Twilight Girl

by Della Martin

  "When they find a good organizer, they work her to death," Mrs. Harris said. "I told them that right to their faces."

  "Good for you," encouraged the man behind the glasses.

  "Verna had the gall to tell me I'll have more time with the kids out of school. Came right out and asked me if Lon didn't help around the house. Of course, what could I tell her?" Shaky hands left the table to pat the machine-frizzled hair. And the bright dark eyes turned accusingly toward Lon.

  Lon counted frozen peas. And her father poured oil on the troubled waters. "Lon's not like Evie and Judith.' We're all different, Mother."

  "She carried all the rocks." This was an unexpected defense from the potato-stuffed mouth of Eddie Junior. "She brang the rocks for the rock garden."

  Lon threw him a wry thank-you with her eyes, sweeping in that moment the thin, simian face, wizened, somehow, far beyond its eight years. Mention of her sisters and the sight of Eddie's face stirred the buried recollections, the unburied resentments. Evie and Judith, married now, but in those days primping and giggling and bossing her around the house, with no Eddie in view. And Dad tousling her hair, teasing, "Counted on you to play with Brooklyn, y'little monkey!" Never really complaining because she was a girl. Joking about it that way. Playful, controlled punches in the arm, full-swinging pats on the back when she stole third or scooped a playground grounder. And proud of her, with the pride nurturing, growing inside her.

  And all this was B.E.—Before Eddie, the family afterthought who squealed, bleated, kicked and raged his protest vainly, ignored in his protests by Dad, who now had a son to be buddy to. For above all that was sacred, Eddie Harris Senior believed fervently in his mission as Father, the Pal. So that After Eddie, there came to Lon the life-vital need to be more a boy, more a pitcher, more, more—until the gentle swelling under the smudged T-shirt proclaimed the odds insurmountable, the competition too heartlessly stacked against her. So that now Dad had Eddie, and L.A., not Brooklyn, had the Dodgers. And Lon had the Island, discovered in reverie between her twelfth and thirteenth years—the undetermined pin-point in the Pacific to be peopled with a painstakingly selected population. Excluding the Harrises, one and all. Except Lon.

  "People are noticing the way she runs around, Dad." Her mother's flute-pitched lecture on the state of the belt-line of Lorraine Harris's jeans was usually channeled through a neutral source. "You'd think if she has to dress hike a hooligan, she could at least recognize where God put her waistline!"

  The voice-sound blended with the whine in Lon's head. Shut up! Just shut up and let me go.

  "It could be worse." Dad apologizing for her again.

  "She could be painting her face like a barn and staying out late with boys. Am I right, Lonnie?"

  Lon nodded yes to the milk glass. And when it was over once more, she washed and dried the dishes mechanically, then closed the door of her room behind her.

  * * *

  The room, like the rest of the new gingerbread-tract house, was furnished in an abortive maple—rag-rug— pepper-grinder—lampbase attempt to resurrect old New England in new Los Angeles suburbia. But the Polynesian masks Lon had whittled from fallen dried palm fronds were her own. The draped fishnet and cork floats were hers. And the papers she took reverently from the bottom desk drawer belonged to a world that none other traveled, except by invitation of the fertile mind. Carefully she chose them, the residents of this unsurveyed microcosm of her fantasy.

  She passed quickly over the world map, the South Pacific circled in red crayon and marked: In This General Area. Nor was there need, this evening, to review the List of Supplies (fish-hooks, canned milk, thread, pencils, paper)—some day to be alphabetically arranged, but scrawled now in green ink. And no time for the Sacred Rites of {name of Island to be selected when we arrive). No interest now in the Secret Incantations, lists, charts, schedules, village layouts, codes, rules, menus, constitution, cultural and recreational plans—or the notebook devoted to Ideas on How to Get There, including:

  A. Boat (Check costs)

  B. Where to Sail From

  C. Knowledge of Sailing (Find someone who knows about it)

  * * *

  With none of these details was Lon Harris concerned on this evening of the last day of school in June. From the imposing sheaf of papers she pulled the list of proposed inhabitants. For reasons she had never considered, accepting the fact as casually as she chose a gray sweatshirt over an eyelet embroidered blouse, none of the names recorded was male. Under the heading LON HARRIS, HIGH PRIESTESS was another name she had added to the roll call early in the second Junior-year semester. With a surge of something inside her that had wavered before friendly Dalmatian eyes, she picked up a ballpoint pen and traced a question mark after SECOND HIGH PRIESTESS. Then grimly, her revenge tempered by the solemn responsibility of her ritual, she drew a line through the name of Netta Chamberlin. And in that moment, the sound in her head that was not a sound abruptly stopped.

