Lilac Mines (13 page)

“We haven't seen Auntie Randi since—must have been elementary school,” says Al, stalling.

“I might as well see how spinsters are
supposed
to behave,” Suzy says. But there's excitement behind her sarcasm. Al knows that excitement firsthand, and she can't bear to take it away from her sister.

Miranda Lund, their mother's older sister by ten years, lives in a tile-roofed cottage across the street from a new TV studio and a farmers' market. She took her nieces out for strawberry milkshakes and had almost no food in her ice box. Al can't remember much else about her.

“So it's settled, then?” Al asks.

The front door squeals open, then bangs shut. Meg always makes an entrance. She walks into the kitchen, a bundle of envelopes under her arm and a multiple-paged letter in her hands. She can never wait. She laughs loudly at whatever she's reading.

“What's that?” Suzy asks. She's always pressing for bits of Al's life, though she never minds returning to the subject of her own. “Is that your roommate?”

“That's her,” says Al, who is supposed to be living in an all-women's boarding house, working as a secretary. Meg loves the irony of her lie; Al does not. “Listen, Suzy, I've got to go.”

When she hangs up, she says, “You could be a little quieter.”

Meg sits on the kitchen table. The way she leans on her right arm, thrusting her shoulder forward, looks like a dare. “I can't help it if Petra's funny.”

Petra is Meg's neighbor from Kerhonkson, New York. Her family watched over Meg after her mother died, when her father was too distraught to get out of bed. Al doesn't understand why Meg puts so much stock in letters from a high school student, but she doesn't talk to her father, and she's an only child, and there are plenty of things that Al doesn't understand. There have been a few of what Al thinks of as blues episodes over the past months. Just one or two, each mysterious. And so Meg paints herself, more and more vivid, and increasingly abstract.

“Look, how would
you
feel if Petra discovered that you were sleeping with a woman? If suddenly she started picturing your life like some 10-cent paperback?” Al demands.

“Better to be a 10-cent paperback than a dictionary,” Meg snaps. “And I'll have you know that she
does
know.”

“You're kidding me. Meg, you could get
arrested.”

“Well, she knows most of it,” Meg says. With determined casualness, she flips through the rest of the mail. “If she can halfway read between the lines, she knows.” She tosses the bills on the floor. The ferocity of Meg's truth astonishes Al as much as the ease of her lies.

“But you're seven years older than her—aren't you supposed to be someone she can look up to?” Theirs is a life that cannot be translated to outsiders.

“And I suppose that couldn't possibly be me? I'm some floozy, then?” Meg is mad now, a car peeling around a hairpin curve when, a minute ago, it was purring in the driveway. She hops off the table, balls up Petra's letter and throws it at Al with surprising force. She stalks out of the room, every muscle taught.

Al remains in the kitchen, helpless again. Slowly she unfolds Petra's letter, smoothing its creases, a sort of
there, there.
It's written on plain notebook paper and decorated with ballpoint flowers.
Dear Meggie.
The handwriting is loopy and young, i's dotted with small circles.
Al sounds like the best friend ever,
Petra writes, mid-page,
Strong
and
kind, holy smokes!
Al hopes this isn't the part that made Meg laugh.

“I want to meet your sister,” Meg says. She is just home from work, dusting the bedroom with nearly frightening fury. She lifts each corner of the mattress and sweeps out armfuls of crumbs. April in Lilac Mines is slushy and cold, but Meg is in her underwear. High-waisted beige panties that exaggerate the inverted heart of her backside.
You are my upside-down heart,
Al thinks.

“Why?” Al asks, though they've had this conversation several times.

“Because she's a part of you.”

“We're not much alike.” Suzy loves Los Angeles, according to the one postcard Al received. Aunt Randi teaches flute at Pepperdine University and will go on tour with an orchestra this summer, leaving Suzy her house with the tiled fountain and her circle of musician friends.

“You probably are alike and don't know it,” Meg declares. “Come on. Let's drive down to Los Angeles. I'll be your Good Friend Meg. I'll be your Good Friend…
Michelle.
Ooh, I like that, it sounds French.” She extends a dusty palm down. “Bonjour, Mademoiselle Soo-zie.”

Al laughs in spite of herself. She kisses Meg's fingers and sneezes. She grabs Meg by the waist and pulls her to the bed. The feather duster clatters to the floor.

Al slips into her bedtime persona, the one that can peel away Meg's panties with one hand and reach for the dildo tucked between their pillows with the other. Meg grins up at her, dark hair Veronica Lake-ing. Al smiles back like,
I know how you like it,
tickling her with the tip of the dildo before sliding it in. It occurs to her that somewhere along the way, the look and the tickle and the slide, the flattening of Meg's thighs against the bed, became more than posturing. She really
does
know how Meg likes it, and she likes believing she is this person as much as she likes the sex itself, the actual body-parts part.

