Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  Al squats, holding the paper, hands quivering. She’s still in her nightshirt and someone is telling her what she is. Handing her fate to her like a fortune in a cookie. The cat slips between the rungs of the fence, and possibility slithers out of view.

  Did the neighbors have anything to do with this? The Espeys are a childless couple in their 30s. Zeke Espey works at the mill and flirts with Meg. His wife, as a result, hates Meg, and both are cold to Al. It’s hard to name the causes in such an intricate situation, what they know or don’t know, what they’re capable of and what they wouldn’t waste their time on. Sometimes Meg flirts back.

  “Come in, I’ll make bacon… make-up bacon,” calls Meg.

  Al knows she should tell Meg about the braid, about the maybe-murdered girl. Meg is brave. She would run down the road in bare feet. Al should say, Call all our friends, it’s us against the world.

  Except right now it feels more like the world against us. Al feels herself shrink down to the i in DiKE. She will save her questions for later. She will not tell Meg—she wants to believe this is motivated by protectiveness of her femme, but she suspects its origins are bitter, sneaky. The product of a girl split in parts.

  By August, Al is back at the church. Just over a year after arriving in Lilac Mines, she is tentatively tapping the heavy wooden doors, as nervous as when she first stepped into the bar behind Jody and Imogen.

  “Can I stay here awhile?” she asks Imogen, who opens the door like a housewife expecting to hear a pitch about carpet cleaner. There’s a dust rag in her hand. Clicking noises suggest the movement of curlers beneath her red headscarf. She’s been leading a life behind those doors, and Al has interrupted it.

  “Of course, honey. Come on in and tell me what’s goin’ on.” Her voice is softer, slightly country.

  She guides Al to a table and chairs with calico seat cushions in the kitchen. These are new—or new to the church, at least. She pours her a cup of burnt-tasting coffee, and puts a carton of milk on the table between them.

  “Meg and I have been fighting. A lot.”

  “What about? If you don’t mind my prying.”

  “I don’t know.” Al means she doesn’t know what they’re fighting about, but she doesn’t know if she minds Imogen prying either. She wants to collapse into her soft arms, but she would need a reason, and she’s not sure she has one. “Nothing? Everything? I thought it would get easier, the longer we were together, but it’s not.”

  In her head Al sees the Ford’s headlights on Meg’s pale face in the mine. Bessie Smith’s record tilting in circles on the phonograph. The seams of Meg’s stockings. The limp ribbon on the end of the braid and the months of quiet afterward. Meg tear-stained, then happy, then tear-stained. It doesn’t add up to anything she could tell anyone. She wishes she could say, Meg snores. Meg has eyes for another butch.

  Imogen is studying Al closely. “Sounds like the honeymoon’s over. I don’t mean just the honeymoon between the two of you, but between you and this whole thing.” She gestures abstractly. “Me and Jody, we went through that. Some time ago. Had to say to ourselves, did we really want to sneak around our whole lives? To get mean looks even from other girls in the life?”

  “And did you want to? Do you?”

  “Some days. But at least in a place this small you can get to know everyone one by one. Eventually most of them stop thinking, ’Jody’s with that Negro,’ and think, ’Jody’s with Imogen.’ ” Her eyes angle toward the uneven wood floor in a way that is shy and tired and cynical all at once. “You stick it out ’cause you know you’re not gonna find anything better. And sometimes I mean it in the best way, like what could be better? But sometimes I mean it like I’m just not cut out for an easy life.”

  Al adds as much milk as she can to her coffee without making the mug overflow. Now it is almost palatable. “What if I’m not cut out for a hard life?” she worries. She wants Imogen to tell her, Yes, you are.

  “Then you’ll find out, I guess.”

  She makes Al a bed next to Sylvie and Jean’s—a pile of thin blankets that add up to something soft—and the next morning Al rides to the mill in Jody’s Edsel. Even with the windows rolled down, it’s unbearably hot. Dust blows in and covers the vinyl seats, sticks to their sweaty faces. When Al steps out of the car and into the burning 9 a.m. sun, she can’t believe the day is just beginning.

  “So, are you and Meg still together?” asks Caleb, the bartender at Lilac’s. His voice strikes a note somewhere between gossip and concern.

