by Cheryl Klein
Jody slips it inside Al’s collar. “See? All gone.”
“The pants are too long,” Al worries, wagging a foot.
“One of the femmes will hem them,” Jody assures her.
“Really?”
“’Course.”
“If you ask nice,” Imogen clarifies.
Al thinks of her father’s slacks. He takes them to the tailor down the street from Hill Food & Supply. Even if Al could afford a tailor, she can’t just walk in and say, Shorten these pants to fit a 5’4” woman—and let the hips out a little while you’re at it.
“All the femmes are going to swoon,” Imogen whispers.
“You think?” Al says, stifling a smile. She has seen Meg at Lilac’s two more times. All the other regulars seem to be more… regular. Jody and Imogen keep singing the praises of Sylvie, a femme who lives with them and a few other women in an abandoned church east of Calla Boulevard. Sylvie has delicate features, silent-film-star lips, a funny way of wringing her hands. She’s okay, but something about her is too familiar. Al prefers to watch Meg in profile as she sips her drink. There’s a bump in the middle of her nose. Al wonders if it’s been broken.
“Wait till Sylvie sees you,” says Jody. Jody has a way of making things sound like the final word. These clothes. This girl. Al wonders if this is what it’s like to have an older brother—someone fiercely on your side and mostly uninterested in your opinion. “Okay, put your old clothes back on and Imogen will go pay for these,” Jody instructs. “Did you want the blue shirt too?”
“No, this is already more than I can afford,” says Al.
“Don’t worry, we’ll chip in. Right, Jo?” Imogen says. “We’re like the Homosexual Welcome Wagon.”
Al slides out of the slacks, catching sight of herself in white underpants and bra, suddenly a girl again. Opening her body as little as possible, she puts on her women’s brown slacks. In the fluorescent light of the dressing room, she can see how dusty they are. She’s worn them almost every day during the weeks she’s been in Lilac Mines. She’s reluctant to unpack her other clothes—the circle skirts, the secretarial blouses—for fear that they’ll mop up all the town’s magic like old rags.
Imogen gathers Al’s new clothes and eases out of the dressing room. Twice as fast, she pulls back in. “Damn it,” she hisses. “I think he saw me.”
“Who?” mouths Jody.
Imogen’s voice is barely audible. “Some man. Some customer. Damn it, damn it.” Her blue-shadowed eyes are wide. Jody is breathing heavily, combing her hands over her short, red-blonde hair as if it will coax a plan from her head. The fearless centaur of the other night looks panicked, slightly wild.
Peering through a narrow gap in the booth’s structure, Imogen whispers, “All right, he went back out. You two gotta make a break for it.”
Al doesn’t know exactly what this involves so she follows Jody, who walks briskly down the hall of dressing rooms, past a rack of shiny leather shoes, and toward the make-up counter. Behind them, the clerk’s voice calls out, “Ladies? Ladies!” a reminder of what they are or should be.
“He’s on to us,” Jody says. “I hope Imogen doesn’t try to pay for that stuff now. She’ll get hassled something awful.”
They linger nervously by a poster of a dark-haired woman powdering her face. It says, “Ladies: what could be more foolish than choosing a foundation based on your hair color?” Al, who only wore make-up when Suzy pinned her down and attempted to obliterate her freckles, didn’t know that this was something ladies did. She has to agree it seems foolish.
Finally, Imogen trots up to them. “I took it upstairs and paid in Children’s,” she says. “I don’t think that clerk in Men’s was about to leave his post, but we better get outta here just in case.”
“Sounds good to me,” Al says. She takes the bag from Imogen and clutches it tight to her body as they exit the store and hurry toward Jody’s grinning Edsel. Al has never worked so hard for a pair of pants. She’s never had a pair that fit so well.
The church is a plain wooden building with peeling paint and a rusted-silent bell in its steeple. Nevertheless, Al considers it a holy place. When Jody explained that they were squatters, Al asked how they got away with it. “Think of us like church mice,” Jody said. “Everyone knows they’re there, but no one cares until one of them runs up some old lady’s leg.” And so by this blessing they are left alone with their functional altars: the wood-burning stove; the long table Jody and Shallan built; the old pews pushed together to form beds, appropriated as shelves, arranged in every formation but straight rows.
