Lilac Mines (21 page)

“What is it, exactly?” says one of Suzy's friends politely.

That's the problem, of course. It isn't anything. It doesn't
do
anything, it doesn't even hold flowers. Meg feels heavy and useless, too, beneath the ladies' cheerful gaze. “It's, um, just a decoration, I guess,” Meg mumbles. Her ears are hot. She's sweating fiercely. She can't even come up with a good story this time. She hates them all. More silence. What was Meg thinking? That she could come here, present Al with a jar of broken glass, and whisk her back to Lilac Mines, all while making small talk with the knitting club?

Finally, the girl named Nancy-Jane says brightly, “Oh, like arts and crafts?”

“Well, um…” Meg begins. But then she quickly agrees, “Right, yes, like arts and crafts.”

Mrs. Hill announces a little too loudly, “Well, I think that's
lovely,
Meg. That's how we used to do it, back when I was a girl. We all gave each other handmade gifts, every holiday. It's nice to see a young lady who understands tradition.”

Meg nods. Maybe she doesn't hate Mrs. Hill. Al looks like she's going to cry. Meg will hate her if she cries because Meg feels like crying herself. “Thank you,” Al whispers. “I'll keep it.”

As soon as the last curl of ribbon hits the floor, Meg says, “I have to go.”

“You have a long drive ahead of you,” Mrs. Hill nods. “Back to… where is it, dear?”

“Lilac Mines.”

“I'll walk Meg to her car,” Al tells her mother.

“But sweetheart, your guests…” They're standing at the edge of the parlor. The women are clustering again. It must be something in their genes. Even most of the bar femmes do this.

“I'll be right back, Mother,” Al says impatiently.

They walk down the gravel road toward Meg's old Ford. There's a breeze, finally, although it is not cool. The big egg-yolk sun looks exhausted as it sinks into the flat horizon.

“I never wanted to be normal, you know,” Meg says off-handedly into the hot wind. She doesn't look at Al. “Not even when I was little. Not even when my mother was alive. I was always running away, just to run away. I never wanted to go to tea parties.”

“I know,” Al sighs, “it's what I always liked about you.”

“But,” Meg adds, “it would have been nice to be asked.” When she was around Al, at the beginning, she felt like she was being invited to a hundred tea parties. Everything's quiet. Here is Meg's car that will not take them to the mine tonight, that will not bathe them in dusty yellow light while they devour each other's bodies.

“Why are you doing this?” Meg says finally. She is not afraid of being hurt. She is not afraid of knowing. Al squirms, but Meg can give herself over to the ache. She wants to put a shard of purple glass in Al's hands and hold out her pale white wrists.
Just do it,
she silently dares Al.
Just cut through my veins.
Out of the corner of her eye, Meg sees someone running toward them. Soon the figure turns into Suzy, her gold hair floating behind her as her boots pound the gravel.

“Meg! You forgot your party favor!” She thrusts a small flowerpot into Meg's hands. It contains tiny, perfect pink roses. She knows it will die—she has no patience for the slow, finicky lifecycle of plants—but she thanks Suzy politely.

“Goodbye, Meg,” says Al steadily, eyeing Suzy, “I'm glad you came.” She kisses Meg lightly on the cheek, and Meg can feel her lips quivering.

Meg keeps her foot on the gas the whole way back, narrowly missing a late-grazing deer. She pulls into Lilac's and orders a shot of whiskey. She likes the way the alcohol sizzles through her body like a threat. It's a Sunday night, and the bar is sparsely populated.

“Rough day?” Caleb asks when she orders a second shot.

“Just let Jean know that I saw Al and she kissed me,” Meg says with a half-smile. She spent much of her drive reminding herself of her original plan. If Al didn't know what she was missing, she would make sure Jean sure did.

Caleb narrows his ale-colored eyes. “Is this one of your games, Meg, honey? Because Jean is back with Miz Sylvie. You knew that, right?”

“Shit, Caleb, you're kidding me, right? They've been broken up for a year.”

“Well, they were in here last night, slow dancing and necking like the world was ending. And you know Sylvie, she doesn't do that sort of thing with a butch who's not her steady.”