  “Yeah, we are.” Al draws a squiggly line in the condensation on her beer glass. “We’re just… I’m staying with Jody and the girls for awhile.”

  Caleb nods like he knows something that Al is too young to learn. He’s wearing a navy blue turtleneck tonight and the beginnings of a mustache. Al doesn’t know him well. She doesn’t know if he has only two sweaters or if he considers them his uniform and wears them only on Friday and Saturday nights, or if he has hundreds of identical turtlenecks lined up in a closet.

  “Meg is a gorgeous girl,” Caleb says. “But she’s a wild one. She burned Jean’s clothes after they broke up.”

  “That’s not true,” Jody interjects. It’s a Friday in September, not dark yet. They’re drinking after-work beers. There are just a few butches in the bar, a couple of men, no femmes. “I thought it was true, but Imogen said no, that’s just what people do to a femme when they decide her temper’s too hot. They make things up.”

  “I heard it from Jean,” Caleb says a little smugly. “Just after they broke up.”

  Jody leans on her elbows. There are flecks of sawdust in the light hairs on her arms. “And what makes you think some brokenhearted butch is going to tell you the truth? Jean’s my buddy, I wanna make that clear, but I remember those days, before she got together with Sylvie. She was capable of anything, too. She was just quieter about it than Meg was.”

  It’s strange hearing about this other Meg. Caleb makes her sound like a banshee, wild-eyed and match-wielding. Al tries to counter it with what she knows about Meg: the way she clenches her teeth when she’s mad, the surprised giggle when Al scissors her own legs between Meg’s in bed. But she hasn’t seen Meg in four long days. Maybe her version is wrong as well.

  Then, as if to set the record straight, Meg is suddenly there. The door to the bar lets in a small explosion of late-afternoon light. Meg is wearing the same pink and orange plaid skirt that she was wearing the first night Al saw her. For a second Al pictures them starting over, getting it right. Al will ask to buy Meg a drink. Meg will be impressed by Al’s straight-backed walk, her leather wallet.

  “Al, I just talked to your mother,” Meg says breathlessly.

  “What?” says Al.

  “Ho boy,” says Caleb.

  “Your mother. She called. She said your sister gave her the number—your sister called a few minutes later to say she was sorry, but it was an emergency. Your mother said your dad had a heart attack.”

  Al puts her fingers on her forehead. They are beer-cold and her face feels hot. Now it is her father she tries to piece together: whenever she’s pictured him over the past year, it’s been at the little desk in the back room of the store, chewing on the end of his pencil as he tries to make sense of the finances. His red-brown hair mussed by his worried fingers. Somehow Al imagined he wouldn’t leave that desk until she was there.

  “Is he…” she whispers. It feels like something is sucking at the back of her head.

  “He’s not dead,” Meg says, her voice a little too loud. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make it sound worse than it is. He’s in the hospital.” She reaches into her purse and hands Al a scrap of paper. Fresno Episcopal, where Al and Suzy were both born, is written in Meg’s hard scrawl. Below that, her parents’ home phone number, as if Al might have forgotten it. It’s strange to see it with the area code.

  Al closes her eyes and listens to what might be her own heart. Fast but functioning. Now when she pictures her father, she sees him
in a hospital bed that looks like the metal-framed twin she still sometimes shares with Meg. Is this all that’s left of her family? A crazy quilt of memories threaded deceitfully with details from her new life? I need to restock, she thinks, and it’s almost literal. As if her hands would gain something from stacking chickpeas on shelves, four cans deep.

  “What do I do?” Al asks. They’re all staring at her.

  “How would we know?” replies Caleb.

  “Depends,” says Jody thoughtfully. “How much do you like your pa?”

  “You go home,” Meg states, and Al is grateful for her decisiveness. Al slips off the barstool and into Meg’s arms. Her embrace is so tight that Al can’t catch her breath. “I’ll loan you a dress,” Meg whispers into Al’s ear. “I’ll take it in and shorten it tonight.”

  TOO YOUNG TO BE HISTORICAL

  Felix: Lilac Mines, 2002

  In early December Matty quits the Goodwill and moves to Vancouver. This surprises Felix, who sort of figured that a town as small as Lilac Mines would be static. She assumed that most people lived here by accident, and that if they were going to leave, they would have done so long ago.