Al’s new clothes are folded neatly on the pew that holds her suitcase. The white shirt is dappled gold and purple in a stained-glass shadow.
“Where’s Imogen?” Al asks. “I need to pay her back for the clothes.” She peels the last bills from her wallet. They’re dog-eared, soft as a peach.
“She’s getting dinner started,” Sylvie says with a giggly grimace. Of the femmes, Imogen is the worst cook. Jody has asked that she not cook meat because it’s expensive and she always renders it un-chewable.
Al finds her in the church’s tiny kitchen chopping vegetables. Zigzags of hair escape her carefully molded bun. The ostensibly white countertop is stained and missing tiles, like a bad smile. Imogen’s coffee-brown forearms ripple as she knifes a yellow squash, as if pure determination will summon the proper picture of domesticity.
“Ten seventy-five, right?” says Al. “I’ll leave it over here.” She puts the bills under a saltshaker shaped like a chubby farmer. His chipped wife holds the pepper. “I need a job,” Al sighs.
“We all do,” says Imogen, although she’s just being sympathetic. She has a regular job at a doctor’s office—technically as a receptionist, although the doctor frequently asks her to clean the examining rooms, and occasionally asks her to kiss him. She gives in to the former to make it easier to refuse the latter. “The end of the month is the toughest. But don’t worry too much. We know you do your part. Maybe you’re not working yet, but you swept up and set those mousetraps and helped Jody with… ”
With a start, Al says, “The end of the month… wait, what’s the date today?”
“August 24th.”
“Oh no. It’s my sister’s birthday.” Al can’t believe she forgot. Usually she is vigilant about deadlines. Her school papers didn’t always earn A’s, but she invariably turned them in on time. But so many things are different in Lilac Mines. Maybe time is too.
“You still talk to your family?” The hard and longing look on Imogen’s face says that she does not talk to hers.
“Well… I don’t know. I haven’t really decided anything yet, not officially.” Hot afternoons of around-the-church work with Jody have stretched into evenings of scanning for Meg, which have cooled into yellow-gray mornings waking up on her mat. The floor pressing into her back makes her feel resilient, ready for another day with her tribe.
Imogen wipes her pulpy hand and reaches into the pocket of her skirt. She drops two dimes into Al’s palm. “Go to the drugstore and give her a call.” Her voice is so sure, so parental, that Al doesn’t dare turn her down.
Al could walk to the drugstore, buy a soda, and page through movie magazines for a while. She could buy a newspaper and read it at the counter. But she’s not a good liar. If Imogen asks her how her sister is, she won’t be able to invent an answer. This is why she cannot live in Fresno and love girls at the same time. She can’t imagine looking at her father’s expectant, mustached face and telling him that she was out with a nice boy last night, nothing serious, no, she doesn’t think she’d like to bring him home.
The first dime tinkles into the pay phone. The operator asks for another, and Al remembers that this is long distance. She’s not sure she’s ever made a long-distance call before. She blows a small O of air from her lips and drops in the second dime.
Suzy picks up on the third ring. Al’s first reaction is relief that it’s not one of her parents on the othe
r end of the line, but her stomach quickly clenches again. She will still have to explain.
“Anna Lisa?” Suzy exclaims when she hears her sister’s voice. “Oh my God, Nannalee, I’m so glad you called. Are you okay? Where are you?”
“I’m fine, I’m in…” Al hesitates. She wonders if her family is the type to form a search party, and if she’d want them to. She decides to say she’s in San Francisco—big, un-searchable, home to Alcatraz—but when she opens her mouth, she says, “I’m in this little town. It’s, um, kind of northeast of us.” She is still placing herself with them: “Us” is Fresno, slow days, the hum of the ceiling fan in the family store, crops lined up the way church pews are supposed to be lined up.
“Why did you run away?” Suzy wants to know. It’s a fair question.
Al recalls the vague note she left. “I… when I tried to picture the rest of my life, nothing came up. Does that make any sense at all? It was so frightening. Just a blank, like all the old fields around our house.”
