by Radclyffe
“Crash Pad?” I say, leaning on the wall next to Bex. My head is throbbing with the click of the high heels. I can’t stop thinking about how it would have felt to lick the pin-up girl’s neck, the way her throat would arch when I slid my hands inside her bra, whether her skin would be sweet or salty. She clicked away twenty minutes ago with some other femme in a glittery dress. I try not to think about how ridiculous I would look in a glittery dress.
The traffic is crawling by and I know there’s no chance of a taxi at closing time, not that we could afford one anyway, and it’s not like our shoes are hurting our feet or we’re cold in our plaid and denim, or like we have to get home fast because we’ve got to wash our strap-ons and find the right flavor of lube. I bet her skin would have tasted of chemicals from her perfume. She would probably have wanted to cuddle after she came.
Bex pushes herself off the wall and slumps off through the drizzle toward home. It’s three a.m. and the bars are all closed and that ex never showed up after all and my clit feels swollen to the size of a ball bearing and no one noticed my band badges and I don’t like the way that lipstick feels against my mouth anyway. So I follow her.
*
Thursday night at the Sleazy Queen, three beers down, and I’m peeing and trying to figure out the graffiti on the inside of the stall door: names and lovehearts and song lyrics and scraps of poetry and across it all is Beware of Clit Rings because of course Bex has been here before.
I finish peeing, wash my hands, and stare at my face in the cracked mirror. I’m sure the shadows under my eyes are getting darker the more I sleep.
Back out in the bar, Bex is hunched over a table with a compass in her hand, scratching something into the wood. She’s got her arm curled round so I can’t see what she’s writing, but if it’s about damn clit rings I swear I’m going to dump my drink on her head. I sit down and try to see what she’s carving.
“Where the hell did you get a compass?” I haven’t seen one since I was at school. It’s not often in my life that I have to draw a perfect circle, and thinking of circles makes me think of other round things like planets and globes and then of course I’m thinking about tits and it’s not even funny how much I need to get laid. Next time Bex goes to the bar, I’m getting tequila.
“Brought it,” Bex says.
“Thought you might need to draw some angles, did you?” I ask, but before she has a chance to reply I stand back up again and go to the bar because I can’t even be bothered to argue right now about how fucking bizarre it is to bring a compass on a night out. The crosshatched lines at the corners of Bex’s eyes look deeper than they did last week. I can’t remember what she looks like when she’s not squinting.
“Dos tequilas, por favor,” I say to the guy behind the bar. He doesn’t laugh, which doesn’t surprise me. If I were him, I wouldn’t have either.
I look back at Bex over my shoulder; I thought she’d still be engrossed in her minor vandalism but the compass is lying limp in her hand and she’s staring at the doorway. It’s either going to be something really fucking good or something really fucking bad, so I take my time in looking where she’s looking. The femmes are back, and they look so good it’s got to be bad. The Bettie Page of dykes has a little peacock feather in her hair, and this seems like the perfect conversation starter because why else would you wear a peacock feather except because you want people to mention it? Every possible joke about birds trips through my mind before I abandon them all for being irrevocably shit.
I down both the tequilas and then grip the bar with both hands to keep them from rising back up my throat. “Same again,” I choke at the bar guy, and pull a tenner out of my back pocket. I glance at Bex again and she’s back to scratching, but with her back held oddly stiff like she’s only too aware of the femmes watching. The femmes aren’t actually watching, obviously, because why would they watch some butch in a plaid shirt and a wonky Mohawk carving a table? They have way more interesting stuff to think about, like how hot they look in their underwear.
I leave my change as a tip to the bar guy to make up for acting like an alcoholic, and take the new tequila shots over to Bex. We clink glasses, mutter slangevar as a toast, and tip our heads back. I wait a second longer to drink so that I can see what Bex has been carving into the table, which is absolutely nothing. Or rather, it’s a fist-sized circle ringed over and over and over again, which is just as pointless as nothing. She slams down her glass and I look away like I haven’t noticed, but when I look away I’m looking at something else and that’s the close-up face of the Bettie Page of dykes.
“Hi,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say, and to my dismay I sound like Keanu Reeves. I try not to flinch.
“Can you settle a bet?” She perches one side of her arse on my chair, and I shift up to give her room. Then I shift back a bit so her thigh is pressed hard against mine.
“Sure I can.”
She presses her red-painted lips together and pouts them out at me. “Great. Well, we—my friends and I—we were just wondering whether you’re more a boxers or briefs kind of girl.”
I frown, like I’m considering the question. “That would be telling.” Unfortunately I still seem to be channeling Keanu Reeves, but it’s okay because this chick is feeding me all the right lines.
“Well, I really think I should check for myself.” She strokes her fingertips very slowly along the knee of my jeans. “Just to be sure.”
I think about taking her on an immediate date to the ladies’ loos and I think about asking for her phone number and then I don’t do either, I just say “Want to get out of here?” and I know that sounds like a lazy line from a lazy rom-com but she seems to like it because she stands up and slips her hand into mine and smiles down at me.
