really? Did everybody in the family know?”
“Ma and Pa knew and me and my brothers and sisters. Hazel never come right out and said what she was, but the longer she lived with that woman, the clearer it became. Finally Pa told her if she didn’t change her ways the family wasn’t gonna have nothing to do with her. He told her he’d never stop praying for her, though.”
Chrys wondered how many women and men and girls and boys throughout time had heard similar things from their families. “So did you stop having anything to do with her after that?”
“Not all the way. I always sent her a card at Christmas and on her birthday and she did the same for me. But that was all. After she died, I knew two cards a year wasn’t enough. We was so close when we was girls—as thick as thieves.” For a few seconds, she had a faraway look in her eyes, but then she blinked hard, like she was coming back into the present. “They had her funeral in Detroit since nobody back home wanted nothing to do with her. I took the bus up there myself to go to it. I was the only real family she had there. Everybody else was her friends—women like her, I reckon. I went up to the woman she’d lived with and shook her hand and told her who I was.” She looked off into the distance for a moment. “I know Pa thought he was doing the right thing, cutting her off like that. He said if you’ve got a tree with a rotten branch, you cut off that branch so it don’t infect the whole tree. That’s what he done to Hazel. But that’s the way it was back then.”