To Al’s surprise, Suzy says, “Yes! It does make sense. Oh, Nannalee, they both broke things off. First Roy, because he found out about Kevin, then Kevin because he’s just a copycat. Now I don’t know what to do—they’re both spreading rumors—and I can’t exactly tell Mother and Daddy about this sort of problem.”
Suzy’s voice is twisted with despair. Somehow Al thought that things would stay the same in her absence, that liking boys would be enough to guarantee Suzy a future in Fresno.
“What should I do? Couldn’t you come home?” Suzy begs. Her questions are no longer about Al’s motivations and safety; now they demand things from her. Al’s fraction of a moment in the spotlight burned her, then left her cold.
“Let me think about it. I’ll call you again soon, I promise.” Their phone time is almost up, and Al is out of coins. “Happy birthday,” she adds feebly.
DIFFERENT STORIES
Felix: Lilac Mines, 2002
For her first day of work, Felix wears a ’70s sundress over skinny-legged jeans. She’s aware that she’s been femming it up lately. She’s always worn dresses and skirts and chunky jewelry, but she’s alternated them with butcher days: long shorts and boyish T-shirts and knit beanies. Lilac Mines is a town of sweatshirts and sneakers, androgynous and utilitarian, but she doesn’t want to take any chances. And she hates that she doesn’t want to take any chances.
At Goodwill, she winces when Tawn hands her the requisite blue apron, and winces again when she pulls the strings around her waist. The ache in her side has dulled, but it’s far from gone. Its persistence irks her. Okay, I get it, you’ve made your point, she tells her injury. Pain—she would never have suspected this—is boring.
“I feel like I should be baking,” she jokes, smoothing the apron over her thighs.
“I hate baking,” says Tawn. She seems immune to Felix’s humor. Today she’s wearing the same black jeans that she interviewed Felix in, with a different baggy T-shirt. This one says I Love to Ski Mammoth Lakes in puffy letters. Felix doubts it’s ironic, but she can’t picture Tawn—with her resigned posture and fearful expressions—actually skiing, either.
“The truck comes today,” Tawn reminds her.
“You said.”
“I’ll be working on payroll, but Matty can help you with any of the heavy stuff.” She gestures to the other employee working the shift, a chubby, 30ish blond guy in a very sincere-looking marijuana leaf T-shirt. Tawn tugs at her rope of black hair—somehow braided without being untangled—and retreats into the back of the store.
“It’s Matt,” says Matty as Felix follows him outdoors. It’s already hot. “Tawn and I grew up together, I mean, she’s eight years younger than me, but I was still Matty when she was a kid. Old habits die hard. I still can’t believe she’s my fucking boss.”
But it’s too late: Matty is Matty to Felix. They sit down on an old bench, someone’s discarded patio furniture, and wait. Felix is surprised that they’re not expected to do anything in the meantime, but she has no complaints. The sky is cloudless, the sun unapologetic. She can feel new freckles erupt on her shoulders.
“Tawn says you’re from L.A.?”
“Yeah, I’m visiting my aunt Anna Lisa for the summer.” She holds her breath. There’s no reason that this explanation shouldn’t suffice, but she lives in fear that someone will call her on it.
“Cool,” Matty nods vigorously. “I’m probably gonna head down to L.A. sometime. Or up to Portland. I gotta get out of this place.” He lights a cigarette.
Felix doesn’t think he’ll leave. He doesn’t seem like the motivated type. “I’m going to New York in a few months,” she says. She did visit the Fashion Institute of Technology website. There was a photo of the street sign for 7th Avenue, with the words “Fashion Avenue” above it. But the only graduate program that’s vaguely related to fashion design is “Museum Theory: Costume and Textiles,” which sounds stuffy and irrelevant. She clicked “Send me an application,” just in case.
“What do you think of our lady Tawn?” Matty challenges.
“She’s interesting.”
“She’s a trip, isn’t she?”
“She’s really hung up on getting me to unload the truck. Is it that hard?”
