by Della Martin
"Secon' high priestess. Hot damn!"
A chill suspicion trickled down the length of Lon's spine. Was Mavis making fun of her? Fighting boredom, the way Sassy was killing time on the dance floor with Violet? They had danced by a moment before and the tall blonde had been yawning. With dampened enthusiasm, Lon said, "I still have a lot of details to work out. Transportation's my main problem. I have to figure out how to get a boat and where to find somebody that'll know how to sail it"
"Man, you talk to Sass. Her daddy, he got him a yatch. She know mo' 'bout yatches anybody you evah meet!"
And spurred again, Lon said, "Really? Does she really?"
"That cat's made the Catalina scene all by her lonesome." Mavis dropping her pose once more, like a seagull letting go of a fish. Then adding significantly, "Don't count on her, though, baby. The way Sassy's goin', don't anybody count on her for Thing One."
Lon would have asked for an explanation. But the girls returned to their table. Violet ecstatic, Sassy apparently disgusted. "God, what an obvious crowd of neurotics!"
"They neurotic," Mavis agreed.
"That's one a the kinds a persons I can't stand," Violet echoed.
And Sassy winked at Mavis, snickering behind her beer.
"They psychotic," Mavis added. "Pore chillun!"
Then Sassy, in sudden irritation, "God, will you cut that plantation bit? Talk about sounding neurotic! Where's your goddamn pride?"
Mavis sighed, shrugging once more. "Can't be queer, effen you ain't neurotic."
Lon watched Sassy's anger flare. "I detest that word, Mavis. Literally detest that word."
"Okay, baby. Yo' bi-sexual. Ain't queer nohow. Yo' bi-sexual."
Sassy leaped up from the bench, seething. "You make me so damned—" Her sudden motion upset a tray with which Betty was trying to wriggle through the narrow aisle between tables. A beer bottle toppled, rolled down Sassy's back, crashing to the concrete floor in a burst of glass and foam.
"You clumsy bitch!" Sassy whirled on the waitress in a scarlet-faced rage. "Goddamn clumsy—you did that on purpose!"
"Got her monkey wet" Mavis murmured senselessly. "That monkey gonna ketch pneumonia."
Sassy caught the muttered phrases. They meant something to her, Lon decided, for the fury turned on Mavis now. "Keep your nasty little mouth shut!"
Betty stared open-mouthed, shocked by the force of Sassy's outburst. A small, curious group gathered around the table, watching with detached interest.
And Sassy reached back to assess the damage, shrieking, "My back is soaked. Literally soaked, you goddam, stupid..."
"One more word, debutante, and you'll go home in a basket." The grim figure in the black tuxedo had materialized from nowhere. Rags, with menace written all over that pale, pitted face. Sassy towered over her. Like a eucalyptus tree in a poppy field, Lon thought But evidently Sassy caught the threat in that throaty masculine voice. She stopped in the middle of her sentence, violence suspended in mid-air. And then Lon saw why Goliath curdled in the face of this tiny David. The something that Rags turned slowly in her hand was a breadknife. And Sassy stood still, pulsating with the hateful silence, eyes helplessly drawn to the saw-toothed blade.
No one moved. They stood around, sat around, immobile in a tableau of motionless waiting, breath suspended. And Lon caught up in a tremulous excitement of heroic battle, siding with the underdog in a T.V. writer's struggle for truth, honor and justice. Still, it was Sassy who owned a boat—Sassy who knew how to sail. And Sassy who would bring Mavis if Mavis was to come again. Apart from the other spectators, Lon waited for the next move.
"I suppose one should expect this sort of thing in a place like this," Sassy said, breaking the impasse with lame defiance.
One of the observers hooted, "Hey, Rags—whyn't you pick on somebody your size?" Jeering laughter routed what was left of the drama. Slowly, Rags lowered the breadknife. But her eyes had preserved the glint of its blade. "Beat it, debutante. Go do your slumming somewhere else!"