Immediately after she comes, Meg starts laughing, which she almost always does, though a few times she has started to cry. It's her who-knew-it-could-be-so-good laugh—her body's forgetting and remembering—as if she is pleasantly surprised that the world is not ending.

Meg takes the dildo from Al, draws an S-shape over the top of Al's underwear, which is white and worn ghost-thin. There is no good underwear for butches. She's heard about a law that women must wear three items of female clothing at all times in public or risk being arrested. She doesn't know if this is true, and she doesn't know how to find out. She can't very well just march into the police station and ask. The line between law and legend is ghost-thin, too.

Jody's theory on butches who let themselves be touched is this:
It's all fine and dandy till you break up. Then she goes and tells her friends exactly what you like and don't like.

Meg's theory on butches who
don't
let themselves be touched is this:
I don't have much respect for anyone who puts acting tough ahead of feeling good. Even men aren't that stupid.

Al wishes her bedroom life were not the crossroads of a philosophical debate. She wishes she could just be a body, that she could writhe and giggle like Meg. But her whole life is with her at any given time. It's her curse. And so she compromises: Meg can put her tongue or fingers between Al's legs, but not
that
thing.

Meg dangles the dildo by one of its pink plastic testicles. “Al, c'mon.” They've been through this before.

“But it looks so real. It's creepy.”

“You didn't think so when you had it up inside me,” Meg says. “It's just plastic. It's a spare tire. A baby doll.” Meg has retreated to sitting cross-legged on the bed. “Okay,” she continues, “I want to understand. You like feeling like a guy, but you don't like feeling like a guy is fucking you?”

Al winces. Meg can be vulgar sometimes. “No… no, it's not that,” Al says. Her cheeks are hot. She hates talking about sex. “I guess I like feeling like a butch. But not like a guy. I couldn't feel like a guy even if I wanted to, I don't think.”

“You need to work on your imagination, Al.” She knows it's true.

Tawn Twentyman lives in a mansion. It's creaky and unrestored, but it has a wide porch, French doors and gingerbread flourishes. A porthole window looks into the foyer. Ivy covers a dry stone birdbath in the front yard. It was once the mayor's house, she explains, or maybe the saloon owner's, or maybe both at different times.

Felix spends six days begging Tawn to throw a Halloween party at her perfect house. Tawn finally admits that she doesn't have enough friends to throw a proper party.

“Maybe you could get your aunt to invite some of her friends?” Tawn suggests.

“I don't know….” Felix says. She wonders if Tawn would understand her problems with her aunt. Tawn lives with her parents and grandfather, a three-generation patchwork of Washoe and Pomo and white in one house. Felix imagines them sharing recipes, passing down ancient stories.

In the end, Tawn and Felix decide to transform the front rooms into a haunted house for trick-or-treaters instead.

On the afternoon of the big night, Felix follows Tawn home, parking behind her '86 Mustang in the gravel driveway. The sky is sweatshirt gray. Tawn pushes open the heavy front door and Felix inhales a mix of dust and cat and cinnamon.

Tawn leads Felix to the dark living room, where her parents sit on the couch shouting at the TV, “Who is John Henry? What is radium? What is New Edition?” They are surrounded by what could be original furniture—dark wood saddled with velvet and strung with cobwebs. A mounted buffalo head flares its nostrils at Alex Trebek.

Tawn's mother looks nothing like her. She has a round, brick-colored face and short permed hair. Her father is thin, like Tawn, with a loosened tie dangling from his neck as if it just lassoed him by surprise.

“Don't worry, we'll get out of your way. The nursing home—that's where I work—they're having a party tonight,” Mrs. Twentyman explains to Felix. “Tawny's dad and I are going to sing a couple of numbers from
Oklahoma!
and
Showboat.
They love it.” She stands up and turns of the television. “Tawny, keep an eye on Gramp, okay?”

As soon as they leave, Tawn begins pushing a claw-footed coffee table toward the kitchen. “Let me get this stuff out of the way.”

“No! Tawn, this stuff is great.”

“But it's all just junk my mom buys at garage sales. Or that the people from the nursing home leave her in their wills. It's gross. Dead people's stuff.” She gazes up at the buffalo head and shudders.

Felix sends Tawn to fetch the candy they purchased earlier in the week. She sets to work hanging black sheets (actually, they're eggplant, but the lights will be off) to make a path through the living room, dining room and out the back door. She strews appendages of borrowed mannequins and sets a mechanical hand crawling across a roll-top desk. She strategically places candles beneath a framed photo of a stoic-looking Indian.

There is noise upstairs, voices and movement. “Gramp!” Tawn's loud voice floats down the stairs.

Tawn says her grandfather is a little crazy. She thinks he's always been that way, but she can't remember for sure. Felix worries that he's had a heart attack. She pounds up the squealing staircase in her metallic blue Docs.

