Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  “You don’t have to be at my house all night if you don’t want to,” Tawn says icily. “You’re only here for another few weeks anyway. You’ll last as long as a pair of designer jeans at the Goodwill. I know you’re just slumming.”

  “Tawn! I am not fuckin’ slumming! Do you know how many local history books I’ve read since I got here? I’m trying to figure out what actually happened to Lilac Ambrose. Who hurt her. Lilac the person, not the mascot. Have you even read your grandfather’s own book?”

  Tawn wraps her arms around herself. Her eyes are huge and liquid. “If you’re so into history, maybe you should realize that it’s still real for some of us. The old, homophobic days are now.”

  Felix doesn’t mean to touch the scar on her lip, to be so cheap and obvious, but her fingers gravitate to the white bump of skin. “Yeah, I know that, thanks.”

  “Sorry,” Tawn says in a low voice. “But, well, there’s still a difference between one really bad day and every day. I just feel like sometimes you don’t even notice what’s around you.”

  “Whatever,” Felix sighs.

  Tawn is shivering and looking hard at the parking lot. “Hey, is that your aunt?”

  “Where?”

  Tawn points. Felix sees the poodle in the truck bed, then Anna Lisa walking toward Nora’s Unisex Salon. She’s bundled in a shapeless blue jacket, as utilitarian as a unisex hair salon. Her hair does look a little shaggy.

  Felix dumps the rest of her coffee and introduces Tawn to Anna Lisa on the freezing boardwalk that connects the store and the hair salon. It’s strange to see them together, since she started working at the Goodwill partly to get away from Anna Lisa. I could put my hand on Tawn’s back, Felix thinks. I could hold her hand while I introduce her, show Aunt Anna Lisa how it’s done. But she doesn’t feel like touching Tawn right now. She feels like letting her shiver.

  “Nice to meet you,” Anna Lisa says with a nod.

  “You too,” Tawn nods back, still clutching her hot chocolate.

  “I was going to get a haircut,” Anna Lisa says.

  “Is this a good place?” Tawn asks politely.

  “The only other place I’ve gone is A La Carte Nails, which does hair too now, but it’s not open Mondays and it’s so… pink.”

  Tawn laughs and Felix hates them both.

  “I was about to leave,” Tawn says. “Felix, why don’t you get a ride home with your aunt?” She turns, with a flip of her rain-frizzed hair, and walks across the parking lot.

  And so Felix finds herself in the waiting area of Nora’s with a year-old issue of Good Housekeeping, thinking about how little the magazine has to do with housekeeping, trying not to think about Tawn.

  Nora Banister emerges, aproned, scissors in hand. She has a manic blonde perm and bright pink lips (raspberry? Pepto-Bismol?). Felix’s aunt sits in what looks like an old dental chair, a piece of furniture that might be found in a particularly creative BDSM club.

  “The usual?” Nora asks.

  “Same old, same old,” smiles Anna Lisa. Apparently Nora’s Unisex Salon doesn’t shampoo. Nora examines Anna Lisa’s dry hair with her fingers, and places her hands on Anna Lisa’s shoulders when she talks. Felix watches them, thinking, This is what it would look like if Anna Lisa had a girlfriend.

  Felix grows bored with an article about “Jeans For Every Body.” How was it she used to spend every day writing this shit?

  She stands up and walks around the salon. In addition to several hanging plants, there is a large wood and metal contraption in the corner of the waiting area. It’s an architecture of keys and rollers, with one big flat area. It seems to fit with the old dental chair and the peeling windows, but she can’t imagine what it has to do with the beauty biz.

  “What’s this?” she calls to Nora.

  “Old printing press,” Nora says, continuing to snip. “From back when this was a newspaper office. It’s been here since we opened, and I haven’t gotten rid of it ’cause I think it’s kind of cool. I keep meaning to paint it, though, and put some plants on it.”

  Felix leans in. Ancient, inky fingerprints smudge the levers and even the legs of the press. Hands fed the news into the machine, following the same trails day after day. One day, she imagines, they arranged the letters to say LILAC AMBROSE LOST. Or (is this how printing presses work?) TSOL ESORBMA CALIL. The word HOGAN is scratched into the metal edge of the press, and Felix’s mind wanders to that sitcom, The Hogan Family.

