by Cheryl Klein
Anna Lisa looks up, surprised. “Good evening to you, too, Lion Tamer.” She adds, “I don’t care to pay for cable, and I’m old and set in my ways, if you want to know. It would be pretty exciting to see anything about Lilac Mines on the news, honestly. Maybe instead of that ’Reno Casino of the Week’ segment. Would you mind closing the door? Otherwise, mosquitoes’ll get in.”
Felix gives it a good slam. “Lion Tamer, my ass.”
BLUES
Al: Lilac Mines, 1965-1966
“Listen to this,” says Meg, with a naughty grin. She lets go of the record player’s arm. The needle touches down:
Madame Bucks was quite deluxe,
servants by the score,
good ones at each door,
butlers and maids galore.
But one day Dan, her kitchen man,
gave his notice he’s through.
She cried, “Oh, no, Dan, don’t go—
it’ll grieve me if you do.”
It’s an old-fashioned voice, from when Al’s parents were teenagers. That Depression scratch. But she can’t picture Gerald and Eudora Hill listening to this kind of music. The woman singing is clearly a Negro. Her voice is deep, etched.
“Where’d you get it?” Al asks.
“Imogen. She said when she was a girl her parents would only let her listen to gospel, and that made her love Bessie even more.”
“Who’s Bessie?”
“Smith,” says Meg. “Singing.”
…turnip tops, love the way he warms my chops.
I can’t do without my kitchen man.
His jelly roll is nice and hot,
never fails to hit the spot.
Meg leans into the music, eyes closed, as if it could catch her. She’s wearing a soft black sweater that sheds hairs wherever she goes. Al finds the trail of Meg comforting. They are in Meg’s living room. The house is tiny, a converted miner’s residence with one bedroom, and a bathroom tacked on in the back. The plumbing will freeze in a month or so, Meg warns, and the oven’s pilot light swoons like a girl in a corset, but it is luxurious compared to the church, where Al has been spending less and less time. She likes to sit on the toilet and look out the window at the naked gray branches on the trees.
“Are you listening?” Meg prompts. Her cheeks glow like Saturday night, even though it’s Thursday. “She’s scandalous. ’His frankfurters are oh so sweet?’ ‘Oh how that boy can open clams?’ ”
Al blushes. It’s hard to make out all the lyrics on the scratchy record. “I hadn’t thought of it that way. I just thought she was singing about her servant.”
“Well, even that would be pretty amazing. Think about it: a colored woman with a servant, a man who works in the kitchen.”
“I didn’t think about that either. But maybe the lady with the servant isn’t colored. Maybe just the singer is.” Servants only exist in fiction for Al. A Negro employer seems no more outlandish than a Southern belle in hoop skirts. The only people who’ve worked for the Hills are other Hills. “Where would she sing a song like this?” Al wonders out loud. She wants to give the lines a space to be scandalous in.
“Harlem, probably,” Meg says absently. She’s moving around the living room, bringing everything in her path into her dance. She picks up an abandoned feather duster and pretends to smoke it, Marlene Dietrich style. “Imogen says folks in Harlem did things 40 years ago that would still shock people here.”
It’s been almost a week since Al has seen Imogen or Jody or Sylvie or any of the people from the bar. No particular reason. But she has sensed a slight cooling. Must be nice not to use an outhouse, Jody said. You can come over any time, Al assured her, I’m sure Meg wouldn’t mind. Meg is generous and borderless. If Meg had had a sister, she never would have divided their room with a strip of tape the way Al and Suzy did.
Al feels a fist clench inside whenever she thinks of Suzy. Or her parents. Thanksgiving is coming soon, and Al pictures them eating turkey legs wrapped in thin waffles, a family tradition from some other continent, her mother giving humble and guilt-edged thanks: I am thankful my girls are safe, even if one of them won’t talk to me.
“ ‘When I eat his donuts, all I leave is the hole,’ “ Meg and Bessie drawl. Al tries to listen to their secret language. “ ‘Any time he wants to, he can use my sugar bowl.’ ”
A few days later, Al will encounter Bessie Smith for the second time. In the morning, Meg drops her off at the Clarkson Sawmill for her first day of work. Shallan shopped for an anniversary present for her foreman to give his wife, and he owed her a favor. She got two out of him: a job for Jody, and one for Al.
