by Lee Lynch
Abeo’s attention had wandered. “How long you going to treat your guest of honor like some hitchhiker?”
“Don’t you have any fight in you at all?” She looked at Abeo, who had always put on party girl airs like a perfume. For some people, being in the world itself was a fight. “Get in the truck and I’ll take you up the mountain.”
“Ah-hem,” Abeo responded, somehow eyeing her suitcase and the truck bed simultaneously
Donny balked. “I never had to treat you like a lady when you really were a queen. Do I look like your house slave now?” She wasn’t about to admit that hauling shit at the store left her hurting too bad to be bending over and picking up a suitcase as big as a chest of drawers.
“Humph.” Abeo, who was almost a dozen years her junior, flung the big bags into the truck bed with ease, then daintily entered the cab. “Why are we climbing mountains tonight?” she asked as Donny clicked her seatbelt into its slot. “Chick won’t let this gender-freak in your home?”
“You know Chick better than that, Queenie. She’s up at Harold and Joe’s place and wanted me to bring you there first. You remember how the white girls and radical faeries love that drumming. The boys have a teacher staying all week.”
“Drumming! That’s exactly like your woman to remember how I loved drumming. It gave me a vision of who I really am. What are we waiting for, girl?” Abeo asked, hanging on Donny’s arm.
She smelled like she really had taken a bath in some funky perfume. Donny said, “For you to let go. I can’t drive with you playing whiney little girl all over me.”
Abeo slumped to her side of the truck. “Never mind then.”
“Damn! You look like some fine woman, Abeo, but maybe you ought to tone it down.”
“Who all voted you Miss Manners? Give a girl a chance to fine-tune her new-lady self. I’m saving up for charm school as soon as they send my check.”
“You still acting crazy for the government?”
“I’ll be crazy until I find a husband to support me.”
Donny turned off Stage Street toward Blackberry Mountain, grinning at the dark road ahead. “You don’t need that charm school. Do you know any better femme-trainer than me?” She took her hand off the steering wheel to smack Abeo’s palm. “Damn!”
“What’s the matter, Don?”
“I missed you,” she said quickly to cover. Her fingers were getting so gnarled up from the arthur the littlest pressure sometimes started a big ache. Dr. Wu told her not to be overusing her hands—like she had a choice—but she was damned if she was going to act like some old woman. She wasn’t the retiring kind.
Abeo chattered happily about her trip from Chicago and their old Southside gang until Donny parked alongside the other cars that jammed the boys’ driveway.
They could hear the drums.
“Oo, baby. That’s my song. Do I look okay?” Abeo asked.
Poor Abeo. She’d never been model material. “Like my dream girl back when I was a young stud.”
For a while Donny kept them in the shadows away from the bonfire. The drumming made her irritable. She’d thought drumming would be a body thing, like dancing with your hands, but she saw little of that in these circles. Now and then Chick let out a sound of what sounded like pleasure, and once a gangly kid got up, drum under his arm, and stomped, knees high, around the fire. The rest of the drummers were concentrating so hard it made them look like they were being faithful to some fancy white man’s score.
It had surprised her when Chick took up drumming. Chick started messing with the little drums they carried for sale in the store, getting together with a handful of drum nuts once a month, then more often. She’d once told Donny that drumming took her so far inside herself the drum beats became her heartbeat, and that made Donny wonder what, on the outside, her woman needed escaping from. Something had been on Chick’s mind and had been for a while, something she wouldn’t talk about, but which had her lying awake at night and making mistakes during the day, taking away her sex drive and sending her drumming every chance she got.
“It’s my therapy,” she had told Donny.
“What do you need therapy for, woman?” she’d wanted to ask.
She wouldn’t ask, though. The times they’d gotten into it with each other were the times Donny had pushed too far, asked too many questions about the deep-down Chick. Chick did not care to be pushed. If she needed to go far away, that was her business, as long as she came back. Chick had been drumming long enough now that Donny knew it could be a distress signal or it could be about high spirits. She went fishing and Chick drummed. It was one more way they were different, along with their colors, ages, even their sizes. Beanpole Donny called Chick her love pillow.
