Warm November

by Kathleen Knowles

  Pat smiled vaguely and sipped her tea. There was an uncomfortable pause. Merle waited. She liked to let people free-associate so they could either reveal their good qualities or hang themselves. She was on the verge of making an offer to Pat when Pat said, “There’s one little thing. I’m waiting for word from Minnesota, but I may have to leave suddenly when we get notice that Earth’s magnetic poles are going to switch. Then the only safe place will be Hibbing, Minnesota. And I’ll have to leave without much notice. I hope that wouldn’t be a problem?”

  Merle was so dumbfounded all she could think of to say was, “Wasn’t that where Bob Dylan was from?”

  “Oh yes. Odd coincidence, huh?” Pat beamed.

  “Well. Thanks for coming, I’ll be in touch.”

  Merle was getting very discouraged.

  Chapter Three

  Hayley Daniels sat at her kitchen table with the divorce papers in front of her. They’d arrived folded up in thirds in a legal envelope. She smoothed the pages, trying to get them to lie flat. They came with a nice heavy blue paper backing and helpful little sign-here tabs.

  It was miraculous that what she’d considered for so long was finally about to happen. She was holding the concrete proof of what she was about to do. These pages with their dense legalistic language would make it official. She was getting a divorce from Howard. She repressed a tiny flicker of indecision. It was the right thing to do, and it was the right time. If there was ever such a thing as a right time for divorce. Not getting married in the first place would have probably been a better idea. But no, she’d done the expected thing. She’d gotten her man and got hitched at twenty-four. That was twenty-eight years ago. Christ, she’d been married for more than half her life. What a horrible thought.

  Hayley picked up the first page and stretched it with her fingers. She pushed her hair out of her eyes and behind her ears and tried to focus on the document instead of her regrets. The language didn’t intimidate her. She was a paralegal and had read thousands of legal documents. It was really just another document. But it wasn’t. This time it was personal.

  She looked at the last page and saw Howard’s signature. She knew it so well and yet it looked strange. She picked up her pen and tapped it on the table, then turned back to the front page. The dry prose could hardly capture what this really all meant. Most people would see it as evidence of failure, but she refused to think of her divorce in those terms.

  They’d tried to make it work for long past the point where it was worth it. Howard knew it and she knew it.

  The only problem, if it even could be called a problem, was their son, Robbie. As far as she was concerned, Robbie was one positive aspect in her married life. So far, he’d taken the divorce in stride. When they sat him down to tell him, he looked from one to the other for a moment, then shrugged.

  “I could tell you weren’t happy.”

  Hayley and Howard had stared at each other and then back at Robbie.

  “How?” Howard asked. They’d never fought or argued. They got along very well, in fact.

  “Well, you never spent any time together. You never talked about each other. You never talk to each other.”

  And that was about the size of it, Hayley recalled. They’d been living separate lives since the day Robbie had gone to college eight years before.

  So hurting Robbie’s feelings wasn’t an issue. The only one who had an issue about their divorce was Howard’s mother, Ida. She was one of those till-death-do-you-part, do-or-die, stand-by-your-man women. She couldn’t believe it when they told her.

  “Why now? Whatever will you do, Hayley?” She sounded stricken.

  Typical of Ida to form the question with her name in it when what she really meant was whatever would Howard do?

  As for Hayley, she knew exactly what she was going to do. She intended to be a lesbian. She supposed it was sort of silly to make a statement like that, even to herself. Of course, everyone knew it wasn’t a choice. Everyone but the stupid religious fanatics, anyway.

  No, it wasn’t a choice to be a lesbian, but it was a choice to have ignored it for most of her life. She was done. Ergo, she’d always been a lesbian, but she planned to change the theoretical to the actual, change the thought to action.

  When Hayley’s mother heard the news of their divorce, she’d been noncommittal. She’d never been especially fond of Howard. But Hayley hadn’t told her the real reason for the divorce. She decided to wait for another day to announce that to her mother.

