Beggar of Love

by Lee Lynch

  Yolanda walked a stump over and sat, blowing into the neck of her bottle to make a deep, mournful sound.

  “I can’t deal with this subject,” said Rayanne. “Did you hear Spain is making gay weddings legal?”

  Yolanda sputtered. “Spain? They’ve got more Catholics than Massachusetts.”

  Dawn was clearly glad to get on to another subject. “Does that make the U.S. the most knee-jerk country on the globe?”

  “Who cares!” Shannon wailed. “Is this world all about couples? The four of us get along fine single.”

  Yolanda drank and played a new note. “Personally, I am pretty fried with all this gay-marriage publicity. They ought to leave it alone before some straight starts killing honeymooners in P-town.”

  “I don’t think I could find a marriage that’s better than what we have,” Rayanne said.

  “Had,” Yolanda pointed out.

  “Check it out: it’s not over till it’s over,” Shannon cried, echoing Jefferson’s words.

  Dawn looked as if she’d known it would be bad, but hadn’t expected this. She walked to the refrigerator and poured some iced tea. “Come on, guys,” Dawn said. “Tell me how I can turn my back on this job.”

  “Watch this!” Yolanda said, standing and turning until her back was to them. “Piece of cake.”

  “You jerk,” Dawn said, laughing.

  Yolanda sat down on her stump again. “Seriously, if I give you a million dollars, will you stay?”

  She laughed again. “Make it two million and you’re on.”

  “Hey,” Rayanne said. “If that’s what happens when you threaten to leave, I’m leaving too.”

  “Marry me.” Shannon dropped to one skinny knee. “I’ll support you. You’ll never have to work again.”

  “Watch out, Dawn,” Yolanda warned, “she’s serious.”

  “No, she’s not,” Rayanne said. “Shannon’s tired of living in her cabin. She wants to move in with you so she doesn’t have to get a real job.”

  Dawn smiled fondly at Shannon, as if she knew the woman was serious. “Get up.” She raised her chin upward. She didn’t seem to mind having three butch admirers, but she also seemed real clear that she wasn’t stringing them along. “Sorry, Shannon. There’s nothing I’d like better than someone to marry—except being single.” Was that true? Dawn didn’t move her eyes from her carving.

  “What are you asking Dawn to marry you for?” Yolanda asked with an affronted tone. “She’s already married. To us.”

  “Oh, right,” Rayanne said. “The world is going to love it when we demand equal rights for group gay marriages. Wouldn’t some of those bigamist religions be pleased.”

  “I’m really serious this time,” said Yolanda. “This is as good as it gets for me. We don’t fight, don’t get in one another’s faces, can leave at the end of the day, but we know we’re here for each other. That’s like all the good stuff and none of the bad.”

  Shannon asked, her voice wistful, “Isn’t there something missing?”

  Rayanne laughed. “You may have a point. Romance? Sex? Are they worth it?”

  “And if we were married, you wouldn’t leave us. Either we’d all go,” Yolanda argued, “or we’d all stay.”

  “Or we’d divorce,” Dawn suggested.

  “That’s what it feels like,” Shannon said. “It feels like you told us you’re getting a divorce.”

  Yolanda opened another ale. Shannon wrung her hands. Rayanne stared at the woman across the street. The neighbor was rolling out a rumbling, overflowing weed-filled trash can. Jefferson had pulled almost as many weeds early that morning while it was still cool. Her laundry was done. Before quitting and checking in at the office, she’d groomed the kittens, who had acted like she was trying to kill them. That had helped defrost her beat-up old heart.

  “What about Snickers?” she asked.

  Dawn answered. “Look at him in the window watching for signs that I’m coming in to feed him his cat food.” She sighed. “I’ll have to find an apartment that allows pets. I won’t buy anything until this house sells and I know the job’s for me.”

  Shannon said, “I’ll keep the house up. If things don’t work out you can come back.” Shannon didn’t have a steady job. She cleaned pools in the summer and washed dishes at the inn weekends and holidays year-round. She rented a small, unheated cottage out of town and seemed to survive the cold-weather months with a space heater and an incredible number of layers.

