Beggar of Love

by Lee Lynch

  The great-room walls were the original tongue-and-groove wood paneling, stained and shellacked to a shine, and the floors were made of wide wood planks with big, old-fashioned blue braided rugs. When they replaced the outhouse with a bathroom, they made it large enough for a toilet and shower. Originally they used the antiquated, red hand pump out front. An enamel sink hung on the wall outside the bathroom, supported by metal poles and skirted with old oilcloth-enclosed storage.

  Only the kitchen had been updated. The pine open shelving and single wooden counter, patches worn in its varnish from use, hadn’t changed, but in the 1950s, the icebox had been moved out back to store tools and garden implements. Her grandparents had put in a stark white Frigidaire Kelvinator, which whined now. The repair guy from Mailboat Harbor, though long retired, still came out to work on it and the Tappan range they’d bought at the same time. Only the clock at the top of the stove was not working. It stuck with a click every time it passed 3:18. She’d see if she could get that fixed and find someone to blow insulation into the walls.

  There were two bedrooms off the great room, with knotty-pine three-quarter walls and, over them, an open loft where she’d slept as a kid. The climb up the vertical wooden ladder to the mattress under the attic window had been a highlight of her childhood. From the foot of her bed she could see the rafters over the living room and glimpse the grown-ups talking, smoking, and drinking on the deep screened front porch, its floor painted blue. Now the big bedroom downstairs was hers. The red-and-black checked bedspread and matching curtains at the screened windows must be at least as old as she was. There were no doors on the closets in the house, just rods and blue muslin shower curtains. The cottage, dotted with floor lamps, had always felt more like home than her parents’ big, dark, ungainly house in Dutchess.

  Her things weren’t due until the next day, so she had little to keep her busy. She’d brought their blue-and-purple-striped comforter and wrapped it around herself on the old overstuffed couch. How many times had they made love on this very couch when they were first together? How many times sat touching shoulders, hips, feet, with their legs resting on the cherrywood-slab coffee table, watching logs burn in the fireplace? The mantel was made from a piece of the same cherry. They’d talked about work, their friends, their plans, growing old together, foolish bits from the local papers, their favorite TV shows, the old framed nature watercolors hung on the walls. It seemed they could talk about anything for hours, for days, for whole vacations. The more history they had together, the more there was to talk about. The silence got to her now, but she couldn’t bear to cover up the quiet with music or TV. It was their silence, the vacuum in her life Ginger had filled, that she hung on to. All she had left was the very present absence of Ginger, which at least affirmed that there had been a Ginger, had been love, and she hugged the shadow of who they had been as tight as she could.

  After a week of unpacking and setting up, Jefferson thought it would be good to be face-to-face with people someplace other than the grocery, hardware store, and post office. There was a bean supper at the Methodist church in Gramble, twenty minutes north and east along the lake. She’d always wanted to go to that bean supper as a kid, but that would have interrupted her parents’ established cocktail hour, and the church didn’t serve liquor. Ginger, brought up Catholic and turned off by the priests’ child abuse, had made a face and exclaimed, “A church?” Now Jefferson was a free agent, like it or not, and no one could stop her.

  Truth be told, aside from feeling like a length of herself had been severed, she kind of liked kicking around trying to figure out her own agenda with nobody else’s itinerary or baggage tripping her up. Life, pain and all, had become an adventure again, and she, the real sober McCoy, was the greatest source of surprises.

  Once past the gray stone doorway, she could see the long tables waiting for the crowd. They were covered with sheets of colorless butcher paper, not the brown of the crab shacks in Maryland where she’d taken Ginger one wonderful long weekend. They’d traveled to Washington, DC, on Amtrak, then rented a car to get around. The dinner had been fun, but the strongest image she had of that weekend was of Ginger’s long, muscled dancer’s legs in the air while Jefferson made love to her. The memory was so powerfully erotic she had to force herself to tune back in to this small-town church where she stood beside the children’s leaf tracings, feeling awkward, and looked for an empty seat.

  And there they were, a small knot of lesbians clustered at the end of one of the tables. One more chunk of home fell into place for her.

