Lilac Mines (24 page)

“Twenty-five cents each,” Imogen says. She keeps her eyes on Petra.

“Yeah, but are they… ” He lowers his voice. “I mean, are there any
special ingredients?”

“Oh. Those will cost you a buck, and you'll have to ask Agapi. She's the woman on the drums over there. But wait till she's done.”

Imogen hands out oatmeal cookies and carob-chip muffins, and watches and watches. There are people who bend under the weight of the world, she thinks, like timid Al seemed to, and people who wrestle it, like Meg. Then there are people like Petra, who bend the world to them. Petra dances over to the baked goods table. “Can you believe this?” she bubbles. “People love it!”

“I know.”

“Can I have a sip of your iced tea?” Petra nods toward the half-full Emily-made mug at the edge of the table.

“ 'Course.” Imogen hands it to her, and Petra gulps. “But you know you could get a whole glass from Marilyn at the beverage table.”

Petra smiles with small straight teeth. She had braces as a child. “I know.” She goes back to her dance.

The drums are not hard to play. The key, Imogen discovers during her dance rotation, is to let her hands lead. Skin bouncing off skin, sweating beneath the late afternoon sun. Massassi doing her thing inches from Imogen and a world away.

“This is wonderful, just wonderful,” gushes a white woman who is already wearing one of the Lilac Mines Festival '71 T-shirts that Emily silk-screened. “My husband, he said this was a bunch of nonsense, but I kept telling him, 'Carl, it's good to know how other people live.' “

Imogen's final shift is at the tie-dyeing station. She shows the festival-goers how to bind T-shirts and cotton skirts and even a canvas hat with twine, and submerge them in buckets of dye. Red and green and eggplant purple. When they unfurl the wadded items, there are white lines snaking through the newly red or green or purple clothes. The grin and shake their heads at the results. Who knew that
their
boring old work shirts could be so transformed? Perhaps anything is possible. They clap their red and green and purple hands. Imogen feels a hand on her shoulder.

It's Jody, who has been grilling hamburgers in the church kitchen. She points toward Petra, who has resumed her place dancing beside Massassi. “What a goofball.”

“Oh, come on, you gotta admit she's good,” Imogen laughs. “She's got her own goofball rhythm.”

Jody hugs Imogen from behind, putting her hand on Imogen's stomach. She has never done this outside of home or Lilac's. Two young girls with their arms in the buckets look up at them. Imogen feels the weight of Jody's large palm, smells the hamburger grease. The girls blink and go back to their inky ponds.

This can happen,
Imogen thinks. The sun is bright above them, the air is new and piney, as if spring is not a season but a revolution.

The gesture ends after a few seconds, and Jody slips one of the dry shirts—pale green with a trail of white spiraling out from the left shoulder—over her head. Imogen looks at her butch. She knows where they fall, she and Jody. They are the ones who stay.

The cradle is perfect. The dark red wood is worn so smooth that the cradle seems to promise a splinterless life. A soft, cream-colored blanket is folded inside.

“My mother knitted it,” Terry explains. He holds the cradle in his arm, as if it's the baby itself. “She thought it would be bad luck to give it to me empty. Can you believe I fit in here once? And my dad before me? And that this is made from a tree that grew in a Russian forest somewhere?”

He sets it down in the spare room he insisted on painting pale yellow. For Terry it's always been a matter of when, not if. In theory Anna Lisa feels the same. But she is 25 now, Terry 31, and she can't bring herself to stop taking her small pastel pills every day after breakfast. Lately, Terry seems to have adopted a strategy of material evidence. If they have a yellow room and an heirloom cradle and the tricycle that the Sammartinos' son recently outgrew, soon they'll have to have a baby to occupy the place they've created.

Terry sits down on the guest bed—Anna Lisa's twin bed, imported from her parents' house—and admires the cradle. It's a pink Sunday in June, the kind that could grow a baby all on its own. Through the open window, with its sighing white curtains, Anna Lisa can see her flower and vegetable garden in the backyard. It's bursting with delphiniums and purple, lion-headed flowers called Lilac Time Dahlias. It turns out she has a bright green thumb. She half expects to see an infant crawl out of the cabbages.

Terry gestures for her to join him. “Come, look. Doesn't it just all make perfect sense?”

She sits down next to him, but doesn't touch him. “I know you're anxious, but I can't pretend I'm ready when I'm not.”

“You're 25! If not now, when? I'm just being practical.”

Which is of course part of the problem: Terry is practical and the wisps of thoughts that float through Anna Lisa's head are not. She can't tell him:
I'm a butch, I'm not getting pregnant.
“Maybe I should babysit Wally Jr. more. You know, to get used to it.”

Terry unbuttons his wide-collared brown shirt and folds it neatly. He has the beginning of a belly beneath his undershirt, which Anna Lisa supposes most wives would find charming. But his body is always waiting for her, or disappointed in her, or reminding her how things are supposed to be. “Annie, I don't think being a mother is something you 'get used to.' It's what we're born to do, it's nature.”

