Rubyfruit Jungle

by Rita Mae Brown

  The funeral was set for Sunday. When we went down to Zimmer’s Funeral Home with Carl’s clothes we discovered that Carl wasn’t there. We called every funeral home in the city trying to track down his remains and found him at Bolt’s Funeral Home. Since his last name was Bolt the ambulance drivers got mixed up and took him to the wrong parlor. Didn’t matter to them that they’d made a mistake, they charged us twice anyway.

  After the service we got in the big, white Continental to drive out to the cemetery and Carrie recovered her sense of humor long enough to say, “Well, this is the first time I got to ride in such a rich car. Seem’s like someone’s got to die before you can ride in a Lincoln Continental.” She giggled and Florence looked at her as though she’d been deranged by the sorrow. I thought it was pretty funny myself. For all our fights, there was no getting around the fact that Carrie wasn’t fooled by show and she regarded most of the world around her as a show for the rich at the expense of the poor.

  Loneliness settled over the pink house with Carl’s death. Carrie cried nearly every day right up until I went back to school. I tried staying around for awhile to make her feel better, but all we did was fight. We’d fight about the funeral, fight about me not carrying on over it, fight about me working at the tennis courts instead of as a file clerk. I gave up on staying home and went out all the time. Then we fought about me leaving her in the house with her buckets of misery.

  Two weeks after school started, I came home around five and changed my clothes to go back later for a meeting. Florence had succeeded in prying Carrie from the house and took her window shopping at the new Britt’s store. I was sitting in the bright yellow kitchen reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, laughing my head off, when I looked up at the clock and noticed it was five-thirty. I jumped up and put on the coffee pot. The deep rust colors swirled through the clean water when I looked out the jalousie door and realized Carl was never coming home again. I felt so stupid and desolate, putting on the pot so he’d have fresh coffee after work. I sat down and tried to read Orlando again, but I couldn’t focus on the page. I stood up and went back into Carrie’s bedroom. Carl had a drawer in the huge, brown old dresser with the gray linoleum top. The little thin drawer cherished a handful of old pearly penknives, a red and silver palm size cigarette case from the thirties and a worn, oval ring with Athena’s head carved in the sardonyx. A whole human life is gone. A wonderful, laughing life and all that’s left is this handful of used-up goods, and they’re not even quality stuff.

  The limping ’52 Plymouth rolled into the carport and I heard those two get out, each one grumbling to the other that she didn’t need help. I zoomed back into the kitchen and opened my book. Florence right off noticed that my eyes were red and my nose was running.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she demanded.

  “I was reading this sad book, that’s all.”

  Carrie snorted that all I ever did was read sad books and I was going to ruin my eyes. “You all the time got your nose in a book. A bookworm, that’s what you are, straining those eyes since a baby on up. You won’t listen to me. No, you never listen to me. I tell you for your own good you got to stop this reading so much. Besides that it ain’t good for your brains as well as your eyes to be reading all the time. Makes things percolate overtime. Ruin your health sure as I’m standing here talking to you. Molly, do you hear me!”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  She opened a big white bag with Thank You written on it in script and showed me a wilderness of plastic flowers. “They’re for your father’s grave. They’ll last longer than real ones. It’ll look pretty when people drive by.”

  “They’re pretty. Excuse me, I gotta go back to school.”

  As I started out the door I heard Florence say to Carrie, “That girl of yours is crazy. She don’t cry over her father’s death, but she sits here and cries over some dern book.”

  Senior year was a victory. Connie and I never had to go to class if we didn’t want to. Mr. Beers wrote us blue freedom slips at a moment’s notice. The only class we condescended to attend was Advanced English with Mrs. Godfrey. She was such a great teacher that we didn’t mind learning Middle English to read Chaucer. Carolyn was in the class also. The three of us sat in the front row and fought it out between us for the highest grade.

