Pages for You (10 page)

And maybe, in that scenario, her doubt was just doused by the floodwaters of girlish excitement they produced between them. Her questions were silenced by their pleasure calls, and the smoothness and fluidity of their limbs together calmed her.

L
ying flat, looking at the ceiling, Flannery felt free to talk. This was something else Anne had unlocked in her: her unsuspected wish and ability to speak.

“I never knew this before. I never knew this was possible before.” On
this
she pressed the nearest patch of Anne that was to hand—her warm thigh.

“Did the boys leave you cold?”

“No. Not cold, exactly. Lukewarm, maybe. I liked boys. I just never thought . . .” Flannery’s sentence wandered off, unfinished. “How about you?”

“What?”

“You and the boys?”

“Boys? I’ve had a few.” Flannery heard a laugh that came from somewhere else—another city. Another story. “Then again, too few to mention.”

“That’s not true. You’ve had more than a few.”

Anne pulled away at that. “Why do you say that? How do you know?”

“I just do. I can tell.” She did not even bother to argue it. When Flannery spoke in that tone, occasionally (perhaps she’d start using it more now), you could hear the adult in her; the one who was aware of her own intelligence and trusted it. There was no room for contradiction. “But you don’t care to mention it.”

The ceiling watched the naked girls impassively.

“Well.” Finally. In a deliberately casual drawl: “I’m sure you’ve had a few, too. Even if they left you lukewarm.”

“No. I told you.” Flannery rolled over now to kiss Anne’s shoulder. “You’re my first.”

“Your first of this gender, I thought you meant.”

“Nope. My first of any gender, of any kind.”

“My God.” Anne gave a small, alarmed laugh. “That’s such a responsibility! I had no idea.”

“It certainly is.” Flannery demanded an embrace from her deflowerer, and got one. She looked at her sternly. “I hope you take it very, very seriously.”

“From now on”—Anne cleared her throat—“I certainly will.”

S
o people showered together! That was what went on. Who knew? Flannery, for one, had never foreseen such a thing.

The shower was such a personal space, not somehow unlike the womb, or the confessional. A space not imagined for two. First, because it was a part of that shrine to hygiene, the bathroom—the room where all your unmentionable questions could be asked (“Have I got—?” “Is that a—?” “Where’s my—?”) and sometimes, in a good light, answered. The room where you did what you could to follow dutifully the rules: floss your teeth, wipe the right way, rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Like most rooms the bathroom contained a unique catalogue of your complex self, the bathroom cabinet, in the same way that the kitchen described you by the contents of your refrigerator, and your living room by the books on your shelves.

Flannery was still recovering from the riotous lack of privacy of the dorm’s group bathroom, where you were rarely alone and had to pretend, through regretful, gritted teeth, that the experience was just like
camp
, which could be fun. Couldn’t it? Performing your ablutions together with other people, chatting over the toothbrushes, sharing conditioner across the shower divider. Like camp, or the gym, a place Flannery had just started going to swim, where even the body-shy have to shed their inhibitions and learn to wash themselves freely in the bright glare of the public.

But showering
with.
Showering with a lover. What a strange sensation, another of the seemingly unending dimensions of romantic life Flannery had not encountered, even in her hardworking fantasy. Soaping up a lover’s body: developing the same fond ease with it you have with your own, with the difference that you love that other body without reservation but are bound to have some quibbles and complaints about the one you were born with. Rubbing the bar under her arms and then over them, across her sleek-boned back and shoulders, working up a slippery lather with your active hands. Taking turns, for fairness, under the hot center of the water stream. Shampooing her hair, massaging the gel into that firm head with your warm fingers.

Rinse and repeat.

Flannery loved it. Luxuriated in it. Was baptized, blinking, by the sheer splashing soap and water of it. Hard not to wonder, as she perpetually did: Why wasn’t I told of this before? Why did they keep from me the key fact that this bliss is possible?

And, at the same superstitious time: is this bliss really possible?