“Goddamn… She didn't say anything to me.” Meg lights her cigarette and offers her open box to Caleb, who takes one and lights it off Meg's. “Honestly, it was months.”

“I guess there's always hope,” Caleb says absently, wiping down the bar.

“Bullshit,” says Meg.

The wedding is in December, that's what someone at the shower said. Winter comes but no invitation arrives.

The letter is wrinkled from so many readings, and smells faintly of vanilla. Meg's sprawling handwriting plainly states,
You'll be done with school soon. Why don't you come visit me?
This invitation has kept Petra going for months, through bitter meetings and irksome finals and her parents' well-meaning graduation party.

The only good thing about Kerhonkson, New York, Petra Blumenschein decides on her way back to the city, is their family's long gravel driveway. The sort of driveway where (after your parents give you a generous graduation check and demand to know when you're applying to PhD programs) you can paint your '65 Thunderbird purple.

“But that car's a beaut,” Meg's father had protested, “and only five years old!” Petra always nodded politely at his nosy neighbor comments. His wife had left the earth and his daughter had left town, and Petra could smell his sadness of burnt coffee and clothes retrieved from the hamper. It made her want to tell him,
I know where your daughter is. She's in a place with black mountains and gold-pink sunsets.

“It's more beautiful this way,” Petra grinned, but didn't expect him to understand.

With the windows down, her wavy blonde hair whips in the wind and cool air rushes over her bare arms, but she's not fooled. The city is about to begin another hot, writhing summer. For four years now, she's joined her fellow NYU students in protesting the war, racism, pollution, and patriarchy. They've screamed all day and smoked all night. Now New York announces itself once again, a charcoal silhouette on the horizon beyond the matte-purple nose of her car.

Lately she's gotten tired of championing everyone else's cause. Even her women's group, Women for Equality on Earth (a.k.a. WEE), has fragmented like a building going co-op. Most of the girls are focused on legalizing abortion, and Petra just can't get into it. Ever since she abandoned sleeping with guys, she hasn't had to worry about that. When she pulls into Soho, it's almost dark. By the time she finds a parking place and walks up the five flights of stairs to her apartment, the WEE meeting is over. Only those too zealous or too stoned to go home remain. And Francine, of course.

“Where were you?” Francine greets her at the door. “You said you'd be back by six at the latest.”

“I had to wait for my car to dry. Fran, it's so cool. I wish you could see it from the window. I painted it purple. I'm gonna call it The Lavender Menace. Get it? Then we can run over those…”

“Sshhh,” hisses Francine, “some of them are still here.” Her lips are pursed, a tight asterisk.

Petra sighs, “So no kiss?” She steps inside and tosses her big cloth satchel on the bed.

The two remaining WEE women, a reformed sorority girl and a jaded communist, shoot sharp looks in her direction. Petra glares back. This is her apartment… well, hers and Francine's and their Greek subletter's.

“Is that a letter from the girl you grew up with?” Francine asks, all friendly-cuddly, the fringe on her blouse tickling Petra's bare shoulders. Petra smiles at the person she first encountered six months ago, back when they were breaking up with their male chauvinist boyfriends, back when they discovered each other's soft girl-skin.

“She wants me to visit her,” Petra replies. “I'm going to do better than that. I'm going to
move
out there, to California. And you can come with me.”

Francine takes her arm from Petra's shoulders and rakes her fingers through her wild brown hair, frowning.

“Come
on,”
Petra presses. “It will be fun.”

“I don't know,” Francine says reluctantly. “There's really so much going on here.”

“That's the problem. Too much has already happened. We can't have a meeting without arguing about some theory from some other meeting. I need to be out west, Fran, where the air doesn't turn your lungs black.” Petra perches on the window ledge by the fire escape. “I'm smart, Fran. I know that's blasphemy in WEE, saying you're actually good at something and not just a worker bee for the movement, but it's true. And I'm sick of them not listening to us because we want 'too much, too fast.' They call it strategy, but it's just another way of calling us queer.”

Francine is glued to the bed. Her round face is shadowy, anguished. “Let me think about it,” she says softly. “Let me think about it. Give me some time.”