I go to pick up the rest of my drink and I go to tuck my stool under the table and I realize I’m twitching my hand out aimlessly like a total tool so I abandon all that unnecessary shit and just squeeze her hand and walk toward the door and oh holy hell I’m walking out of here with a pin-up girl on my arm. Then—shit—I ask her to wait at the door and run back and say, “Bex, I’m just gonna…I just have to…” and she doesn’t say anything, just grunts and keeps scratching away with her compass, so I just flick her quiff and head back to my girl.
*
On our six-month anniversary, Amelle suggests that we go to the Sleazy Queen. We haven’t been back since the night we met, and I remind her that there are reasons for our continued absence. Many reasons, in fact—most of them being bad music and cheap vodka and an eternally sticky carpet. But Amelle loves a bit of nostalgia, and if there’s one thing the past six months has taught me it’s that Amelle is extremely convincing. I’ll have to draw the line at tequila, though; nostalgia can be really bad for your constitution. When we get there she heads for the bar and I try to get us a seat.
The Sleazy Queen looks exactly the same as the last time we were here. The lights are low enough that everyone looks more attractive and less drunk than they really are, the optics are snowed with dust, every low table is occupied by glittering femmes or wide-elbowed butches or a little bit of both, and in the corner there’s a girl in a plaid shirt and hair waxed to a quiff. It’s exactly the fucking same. The girl is rubbing something against the surface of the table and when I squint up my eyes I see it’s a compass and then I feel dizzy and nauseous like I just huffed spray paint because it’s Bex.
I leave Amelle waiting to get served at the bar and I walk over to Bex’s table, standing there until she looks up. She doesn’t smile.
“Bex. Hey. How’s it going?” I lean down and hug her awkwardly, thumping my fist on her back.
“You know.”
I laugh. “No, I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”
She doesn’t say anything else, just shrugs. She still hasn’t met my eye. Amelle walks over with a drink in each hand.
“Hey,” she says. She’s got her hair tied back and she’s wearing skinny jeans and there’s not
hing peacock-related on her head, so I figure maybe Bex doesn’t recognize her.
“Bex, this is—”
“I know who it is.”
Amelle raises her eyebrows but doesn’t say anything.
“Can we join you?” I start to pull out a chair at her table.
“No thanks.”
I laugh. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
No one says anything. It’s a standoff of epic proportions; I wait for a tumbleweed to blow past.
“Forget it,” says Amelle. “Let’s just go.”
“Fine,” I say, and I take our untouched drinks from her hands and put them on the table and walk out of the bar without looking back.
In the street Amelle walks on ahead, craning her neck to look for a taxi, and I stop to rifle through my pockets for a light. I get that sixth sense of someone standing nearby, so I turn around and there’s Bex, scuffing her feet on the pavement and looking more than ever like a teenage boy.
“Um,” she says.
“Bex, seriously. Did you take six months out of your smoker’s lungs by running up those steps just to mumble at me?”
She keeps scuffing her feet on the pavement, and I’m getting annoyed at her and I’m just about to tell her good-bye when she says, really quietly, “I miss you.” I don’t know what to say so I don’t say anything. “I should have called. I was just annoyed or…I don’t even know. It’s just…” She looks up at me, making proper eye contact for the first time. “Just fuck it,” she says. She turns and starts walking back downstairs.
“Your quiff,” I say, loud enough that she stops. “It’s to the right.” She doesn’t turn around. “So does it change with the seasons, or what?”
She snorts out a laugh and turns round. “It shows the ladies the way to my bed.”
“So listen,” I say, and wait for her to climb back up the stairs. “You still got that Crash Pad DVD?”
“You know it.”
I grin at her, and she grins back. Something wriggles in my belly, and I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than go home with Bex and drink a few beers and watch strap-on porn. I look over to where Amelle is waiting for a taxi, but she’s looking back at me. I run over.
“Hey, I have to—”
“I know.” She smiles at me in that way she has, like she’s got some fucking Guide to Being an Adult that I’ve sure as hell never seen. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Love you.”
“I know.”
Bex is leaning on the wall, lighting a cigarette and pretending she can’t hear us. She pushes herself off the wall and starts to walk down the street, her elbow cocked and ready for me to hook my wrist through. It’s one a.m. and the bars are still pulsing and the rest of the night is spread out before me like a warm blanket.
And Bex is still Bex. So I follow her.
Pool of Sorrow
Sam Sommer
It was the summer of ’62, the summer before I was to enter junior high school. This was something of a landmark for me, a turning point, if you will—a new beginning, like crossing over into another country. I knew if I let myself obsess over it I could easily fill my head with an eddy of swirling possibilities, the outcomes of which were at the same time both marvelous and dreadful. However, it was way too premature for that. School was still ten weeks away, and there were more pressing matters at hand.
My friends were all away that summer, off to camp or family vacations. It was the first year this had ever happened to me. In the past, there had always been someone left to pal around with—someone to share the swollen, sultry days of summer.
I was twelve that year, and the block where I lived was eerily quiet. By the end of July I’d read half a dozen books and seen three movies by myself (it was the first year I’d been allowed to do this). Then Teddy came home early from camp. Teddy lived just across the street. I was told one morning by a nosy neighbor who felt it her duty to keep the block abreast of all news, both public and private, that something had happened to him—that he’d gotten himself into some sort of trouble. What that something was she never mentioned, or else didn’t know. I didn’t ask.