Is it?

A
nd then there was sleep.

It was not something Flannery had ever spent time imagining: that privatest part of a night spent with someone else. The soft tangle of another body to accompany you as you made your bold and dogged way through your dreams. Surely that was the most secluded, most interior thing, actually, more than this flailing new ecstasy of juices and explorations, all these calls of the wild? Flannery had gotten used to the idea that another person—this cherishment, Anne—had seen her naked, continued to see her bare and to know her, breasts and knees and back and warts and all. The modest, never-skirted, one-piece-rather-than-bikini, turning-her-back-to-the-other-girls-while-she-changed Flannery had gotten used to flaunting it (sometimes) in front of her luscious and appreciative lover.

But
sleeping:
that was a new intimacy altogether, and one Flannery often could not believe she shared. It was a secret, wasn’t it? Sleeping? What a person looked like when they couldn’t help it; what that defenselessness might suggest; what revelations might be conveyed by that loosened, floppy shape, in the unintended words or murmurs of the dreamer? Flannery did feel, in her gut, that any discoveries one person made about the other while she slept were unfair. It was like cheating on a test. (She’d always been struck by the song about a woman who learns of her lover’s infidelities from the endearments he speaks in his sleep.) Flannery felt that who you were when you were out and off the record was nobody’s business but your own. She could never believe people allowed themselves to sleep in public, in class or at the library—those sprawled, flattened figures scattered everywhere like battle corpses, collapsed in damp and possibly drooling heaps across their books. Exposed!

To sleep with Anne was, for Flannery, an ultimate trust. It was the handing over, the giving in. It was more than the keys to the realm: it
was
the realm, the realm of the deepest self, and if Flannery was willing to go there in Anne’s company, she must be willing to go anywhere with her. Albuquerque, for example, or Paris, or the dark heart of the Everglades.

Their first nights together, Flannery made sure she stayed up past Anne, till she heard her lover’s breathing slow and thicken, and she willed herself to wake up earlier. That was how she stayed safe. But, cumulatively, the fewer hours’ rest made her tired, and several days along she stayed up late past Anne, only to wake in the morning to find Anne’s cat face watching her. Watching her while she slept.

Flannery sat up, startled.

“What? What are you looking at?”

“You. Sleeping.”

“Why—” Flannery started to panic. “Why—? What’s the—?” before she felt the love break over her like a wave.

“Hush.” Anne kissed her. “You’re beautiful when you’re asleep,” she said. “Beautiful.”

And Flannery believed her.

T
wo days into all this love, her muscles sorely stretched, her body shocked and soaking, though somehow, impossibly, wanting more—

Flannery went to Thanksgiving.

She had to. There was only so much rudeness she could allow herself, and Mary-Beth—
Mary-Jo—
had been good enough to invite her. (Anne planned to make a private pumpkin pie for herself and work.) Reluctantly Flannery left behind the thankful gift, her new discovery, and cleared her head for New York company.

They were so nice, and it was such a large, luxurious apartment—it was hard not to notice the difference from the cramped theorist’s quarters. All the people had wide smiles and big handshakes, and Flannery could not remember a single name. She was underdressed, she realized immediately, since everyone else looked formal and aristocratic, as if they spent quite a lot of time drinking martinis and eating roasted cashews. Flannery had worn what her mother might charitably have called “slacks” (“Don’t worry, honey, those slacks look nice on you”), but the truth was, they were pants, and the other women there were in skirts and dresses. This made Flannery feel immediately visible as a
woman being sexually awakened by
ANOTHER WOMAN
—that nasal misfit: a lesbian—but if the word was printed on her forehead, everyone was too polite to mention it. They were all polite altogether: no one stared at her pants, or her short unvarnished nails, or her slush-covered boots (girls wore heels, she learned by example); no one acted horrified when she confessed that she was Undeclared in her major. Mary-Jo had the whole college experience wired, quite clearly, and Flannery could see why. She was following in the footsteps not just of Dr. Dad, a warm, broadcaster-voiced man in orthopedics, but also of Dr. Mom, who was an oncologist—a word that stuck uneasily in the back of Flannery’s throat because she couldn’t remember what it meant, and it seemed embarrassing to ask.

