by Cheryl Klein
“That’s the last of it,” Jody says. They’re at Meg’s house because Jody can’t handle the colony seven nights a week, and Meg can’t handle being alone every night. “I should go home now. Imogen’s waiting up.” At least, she hopes Imogen is waiting up.
Meg looks at the green bottle, drained of cheap red wine, and repeats, “That’s the last of it. That’s the last of us!” Her dark eyes widen, glistening in the dim light of the kitchen. “That’s what Petra said, right? We’re dinosaurs. It doesn’t matter what we think because we’re all going to be dead soon. We’ll just be a bunch of bones in a museum, and people will look at our insides and think they know what we were like.”
Meg and Petra have had plenty of falling outs. But lately their spats have gotten colder and meaner. The more successful the colony gets, the more convinced Petra becomes that she doesn’t need Meg, even though she wouldn’t be in Lilac Mines at all if not for Meg. When one of Meg’s butches stole four tabs of acid from Gapi, Petra called her a chauvinist pig and told Meg that neither of them were welcome in the colony any longer. Jody is not a fan of Petra either, but she knows she can’t wrest Imogen from the church, and she is afraid to make her girl choose.
Jody stands up. Spotting Meg’s car keys in a small glass bowl on the counter, she slips them into her pants pocket while Meg is busy thumping the bottom of the wine bottle. Meg is prone to late-night drives through the mountains. “G’night,” Jody says. “And you’re wrong. They would never build a museum for us.”
It’s past midnight. Jody knows she’ll be exhausted at work tomorrow, but for now she enjoys the peaceful walk. January snowflakes meander down from the clear sky, as if the stars themselves are falling on her shoulders. She loves the snow, when it’s just right like this. She’s always amazed by how quiet it is. Rain rattles windows and tap dances on rooftops, but snow just goes about its business. It reminds her of Boston, of eight small ears glued to the living room radio in hopes of hearing that school would be closed for the day. But she can never think about Boston or her family for long. Snow days make her think of mugs of hot cocoa crammed with marshmallows, but that reminds her how she used to steal her scrawny older brother’s marshmallows. He would cry, and their father would storm in. Ostensibly he was mad that they were fighting, that Jody wasn’t sharing, but they both knew he was mad at the order of things. If a bossy older brother had stolen his helpless sister’s food, he would have been gently reprimanded, and she would have been given more marshmallows. These memories lead to stinging cheeks, slammed doors, cold beans for dinner, exile that becomes wider and wider: to her room, to her grandmother’s house, to we-don’t-want-to-know-where-you-are.
Jody keeps walking. Imogen took the car to the Lilac Mines Green Grocer earlier in the day. By now their cupboards will be lined with cans of baked beans and diced tomatoes. In the refrigerator there will be apples and bricks of cheese, and jugs of milk so heavy that the metal shelf sags in the middle. For a night they’ll feel rich. When Jody reaches the corner of Gemini Street and Redwood Road, she debates which route to take home. If she heads down Redwood, it’s just a short walk to Moon, where the church is. But that route would require her to pass a once-grand Victorian with peeling blue paint and a stream of young male boarders, where last week a man had yelled at her from the porch, something about her clothes. It wasn’t even dusk then. She pulls her coat tight around her body and heads west toward Calla Boulevard.
At Calla and Silver Street, a little sliver of an avenue that tapers off into dirt road after less than a mile, two men are felling a street sign. That’s what it looks like—one is hacking away at the wooden base with an ax. Jody debates whether crossing the empty street would just draw more attention to herself. But she sees a yellow city truck parked nearby, floodlight in the bed, and decides it’s not vandalism, though that doesn’t necessarily mean she is safe.
“Evening,” one of them says. The one holding the sign for the chopper. He has a big handlebar mustache, like stagecoach robber in a western, or maybe the town banker.
“ ‘Lo,” she replies.
The other one looks up. She knows him from the mill, Tom North, one of two Toms. He looks a little like what she imagines her youngest brother must look like by now, with deep red hair and a face that’s just starting to lose its baby fat at 29.
“What’re you doing?” she can’t help but ask.
“Just a little freelance work for the city,” North says proudly. “Mayor Clarkson himself wants these old signs replaced.”