Sassy threw back her head in a gesture of contempt. "Scum. Literal, uncouth, uncivilized, neurotic scum." She edged her way past the onlookers, pushing disdainfully against the rigid wall of unfriendly shoulders. Lon sensed the blood churning invisibly inside, the gray-blue eyes deliberately unseeing, as though by her unawareness Sassy had dismissed them all. "If I thought it was worth the bother, I'd have my dad pull the right strings."
"Before you start shutting us up," Rags said, her voice deadly level, "figure out a good excuse for your daddy-O."
And picking up the cue, another voice cried, "Yeah, tell him what you were doing here, rich-bitch!"
"Are you coming, Mave?" Sassy, halfway across the dance floor. Not bothering to turn her head.
Mavis sighed. "Don' make no never-minds to me, baby."
Rags wedged herself between Mavis and the narrow aisle. "We don't hold anything against you. We don't want you to think we aren't—well, democratic." Still wearing the unsmiling mask: "Don't think you aren't welcome here because you're colored."
Lon nodded approval. The T.V. drama was going according to all the principles. Truth, honor and justice. These were great kids. Really great kids, and Violet had not been wrong. Lon found time to drain the second bottle.
"Hot damn, you sho 'nuff democratic! You so democratic, man, I overwhelmed!" Mavis having herself a ball. "Heah I thought you Republican."
"If you haven't got a way home, I’ll drive you myself," the poker-faced owner promised, the dusky sarcasm escaping her.
And timidly, Betty piped, "Don't mix in between them, Rags. If you were that other girl, I'd stick by you. Even if you were wrong, I'd walk out of here with you."
Rags considered the protocol of loyalty and stepped aside. "I just wanted her to know how I feel."
Lon missed the next few bits of by-play. Violet clutching her arm and whispering desperately, "Jesus, kid, what'll I do? If I go out now, Rags won't ever leave me in again. But I gotta see that Sassy again. Kid, I jest went ape over her!" The lavender-blue eyes following Sassy Gregg out of the room, miserable. "If you was me, would you make up some excuse that she fergot somethin' an' follow her to the parking lot? Or what, kid?"
Mavis solved the problem before she left. "You gals give us a buzz now, heah? You call Sass an' me an' we have us a real swingin' time." Then with head held loftily, as befitted the Second High Priestess of Name-to-be-Selected-When-We-Get-There, she swept across the floor. Moving easy, as if, perhaps, at the far end of this chandeliered ballroom her ladies-in-waiting curtseyed in greeting to the Queen. Weary black sack dress drooping from the proud breasts—nobody in style but Mavis. And fat warm tears out of nowhere blinding Lon's view of her departure.
"I want to see her again," Lon said quietly. "I don't care about the other one. I want to see Mavis again."
Violet matter-of-fact "I know how it is, sweetie. You're like me, real emotional." Then, noticing her beer was gone, watching Betty blot up the puddle on the floor, Violet added, " 'Course, I should be jealous, you feelin' that way about somebody when you're out with me."
"Oh, I like you, too, Violet"
"It's okay, kid. I know how it is. Holy Jeez, wouldn't I love it if you got that chocolate girl away from Sassy? I could really go to town, hey?" She drummed the redwood table with bird-long lavender fingernails, the idea playing around the corners of her little 0 mouth. "Trouble is, hon, you got a lot t' learn."
CHAPTER 4
Still, having a lot to learn is not an insurmountable problem when the student thirsts for knowledge and the teacher is dedicated.
They stumbled into the airless living room and Violet switched on a lamp. Through the ruffled, velvet-ribboned red shade, a hideous light poured into the Polivka parlor, crammed to bursting with the monstrous mohair sofa, chair and ottoman; royal blue, the legs like a mastodon's—carved from imitation mahogany. Crocheted antimacassars protected the arms from elbows or elbows from the harsh scrub-brush fabric. A maroon carpet swirled with bilious tan
feathers, a knee-high nude in simulated jade held an ashtray hopefully over her head, competing with the toilet-shaped tray on a blue-mirrored coffee table, its glazed surface inviting, "Put your ash here." An artificial fireplace held an artificial log. Across the mantel, sentimental hands had arranged cardboard-framed wedding pictures: artificial white faces over rented tuxedos and stiff tafetta gowns. Violet was represented, too; her plump little-girl figure ludicrously old in a white confirmation dress, the hair still naturally dark under the skimpy veil.
