Twilight Girl (7 page)

"Okay, I told you. Can I go back to my room?"

"May!"

"May
I go back to my room, Mother?"

"I have a few things to say to you first." Then, softening the shrill voice to the painfully studied mother-daughter tone, "You'll meet lots of nice boys at church, dear. You remember that membership contest... I was
so
pleased with the results. Everyone was amazed, though, of course, they never appreciated the work that went into the planning. And what I'm trying to tell you, dear, is that you don't have to sneak around behind my back to meet boys..."

"I don't sneak around behind..."

"… because it's a perfectly natural interest If you'd pay some attention to the way you look...”

"I don't give a damn about boys!”

"Lorraine!”

"Well, I don't."

"Don't raise your voice at me, young lady. Don't you dare raise your voice at me! You aren't leaving this house again until I know where you're going. Is that clear?"

"Okay, okay."

"That's understood?"

"Yes, yes, yes!"

"Catch me believing you spend all that time with a girl. I wasn't born yesterday, Lorraine. I've raised two daughters and I don't mind telling you I did a good job. When they went out at night I met their escorts at the door!"

"Why don't you hire a detective and have him follow me, while you're at it?"

"That will be enough, young lady!"

"Well, don't go accusing me of things I don't do."

Lon stamped away from the argument with her mother's clinching point shrilling behind her: "I know some things you don't know, young lady!"

She had been saying that for a long time, Lon thought, closing the bedroom door with pointed finality. Mother had always known things that no one else knew; why the custodian at the Junior High had been fired—the size of the mortgage on the Women's Club—who would preside over the PTA in the coming year. She knew everything except how to tear aside the curtain that separated her from a third daughter who could not be like the first and the second. She was a woman burying herself in her own excavation, digging out new inconsequential secrets, so that she could impart secret civic knowledge, but never finding time to listen, except to compare the called-for answers with answers preconceived. And never understanding a problem that could not be resolved by appointing a committee. Until now, at last—and Lon permitted herself the shadow of an ironic, satisfied smile—now, at last, while she assumed the sins of boy and girl in the back row of the drive-in, the third daughter of Mrs. Harris knew something that Mrs. Harris didn't know.

CHAPTER 6

"Yeah, maybe the cute colored one said fer you t' call," Violet argued, "but that society one didn't give me any come-on. I wouldn' take the chance a callin' an' gettin'
snobbed!"

They sat at their favorite corner table among the 28%, with the restlessness playing between them more palpably than the cry of the juke. Someone, the record wailed, had stolen the keys to someone else's Cadillac car. And Lon considered Violet's logic carefully. If pride made a telephone call unthinkable, and since it was unlikely that Sassy would return to their hangout, what was the matter with looking for her, and for Mavis, elsewhere? Not that the present arrangement was not mutually satisfying. But as Violet amplified, "It's a good deal, the way we got it. But we're the broad-minded types, hon. I could even be broad-minded about you makin' a play fer dark cloud, 'cause I gotta admit she's sharp-lookin'. And, Jeez, how I could go fer that stuck-up butch!" Then, apologizing for Sassy, "She's gotta be snooty, kid. She's society."

Violet was an exception, Lon decided, for nowhere in The 28% had she encountered signs of prejudice. "Regardless of race, religion or color," a phrase hackneyed and insincere from too much use, was faithfully observed here, where the only ticket of admission was being gay. Still, Violet was not unreasonable. "Wanna go look aroun'?" she asked.

"It's up to you," Lon told her, squashing down enthusiasm.

Violet fluttered the weighted lashes. "Not jealous, sweetie?"

"Why should I be?" Then, in her newer vein, "Why the hell should I be?"

"Well, I'm pretty loyal to Rags an' Betty, but there's other gay joints."

"Where?"

"There's this mixed joint. The boys go there, too. Over on the beach."

"What makes you think they'd be there?"

"They gotta hang out somewhere, don't they? Then there's this place up in the canyon."

"What canyon? Mint, Topanga, Coldwater... I know a million canyons."

"Oh, some crappy Spanish name. I ferget. You have to go in with somebody who goes there regular, so that's out. Tonight, anyways."

"Do you know how to get to the beach place?"

"Yeah, I been there once. Wanna go?"