What's the reason?
Anna Lisa asks herself sternly. She likes children. She loves building block towers with Wally Jr., then smashing them with a vigor that is frowned upon in adult circles. She loves Terry. Or at least, she is linked to him in a way that cannot be separated from love. And she wouldn't mind giving up her part-time job at The Quill Pen. She's gotten enough paper cuts to last a lifetime. So… what?

“I wish you'd talk to me more about things,” he says. His embrace clamps her arms at his sides. “Sometimes it's like you're only half here.”

“That's just how I am. I just don't have a lot to talk about,” Anna Lisa protests. Her thoughts grow inward, like roots in a potted plant.

“That's not true. I see you, Annie. You're beautiful and brilliant and interesting and mysterious. Or at least, that's how I've always thought of you. But maybe it's just that you're not that interested in me. Maybe you're always dreaming about being somewhere else.” His voice grows small and nervous. “Or with another man?”

“Don't be crazy. I couldn't be with anyone else. I can't even imagine it.” And this is true. She thinks about Meg all the time, but those feelings are ancient and historical, not the kind that might be linked to action.

“Promise?” Terry turns to face her. Anna Lisa shakes out her arms, and he rubs her thighs through her jeans. Soon he is unzipping them, peeling off her blue paisley blouse. It's been a while since they've had sex, longer since they've undressed each other.

Even though Anna Lisa is on the pill, Terry always makes love like he's trying to produce a baby, industrious and cheerful if not quite passionate. His thrusts are rhythmic, as if the inside of Anna Lisa is not a cave to be explored but a closet to be swept. It's reassuring, in a way, as if they're both concluding,
No mystery here, just some shirts to fold!
She tries not to be one of those I-Have-A-Headache wives. She can't give him her mind or her past, so her body is a consolation prize.

“Thank you,” he says when he rolls off of her. “That was nice.”

Afterward, Terry watches TV in the family room, and Anna Lisa begins dinner in the connected kitchen. It seems the hard part of the day has passed. She moves lightly from fridge to cupboards to stove.

“I'm trying a new recipe,” she calls to Terry. “This casserole with brown rice and cheese and artichoke hearts.”

“Brown rice and what?” he asks over the sound of a sports game.

“Artichoke hearts.”

“Sounds strange.”

“Well, it's new. We'll see.”

They eat off trays in the family room, the evening news unfurling in front of them. They bought the color television a few weeks ago. Now olive-green planes soar over Crayola-green jungles and light Halloween-orange fires. Then the whole scene is eclipsed by thick black smoke, somehow different than the black of their black-and-white TV.

“What a thing to see in color,” Anna Lisa sighs.

“I don't know what to wish for anymore,” Terry says. “For America to do more, or do less.”

She touches the blue veins on his hand. It comforts her to know that Terry is capable of something other than complete self-assurance when it comes to his own desires.

The story switches. A young woman news reporter with a bright red beehive stands against a crowd of men. “I'm here in San Francisco where local homosexuals are marching up Folsom Street in observance of what they call 'Christopher Street Liberation Day,' ” she says. “They say that they're here to prove there's nothing wrong with homosexuality. But as you'll see, some are nearly naked, and some are even dressed as women. A theatrical group calling themselves the Cockettes 'mooned' our cameraman.” She looks nervous, like she's not sure whether this is a funny human interest story or the next Kent State. The men are a parade of color in yellow feathered headdresses and pink feather boas, tight blue jeans and tanned hairy chests. Signs painted with red letters: COME OUT!; GAY LIBERATION NOW!; RED, WHITE, BLUE & LAVENDER. The day is golden around them.

San Francisco is so far away. Anna Lisa looks down at her dinner. She thought she was being adventurous, going to the Safeway instead of her parents' store for artichoke hearts. Writing names in increasingly calligraphic handwriting on scraps of paper, then stowing them in strange, secret places. She knows why she doesn't want to have a baby: she can't bring a child into a world she doesn't know how to fully participate in. How can she tell it
Do your best, be your best
when she has no idea how to do it herself? She would doom her son or daughter to mediocrity. That would be her legacy.

“Can you believe it?” Terry remarks. “A parade of homosexuals?!”

Anna Lisa feels her face and neck turn as red as the letters on the signs. “It makes them happy,” she whispers. “It seems to.”

“Say it's true what the homosexuals say, that they were born that way,” Terry says in his his which-councilman-should-we-vote-for voice, “that still doesn't make it something to be
proud
of. You can only be proud of something you've worked for. Worked at. A business or a house. Or a child you've raised.”

There was a time when Anna Lisa believed that Terry saved her from something desperate, being a lesbian or an old maid. Lately she's been wondering if he's keeping her from something. It's a tiny, bitter voice inside her, and quickly stifled by the thick chords of their life. She's in deep. There are her parents: her father's condition is steady but demanding, while her mother's arthritis is unpredictable though often undetectable. There is this house and its papers showing both their names. There is the store and more papers with both their names. It was a big gesture from Terry: these are your envelopes, too, your three-ring binders, your plastic sheet covers, your No. 2 pencils. There are the Sammartinos and the Carys and the Jensens. There is bowling on Saturdays and church on Sundays.