And crowning the mass of carnival bulldogs with sparkling eyes, the dime-store ceramics piled with dime-store roses, the lustrous glaze of panthers, the dancers, rosebud planters, kittens and gazelles, ersatz Hummels, genuine Tokyo parasols and bona fide blue-green abalone shells—crowning all these, a poignant Jesus looked out upon the grandeur from a mat of silver foil leaves and garishly dyed pressed flowers. The sacred heart was bleeding realistically red, the thorns were accusingly sharp.
Violet paused, proudly allowing the impression to register. Belittling the effect of splendor, as if modesty were called for in the face of so much opulence. "You wouldn' guess from the outside how it looks in here, would ya, kid?"
Lon shook her head dully. And found herself sinking into the overstuffed blue showpiece of the room. Her head felt hollow from the unaccustomed beer, yet every nerve had escaped the deadening effect and transferred to the flesh a suspenseful awareness, an acute knowledge of being alive and of wanting to be more so. She felt her breath accelerating as Violet's purple-tipped fingers rested on her jean-covered thigh, and waited through vaguely heard small talk until her hostess, softly lovely in the red-tinted light, reached at last the point where learning began.
"It's kinda mixed-up at first, but you get the hang of it. Like there's girls that're butch. I mean, they wish they could be a guy and they treat you same as they were a guy, on'y better. And there's fems, like me. See, like one is the guy and one is the girl—" And Violet laughed her beered-up starlet laugh. "So you don't have to stick to no damn rules. Like for instance. No lie, sometimes in bed I'm way ahead of those butch types." And she laughed once more at the private memories.
"Oh, Christopher, I wish I knew. Sometimes I just wish I knew," Lon said without knowing the meaning of her words.
"You're butch, Lon. You mean you didn' know it?"
"I never even heard the word before." Yet, how the softly rounded forms had gyrated on the shore of the Island... How, always, the dancers had been girl-lovely, and to be loved!
"Well, you're butch awright. I c'n tell a girl that's straight a mile away. What I wanna know is, didn' you ever have a case on some other girl?"
"Sort of. Only it wasn't a girl, exactly."
"What the hell y'mean, not a girl exac'ly!"
"I mean, she was a teacher. Not what you'd call a girl any more." Lon spoke as if the remembrance had been buried in time. But now it prodded itself into life: This morning I was in love with Miss Chamberlin. Up until this afternoon I loved her, loved her!
"Was she gay?"
"You mean did she..."
"Did she go fer girls?"
"I guess not."
"Get anywheres with her?"
"No." Then, shoving the ache into the dim corridors of the past, "No, and I hope I never see her again."
Violet moved closer, her fingers tracing an indolent pattern across the faded blue jeans. "Did you ever kiss a girl, hon?"
"I used to think about kissing—this teacher. I couldn't help it."
Violet shook her colorful head incredulously. And broke the quiet enchanted spell. "Jeez, it's so funny to be aroun' a sharp-lookin' butch that don't know sugar from Shinola!" Then, as though she regretted having laughed: "Boy, I'd like t' get next t' you about five years from now. Wowie!"
"I was hoping," Lon said earnestly, "that we could get to be friends right away, Violet." Sassy Gregg would have said it in a more commanding voice, she reflected. And envied the other girl's height, though she, Lon, sat inches taller than Violet. And would stand inches taller than Mavis, too. "Why would you want to wait five years?"
Violet's eyes narrowed. "Hey, are you snowin' me? Is this some kinda line or somethin'? Not that I give a crap, kid. If you got it in your head t' make me, you don't ketch me fightin' you off. What I wanna know is, are you as dumb as you act?"
If she denied it, the lesson might end. Sheepishly, Lon said, "Nobody knows everything about everything."
"Well,, one thing you oughta know about gay kids. Some practic'lly get married. Even, they give a ring. But mostly the kids I know, 'specially the butches, they get fed up with one girl. Know what I mean? They keep cruisin', lookin' fer kicks."
"Mavis told me something like that. She said she'd get tired of Sassy or Sassy would get tired of her."
