Lunatic Fringe (8 page)

Lexie took the proffered blanket and
curled up inside it resting her chin on her knee.

“
Cheers, then,” Renee said,
lifting the glass to her lips.

Renee tipped her head back to let the
wine run down her throat. She offered the glass to Lexie, who took
a sip for herself. The wine tasted tart and brazen, as though it
had been sitting out all day. In all likelihood, it had.

A blanket of quiet descended on the
room. Blythe and Mitch engaged in a grooming ritual of mutual
caresses and eye-gazing. Hazel and Sharmalee had taken a break from
their earlier hushed exchange about the ambiguous sexual
orientation of a cute underclassmen in attendance earlier that day,
mulling over each other’s points as they both rested on Corwin’s
chest, their heads buoyed with the even rise and fall of her rib
cage. Jenna added two logs to the cramped hearth, though Lexie
still shivered in her hoodie and blanket.

Renee whispered, “I can hear your brain
working.”

Lexie shrugged.

Renee laughed aloud, the sound rising
above the valley of low voices in the room. “What are you
thinking?”

Lexie hesitated. She hated to dispel
the quiet. “Doesn’t seem like there’s much of anything to
say.”

“
There’s always something
that needs to be said,” Renee said, taking another sip of wine.
“This world conspires to take away women’s voices at every turn.
May as well use your voice when you can.”

“
I’ve never had a hard time
speaking up.”

“
Oh, yeah?” Renee
challenged. “When was the last time you did?”

Lexie bit her lip, thinking hard but
coming up empty.

Renee set her wineglass on the table.
“May I kiss you?” she asked.

Lexie gaped. The question sounded
foreign, absurd. She wanted to laugh at the improbability at
hearing it, ever. She furrowed her brow even as she fought off a
timid smile.

“
What?” Lexie
asked.

“
Can I kiss
you?”

“
Uh . . . I mean, it’s just
that--” Lexie struggled to right her brain.

“
Say ‘no’.”

“
What?”

“
Say ‘no’!” Renee laughed
with frustration.

“
But I--”

“‘
No’ is a complete
sentence. Say it,” Renee demanded.

“
No, it’s not that . .
.”

“
Just the word!”

“
No,” Lexie
said.

“
Thank you.”

“
For what?” she
asked.

“
For using your voice,”
Renee said.

“
Oh.”

“
See?”

“
I guess.”

Lexie reached for the wineglass and
took a long sip, trying to puzzle out what the hell had just
happened. Saying “no” wasn’t a problem for her; it was “yes” she
could use some practice with. She wished Renee would give her a
chance to try that word on for size.

“
Good thing you didn’t want
to kiss me,” Renee said with a wink.

“
Good thing,” Lexie
replied.

Renee smiled. “I guess you didn’t have
to fight much for your right to speak growing up, huh?”

“
My house was pretty
quiet,” Lexie admitted. “My dad slept a lot. I tried not to be
loud.”

“
Well, I can’t say that
doesn’t sound kind of nice sometimes. Living with eight women can
be intense,” Renee chuckled.

“
Like, your periods are in
sync? I read that that happens sometimes.”

“
You have no
idea.”

“
Intensity is something I
could use in my life. Living with people like this would be a
welcome change.”

“
Do you do your own
dishes?” Renee asked.

“
Yep. And my dad’s,” Lexie
said.

“
Then you’re way ahead of
half the women here.”

Hazel chimed in from the other side of
the room. “Why doesn’t your dad do his own dishes?” she
asked.

Renee lobbed back, “Why don’t you,
Hazel?”

Hazel flipped her black ponytail over
her shoulder. “I prefer to spend my time fighting the patriarchy,”
she said, evoking a round of laughter from the girls.

“
Change begins at home,”
Jenna said.

“
Yeah. Think globally,
clean locally,” Renee quipped.

Hazel stuck out her tongue and nuzzled
herself back into Corwin’s chest for more affectionate
rubs.

In the corner, Blythe and Mitch
whispered and giggled in their own little bubble, taking advantage
of the false privacy bestowed by the even pounding of the rain.
They kissed and nibbled on each other’s fingers, enjoying the
gentle dalliances of their romance. Lexie stared, as though by
watching them, she could absorb all there was to know about
feminine intimacy. Perhaps by studying them, her own desires would
reveal themselves as easily as the clouds releasing rain. What
would it mean to know her needs and desires as clearly as these
women seemed to know each other? Her fantasies, sexual and
otherwise, had only ever been nebulous, shifting shapes of
aspiration and lust, as difficult to decipher as the
dream-gibberish that filled her nights.

Lexie sifted through her memories,
tracking clues from her childhood. Certainly she’d admired a woman
or two before, like Wes. Once, while waiting for the school bus
during a field trip, she gave her sixth-grade math teacher, Ms.
Jones, a shoulder rub. Though the preteen Lexie had enjoyed it, she
ultimately dismissed it as some sort of mother complex. Then there
was the soap opera that her dad spent hours watching when he was
first injured. A spectacularly proportioned actress played Doctor
Delaney, and at the time, Lexie thought she wanted to be a doctor,
so that could be dismissed as idol worship. Certainly not
lesbianism.

A flash of other memories passed
through her mind: She had insisted on dressing up as Calamity Jane
for three consecutive Halloweens. In high school there was Peter;
he looked like a girl, so maybe she just liked girly boys. That was
possible. Peter had been Lexie’s only boyfriend and clearly gay and
maybe even a little bit more. He changed his name junior year to
the more gender-ambiguous Robin, just before his family moved to
Chicago, but that didn’t mean much in the great scheme of her
sexual life. She also never got anywhere near his penis, but that
seemed like a consensus-driven decision. Since him, there’d been
little in the way of partnered sexual exploration. The distinction
between a straight girl who just hated the trappings of
heterosexual femininity--the dresses, the fairy tales, the endless
pursuit of narrow-minded beauty--and a queer girl was so subtle
that Lexie couldn’t distinguish between the two.

