Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  “I care,” Imogen says. She grabs Meg’s hand, and although Meg is strong, her shoes slide on the floor. “You want to ruin it for everybody?” Imogen pulls Meg through the linens aisle and out the door.

  When they are sealed in Jody’s Edsel, Petra turns ecstatic. “That was so amazing! I knew you had it in you!” She leans forward from the back seat, a flower in time-lapse bloom.

  Meg attempts to roll down the passenger side window, but it sticks after three inches. “I don’t like being told what to do,” she says simply.

  “Right on!” Petra cheers. “We should all stick it to the man like that. Seriously, we could organize a protest. We could gather up all the lesbians in Lilac Mines and we could go back to the store and all start kissing each other. If there are enough of us, they can’t do anything.”

  “Pet,” Imogen says patiently, “most of the lesbians in Lilac Mines are happy if they can just shop at May Company without getting harassed. They’re not gonna draw attention to themselves on purpose.”

  They’re on Meg’s block of Gemini Street now. “You organize it,” Meg says. “And call me if any handsome butches show up.”

  Petra wilts in the back seat. “Fine, don’t be a feminist. It’s your loss.”

  And what Petra does not see is that Meg already is a feminist. Petra sees curled hair and pressed clothing and assumes the past, when in fact Meg is outside of time. Her saving grace and her downfall.

  “Your stop, girl,” Imogen says, pulling up in front of Meg’s small brown house. Meg waves goodbye and Petra climbs into the front seat.

  Like a rock tumbling down the mountain, or gossip moving through a school, an invisible energy draws people to the church from Lilac Mines and Beedleborough and even Columbia. They look at the painted bed sheet. At the table of necklaces Linda and her cousin made, sparkling in the sun. At Emily pressing the pedal on the pottery wheel with her foot to the rhythm of Essie’s folk guitar. The people smile or wrinkle their noses. But either way, they believe it. This is what amazes Imogen. They just take it all in like it’s real, like it always was, like the colony is as much a part of town as Lou’s Bar, which has a sticky floor and slow service, but is where you go nonetheless.

  At three points during the day they’ll rotate jobs, because that way they’ll all learn a variety of skills and no one will have exclusive power over any given domain. Emily is the only one who knows how to use a pottery wheel, though—the other women have tried, but they’ve only created imploded lumps of wet clay—so Linda and Marilyn will teach festival-goers how to make pinch pots on their ceramics shifts.

  From her shift at the baked goods table, Imogen has a perfect view of Petra and Massassi, the dance teacher Petra has imported from Oakland. She is taller even than Petra, with golden brown skin and square shoulders. She wears pounds and pounds of beads—wood and bone and coral—but dances as if they weigh nothing. Massassi has agreed to teach an Umfundalai dance at the festival in exchange for a $25 check made out to the Oakland Dance Revolution. So she dances, now, with a circle of white people. Most are spastic or painfully inhibited, but Petra—in homemade turban and tube top—holds her own. She raises her elbows and moves her ribcage to the beat Gapi is slapping out on a set of bongo drums. And she looks good. Flat bellybutton looking this way and that. Strands of blonde hair escaping her turban, turban loosening. Every part in motion. She is no Massassi, who is as bored and graceful as a waking cat, but she is very much a Petra.

  A teenage boy with curly hair erupting from beneath his baseball cap points to a plate of brownies. “Are these… you know…”

  “Twenty-five cents each,” Imogen says. She keeps her eyes on Petra.

  “Yeah, but are they… ” He lowers his voice. “I mean, are there any special ingredients?”

  “Oh. Those will cost you a buck, and you’ll have to ask Agapi. She’s the woman on the drums over there. But wait till she’s done.”

  Imogen hands out oatmeal cookies and carob-chip muffins, and watches and watches. There are people who bend under the weight of the world, she thinks, like timid Al seemed to, and people who wrestle it, like Meg. Then there are people like Petra, who bend the world to them. Petra dances over to the baked goods table. “Can you believe this?” she bubbles. “People love it!”

  “I know.”

  “Can I have a sip of your iced tea?” Petra nods toward the half-full Emily-made mug at the edge of the table.

  “ ’Course.” Imogen hands it to her, and Petra gulps. “But you know you could get a whole glass from Marilyn at the beverage table.”