  Of course her lesbianism hadn’t occurred all of a sudden or out of nowhere. There’d been that time in college with her best friend. They’d been very drunk and started to get intimate but didn’t go through with it. Hayley had decided that had been a fluke. So she got married. She had a son, she had Howard, she had a so-called normal life that she was conditioned to believe was happy and secure. Though she had random thoughts and fantasies, she just dismissed them as mind tricks.

  Then something else had happened a few years before.

  Her law firm had acquired a new client, one Sabine Mills. Sabine was a software engineer who was suing her employer for employment discrimination. Sabine was unmistakably, visually and verbally, a lesbian. And a big flirt. Every meeting they had, every time Sabine came to the office, she flirted with Hayley openly. When they went to court (Sabine won her case, her lawyer was Hayley’s boss at the time and was excellent at her job) and then afterward when they went to a fancy downtown restaurant to celebrate, the flirtation turned into making out in the bathroom of the restaurant. But that was that. Hayley didn’t want to go further, though she thought Sabine was funny and sexy. But she was clearly an alcoholic, and well, Hayley was still married to Howard and didn’t want complications.

  But the experience lingered. She spent many nights lying awake thinking about how it had felt when Sabine had kissed her and squeezed her breasts. The point was she felt something. She no longer felt anything with Howard. Not that she’d ever felt much to begin with, even when they were first married. Maybe a twinge or two. Hayley had found out about true pleasure when she taught herself to masturbate right after she got married. When Sabine had kissed her, her stomach had turned over and she’d nearly passed out, she was so aroused. She remembered her friend from college and the puzzle pieces clicked into place.

  Hayley started looking up lesbian sites on the Web. She very shortly found out that a lot of women figured out their true sexual natures after a long, long time of being ostensibly heterosexual. Women were thought to be more flexible in that way. Go along to get along. Stay with the husband and raise the kids. Well, for Hayley that was over. The kid was an adult and Hayley wasn’t getting any younger. It was time to find out what this whole lesbian deal was about.

  So here she was. She was getting a divorce, they were selling the house, and she was going to start a whole new life. An entire city full of lesbians was waiting. San Francisco was ground zero for LGBTQ culture; at least that’s what Hayley thought. How hard could it be to meet women? It ought to be easy. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Hayley smiled to herself at that old cliché. Then she looked at the divorce decree again. One last time, she tried to get the pages flat, this time with her forearm. She stared at Howard’s signature, then added her own on the line below. After she folded the papers and stuffed them into the envelope Howard’s lawyer had provided, she went to find the stamp he had not provided, the cheapskate. Then she put on a jacket and went outside to find a mailbox.

  They lived in the “Avenues,” the numbered streets to the south of Golden Gate Park, officially called the Sunset District. Their soon-to-be former home was on Thirty-sixth Avenue and Pacheco. Hayley loved living near the ocean. It made up for having gravel for a front yard and a miniscule backyard, which was more than a lot of San Franciscans had. She walked west on Pacheco Avenue, the blue Pacific straight ahead of her. After she dropped the divorce papers into a mailbox, she continued the eleven blocks to the Great Highway.

  It was a sunny, br
eezy afternoon. The fog had burned off, and the sun brought out the people. She skipped up to the path and walked north, facing the Cliff House and Ocean Beach in the distance. She admired the gray-green Pacific and the long, rolling waves. Setting herself a good pace, she cheerfully dodged between the strollers and the runners and the bicycles. Hayley didn’t mind the crowds on the Great Highway.

  She’d miss this part of living in the Avenues, taking her walks with the ocean crashing in the background, but so be it. Soon she’d be moving and would be taking a different walk in a different neighborhood. Everything in her life was going to be different. She was done with settling for what she had. She was going to get what she wanted now. No more pretending and no more evading the truth. She was finally ready to really be herself, with no need to hide and no need to be ashamed.

  Hayley’s knowledge of lesbian culture so far was confined to the Internet and to her conversations with Britt, a law-student intern in their office. Since Britt was a generation younger, Hayley didn’t think her experience was especially relevant. Britt was a twenty-something who talked a mile a minute about hooking up and Girl Bar and online dating and sexting and what have you. Hayley doubted that her life would be anything like Britt’s. There was a generation gap for everyone, she guessed.