  Carolyn was captain of the cheerleaders and she usually showed up in the lunchroom in her uniform with blue tassels on her white boots. Connie and I scoffed at such a thing as cheerleading, but Carolyn was the social leader of the school because of it. The three of us also dated three boys who were close friends. Whenever we were seen with our respective boyfriends, we paid the usual fondling attention to him demanded by rigid high-school society but in truth, none of the three of us gave a damn about any of them. They were a convenience, something you had to wear when you went to school functions, like a bra. Carolyn was becoming tighter than a violin string because Larry kept pushing her to sleep with him. Connie and I told her to go ahead and get it over with because we were sick of hearing her bitch about Larry grabbing her boob at 12:20 A.M. every Saturday night. Besides Connie and I were both doing it with our boyfriends with no harmful side effects. No one was supposed to know of course, but everyone did in that behind-the-hand manner. All this overt heterosexuality amused me. If they only knew. Our boyfriends thought they were God’s gift because we were sleeping with them but they were so tragically transparent that we forgave them their arrogance.

  Carolyn decided, again with her relentless logic, that if we won the football game against Stranahan, she’d do it with Larry. We creamed them. Carolyn’s face walking off the field of honor was not the usual bright cherry red from screaming her lungs out but an ashen and drawn white. Connie and I went over to her to bolster her. Then the three of us went back to the locker room to wait for our dates—all Princeton haircuts, Weejun shoes, and Gold Cup socks. Clark came out with a gash on his cheek and wanted sympathy. I told him he was a football hero, which he was, having made two touchdowns. Connie’s Douglas lumbered out (right tackles tend to grow large) and she told him he was a football hero. Larry stumbled coming out of the door he was in such a rush to see Carolyn. She didn’t have time to tell him he was a football hero because he gave her a bone-crushing kiss which was a rerun of an Errol Flynn movie and picked her up bodily, placing her in his Sting Ray convertible. Carolyn nervously waved good-bye and we all waved back. Then the four of us climbed into Doug’s car and headed for Wolfie’s for endless talk about this missed tackle and that fine block interspersed with bananas and hot fudge sundaes.

  The next morning the phone rang around 9:00 A.M. It was Carolyn. “I have to talk to you right now. Are you awake?”

  “I guess I am if I answered the phone.”

  “I’m coming over and we can have breakfast at the Forum, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Fifteen minutes later Carolyn arrived looking paler than usual. As I slid in the front seat of the car I asked, “How is Ft. Lauderdale High’s newest harlot?”

  She grimaced. “I’m all right, but I have to ask you some questions so I know I did it right.”

  Over eggs that looked as though the chickens rejected them, she began, “Is it always such a mess? You know, when I stood up all this stuff ran down my leg. Larry said it was sperm. It was so disgusting I nearly barfed.”

  “You get used to it.”

  “Yech. And another thing—what am I supposed to do during all this, lie there? I mean, what do you really do? There they are on top of you sweating and grunting and it’s not at all like I thought.”

  “Like I said, you get used to it. It isn’t very mystical if that’s what you’re waiting for. I’m not an expert or anything, but different people are different. Larry may not be the hottest lay in the world, so don’t base your judgment on his one performance. Anyway, they’re supposed to get technically better as they grow older. We hit them at that awkward age, I guess.”

  “That’s not what the medical book says. It says they
reach their prime at eighteen and we reach ours at thirty-five. How’s that for timing? It’s all so ridiculous. You and Connie must think I’m a real spastic.”

  “No, you take it too seriously, that’s all.”

  “Well, it is serious.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s a big dumb game and it doesn’t mean anything at all unless you get pregnant, of course. Then it means you’re screwed.”

  “I’ll try. Hey, you want to go drinking Friday?”

  “Sure. What about Connie?”

  “She has to go to some journalism conference in Miami for the weekend.”

  “Okay, so it will be the two of us.”

