Lilac Mines (30 page)

Anna Lisa touches its splintery letters reverently. This was the colony that was born and died while she was elsewhere. This is the cousin she never knew, whose waxy face she examines in search of a family resemblance.

She drives down Silver and Washoe and Gemini Streets. They're all the same: boarded-up buildings that won't quite look at her, plus a business still open every four or five blocks, like gravediggers in a plague-town. Anna Lisa marvels that the residents have left so quickly and cleanly. The mill closed just a few months before Jody called her. There's something cruel about their efficiency.

She reaches Meg's house at two miles an hour. The small brown house is nothing like Meg. It is compact and unassuming. There are faded blue-and-white curtains in the living room window, off-white ones in the kitchen. The feeling that grew inside her—that sprouted small white buds when she put on the dress in the hotel—curls up, dehydrated. Meg's house looks like all the other boarded-up houses. Anyone could live here.

Anna Lisa sits in her car and wonders if she should go home now. To Fresno. To Terry. Suzy and Martin won't even have left on their honeymoon yet. Except she's already done that. She's already turned around when Meg and Lilac Mines failed to eclipse the rest of her universe. So, for the sake of difference, she steps out of the car, climbs the porch, and tries the door. It's locked, as if Meg is standing on the other side, keeping her out. Anna Lisa feels a rush of red anger. She remembers how Meg did that—got mad or weepy and wouldn't tell Anna Lisa why. She was like a wild animal smelling something on the wind that humans couldn't sense. Anna Lisa becomes more determined to get inside.

She tries all of the windows, but they're either locked or stuck. At the back of the house, she finds an old shoe. One of Meg's? It's a silver lamé heel; the outside toe is scuffed black. She feels like a silver miner:
Eureka!
She could use a rock, of course. It might be more effective, but she feels stronger, more womanly, smashing the silver heel against the back bedroom window. The glass smashes easily, like it was waiting for her. She pulls the sleeve of her brown leather coat over her fist and clears the wreckage. Glass falls inside and outside the window.

When she hoists herself over the ledge, she finds herself on Meg's bed. It's facing west now. She and Meg used to watch the sun rise through the eastern window. And instead of the pale quilt Anna Lisa remembers, there's a bright red comforter. Did she really think Meg wouldn't have gotten a new blanket in twelve years?

Nevertheless, she searches the house for pieces of Meg, of herself. Her record collection is fatter. A paperback called
Sappho Was a Right-On Woman
lies atop a pile of laundry. Anna Lisa vaguely recalls that Sappho is a poet. Did Meg like poetry? There are a few dishes and a painting of a mermaid that has fallen from the wall. It's signed
Essie Brenner.
A flowerpot the size of Anna Lisa's fist holds spare buttons. Why does it grab her attention? It take a few minutes, but Anna Lisa finally recognizes the little terracotta pot as the party favor from her bridal shower years ago. Why didn't Jody and Imogen claim any of these things? What about Meg's father? Were they all too heartbroken to go through the house? Too busy? Then again, the rooms are fairly sparse. Maybe they already took what they wanted.

The dark, hulking wardrobe where Meg kept her clothes has been pulled away from the wall. It looks like a lunging beast, as if it attacked Meg rather than stood stoically as she looped rope over its doors. If that's what she did. Anna Lisa doesn't know the mechanics of hanging. The act belongs to another era, one of high-noon shoot-outs and executioners in black hoods. It makes sense, in a way. Meg was the most Wild West girl Anna Lisa ever knew. She left snowy Kerhonkson, New York for a mining town so dry and impatient it nearly crackled. Did she feel like it was her last chance? When Lilac Mines started to crumble for the second time in its history, did she see no choice but to crumble with it? Maybe she felt like the town abandoned her, or maybe she felt like the town
was
her.

Holding her breath, Anna Lisa opens one of the wardrobe's creaky doors. The smell of Meg engulfs her like roused bats. Soap and sweat and the vanilla that Meg put behind her ears.
It's not like I'm going to bake a cake,
she would laugh before they went out. It's the smell that summons Anna Lisa's tears. She is surprised by them. She's been waiting a week, and she'd almost given up, decided that real tears must be reserved for real relationships. But here they are, salt in the vanilla cake. And here is sound: deep belly-sobs that climb her esophagus and jab at every corner of her body. She sobs as she sifts through Meg's clothes: a dress in bedspread-red, blouses in wild prints, pink slacks, orange slacks, a lime green skirt that kisses the floor of the wardrobe.

She sobs as she puts Meg's jewelry on her own body: fake pearls, glass beads, plastic beads. She finds a lone earring, a hook with a translucent circle of dangling shell. Her own holes closed up when she stopped wearing the gold studs Terry bought her, but she stabs it through her left lobe. The pain makes her gasp, a break in her sobs. She starts up again as her ear begins to throb.