  “Oh, right,” Rayanne said. “Like she can afford to buy in Concord if she keeps this place.”

  “I can’t picture you in Concord,” Yolanda said. “Where are you going to carve? I can’t see you in an apartment building, with no yard work and no gang to hang out with.”

  “I’ll check Out In the Mountains, that gay paper, for a hiking group.”

  “They folded,” Rayanne said. “I used to advertise there.”

  “Anyone want iced tea?” Dawn asked, going back to the garage.

  Shannon followed her inside and grabbed a mug she kept over the laundry tub. “Did you already accept the job?” Jefferson heard her ask Dawn in a low voice.

  “They gave me to the weekend to decide.”

  “Come to my place for dinner.”

  “Are you asking the others?”

  “No!” Shannon said.

  Jefferson shook her head. Suddenly, shy Shannon was making her move. She was cute in a desperate kind of way. When Jefferson looked around, she saw that the others were listening too.

  “Better to stop her now,” Rayanne whispered, “than to build up her hopes.”

  “I don’t think so, Shannon,” they heard from the garage.

  Shannon sounded like her next word hurt coming out. “Why?”

  “I like things the way they are.”

  “I wasn’t going to—”

  “We won’t tempt fate, okay?”

  “It’s because you’re not over Bonnie yet, isn’t it. That was four years ago!”

  Drew had filled Jefferson in about the woman Dawn was with when she bought this house. Tall, sports-crazy, fickle Bonnie was what he’d called her. Drew had said that he still couldn’t believe Dawn hadn’t known what Bonnie was doing behind her back. That shame, he’d said, was part of what kept her from trying again.

  Had Ginger felt shame when she caught Jefferson fooling around? Why hadn’t she seen what harm she was doing? It was so clear to her now.

  Shannon strode from the garage and asked the others, “What good is getting the okay to marry when nobody wants me?”

  Dawn had already turned her back. She seemed not to hear Shannon.

  “We’ve decided,” Rayanne said when Shannon sat again.

  “Decided what?”

  “You’re not going,” Yolanda told her.

  “Of course I’m going. Don’t you guys want the best for me?”

  Rayanne laughed. For all her sharp words, she had a laugh like tickled wind. Dawn smiled despite herself as Rayanne said, “Not without us!”

  “We’re going to tie you up and keep you here, that’s all there is to it,” said Yolanda, taking Dawn’s hands in her own and swaying face-to-face with her. “Flatten your tires, put sugar in your Subaru’s tank, call Concord and tell them what a mistake they’d be making.”

  “Yeah,” Rayanne added, “tell them you’re queer.”

  “These days, that would probably make a library hire me so they didn’t get in trouble for discriminating.”

  “But seriously,” Rayanne said, “you are plain nuts to leave the lake. Everybody wants to live here, you know that. And to have a job here? We are living every sucker’s dream. How can you think about giving it up?”

  “You want to meet someone, don’t you.” Yolanda’s voice had a new edge to it and sounded accusatory. “The lake lezzies aren’t good enough for you.”

  Shannon was quick to say, “That’s her right.”

  “At least,” Yolanda said, “there’s a couple of bars there.”

>   Rayanne asked, “Will you still go to Women Outdoors with us?”

  “Not if she has a girlfriend,” Yolanda declared.

  “Wait a minute,” said Rayanne. “This is the best place to attract a girlfriend. Who wouldn’t want to move to the lake?”

  “Do I get to say anything?” Dawn asked. “I don’t want to leave the lake.”

  “So why go?” Yolanda asked.

  Jefferson could hear a robin in the tree in Dawn’s backyard. Rayanne looked puzzled, Shannon looked anxious, and Yolanda said, “Maybe it’s because I know my brother and I are going to inherit the shop, but I can’t get all that excited about career moves that rip me away from everything I love. This is your home, Dawn.”

  Rayanne said, “Maybe you’re ambitious. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the American way.”