Lon arched her brows, feigning indifference. They finished their beers before they got up to leave.

"Hey, you're leaving early," Rags called to them. And then it was her turn to arch the eyebrows, stretching her mouth into a grim Rags smile. "I know how it is, kids. Have fun!"

* * *

The
Mermaid,
unlike the club from which Lon and Violet had departed, was not a teen-age hangout. In fact, a sign to the effect that minors were positively not admitted had been dutifully posted at the door. If the law were waived at the entrance of the Misses Harris and Polivka, it was not a deliberate violation of the statute, for the proprietor had retired to the beach with her current friend and the girls behind the bar were too entranced by lavender hair and the skin-tight white jersey dress into which Violet's roundness had been poured—much too startled—to concern themselves with the age of her pseudo-bored escort.

"Wow, am I gettin' the once-over," Violet whispered ecstatically. There was no room for them at the tiny tables, the little brown cigarette-scarred tables with their tincan-protected candlelight and the faces around them blurred in the smoke haze. So they pushed their way past others for whom there was no room and stood awkwardly near the bar, Violet eyeing the prospects and Lon noting that half the patrons looked so elegant that they must be slumming, the other half so deliberately stamped with the hoodlum label that they seemed crashers at a swank affair.

For the
Mermaid
was open to all brackets and all genders, and a mermaid illustrated in oils behind the bar was, according to the inscription, "Just another frail with a crazy, mixed-up tail." Here occasional males gathered to socialize with the gay girls. Yet when the man at the corner organ (licking his lips first, so that they glistened moistly in the candle glow) thumped out a provocative rhythm, the girls danced only with each other.

A big woman in a sweater winked lasciviously at Lon. Then the woman swept Violet into her arms, holding the smaller girl at a comfortable distance, fanny sticking out like a bustle. Violet giggled, everyone hooted. Or screamed or whistled or laughed. And Lon moved away from the bar, tight-lipped as Rags at The 28%, more lost than disgusted, more lonely than resentful. Thinking, if anyone's a freak, it's Violet. And left Violet to dance with the clown.

With nowhere to go, Lon made her way to the bright blue door of the powder room.

No library in all the land dispenses knowledge with the direct efficiency of the public washroom. Lon did not linger long in the three-stalled cubicle of the
Mermaid.
Only long enough to hear sophisticated chatter, arty phrases that escaped her—and bits and snatches that convinced her further that Violet was a true exception to the loose format of Lesbian society. From the conversations, she pegged one of the thirtyish women as a fashion executive. Another had something to do with script-selection at a major movie studio. A smartly dressed pair argued about the influence of Zen on the contemporary artist. Lon longed to understand and feel included. Among these people, Violet could only be regarded as an amusing but pitiable showpiece. A shame for having come with Violet rose within Lon, intertwining itself with the hopeful reason for having come at all.
A girl could be proud to go out with Mavis, who knew so much and was so beautiful that beside her Violet looked like some cheap bauble. Made in Japan and cheap, cheap, cheap!
Then, mentally apologizing to the Violet as her anger mounted, Lon stepped out of the line formed before the swinging doors, though someone smiled at her invitingly and said, "Were you next, hon?" Lon stepped aside, mumuring, "Changed my mind," and fled the washroom, feeling eyes on her back.

Across the jammed floor, she could see Violet living it up. The butches were more aggressive here than at The 28%, Lon decided. Well, good. So much for Violet. It was for another face that Lon's eyes screened the crowd; that haughty loveliness entrenched in her memory. Before I leave, she promised herself, I'll cover the beach. It would be painful not to find Mavis, more painful to find her among the couples making out in the Pacific sand. Lon cursed Violet's vanity, the vanity that had rubbed off on her, making the simple, invited phone call so frightening.

A dark alcove broke the symmetry of the room. In it were several booths, shielded from close view by dancing couples. Lon picked her way through the mob, twisting like a halfback to avoid impulsive table-hoppers. A group of girls, their faces barely discernible in the flickering light, invited her to join them as she peeked into their den. "Looking for someone," she excused herself. And a husky voice accepted her apology genially: "Baby, aren't we all?"