  “Oh, dude. That’s great,” she’d said when Hayley took her out to lunch and confessed what was up with her. “You gotta get out and about. So to speak.”

  “Um, I don’t think it’s going to be quite the same for me,” Hayley said.

  “Nope, guess not. But hey, there’s plenty of older dykes around. This is San Francisco, right?”

  Hayley winced at the term “older dykes.” She felt the opposite of old—entirely too young and naive. Also the word “dyke” grated on her ears. “I may be chronologically older than you, but I have zero experience with women, so that’s why I’m talking to you about this.”

  “You’re like a baby dyke, but um…not.” Britt grinned to show her that was a joke.

  She wondered again why Britt used the word “dyke.” Wasn’t that derogatory? “What’s that mean?”

  “Oh you know. Like. Just out, brand-new. Kind of like a virgin.” Britt had the grace to blush when she said that.

  “That’s true.”

  “It’s awesome, dude. You’re gonna have a blast.”

  Hayley hoped that was true but wasn’t sure how to get started, so she asked Britt for suggestions.

  “OkCupid,” Britt said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a dating website. That’s how you, like, meet women.”

  “I want to meet women my age, not women your age.”

  “No, dude, it’s all ages. And how come you don’t want to meet women my age? Are you ageist or something?” This time, Britt seemed a little offended.

  “Dude. No offense, but a younger woman just wouldn’t work for me. I need someone closer in age, and I want to meet her in a more traditional fashion,” Hayley said.

  Britt frowned. Was it possible Britt wanted her to ask her out? Yuck. That would be liking dating one of her son’s classmates. This whole thing was sliding into inappropriate territory.

  “Yeah, okay. You can meet women at meet-ups.”

  “Hmm. What are those, exactly?” Then she waved her hand. “Yeah, yeah, online, right?”

  “Obvi.”

  Hayley knew that meant obviously. She liked to think she wasn’t hopelessly out of touch. She wasn’t discounting the resources on the Web, but she didn’t want to limit her options.

  *

  One day shortly after Hayley signed her divorce papers she took off work and went to Castro Street to walk around. Do reconnaissance, be gay, whatever that might mean.

  A lot of men around but few women. She liked the neighborhood feel of it. Would she end up living in the area? That might be fun. She found a copy of a newspaper, The Bay Times, and snagged a table at Starbucks on Eighteenth Street. There, she practiced smiling at the barista, whom she assumed was a lesbian, although it could be hard to tell with younger people. She thought about Britt and grinned. The barista smiled back, but it was a professional smile. Hayley needed a more flirtatious milieu than Starbucks on a Thursday afternoon.

  Like maybe a dark, crowded bar on a Saturday night, though that thought scared her. She couldn’t picture herself waltzing into a gay bar and picking up a woman. It wasn’t as though she had anything against casual sex. Never mind. That wasn’t what she wanted to do. It would probably be pointless anyhow.

  She doubted many people in any bar would be over thirty-five.

  Nope, she wasn’t ready for the pick-up scene, so she found out about meet-ups online and decided that was probably worth a try.

  But the first thing on her to-do list was to find a place to live. Everyone told her that was going to be tough. San Francisco’s rental market was the second tightest in the country after Manhattan. Some people said the dot-commers were to blame, but Hayley thought it was just a simple case of supply and demand. A lot of people wanted to live in San Francisco, but there weren’t nearly enough places for them to live in. Therefore, the rents were sky-high. It wasn’t anyone’s fault; it was basic economics.

  When she finished her iced coffee at Starbucks, Hayley strolled around the residential streets of the district. She spotted a few hand-lettered for-rent signs. It wasn’t the worst idea in the world to consider living with gay guys. Might be a lot easier than living with women. She’d known a bunch of them in the law practice, and they were sweet and fun to talk to. She also couldn’t imagine their housekeeping habits would be problematical.