“…
all
of it?” Tawn is saying. She straddles a doorway. Felix peers past Tawn's shoulder and sees a wrinkled man hunched over a pile of Hershey's Miniatures wrappers.

Tawn whips her head around. “Can you believe he ate all the candy?”

The man has small dark eyes and white hair. His skin looks like a discarded paper bag, but Felix can see Tawn's cheekbones beneath the surface. He's dressed in green and white striped pajamas that make Felix feel like she should look away. She is the accidental witness to a private moment.

“I had to test it,” he protests. Felix sees he's not joking, so she does not laugh, even though her dad made the same proclamation every year as he trolled for Heath bars. “For poison,” he says, “for razor blades.”

“Testing is one or two. Now there's no more left.”

“But how am I supposed to know the next one's not the laced one?” His voice is gravelly but strong. He could narrate a documentary. “You don't know how many unsavory characters there are out there.”

Felix is starting to see where Tawn gets it.

“Fine,” says Tawn, “I guess I'm going to the store.” She stomps down the hallway, her tangle of hair rallying behind her.

While she's gone, Felix finishes the haunted house. With the lights off, the makeshift becomes ominous. She goes back upstairs to put her costume on in Tawn's neat, sparse room.

It found her just two days ago, floating from the truck like foreign aid arriving by parachute. She doesn't know what she is supposed to be: the dress is ivory and floor-length. The sleeves are as large and round as her head. Lace fringes her elbows and plunges down the bodice, or what Felix imagines is a bodice. She knows clothing words like “capri” and “hoodie” and “shrug.” This dress requires old-fashioned vocabulary, “crinoline” and “petticoat” and “brocade.” Green glass beads circle the high collar, and a crumpled sash rounds the high waist. Felix buttons it up as far as she can on her own. She tries to imagine a world of ladies-in-waiting, or at least a sister always on hand with a buttonhook. Dressing as a communal art. Her upper back is naked, while her waist is more confined than it's been since she took her bandage off. She thinks of Eva hugging her from behind, that small, loved feeling.

She looks in the mirror. She could be a bride or La Llorona or just a girl with a place to go. The disguise makes her feel pretty and safe. She makes her way carefully down the hallway. The dress swishes against the carpet.

“Holy God! You!”

Felix stops. She is in front of Tawn's grandfather's room again. He is pointing at her with a jittery finger.

“I'm sorry?” says Felix. The cold air in the house grazes her bare skin.

“You're just like—you could
be—
”

“What? Who?”

“Oh, never mind, it was years ago and I'm an old fogy.” He shakes his head. Now his voice is businesslike. “I should introduce myself properly. Luke Twentyman.”

“I knew it!” says Felix. She shakes his hand. It's dry and small, but strong. “I figured Tawn must be related to the guy who wrote that book. It was you, wasn't it?
A Brief History of Lilac Mines.”

A yellow-toothed grin peels across his face. “No one's read that old thing in ages. Used to call the library now and then to find out, but it got depressing.”

“Well, I'm really interested in it,” Felix hesitates, “… in the whole Lilac Ambrose thing. I didn't mean to scare you.”

“Don't worry about it, it's tough to scare an old snooper like me. You just remind me of something I saw a long time ago.”

“Is it the dress? I got it at the Goodwill.” Luke is old, but not old enough to have gotten married in the 1890s.

“The dress and the way you walked past the door.” He unwraps a surviving Mr. Goodbar and bites it with his side teeth. “Today is Halloween, right? Sit down, I've got a yarn for you.”

Because he is old and because he might know things, Felix does. Ashley Burd was a dead end, but now a ribbon of hope begins to weave through Felix's stomach. She spreads the dress around her legs on the floor. The scent of brittle fabric embroiders the stronger chocolate smell.

“Let me start by saying I don't believe in ghosts,” Luke begins. “That mumbo-jumbo is thick on the reservation, and that kind of backward thinking never got anyone
off
the reservation. Drives me crazy when Tawn gets all spooked in the million ways she gets spooked.”

The house is quiet. Felix rubs her bare forearms and wiggles her toes. She holds her breath.

“Still,” says Luke, “maybe I should qualify that. I
didn't
believe in ghosts. This was in… oh, '74? '75? Almost everyone had left town. They'd finally closed the mill, and everything else fell like dominoes. I had plans to go live with my son and his wife in Angels Camp till I could find a place around there, but he and I weren't getting along too well, and I was reluctant to leave this dive. That's how I found myself spending one last night at the Lilac Mines Hotel, even though it was closed and one of the floors had been burnt up in a fire.