  The first one to spot her, a hefty woman with curly short hair who looked like she might get familiar with a six-pack pretty regularly, glanced away, then did that mumbly thing dykes do when sharing a spotting on their dyke radar. The second one, thin, with short bleached hair and a Xena sweatshirt, checked Jefferson out and alerted the slight woman across from her, the only femme—or straight girl—in the group. Bangs made her look very young, but the rest of her hair, straight and feathered at her shoulders, was laced with gray. The gray, with her light makeup, made her look both mature and alluring. She had high arched eyebrows that gave her a questioning look, but beneath them were calm yet merry blue eyes. The woman gave her a quick smile, then looked again, as if realizing Jefferson was gay. The fourth woman never stopped talking.

  Of course they would all be at the bean supper, and they all would go together. They were probably locals who had been going to bean suppers since infancy. Or one of them, the femme, she imagined, had been dragging her friends for years. She forced herself to keep eye contact with them and not get shy about this. They were the first gays she’d seen in Pipsborough. She was at least ten years older than the youngest of these women, but they would know others—if there were others. She might not get a chance like this again.

  How she had always loved the hushed defiance of being gay, the underground of secrets and shared knowledge that ensured their survival in the face of physical danger and psychic extinction. She didn’t know if she could appreciate coming out now, when coming out meant a public declaration, a not-so-shocking rebellion before an audience of parents, peers, and employers. She thrived on doing lesbian things in the dark of night, of society, of her soul.

  The woman with bangs was addressing her. “This is family-style. Come join us. I’m Dawn Northway.” Her smile was now wide and open. She wondered who in the group Dawn Northway was hitched to. She looked happy. Jefferson pushed her sweatshirt hood off her head, picked up a folding metal chair, and inserted it between Dawn and a palsied woman in a flowered fleece cardigan who looked near ninety. The old woman grinned and nodded her permission.

  “I haven’t missed a bean supper in forty years,” the old woman whispered. “I was a server until the shakes got so bad. Harry and me, we helped start them. When Harry died nineteen years ago this month, I still came to the suppers.” She winked. “I knew he’d be here in spirit.”

  “Are you bragging again, Kathy?” Dawn Northway asked.

  Jefferson put a hand on Katherine’s arm and exclaimed, “Heaven forbid! Katherine’s way too young to have anything to brag about.”

  Katherine bent forward in her seat to see past Jefferson. “Your friend is right. You get to be my age, you have a right to brag,” she told Dawn. Then she whispered to Jefferson, “She’s our librarian. Ed Northway brought her mother over after the Vietnam conflict. Word is, he saved her life. There must be a dozen Viets on the Northway farm now. Ed and the Mrs. brought out all the family left living.” She lowered her voice. “It was a scandal at first, but I say, what harm have they done? They stay to themselves unless they’re doing something civic-minded. All of the men volunteer with the fire department.”

  Jefferson waited for more, but Katherine turned to her other neighbor.

  “Our lucky day,” said the talky dyke when Jefferson met her eyes. “Usually we get to sit with Republican retirees.”

  “Hey, troops,” she said, relapsing into her old coaching jargon,
“how do you know I’m not?”

  Dawn touched her shoulder as she laughed, as if they were already old friends. She kept her hands smooth-looking and nicely manicured. “This is Rayanne,” she said. “Don’t mind her and her sarcasm, she’s harmless. We went to college together. Which makes her one of my oldest friends.”

  Rayanne gave Dawn an annoyed look and told Jefferson, “That’s oldest in years, not age.”

  “That gets her every time,” Dawn confided, with a grin at Rayanne.

  Jefferson guessed the two had been more than friends at some time. She asked, “What do they do, bring the food to the table?”

  “Eventually,” said Rayanne, settling her chin in her hands with a loud, discouraged sigh.

  The thin woman craned her neck toward Jefferson and said, “It’s worth the wait. Things get a little backed up in the kitchen at first. It’s all volunteers.” She reached across the table to give Jefferson’s hand a brisk shake. “Shannon Wiley, present and accounted for,” the woman said, wincing as she stretched. Back trouble, Jefferson noted.