The mill consists of several large wooden buildings just north of town. Al leans out the passenger side window as Meg brakes. Below them dozens of little miners’ houses occupy a sparse patch of the mountain.
“Amazing view, huh?” Al says, thinking of their night in the mine.
“The houses look like a herd of cows,” Meg frowns, “who’ve eaten up all the grass. I gotta get to work, darling. I’m going to be late.”
Al closes the car door and heads for the office. The foreman is a short, muscular man who shakes Al’s hand firmly.
“Alice Hill,” he says, “Shallan O’Toole spoke highly of you.”
“It’s Anna Lisa, actually, but, well, that’s nice to hear.”
“Oh, she said ‘Al’ and I assumed… Anyhow, you’re a small girl, so I think we’ll start you off as a sweeper.”
Al squirms under his gaze. She’s wearing a plaid flannel shirt and blue jeans and gloves with the fingers cut off.
“We’ve got a few ladies working at the mill now. A couple of them have been around since the War, and the younger ones… well, it’s a changing world, I guess. But I won’t kid you, it’s a man’s job, and you’ll have to work like a man. Rigby Clarkson will show you around.”
“Thank you, sir.” Al swallows. Shallan warned her about Rig, the middle son of the Clarkson family, who has been demoted several times as a result of his drinking.
The foreman hands her off to Rig, a shaggy-haired man of indeterminable age. He’s thin but potbellied. He has ruddy skin with soft-lidded, weary blue eyes.
He hands Al a broom, looks her over with blatant disgust. “You must be O’Toole’s friend,” he says with a huff. “My pop owns this place, so you don’t want to go messing around on my watch.” He leads the way with big, swaggering steps, like he has studied cowboy movies very closely.
Soon they’re in a large, open room. Al sneezes. Men in work clothes and heavy boots stand around a wide trough, catching pale planks of wood as they shoot out of a gauntlet of saw blades. They inspect the planks and corral them toward one of three forks, hand-labeled “Large,” “Small,” and “Defective.” Al holds her breath as she watches a tall man heave a two-by-four toward the “Defective” path. She can’t tell what’s wrong with it, and is momentarily glad that this isn’t her job.
Through the haze, she scans for Shallan or Jody. They’d be dressed like the men. But she doesn’t see them.
“It’s way too dusty in here,” says Rig. “It’s tough on the eyes and lungs, but we’re used to it. You might need these, though.” He hands Al a pair of goggles and laughs when she puts them on. “Start in that corner over there.”
Al works her way from corner to corner, mumbling apologies when she gets too close to one of the men swinging planks like baseball bats. She sneezes the whole time. When she’s filled three sacks with sawdust, Rig directs her to a trash bin behind the building. The bags are light as balloons—nothing like a two-by-four—but Al’s back pinches when she tries to stand up straight.
Next she sweeps what Rig calls “the log building,” where the workers push downed pines through a murky stream toward spinning saw blades. She realizes this is the other side of the gauntlet, that the two buildings are attached. She’s working backwards. If she kept going, she’d be in the quiet forest, where the trees are still full of birds.
“Al,” someone
hisses. She looks up from the dusty floor and sees Shallan. Bits of red-brown hair peek out from beneath a blue knit cap. Flakes of bark polkadot her tan work shirt. She nods like good work, man.
Al smiles and ducks her head. She sweeps faster. Then she spots Jody, a few paces down the line from Shallan. Jody’s face is red with effort as she leans into a log the width of a car tire. Al sweeps and watches. Every few minutes, someone calls out to Jody or slaps her on the back. Al can’t make out the words over the buzz and clamor of the log building. Jody is working hard, but she’s a natural, it’s obvious.
When Al has more or less cleared the log room of dust, she finds Rig.
“What’s next?” she asks as brightly as she can.
“ ‘What’s next?’ ” Rig mimics. “Lemme show you something.” He leads her back to the first room that she swept. A thick layer of peach-colored sawdust has gathered like snowfall. “Keep brooming, girl,” he says, and rejoins the men on the line.