She sobs when she discovers the one item of clothing that is clearly not Meg's: a black leather jacket with lacing up the sleeves and a row of fringe halfway down the back. There's no name sewn inside, nothing in the pockets. She puts this on, too, to see what it would be like to be Meg's last butch, and it is heavy. It's not until she takes off her own coat that she sees the streaks of blood like switchbacks on her arm.

Anna Lisa cries and cries. Short cadences and long howls. She sinks to the floor and leans against Meg's bed, bleeding and crying. When she looks up from her folded arms, it's completely dark. She doesn't know if a few minutes have passed or an hour. She's not sure whether she's still crying. Something is happening to her body. It reminds her of the dry heaves she sometimes sees from patients: more jarring and terrible for the lack of substance in their stomachs. She presses back into the floor and cries until she falls asleep.

When she wakes up in a thin shaft of gray light, her muscles ache. She stands up and looks at herself in the mirror nailed to the back of the bedroom door. She's still wearing the motorcycle jacket and a garland of necklaces. Her eyes are swollen and strange.

She unlocks the front door and goes outside. There is a bench on the porch that looks like it was stolen from a park. Sitting with her feet on the porch railing, looking at the pines through the morning mist, she feels almost tranquil. Last night she saw the plainness of the house and thought
Anyone could live here.
It was a letdown, a reminder that her gaze and her love were not special. But now the words begin to transform into something like possibility. Anyone could live here… Even a cowardly, mousy divorcee.

Anna Lisa leaves Lilac Mines just long enough to buy what she will need to stay in Lilac Mines: a camping stove, a stack of wool blankets, a propane heater, two kerosene lanterns, packets of seeds, cans and cans of food. She walks the aisles of a Beedleborough grocery store, remembering her fourth-grade teacher instructing the class on how to survive a nuclear attack.
It's not just ducking and covering that are important,
she said,
it's what comes after, how we'll live out those long, lean years.

The spring of 1974 does not feel lean. The mountainside erupts with wildflowers. Deer and owls and coyotes wander freely through her backyard—Anna Lisa comes to think of it as hers after she plants pale peach dahlias there. There are no cars or residents with shotguns to scare them away. Each species has its own time of day; when there's overlap, someone gets eaten. Anna Lisa rises from Meg's red bed at dawn and returns when the sun drops behind the mountain. She discovers that she has to be very purposeful about certain things—food, warmth—and that she has to just ride with others, like the hours the sun chooses.

Without electricity, she pumps water from the well behind the house manually. Her arms are sore at the end of each day. She collects rainwater in a bucket and pours it on her seeds. The toilet, which feeds into a septic tank somewhere down the block, flushes with a little encouragement. After four weeks in the house, she gets a notice that mail delivery to Lilac Mines will be ending; she'll have to get a post office box in Beedleborough if she wants to keep in touch with the outside world.

When the day grows too hot to garden, she wanders the empty streets, mentally placing Meg and her friends in various spots, like paper dolls at a tea party. Here are Edith and Shallan dancing at Lilac's. Here is Jody at the drugstore, resisting the urge to touch Imogen's shoulder when she sees her favorite shampoo on sale. Then Anna Lisa realizes that she is the mayor of her imaginary town—why not make it friendlier? Here are Edith and Shallan dancing at Lou's. Here are Jody and Imogen holding hands among the shaving cream and aspirin.

She takes refuge in the dim, dusty buildings. There are all sorts of objects that might be valuable if she had electricity: refrigerators and lamps and coffee pots. But without energy pulsing through the town, it's just a giant museum. She leaves the abandoned buildings in the late afternoons. The sun burns her neck and freckles her arms all the way back to the little house on Gemini Street, where she reads whatever books she can find. Recipes from Meg's unstained cookbooks start to sound like poetry:
Cracked wheat is whole wheat kernels broken into fragments… Yeast is a living organism killed by high temperatures… To sift or not to sift.
In her imaginary town,
Sappho Was a Right-On Woman
(which is not about poetry at all) would be the book in hotel nightstands.

Sometimes she uses the remainder of the hot day to take a cold shower. Other times, she just lets herself ripen. Her body becomes both strange to her and somehow more familiar. Long, light brown hairs grow on her legs. The hair on her head passes her chin and then her shoulders until she has to tie it back with one of Meg's stockings while she works in the garden. She smells like the sun and dirt. She wears clothes, but not in the same way she used to. Now she thinks,
This necklace will catch the light,
and she'll put it on but not bother with a shirt that day.
This is what people must have looked like and smelled like in the cave days,
she thinks. The things she always thought of as normal and natural—furnished houses and ironed clothes—seem like bizarre creations. So perhaps the things she thought of as terrible and unnatural are not what they seem either. When she drives to Beedleborough to buy supplies and pick up letters from her sister, she enjoys seeing people in the streets going about their quaint business but she has no desire to talk to them. Her tongue feels thick and used-up.