  Friday night we went to the children’s playground at Holiday Park. No one came there late at night, and the police patrols were too busy beating the bushes and their own meat to harass the playground. I didn’t really like drinking so I took a few swings to make it look good, but Carolyn got blasted. She slid down the fireman’s pole, played on the swings and discarded various pieces of her clothing at each go round. When she got down to her underwear, she made a beeline for the grounded blue jet and crawled in the open tail to the fuselage. She stayed in there making airplane sounds and showed no sign of giving up her piloting. I crawled in after her. It was a tiny, narrow space so I had to lie down next to her.

  “Carolyn, maybe you should join the Air Force when you graduate. You’ve got the sound effects down pat.”

  “Whoosh.” Then she leaned up on one elbow and asked in a coy voice, “How does Clark kiss you?”

  “On the lips, where else? What do you mean how does he kiss me? What a dumb question.”

  “Want me to show you how Larry kisses?”

  Without waiting for my sober answer she grabbed me and laid the biggest kiss on my face since Leota B. Bisland.

  “I doubt he kisses that way.” She laughed and kissed me again. “Carolyn, do you know what you’re doing?”

  “Yes, I’m giving you kissing lessons.”

  “I’m very grateful but we’d better stop.” We’d better stop because one more kiss and you’re going to get more than you bargained for, lady. Or maybe that’s what you are bargaining for?

  “Ha.” She dropped another one on me this time with her entire body pressed against mine. That did it. I ran my hands along her side, up to her breast, and returned her kiss with a vengeance. She encouraged this action and added a few novelties of her own like nibbling my sensitive ears. By this time I began to worry about being in the tail end of an old blue jet in the middle of the children’s playground in Holiday Park. Carolyn had no such worries and threw off what was left of her clothing. Then she started taking off mine and tossed them up in the cockpit. If I was worried, I got over it. All I could think about was making love with Carolyn Simpson, head cheerleader and second-year chaplain of Ft. Lauderdale High School—and a cinch for prom queen. We were in that plane half the night coming in the wild blue yonder. I know we broke the sound barrier. Eventually, the sky began to lighten and the air became chilly. I thought it was time to go. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “I don’t want to get out, I want to stay in here for ten years and play with your breasts.”

  “Come on.” I reached up and got her underwear and my clothes. Then I backed out of the plane and collected her dew-covered bermuda shorts, Villager blouse, and white, worn-out sneakers. Shivering, we ran to the car.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked.

  “For you.”

  “Carolyn, you are so goddamned corny. Let’s go to the ‘Egg and You’ and get something good.”

  I ordered two breakfasts for all the energy I burned up, and Carolyn had bacon and eggs.

  “Molly, you won’t tell will you? I mean we could really get in trouble.”

  “No, I’m not telling but I hate lying. It seems pretty impossible that anyone would ask such a thing, so the coast is clear.”

  “I hate to lie too, but people will say we’re lesbians.”

  “Aren’t we?”

  “No, we just love each other, that’s all. Lesbians look like men and are ugly. We’re not like that.”

  “We don’t look like men, but when women make love it’s commonly labeled lesbianism so you’d better learn not to cringe when you hear the word.”

  “Have you ever done that before?”

  “When I was in sixth grade but that was about seven centuries ago. Did you?”

  “At camp this summer. I thought I’d die from the fright but she was so terrific, this other counselor. I never thought of her as a lesbian, you know. We spent all our time together and one night she kissed me, and we did it. I didn’t stop to think about it at the time, it felt too good.”

  “Do you write her?”

  “Sure. We’ll try to go to the same college. Molly, do you think you can love more than one person at a time? I mean, I love you and I love Susan.”

  “I guess so. I’m not jealous, if that’s what you’re after.”

  “Kinda. You want to know something else? It’s a lot better than doing it with Larry. I mean there’s no comparison, you know?”

  “That I know.” We laughed and ordered two hot fudge sundaes at 6:00 in the morning.

