by T. Greenwood
Returning to our normal lives after that first summer at Lake Gormlaith meant returning to a lie. Frankie told me once that when he was little, his parents didn’t have enough money for Christmas presents for all the children, and so his mother had sat down and wrapped up a dozen empty boxes and put them under the tree so that when company came over it would look as though there were gifts for everyone. It was like this, and it seemed impossible to comprehend how we had lived for so long inside these pretty, empty boxes. Our days were spent simultaneously keeping up this illusion and finding ways to be together. We lived in fear of being found out but could not stomach the alternative.
We lived in a state of constant hunger; that gnawing, futile desperation of the starved. Fearful, clawing, scheming. We learned that desire, true desire, is both raw and complex. The entire world seemed to be conspiring against us, which only made us hungrier.
The children were all in school now, at least, with only little Rose at home. And Ted, with some new, odd sense of trust (perhaps that my friendship would keep Eva from straying into another man’s arms—God, how little did he know), had started riding to work with Frankie each morning, leaving his car behind. The sudden mobility that Eva had was a blessing, but it also felt like a trap. I second-guessed every good thing, every blessing, waiting, always, for the other shoe to drop.
We drove. Some days, we’d get in the car and just go. No direction, no destination, just simply moving, as though momentum alone could protect us. We’d roll the windows down to the Indian summer heat and let our hair fly. We cranked the radio up as loud as it would go, and little Rose would cover her ears with two pudgy hands in the backseat as we sang. Eva drove fast, the car almost flying in her control (or out of it, rather). She, and Rose, particularly liked one hilly road that dipped up and down like a roller coaster. She’d accelerate on the incline so that the car was nearly airborne when we reached the summit. Those were breathless, reckless times. Hearts pounding, we knew we should be more careful but somehow could not resist.
We clung to the moments when we could be together, though Rose’s naps were the only time when we were truly alone. Each morning after everyone had left, I would finish cleaning up the kitchen and put a load of wash in, and then hurry across the street, knocking softly at the door. Rose still took her morning nap (though we knew the end of these was coming soon), which gave us a blessed hour (and sometimes two) together. We disappeared into Eva and Ted’s bedroom until we heard Rose’s cries on the other side of the wall, and then we would spend the rest of the day together, sharing the domestic duties at each of our houses to ensure that the floors were clean and the tubs and toilets sparkling before we got in the car and flew.
It was 1961, and in other parts of the country young black students were demanding their civil rights, sitting down at “whites only” lunch counters. Their courage and audacity to demand equal rights was something I admired but did not connect, not then, with my own life. It would be a long, long time before I felt that I had a right to this life, to these dreams and needs. Eva, on the other hand, saw us as somehow allied with these kids, these people who only wanted to be treated fairly by the rest of the world.
“I wish,” she said once as Rose napped and we lay together in her bed, “we could go somewhere.”
I was touching her hair, marveling at how it was so soft, I could barely feel it in my fingers. It reminded me of the girls’ skin when they were infants.
“There are places,” she said, dreamily staring at the ceiling above us. “Where girls, women like us, don’t have to pretend.”
“Where?” I scoffed more loudly than I had intended. Certainly not in Hollyville, Massachusetts.
“I knew someone at school in San Francisco,” she said.
I felt my throat grow thick. The idea of Eva and Ted was somehow tolerable, because I knew it wasn’t real, that it was just another empty box under the tree. But the notion of her with another woman, with someone besides me, was intolerable. I felt sick. “Who?” I managed to choke out.
“Just a girl I knew. A student. She took me once to a bar where everyone was, you know . . .”
“Why did she take you?” I asked. And it was like a dark shadow had crossed this sunlit bed where we lay naked while the world spun endlessly, obliviously, without us.
She ignored me, the way I knew she probably dismissed Ted’s jealousy, his invidious delusions. Still, I needed to know.
“Have you . . .” I started, feeling blood rushing to my ears. “Been with other girls?”
Eva tilted her head and looked at me as though gauging whether she should answer me. I hated her hesitancy. This quiet distrust.
“I mean, it doesn’t matter, I’m just curious. . . .” I said, backpedaling, wishing I hadn’t asked. Not really wanting to know.
“I’ve felt things, before,” she said softly. “But I’ve never done anything about it. I thought the feelings would go away. With Liam. And then Ted.”
“Did they?” I asked. “Go away?”
She cocked her head again. “I suppose. Until you came along.”
“Do you think it’s a sin?” I asked, thinking about my mother and father. About the way they thought that God could fix me. That I was somehow broken and in need of repair. I knew that Eva made weekly treks to church, that they had a family Bible on display in their living room.
“I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head. “Adultery is a sin. But is it adultery when you never loved the person you married?”
“You never loved Ted?” I asked, feeling my heart swell. “Not even before?”
She shook her head. “I made a mistake.”
I thought about Frankie then. I tried not to when Eva and I were together; I felt terrible imagining how Frankie would feel if he knew what happened after he pulled out of the driveway every morning. He would absolutely see this, the tender morning hours Eva and I spent clinging to each other, as sinful. It would kill him. Like Ted, Frankie could be a mean drunk, but he was generally a good man, a good father. I did love him for that. But that wasn’t the kind of love I meant. Not the kind of love I felt for Eva.