  “You should know,” said Yolanda.

  “I’m not ambitious,” Rayanne said. “I like money.”

  “Who doesn’t?” asked Yolanda.

  Rayanne answered, “Shannon.”

  Shannon grinned. “I guess I’m not very ambitious.”

  Dawn sighed. “All right. You find me the woman I’m looking for around here and I’ll stay.”

  “I told you it was about meeting someone, didn’t I?” Yolanda declared.

  Dawn sat and began to whittle again. She had small but sensitive-looking hands, very dexterous. It was amazing that she could both whittle and keep her manicure. There was nothing as lovely as a femme’s touch. Femmes somehow managed to make touch as gentle as dandelion fluff, yet exciting beyond imagination. Her voice was as light as her touch, clear, but quiet, like grasses rustling in the lake.

  She was so different from Ginger—and from all the women she’d been with. There was none of the New York jangle, rushing, or ego about her. Jefferson couldn’t imagine Dawn contained inside crowded buildings. She belonged to the lake and the country air. Her friends were right; she was as much a part of this place as the native trees and birds. Dawn would have fit in before the settlers arrived, when it was all lake and forest. She drifted into a dream of colonial days and walking across a village green with Dawn, courting her in a gentlemanly way.

  But Dawn was telling them about her dream partner, looking at her knife and wooden bird. “She’d be on the tall side, with thick hair I’d want to run my hands through—maybe brown, but some gray would be fine. She’d be sturdily built, but not fleshy, strong-looking. Probably late forties and survived some tough times, or maybe in her fifties already. She might not sound like a New Englander, but she’d fit into this upscale resort town somehow, like she was bred to money. It would be the woman’s hands that would be most striking, though. On the large side, long-fingered, younger than her face, with prominent veins that made them look stronger. And experienced. She’d have to be very experienced.”

  Jefferson ran through the small inventory of dykes she’d met on the lake, but couldn’t think of one that fit the description. That’s when she realized the women were looking at her hands. A trickle of excitement moved through her. Would her hands be considered big, her fingers seem long? Hadn’t others remarked on their strength?

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Jefferson was learning that love is a hard habit to break.

  “No matter how much I try to stay open to being with someone else, when I remember Ginger, there’s no way.”

  Shannon, with her high energy and need to please, was helping her get the bottom scum and algae off the Runabout. Jefferson’s parents had been there so little the past several years that Jarvy hadn’t taken his usual loving care of it. She had the engine in town being overhauled.

  The day was glorious: blue lake, blue sky, mellow sun, smooth mahogany. She was learning, in sobriety, that her good emotions could be overwhelming, and the bad now had blunted edges. This spring was long and lovely.

  “You could have any woman in the world—even Xena—with your looks and a house by the lake. You’re nuts.”

  She examined the kid. Shannon wore black canvas sneakers with holes at the small and great toes, camo cutoffs, and yet another Xena T-shirt with its sleeves ripped off. The bleached tufts of her hair were pointing every which way. She looked like she’d barely survived a major battle with something much bigger than herself: a hurricane, a bear, deep depression. Her eyes were big in her pale face, her cheeks as sunken as if she’d lost her teeth. Her lips were badly chapped, and her roots were growing out a dull brown.

  Jefferson had been listening to Mozart, but Shannon said she needed a beat to work and changed the station to rock.

  “You mean I could have Dawn.”

  Not looking her way, Shannon said, “I think she’s stayed so far because you moved here.”

  “Shannon, you have Dawn on the brain.” She wondered if her lack of interest in Dawn was Dawn’s very availability. Playing hard-to-get wasn’t Dawn’s style.

  “I wish that’s what was on my brain.”

  She pushed up the sleeve of her purple, white, and gold hoodie and poked at the boat’s joints with a screwdriver to make sure the wood was firm and not rotting. Without the Zoloft, hearing Shannon’s troubles would put her in a bad space. “Shannon Wiley,” she said.

