Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  The sky brightens, then dims again, to an indecisive blue-pink. Her thoughts are divided between death and bean burritos when she hears hooves. Horseback riders! She turns in the direction of the sound. There is Anna Lisa, looking down from a tall silvery mule.

  “You came here?!” is the first thing her aunt says. Felix can’t tell if it’s a question or not. Anna Lisa is wearing an orange, roadwork-style vest, mud-caked boots, and a frown.

  “You came here!” Felix echoes. She’s not sure if she’s talking about right now or 40 years ago, when Anna Lisa came here with Meg. Anna Lisa climbs down from the mule, and Felix falls into her aunt’s stiff frame, no larger than her own. She hangs on as tears pool on the crinkly vest.

  Anna Lisa jerks away. “I thought, ’Well, she’s an adult. She doesn’t have a curfew. She doesn’t owe me anything.’ I thought maybe you met someone in Columbia, or went over to Tawn’s. I don’t know.”

  Anna Lisa opens one of the mule’s saddlebags and takes out a wooly green blanket. She’s all business as she wraps it around Felix’s shoulders. Felix is suddenly sixteen, about to get grounded for worrying her parents. “I would have called you. I tried to call you, but my cell wasn’t getting any reception and I thought I was just going to be gone a minute. I found out some stuff about Lilac and this other girl, Calla Hogan. I think they—”

  “You thought you could go storming through the mountains and come up with some bones? A treasure chest? In a minute?” Anna Lisa huffs incredulously, even as she hands Felix a water bottle.

  “I know,” Felix says, now sobbing in full. “I’m such a city girl. I wish I had your skills. I can’t do shit out here.”

  Anna Lisa doesn’t look at her. She just says, “Let’s get out of here. It’s supposed to snow again today.”

  She helps Felix onto the mule’s back and walks in front, carrying the reins. It’s one of Ernie’s, she says. He does search-and-rescue, too. “But you’re not an official search-and-rescue case. You’ve gotta be gone 48 hours before they call in the team.”

  “God, I feel so stupid,” Felix calls down. “I couldn’t even get lost right.”

  “Be glad,” Anna Lisa says. Felix watches the back of her head as she marches down the trail, which has suddenly manifested, a two-foot-wide snake of damp dirt and flattened grass.

  The path hugs a steep bank. They round a corner, and Felix is shocked to see rows of houses and trailers in the distance.

  “It was here this whole time?” Felix says. “I can’t believe I lost it.”

  Anna Lisa doesn’t look back. “You came pretty far.”

  After a while, Felix’s legs begin to chafe. The parts of her inner thighs that are covered by her torn jeans are okay, but her long johns don’t hold up. Anna Lisa helps her off the mule, who seems indifferent about the whole thing. He twitches his ears and blinks his long-lashed eyelids, as if to say, Another day, another lost girl. Felix remembers what Ernie said about the mules in the mine, and wonders if this particular animal had ancestors who perished in the tunnels.

  Now she walks shoulder to shoulder with Anna Lisa. She’s gotten a bit of a second wind. She tries to match her aunt’s short-legged stride. As much as she hates their twin haircuts, she thinks she would like to have Anna Lisa’s sturdy, flat-shoed walk. The day has become almost spring-warm, so she throws her jacket over the mule’s wide back. Sweat begins to prickle in her armpits and at the back of her neck. They keep going.

  “You should have come straight home,” Anna Lisa says finally.

  “I know, I—”

  “You don’t really understand that this is real, do you?” Her tone is bitter and judgmental.

  “I do, now,” Felix promises. All of this. How can she make her aunt believe her?

  “Hmph.”

  Felix stops abruptly, her feet skidding slightly in the mud. “How would you know what I know? You’ve pretty much ignored me since the day I got here.”

  “I’ve cooked for you, I offered to get you a job at the school. I don’t know what you want from me. You seemed pretty content poking around in the library, in mineshafts. You seemed to be enjoying your little field trip.”

  Felix stares at her aunt. “You can’t imagine that there might be anything else I’d need from you?”

  A cloud creeps across the sky above them. Seconds go by.

  “Well.” Anna Lisa rubs the mule’s nose nervously. “I know Suzy wanted me to step in for her, to be the lesbian fairy godmother you never had. Who the hell knows why she thought I’d be qualified.”