  “Bye, lezbirds. Don’t forget to invite me to your big lesbo wedding,” he says on his last day. The door dings as he steps out of the store and into the rainy day.

  Felix and Tawn are a long way from a big lesbo wedding, but they do seem to be really and truly dating, in a teenage sort of way—not that Felix actually dated anyone when she was a teenager. They make out in Felix’s car and have quietly reached third base in Tawn’s bedroom. Felix has learned a few unexpected things about Tawn: she’s been more or less out since high school because, she says, she’s a bad liar. She has an extensive collection of reggae CDs and dances to them with mellow, unselfconscious grace.

  After Matty’s long, soggy last day, Tawn counts out the cash register and locks the shop. They drive up North Main only to discover a road crew jackhammering at chunks of asphalt. The detour veers west, toward the newer part of town. The line of cars, brake lights blinking, is the first traffic jam Felix has seen since she arrived.

  “It’s okay, we need to head east anyway,” Tawn says. “Let’s try going down Washoe Street.”

  Washoe Street is a sort of shadow of East Main. The old buildings here are less restored, less like a tourist’s idea of a small town and more like a small town’s idea of a small town. There are hardware stores and shoe repair shops and a shooting range. Anna Lisa went there one night, and Felix was horrified.

  “Your car is fucking freezing,” Felix says. “No offense.”

  “Yeah, the fan is broken. It’s actually better that it’s cold out because at least this way it doesn’t overheat.”

  “Aren’t you scared of getting stuck by the side of the road? There are freaks out there who might take advantage of a cute, stranded chick. Have you looked into getting a new car? Or like, a newer car?”

  “Yeah, of course I’m scared,” Tawn says, glancing at her sideways. “I’ve looked at some ads, but anything that would be a real upgrade is too expensive. I did meet this girl with a year-old Beetle, though,” she smiles.

  Felix puts her hand on the back of Tawn’s warm, slender neck. Tawn jumps. The car zigzags.

  “Oh my God, your hands are cold,” says Tawn when she’s regained control of the wheel.

  “Let’s stop there,” Felix says, pointing to a low wooden building that says Nora’s Unisex Salon on one side and Coffee - Cold Beer - Ammo on the other. “Let’s get some coffee.”

  “I hate coffee,” Tawn says. “It doesn’t taste like something you’re actually supposed to drink.”

  “We can just warm our hands on the cups,” she promises. “And pick up some bullets.”

  The store is small and dark, crowded with dusty displays. The stringy-haired woman slouched on a stool behind the counter glares at them. Felix wonders if it’s obvious they’re a couple. She wonders if they are a couple.

  She decides to be friendly. “Afternoon. Hey, um, how old is this building?”

  The woman looks Felix up and down with small blue eyes the color of swimming pools. She takes in the rainbow of plastic clips twisting Felix’s spiky hair, the bomber jacket, the pink wool pants.

  “You’re not from the Historical Society, are you?”

  “Huh? No.”

  “Good, ’cause they’re always snooping around here. Guess they know how old this place is by now, though. They want to take it. Commies.”

  “Why do they want to take it?” Felix asks. Tawn is investigating the store’s lip balm selection, conveniently located next to a dangerous-looking—but powerful—space heater.

  “Used to be the post office and the newspaper office. Back in olden times. They want to put some stupid plaque up that says ’319 Washoe Street used to be the post office and newspaper office in 18-hundred-and-such-and-such.’ Tell me, where’re people gonna get their coffee and beer then?”

  “And ammo,” Felix says, then clamps her mouth shut. Tawn giggles and studies a tube of Blistex intensely.

  Three-nineteen Washoe Street. Why does that sound familiar? Her reading about the town has centered on the mine. One book mentioned a bank robbery, and another recalled a popular update of Romeo and Juliet at the Silver Bird Playhouse, but there’s been nothing about a post office or newspaper office—and why would there be?

  Then she sees the number written out in her mind—319, with a flat top on the 3, and a little flag on the 1. A soft-bottomed W.

  “That’s the address on the postcard,” she says aloud. She’s giddy with the information, and embarrassed that she hadn’t even thought about where the postcard was sent. Maybe Cal is just around the corner.

