by Cheryl Klein
She sobs as she puts Meg’s jewelry on her own body: fake pearls, glass beads, plastic beads. She finds a lone earring, a hook with a translucent circle of dangling shell. Her own holes closed up when she stopped wearing the gold studs Terry bought her, but she stabs it through her left lobe. The pain makes her gasp, a break in her sobs. She starts up again as her ear begins to throb.
She sobs when she discovers the one item of clothing that is clearly not Meg’s: a black leather jacket with lacing up the sleeves and a row of fringe halfway down the back. There’s no name sewn inside, nothing in the pockets. She puts this on, too, to see what it would be like to be Meg’s last butch, and it is heavy. It’s not until she takes off her own coat that she sees the streaks of blood like switchbacks on her arm.
Anna Lisa cries and cries. Short cadences and long howls. She sinks to the floor and leans against Meg’s bed, bleeding and crying. When she looks up from her folded arms, it’s completely dark. She doesn’t know if a few minutes have passed or an hour. She’s not sure whether she’s still crying. Something is happening to her body. It reminds her of the dry heaves she sometimes sees from patients: more jarring and terrible for the lack of substance in their stomachs. She presses back into the floor and cries until she falls asleep.
When she wakes up in a thin shaft of gray light, her muscles ache. She stands up and looks at herself in the mirror nailed to the back of the bedroom door. She’s still wearing the motorcycle jacket and a garland of necklaces. Her eyes are swollen and strange.
She unlocks the front door and goes outside. There is a bench on the porch that looks like it was stolen from a park. Sitting with her feet on the porch railing, looking at the pines through the morning mist, she feels almost tranquil. Last night she saw the plainness of the house and thought Anyone could live here. It was a letdown, a reminder that her gaze and her love were not special. But now the words begin to transform into something like possibility. Anyone could live here… Even a cowardly, mousy divorcee.
MAYOR OF AN IMAGINARY TOWN
Anna Lisa: Lilac Mines, 1974-1976
Anna Lisa leaves Lilac Mines just long enough to buy what she will need to stay in Lilac Mines: a camping stove, a stack of wool blankets, a propane heater, two kerosene lanterns, packets of seeds, cans and cans of food. She walks the aisles of a Beedleborough grocery store, remembering her fourth-grade teacher instructing the class on how to survive a nuclear attack. It’s not just ducking and covering that are important, she said, it’s what comes after, how we’ll live out those long, lean years.
The spring of 1974 does not feel lean. The mountainside erupts with wildflowers. Deer and owls and coyotes wander freely through her backyard—Anna Lisa comes to think of it as hers after she plants pale peach dahlias there. There are no cars or residents with shotguns to scare them away. Each species has its own time of day; when there’s overlap, someone gets eaten. Anna Lisa rises from Meg’s red bed at dawn and returns when the sun drops behind the mountain. She discovers that she has to be very purposeful about certain things—food, warmth—and that she has to just ride with others, like the hours the sun chooses.
Without electricity, she pumps water from the well behind the house manually. Her arms are sore at the end of each day. She collects rainwater in a bucket and pours it on her seeds. The toilet, which feeds into a septic tank somewhere down the block, flushes with a little encouragement. After four weeks in the house, she gets a notice that mail delivery to Lilac Mines will be ending; she’ll have to get a post office box in Beedleborough if she wants to keep in touch with the outside world.
When the day grows too hot to garden, she wanders the empty streets, mentally placing Meg and her friends in various spots, like paper dolls at a tea party. Here are Edith and Shallan dancing at Lilac’s. Here is Jody at the drugstore, resisting the urge to touch Imogen’s shoulder when she sees her favorite shampoo on sale. Then Anna Lisa realizes that she is the mayor of her imaginary town—why not make it friendlier? Here are Edith and Shallan dancing at Lou’s. Here are Jody and Imogen holding hands among the shaving cream and aspirin.
She takes refuge in the dim, dusty buildings. There are all sorts of objects that might be valuable if she had electricity: refrigerators and lamps and coffee pots. But without energy pulsing through the town, it’s just a giant museum. She leaves the abandoned buildings in the late afternoons. The sun burns her neck and freckles her arms all the way back to the little house on Gemini Street, where she reads whatever books she can find. Recipes from Meg’s unstained cookbooks start to sound like poetry: Cracked wheat is whole wheat kernels broken into fragments… Yeast is a living organism killed by high temperatures… To sift or not to sift. In her imaginary town, Sappho Was a Right-On Woman (which is not about poetry at all) would be the book in hotel nightstands.