The wind carried bonfire smoke her way and she shifted around the circle. Uh-huh, some of these people were showing off or trying to fit in; Chick was into it.
At the first sign of quiet, Abeo burst into the circle and threw herself at Chick.
“Abraham!” Chick cried, opening her arms.
Donny heard a little yelp from a severe-looking young dyke she’d never seen in the store. They normally got them all stopping in at one time or another.
Chick gave her big open laugh. “This is our city friend Abraham! Remember him from potlucks at the faerie farm?”
Donny could see the unease on the faces of the women around the fire. They were used to the local gay guys, but here was Abe dressed like the kind of woman they refused to be.
“But this isn’t Abraham anymore, Miss Chick. It’s the new improved version. I am Abeo the Magnificent!”
Donny could tell Chick hadn’t understood what Abe meant about improved. “Abeo has left her old gender behind,” Donny told the group. “She’s a sister now.”
“I remember you from my last visit,” Abeo said, pointing at R. “And you and you.” She looked beside herself with excitement—and excitement, Donny remembered, was Abraham’s food and drink.
R, who sat drumless, cape around her, on the log closest to the fire, gave an unsmiling nod in greeting. Donny wanted to laugh at her discomfort—the woman didn’t want to play if she wasn’t setting the beat. She watched while two of the younger women, the severe-looking one, who Chick introduced as Sandstone, and the short, muscular old-timer Alice, pressed close to R, whispering. R seemed to answer by raising her eyebrows.
“Abeo,” R said, “we welcome you as a woman.”
“I know what you’re worrying about, you and the other gay girls. You’re scared I’m a straight woman. Well, have no fear. Abeo does nothing halfway. I am through with men forever. I don’t want to be one or be with one.” She looked at Harold. “As lovers. I’m not the man-hating kind of lesbian. I’ve lived in both worlds now.”
R seemed to study Abeo in silence, then said, “I hope you’ve also embraced the lesbian sensibility that comes with being a woman-loving woman.”
“Don’t you be telling her how to be a lesbian, R,” said Donny. “You took your own damn time joining our club.”
R’s eyes took on an intensely sad cast. “I’ve been a lesbian all my life.”
“Funny. So have I and I didn’t spend any of that time sleeping with a man or raising his sons. You and Abe here have a lot in common.”
Alice and Sandstone rose menacingly on either side of R. Donny could hear one of the men give a loud sigh and saw another roll his eyes. She ignored them.
“Can Abeo catch a ride back with you later, Chick?” she asked. “Nothing against drumming,” she told the rest. “But knowing you women I’d be here half the night. Tomorrow’s baking day.”
“You’re leaving your friend here?” asked Sandstone. Alice seemed to grow burlier beside her, knees bowing, hands turning to fists.
Donny threw a challenging arm around Abe’s shoulder. “What can I do if she’d rather be with you than me? She’s only my best runaround buddy who I haven’t seen for three years.”
“Uh, excuse me?” the kid said with annoying hostility. “I was
at Michigan when a trans woman tried to invade outer space. As long as this isn’t woman-only space I’m okay with it, but I don’t think someone can change their gender inside.”
The little shit might as well have slapped Abe in the face. That tight-skinned fire-spitting feeling spread around Donny’s head. Her own hands began to fist.
It was Abeo who responded. “I’m as anatomically correct as Barbie should be. Want to see?” she asked, beginning to unbutton.
“Quit it,” Donny ordered. “My friend is not going to expose her private stuff for any politically correct recovering G.U.P.P.Y. who wouldn’t know what a transgender street person goes through without reading about it in a gay studies book.”
By the light of the fire she could see panic flicker over the faces of the women. Donny had heard their discussions often enough to guess what they were thinking. Should they support Sandstone? Was Abeo really a woman? Was it all right to cross Donny, who was not only a pillar of the lesbian community, but a black woman? Was it racist to let Donny’s and Abeo’s color influence them? What was R thinking?
Harold stood too. “We only have our teacher this one weekend, folks. Why don’t we do what we’re here to do?”