  Felix doesn’t want to admit that her own hopes were as ridiculous as her mother’s. “I know you’re not out and all. I don’t care, anymore. I want to hear all of it.”

  “All of what?”

  “Everything!” The sky has turned a dark red-purple, and now it finally opens up. Fat warm droplets land on their shoulders like blood breaking through a bruise. “Everything from… before.”

  “What makes you think I have anything to tell?” Anna Lisa retorts. Felix studies her profile, the hard jaw beneath the soft skin.

  Lightning zags across the sky, a white, stinging cut. Felix opens her mouth to speak. Thunder chases the lightning, trampling over her words. The mule does a nervous dance step behind them.

  “That’s close by. We shouldn’t be walking in this weather,” Anna Lisa says, studying the sky. “We should wait it out.” Her voice is even and confident now. As long as she can talk about weather or baking or nursing, she’s fine.

  “But where?”

  Anna Lisa points to a shack 50 feet or so from the trail. Felix must have passed it last night, but it’s unfamiliar to her. She could have been shining her flashlight in the other direction at that moment. The weight of this arbitrariness presses down on her.

  “But what if lightning hits the house?” Felix asks as Anna Lisa pries open the door.

  “Lighting rod.” Anna Lisa points. Sure enough, a thin shaft of metal is fixed to the roof, pointing at the sky.

  “Wow,” says Felix. “I thought they only had those on the East Coast.”

  “They’re pretty rare out here,” Anna Lisa agrees. “But I guess when the trees came down, whoever lived here had to own up to being the tallest thing around.”

  She guides the mule through the door. He stands in the middle of the shack, swishing his tail, as if he hangs out in houses all the time. Felix wonders where the phrase “stubborn as a mule” came from; this one seems amenable to everything.

  “What’s his name?” Felix asks. She and her aunt sit on a wobbly bench that has fallen partway through the wood floor.

  “Lilac. Ernie thought he was a girl when he bought him.”

  “Oh.” So this is Lilac. Felix doesn’t want to think about that name right now.

  There’s nothing to do but sit side by side, watching the mule like a TV set as the rain gushes through the soccer ball-sized holes in the roof.

  “I don’t know why I’ve been so obsessed with Lilac,” Felix begins slowly. “Not you,” she clarifies to the mule. “I mean, she’s gone, right? Whatever the truth is about her, it’s lost. So why bother?”

  “Words to live by.” Anna Lisa echoes, “Why bother?” She studies her gloved hands, clenched together in her lap, for a long time. “Suzy’s going to kill me. I don’t know what she thought I’d do for you, but losing you in an abandoned mine shaft probably wasn’t high on her list.”

  “Anna Lisa,” Felix pleads. “What did I do? Other than act a little… I don’t know, impatient?… sometimes. I don’t get it.”

  Anna Lisa looks at her so hard Felix thinks she’ll melt. “Did it ever occur to you that I might be envious? You have everything handed to you, the whole damn world. And what do you do? You turn against the butches and femmes, you say you hate the ’labels’ that we came up with—well, we invented them because before that there were only epithets. You go to rave parties.”

  “Wait, what are you talking about? Do you mean me personally or my whole generation?
” She thinks about her Women’s Studies class. Is Anna Lisa right about Felix’s generation, or is she lumping two or three eras together? Wasn’t the whole butch/femme thing reclaimed in the ’80s? The textbook didn’t go past the early ’90s, so Felix is not sure what movement she’s supposed to claim.

  “You are your generation,” Anna Lisa seethes, lips tight. “You might think you’re an individual, but you’re just pushed along on the current. We all are.”

  Felix is shaking. The Sunset guys shoved her into the past, into wondering what it really meant to be gay, and now Anna Lisa has just shoved her back, a we-don’t-want-your-kind-here-either.

  She wants to run out of the ruined cabin and into the rain. But she has nowhere else to go.

  “When I was atta—… When those guys came at me—” her throat feels like it’s full of splinters “—I didn’t know where to put it. Does that make any sense? And when Eva took off, I didn’t know what to do with that either. It was, like, I looked around and all the stuff that I thought would make me feel better didn’t do anything at all. I figured you would at least have some… context.”