Sometimes she uses the remainder of the hot day to take a cold shower. Other times, she just lets herself ripen. Her body becomes both strange to her and somehow more familiar. Long, light brown hairs grow on her legs. The hair on her head passes her chin and then her shoulders until she has to tie it back with one of Meg’s stockings while she works in the garden. She smells like the sun and dirt. She wears clothes, but not in the same way she used to. Now she thinks, This necklace will catch the light, and she’ll put it on but not bother with a shirt that day. This is what people must have looked like and smelled like in the cave days, she thinks. The things she always thought of as normal and natural—furnished houses and ironed clothes—seem like bizarre creations. So perhaps the things she thought of as terrible and unnatural are not what they seem either. When she drives to Beedleborough to buy supplies and pick up letters from her sister, she enjoys seeing people in the streets going about their quaint business but she has no desire to talk to them. Her tongue feels thick and used-up.
In early October, though, the toilet breaks. She knows no plumber willing to drive 30 miles of mountain roads to fix what might be a larger problem with the sewer lines in an eroding town. Also, it’s starting to get cold, and Anna Lisa can’t imagine spending all her days beneath six layers of blankets. And she is running out of money. So this time, when she drives to Beedleborough, she stops at a bakery with a “Help Wanted” sign in the window. She eats a cherry danish and fills out an application.
Sometimes she thinks about Saint Julian’s—the wounds she’s not cleaning, the blood she’s not taking. Maybe she’ll look for a job at a doctor’s office in Beedleborough at some point. The town is bigger than Lilac Mines; now there are two large grocery stores, a mini-mall, a campground. But there’s no real hospital. Beyond that, though, Anna Lisa believes she cannot take care of anyone right now. Her life is too rich with loneliness.
So she learns to bake from a fat, quiet man named Sid Olney. She learns how much butter to put in a crust to make it flaky but not oily. Slowly the language of Meg’s cookbooks is revealed to her, knead and marble and zest becoming manifest. Her biceps and forearms harden from kneading dough and stirring batter in giant metal vats. Cooking is not femme work, or maybe femme work is not easy. She coils her long ponytail into a net. She discovers mornings, waking at 4 a.m. when Lilac Mines is a black icicle, driving on sporadically plowed roads, and slipping her white paper hat on her head when Beedleborough is still foggy, not quite real.
Sid has a soft donut body and a straight, flat nose squished between chubby cheeks. Despite his girth, he seems delicate. Resigned to a life in the off-hours, he rarely asks her questions about herself, as if it would be rude. He bakes almond tarts for her, cookies in the shape of her initials. ALH. She has gone back to H. When he presents her with a puppy the following spring—a pink-tongued snowball of a dog—she realizes he is in love with her. It comes as a surprise, that a man could desire her without seeming to want all the things women are supposed to provide: sex and food and children.
Anna Lisa takes the puppy and names it Chelley, which she spells with a C as in Michelle, even though she never has occasion to actually write the name dow
n. But to fragile-as-meringue Sid, she says, “There’s a customer I’m interested in.” He just nods and drowns a herd of raisins in the bread dough. And there is a customer she’s interested in. Interested in is the right phrase, because she’s not sure she’d want to date her, if she could date her.
Karyn Loadvine is a butch. She’s no taller than Anna Lisa, with a slim, tight body beneath her button-down shirts and low-slung jeans. She has short, shaggy hair the color of the caramel glaze on the croissants she orders every day. Sharp cheekbones, boyish nose, thick lips that acquire a gloss of butter as she sits and eats at one of the store’s small metal tables.
Chelley makes friends with Karyn right away, flopping around her ankles and sniffing her men’s dress shoes. Anna Lisa prefers to study her from behind the counter. She tells herself stories about how Karyn got to this corner of California. Fleeing a crazy, knife-wielding femme. Leaving her own husband and family somewhere cold and serious. Except Karyn doesn’t have that wounded look that Anna Lisa recognized on the face of every woman she knew in Lilac Mines. She’s just a butch going about her business: unraveling her croissant layer by layer, leaning down to pat Chelley’s head or scratch her own ankle beneath her argyle sock.