“We could go somewhere,” she said earnestly, tracing her finger across my bare stomach. My skin trembled under her touch. “Where we wouldn’t have to hide.” My entire body grew feverish as I thought about this possibility. About running away.
“Where?” I asked.
“I have an idea,” she said, and sat up, clapping her hands together like a child. “Let’s take a trip.”
I still don’t know how she talked Ted into it, though convincing Frankie was easy. I simply told him that Eva and I were going to New York City to a Girl Scout leaders’ convention, a national conference being held over a weekend in January. In my mind, the convention existed. I pictured a hundred other mothers in their Scout leader uniforms, learning better ways to start campfires, braid lanyards, and peddle cookies. He said that he’d keep Ted company while we were gone.
It was the aunts, ultimately, who unwittingly made it possible. Frankie’s sister Theresa agreed to come help Frankie watch the girls for the long weekend. And Ted’s sister, Mary, offered her babysitting services again as well. The aunts arrived on the same train in from Boston, and Ted picked them both up. Then, after we’d given our various instructions, Frankie took Eva and me to the train station and dropped us off, the changing of the guards nearly seamless. It was almost too easy.
Eva and I got on the train, carrying our Girl Scout handbooks and luggage, waved good-bye to Frankie, and then collapsed into our seats with such tremendous relief and excitement we could barely contain ourselves.
Eva’s friend Dorothy (Dot), from school, lived in New York now, had since she finished school in San Francisco. She told Eva we could stay with her. Eva said she wanted to take me to the Museum of Modern Art, to Rockefeller Plaza, to Times Square. As we hurled through the frosty morning, I felt like the farm girl I was, had always been, having never traveled farther south than Massachusetts
and never farther west than Niagara Falls. I had never been to New York.
Dot, a pale wisp of a woman (a painter, Eva had said), met us at Grand Central Station. I was dizzy with the traffic noise and smells and sounds of the city, feeling like a real country mouse, as we navigated our way to the subway and then six blocks to her apartment in the Village.
“Welcome to my humble abode,” she said, smirking, as she unlocked the heavy iron gate leading to the basement apartment. The steps were steep and cracked, with a thin layer of treacherous ice. The windows were smudgy and small, but inside the apartment was warm and clean.
Dot made us scrambled eggs and toast for dinner that night at a tiny stove with only two burners, gave us herbal tea, and showed us where the clean towels and washcloths were.
There were canvases propped against every inch of every wall, mostly gloomy-looking portraits of women. A lot of them were nudes, only instead of women in repose, the women appeared to be in agony, grimacing, with writhing bodies curled like fists.
Dot struck me right away as one of those women who has something to prove. She asked a lot of questions about how Eva and I met, and then went into a lengthy anecdote about the first time she’d met Eva. “Well, you know she had on that blue dress,” she said, reaching for Eva’s arm and then looking at me, as if challenging me to remember that blue dress. Eva had a lot of blue dresses. I didn’t know which one she was talking about or why it mattered.
“And of course, Liam couldn’t keep his eyes off her, none of us could in that dress, but she just sat right down at one of the free easels and started to sketch, and it was a drawing of him. Liam O’Leary. Nude.”
Eva blushed and swatted at Dot’s arm, giggling.
I felt my skin growing hot. I tried to imagine this Eva, this other Eva in her blue dress, this brazen Eva undressing her professor with her pencil. I also wondered if she’d ever “felt things” for Dot. If she had ever fawned over her the way I had over Miss Mars.
“We all knew then that Eva was one ballsy lady,” she said, throwing her head back, laughing.
They reminisced for another fifteen minutes or so until finally Dot seemed to grow bored with us (with me anyway) and took off to meet some friends for a drink. She gave us the address of the bar where she planned to be later, and we told her we’d meet her there after we took a little rest.
Grateful to be alone again, I sat down on the edge of the Murphy bed, which Dot had pulled out of the wall like magic. The sheets were threadbare but soft. Through the basement window, I could see Dot’s feet as she walked away.
“She’s something else, huh?” Eva asked. I could tell she wanted me to like her, and I didn’t want to seem ungrateful or judgmental of her old friend.
“She’s funny,” I said.
Eva nodded. “She was the only one I had to talk to when I found out I was pregnant. . . .” Again, I felt this nagging stab of jealousy. I hated myself for it.
“Come here,” I said, and motioned for her to join me.
She sat down next to me on the bed, and I stroked her hair. It was as soft as corn silk in my fingers. This was what surprised me the most, I think, the contrast between Frankie and Eva. Frankie with his hard stubble of a beard at night, his callused hands and tough skin. Eva was silk, while Frankie was metal. A corrugated tin man.
Together we lay on the bed, completely alone for the first time ever. And I remember watching people’s feet move across the sidewalk through the high windows in that apartment, feeling safe in this underground place: this makeshift subterranean haven.
At about eight o’clock we took a shower together, and then got ready to meet Dot. I would have been content to spend the rest of the weekend in the apartment alone with Eva, but she was excited to show me the city, and her enthusiasm was infectious.