In early October, though, the toilet breaks. She knows no plumber willing to drive 30 miles of mountain roads to fix what might be a larger problem with the sewer lines in an eroding town. Also, it's starting to get cold, and Anna Lisa can't imagine spending all her days beneath six layers of blankets. And she is running out of money. So this time, when she drives to Beedleborough, she stops at a bakery with a “Help Wanted” sign in the window. She eats a cherry danish and fills out an application.

Sometimes she thinks about Saint Julian's—the wounds she's not cleaning, the blood she's not taking. Maybe she'll look for a job at a doctor's office in Beedleborough at some point. The town is bigger than Lilac Mines; now there are two large grocery stores, a mini-mall, a campground. But there's no real hospital. Beyond that, though, Anna Lisa believes she cannot take care of anyone right now. Her life is too rich with loneliness.

So she learns to bake from a fat, quiet man named Sid Olney. She learns how much butter to put in a crust to make it flaky but not oily. Slowly the language of Meg's cookbooks is revealed to her,
knead
and
marble
and
zest
becoming manifest. Her biceps and forearms harden from kneading dough and stirring batter in giant metal vats. Cooking is not femme work, or maybe femme work is not easy. She coils her long ponytail into a net. She discovers mornings, waking at 4 a.m. when Lilac Mines is a black icicle, driving on sporadically plowed roads, and slipping her white paper hat on her head when Beedleborough is still foggy, not quite real.

Sid has a soft donut body and a straight, flat nose squished between chubby cheeks. Despite his girth, he seems delicate. Resigned to a life in the off-hours, he rarely asks her questions about herself, as if it would be rude. He bakes almond tarts for her, cookies in the shape of her initials. ALH. She has gone back to H. When he presents her with a puppy the following spring—a pink-tongued snowball of a dog—she realizes he is in love with her. It comes as a surprise, that a man could desire her without seeming to want all the things women are supposed to provide: sex and food and children.

Anna Lisa takes the puppy and names it Chelley, which she spells with a C as in Michelle, even though she never has occasion to actually write the name down. But to fragile-as-meringue Sid, she says, “There's a customer I'm interested in.” He just nods and drowns a herd of raisins in the bread dough. And there
is
a customer she's interested in.
Interested in
is the right phrase, because she's not sure she'd want to date her, if she could date her.

Karyn Loadvine is a butch. She's no taller than Anna Lisa, with a slim, tight body beneath her button-down shirts and low-slung jeans. She has short, shaggy hair the color of the caramel glaze on the croissants she orders every day. Sharp cheekbones, boyish nose, thick lips that acquire a gloss of butter as she sits and eats at one of the store's small metal tables.

Chelley makes friends with Karyn right away, flopping around her ankles and sniffing her men's dress shoes. Anna Lisa prefers to study her from behind the counter. She tells herself stories about how Karyn got to this corner of California. Fleeing a crazy, knife-wielding femme. Leaving her own husband and family somewhere cold and serious. Except Karyn doesn't have that wounded look that Anna Lisa recognized on the face of every woman she knew in Lilac Mines. She's just a butch going about her business: unraveling her croissant layer by layer, leaning down to pat Chelley's head or scratch her own ankle beneath her argyle sock.

Anna Lisa looks for clues to affirm her stories. Karyn drinks her coffee black. Moves her small, square hands through her hair stiffly. Usually reads the newspaper but sometimes pulls a book from the blue canvas bag she carries. Never has Anna Lisa watched a butch so closely. She watched Jody—her swagger, the way she wore Imogen's hand in her back pocket like a wallet—but that was a game of follow-the-leader. When she watches Karyn, she feels invisible. That's how she feels most of the time now. It's not a bad thing. She is a ghost, misting through town, not subject to the same rules and disappointments as humans.

But one day Karyn reminds Anna Lisa that she is not a ghost. It's 9 a.m.—late afternoon in the baking life—and Sid has gone home and left Anna Lisa to watch the counter. Karyn has finished her coffee and pastry and is about to slip the long handles of her bag over her head. She always positions the bag so that the strap crosses between her small, seemingly accidental breasts. But today she pauses.

“Hey,” she calls. “D'y'all give free refills?” Anna Lisa has taken her order before, but she's never caught the southern accent in the short strings of nouns.

“Yes, we do,” Anna Lisa says decisively, although they don't. The coffee gurgles into Karyn's styrofoam cup. They don't have any real mugs because they can't pay a dishwasher, and most people get coffee to go anyway. But suddenly Anna Lisa longs for ceramic.