  The address of the newspaper office/salon is also 319 Washoe Street. What if, Felix wonders, the postcard was sent here, and not to the post office? It’s not like it’s a letter to the editor, but what if Cal worked for the newspaper?

  “Any idiots out there this season?” Nora asks Anna Lisa.

  “Not yet, but it’s only a matter of time. There are always people who think hiking in the off-season is some well-kept secret. They don’t stop to realize there’s a reason that most people don’t head up into the mountains when it might snow any minute.” Anna Lisa doesn’t turn her head but calls to Felix, “Nora’s husband TJ does search and rescue with me.”

  Nora combs and scissors, her acrylic nails clicking. If she lived in L.A., Felix thinks, she’d have layered hair, ironed straight. She’d wear velour sweatsuits. Bits of brown hair fall on Anna Lisa’s cloth bib like snowflakes.

  “We’ve known your aunt forever,” Nora says cheerfully. “Me and TJ. She was at our wedding, and just last week she did a lice check on our little girl’s class. I still can’t believe Charlotte had lice.” She laughs heartily. “How embarrassing, a hairdresser’s daughter with lice.”

  But she doesn’t seem embarrassed. Plastic hearts swing from her earlobes as she laughs.

  “How long have you lived here?” Felix asks. She still wants to find old-timers; Nora Banister doesn’t look older than 40, but, well, she said she’s known Anna Lisa forever.

  “Let’s see, TJ and I moved here from San Diego just after he got out of the Marines, and before I had Dillon, so… 18 years? Lilac Mines was really just starting up again at that point… right, Anna Lisa?”

  “Yep,” Anna Lisa agrees, still not moving her head.

  “What do you mean?” Felix is confused. “I thought it stopped being a ghost town in, like, the ’40s.”

  “Oh no, no,” says Nora, shaking her curly head. “Well, it did—there was a saw mill and such here during World War II and into the ’50s and ’60s—but by the mid-’70s no one was here. Ask around. You won’t meet anyone who’s lived here longer than 20 years.”

  Anna Lisa stares straight ahead.

  Felix thinks about the people she’s met, oldish people with history. Gary Schipp and Luke Twentyman and the haggard woman next door. Not that she’s asked most of them what they were doing in the ’70s and ’80s. People carry their histories like luggage, and you try to decipher whether it’s Louis Vuitton or JanSport or a stickered steamer trunk. Busy strangers. Didn’t Luke say something about everyone leaving?

  “Well, a few people lived here, off and on,” says Anna Lisa. “But hardly anyone.”

  Nora continues, “In the ’80s, when real estate in the cities started to skyrocket, people started moving back here in big numbers. It was one place normal folks could still buy a house with a yard bigger than a postage stamp.” Nora plugs an electric shaver into a nearby outlet and expertly mows the nape of Anna Lisa’s neck. “We’re a double ghost town,” Nora says over the buzz. “Even if there was nothing exciting like a lost girl in a mine to kick off the second round.” She turns off the shaver and steps between Anna Lisa and the mirror to appraise her work. She snips above Anna Lisa’s right ear and says, “There. Looking good.”

  Then Nora whirls around to face Felix. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Let me cut your hair, too. It’s looking pretty overgrown.” She is so enthusiastic, in her tight flowered dress, waving her eager scissors, that Felix doesn’t have time to feel insulted. Her head is still reeling with the news: while she was searching for what happ
ened a century ago, she didn’t bother to notice what happened 30 years ago. Felix finds herself easing into the kinky chair, which is surprisingly comfortable. Anna Lisa smiles her encouragement. Her hair is short and neat.

  “Just a trim,” Felix says. She removes the plastic clips from her hair one by one and sprinkles them on the counter. A few strands of coarse brown hair come with them. “Just an inch or two,” she says again. If she were home, she wouldn’t mind a good chop, but she wants to minimize any potential damage.

  She closes her eyes as Nora cuts. There’s something slightly medical about the process, and she thinks of her night in the hospital. The hum and click of alien instruments, being at the mercy of hands that might be good or bad. She forces her thoughts elsewhere.

  Where was her aunt during the ’70s? Maybe she did have a fabulous queer life, maybe those were her glory years. Maybe she went to a big city and met a nice girl. Or maybe Meg came with her. Maybe they lived in a skinny Victorian in the Castro.