  Tawn looks up. “Yeah, of course it is. It’s the post office. They didn’t have mailmen in a place like this, way back then. Even now, a lot of people farther up in the mountains come into town to pick their mail up.”

  “Oh. Right. Duh,” Felix says. “I’m such a city girl. And she… you,” she looks at the beady-eyed clerk, “just said it was the post office.”

  “Are you going to buy something?” asks the clerk. A cigarette smolders in an ashtray next to her.

  There are two metal canisters of coffee next to a rack of heat-lamp-haloed pretzels, and Felix fills a styrofoam cup. Tawn buys a hot chocolate, and they sit down on the patio furniture that is the store’s dining area.

  “I really want to find out what happened to Lilac,” Felix sighs. “I know it’s stupid and impossible, but it’s like, I would just be so happy if I knew. It would feel so good to have a solid answer. Nothing else does.”

  Tawn stabs at her drink with a skinny red straw. “This is definitely the powdered stuff.” She leans in. “That woman is watching us. Doesn’t she know we’re too young to be historical?”

  Felix adds, “When I said nothing is solid, I didn’t mean—I’m not saying we’re not. I’m not saying we are. I mean, I’m not one of those U-Haul lesbians, I just—”

  Tawn lowers her voice. “U-Haul lesbians?”

  “You know, the joke—what do dykes bring on the second date?”

  “Oh. Because they can’t afford movers?”

  “No, because they shack up right away. You haven’t heard that one before?”

  “Oh, I get it,” says Tawn. “You know, it’s not like there’s some big—I don’t know—lesbian joke conference in Lilac Mines.”

  Felix laughs. “Yeah, I picked that one up at the lesbian joke conference in L.A. The tenth annual.”

  They’re quiet for a minute. The clerk goes to the freezer case and fusses with the bottles of beer and soda.

  “Um, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” Tawn says. Felix thinks, This is it, this is where she lays out the future. Felix feels strangely calm. Like she might be ready for this.

  “I’m going to be hiring someone to fill in for Matty pretty soon,” Tawn says, “and I think it would be a good idea not to mention that we’re, you know, seeing
each other.”

  “Okay… “ Felix lets it sink in. Tawn was talking work-future. “Right. Well, that seems fair.”

  But as her coffee burns her tongue and Tawn watches the parking lot, Felix starts to think about the reality. She will have to go into the Goodwill four mornings a week and not touch Tawn’s arm and not call her “honey.” Not that she does call her “honey,” but suddenly she wants to. What if whoever Tawn hires asks if Felix is dating someone? A few months ago, when she was still jittery from the attack, she might have found forced silence shamefully appealing. But now she’s ricocheted to the opposite end of the out-ness spectrum.

  “I thought you said you were a bad liar,” Felix says.

  “I am. But we have to be professional. I don’t think we really have a choice.”

  “Sure we do. We could be pioneers. We could really make a statement.”

  “A statement about what? I’m not saying we can’t be gay—it’s not the Salvation Army—but I wouldn’t like it if, like, you and Matty were dating. I don’t want to be a hypocrite or a bad example to the new person.”

  “I just believe in trying new things.”

  “Felix, this is my job. I have to talk to people from corporate and stuff. I can’t just screw around. So to speak.” She half-smiles, but her dark eyebrows are still clenched with worry.

  Felix’s first thought is that Eva would have put boundary-breaking principles above corporate principles any day. Of course, it’s broken boundaries and a sizeable savings account that are sending Eva on her European tour. Felix’s second thought is that this must be how her aunt felt. Back in the day. Or maybe today.

  “I get it,” Felix says slowly.

  “I’m not really sure you do, actually,” Tawn says. “If I ever want to get my own apartment, I have to stick it out at the Goodwill. My life isn’t like yours—it’s not some big, fun closet where I wake up and say, ’Hmm, what am I going to wear today?’ ”

  “Maybe you don’t get me. I’m trying to be political here,” Felix says. She’s hurt. Doesn’t activism mean speaking your truth and all that? So why does her truth feel alternately shallow and impossibly, murkily deep in Lilac Mines? She takes a slow breath. “I mean, I get it, okay. I’m just not looking forward to going into work and acting like I wasn’t at your house all night.”