  CHAPTER 2

  Luigi's Drive-In jumped with cars. The cars jumped with kids and the kids' radios jumped with the beat of Fabian's mixed metaphor:

  I'm your tiger, you're my mate!

  Hurry up, buttercup, and don't be late!

  Lon turned off the ignition and waited in the old Plymouth, wondering why she had come here alone, where no one came alone. Not knowing what she waited for on the outer edge of the parked cars. Still, a lonely voice inside was telling her she had pulled into Luigi's because this was one of the restless evenings when the Island was not big enough to hold her, and where else was there to go? So she had come where the music jumped and the cars bulged with kids delirious with the prospect of three undisciplined months spreading out before them.

  Jumping, too—with menus for the heap with blinking headlights, and a tray of Luigi-Burgers and malts for the gang in the dago-ed Ford—was a curved and compact doll, all five feet of her crammed into the Air Force blue slacks and vivid red bolero that identified a Luigi car-hop. Her face was buried somewhere beneath layers of pinkish pancake. Yet Lon was certain that under the thick make-up, the girl's complexion would be genuinely pink and white. Mascara-weighted lashes fluttered provocatively over lavender-blue eyes that, like the rest of her, were round. For her face was round, the breasts that strained against the scarlet monkey jacket were round, and her hips in the tight gabardine slacks were just wonderfully round. Too, she had a round button nose. Her mouth, when she was not smiling to reveal even white teeth, formed a perfect 0. And under the round gray-blue cap, her face was a pretty pink moon.

  But the hair, Lon thought. The hair out of some technicolor nightmare, untamed by the required hairnet and falling midway between the girl's chin and shoulders, assaulting the eyes with a shade that hovered between lavender and violet.

  And it was, "Hey, you, Vi'let!" that the boys howled from the parked cars. "You with the purple mop!" "Wha' hop-pen' ta the ketchup fer my fries?" Roaring like the tiger looking for its mate: "Is it purple all over, Vi'let?" "Prove it, honey. I only want the facts, man!"

  The girl replied with winks, responded with smiles. And the boys who asked for proof were rewarded with sidelong glances. She gloried in her upstage role and Lon thought, she's not beautiful. Not actually beautiful. But she acts as if she is and so nobody can be sure she isn't.

  Not actually beautiful, but seeing the girl through the girl's round eyes, Lon shivered a little, felt her tongue turn to balls of wool as Vi finally got around to the old tan crate in the back row.

  "Hi. Sorry it took so long." She shoved an oversized menu at Lon.

  "It's okay. No hurry." Lon pretended to study the glossy card.

  "They sure give me a hard time about my hair," the girl complained proudly. Wrinkling the little round nose, pleased with the hard time. Her voice was coarse and she spoke with a practiced attempt at sexy intonation. Lon felt an unaccountable swell of disappointment.

  "I notice."

  "At first Luigi said to let it grow out natcherl or blow. Th
e crust! I said he could take his lousy job an' shove it One night, on'y one night I worked with it like this and he's beggin' me to leave it alone. Guys come around jest to see me an' don't he know it!"

  The girl studied Lon while speaking, looking Lon over carefully. Faded red of the cotton T-shirt, mostly. Sizing me up as a weirdo, Lon told herself. And said aloud, "It's very pretty."

  "I bleach it first an' then I put on this stuff I mix myself. Jest food coloring, that's all it is. Red an' blue. Holy Jeez help me I ever get caught in the rain, huh?" She laughed, catching Lon's eyes with the lavender-blue discs and holding them uncomfortably long. "It goes with my name. My name's really Vi'let. You dig?" She was quiet then, waiting for her order, staring in a strange, knowing sort of way.