Public radio; New York City politics; favorite stuffing recipes; the year that Mary-Jo made the pumpkin pie with salt instead of sugar; the president of their university, who according to Dr. Dad was a terrifically funny guy, but who’d have thought he’d nail that job? Such was the talk of the feast as turkey, cranberry sauce, and the other ritual trappings were generously doled out. Flannery spent some time next to a bony woman in red who accepted a sparse plate of turkey (no skin) and just green vegetables, then told Flannery all about her fresh divorce and her daughter, who was spending this holiday with her boyfriend, and how much she missed her.

By nine, stuffed and suffocating, Flannery felt she could decently leave. They asked her to stay, of course, so she had to say, “Oh, I’d love to, thank you, but I’d better get back. I have a lot of work to do.” “But, Flannery”—this was Dr. Dad—“are you sure the trains run this late? On Thanksgiving?” “I think I can just make the last one. It goes in about half an hour.” Oh, yes. What a New Yorker Flannery pretended to be: as if she knew the timetable by heart. They tried a few more murmuring protests, but Flannery could see they were relieved, too. The woman in red could clearly hardly wait for her to leave, so she could update Mary-Jo’s mother on the divorce news.

Mary-Jo’s father came down with her after the goodbyes, to help her hail a cab. They waited in the cold for a minute. The streets were peaceful in the overfed aftermath of the holiday.

“So,” said Dr. Dad, with a smile in his voice she hadn’t heard upstairs. “Rushing back to campus, eh? At this hour?”

“Well, you know. I’ve got a lot of reading. Some papers due.”

“Sure, of course. They load you up with work over the break, I remember that.” Mary-Jo’s father had gone to the same university—back in the bad old days, he’d laughed when he told her, before they let the pretty girls in.

A cab approached them finally, and Dr. Dad put a protective arm around Flannery as he checked out the driver. “You know where you’re going?” he asked her gently.

“Sure—you know—Grand Central,” she stuttered.

“Of course.” He winked, and gave her a hug goodbye. “Good luck, Flannery. I hope he’s a nice fellow. He’s lucky to have you.”

W
hen do the endearments begin? When does “honey” start, or “sugar,” or “babe,” or whichever lower-case term seems right to capture the spontaneity of fondness? All those times when a given name seems too formal, too serious or even harsh, and you want something friendlier as a salute or calling.

In their earliest days it was only “you” between them. (The way “Hey, you” can become the tenderest utterance.) It was all they needed. But by the time they left New York, Flannery realized she had become Anne’s “babe.” “Come on, babe, let’s go.” “Hey, babe, do you want some coffee?” Flannery liked
babe.
It wasn’t too frilly or delicate—it sounded tough, like they were in this together.
It’s you and me, babe. I got you, babe.
It made Flannery feel like a rock chick, as she told Anne later; after which she had to, on demand, play a minute of air guitar and toss her blond mane around as any self-respecting rock chick would.

But what could she call Anne? Flannery could not pull off “babe”: it wouldn’t have sounded authentic, coming from her. She didn’t have the jacket for it, or the attitude. Her voice was too faint. (She had never much liked her voice.)
Honey
brought on thoughts of her own mother, a constant
honeyer
, which was not a good idea; and
darling
was never even in the running. Which left sweetheart.
Sweetheart.
It seemed to fit. It was a classic, after all, and yes, sweet, without being cloying. She tried it out to see how it sounded.

They were on the train together back from New York. Anne was reading. Flannery had been looking out the window, not seeing the trash-strewn landscape, blinded as she was by the overwhelming fact of how much had happened, how completely the world had changed since she had last ridden this train in the other direction. She turned, and in an unrehearsed voice said,