  Nora’s nails catch on the small silver hoop at the crest of Felix’s left ear.

  “Ow!”

  “Sorry.” But Nora doesn’t sound too worried.

  Eventually Felix relaxes into the rhythm of the scissors. Her dry hair is so light. She’s awed by how easily her hair gives in. Gives up. Now it’s on her head, now it’s on her shoulders, now it’s in a dustpan. It doesn’t fight for its place, it just adapts. The difference between dead and alive left to the squeezing of metal handles.

  She can’t bring herself to watch the mirror, so she slides her gaze over to the parking lot, and beyond that to the cold brown strip of town. There are no dewy trees here to evoke Christmas, just a general gloom. What still surprises her about this part of town is that she never would have guessed there used to be trees here. When she was an obedient Hermosa High Ecology Club member contemplating Depleted Rainforests, she visualized fields of stumps, perhaps a gangly, confused monkey here and there. But the clear-cut portion of Lilac Mines looks as if it always was a stripped field disguised as destiny.

  “So… what do you think?” Nora wants to know.

  Felix turns toward the mirror. Her hair is short and neat. What she usually spikes up is now flattened down. Nora stands over one shoulder, pink-faced and expectant. Anna Lisa stands over the other, looking exactly like Felix.

  It’s no longer just a family resemblance. Anna Lisa looks like one of those computerized images of kidnapped children, aged but not updated. Two round faces, one lined but still chubby-cheeked. Two showers of freckles. Two ready-for-the-big-softball game haircuts.

  “Wow, you all look just alike!” Nora exclaims. “I didn’t see it when you came in here, but wow. If you went to the same salon all the time, you’d be twins.”

  Felix purses her lips and tastes her scar. She has an overwhelming urge to slather her hair with gel. Would it be rude to ask what sorts of styling products Nora has on hand? Anna Lisa makes her uneasy, looking back at Felix with Felix’s face. If we had the same salon, Felix repeats in her head.

  Anna Lisa, for her part, has a strange smile on her face.

  THE EFFECTS OF OATMEAL COOKIES

  Al: Fresno, 1966

  It was not a heart attack. By the time Al learns this, she’s home already, standing in the kitchen of the old farmhouse. Her mother has put up new curtains—printed with apples and corn and other things that don’t grow in California—but everything else is the same. The smell of Lemon Pledge, the clay ashtrays Al and Suzy made in school.

  “It’s congestive heart failure,” Eudora Hill tells her daughters. “Which can cause heart attacks, but didn’t, technically, in your father’s case.”

  Suzy has come home, too. She loves Los Angeles, is tan and nearly blonde, has befriended the students Aunt Randi teaches flute to at Pepperdine. The bored and panicked girl Al heard on the phone is gone; she’s back to being a streak of forward motion. Al feels almost shy.

  “Oh, thank God,” Suzy says.

  “Yes, I think we should thank God,” agrees their mother. “Dr. Shannon says he still needs to take it easy until his body adapts to the medication and we figure out just how much work he can handle. We’ve hired a nice young man to help out at the store. Terry Kristalovich—he manages the office supply store across the street and helps out with restocking after he closes up shop for the day. You have to admire that sort of enterprise in a young person.”

  Is it Anna Lisa’s imagination, or is her mother looking at her pointedly? Eudora Hill has blue eyes that match the flowers on her CorningWare bowls. Neither of her daughters inherited them. She’s taller than both girls too, sturdy despite her fragile housedress. Her nut-brown hair is marbled with more gray than Al remembered.

  “I’m so anxious for Daddy to come home. Let’s make him a big sign or something,” Suzy says. She bends down and pats Al’s suitcase as if it were a dog. “Aw, the old suitcase. I remember. Looks like it’s been through a lot, Anna Lisa.”

  “It has,” Al says quietly. So far her mother and sister have done most of the talking. It’s easier this way. Meg dropped Al off early this morning. Al kissed her on the cheek and said, “You’ll wait for me, right?” She immediately hated herself for sounding so insecure. Eudora wanted to know why Al didn’t invite her roommate in for coffee and cookies. She was cheerful, glad, apparently, that her mysterious daughter was not shacked up with some man.