  Muscles tightened under the red shirt, a spasm of remembering for no special reason the agony of undressing in the gym locker with perspired, perfumed bodies crowding her against the steel cabinets, the gagging, hot-faced bewilderment of her own nakedness and theirs. "It's sharp. I mean, it goes together."

  A horn sounded and the girl spoke again. Under the heavy black lashes, the pastel eyes looked vaguely amused. "Listen, I gotta go. What'll it be tonight—butch?"

  Lon handed back the menu. "Large chocolate Coke."

  Violet didn't move. "You heard me."

  "I said, large chocolate Coke."

  "Oh, Christ, come t' the party. You slow on the uptake, butch?"

  "My name's Lon Harris."

  "Lon. Hey, that's cute. You just cruisin' or did somebody tell you 'bout me?"

  "I just got a taste for a Coke."

  "Sure you did!"

  "I did." Lamely, Lon added, "I hadn't much else to do.”

  "I bet you didn't know I work here," the girl teased. "No, not much."

  Helplessly, Lon sensed insinuation. "What difference would that make? I don't know anybody you know. Anyway, what difference would it make?"

  Violet's eyes widened. "No kiddin', you don't know any of the kids?”

  "Oh, I know kids, but..."

  “Our kind a kids?" Then with something like awe. "Holy Mother, you ain't that dumb! I'd a swore...! Oh, Jeez, I woulda swore!" She looked over her shoulder as if to check the nearness of others. "I hang out at The 28%. Ever hear of it?"

  "What's the 28%?"

  "Gay joint Private, jest girls. I know all the kids hang out there." She lowered the hoarse voice. "Wanna go?"

  "When, tonight?"

  "Crazy. I get off ten-thirty."

  "I don't know." Lon's glance fell to the low-slung jeans. "I'd have to go home and change." And added sheepishly, "I didn't bring... money."

  "I get paid tonight Go on me."

  "What is it some kind of girls' club?"

  "Yeah, a gay club. Where the kids c'n dance. They have beer an' Coke—you know."

  "I'd have to change," Lon said again.

  "Nah, what for? Saturday night the butches wear good pants, but Friday night who cares?" She reached through the window to pat Lon's cheek. "Stick around, hon."

  A blast from a front-row M.G. shook Violet from the window. "Ah, have y'self a hemrich, why dontcha?" And then to Lon, with the soft sound of old intimacy, "I gotta hop, sweetie. Don't go. I mean after, when you drink your Coke. Stick aroun'!"

  Lon stuck around. Stuck after the syrupy drink tasted like melted ice and after three visits from the girl whose brows were a thin black pencil-line. Once she slipped into Luigi's phone booth to call home and tell her mother she had met some of the girls from school and was going to the show. And the fourth time Violet returned to the car, she had changed into purple toreodor pants, a bulky white sweater and spike-heeled gold slippers. Her mouth wore a fresh coat of orchid-pink lipstick and she smelled of violet cologne.

  She bounced into the Plymouth, snuggling deep into the scratchy upholstery before she pulled the door shut "You're a doll, waitin' aroun'. This girlfriend of mine, she moved up t' Stockton an' I'm playin' the field nowadays. I sure am glad t' get a lift." Lon chugged the old car out of Luigi's lot into the street

  She drove purposefully, following Violet's instructions, glad of the heavy Friday-night traffic that absorbed her wondering exultation. And Violet rattled on. The girl with the lavender hair seemed compelled to reveal in minute detail the story of her life.

  She was nineteen. She lived in a rented house at the wrong end of the Valley. Her mother was out of town, workin' grab joints on the fair circuit which is what the old lady had been doing since they had left Cicero, Ill. That was after her old man beat the old lady up so bad and her an' the old lady had grabbed a bus for California, which was sure funny because one time in Chicago, before they moved to Cicero, they had lived in this flat on a street called California. How 'bout that? Violet was not insensitive to the strange twists of fate.

  "I worked grab," she told Lon. "Jeez, I got so I come near pukin' if I smelled a hot-dog." But her old lady didn't trust her around the carnies or the carnies around her. Which was okay by Violet because she was makin' good hoppin' cars, not on'y in the fair season but all year. And which brought up another subject "We're Bohunks. What're you?"

