Lilac Mines (32 page)

“Personally, I think she was lonely,” Petra says. “I always tried to get her to move into the colony with us, but she didn't really get feminism. She was an individualist, which is cool, but you can't take down patriarchy all by yourself. She thought she could manage all her happiness and all her sadness on her own.”

Anna Lisa does not think this is why Meg killed herself. More likely, this is the story Petra needs to believe: her colony could have saved Meg. Nevertheless, Meg was an individualist; that much is true. She remembers Meg's long nights on the porch, drinking coffee with whiskey, telling Anna Lisa to go inside when she tried to join her.
I just want some time with the stars, okay?
she would say. Anna Lisa thinks that maybe, finally, she understands that impulse. That feeling that no human being is enough. She clears her throat. “Um, about the church? The colony.”

“Right!” Petra leans forward. “I am so happy you want to buy it. Just name the price. I hate to think of it out there just rotting. You said in your letter you want to open a bakery, right? I think that's so cool. The kitchen's not much—you would need to put in a real stove and a big fridge and whatever else bakeries have—but it's big enough that you could live there too if you wanted. Oh God, I just think it's great. Maybe you can bring back Lilac Mines, Al.”

No one has called Anna Lisa “Al” in years. The fact that Petra does means that Meg or Jody or Imogen must have talked about her, at least occasionally.

“I don't know if I can do that,” Anna Lisa says hesitantly.

“Oh, I know you can. I think history is so important. That's what I'm learning from this documentary. Most of our country wants to just forget the war, forget that we lost, move on. But I think we should record it all, every little detail. You wouldn't believe Carver's stories about the shit that went on over there. He's let me interview him probably 25 times, and his buddies, too. White guys, black guys, everyone. He's going to edit the whole thing, the bedroom is practically overflowing with film canisters. My girlfriend is ready to kill me.”

Carver interrupts, “If you know anything about Petra, you know she's a determined woman. I ask myself once a day why am I doing this. But it ain't like there's a lot of jobs waiting for me.” He picks at an invisible spot on the kitchen table with his thick fingers.

Anna Lisa doesn't know much about Petra, and she knows less about Carver McAdams, but she feels like she has more in common with him. The exhaustion, the scars. She wants to put her hand on the stump of knee that juts over the cliff of the chair.

Petra is ready to give Anna Lisa the church. She is a full person, bubbling over. She has a realtor friend who will handle it all for nearly free, she says. Anna Lisa imagines living in the church again. She hopes that the smell of yeast and cinnamon doesn't cover up the woody, waxy scent she remembers.

She has only one more question for Petra, the thing she will need to know to make the church hers. “What was it like all those years? What happened at the Lilac Womyn's Colony?”

Petra beams. She is clearly thrilled to tell the story.

The winter starts cold and fast, but exhausts itself early on, content to drop occasional shawls of snow and light rain on the town. Anna Lisa spends the months scrubbing the walls and re-staining the floors of the church. Her boss-turned-business-partner, Sid, joins her on weekends. It takes all her savings to renovate the kitchen and take out extra walls and turn the front of the church into a café space. The building is too big and poorly ventilated, but the stained glass windows make red and purple shadows that look like magical placemats on her secondhand tables.

By late February of 1976, they're ready to open. They just need a name (and an assistant). “A new Anna Lisa,” Sid says kindly. He means the assistant, but Anna Lisa feels like a new Anna Lisa. The freshly cleaned windows open onto snow-speckled mountains and immense blue sky.

“You should call it Anna Lisa's Café, or Anna Lisa's Bakery… something like that,” Sid suggests.

She's not sure why, but the thought terrifies her. Anna Lisa shakes her head, “I couldn't do that. How about Fresh Baked Goods, just like my stand? Or how about Sid's Bakery, so people know that it's an extension of your place in Beedleborough?”

“But it's not an extension… or not
just
an extension. And Fresh Baked Goods is too boring.” Sid laughs, “I'm not a creative type, but even I know that. It's gotta be something personal.”

Anna Lisa sits down on one of the wooden chairs salvaged from Lilac's. She likes having a piece of the old bar in her bakery. If she puts her face close to the wood, she can smell beer and oily skin, and, she imagines, a trace of perfume. Anna Lisa is and is not Al. Now she's a patchwork of Al and Nannalee and Annie. She's okay with that. “I know,” she says slowly. “Let's call it… Al's.”

“Who's Al?” asks Sid.

“It's a nickname I used to have,” she shrugs.

“But Anna Lisa is so much prettier.”

She states, “We're calling it Al's,” and that settles it.