She lost herself in the stream of her
thoughts. If left to her own devices she would analyze herself
unconscious. She forced herself back to reality, taking the
wineglass from Renee. She sipped the wine, studying a cluster of
freckles on high on Renee’s right cheek.

“
You seem . . .” Lexie
ventured aloud while Renee stretched her calves. “I don’t know.
More laid back than the other girls. Not as . . .” She knew the
word she was searching for, but something about the term “militant”
made her think she should keep her mouth shut. Her ears warmed with
the fear of misspeaking. The corner of Renee’s mouth curved to a
smirk, and she shifted back onto her elbows, her bare legs
stretched out in front of her.

“
We are opinionated ladies.
That’s an observation, not a critique,” Renee said. She reached out
her empty hand, beckoning for the glass. “And if you meant it as a
critique, girl, you are in the wrong place.” She smiled again and
took a healthy sip, then passed the glass back to Lexie.

“
It seems like everyone
spends a lot of time talking about the way men suck,” Lexie said,
losing grip on her inhibitions because of the wine, or the day, or
the way Renee made her feel. Or, perhaps all three.

Renee raised her eyebrows. “A lot of us
have issues with men, it’s true. A lot of women have issues with
men, because a lot of men are fuckwads. Some women turn their
issues into opinions and their opinions into manifestos. Some
women, like myself, for instance--like the Pack--turn their
manifestos into action. We all have different ways of getting to
the same place. As long as we arrive to do the work that needs to
be done, who cares how you got there?”

“
That seems rather . . .”
Lexie struggled to find the right word.

“
Essentialist?” Renee
offered.

The actual word Lexie was going for was
“reductive,” but she let Renee continue.

“
I think things are the way
they are until they’re not. It’s the job of the activist to be a
catalyst, to supplement the natural process of change and speed it
up for the good of everyone.”

“
Everyone except the
original compound,” Lexie said, feeling smart for catching the
biology reference.

“
Compound fracture,
compound interest, compound prisons, let ‘em all go to hell,” Renee
retorted.

“
But it seems like there’s
such a chasm between these girls’ experiences and my own,” Lexie
admitted. “I feel like I’m a different species, and I grew up here!
I love my Dad. I have no problems with men.”

“
Just because you haven’t
had negative experiences with men yourself doesn’t mean that those
experiences aren’t real for other women. Solidarity begs you to
treat those issues as your own, because what is it but luck and a
little bit of social progress that has kept you safe all these
years?”

It sounded like a rhetorical question,
but Renee opened up a space for Lexie to respond. The question
confounded her. Lexie rooted through her memories, trying to find
the hidden moments in her life when it really was nothing more than
luck that had kept her safe.

“
I don’t like looking at
the world as if I’m constantly in danger,” she said. “Whether it’s
true or not.”

Renee softened her approach. “All I’m
saying is, you don’t need to have been raped or beaten to want to
work for a world in which things like rape and violence don’t
exist. Or genital mutilation, or ‘honor killings’, or the myriad
other ways our world hurts and oppresses women. We all suffer from
injustice. The point is to fight even when it’s not your head on
the block.”

“
I just don’t think that
men are the problem.”

“
Not all men are the
problem. There are many amazing men in this world, doing great
work, fighting for justice. But I won’t rely on them to make my
world the way it needs to be. That’s my job.” Renee swirled a reedy
index finger toward her chest.

“
Besides, what we’re
about--” she said, sighing. “Well, what I’m about isn’t destroying
the patriarchy. It’s the kyriarchy I’m after.”

“
The what?” Lexie
asked.

“
Kyriarchy. Patriarchy
implies a gendered power structure ordered and arranged by men. But
not all injustice is perpetrated by men or the work of men.
‘Kyriarchy’ encompasses inequitable power structures across
genders, races, sects, contexts and so on.”

Lexie sighed, rubbing her forehead at
the onset of a headache. “You’re smart,” she said with more than a
little disappointment.

Renee snorted. “Yep. Does that bother
you?”

Lexie blinked back unexpected
tears.

“
Whoa, girl. It’s okay. You
PMSing or something?” Renee said, stroking Lexie’s
shoulder.

“
No. Well, yeah, but no,”
Lexie said. “I just . . . This is all a lot for me to digest. I
just feel . . .”
Ashamed, embarrassed,
stupid
. “. . . stupid.”

Renee grasped Lexie’s chin and pulled
her face close. Lexie cast her eyes downward, but Renee shook her
chin, forcing Lexie’s eyes to meet her own.

“
You are not stupid.” Renee
said.

Lexie tried to shake her head in
protest, but Renee held fast. “You need to work on your
self-esteem, mama. You understood everything I just said. You’ve
held your own when confronted by a hell of a lot of scary-ass women
with some radical-ass thoughts. You are getting an education and a
chance to get the hell out of your Podunk town. You are working
your tail off to better your situation when many women never get
that chance. You’re not afraid to ask questions and have your
assumptions challenged.” Her eyes blazed fierce, dark, and
deep.

“
Don’t you dare call
yourself stupid. You are goddamned brilliant.”

Lexie caught the fire in Renee’s eyes
and found that she believed her. In the company of these women,
Lexie felt stronger and smarter than she ever had. They made her
want to pursue her own greatness, whatever that might
be.

“
Lexie,” Jenna asked from
across the table. “Blythe says you’re from around here.”

Renee dropped her hand, and Lexie wiped
her eyes and nodded. “Wolf Creek. It’s like fifty miles
east.”

“
Neat,” Sharmalee said,
twirling the ends of her hair. “Do you miss your
trailer?”