Donny said goodnight and walked to her truck. She’d gotten over her mad old self about Abeo’s big mouth. It hadn’t got Donny busted after all. And they could get over themselves too. From the silence behind her as she walked away, she knew at the very least they were telling Abeo she had to sit downwind from them so Kimama wouldn’t get sick from her perfume. All the way to the highway, over the clamor of her motor, she strained to hear the beat begin.
Chapter Twelve
Two Worlds
Señorita’s was a long, low, flat wooden restaurant and lounge painted turquoise except for its yellow doors and pink window trim. Striped pots of plastic fuchsia hung along the rail of a porch which stretched the length of the building. The place reminded Katie of the tavern next door to the trailer park she’d lived in during grammar school, a place that seemed so glamorous then because it was where the grownups went to have fun.
It was the weekend of the Honeysuckle Festival and she felt ridiculously excited. She’d gone on a wildflower walk to persuade the women at Spirit Ridge to come into town for the parade and the sidewalk sales. They complained that they weren’t into watching an army of little kids dressed as wild red honeysuckle, orange honeysuckle, Japanese honeysuckle in kimonos, twinberries in matching red, trumpet honeysuckle tooting toy horns—even the blue honeysuckle berries no one could grow around here—escort the Honeysuckle Queen on her vine float. They spent too much time trying to get rid of the pesty stuff so they could grow a few vegetables.
“Two-step dancing! Music by our old-time music band!” Katie Delgado had tempted the Ridgers, sunglasses raised in her hand as she danced by herself to no music at all.
“Maiden blue-eyed Mary,” R had said, pointing to tiny blue and white flowers. “And over there, scarlet fritillaries.” Katie had zoomed in and shot them, with their yellow streaks, like Mother Nature had been about to paint them orange then decided she liked the flowers the way they were.
“Let’s do it!” said one of the land veterans, twenty-nine-year-old Nitara, originally from Delhi, who’d moved to the Ridge for a junior year project at Antioch and returned after graduation. She was still living on grants and writing an extensive history of women’s communes seven years later. “I’ve always wanted to barge in on a drinking hole full of straights. They probably think it’s a regular babe band.”
“Not any more they don’t,” Katie said. “I know the owners. I couldn’t believe Eddy and Perlita hadn’t caught on. They’re extremely padrisimo about it.”
“You outed the band?” asked Marge, shock on her face. “Are you out of your mind? That’s their steady job.”
R’s hands were folded, a sardonic little smile on her face. “The owners will let that information get out. They probably think the novelty will attract more men. And they’re right.”
Aster, who had moved there from the university with Marge, mimed sticking a finger down her throat. “Like yuck.”
R said, “Men are much closer to our animal past than women. They may also want power and money, but only because it will get them more sex.”
“Don’t be such a grinch,” Katie had chastised R.
“They can’t help it. They have that propagation instinct. They disguise it, protect it any way they can. Who popularized romance? It’s the only aphrodisiac they found that works on women. Who created marriage? That’s simply the institutionalization of free and guaranteed sex, a business proposal in which men buy a female and feed and shelter her by bartering for sex and child-rearing.”
Nightfall said, “Can you imagine educated het women being suckered into going along with such a patriarchal agenda?”
“Dancing is a heterosexual courting ritual,” R said.
“I never danced for a man,” Marge told her.
“Double yuck. Me neither,” agreed Aster.
“Let’s go turn dancing into a homosexual courting ritual! Come on, R, support poor dance-crazed lesbians!”
“If it means that much to you, Katie, I’ll consider it. I realize this lifestyle shift from urban to rural has been difficult.”
“R,” she cried. “I don’t want you to do it for me. Don’t you ever like to cut loose and party?”
Nightfall said, “R’s idea of partying is the quarterly potlucks at the Grange.”
“Those are cool,” said Katie. “But truth? They don’t get my blood pumping.”
“And that’s what you need to feel good, Kate?” asked R. “A rush of pumping blood?”