A second group, of a tougher species, ignored her completely. Laughing hysterically, they were busy dripping icecubes over the face of a pale, aesthetic-looking young man whose head rolled dizzily against the back of the booth. "We shouldn't laugh," one of the group admonished. "He only gets boiled because he's trying to forget Larry." The water rolled from the pale young man's face and he stirred like a sleeping dog with a fly on its nose. The girls were still laughing as Lon moved away, but one, controlling her merriment, was assuring the others that Larry was a real louse and not worth getting drunk over.

It appeared, at first, that the corner booth was unoccupied. Lon peered into the candleless darkness, seeing the couple then, locked in a jig-saw puzzle embrace. "Oh—sorry!" she said. And regretted in the next instant having spoken, for if she had gone away quietly, they would have never known she was there. Now they knew, and suddenly. They broke the impassioned grip and the larger shadow lurched toward the end of the seat. A throaty, drunken voice demanded, "What the hell you mean, spyin' on people?"

"I was looking for a girl I know," Lon said dully.

The drunk was on her feet, weaving under her enormous weight. Outside the booth, the smoke-screened light caught her face—gray and sharply pointed, as though someone had used it to shovel cement. "You got a goddam lotta crust..."

Something of her newfound male aggressiveness spurted up in Lon. "What makes you think I've got nothing better to do than watch you make out?" She turned to leave and the big butch staggered forward, grabbing a rough handful of Lon's shirtfront.

"Get smart with me, you punk bastard, you'll get a knuckle san'wich!"

"Hands off me," Lon threatened. The sound that had not whined inside her head since the debacle with Miss Chamberlin made itself known, irritating her fury at being stopped. Her fists tightened, one swinging automatically over her head and smashing down against the girl's forearm, breaking the savage grip in a shredding of fabric. The ripped shirt ignited the smouldering fury and she was ready as the thick fist swung toward her in a wild, wide arc. The blow grazed her protecting left arm and her right smashed against the mud-colored face. A smaller shadow inside the booth shrieked, "Gil!" and the big butch, spinning in a feeble effort to strike back, crashed across the booth table. Panting, Lon watched the burly form hang there for one sliding moment, then thud to the floor like a limp sack. The dark blotch forming under the open-hung mouth, she guessed, was blood.

No crowd gathered; it was just a fight. But the ice-cube girls stood in their booth for a quick look-see, and the butch's tiny friend wriggled out of her seat, sobbing curses, then kneeling to mop at the bashed lover's mouth with a wrinkled head scarf.

Lon walked past the ice-cube party with a heroic nonchalance, yet uncertain that they were not friends of the fallen foe. "Gil woulda knocked the hell outta you, kid, sober," one of them said. And another, more impressed, argued, "First time I've seen her take the count, drunk or sober." As if that settled the matter.

And Lon made her way to the bar, leaving the blubbering Florence Nightingale with her sprawling patient. Still shaking with the unchained anger and furious about the torn shirt, Lon was nevertheless pleased with herself. As though she had graduated to a higher status in the strange new world to which she belonged—belonged irrevocably now, having defended both honor and the right to search for Mavis. For Mavis was related in some mysterious way to her prideful victory. The right to long for and to search for Mavis...

CHAPTER 7

They gained access to the canyon club and they returned to the beach once more. They invaded another spot in the Valley, open to the public, so that the straight gawkers stared at them as they stared at the other girls who drank cautiously and spoke in quiet subdued voices. Dancing was not permitted in the "open" clubs. And, perversely, Lon dismissed the simple maneuver of phoning the objects of their search, immersed in the drama of seeking Mavis in the darkest corners. Later, she would solace on Violet's rumpled bed where the lace and tafetta boudoir doll watched the ministrations with solemn painted eyes. And a more solemn Holy Mother looked beyond them from the bedroom wall.

But it was in the beer-stale darkness of The 28%, after all, that Lon at last found Mavis. Mavis alone, as palpably alone as only Mavis could be. She sat unobtrusively in the same shapeless black dress, with her slim piano fingers caressing a Coke bottle. Seemingly at peace with her aloneness.

Violet saw her, too. "Oh, Jeez, honey, look who's here!" Her quarry-trained eyes swept the room for Sassy Gregg, yet at the same time she was saying, "Listen, Sassy wouldn' of come back here." Trembling with a new strategy. "Listen, I'll stay aroun' the bar so I don't cramp your style. But remember, fix it up fer the both of us."