I watched Teddy every day for nearly two weeks from my front porch. At first he made believe he didn’t see me, and I kept my nose in my book. I watched him mope about, watched and wondered how he could play stoop-ball for hours by himself, watched him pad around in his bare feet and swim trunks as he washed his mother’s ’51 DeSoto. The car had sat in his driveway unused since his father’s death nearly two years earlier. His mother didn’t drive, and Teddy had confided in me the day after his father’s funeral that the car would be his as soon as he was old enough. I wondered at the time why he’d chosen to tell me that, or for that matter, why he’d bothered talking to me at all. Grief did strange things to you, I decided, and didn’t give it very much thought after that.
Teddy was two years older than I. Two years seemed a generation back then. We went to different schools, had different friends, and although we lived just across the street from one another, it was only on occasion—usually when desperation prevailed—that we came together. Teddy was as handsome and as well turned out as I was awkward. He was almost a foot taller than me, a hand’s width broader, and at least in my mind, a man. He had already begun to shave, although it was only a few inches of stubble around his chin and upper lip. He was at times brooding and inscrutable, and his silences were both devastating and exciting to me. I was terribly insecure and overwhelmingly attracted to him, and never at any given moment knew what to expect, but our mutual need that summer was greater than our differences, and it made us both more accepting of things we couldn’t change.
After nearly two weeks of making believe the other didn’t exist, we found ourselves face-to-face, quite by accident, by the oddest of matchmakers—the Good Humor Man. I hadn’t seen Teddy on the opposite side of the truck (if I had, I most probably would have waited a while to purchase my ice cream), nor he me, until it was too late. By then it was impossible to ignore the other.
“Hi, Teddy. Getting a Good Humor?” I asked, too surprised to think of anything else to say.
“What does it look like?” he answered, sarcastically.
“Stupid question, huh?” I humbled myself.
He nodded, but then smiled. We paid for our ice creams, pocketed the change, and stood there staring at each other until the Good Humor Man got into his truck and drove away.
“You want to sit on my porch?” I asked, unwrapping my Toasted Almond Pop.
“Okay,” he said, much to my amazement.
The rest came surprisingly easy. It seemed that was all we had needed—just a little push. At first, we sort of drifted together each morning. I’d wait for him on my front steps and wave when he came outside, or on occasion, he’d pace in front of my house, bouncing his Pensy Pinky off the curb, trying to appear nonchalant. Eventually, as the days progressed and we became more comfortable and accepting of each other’s company and our new friendship, we let go of appearances. It no longer seemed important that I was the little twerp from across the street, or he, one of the “big kids.” There was no one left on our block that summer to see us or care, and our mothers were both just glad we had found each other.
Teddy’s mom seemed fragile and withdrawn to me. She hardly ever got dressed, and remained in curlers and a bathrobe most, if not all of the day. She’d sit at the kitchen table or on the back porch, read her paper, and drink cup after cup of black coffee. She’d smile benignly at me, or ask how my mother was when we passed each other, and then go back to reading. My mother had once mentioned that Teddy’s mom had sort of given up after her husband had died, only she didn’t seem sad to me, or heartbroken, just worn out, like an old T-shirt you could almost see through.
July had been hot, but August was brutal. It never seemed to cool down. Not even at night. We didn’t have air-conditioning. It wasn’t that we couldn’t afford it, just that my parents insisted that it wasn’t necessa
ry. “The house has good cross-ventilation,” they’d reiterate year after year. “I have better places to put my money,” my father would say, and then quickly change the subject before I had the chance to object. The fact was they were both right. On most evenings it was cool enough. Only after two weeks of daytime highs in the nineties, and nights that rarely dropped much below eighty, cross-ventilation just didn’t hack it. It was during that long heat spell that I found myself thinking a lot about Teddy and often dreamed of him.
The radio said it was already eighty-six degrees at nine that morning. I poured myself some cereal, ate while I dressed, and went out to look for Teddy. I found him by accident, sitting on the floor of his utility shed, crying. I hadn’t meant to intrude or surprise him. The door to the shed was open and so I just walked in. When I saw him sitting there that way, I tried to back out quietly before he noticed me, but I wasn’t fast enough. He wiped at his eyes and nose with the bottom of his shirt.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything. I was just looking for you.”
He stood up. “Don’t go,” he said. “I’m okay. It’s nothing, really.”
“How come you’re in here?” I asked.
“The pool,” he said, pointing to the large cardboard box in the corner.
I’d forgotten his family had a pool. It was one of those pre-fabricated things with the plastic liners, about three feet high and ten or twelve feet in diameter. I hadn’t seen it in a couple of years—not since his father had died.
“My dad and I made a big thing of setting it up every year,” he said, as if he had just read my mind. “I thought since it’s been so hot I’d drag it out and put it together.”
His face suddenly started to tense and I could tell he was going to start to cry again.
“I miss him so much,” he said, holding back the tears. “I want him back. It isn’t fair. It’s just not fair!”
I didn’t know what to say to him.