  Carolyn started waiting for me in the lunchroom and paying all kinds of attention to me. She forgot to pay attention to Larry or Connie. Larry didn’t mind as long as he got his weekend fuck, but Connie was more sensitive. Because of it, I tried to spend more time with Connie, which made Carolyn mad. The times the three of us were together became more and more strained until I began to feel like a bone between two dogs. We were the witches for the English class’s production of Macbeth and during rehearsal I tried to explain to Carolyn what I thought was happening and that she should cool it. She burst out with, “Are you sleeping with Connie?”

  Connie who was sitting on the other side of a cardboard rock popped her head over the top and said, “What?!”

  This is it. Now what do I do? “Carolyn, that’s a stupid thing to say. No, I am not sleeping with Connie, but I do love her. She’s my best friend and you’d better get used to it.” Carolyn began to cry.

  Connie looked at me in amazement, and I shrugged my shoulders. “Molly, why would she think we’re sleeping together? What’s going on?”

  “Connie.” Pause. What the flying fuck do I say now? “Connie, there’s no use trying to lie about it. Carolyn and I have been sleeping together. End of sentence. She got jealous I guess. I don’t know.” I turned to Carolyn, “Anyway, what the hell are you jealous about, you’re the one with Susan, not me. It makes no sense.”

  Carolyn started to offer an answer through a sniffle but Connie, recovering from shock, beat her to it. “I want to make certain I’ve got this right. You make love with Carolyn?”

  “Yes, I make love with Carolyn. Carolyn makes love with me. I make love with Clark and Carolyn makes love with Larry. All we need is a circular bed and we can have a gang bang. Christ.”

  “Do the boys know?”

  “Of course not. Nobody knows but you. You know what would happen if it leaked out.”

  “Yeah, everybody would call you queer, which you are, I suppose.”

  “Connie!” Carolyn shrieked. “We are not queer. How can you say that? I’m very feminine, how can you call me a queer? Maybe Molly, after all she plays tennis and can throw a football as far as Clark, but not me.”

  Carolyn was dropping her beads, all right. I tried to pretend I didn’t know she’d run a number like that when cornered, but I knew it inside. A delicate whiff of hate curled round my nostrils. I’d like to bust her feminine head.

  “What does Molly’s tennis have to do with it?” Connie was becoming increasingly confused.

  “You know, lesbians are boyish and athletic. I mean Molly’s pretty and all that but she’s a better athlete than most of the boys that go to this school, and besides she doesn’t act like a girl, you know? I’m not like that at all. I just love Molly. That doesn’t make me queer.”

  Quiet a
nger was in Connie’s voice as she faced Carolyn. “Well, I’m about fifteen pounds overweight, hefty is what I believe it’s called, plus I don’t remember that I’ve ever cooed and giggled in true female fashion, so why don’t you come right out and call me a dyke too if that’s how your mind is misfunctioning?”

  Carolyn was genuinely stunned. “Oh, I never meant that about you. You’re just straightforward. Anyway, you’re lazy, that’s why you’re fat. The last thing you are is athletic. You’re the career-woman type.”

  “Carolyn, you make me sick.” I threw off my witch’s tatters and headed for the auditorium door.

  “Molly!” Carolyn screamed.

  Connie took off her costume and came out after me. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know, mostly I want to get away from Miss Teenage America in there.”

  “I’ve got the car, let’s go to the park.”

  We drove over to Holiday Park and positioned ourselves in the cockpit of the blue jet. I didn’t bother to tell Connie about my last time in the jet

  “Do you think you’re a queer?”

  “Oh great, you too. So now I wear this label ‘Queer’ emblazoned across my chest. Or I could always carve a scarlet ‘L’ on my forehead. Why does everyone have to put you in a box and nail the lid on it? I don’t know what I am—polymorphous and perverse. Shit. I don’t even know if I’m white. I’m me. That’s all I am and all I want to be. Do I have to be something?” Connie looked down at her hands and her eyebrows wrinkled over her eyes. “Come on, Connie, what’s on your mind?”