She wore the red dress that I loved, the one that made her look like a magazine model. She painted her lips red as well, and instead of her usual White Shoulders, she wore a perfume that smelled like cinnamon. She was like one of those fireball candies that Johnny and Mouse loved. Feeling dull in comparison, I put on my best dress, the one with raglan sleeves and a pleated skirt, a dress I’d made myself from a remnant of emerald green shantung I got on sale, and a pair of heels I’d dyed to match. The last time I’d worn it was for one of Frankie’s sister’s weddings.
“You look so pretty,” Eva said, squeezing my hand, as the taxi moved in fits and starts through the city.
The bar’s entrance was in an alleyway, and it was snowing lightly as we got out of the taxi, clutching the address Dorothy had given us. Eva leaned over and handed the driver the fare, and we stood peering down the dark alley. She reached for my hand and squeezed it again. “Ready?” she asked.
I nodded.
We made our way through the dark and found the entrance, where a couple, embracing, was blocking the doorway.
“Excuse me,” Eva said, and the couple pulled apart, startled. I felt my face grow hot as I realized it was two women.
Relieved to see that we were going into the bar, they resumed their groping against the brick wall next to the entrance.
Inside, the bar was smoky and loud. There was a band playing a song from Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, an album Eva loved, though the last time we’d listened to that record, we’d been sitting at her kitchen table, sewing Girl Scout badges onto sashes.
My heart pounded in time with the snare drum as we walked briskly across the dirty floor to Dot, who was motioning to us from the bar. The room was packed, and all of the patrons were women, though at first glance you wouldn’t have known that. While half of the women were dressed like Eva and me, in dresses and stockings and heels, the other half were dressed like men: short hair slicked back into ducktails, high-waisted pleated pants and collared dress shirts. Suspenders and jackets and ties. It was only the softness of their faces and eyes that gave them away, only their hands, their long, thin fingers and manicured nails, that held on gently to bottles of beer or cocktail glasses. It was confusing, and frightening. I didn’t know where we fit into this crowd, how we fit into this crowd. Who these people were, who we were. Who I was. The apprehension must have shown on my face, because Eva squeezed my hand again and leaned toward me, whispering, “It’s okay. Just relax.”
The band started playing Nina Simone’s “Forbidden Fruit,” and Dot came over to Eva from the barstool where she had been perched like an odd little bird.
“May I have this dance?” she asked, and Eva smiled, curtseying playfully. “Of course.” I felt my back stiffen despite myself.
The song was a clear favorite among this crowd, and the dance floor filled quickly. From the bar, I watched Dot and Eva dance, and it took every ounce of self-control I had not to march up to her and cut in, to claim what was mine. But Eva was not mine. Could never be mine. The realization of this hit me in the chest like a fist. I was near tears with frustration and anger when the band started to play Coltrane’s “My Shining Hour,” and Eva came over to me, breathless. She collapsed against me, closing her eyes dreamily. “Dance with me, Billie?” she asked, and my heart quickened.
Frankie liked to dance. He was a terrific dancer, but he always made me feel clumsy. He knew how to lead, but I failed to follow. At our wedding, I’d felt like an oaf on the dance floor. He’d get frustrated sometimes and simply find another partner to dance with.
“If she won’t, I will,” Dot said, winking at Eva and looking at her in a way that made my spine tingle.
I couldn’t bear the thought of Eva dancing with her, and so I relented. “I’m a really terrible dancer,” I said, shaking my head apologetically. When we had danced in her living room, there was no audience, no one to see me stumble along.
“Just follow me,” she said. “It’s a nice, slow song. You just need to hold on.” She pulled me gently by the hand to the dance floor and stopped, positioning my hands around her waist. I felt myself blushing, though no one was paying any attention to us.
She pressed her body
into mine and leaned her head against my chest, humming the music into me. My entire body vibrated with the music and her breaths. I could have stayed like this, our bodies pressed together, held together by the music, forever. But the song came to an end, and there was only stillness, the cacophony of the crowd filling in the empty space the music had made. But instead of pulling apart, she looked up at me.
When she kissed me, my instinct was to pull away. Our kisses had been private things, all of them illicit, stolen. The idea of kissing her, of touching her mouth with my own, in front of all of these people was almost more than I could take.
I remember the light in the bar was a sort of green, an absinthe green, our skin painted in verdant light as though we were standing in the forest, the sunlight shining through the trees, dappling us. When she kissed me again, I pretended that we weren’t in an alleyway bar in New York City in January, but rather deep in the cool woods in Vermont in June.
Dot finally left us alone after a while, finding another girl to dance with for the rest of the evening and then disappearing with her. Eva and I both drank too much that night, stumbling out of the bar at three a.m., brazenly holding hands as we navigated the slippery streets, emboldened by the acceptance we’d found inside that absinthe-colored night.
My head was spinning from the liquor and the lights. The air smelled like a thousand things. It was a carnival of sensations, and I couldn’t get enough of it. Enough of her.
“We could move here,” I said.
“What’s that?” she asked, laughing and pulling my hand to cross the street when the light changed.