Anna Lisa looks for clues to affirm her stories. Karyn drinks her coffee black. Moves her small, square hands through her hair stiffly. Usually reads the newspaper but sometimes pulls a book from the blue canvas bag she carries. Never has Anna Lisa watched a butch so closely. She watched Jody—her swagger, the way she wore Imogen’s hand in her back pocket like a wallet—but that was a game of follow-the-leader. When she watches Karyn, she feels invisible. That’s how she feels most of the time now. It’s not a bad thing. She is a ghost, misting through town, not subject to the same rules and disappointments as humans.
But one day Karyn reminds Anna Lisa that she is not a ghost. It’s 9 a.m.—late afternoon in the baking life—and Sid has gone home and left Anna Lisa to watch the counter. Karyn has finished her coffee and pastry and is about to slip the long handles of her bag over her head. She always positions the bag so that the strap crosses between her small, seemingly accidental breasts. But today she pauses.
“Hey,” she calls. “D’y’all give free refills?” Anna Lisa has taken her order before, but she’s never caught the southern accent in the short strings of nouns.
“Yes, we do,” Anna Lisa says decisively, although they don’t. The coffee gurgles into Karyn’s styrofoam cup. They don’t have any real mugs because they can’t pay a dishwasher, and most people get coffee to go anyway. But suddenly Anna Lisa longs for ceramic.
“Thanks.” Karyn gives her a cowboy nod.
It’s dark when Anna Lisa gets home that night. Early in the spring of 1975, the days are getting longer but they’re resistant to change. She carries her kerosene lantern into the kitchen. Meg’s kitchen. She pries open the cabinets and finds a mug: white with a blue stripe around the top, shaped like an upside-down bell. She scrubs it in the cold water, her hands going numb as the rest of her body heats up.
She presents the mug to Karyn. “I thought you could use this here.” She feels brave, buzzing with possibility.
“You some kinda environmentalist?” Karyn laughs. Her voice is deep.
“No, it’s just, I mean, since you’re in every day almost. Styrofoam can feel weird on your teeth. It changes how the coffee tastes, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, come to think of it, I guess it does. Thanks.”
“My name’s Anna Lisa. Hill.”
“Karyn Loadvine.” It sounds different when she says it than when Sid told her, That’s one of our regulars, Karyn Loadvine. Karyn says it Cairn.
It’s months before they make more than small talk. In April, Anna Lisa learns that Karyn is from Louisiana (Loosiana). In May, she learns that Karyn has a two-year-old nephew. In June, she learns that Karyn likes reading Westerns. She stores these bits of information. A brown ring darkens inside the white mug.
July is so hot the air feels dangerous. Every shrub looks like kindling. Anna Lisa hopes there are no remnants of gas leaking from the old lines beneath her house. The sweat that streams down her back and temples is the only moisture around. It is so hot that she thinks, Why not? The skin around her skull feels tight. She thinks of Sappho and of Meg, how they were both brave. Anna Lisa has heard people say that suicide is cowardly, but Meg was never afraid of new places. Maybe death was just west of Lilac Mines, as dark and beautiful as the ocean. Why not? And so one day she crosses the border from behind the counter to the front of the store. She pulls out the empty chair across from Karyn and says, “Mind if I sit down?”
Karyn’s bottom jaw pauses mid-chew. There’s a sliver of almond perched atop one of her molars. But she rallies a polite smile and says, “Sure, why not?”
Exactly, Anna Lisa thinks. Karyn’s tan hands are curled on top of a headline that says, “ ‘I Died But Out Of The Ashes I Was Reborn,’ Claims Patty Hearst, Alias Tania.” Anna Lisa wants to say something about the story, but she is so far away from the world of war and politics and movies. What if she just stays frozen like this forever? What if she can only ever make half a bold gesture before getting scared and turning back?
“I haven’t read a newspaper in so long,” Anna Lisa blurts. It’s a stupid thing to say, but it’s the truth and it feels good in her mouth.
“Oh, y’want a piece of it?” Karyn looks relieved. “I already finished Ann Landers.”
“No, that’s okay. What… what did Ann have to say?”
“Aw, you know, the usual. Some woman wrote in about her husband’s gambling problem. She loves him and he’s not a bad guy otherwise, but she’s worried about their finances. ’Ann says, Are you better off with him or without him?’ That’s what she always says.”