“In the middle of the night?” Jody asks. The man with the mustache glares at her from beneath his hard hat. She is questioning the city, and he sees himself as the city.
“Guess he didn’t want us disrupting traffic,” North says with a shrug.
Jody nods and looks up at the old sign. Calla Blvd. is carved in relief on the plank of wood, the raised letters painted white and peeling. Silver St. juts out at a 90 degree angle. The new sign lies on the sidewalk, a thin metal pole and two metal signs, white letters on a blue background. One sign says Silver St. The other says N. Main St.
Tom North would hammer the wrong sign into the ground.
“Hey, North, no offense,” Jody says, “but Main Street is down that-a-way. We’re on Calla.”
He looks over his shoulder and says, “Shit.” But the bank robber says, “We’ve got the right sign, lady. Or whatever you are. They’re changing the name.”
“You’re joking, right? What kind of town has two Main Streets?”
“This kind of town,” says the stagecoach robber. “Or the kind it’s gonna be.”
Jody has always liked the name Calla Boulevard. She doesn’t know where it comes from, but she remembers the story about calla lilies filling Lilac Ambrose’s empty coffin at her funeral. The street has always seemed beautiful and sad to her, like her mother singing “Molly Malone.”
“But why are they changing it?”
Tom North’s face brightens in the yellow floodlight. He has remembered something, she can tell. “Mayor Clarkson said—well, the deputy mayor actually, Bill Heib, he said we ain’t gonna have a street named after some dead girl no more, it’s bad luck.”
“But we have a whole town named after a dead girl.”
“No, not Lilac,” North says patronizingly. “ ‘Nother dead girl, I guess. Someone named Calla Holmes or something. Bill Heib called her ’Lilac’s little friend,’ but I don’t know if he meant it like they were really actual friends or they were both just, you know, dead.”
“Shut up, North,” says the stagecoach robber. “You’re gonna get us in trouble.”
“Yeah, what’s she gonna do?” huffs Tom North.
The men pant in the thin, cold night. She’s still not sure why they’re out so late, why they’re chopping down the old sign instead of digging it up at the base. They’re phantom workers, urging her to forget she saw them, laboring for a different world governed by odd rules.
“I’m not doing anything, fellows,” she says in a low voice. “ ‘Night.”
She walks briskly up Calla—up North Main—past the shuttered shops and cooling bars. Is Calla Boulevard really named after a second dead girl, she wonders? Or is Tom North just getting things wrong, which wouldn’t be new for him? Of course, every town must have plenty of dead girls, when you think about it. In the 19th century, people died of the flu and infected hangnails, not to mention a catalog of diseases that Jody can only name in her grandmother’s voice. Smallpox and scarlet fever and consumption. Children starved and swooned and were buried without anything being named after them.
It’s as if the town is preparing itself for a big date, polishing its shoes and practicing its how-do-you-do’s. In February, Petra gets a phone call from Mayor Clarkson. When she hangs up, she says, “Can you believe it? They want to sponsor the festival. Our festival.” The women gathered in the main room of the church are silent as they try to picture Mayor Clarkson up to his elbows in tie-dye. They don’t know whether to be fl
attered or frightened.
Essie drives to Berkeley and, on her way back, sees a highway billboard that says, Come to Lilac Mines for Old-Town Charm and Modern Convenience! There’s a cartoon of a haunted house with a ghost girl oozing from one of its windows, next to a map and a bubble announcing, Just off Route 49! “Poor Lilac,” Essie reports. “Pimped by Clarkson and his goons.”
They discuss the possibility of a protest—“Of what, exactly?” Jody asks—but by early March it becomes clear the date is off, with no help from them.
Jody is at work, studying her eye in the bathroom mirror. The skin around it is the color of the sky after a storm, purple-gray with swells of yellow. Last week, when Zeke Espey’s fist hit her cheekbone with a solid thwack, it was a red, puffed-up fish, then it turned into a blue flame threatening to start a wildfire.