“Thanks.” Karyn gives her a cowboy nod.

It's dark when Anna Lisa gets home that night. Early in the spring of 1975, the days are getting longer but they're resistant to change. She carries her kerosene lantern into the kitchen. Meg's kitchen. She pries open the cabinets and finds a mug: white with a blue stripe around the top, shaped like an upside-down bell. She scrubs it in the cold water, her hands going numb as the rest of her body heats up.

She presents the mug to Karyn. “I thought you could use this here.” She feels brave, buzzing with possibility.

“You some kinda environmentalist?” Karyn laughs. Her voice is deep.

“No, it's just, I mean, since you're in every day almost. Styrofoam can feel weird on your teeth. It changes how the coffee tastes, don't you think?”

“Yeah, come to think of it, I guess it does. Thanks.”

“My name's Anna Lisa. Hill.”

“Karyn Loadvine.” It sounds different when she says it than when Sid told her,
That's one of our regulars, Karyn Loadvine.
Karyn says it
Cairn.

It's months before they make more than small talk. In April, Anna Lisa learns that Karyn is from Louisiana
(Loosiana).
In May, she learns that Karyn has a two-year-old nephew. In June, she learns that Karyn likes reading Westerns. She stores these bits of information. A brown ring darkens inside the white mug.

July is so hot the air feels dangerous. Every shrub looks like kindling. Anna Lisa hopes there are no remnants of gas leaking from the old lines beneath her house. The sweat that streams down her back and temples is the only moisture around. It is so hot that she thinks,
Why not?
The skin around her skull feels tight. She thinks of Sappho and of Meg, how they were both brave. Anna Lisa has heard people say that suicide is cowardly, but Meg was never afraid of new places. Maybe death was just west of Lilac Mines, as dark and beautiful as the ocean.
Why not?
And so one day she crosses the border from behind the counter to the front of the store. She pulls out the empty chair across from Karyn and says, “Mind if I sit down?”

Karyn's bottom jaw pauses mid-chew. There's a sliver of almond perched atop one of her molars. But she rallies a polite smile and says, “Sure, why not?”

Exactly,
Anna Lisa thinks. Karyn's tan hands are curled on top of a headline that says, “ ‘I Died But Out Of The Ashes I Was Reborn,' Claims Patty Hearst, Alias Tania.” Anna Lisa wants to say something about the story, but she is so far away from the world of war and politics and movies. What if she just stays frozen like this forever? What if she can only ever make half a bold gesture before getting scared and turning back?

“I haven't read a newspaper in so long,” Anna Lisa blurts. It's a stupid thing to say, but it's the truth and it feels good in her mouth.

“Oh, y'want a piece of it?” Karyn looks relieved. “I already finished Ann Landers.”

“No, that's okay. What… what did Ann have to say?”

“Aw, you know, the usual. Some woman wrote in about her husband's gambling problem. She loves him and he's not a bad guy otherwise, but she's worried about their finances. 'Ann says, Are you better off with him or without him?' That's what she always says.”

“Mm,” says Anna Lisa. “That makes it sound so simple.” Karyn's face glows in the heat. Anna Lisa imagines touching the knob of her cheeks, the square chin. She can almost picture it. She can almost reach across the table into Karyn's world.

“It
is
simple,” Karyn is saying. “Are you better off with him or without him?” She's so young. Twenty-four? Twenty-five? “What more is there to say, really?”

“But what if 'without him' just feels like a giant, awful weight, like you're not really even without him because he's so…” Anna Lisa sees Karyn's bushy eyebrows knit in confusion. She stops. “There's not many of us in town, you know.”

Karyn knows what Anna Lisa is saying. Anna Lisa is sure of it. Karyn narrows her eyes, which are the same gold-brown as her skin and eyebrows and hair. Her eyes warn Anna Lisa not to say more, but Anna Lisa can't help it. She's sweating waterfalls now, and it feels wonderful, purifying.

“Us girls. Us women,” Anna Lisa says. Maybe Karyn spells “women” with a Y, the way she spells her name. “It's just, we should stick together, don't you think? Or at least find each other? Maybe you and I could…” Anna Lisa isn't sure whether she's about to suggest a buddy activity like bowling, or a date. But Karyn speaks before she can figure it out.

“Listen,” Karyn says, scraping her metal chair along the tile floor as she inches it back. “You're not the first lesbo to come onto me. I know I'm a tomboy. But I ain't like
that.”

Anna Lisa gulps. “You're sure?” She thought she felt the air crackle between them, not attraction necessarily, but mutuality. She thought they would share stories of their first heartbreaks.