“Mm,” says Anna Lisa. “That makes it sound so simple.” Karyn’s face glows in the heat. Anna Lisa imagines touching the knob of her cheeks, the square chin. She can almost picture it. She can almost reach across the table into Karyn’s world.
“It is simple,” Karyn is saying. “Are you better off with him or without him?” She’s so young. Twenty-four? Twenty-five? “What more is there to say, really?”
“But what if ’without him’ just feels like a giant, awful weight, like you’re not really even without him because he’s so…” Anna Lisa sees Karyn’s bushy eyebrows knit in confusion. She stops. “There’s not many of us in town, you know.”
Karyn knows what Anna Lisa is saying. Anna Lisa is sure of it. Karyn narrows her eyes, which are the same gold-brown as her skin and eyebrows and hair. Her eyes warn Anna Lisa not to say more, but Anna Lisa can’t help it. She’s sweating waterfalls now, and it feels wonderful, purifying.
“Us girls. Us women,” Anna Lisa says. Maybe Karyn spells “women” with a Y, the way she spells her name. “It’s just, we should stick together, don’t you think? Or at least find each other? Maybe you and I could…” Anna Lisa isn’t sure whether she’s about to suggest a buddy activity like bowling, or a date. But Karyn speaks before she can figure it out.
“Listen,” Karyn says, scraping her metal chair along the tile floor as she inches it back. “You’re not the first lesbo to come onto me. I know I’m a tomboy. But I ain’t like that.”
Anna Lisa gulps. “You’re sure?” She thought she felt the air crackle between them, not attraction necessarily, but mutuality. She thought they would share stories of their first heartbreaks.
“ ’Course I’m sure. How could I not be sure? Look, I got a fiancé in Louisiana. His name’s Curtis Ross and he’s six feet three with red hair and he works construction. We’re gonna open up a company together. I came out here to see if there was a good place to start up a firm. Find some little boomtown in the West. I always wanted to live out here on the edge of everywhere. Except it’s just small and dead, and there’s all these hoops they make you jump through to get any kinda business permit. And I miss Curtis so bad. And now I’m getting picked up on by a queer.”
The word slaps the formica table and flounders there: queer. She says it as if she’s recounting a rough day, as if Anna Lisa will be sympathetic: poor thing, getting hit on by a lesbian. And though Karyn’s pouting face reminds Anna Lisa of a ripe fruit rotting, this life of details does take shape. Karyn Loadvine soon-to-be Ross wants to pour wet cement on leveled slices of the mountain, buy matching cowboy hats for herself and her husband. This life is brushing up against Anna Lisa’s, and it has nothing to do with her, even as it nudges Anna Lisa this way and that.
“I’m sorry I guessed wrong,” Anna Lisa says. Her sweat is finally cooling her skin. Chelley trots out from behind the counter for an update. She wags her skinny tail to say, So how’d it go? “Good luck with your business.” She stands up.
“And don’t try to tell me I’m lying to myself either, alright? Other queer girls have done that, tried to recruit me. Just back off, okay?”
“I’m not those girls,” Anna Lisa says calmly. For better and worse, this is true.
She expects another round of heartbreak. She closes the bakery early and drives home in the boiling afternoon, Chelley panting in the seat beside her. Her left arm is brown with a constellation of dark freckles now, while her right arm is evidence of a more sheltered existence: creamy white with just a few peachy freckles.
Halfway over the pass, it begins to rain. Fat warm droplets on her driver’s side arm. A surreal summer rain that reminds you anything can happen. Or not happen: Anna Lisa feels fine, even though there are apparently no other lesbians in a 50-mile radius. When she gets home, she curls up on Meg’s bed with Chelley nuzzled into her ribs, smelling like everything the two of them have encountered that day: heat and rain, coffee and cinnamon rolls. She wouldn’t have guessed that having a dog would be so different from hosting the wild animals in her backyard. There’s a Steller’s Jay who eats crumbs from her windowsill. But Chelley is so domestic. She has become a part of Anna Lisa’s life as if it’s the most natural thing in the world, as if the dusty shack is, in fact, a home. Making a nest in the pile of blankets at the foot of the bed, barking at the buzzing propane heater. And Chelley reminds her that she is different when she’s not alone.