Petra leaves the next morning. She wakes up sweating, wearing the summer humidity like a too-small shirt, and she can't take it one second longer. She kisses Francine's sleeping face. Fran's peanut butter-brown hair is fanned out on the pillow like sunrays. Her mouth is slack, a sort of stoned smile. Francine is so beautiful when she's relaxed. Petra will try to remember her like this.

Surprisingly, the Greek subletter wants to come along. Agapi has attended a handful of WEE meetings and is now nominally a feminist.
She's just in it for the pot and free food,
Francine had said. But that seems cynical, especially when Petra watches Agapi rope her suitcase to the roof of the Lavender Menace. She's a thick-trunked girl with wiry copper-black hair that's always hovering dangerously close to her lit cigarette. She is happy to pump when they gas up at the Esso station on Broadway. When they pass the shoe repair shop where she works, Agapi waves to the dark window and shouts, “Fuck with you, Mr. Theophilus.”

They reach Pennsylvania by lunchtime, Cleveland by nightfall. Petra is glad to have a travel partner, even if it's not Francine. The dingy motel where they're staying would make her nervous on her own, despite the six judo lessons she took in an East Village basement last year.

“You have a girl in the Lilac Town?” Agapi asks. She's stretched out on the bed in her white cotton underwear. Her blouse is open, revealing an equally no-nonsense bra and olive-colored breasts as big as grapefruits. Agapi is definitely a go-with-the-flow kind of girl.

Petra says, “Lilac Mines. I don't 'have a girl' there, but yeah, I know someone. Meg. She grew up across the street from me in Kerhonkson. After her mom died when she was 10, she spent a ton of time at our place. She was kind of like my big sister. She moved to Santa Clara, which is kind of near San Francisco, I think, for college, and wrote me letters. I was just a kid and I thought they were about the neatest thing in the world. Then when
I
went to college and wrote to her—she was probably the only person from Kerhonkson who didn't think I'd gone off the deep end.” Petra laughs.

Petra slips off her flowered nightgown. She's not about to be out-nuded. “I went back and reread some of her old letters and it was all there—stuff about the women she was with. How she got kicked out of Santa Clara University for an 'indiscretion' in the dorms. I thought that meant her room was a mess,” she laughs. “It's so trippy, looking back from an enlightened perspective.”

The woman who opens the door of the shabby wooden cottage looks like a secretary. She's wearing a yellow polyester dress and high heels. Her sculpted brown hair is clearly the product of curlers. She is a catalog of oppressive beauty regimens. They've arrived in Lilac Mines on a Friday afternoon after two and a half weeks on the road. Petra's stomach is doing flip-flops. She's not sure if it's from the mountain roads or the anticipation.

“Meg?” It comes out as a squeal.

“Petra! God, you're a full-grown woman!” Meg pulls her in for a bone-squeezing hug. Then she stands back and takes in Petra's patched bellbottoms, Madras plaid shirt, and tangled blonde hair.

Over the last few years, Petra has reconstructed Meg in her mind, from the teenager who told her ghost stories about the abandoned cattle barn on Abel Drive while braiding her hair, to a frontier-living rebel. But the woman in front of her looks like a nice lady enjoying smalltown life. Petra prays to goddess that she hasn't come all this way for nothing. Meg shakes Agapi's hand and helps them with their suitcases. She gestures for them to sit down on the sagging couch and brings them tea in mismatched cups.

“I didn't know you'd be bringing a friend,” Meg says. “I don't have room for you both, but I have some friends you might be able to stay with. They live in an old church not too far from here. Well, it's not a church anymore…”

“Right on!” Petra enthuses. A big, abandoned building is exactly what she needs. She will paint her perfect world on the walls.

“But it's freezing in the winter, and no one has their own bedroom,” explains Meg, puzzled.

“Rooms just keep people apart,” says Petra. “They're meant to divide people.”

“What is it you girls want to do here, exactly?” Meg asks.

“New York has too much negative energy,” Petra says. “ I just have this sense that things could be perfect out here. We could build a whole new society.”

“A whole new society?” repeats Meg. “Um, you know this town is basically two bars, one hotel, and a post office, right?”

Petra nods. “Room to grow.”

“Petra's mama and papa give her a big chunk of money,” Agapi adds.