What was it her mother used to mutter over a sink full of dishes about a woman’s work never being done? Al shakes out her arms and legs and returns to the corner where she started.
She hopes Meg has made something wonderful for dinner. Steak, maybe. Meatloaf? Jody and Shallan were going to get beers, but Al’s back hurts too much, so she is walking—slowly—to Meg’s small, glowing house.
The lamp in the main room is on, but Meg isn’t here.
From the bedroom, a ghost howls. That’s Al’s first thought. The noise is a sharp, disturbed wahoooOOooo. Al lunges through the doorway.
Meg does not look up. She is facedown. Her dawn-pink skirt is rumpled, her stockings lie next to her bare legs like molted snakeskin. Is she sick? A record spins on the player next to her. It’s plugged in the socket that normally supports the lamp on her dresser.
This house is so haunted with dead men…
It’s Bessie again. Another happy-and-sad tune. Al puts her hand on Meg’s back, and Meg rolls over.
“What happened?” Al demands.
“What do you mean?” Meg’s eye makeup runs in ghoulish rays down her cheeks.
“This.” Al gestures; she’s not sure to what. “I mean—”
“Maybe you should go,” says Meg.
“Are you sick?”
“No.”
“Were you crying?”
“So what if I was?” Meg snaps. “A girl can have a mood in her own house. I’m fine now.”
“But what were you upset about?” When things go wrong for Suzy, she becomes the littlest of little sisters, collapsing into Al as if leading her in a dance. Meg moves stiffly away, and Al is left caressing the green and yellow patchwork quilt.
He moans when I’m sleeping, he wakes me at 2 a.m.
He makes me swear I’ll have no other man but him.
“Just… sometimes I just am. Could you spend the night at the church tonight, do you think?”
“Was it work? Was Mr. Twentyman mean to you?” The knot in Al’s back screams like the ghost on the record.
“No, it’s nothing. It’s not a thing.”
“Is it me? Did I do something wrong?” Meg’s presence in Al’s life is so improbable. It stands to reason that she could slip away just as inexplicably.
Meg glares at her. “No, okay? Can we stop playing twenty questions?” Meg is curled like a snail at the corner of the bed. She turns so that she’s leaning on one wall, facing the other. Away from Al.
“It’s just that… my back hurts pretty bad and I don’t know if I can make the walk,” Al says. She kneads a square of green cloth freckled with blue flowers.
“Fine,” Meg shoos her, “just go out there.” She lowers her head to her knees and Al observes the delicate top vertebrae of her neck—arched and knobby, as if injured. The singing, swaying Meg is gone. Tonight Bessie frets alone: I’m scared to see him, I’m scared to leave. Does this song have another meaning too, again closed off to Al?
She backs out of the living room and sits down slowly on the couch. She wants to go to the church with its chorus of answers. The women there would help her. They would sit with hips touching on one of the pews, spooning burnt macaroni and cheese into their mouths. Meg’s little house can look so perfect sometimes, like one you might see on a suburban block with a white fence and a sprinkler glittering the yard, but Al feels far away from everything now.
Winter inches along. Suzy mails Christmas presents from their parents. When Al tears off the brown paper and sees the duckling-yellow cardigan, trimmed with sequined flower buds, she starts to cry. Her parents have no idea who she is. She can’t begin to answer the pleading letter that accompanies the package. She’s relieved when the everyday numbness of January sets in.
One chilly morning in early March, Al makes her monthly, prearranged phone call to Suzy from the phone in Meg’s kitchen. She’s glad Meg is at the post office. When Al talks to Suzy, she becomes a string of tight-lipped answers, denying everything around her. It’s hard enough to deny the stove, the blue-bordered ceramic dishes, the half-eaten ham on the counter. No way can she deny a living girl, her ankles wrapped around her chair in anticipation, her cigarette smoke meandering into Al’s lungs.
“I can’t take it here anymore,” Suzy says. “Every date I go on, it’s like I’ve been out with that boy before, even if I haven’t. We already know each other too well, even if we just met that week. I dated his cousin, or he’s been to the store and bought lasagna noodles from Daddy. I’ve got to get out. I mean it this time.”