By spring, Toby's has opened up next door to Al's. Toby Minnitt cuts hair and sells tires, sandwiches, and used coats. So it's just “Toby's” because there's no single noun that could explain all he does. Anna Lisa brings him pound cake and cinnamon buns. He cuts her long brown waves into a feathered fringe that tickles her ears. Lilac Mines begins to stir. Anna Lisa could swear that the trees turn greener, the sun shines a little brighter. Like the town is preparing itself.

Just after Easter, the Lilac Mines Hotel collapses. Anna Lisa is eating day-old bread with jam in the yellow-white patch of sun behind the bakery when she hears a noise that makes her think of ghosts, the sound of something old on the move. She thinks of her first night back, at the hotel. Later that afternoon, she learns that the burnt-out building has fallen in on itself. Bits of dry-rot, ash, and mold were at work all these years, shifting imperceptibly, adding up to something huge.

A month later, a bulldozer rearranges the rubble and a dump truck hauls it away, mountain by mountain. Maybe it's the parade of cement and wood through neighboring towns, but it's as if Lilac Mines is officially open for business, its charred past cleared. A gas station opens. Two gift shops. Soon there are people, moving through the streets and occupying the old houses. New houses grow like toadstools after a rain. They push into the forested west side of town.

When Suzy comes to visit late in 1976, she says, “Nice town you got here.” The mattress buckles under the weight of her suitcase.

“You don't know the half of it,” Anna Lisa says.

Suzy is 29 years old, but she looks younger. Her hair is nearly blonde and she wears it in two loose braids over her shoulders. She stepped out of the car in a short red dress with white flowers embroidered around the collar and black Mary-Janes, although she's since changed into a pale blue jogging suit. Her legs were tan and thick. Her cheeks are pink, her nose bears a streak of permanent sunburn.

“You look like such a California girl,” Anna Lisa says, smiling. “You look like someone the Beach Boys would sing about.”

Suzy laughs. “It's my young mother look, actually.”

“Young mother look?” Anna Lisa's eyes reveal her surprise.

Suzy just looks at her sister, smiling her big, beachy smile.

“You mean… ?”

“Uh-huh. Oh, Nannalee, I'm so happy. You should see Martin. They say pregnant women glow, right? But I swear Martin glows. He's such a goofball, running around, painting things and talking about how we'll have build an addition on the house for our
second
one. He's already talking about the second one!”

The Hill sisters stand in the gleaming kitchen, grinning dopily at each other. The shared thrill of bringing something new into the world. A person, a town. The shared lie, pretending there is such a thing as new. Anna Lisa congratulates her, and says, “Have you thought of names yet?”

“Well… I want this baby to be a part of me, to already be here before she's here, know what I mean? I think it's going to be a girl, I really do. And I want her to be… tied to me,” she says quietly. “You know how there are words that just stick in your head for years? There's this place where I got a haircut years ago. June of 1965.” When Suzy discovered sex and Anna Lisa discovered the girls of 3-B. “Lola Felix's Beauty Shoppe.” Suzy sighs, “And I know Felix is a boy's name, but that's what I want to call her. Felix.”

III

“Wow, that's some story.” Felix's butt has fallen asleep. They are still huddled in the woods on the shack's splintery bench, but the rain has slowed to a lazy drip. She's glued here, ready for more stories. “So you really were married.”

“Yep,” says Anna Lisa, “I spent the most exciting years of the 20
^th
century married to a man in Fresno.” Framed by the hood of her sweatshirt, Anna Lisa's face is pale and defeated. “I think I missed my own heyday.”

“Forget it, chasing after heydays is a lost cause,” Felix assures her. Her body feels like crap, but she speaks with confidence. “That's all I ever did in L.A. and the minute I'd find a scene I thought was cool, it was like 50 people were behind me, ready to use my little niche as a backdrop for a credit card commercial. We always thought—my friends and I—that people were imitating us, but they might as well have been chasing us, we were so out of breath all the time.”

The bits of sky showing through the roof are a milky dark blue. “It's probably safe to walk back now,” says Anna Lisa, looking up. “I'd better give the mule some water first.”

Anna Lisa pours some water into a red plastic cup, which Lilac takes gingerly in his teeth. He then tosses his head back and opens his mouth, pouring the water in without spilling a drop. He holds the empty cup until Anna Lisa takes it from him. “That was amazing!” Felix can't believe what she just saw.

“Ernie says you can teach them anything.” Lilac smacks his flappy lips.

Felix is not ready to return just yet. “Was Meg the only girl you ever loved?” she ventures. It sounds so romantic and so depressing.