  Suzy had defended her: “Golly, Mother, Anna Lisa’s worried about Daddy. She doesn’t want to make small talk over cookies.” Al wondered what Suzy had guessed.

  Now Eudora scoops up the suitcase and carries it upstairs, daughters trailing behind. Before Al can stop her, she has tossed it on Al’s old bed, unclasped it and removed two neat stacks of folded clothing.

  “Let’s get you settled,” she says.

  Then Eudora sees the men’s shirts and slacks. Al could probably get away with wearing them one at a time, but they implicate her in the aggregate. Right now she’s wearing a button-down shirt with the sandstone-colored skirt that Meg hemmed for her. It’s a safe costume, but her bare calves make her feel more vulnerable than ever.

  Her mother holds up a pair black pants, the ones she bought with Jody and Imogen. The cuffs are frayed now, but that’s not what concerns Eudora. “Anna Lisa, I thought you worked as a secretary. Don’t tell me this is what you wear to work.”

  “It’s not,” Al says truthfully. She wears blue jeans and heavy tan boots. This is what she wears to Lilac’s.

  “Then what…?” Her mother’s eyes beg her for a story.

  She didn’t really think she could come home without explaining anything, did she? Nevertheless, she’s caught off guard.

  “It gets cold in the mountains,” she explains. This is also true.

  “But honey, these look like men’s clothes. And it’s 90 degrees here.”

  Al feels every bit of the heat. Her cotton shirt is damp against her back and armpits. The bedroom where she slept every night for 19 years seems to have shrunk.

  “I—” Al begins. What would happen if she told the truth? She looks at her mother for a clue. Eudora’s face is pulled out of shape, like a wad of Silly Putty pressed against the comics page and stretched by her sick husband, her mysterious older daughter. Al remembers playing with Silly Putty as a kid, how the picture would snap in half if she pulled too fast, or collapse into a limp string if she pulled too hard.

  “I work for this old man,” Al says a little too quickly. “His name is Luke Twentyman. He’s a historian, and he’s researching some of the old mines in the area, including this one where a girl died back at the turn of the century. Sometimes we have to go down in the mines. It’s cold and slippery, and it would be dangerous to wear a skirt or high heels.”

  Suzy’s expression is intrigued but wary. Her green-gold eyes narrow. “You never told me that.”

  “Well, she never told me anything at all,” Eudora says, taking a step closer to her younger daughter. Al pictures them staying up late, talking abo
ut her over tea. “A girl died there? Is it safe for you to be down there? Aren’t mines always caving in?”

  “We don’t go that far,” Al assures her. “And Luke, well, he knows everything there is to know about the area.” She takes a breath, and inches toward neutral territory. “There are rumors that the girl’s ghost still haunts the mines, though.”

  “Yeah?” Suzy sits down on the bed, folding her legs neatly beneath her fern-print skirt. She settles in for a story.

  Eudora puts down the black pants. “Ghosts—I hope you know better than that.” But she’s listening, too. And so, in the middle of the sun-bleached room, Al tells them what she knows about Lilac Ambrose, and a few things she doesn’t. She embroiders the story with eerie details from the safe, dead past, and silently thanks Lilac for saving her.

  Gerald Hill has lost weight and gained wrinkles. But his hair and mustache maintain their color and wiry texture, and he plunges back into the store the minute he can, humming among the dried beans sandbagged around him like a fortress. Al and Suzy help out, punching orders into the cash register and tossing out blemished fruit. No one minds that Al wears slacks as long as she wears her maroon Hill Food & Supply apron, as if one balances the other. Summer crystallizes into autumn. Al’s hips and belly begin to show the effects of her mother’s oatmeal cookies. Her hair brushes her chin now and falls in front of her eyes.

  “When are you coming home?” Meg wants to know. The connection is as bad as it usually is and her strong, deep voice is unnaturally quiet.

  “They need me here at home,” Al protests. The two homes. Tonight she’s on a pay phone on Fulton Street, the cold air nipping at her elbows.

  “It’s been two months,” Meg pleads. She is so far away.

  Al’s skin feels ready to crack open from the cold. Her warm insides will slither along the ground, then melt into it. “I know, I miss you something fierce.”