"Don't I know it, kid! See, even if you wear rings, who you kiddin'? The straight married people, they got kids or they're payin' on a house an' a car. They're stuck. But if you're gay an' you get fed up... pow! You take off. You don' have t' cruise long an' somebody else shows up."
Thinking—and it seemed stranged to be thinking of Mavis—She said, "But if you really love somebody, you wouldn't want to break up."
There was a momentary sadness, it seemed to Lon, in Violet's shrug. "Who wants t' be stuck? That's how you know, honey. I bet you never got it from a guy, even."
Got it. The words dredged up another fevered recollection; the thick brown medical book buried under nightgowns and girdles in her mother's dresser drawer. Lon remembered reading furtively and with a fascinated horror, wondering why anyone would want to perform the intimate and humiliating rites at which the secret pages hinted. And knew, in this moment the flushed exhilaration that had drawn her back to the book time and again when the house had been empty, feeling the tensed band around her chest that had constricted her breath in those forbidden hours. Yet free of the mystifying crudeness of the male body, here where the excitement concerned itself only with the graceful and familiar, Lon did not fear.
"You heard me. I bet you never got it from a guy."
"No," she told Violet. "One kissed me, though.'
"Is that all?"
"And started—you know—petting. That was all."
"Did you get a charge?"
"It scared me. It made me sick."
"If it was a girl, you wouldn' of got sick, sweetie," Violet said wisely.
"I don't know. I get this lonesome feeling sometimes. In a way, I'd sooner be friends with a girl, but in another way— well, I can talk to boys. That part's all right. We can discuss cars or sports, almost anything, and I feel sure of myself. But the other part of it, with boys—I don't know, it gets me disgusted just to think about it. Trouble at school was, most of the other girls acted like I was some kind of—" Lon swallowed the bitter taste. "Some kind of freak. Tonight was the first time I was around girls and didn't feel that way."
"Gay girls. Sure."
"And I kept having a peculiar feeling that somewhere, with somebody, I would fit in. I still don't know all I want to know, but at least, with you, I can talk about it. I never could talk about—about things like this—with anybody. I still feel mixed up, but whatever I've been looking for... Gosh, I won't say I've found it. But I think I'm going to." Lon made the sound of laughter. "Christopher, doesn't that sound whacky?"
"Don't be ashamed a havin' real deep feelings," Violet said somberly, surprisingly. "I don't look the serious type, but I take a lotta things serious like that."
Encouraged, Lon said, "Sometimes I think I'm going to bust up inside. I get these wild urges to..." And dropping her voice to a grim whisper, "I get to thinking about somebody and I love them so much, I want to—grab them and smash them. Oh, nuts, that's stupid! I don't even know what I mean. It's just that I have to love somebody, no matter how they feel about me." Lon spoke slowly then, with paced deliberation. "Before this teacher I told you about, there was a girl in my gym class. We weren't in the same squad, so there wasn't any reason for me to
talk to her. I never got up enough nerve to say anything to her, just kept watching and finding out all I could about her from other kids. I guess it got to her that I was asking questions and she told another girl—and that girl told me that I was a creep and should mind my own business."
"Jeez! I know how you musta felt."
"It hurt a lot, but I didn't stop thinking about that first girl. I have a diary at home. I write everything down in a code that I made up, so my mother won't be able to read it"
"Whatta ya mean, a code?"
"Oh, you exchange letters. I use H for K and K for G. I'll explain it to you some time. Anyway, last year that diary was full of nothing but Joan, Joan, Joan. I never once talked to her. After vacation, last year, I didn't see her around and somebody said she'd moved back East."
Violet looked genuinely touched. "Jeez!" Then, curiously, "Didn' ya ever think about her that way, Lon?"
"What way?"
"Do I have to name it?"
"She was another girl, and I didn't know—" Lon wrestled with the new confusion. "All I remember is, she was a tiny thing and I always felt... Oh, this is crazy! I had a feeling I should take care of her. I'd think about some other girl saying mean things to Joanie—or sometimes it would be a boy. Joanie would be crying and I'd come along and belt the other person in the mouth. I thought about that a lot but nothing ever happened. I just thought about it a lot"