She only wishes she had been fighting for something in particular. Imogen, say. Not that most of the men she works with know about Imogen. But it was just a bar fight at Lou’s. The boys were restless because the mill hadn’t hired anyone new in months, not their friends or brothers or sons, and everyone was overworked, and there were rumors that something worse might be around the corner. Jody knew that times like these were not good for people like her. People like Zeke started to look at the handful of strong, callused women who’d worked beside them for years and think, Hey, what’s she doing here?
There’s a restlessness beneath the town’s new sheen. Like the rivers of capillaries that pulse beneath the stone-smooth skin of her eye. She presses her index finger against her swollen eyelid, wincing. The small mirror in the washroom at the mill is flecked with paint and grime. The men share a larger bathroom just off the main work hall, but the mill was built without a women’s room, so Jody and Gapi and Jennifer—who also lives with them at the old church—use a converted outhouse five minutes and a foot of snow from the building. At breaks, they tromp over together and pee fast while the men drink coffee.
“Hurry up, Jo! We have got one minute left,” Gapi calls. “Remember what Rig say about the next person who is late.”
The three women cast short shadows as they make their way back to the main building. Like Jody, Gapi is tall, with wide hips and torso. She’s a little lazy, smokes pot almost every evening, but she does what she has to do without complaining. Jennifer is Linda’s cousin. She moved to Lilac Mines with her baby last year, leaving her alcoholic husband in Sacramento. She’s their first real straight girl, although she talks a lot about lesbianism, like it’s a book she just hasn’t gotten around to reading yet. She is small but tough, with a tight twist of dark hair and crowded teeth that look like they could take a gleeful bite out of anyone. When the three women approach the hall, they’re surprised by silence, not hearing the sound of saws or talking and laughing men. The sun burns distantly above them, and the snow squeaks beneath their feet. They exchange glances. Jody opens the door as quickly and quietly as possible.
“…Damned environmentalists,” Rigby Clarkson is saying. He’s standing next to Wayland Clarkson, his younger brother and the president of the mill. The workers are crescented around them.
“Hang on, Rig,” Wayland calls down to his brother. He is standing on a stool, looking ridiculous in suit pants, dress shirt, and tie. “As I was saying, a team of environmental scientists, some guys from the government, recently discovered that this part of the Sierras is home to a rare type of moth. Little green thing, has some long Latin name. And apparently it only lives here, in these sugar pines, only breathes this type of air. According to these scientists and the government, we’re destroying this moth’s ’habitat.’ The short version is—I won’t mess around with you here—the mill’s closing.”
Wayland’s fists are balled in his pockets. He studies the rafters above where the workers are standing. No one speaks for a minute. Then everyone does. Questions and shouts and shoves. They are a bear shaking off months of hibernation.
“Folks, folks!” Wayland calls out from his stool, but no one hears him. Rig puts his fingers in his mouth and tries to whistle, but only air comes out. He settles for yelling, “Shut up!”
“Folks,” Wayland continues, “I want you to know you’ll all be given a generous severance package. Two weeks of pay.”
Jody’s heartbeat slows slightly. Her grandmother gave her two weeks, years ago, and she found a job at the umbrella factory in one. Moved to a boarding house in ten days. The workers try to hook Wayland, but he’s out the door, their questions rolling off his body like water off a freshly waxed car. Jody keeps her eyes, the good one and the blackened one, on the sawdust-covered floor. She is sure that if she looks at any of the men right now, she will see what she saw on Zeke Espey’s face last week magnified ten times.
“I think I will hurl,” Gapi whispers.
Jennifer blinks and blinks. Jody knows that the long days at the mill have kept her sane over the past months. It was the slow, hard rhythm of pushing log to blade that kept Jody going two years ago, when she learned that Imogen was sleeping with Petra. At home she was a witness to what seemed like a crime—Imogen’s low chuckle snuggling up against Petra’s young, nonchalant body—but at the mill she was exactly who she was supposed to be. When Imogen eventually chose Jody, the mill stayed the same. That was its beauty. “Let’s get our stuff and go,” Jody says.
When everyone is home, the church is too crowded. Jody and Imogen bicker; somehow the subject of Petra always comes up. And then she comes up literally, smiling in a doorway, spilling an armful of groceries onto the kitchen counter.
“Brie?” Jody says. “We can’t afford brie.”