  Shannon stood up to stretch, grimacing as if pain was moving through her back. Eyes downcast, she apologized. “I’ve bugged Dawn and Yolanda about this so much. I have to talk to somebody else or I’ll go nuts.”

  “Want more iced tea?”

  Shannon held out her plastic glass and Jefferson filled it from the pitcher. The ice cubes were almost melted and had stopped their conking sounds. She sprayed some cleaner on the hull and waited for Shannon to open up. The woman wasn’t that much younger than she was, yet treated Jefferson like an elder. Of course, Shannon acted like a teenager, with her crush, her bicycle, her perpetual joblessness, and her gamin looks. Jefferson vowed to listen and not advise. She didn’t know much more than Shannon did about how to live life.

  “What’s going on? You look shook-up.” Maybe younger than a teen, she thought. Shannon looked like a little boy, lower lip wobbly, trying to be brave and hold back tears.

  “I got a letter from the National Guard. They’re calling me back. I’m scared they’ll send me to Iraq. I can’t go to Iraq. Or Afghanistan. I’ll die from the heat alone, never mind, you know, the bombs and stuff. It gets up to a hundred thirty degrees in Iraq—can people survive in that heat? I don’t know where the heck Afghanistan is.”

  “There’s no way out?”

  Shannon sounded very adult as she explained. “They’re not letting much of anybody leave the service, whether or not their enlistment terms are up. They could get me over there and keep me for fifteen months, eight years—if I lived that long. I was active-duty in 1998–99, and then I was in the National Guard for three years. The army wrote me a few months ago about transferring from the Individual Ready Reserve to the National Guard or reserve. They made me think I wouldn’t go to Iraq if I did that. I didn’t know what to do. What could I do? I didn’t know if they were twisting my arm to volunteer. I stayed in the IRR because I’d be out in June. None of my old army pals knew which way to turn either.”

  “My brain is spinning. I didn’t know there was something besides the guard and the regular reserves.”

  “The IRR is, like, different. We don’t do a regular schedule of training. We’re not paid like reservists. But we can get recalled in an emergency because we still have that reserve-duty commitment. I heard at least two thousand IRRs transferred to either the army reserve or the National Guard. I’ll bet you the ones who went for it will go over too.” Shannon sat on the edge of the dock and covered her face with her hands. “I am so scared.”

  “Would your back keep you out?”

  “What the fuck? There’s nothing wrong with my back.”

  Jefferson wasn’t going to argue. She’d seen it often enough: athletes so used to living with their pain that they didn’t even notice it was there. What could she say to Shannon?
She’d never been much at coming up with solutions to other people’s problems or comforting them. It wasn’t that she didn’t care—or was it? Was she learning to care more, post-alcohol? Maybe she did care about this kid. Well, like they said in the program, fake it till you make it. She scrubbed at another spot of mildew. “Not everyone goes, do they?”

  “Check. Thousands of soldiers killed since 2003.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  The kid was crying now. “What would you do?”

  She thought carefully. What would she do? “Back when I was your age I was drinking a lot. I would have pretended to myself that it was no big deal, gone over there, and stayed drunk as much as I could. Now, though, I can’t imagine being able to pull it off. I’d see if my parents’ old friends could pull any strings. They know a lot of people, including retired army and Washington insiders.”

  “My parents don’t know anybody. My dad got early layoff as a machinist at a furnace factory and my mom works in a card shop at the big mall. They didn’t want me to go into the service, but I thought I could meet some gay girls there. Pipsborough isn’t exactly Northampton.”

  “So did you?”

  Shannon was scrubbing the hull with wide, fast swipes, grinning despite the tears drying on her face. She snuffled. “Sure, loads of them. I was seeing a girl while I was still in boot camp. It got better from there.” She dipped her rag in a bucket and wiped her nose with her sleeve. “I’d have to leave my cat with my folks. He wouldn’t understand why I left him.” She shook her head. “I guess the army wouldn’t care that he’s my dependent.”

  “What about telling them you’re gay?”

  “That only matters in peacetime, unless they catch you. This gives them a chance to kill us.”