  Petra smiles with small straight teeth. She had braces as a child. “I know.” She goes back to her dance.

  The drums are not hard to play. The key, Imogen discovers during her dance rotation, is to let her hands lead. Skin bouncing off skin, sweating beneath the late afternoon sun. Massassi doing her thing inches from Imogen and a world away.

  “This is wonderful, just wonderful,” gushes a white woman who is already wearing one of the Lilac Mines Festival ’71 T-shirts that Emily silk-screened. “My husband, he said this was a bunch of nonsense, but I kept telling him, ’Carl, it’s good to know how other people live.’ “

  Imogen’s final shift is at the tie-dyeing station. She shows the festival-goers how to bind T-shirts and cotton skirts and even a canvas hat with twine, and submerge them in buckets of dye. Red and green and eggplant purple. When they unfurl the wadded items, there are white lines snaking through the newly red or green or purple clothes. The grin and shake their heads at the results. Who knew that their boring old work shirts could be so transformed? Perhaps anything is possible. They clap their red and green and purple hands. Imogen feels a hand on her shoulder.

  It’s Jody, who has been grilling hamburgers in the church kitchen. She points toward Petra, who has resumed her place dancing beside Massassi. “What a goofball.”

  “Oh, come on, you gotta admit she’s good,” Imogen laughs. “She’s got her own goofball rhythm.”

  Jody hugs Imogen from behind, putting her hand on Imogen’s stomach. She has never done this outside of home or Lilac’s. Two young girls with their arms in the buckets look up at them. Imogen feels the weight of Jody’s large palm, smells the hamburger grease. The girls blink and go back to their inky ponds.

  This can happen, Imogen thinks. The sun is bright above them, the air is new and piney, as if spring is not a season but a revolution.

  The gesture ends after a few seconds, and Jody slips one of the dry shirts—pale green with a trail of white spiraling out from the left shoulder—over her head. Imogen looks at her butch. She knows where they fall, she and Jody. They are the ones who stay.

  THE INTEGUMENTARY SYSTEM

  Anna Lisa: Fresno, 1971

  The cradle is perfect. The dark red wood is worn so smooth that the cradle seems to promise a splinterless life. A soft, cream-colored blanket is folded inside.

  “My mother knitted it,” Terry explains. He holds the cradle in his arm, as if it’s the baby itself. “She thought it would be bad luck to give it to me empty. Can you believe I fit in here once? And my dad before me? And that this is made from a tree that grew in a Russian forest somewhere?”

  He sets it down in the spare room he insisted on painting pale yellow. For Terry it’s always been a matter of when, not if. In theory Anna Lisa feels the same. But she is 25 now, Terry 31, and she can’t bring herself to stop taking her small pastel pills every day after breakfast. Lately, Terry seems to have adopted a strategy of material evidence. If they have a yellow room and an heirloom cradle and the tricycle that the Sammartinos’ son recently outgrew, soon they’ll have to have a baby to occupy the place they’ve created.

  Terry sits down on the guest bed—Anna Lisa’s twin bed, imported from her parents’ house—and admires the cradle. It’s a pink Sunday in June, the kind that could grow a baby all on its own. Through the open window, with its sighing white curtains, Anna Lisa can see her flower and vegetable garden in the backyard.
It’s bursting with delphiniums and purple, lion-headed flowers called Lilac Time Dahlias. It turns out she has a bright green thumb. She half expects to see an infant crawl out of the cabbages.

  Terry gestures for her to join him. “Come, look. Doesn’t it just all make perfect sense?”

  She sits down next to him, but doesn’t touch him. “I know you’re anxious, but I can’t pretend I’m ready when I’m not.”

  “You’re 25! If not now, when? I’m just being practical.”

  Which is of course part of the problem: Terry is practical and the wisps of thoughts that float through Anna Lisa’s head are not. She can’t tell him: I’m a butch, I’m not getting pregnant. “Maybe I should babysit Wally Jr. more. You know, to get used to it.”

  Terry unbuttons his wide-collared brown shirt and folds it neatly. He has the beginning of a belly beneath his undershirt, which Anna Lisa supposes most wives would find charming. But his body is always waiting for her, or disappointed in her, or reminding her how things are supposed to be. “Annie, I don’t think being a mother is something you ’get used to.’ It’s what we’re born to do, it’s nature.”