  After an inward chuckle at Shannon’s soldier-like formality, she turned to the hefty mumbler. “Jefferson,” she offered.

  “Yolanda Whale. And I already know my name fits me.”

  “Hey,” she replied, hands up in front of her. “Never crossed my mind.”

  “Keep it that way,” Yolanda advised, “and I’ll turn you on to the best ale in the world.”

  “Sorry, I don’t drink any more.”

  “One of those twelve-steppers?” Yolanda asked. “Nothing worse than a—” Yolanda looked around and whispered, “than a dry dyke. Except for a slogan-slinging dry dyke.”

  “Poor me…poor me…pour me another drink,” Jefferson recited.

  “Oh, I like that one!”

  She saw looks pass between Shannon, Rayanne, Dawn, and two men at the table.

  “I’m Drew Blaine and this is my partner Ryan,” one of the men said.

  Again, she shook hands. “What a nice surprise.” She hadn’t realized the two men were part of the group and gay.

  “We come to protect our town librarian against Mrs. Green.”

  “Is she crushed out on someone?”

  Dawn Northway laughed. “Fat chance!”

  Northway was wearing pink lipstick and light eye makeup. “You don’t look like my image of a librarian,” Jefferson said, which only made Dawn laugh harder. She’d never seen blue eyes in an otherwise Asian face. She was curious about Dawn.

  Ryan explained. “Donna Green thinks Huckleberry Finn should be banned from the library.”

  “Among other innocent books,” Drew added. “The whole Harry Potter series, for example.”

  She told them, patting one of Dawn’s hands, “That’s ridiculous. Can’t you get rid of her?”

  “Tell me how,” Dawn pleaded.

  “I’ll handle her,” Shannon said, glowering. Jefferson couldn’t help but think Shannon’s bleached, surfer-boy haircut would make her butch of the month back at Café Femmes, especially, given her sweatshirt, with the fans.

  “No, Shannon,” Dawn said. “You’d only make it worse.”

  Shannon put on a sulky face.

  “What would you do,” Rayanne asked, “put sugar in her gas tank for the next meeting?”

  “I’ve thought of that,” Shannon said, “but she’d get a ride with some other wacked-out gay-hater.”

  “They’re scared,” Dawn said. “We need to find a softer, kinder way, or it will come back to bite us.”

  “This smell is killing me,” said Yolanda. “We could get the bitch in here and starve her to death. Where’s the food?”

  Katherine glanced their way. “They got started late,” she explained. “Corbin Adams had the key and he got stuck t’other side of the lake.”

  Jefferson sniffed the air. “You’re right. That smells fantastic. I’ve never been to one of these before.”

  “Hang around with Miz Dawn and you’ll be here every month,” Yolanda said.

  Dawn, who seemed to laugh every time she spoke, and not a nervous laugh, but the laugh of someone who genuinely enjoys herself, protested. “We lined up early to get in with the first sitting. If there was a decent restaurant around, we could get together there.”

  “Or if one of us cooked,” Rayanne said. “Do you cook?” she asked Jefferson and, without waiting for an answer, went on. “The boys cook. We need a girlfriend who cooks. Or are you a tourist?” She said this last as if it was a curse.

  “I moved into my family’s cottage. I’m here to stay.”

  The swinging kitchen doors bounced open and the rich, sweet smell of baked beans rushed out with them. Middle-aged and old women served up huge bowls of beans, brown bread, cole slaw, and what looked like red hot dogs.

  While they waited for their server, Shannon said, “I had to drive Yolanda’s truck over because Yolanda wasn’t too steady.” She explained to Jefferson, “I visit my folks in Laconia on Saturdays and get a ride with Yo. Except when I chauffeur her. We won’t let her drive home till she’s sober.”

  “Can’t get the supplies I want in Pipsborough,” Yolanda explained.

  Shannon, her look full of concern, said, “Meaning Golden Loon Ale.”