Matty’s mouth forms a half-smile, half-smirk. “No. It’s not hard at all. It’s a bitch when it’s this hot, but that’s not why Tawn tries to get out of it whenever she can.” He pauses dramatically. “She’s afraid of the clothes.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, she has a fucking phobia of other people’s old clothes.”
“Well, it’s probably not a bad idea to wash your hands after—” Felix allows.
But Matty cuts her off. “No, not like that. Get this: whenever Tawn sees, say, a pair of baby’s pajamas, she immediately pictures something awful happening to the kid who wore them. Like he turned all cold and still in his little baby crib and his parents came in and freaked out, and his pajamas ended up here, eventually. Or she sees some jeans with a weird stain on them and decides it’s blood, that the person was in a car accident and lost his leg and can’t bear to look at the jeans he was wearing when it happened. How fucked up is that?”
“Wow,” is all Felix can say. For her, thrift stores are a chance to have what no one else has. It never occurred to her to think about the lives that shirts and scarves and jeans had previously.
The truck pulls up: a huge 18-wheeler, a football player at a tea party. Matty leads the way, and with the driver’s help unloads five cardboard boxes. He shows Felix how to sort the clothes into blue plastic bins taller than she is, labeled “Men’s Pants,” “Women’s Blouses,” “Undergarments,” etc. It hurts to lift her arms too high, but it’s a hurt she can deal with. She feels good when sweat darkens the flowered print beneath her arms.
“What do you think?” she asks holding up a pair of gray wool pants. “Men’s or women’s?”
“Men’s,” Matty says definitively.
Felix tosses them into the appropriate bin. They strike an acrobatic pose in the air before joining the other golf pants and jeans and Dickies. For a second they look alive.
“How about these?” She holds up a petite pair of light pink leggings. “Women’s pants, or tights?”
“Women’s pants.” Matty is immune to doubt.
“Not kids’?” They make no allowance for hips. They’d probably be small on Eva, who is 5’ 8” and wears a size six.
“Nope.”
The leggings arabesque into the Women’s Pants bin.
Felix sets aside a tank top decorated with what is either a yoga symbol or a Farsi word. Either way, her sister Michelle, who can fold herself like a cinnamon roll and has a Persian boyfriend, will like it. But as she folds the shirt, she takes a minute to smell it, something she’d normally avoid. Beneath the generic used-clothing smell, there’s a hint of something sweet and foody. A thread of soapy perfume beneath that. The smells give nothing away, but Felix starts to think. She sees a girl w
alk through the kitchen of a family restaurant, grab a snack, kiss someone on the cheek, the fat of love stretching her tank top.
Tawn says Felix can help with the front window’s back-to-school display. This is clearly a prize for touching the clothes at their most raw. After excitedly combing the store for plaid skirts, Felix says, “What I don’t get is why you always assume that something bad happened to the people who wore the clothes.”
Tawn opens her mouth, then closes it. Her face turns tartan-red. “Matty told you?”
“Was he not supposed to?”
“God, I hate him.” Her vigor surprises Felix. For someone so timid, she is steadfast about her dislikes. “I should fire him.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Felix says kindly. “I thought it was sort of an interesting theory—I mean, I’d never looked at clothes as having their own histories before.”
“But I’m in the wrong job,” Tawn laments. She strips a smooth-skinned male mannequin of its pants, shaking her head sadly. “When I was a kid, I took this field trip to Washington, DC with my class. I went to prom. I almost went to college. Now I can’t imagine any of that stuff. I can only think about, like, how the guy who wore those brown shoes over there was a traveling salesman who cried between houses.”
Felix frowns and sets down the stack of skirts as Tawn’s feet, like an offering. “Well, maybe it’s just a matter of re-appropriation.”
“Huh?”
“Different stories.”
“What, he was a salesman and he laughed between houses? He worked so hard because he really loved his children? Doesn’t work. I wouldn’t buy it.”
“Neither would I,” Felix admits. She likes that Tawn is a tough sell. “But… what if he wasn’t a salesman? What if he was, um… how about a tap dancer? He was a tap dancer, but he lived in an apartment building in New York, and he practiced in these shoes instead of the ones with the taps so it wouldn’t bother the people living downstairs.”