This is Suzy’s usual refrain. Al is sure that one of her dates will work out. Some farm boy will transcend their shared past and look like the newest, most exotic creature Suzy has ever seen. They’ll get married and present grandchildren to Gerald and Eudora like baskets of fruit.
“I have it all planned out,” Suzy continues. “I’m going to go live with Aunt Randi in Los Angeles.”
Al stops slouching in the doorway and stands at attention. Would Suzy really strand their parents? Al has been counting on her to guide them gently into their old age. This is what’s allowed her to stay in Lilac Mines.
“We haven’t seen Auntie Randi since—must have been elementary school,” says Al, stalling.
“I might as well see how spinsters are supposed to behave,” Suzy says. But there’s excitement behind her sarcasm. Al knows that excitement firsthand, and she can’t bear to take it away from her sister.
Miranda Lund, their mother’s older sister by ten years, lives in a tile-roofed cottage across the street from a new TV studio and a farmers’ market. She took her nieces out for strawberry milkshakes and had almost no food in her ice box. Al can’t remember much else about her.
“So it’s settled, then?” Al asks.
The front door squeals open, then bangs shut. Meg always makes an entrance. She walks into the kitchen, a bundle of envelopes under her arm and a multiple-paged letter in her hands. She can never wait. She laughs loudly at whatever she’s reading.
“What’s that?” Suzy asks. She’s always pressing for bits of Al’s life, though she never minds returning to the subject of her own. “Is that your roommate?”
“That’s her,” says Al, who is supposed to be living in an all-women’s boarding house, working as a secretary. Meg loves the irony of her lie; Al does not. “Listen, Suzy, I’ve got to go.”
When she hangs up, she says, “You could be a little quieter.”
Meg sits on the kitchen table. The way she leans on her right arm, thrusting her shoulder forward, looks like a dare. “I can’t help it if Petra’s funny.”
Petra is Meg’s neighbor from Kerhonkson, New York. Her family watched over Meg after her mother died, when her father was too distraught to get out of bed. Al doesn’t understand why Meg puts so much stock in letters from a high school student, but she doesn’t talk to her father, and she’s an only child, and there are plenty of things that Al doesn’t understand. There have been a few of what Al thinks of as blues episodes over the past months. Just one or two,
each mysterious. And so Meg paints herself, more and more vivid, and increasingly abstract.
“Look, how would you feel if Petra discovered that you were sleeping with a woman? If suddenly she started picturing your life like some 10-cent paperback?” Al demands.
“Better to be a 10-cent paperback than a dictionary,” Meg snaps. “And I’ll have you know that she does know.”
“You’re kidding me. Meg, you could get arrested.”
“Well, she knows most of it,” Meg says. With determined casualness, she flips through the rest of the mail. “If she can halfway read between the lines, she knows.” She tosses the bills on the floor. The ferocity of Meg’s truth astonishes Al as much as the ease of her lies.
“But you’re seven years older than her—aren’t you supposed to be someone she can look up to?” Theirs is a life that cannot be translated to outsiders.
“And I suppose that couldn’t possibly be me? I’m some floozy, then?” Meg is mad now, a car peeling around a hairpin curve when, a minute ago, it was purring in the driveway. She hops off the table, balls up Petra’s letter and throws it at Al with surprising force. She stalks out of the room, every muscle taught.
Al remains in the kitchen, helpless again. Slowly she unfolds Petra’s letter, smoothing its creases, a sort of there, there. It’s written on plain notebook paper and decorated with ballpoint flowers. Dear Meggie. The handwriting is loopy and young, i’s dotted with small circles. Al sounds like the best friend ever, Petra writes, mid-page, Strong and kind, holy smokes! Al hopes this isn’t the part that made Meg laugh.
“I want to meet your sister,” Meg says. She is just home from work, dusting the bedroom with nearly frightening fury. She lifts each corner of the mattress and sweeps out armfuls of crumbs. April in Lilac Mines is slushy and cold, but Meg is in her underwear. High-waisted beige panties that exaggerate the inverted heart of her backside. You are my upside-down heart, Al thinks.
“Why?” Al asks, though they’ve had this conversation several times.