“Just enough to get started,” Petra says quickly. For former communists, Dr. and Dr. Blumenschein earn good money; and because they are still semi-communists, they are generous about sharing it.

“I am bored,” Agapi announces. “Before the new society, let's go out, no?”

“I could take you to Lilac's,” Meg offers. “It's the gay bar.
Officially,
this town only has one bar, Lou's.” She smiles, revealing big teeth with a small gap in front. “I'll make dinner while you change.”

“What do you mean?” Petra looks down at her rumpled shirt and jeans. She sewed the patches—a turtle and a duck—on the pockets herself.

“I just figured you'd want to dress up a bit. I can loan you some clothes if you don't want to unpack yet. Agapi, I bet Sunny—she's my butch—has a jacket that would fit you. Anything she's left in my closet is yours.”

Meg's face radiates warmth, and Petra almost wants to return the favor, to say
Yes, we'll wear your dresses and suits.

“Why you say I'm butch?” Agapi doesn't sound offended, but stares with her round, dark eyes.

“Oh… well, I guess I don't know,” muses Meg.

“It's just that we don't believe in gender roles,” Petra says politely. She likes the way it sounds, as if this is one of the rules of their collective. She feels it forming inside all of them, a bead, an idea, a baby.

“Suit yourself. Or don't,” Meg laughs.

And so, after a dinner of beans and crunchy rice, they pile into Meg's car, an ancient Ford that makes a troubling noise whenever Meg brakes, which she does suddenly whenever a stop sign pops out of the twilight. As if the town she's lived in for a decade is full of surprises.

Calla Boulevard is so steep that Petra's nails make half-moons in her palms as she grips the door handle. Quaint but ragged buildings line the street. Petra's first thought when they enter the smoky, dilapidated bar is that they must have walked into Lou's by accident. Or maybe back in time, to the '50s or junior high school: men on one side, women on the other. But most of the men are women, of course. Dressed with precision in crisp shirts and ties, as if in defiance of the bar's chipped glasses and weak yellow light.

This is not her whole new world. But it is definitely a
world:
it is Friday night and the bar is packed with gay men and lesbians basking in its Friday night-ness, safe in the rhythms of the bar. There are more people here than on Main Street when Petra and her friend drove into town.

“It's so crowded,” Petra whispers to Meg. “How…?”

“I don't know how,” laughs Meg. “A million reasons, probably. Not enough men to work at the mill? The town's named after a girl? Who knows? That's just Lilac Mines for you.”

Agapi walks up to the bar and orders a beer. Meg waves to a white woman in a suit and a black woman with relaxed hair that doesn't look very relaxed.

A man leaning on the jukebox, glowing in the reflected neon, looks the newcomers up and down. “Ooh, hippies,” he purrs to the femme standing next to him. She chews her gum in agreement.

There are four other lesbians living in the church: Imogen and Jody—the black and white couple from the bar—and Jean and Sylvie, also frustratingly butch/femme. Sylvie is so quiet, Gapi says, that she wants to strangle the girl with her own omnipresent needle and thread. But Petra convinces her that Sylvie just needs enlightening. Meg comes to visit, but not as much as Petra would like. She spends a lot of time in San Andreas with Sunny.

By September, when Petra's parents would like her to be starting graduate school, she has wooed another WEE exile from New York. Marilyn Joice, who has an IQ of 162 and glasses that cover a third of her classically beautiful face, helps Petra and Agapi string beads over the doorway of the church kitchen. They also draft a manifesto and install a new toilet.

“Wouldn't it be more natural to use the outhouse?” asks Petra. There is nothing about revolutionary plumbing in the manifesto, but maybe there should be.

“I'm not sure, I think sewage has to be treated,” says Marilyn. “It might be
worse
for the environment.”

“When I am on the rag, I'm not crapping in shack,” says Gapi, and that settles it.

They've replaced the dangerous-looking wood-burning stove with a gas heater. They've planted a vegetable garden that has yielded two delicious tomatoes and a handful of stunted zucchini.

In October, Petra suggests a séance. The women have been bickering, and she thinks a good pagan ritual would bring them together.

“I have a theory that it's Lilac Ambrose's spirit—that that's why there are so many lesbians in such a small town,” Petra tells Marilyn.