  “You think a lifetime of taking shit from people makes you stronger?” Now Anna Lisa rubs her hands furiously against her jeans. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

  “But doesn’t it make you at least, you know… um, wise?” Felix whispers.

  “Maybe that’s the consolation prize. I get to sit home with my dog and be wise. Look, the thing about bad things that happen is, they are bad. If they were all blessings in disguise, CEOs would sign up to sit in the back of the bus.”

  “What bad things, exactly?” Felix ventures.

  “Look, I’m not complaining, I’m not saying my life was so hard. It’s just that, some of that context you want? I wasn’t even there for it.”

  Felix craves the mosaic of her aunt’s life as deeply as she craved Lilac, a day and a lifetime ago. She shivers and hugs herself. She feels a lump against her side. Remembering, she pulls the purple glass bottle from her jacket.

  “I found this,” she explains. “Last night. I thought you could put it with the others in the living room. I like them, the way the sun hits them in the morning. I don’t think I ever told you that.”

  Anna Lisa takes the broken bottle from Felix. She runs a finger over one of its jagged edges, pressing down so hard Felix worries she’ll cut right through her glove. She glances at Felix, then back at the bottle. A drop of water splashes through the roof and onto the glass, polishing a small spot on the murky surface.

  “Thanks,” Anna Lisa says. Then: “I don’t know where to start.” There is surrender in her voice, along with fear and gratitude and endless shards of broken glass.

  “Start here,” Felix offers. “Lilac Mines. What about all those years that the town was empty? What happened then?”

  “You really want to know?” Anna Lisa asks. It’s a challenge, but she also seems genuinely incredulous that Felix would want to hear this story.

  “Yes.”

  “Fine, okay. Well,” Anna Lisa clears her throat, takes a deep breath, “I wasn’t here for all of it, you know. There’s a lot I just heard, and a lot I probably missed entirely.”

  “Stop qualifying, just tell me what happened.”

  “You’re so impatient…. Okay. Well, it started in Fresno, actually.”

  “Fresno?”

  “It always starts somewhere else,” Anna Lisa says. The rain pounds a steady beat as she talks.

  II

  BROKEN VASES

  Meg: Lilac Mines / Fresno, 1967

  Meg shows Jean the invitation written on pale green paper, tied with a pink seersucker ribbon.

  Mrs. Gerald Hill

  and

  Ms. Irena Kristalovich

  Request your Presence at

  A Bridal Shower

  for

  Anna Lisa Hill

  on

  October 3, 1967

  Jean studies the card in the dim light of Lilac’s. “Who’s Anna Lisa Hill?” She sips her beer and studies Meg with cool blue eyes. Even though they were together for almost a year, Jean consistently looks at Meg with poorly veiled surprise.

  “Jean! Anna Lisa is Al.”

  “Al’s getting married?!” Jean laughs. “She wasn’t a very good butch, but she sure as hell wasn’t straight.”

  “Don’t rag on Al just because you’re jealous,” admonishes Meg. “But yes, she’s getting married. Her little sister called one day out of the blue. She said she knew I was one of Al’s oldest friends—well, she said ’one of Anna Lisa’s oldest friends’—and that she and her mother were throwing her a surprise wedding shower, and could she get my address so she could send me a proper invitation.”

  “A proper invitation,” Jean huffs. “You’re not going to go, are you?”

  When Meg says, “Of course I am,” Jean cringes. It would never occur to Meg not to do things. Also, she’s in the process of winning Jean back, and a little competition—even from an engaged woman—couldn’t hurt. It’s Saturday night at Lilac’s, in the middle of Indian summer. The ceiling fan blows Meg’s dark hair into a wild mess, but Jean’s short, waxed cut stands at attention. Meg is on her second martini. She’s enjoying the selective flashbacks that roll through her mind: Jean standing straight and courtly behind a bouquet of purple-black flowers, Jean pressing her against the headboard as she unbuttoned Meg’s blouse. Elsewhere in the bar, Sylvie—Jean’s more recent ex—is surrounded by a fortress of femmes.

  “I don’t get it,” Jean says. “Why are you still hung up on Al?”