“How else am I supposed to make quiche au fromage?” Petra asks. She is 25 years old, but Jody has decided that college girls don’t age the same way other people do. Jody remembers her mother at what must have been the same age: a flurry of efficient hands, chopping carrots, stuffing small limbs into winter coats. Mrs. Clatterbuck kept her hair under a scarf. She lived off leftovers—chicken necks and potato skins and reused bacon grease—and she looked like it: pieced together but undeniably useful. Petra, on the other hand, still opens her eyes wide when she asks questions, still giggles, still spends slow mornings braiding her buttery hair.
Nine people live in the church. A couple have left. Marilyn took a job as a professor up north in Washington, and Emily left after she and Essie broke up. In Emily’s absence, Essie has blossomed into a real person. She revamped the chore chart and struck up correspondence with other women’s groups in Oregon and Massachusetts, bringing back tips on gardening and mediating fights. She was like a proud fisherwoman, presenting her catch and frying it up. In addition to Jennifer, there is Jennifer’s daughter Christy, and a woman named Athena—not her real name, but one borrowed from a goddess she does a fairly poor job of emulating.
With the three mill workers home all day, the church is claustrophobic. Heat doesn’t circulate well, and Jody spends her days moving from hot patches to icy ones. Christy toddles down the hall, away from her irritable mother, drooling on raw yams or handmade toys and howling when Jody or one of the other women trips over her. Linda brings home a cat. Petra complains because it is male, Jody complains because it eats and eats. The baby loves the cat, but the cat hates the baby.
“Think of it as a good thing,” Imogen says one Saturday night, over the too-loud chords of Athena’s guitar. “It was a shame cutting down all those trees anyway. We’ve been wanting to be independent for a long time.” She unties her hair, and her Afro bursts out of its ponytail, glad to be home from the office.
“But we’re not independent, we’re just poor,” Jody says. She feels like she’s always saying this. “You still work for Dr. Tracy, and he’s still a pervert. How does that help our independence?”
“I know,” Imogen sighs. “But I’m the only one of us who has access to any kind of medicine. I like knowing I could score us some antibiotics in a pinch, you know?”
In the main room, an argument between Gapi and Linda competes w
ith Athena’s guitar. It’s not long before Christy starts crying, and Jennifer yells at Gapi and Linda for upsetting her daughter.
“I can’t take it anymore,” says Jody, retrieving her coat from the old refrigerator they use as a wardrobe. “I’m going out.”
“Can I come?” Imogen smiles, but she doesn’t move. She takes in all the chaos of the colony like she’s watching a sitcom: sort of silly, not especially like life, but worth tuning in for again and again.
Everyone is at Lou’s. Everyone except those who are at Lilac’s, who make a point of avoiding Lou’s, especially in groups large enough to draw attention. There are still a handful of gay girls that the colony has not lured in and the town has not driven away, but Jody doesn’t feel like seeing them tonight either. She keeps her coat and scarf on, and slides onto a stool at the end of Lou’s recently refinished bar. Her hands are stiff from the cold. She rubs them together and wonders if the calluses will disappear or if work is now inseparable from her body.
She recognizes a few guys from the mill. They’ve clearly been drinking for hours, and she decides not to say hello. When someone taps her on the shoulder, she turns around reluctantly. But it’s not a mill worker, it’s Luke Twentyman, who Meg has worked for on and off over the years. He’s wearing a brown suit and a tie, and stands very straight. The mill guys wear jeans and stoop to phantom logs.
“Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” Mr. Twentyman says. Jody has never liked being called “ma’am.” She’s not sure if it makes her feel old or excessively female. “Aren’t you a friend of Meg Almond’s?”
Jody looks around. She’s not sure how much Mr. Twentyman knows about Meg. “Yes,” she says slowly. Also, she and Imogen haven’t seen much of Meg recently. It’s hard to spend time with her and not fall into the halo of intensity that burns around her. Always something with a girl, some adventure, some injustice.
“Well, I just wanted to see how she was doing, what she was up to,” says Mr. Twentyman. “Thing is, she was supposed to do some work for me this week, but I haven’t seen her. That’s not like her.”