“What can I say? I’m your typical type A, Gen X adrenaline junkie.” Confessions of weakness sometimes appealed to R when nothing else did. Katie thought of it as tapping into R’s goddess side, the way opposite end of rational. It reminded her to do the same, to rely on her guts more often when reading people.
So every night that week Marge and Aster had coached their land mates in the rudiments of country dance. The Saturday of the Honeysuckle Festival they walked into a macarena number at Senorita’s, the hub of nighttime entertainment for the festival. Onlookers shouted encouragement to the dancers. The band was in overdrive, trying to make music louder than the crowd.
Katie, walking backwards, swished her hips and led R by the hand. From the motor homes parked in the lot and along the sides of the road, she guessed the snowbirds were trickling up north from their winter RV parks. It wasn’t the Bay Area club scene, but it was going to give her a hit of what she needed.
The group snaked its way to the stage. There were seven of them, and four joined the hooting and clapping. “Someone,” she shouted to R, “ought to talk to the band about performing at a potluck. That would liven things up.”
R, wincing as she tried to make herself heard, said, “They did play for us, but I go to potlucks to talk to women, not to shriek at them.”
Hands at R’s waist, she fluttered her legs against R’s. R pulled back and asked, “What are you doing?”
“Dancing with you upright for once.”
“I’m not comfortable doing that here,” R said.
Katie dropped her arms and turned away. She wanted more than anything to be on R’s wavelength and felt like such a d.u.h. dud each time she failed. It was like meditation. Goddess, how she longed to quiet her mind, but as R said, she chattered. She was ashamed how she filled up her head with noise even in her silences. Tonight her body wanted to get in on the act, but wasn’t that natural with a band up on stage playing killer music like this?
She leaned toward Nightfall and asked, “Isn’t that a Grateful Dead tune?”
Nightfall bobbed her head, her face transformed by a smile. “Pig music, but so good. It’s like getting drunk—you know it’s bad for you, you know you’re going to suffer down the line, but it’s worth every heave. Listen to that banjo! These women know their stuff.”
The
y sang along with the chorus. “We can share the women, we can share the wine...” until they laughed too hard to sing.
Jeep was a better fiddler than she’d ever let on when they were together. And for sure the band, in their checked shirts, neckerchiefs, and red overalls, hadn’t had a Dead song in its repertoire before she joined them. Jeep loved the Dead and had used them to chill out. She’d told Katie that they’d been her mom’s favorite group so their songs were like lullabies to her. It was obvious that Jeep had quickly become the heart of the band, leaping around on stage with her fiddle like a crazed elf. How did she keep her cowboy hat—complete with lavender band of course—from falling off? Katie had heard that the other women were total amateurs, some new to their instruments, others to any instruments. She wondered how much their professionalism was Jeep’s doing, because they were totally cool. Jeep had probably even gotten them this job.
“Share the women...” Jeep had played that song while they were together, would play it on her harmonica, croon it over dinner in a restaurant, take her in her arms and dance her around to it in a motel room before leading her to the bed.
Katie didn’t dare look at R who must be having a fit at the lyrics. Too bad her path had led her away from Jeep. She’d had good, if puppy dog, energy, and, with her bad punk haircut, her long straight nose, and ever-smiling lips, they didn’t come any cuter. Katie still wouldn’t be able to keep her hands off the kid if she hadn’t opted for R. She laughed. Did her own puppy dog energy and dogging footsteps bug R as much as Jeep’s had her? Probably! Jeep had been a transitional indulgence, while R was a discipline. The thought crossed her mind that this made her a disciple, but she didn’t want to go there.
Katie had watched a torrent of apprehension pass across the face of each band member as they noticed the dykes out there, but a couple of numbers in, they were fine with it, catching their eyes and grinning. When Jeep spotted Katie her fingers didn’t falter and, for the first time since their breakup, she gave Katie a pained little smile. Katie hadn’t realized how much she’d wanted that to happen. She’d always known Jeep was strong and would be okay, and since she wasn’t right for the kid, leaving had been better for both of them in the long run. Still, she’d had to steel herself against guilt these last few months, and now she could look forward to letting that go. She could dance to Jeep’s music.