“You know the place? They bulldozed it, then built one that looked just like it right over the top.”
Like Berlin,
Felix thinks, recalling Eva's email. The accompanying pang is slightly less gut-wrenching than she expects. “They used photos from my collection to figure out what it was supposed to look like. It's all tarted up, and now they call it something else. Over on East Main. Lily's, that's it. 'Lily's of Lilac Bed & Breakfast.' One of those names that sounds nice to a certain kind of traveler but doesn't mean anything at all. The doll who owns it is named Becky—there's no Lily.”

Luke scratches his head. His hair is thick. His brows fold over his eyelids; it seems like blinking would be tiring. Three of Felix's grandparents died before she was born, and her remaining grandmother, her mother's mother, died when she was six. Felix remembers pearl earrings, a teacup patterned with rosebuds. It's been a long time since she's seen an old person up close.

“I had a lot on my mind and I thought a good night's sleep might help. Actually, I thought a good strong drink might help, but there was nowhere to get one. Everyone had left. Everyone. So I laid down on a bed in one of the less burned-out rooms. It was May, but it was cold in that damned place. I balled myself up like a baby in a scratchy old blanket at the foot of the bed.”

Felix wants him to get to the point. She wants to know where she comes in. She folds and unfolds a Krackle wrapper.

“I fell asleep easy and woke up late. Don't know what finally woke me up. You know how it is, sometimes you wake up in the middle of the story.” Luke talks like an old school detective novel, but one that needs editing. Raymond Chandler by way of senior citizen. “I sat up quick, didn't know where the hell I was. Do that more and more these days, but back then I was keen. I was 50ish and thought I was ancient, thought I had sharpened my cynicism to a fine point.

“Let me tell you though, what I saw that afternoon threw me for a loop. I felt it before I saw it, really. You know how you can feel someone standing behind you? I was facing the door, but at first I didn't see anything. Then she walked by. In a dress like a cloud at sunset. Mostly I saw the dress. Snatch of brown hair. She was walking fast, like she was running late. I was still sleepy, mind you. But I got out of bed and stumbled for the doorway.”

Felix sees it: the door framing the moving portrait. Luke rubs his chin.

“I stumbled for that doorway, and looked down the hall. Looked both ways. But she wasn't there. I called out, even though I didn't know her name. I called out, 'Lilac!' First girl's name that came to my mind. I rounded the corner. Not there. Looked in some other rooms. Not there.”

“Do you think it was a ghost?” Felix whispers. She is a little kid at a campfire. She wants to be scared and comforted.

“Tough call,” says Luke. “I'm a man of science, like I said. But I tell you,
everyone
had left town.”

If this is true, Felix wonders where her aunt went during this time. But Luke seemed a little odd when he published his history book; two and a half decades haven't likely made him saner.

“Do you think it was her?” Felix presses. “You know, Lilac?”

“Not for me to say,” Luke concludes. “But if I
were
to say. I'd say yes. Never saw anything like it before .or since. But why shouldn't it be possible? We all have electric energy pulsing through us. It stands to reason that when we die—”

Downstairs the door slams. Luke puts a finger to his lips. His fingernails are pink against the dark skin of his hands. Felix nods. She hadn't even thought about the supernatural, but maybe Lilac the ghost is more real than Lilac the person.

The children of Lilac Mines are hungry for a haunted house: ghosts and bumblebees, ballerinas and vampires, thumb-sucking pumpkins, scared Spidermen, an angel who steals candy by the handful.
It's Lilac!
they whisper when a white undershirt ghost floats overhead. Felix hadn't given the haunted house any particular theme, but it takes on a local flare of its own. Tawn gets into it. Leading the shy ones by the hand. Squirting extra fake blood at the boastful ones.

In the candlelight she's a convincing witch, thin white hands dancing at the end of her billowing sleeves. Her pointed hat is wrinkled and twisted. She moves between the faux walls of the haunted house like a forest creature, like she could cast a spell.

Felix thinks Tawn is probably more interesting than anyone at the Terrorgasm Ball. She is beautiful, even, in the way that knotted tree roots are beautiful, and French manicures are not.

Between Tawn's transformation and Luke's information, Felix makes a distracted mistress of the dark. Outside, the cloudy sky darkens to a flat, starless black. The kids get bigger. They carry pillowcases instead of jack-o-lantern pails. Felix and Tawn hide behind a sheet and let them go through the maze by themselves.

“I remember them coming to the door when I was little, the big kids, after I was back from trick-or-treating,” Felix remembers. “They seemed so tough. I was always afraid they'd smash my pumpkin. But they look so small now.”

Through a sliver between two sheets, she watches a skinny Grim Reaper peel off his hood and look around anxiously. He steels his scythe, as if it weren't made of plastic.

“Devon?” he calls out to his friend, a short Chewbacca who is already several sheet-rooms ahead. “Devon?” His voice is higher this time.

“Maybe we should turn the lights on,” Felix whispers to Tawn.