“No. There was Millie. Millicent Hersch. We were together for almost ten years. She stopped by the bakery for a bran muffin and orange juice—she didn't drink coffee—and she was wearing a pink nurse's uniform and pink lipstick, and I asked her what hospital she worked at,” says Anna Lisa.

“When was that?”

“1978. March 4th. You were almost a year old then,” Anna Lisa recalls, saying what Felix is thinking. This is the point where their stories meet, the intersection of History and plain old Past.

“Did I ever meet her?”

“Once, when you were four or five. We were at your grandmother's house in Fresno. Your mom was pregnant again, with Michelle. Poor thing, her feet were so swollen I don't think she left Daddy's old green armchair at all that whole visit. Millie and I were just there for the day. Your grandmother didn't ever really know how to act around her, and that only made Millie feel more anxious. We spent most of the time outside on the porch. It was a good thing, too, because that was the day you decided to teach yourself to fly.”

“To
fly?”
Felix repeats, incredulous. But as soon as she says it, fragments return to her: the rusty hood of a car, a fuzzy pink blanket, the smell of a thick felt-tip marker.

“I guess you thought that if you jumped off things and flapped your arms hard enough, it would happen,” Anna Lisa laughs. “First, it was the ottoman in the living room, but that drove your mom crazy. So you moved onto the porch, then before we knew it, you were hurling yourself off the hood of Millie's car, then the
top
of her car.”

“And that's when I broke my arm,” Felix finishes.

“Being a nurse and all, Millie's first aid skills were fresher than mine, so she got you to sit still and wrapped you in a blanket and put you in the back seat. I drove you downtown to Saint Julian's. You got this tiny little cast, and we all autographed it.”

“I did love that part,” Felix remembers.

“To tell you the truth,” Anna Lisa says, “that was the day I decided that I wanted to go back to nursing.”

“Really? So what happened to Millie?” She remembers that someone drew Hello Kitty on her cast in bold black ink. Was it Millie? She can't picture a face.

Anna Lisa sighs. Is there another tragic chapter in her aunt's life? Felix studies Anna Lisa's compact body and wrinkled clothing. How much hardship can a person wear?

“Well, I don't know, exactly. At first things were good. It had been so long, and I was so needy, I think I practically smothered her. But Millie was a good person. She had a lot of room in her. She was like a well, I could just pour all my sadness into her. You don't really want to hear this stuff, do you? I'm your aunt, I'm old.”

“No, really, I do.” Felix smiles. “Keep going, I'm listening.”

“Millie was great, but I sort of scared myself, after spending too much time alone or something. I started to pull away a little bit at a time. We hung in there because, well, that's what I've always done. And Millie was a good nurse, she was trained to let people heal at their own pace. But she got fed up eventually with all my scar tissue. She was still young; I don't blame her. Eventually she went to medical school in San Francisco, and I wondered if she ever ran into Jody and Imogen. But why would she? The world is really big.”

Felix shivers. How much scar tissue does it take to add up to a cave-in, a taut rope, an alley attack? She is sure, now, that hundreds of quiet tragedies lurk behind every headline.

“We should head back,” Anna Lisa says again. “I'm getting hungry.” She stands up and offers Felix her hand. Felix takes it gladly, the small fingers lifting her to her feet.

Felix is grateful when Anna Lisa insists she ride on Lilac's back. She feels dizzy as they bump down the darkening trail. “My car!” she shouts hoarsely when they hit Moon Avenue. With a white cap of snow on its blue top, the Beetle looks like a pale Smurf.

“We'll come back for it tomorrow. You shouldn't drive until you've had a good meal and some sleep,” Anna Lisa says authoritatively. “Let's drive through Taco Bell, beans have a lot of protein in them. Then I'll make you some real food at home. I have some sweet potatoes I've been meaning to cook.”

Felix smiles as Anna Lisa helps her into the cab of the truck. She loves that her aunt can be butch and femme in the same sentence.

“So now I know why you're such a good cook,” she says as they turn onto Washoe Street. “You single-handedly revived this town with fucking
muffins.”

Anna Lisa shakes her head. “There's no such thing as 'single-handedly'. Thanks, though.”

“Seriously, that's totally amazing.” Felix is still marveling when Anna Lisa hands her a bean burrito wrapped in paper. They sit in the Taco Bell parking lot. The moon is a perfect half circle at the edge of the windshield, white as a bone and shaped like an ear, listening to everything they say and don't say.

When they pull out of the parking lot and turn onto North Main, Felix whispers, “Calla Boulevard.” Her breath fogs up the glass.