  Yolanda said, “I drink Golden Loon. You’re a Xena fanfic addict. If you couldn’t get your Xena fix anywhere but Hollywood—”

  A smile stretched Shannon’s mouth, and one deep dimple showed up on her right cheek, then a second on her left. “I’d bike the whole way.”

  “Fangirl,” Yolanda said to Shannon in a teasing tone. “You’d think they could at least serve local beer or wine at these suppers.” Jefferson remembered sounding like her not all that long ago, alcohol her first concern.

  “I have an idea,” Dawn said. “I’ll accept that job in Concord and you won’t have to go to these suppers.”

  “No!” Shannon, Yolanda, and the two men cried.

  Rayanne rolled her eyes. “Forget it. You’re not going anywhere. We found you a nice, eligible bachelor. You are an eligible bachelor, aren’t you?” Rayanne pointed a speared chunk of hot dog at Jefferson.

  “Well, yes and no.”

  Shannon was looking worried.

  “That was clear,” Rayanne said, sarcasm getting past her mouthful.

  “Stop, Ray,” Dawn said.

  “It’s okay. I’m a sort of bachelor, but I’m not eligible.”

  Shannon stared at her, fork halfway to her mouth, like Jefferson should go on.

  She shrugged and told them, “It’s not over till it’s over.”

  This time it was Dawn offering comfort with a touch of her hand on Jefferson’s and sympathy in her eyes.

  A silence followed. Yolanda broke it, saying, “They’re still upset because I started crying while we were in line. I mean, life would suck if Dawn went to Concord. She’s the life of the party.”

  “Life is a party with Dawn around.”

  “There, there,” said Drew, patting Yolanda on the head.

  Jefferson felt like she was intruding on a family quarrel, and at the same time, this affectionate feud felt familiar. She could be at Café Femmes. This was promising, she thought, as, from a host of homemade pies a server offered, she chose the apple with a big slab of sharp cheese.

  It was crazy, but right this minute she was extraordinarily happy. She loved living at the lake. Sometimes she got the incredible feeling she used to have when she was winning a game. It filled her up and she was a walking smile. But how could she—without Ginger?

  Dawn Northway was smiling at her, nodding in approval when Jefferson raised her eyebrows to indicate her pleasure in the food. Their eyes held, forkfuls of pie midway to their mouths. She reminded herself that she had to get out of the habit of thinking of femmes as prospective bed partners. She’d been wondering if it was possible that she’d given so much of her heart away she had nothing more to give; certainly no forevers. She’d had her forever.

  By the end of the dinner, after
she declined to go drinking with Yolanda Whale, escaped Rayanne’s detailed history of the town of Gramble, New Hampshire, since before the Europeans arrived, got a sweet hug from Dawn, hired Shannon, the surfer-dude Xena freak some girl was going to find delectable, to do some work around the cottage, and accepted the offer of a driving lesson in the snow that winter from Dawn, she knew she was making some friends. These people were hungry to add to their community. She was elated.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  There was no getting away from the snow. She had to drive across it, so she depressed the accelerator on her new Toyota Avalon, heard the wheels spin, the engine strain. She inched forward, then threw the shift into reverse, pressed, moved back, pressed—and she was finally moving through this slick little snow dune.

  Dawn gave a cheer.

  “You know what’s funny?” she told Dawn. “Toyota calls this car’s color Blizzard Pearl. If I get us stuck we’ll blend right in and not be discovered till spring.” Then she plowed into more snow and powered out again.

  “Go, girl,” Dawn cried as Jefferson broke through.

  “Getting stuck’s not what scares me,” she told Dawn as she slipped along the parking lot, past piles of rain-pocked snow and refrozen melt. “And don’t you tell anyone I’m scared. I’m forty-eight—too old to be such a sissy.”

  “Oh, the big bad butch girl who can fix anything and is never scared.”

  “Hey, I can power through most anything. It’s the skidding and spinning that gets me in a stew.”

  “Don’t be such a control freak,” Dawn said. “A little four-wheel cross-country skiing is fun.”

  She scowled, gripping the wheel as if she could keep the car from flying. “For daredevils like you, maybe.”