And, of course, there is Terry himself. Anna Lisa cannot break his heart, so she lets her own grow so small and hard that it, too, is unbreakable, a miniature bowling ball.

Looking around the classroom, Anna Lisa is acutely aware of her age. Most of these kids were born in the '50s. Their shaggy hair and lazily draped clothing, though, emits a long stoned cackle at that decade. A girl in a plaid vest and clashing pants sits cross-legged on the desk next to her. She hands Anna Lisa a bright yellow flyer. “The Women's Collective is having a meeting tomorrow afternoon.”

Anna Lisa holds the flyer gingerly, as if leaving fingerprints might implicate her. “What do you do there?”

“Oh, you know, CR, talk about books, that sort of thing.” She pushes a strand of dark hair behind her ear.

“CR?”

“Consciousness-raising. If you have to ask, your consciousness probably needs to be raised.”

The prospect sounds frightening to Anna Lisa. This girl, with her shiny face and bold clothing, doesn't seem like she has anything to hide. Even her subconscious is probably a straight clean wishing well.

“Thanks for the invitation,” Anna Lisa says. She folds the flyer and slips it into the index pages of her new textbook. She wants to go to the meeting, she wants to soak up youth and femaleness until her consciousness rises so high it spills out her ears. And the intensity of her desire is precisely why she can't go. She reminds herself that she's at Cal State Fresno to become a nurse, not to join clubs.

The girl picks up on Anna Lisa's wariness. “It's not like we burn our bras or go lesbian or anything.”

Anna Lisa nods and looks down at her book. It is September. In July, she missed her period. She didn't tell Terry. She waited with dread for her body to do something definitive. While she waited she made a list:

Little scraps from TV, names signed to checks. She gathers them everywhere. Always girls' names. Then, in August, blood came like rain in the dry summer, and Anna Lisa was as grateful as cracked earth. Her body was just playing tricks on her, daring her to make a decision. She tore up the list of names, although she's made others since, and then torn them up, too. If she did not want children with Terry, she needed to do something. And her life seemed to be hinting that she
could
do something. Maybe not
anything,
but something.

Cal State Fresno had just started its nursing program, and allowed Anna Lisa to apply over the summer for admission to the first fall class. She feels strange sitting at a classroom desk again. Her butt takes up more of the seat than it did in high school. DONNY '67 is carved into the Formica surface. She conjugates in her head: Donny, Donald, Don, Dawn, Donna.

Anna Lisa is grateful to see an older woman enter the room. Dressed in a tweed skirt and ruffled blouse, with a red scarf knotted at her starting-to-wrinkle neck, her neat straw-colored curls are beginning to gray. Anna Lisa half hopes the woman will sit at the empty desk to her left, half prays that she won't. She's not sure if she would be young in contrast, or old by association.

But the woman walks straight to the front of the classroom. She takes her place behind the wooden podium, and clears her throat. Slowly, the buzzing kids quiet down. “Hello, welcome to Anatomy 64. I'm Professor Rettig. We'll be learning many interesting things this semester—the human body is a fascinating machine. I trust that you've all purchased the textbook for this class,
Introduction to Human Biology?
You'll be able to use it in Nursing 10 as well, so don't let the price panic you too much.”

Anna Lisa takes her book out of her bag and puts it on top of DONNY '67. She can't believe the professor is a woman. It makes the class feel more like high school, which is both comforting and disappointing. She's immediately intrigued by this Professor Rettig. A. Rettig, it said in the schedule of classes. Her own Aunt Randi taught at Pepperdine before retiring last year, but that was music, not science, and she wasn't a full professor. (Suzy is still in L.A. She works for a company that manufactures party supplies. Anna Lisa pictures her in a warehouse surrounded by balloons and streamers and paper hats. It seems about right.) All of Anna Lisa's own jobs have been out of necessity, and haven't demanded any skills she couldn't learn on the job.

Professor Rettig unrolls a screen above the blackboard. On it there are two transparent figures, one male and one female. Anna Lisa feels slightly bashful. A woman up there with those exposed bodies—it seems too intimate. But she supposes she'll have to get used to these things if she's going to be a nurse. There are so many things she's afraid of, but she doesn't mind blood or dirt or standing up for a long time. She thinks she can do it.

“Who can tell me what the biggest organ in the body is?” Professor Rettig asks.

“The liver,” a boy in the front row says confidently.

“Good guess, but no. Anyone else?”

“The lungs?” says the Women's Collective meeting girl. “Are they one organ or two?”

“Actually,” says Professor Rettig, “it's the skin. Your skin is one big organ, with three distinct layers. These guys”—she gestures to the bodies on the screen—”don't have any. But it's an extremely important organ.”

Anna Lisa writes down “skin.” She studies the palm of her hand, with its tiny crosshatches and deep destiny lines. It makes sense: the thing that covers you and holds you in, the first thing people see. Of course, it is huge.