  What’s the reason? Anna Lisa asks herself sternly. She likes children. She loves building block towers with Wally Jr., then smashing them with a vigor that is frowned upon in adult circles. She loves Terry. Or at least, she is linked to him in a way that cannot be separated from love. And she wouldn’t mind giving up her part-time job at The Quill Pen. She’s gotten enough paper cuts to last a lifetime. So… what?

  “I wish you’d talk to me more about things,” he says. His embrace clamps her arms at his sides. “Sometimes it’s like you’re only half here.”

  “That’s just how I am. I just don’t have a lot to talk about,” Anna Lisa protests. Her thoughts grow inward, like roots in a potted plant.

  “That’s not true. I see you, Annie. You’re beautiful and brilliant and interesting and mysterious. Or at least, that’s how I’ve always thought of you. But maybe it’s just that you’re not that interested in me. Maybe you’re always dreaming about being somewhere else.” His voice grows small and nervous. “Or with another man?”

  “Don’t be crazy. I couldn’t be with anyone else. I can’t even imagine it.” And this is true. She thinks about Meg all the time, but those feelings are ancient and historical, not the kind that might be linked to action.

  “Promise?” Terry turns to face her. Anna Lisa shakes out her arms, and he rubs her thighs through her jeans. Soon he is unzipping them, peeling off her blue paisley blouse. It’s been a while since they’ve had sex, longer since they’ve undressed each other.

  Even though Anna Lisa is on the pill, Terry always makes love like he’s trying to produce a baby, industrious and cheerful if not quite passionate. His thrusts are rhythmic, as if the inside of Anna Lisa is not a cave to be explored but a closet to be swept. It’s reassuring, in a way, as if they’re both concluding, No mystery here, just some shirts to fold! She tries not to be one of those I-Have-A-Headache wives. She can’t give him her mind or her past, so her body is a consolation prize.

  “Thank you,” he says when he rolls off of her. “That was nice.”

  Afterward, Terry watches TV in the family room, and Anna Lisa begins dinner in the connected kitchen. It seems the hard part of the day has passed. She moves lightly from fridge to cupboards to stove.

  “I’m trying a new recipe,” she calls to Terry. “This casserole with brown rice and cheese and artichoke hearts.”

  “Brown rice and what?” he asks over the sound of a sports game.

  “Artichoke hearts.”

  “Sounds strange.”

  “Well, it’s new. We’ll see.”

  They eat off trays in the family room, the evening news unfurling in front of them. They bought the color television a few weeks ago. Now olive-green planes soar over Crayola-green jungles and light Halloween-orange fires. Then the whole scene is eclipsed by thick black smoke, somehow different than the black of their black-and-white TV.

  “What a thing to see in color,” Anna Lisa sighs.

  “I don’t know what to wish for anymore,” Terry says. “For America to do more, or do less.”

  She touches the blue veins on his hand. It comforts her to know that Terry is capable of something other than complete self-assurance when it comes to his own desires.

  The story switches. A young woman news reporter with a bright red beehive stands against a crowd of men. “I’m here in San Francisco where local homosexuals are marching up Folsom Street in observance of what they call ’Christopher Street Liberation Day,’ ” she says. “They say that they’re here to prove there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality. But as you’ll see, some are nearly naked, and some are even dressed as women. A theatrical group calling themselves the Cockettes ’mooned’ our cameraman.” She looks nervous, like she’s not sure whether this is a funny human interest story or the next Kent State. The men are a parade of color in yellow feathered headdresses and pink feather boas, tight blue jeans and tanned hairy chests. Signs painted with red letters: COME OUT!; GAY LIBERATION NOW!; RED, WHITE, BLUE & LAVENDER. The day is golden around them.

  San Francisco is so far away. Anna Lisa looks down at her dinner. She thought she was being adventurous, going to the Safeway instead of her parents’ store for artichoke hearts. Writing names in increasingly calligraphic handwriting on scraps of paper, then stowing them in strange, secret places. She knows why she doesn’t want to have a baby: she can’t bring a child into a world she doesn’t know how to fully participate in. How can she tell it Do your best, be your best when she has no idea how to do it herself? She would doom her son or daughter to mediocrity. That would be her legacy.