  “Well, that seems like a perfectly useless question. Why is anyone hung up on anyone?” But Meg twists back and forth on her barstool, watching her hound’s-tooth pumps as she swings her feet. What is it about Al? When she came to Lilac Mines, when they met in the alley behind this bar, Meg was astonished by the newness of her skin: her Tom Sawyer freckles and tiny pores. But Meg is always attracted to newness, and Al is The Past. Meg says slowly, “I liked how she looked at me.”

  “You’re a sexy woman, Meg.” Jean smiles with half her mouth, relieving the perpetual sorrow of her sloping eyebrows.

  “No, I mean, she always had this look like, ’Where are we going next?’ Like she knew it would be somewhere good. She didn’t act like I was going to fuck up her life.”

  “Are you saying that I…?”

  “I’m saying that I have to find out who she’s marrying. I’m curious.”

  Fresno is flat, the highway flanked by orange trees standing in straight rows like good soldiers. The landscape makes Meg think of Al’s face, the flat plane of her cheeks, the way any hint of drama made her cringe. She’s angry. She’s not going to this shower to entice Al, even though she’s wearing her low-cut red sweater. Meg’s going to show Al what she’s missing. She steps harder on the gas.

  The Hills live in a big, square farmhouse. Every inch has been freshly painted white. Curtains in gingham and vegetable prints wave from open windows. A neat parade of old-but-clean cars line the road leading up to the house. Meg savors the details: this is the life Al wouldn’t show her, even for an afternoon.

  A middle-aged woman with wiry gray hair peeking out of a pink scarf opens the door. Her gaze wanders over Meg’s cleavage, her flowered mini-skirt, her tall brown boots.

  “Mrs. Hill?” Meg says, extending her hand.

  “No, no, I am Irena Kristalovich,” the woman corrects. She has a slight accent from somewhere in Europe. The fiancé’s mother. Meg tries to imagine what a younger, male version of her would look like.

  “You are?” Mrs. Kristalovich prompts.

  “Meg Almond, a friend of Anna Lisa’s.” Meg practiced saying “Anna Lisa” in the car. She will be so smooth, Al will see.

  “Come in, Meg. We have just started some silly game.” Mrs. Kristalovich shrugs and rolls her eyes. Meg decides she likes her.

  Laughter flutters down the hallway. They round a corner and enter the parlor. Women of various ages, dre
ssed in pink and aqua and duckling-yellow, ring the room. At the center of the pastel frame is Al.

  Her hair is long, falling in loose brown waves around her face. She’s wearing a black V-neck blouse and green wide-legged slacks. In the moment Meg’s mind takes this snapshot, Al does not look like a butch contorting to fit the normal world. She looks like a Regular Girl at a nice Sunday afternoon party. The normal world is her world.

  Then Al looks up. The brown eyes Meg knew so well blink, and blink again. Recognition takes hold, and for a fraction of a second, Al looks happy to see her. A body recognizing another body, one that used to echo its curves as they spooned beneath Meg’s patchwork quilt.

  But then it’s gone, replaced by fear. Al opens her thin, freckled lips slightly. She searches Meg’s face, and Meg knows what her lips aren’t saying: Are you here to expose me? Is this your revenge? It is not anything so simple, but Meg lingers in her new position of power. Let Al squirm.

  Meg introduces herself to the ring of expectant faces. The girl who is Suzy is slim and stylish in a short dress and yellow tights. She smiles from beneath a row of gold-brown bangs.

  “We’re playing ’Who Knows Anna Lisa Best?’ ” she explains. “Only Mother and I don’t get to play, of course, since it wouldn’t be fair. We already know her too well. The question I just asked—nobody’s answered yet—is ’When did Anna Lisa have her first drink?’ ”

  “Oh, you’re bad!” says a dark-haired girl in a pink pantsuit.

  “Do you know, Nancy-Jane?” Suzy asks, and the girl shakes her head.

  Al looks at her knees. Meg arranges herself on an ottoman between an auntish-looking woman and a red-haired girl with a wide headband. The room is quiet.

  “Come on, one of us must have been there,” Suzy prompts. “I know my sister’s good, but she’s not that good.” A chorus of relieved laughter relaxes the circle of women momentarily.