  Back in the old stucco on Thirty-sixth Avenue, she surveyed her belongings. She didn’t have much to move. She’d let Howard take some furniture to his new place. The rest they were donating or giving away. If she was starting a new life, she wanted to start with as little baggage as possible, both the physical and the emotional. She could at least get rid of the furniture she’d bought while she was married. Hayley giggled to herself. This was better than going off to college. It was kind of like Christmas. She didn’t know what sort of gifts she’d receive. True love would be an excellent gift. Or if not true love at first, perhaps some really great sex.

  That part of her new life was especially daunting. Once when Howard was away and after the encounter with Sabine, she’d rented a bunch of DVDs of The L Word and watched all of them over the course of one weekend. Her mind was reeling after that. Even allowing for the liberties of cable TV, the drama was way over the top. She didn’t know how she’d survive anything resembling what that group of women endured. But the story line with Cybill Shepherd hit a nerve. Also all the sex was fabulous to watch. She had rich fantasies for months afterward where she made love with every single character on the show, more than once. It was fun, but Hayley strongly suspected reality wouldn’t be like Showtime.

  Hayley logged onto the craigslist site and looked at the housing listings, roommates wanted. One ad leapt off the page.

  Bernal Heights. Owner-occupied (50+). Single woman preferred. Charming Craftsman home with garden. Must like dogs. Own bathroom, 2100 per month plus utilities. References and credit check required. Reply ad #93S6.

  Hayley quickly wrote an email and waited for the response. It came back in a week with a phone number and invitation to call for a meeting. What would be the best approach in this situation? She researched Bernal Heights and found out it was a very lesbian neighborhood. That was even better than the Castro District. She wasn’t concerned about meeting the financial requirements, but she supposed a lot of people would meet those criteria. Living with a dog would actually be nice. She’d wanted one, but Howard wouldn’t hear of it because she would have insisted that he participate in its care. She decided to make friends with the dog, with treats perhaps. She’d heard of people baking cookies to impress prospective landlords. That was a bit too obsequious. Just be yourself, her mother had always said. And that, finally, was what Hayley was prepared to be. She just hope
d that being herself would net her a good place to live.

  She obsessed over what she should wear to this meeting with Merle Craig, then laughed at her own folly. It was likely that Merle would only be concerned that she could pay the rent and not trash the house. She wanted to stand out from the crowd though, and then she thought of something.

  From owning a home for years, she’d become adept at fixing things, such as ordinary plumbing and a little carpentry or simple electrical work. Howard would’ve called in an expert every time if she hadn’t learned such skills, and they would have been paying through the nose. If Merle was a lesbian, and it seemed likely she was, she doubtless knew all this stuff already, didn’t she? Wasn’t there some sort of stereotype about lesbians and power tools? She didn’t know for sure, but it couldn’t hurt to mention her skills. She also could help with yard work. Though she loved flowers, she had no feel for gardening, but she was certain that cutting grass didn’t require any special skill. Nor did cleaning up the inevitable dog feces. Hayley decided on her approach and was ready to audition for the part of Merle Craig’s housemate.

  *

  Hayley got off the bus on Cortland Avenue and walked several blocks to the corner of Bonview and Stoneman. It would be easy to get fit walking from the house to Mission Street to catch the bus. Or even walking all the way to the Financial District. The neighborhood was beyond charming. In the sun, the gardens and landscaping were showy and inviting. She spotted a marvelous variety of plants: marigolds, jasmine, roses, ice plants, ferns, and bougainvillea. The multicolored jumble of architectural styles felt just right, and Cortland Avenue had several types of businesses that seemed to cover anything she might possibly want to buy. The passersby were also a pleasant mélange of people of all races, ages, and, she presumed, sexual orientations.

  In her old neighborhood in the Sunset, the residents were either Asian or white. And very straight. The houses there were pastel stucco almost exclusively, with little greenery or trees. In Bernal, the color and vibrancy of San Francisco was more evident both in the people and in the ambience.