  “Can you believe it?” Terry remarks. “A parade of homosexuals?!”

  Anna Lisa feels her face and neck turn as red as the letters on the signs. “It makes them happy,” she whispers. “It seems to.”

  “Say it’s true what the homosexuals say, that they were born that way,” Terry says in his his which-councilman-should-we-vote-for voice, “that still doesn’t make it something to be proud of. You can only be proud of something you’ve worked for. Worked at. A business or a house. Or a child you’ve raised.”

  There was a time when Anna Lisa believed that Terry saved her from something desperate, being a lesbian or an old maid. Lately she’s been wondering if he’s keeping her from something. It’s a tiny, bitter voice inside her, and quickly stifled by the thick chords of their life. She’s in deep. There are her parents: her father’s condition is steady but demanding, while her mother’s arthritis is unpredictable though often undetectable. There is this house and its papers showing both their names. There is the store and more papers with both their names. It was a big gesture from Terry: these are your envelopes, too, your three-ring binders, your plastic sheet covers, your No. 2 pencils. There are the Sammartinos and the Carys and the Jensens. There is bowling on Saturdays and church on Sundays.

  And, of course, there is Terry himself. Anna Lisa cannot break his heart, so she lets her own grow so small and hard that it, too, is unbreakable, a miniature bowling ball.

  Looking around the classroom, Anna Lisa is acutely aware of her age. Most of these kids were born in the ’50s. Their shaggy hair and lazily draped clothing, though, emits a long stoned cackle at that decade. A girl in a plaid vest and clashing pants sits cross-legged on the desk next to her. She hands Anna Lisa a bright yellow flyer. “The Women’s Collective is having a meeting tomorrow afternoon.”

  Anna Lisa holds the flyer gingerly, as if leaving fingerprints might implicate her. “What do you do there?”

  “Oh, you know, CR, talk about books, that sort of thing.” She pushes a strand of dark hair behind her ear.

  “CR?”

  “Consciousness-raising. If you have to ask, your consciousness probably needs to be raised.”

  The prospect sounds frightening to Anna Lisa. This girl, with her shiny face and bold clothing, doesn’t seem
like she has anything to hide. Even her subconscious is probably a straight clean wishing well.

  “Thanks for the invitation,” Anna Lisa says. She folds the flyer and slips it into the index pages of her new textbook. She wants to go to the meeting, she wants to soak up youth and femaleness until her consciousness rises so high it spills out her ears. And the intensity of her desire is precisely why she can’t go. She reminds herself that she’s at Cal State Fresno to become a nurse, not to join clubs.

  The girl picks up on Anna Lisa’s wariness. “It’s not like we burn our bras or go lesbian or anything.”

  Anna Lisa nods and looks down at her book. It is September. In July, she missed her period. She didn’t tell Terry. She waited with dread for her body to do something definitive. While she waited she made a list:

  Anita

  Sonja

  Maribeth

  Julie

  Christine

  Stacey

  Daphne

  Violet

  Little scraps from TV, names signed to checks. She gathers them everywhere. Always girls’ names. Then, in August, blood came like rain in the dry summer, and Anna Lisa was as grateful as cracked earth. Her body was just playing tricks on her, daring her to make a decision. She tore up the list of names, although she’s made others since, and then torn them up, too. If she did not want children with Terry, she needed to do something. And her life seemed to be hinting that she could do something. Maybe not anything, but something.

  Cal State Fresno had just started its nursing program, and allowed Anna Lisa to apply over the summer for admission to the first fall class. She feels strange sitting at a classroom desk again. Her butt takes up more of the seat than it did in high school. DONNY ’67 is carved into the Formica surface. She conjugates in her head: Donny, Donald, Don, Dawn, Donna.

  Anna Lisa is grateful to see an older woman enter the room. Dressed in a tweed skirt and ruffled blouse, with a red scarf knotted at her starting-to-wrinkle neck, her neat straw-colored curls are beginning to gray. Anna Lisa half hopes the woman will sit at the empty desk to her left, half prays that she won’t. She’s not sure if she would be young in contrast, or old by association.