  Lon turned from the wheel, guessing at the question's meaning. "Welsh and English descent."

  "Well, we're Bohem'an. My real first name is Fialka. That means Vi'let My last name's Polivka. You know what that means? Soup. Vi'let Soup. Ain't that a kill? Vi'let Soup."

  Some of the tension eased away. Lon could laugh at this.

  "Guys usta say, 'How's about a little hot soup?' Horka polivka. Jeez, it usta make me so mad." She remembered another important factor. "We're Cath'lic. You Cath'lic?"

  "My folks go to the Methodist church," Lon told her. It would have taken too long to explain that God Tikitehatu and Goddess Hiuapopoia had produced life on the Island.

  Violet grudgingly said, "I was scared maybe yez were Baptist Or them Witnesses. Methodist ain't too bad."

  Lon laughed again. And to sober her, Violet said, "My old man froze t' death in a car barn. How 'bout that?"

  "Froze?"

  "You think it don't get cold back East? Wow!"

  "Gee, what a rough thing to have happen.”

  Violet laughed now, a tin-pan musical convulsion. "Oh, yeah? Try an' tell that t' my old lady." Then, evidently remembering, reporting dutifully: "Another reason I stay home, this carny got me in trouble. We had to adopt the baby out,- this place called St. Vincent's Foundling. You think I don't cry about that sometimes? Never again, believe you me, kid. She woulda been two years old. Jeez, I talk like she's dead. I mean she's two years now an' you know how cute you c'n dress kids that age. But Holy Christ on a bicycle, I mean t' tell you I had a hard time. I bit clean through my hand, if you wanna know. I could show you the scar, even."

  There was another world beside the other people's world and her own. Maybe there were thousands of worlds, millions of worlds, one of them in purple pants and who knew how many others? Lon gunned the Plymouth to be on the safe side—to be sure she by-passed the new Buick when the light on Vineland Avenue turned green. And listened to the mysteries of a world much stranger than her own.

  "So this bookkeeper where I worked—that was in this supermarket before I started at Luigi's. She was butch, same as you. All she ever did was wanta sit around her place makin' out. Jesus, I like t' get out, so that's why we broke up, but she made sure I got wise. I got more kicks with her than that damn lousy carny, an' no hospital, no baby. You get wise, you don't get hurt You'll find out, kid."

  Lon nodded vague agreement. "Straight ahead?"

  "Yeah, but pull over left. You're gonna make a turn in a couple blocks."

  "Are you sure this is all right? My going to this place the way I look?"

  "That's the nice thing about the twenny-eight. Anything goes. Rags, she's this girl that owns the place, her an' her girlfriend t'gether, she sometimes don't dress. Other times, wow, she wears these real crazy clothes, like she has this p'ticular beatnik outfit. Black suede pants an' shirt, kid— talk about
crazy! She can afford clothes, the dough she makes. Half a buck fer Coke, same as beer—how 'about that? But I don' hold it against her. I seen her wear jeans plenny times. Not stuck-up or anything, kid. An' hell! It's about the on'y place around here the girls c'n dance."

  The questions were stacked in layers at the back of Lon's mind, but now there was time for only one. "Why do they call it that? 28%. That can't be the address."

  "Jest t' show you how cute this Rags is. She read this book by some doctor, he took like a survey an' in this book he claims twenny-eight per cent of women had somethin' t' do with some other woman sometime or other. So that's the whole idea behind why Rags named the club that. Cute?"

  The question left Lon as confused as before—repelled by her own raw ignorance yet fascinated by the need for answers She drove the remaining blocks with the self-assured recklessness peculiar to drivers who can take their-car apart and put it back together again. She drove harshly yet floated on with the promised delights of the club named to honor a statistic. And breathed the delicate air of Parma violets.

  CHAPTER 3

  It was Rags who peered cautiously into the night, opening the drab green door of the lonely cement-block building at the end of the dark, undeveloped street. Lon knew Rags by the sharp black tux, the cerise bow-tie beneath a pallid, acne-scarred face. Rags stood sullen in the doorway, behind her an amateurishly lettered notice: THE 28%—MEMBERS ONLY.