Lilac Mines

by Cheryl Klein

  Tough-love concern clouds Blanca’s face in the dim light of the parking lot. She is 65, plump, still wearing her blue Goodwill smock. Six months ago, Felix wouldn’t have been able to take her seriously, but her newfound respect for small-town residents allows her stomach to lurch. She feels a curling sense of dread that she is about to be told she should not be here, not be her.

  “It wouldn’t be the wrong idea,” Felix says carefully. Is she betraying Tawn? All day no one asked, and Felix did not tell. But now it’s after-hours, now it’s nighttime, and so much more—good and bad—seems possible.

  “What do…? Oh.” Blanca’s face twitches, takes this in. She takes a deep breath and clasps Felix’s hands in hers. “Oh, lord. You know, if this is something you’d like to talk about with people, my church has excellent counseling services.”

  Felix shifts her weight onto her hip, the strong ground beneath her. “I’m actually just fine with it, thanks.” She feels how this is truer than it was six months ago.

  Blanca shakes her head. “I never thought I’d see this sort of thing in Lilac Mines. Your poor aunt.”

  Felix sidesteps the contemporary examples of lesbians in Lilac Mines she might cite. That’s Anna Lisa’s thing, Tawn’s thing. She points to a roof on the horizon, purple-black in the hazy dark. “See that building? That used to be a lesbian bar. Back in the early ’60s, back when North Main was still Calla Boulevard. And your church is like a block from where this other church used to be, where a bunch of lesbians lived and God never evicted them.”

  Blanca frowns. “I don’t know where you got a story like that. I’ve lived in this area my whole life and never heard anything of the sort.”

  The light is on inside Felix’s car. She could go to it, seal herself away from Blanca. It would be so easy to say, I have to go. But she’s tired of going. It’s time to do some staying. She would like to tell Blanca about Lilac and Calla, too, but her theory is so shaky, the story she still cannot own.

  “Maybe you just weren’t listening,” Felix says.

  Blanca fishes in her big shoulder bag. “Let me just write down the phone number of my pastor. He could refer you…”

  Felix pushes away the crumpled piece of notebook paper Blanca tries to hand her. “No, thank you.”

  “If you’re not comfortable going to church—though I think you’d find it quite welcoming; they didn’t look down on me in the least when I got divorced—but if you aren’t ready for church, there are books that could help you, Felice.”

  “It’s Felix.”

  Blanca throws up her hands and looks heavenward. Her town and her God and her own ghosts occupy the same space as Felix’s, side by side, battling for the present.

  “Well, if you don’t want to help yourself, I don’t see what I can do. I suppose I’ll see you at work tomorrow.” She presses her pale lips together and heads toward her own car.

  Felix leans against her Beetle, exhaling white puffs of air. She watches as the lights of Blanca’s Cadillac switch on, as the car inches across the slick parking lot and into the street. It’s not as if Felix could fight off two strong young guys now, but she feels like she could, like she has a small, fierce army behind her.

  And she knows, suddenly and not suddenly, that she will stay. She’s been walking a road made of crushed bits of history: purple glass bottles, rosebud hair ribbons, ivory dresses, rumors, songs, erasures, names. She will stay, not for Tawn or Anna Lisa but for the whispers she can almost hear on the thin winter wind. If she stands still enough, listens long enough.

  Felix asks Anna Lisa to help her find an apartment.

  “You’re really going to give up F.I.T.? That’s no small thing.” Anna Lisa is concerned.

  Felix has the classified ads in front of her. “I know it’s not a small thing. That’s the whole point.”

  Anna Lisa leans across the table and takes the newspaper. “Alright.” She gets down to business. “This place you circled on Moon Avenue? Nora’s husband’s ex-boss owns that house, and he’s a jerk. You don’t want to rent from him. This place on Coyote Drive could be nice. It’s just a couple of blocks from here. One of the math teachers at the school lives on the 1200 block.”

  “What about this one?” Felix points to an ad that says, “1 bd/1 bth 470 N. Main St. Call Trevor.”

  “North Main?” Anna Lisa is puzzled. “That’s all commercial, far as I know. Maybe it’s an office space.”

  “But why would they say ’one bedroom’ then?”

  “I guess we can call Trevor and find out.”

  Four days before Christmas, they make an itinerary of four rentals to visit. The first two houses Felix and her aunt visit are in the newer section of town. Both are spacious neo-cabins. They’re smaller than Anna Lisa’s house, but still too big for Felix. The third stop is 470 North Main Street. Counting the addresses as Anna Lisa drives, Felix gasps when she gets to 470.

  “Oh my God, it’s Lilac’s.” Actually, it’s the Goldrush Tavern. Felix never noticed that the squat bar had a second story. The newspaper shakes in her hands. Could she live above a bar? Would the smell and noise suffocate her, make her feel as if she had moved onto Cynthia Street? Then again, the Goldrush Tavern is not just any bar. It’s the current comfort zone of locals and truckers and bartenders in fringed vests, but it also belongs to Meg and Al and Jody and Imogen.

  They circle the strip mall in search of a way to the second floor. Felix enters the alley cautiously. Everything is different, of course, from the alley below Sunset. It’s noon on a Tuesday, and this alley is banked with slushy brown snow. Her aunt is with her. Still, her heart knocks against her panging ribs. She reaches for Anna Lisa’s hand. It is like her mother’s but with shorter nails. Anna Lisa flinches at first, not used to being touched, but then she squeezes Felix’s hand so hard it makes her knuckles hurt. Felix isn’t sure who is protecting whom.

  Trevor greets them at the top of a metal staircase. He’s a tall Latino man with a frat boy body; he can’t be older than 35. He’s wearing a blue T-shirt with white lettering that says, “Lilac Mines Festival is Back! 1981. Sponsored by the Lilac Mines Chamber of Commerce.”

  He extends his hand. “You’re the first one who called,” he says to Felix, pushing a strand of shiny hair behind his ear with his thumb. “The ad’s been in the paper for weeks. I think people drive by, see that the place is above a bar, and say, ’Hell no.’ ”

  Felix smiles at his candor. “Um, I have a couple of reservations about that myself. But I thought I’d at least take a look. This is my aunt, Anna Lisa.”

  Trevor opens the door and ushers them inside. The apartment is small and filled with yellow-brown light. Green linoleum covers the kitchen floor and flows into the living room. The light fixtures are all circa 1976, frosted glass with flecks of gold. The bedroom is carpeted in brown shag. But beyond this there are hopeful details—crown molding and delicate skeleton keyholes, a bookshelf built into the wall.

  “It could use a young person’s touch,” Trevor says apologetically. He opens the dusty mini-blinds in the bedroom. “Truth is, my grandmother lived here till a couple months ago. She started talking about how she could hear my grandfather downstairs, dancing with ’some floozy.’ He’s been dead for nine years. When it got out of control, my wife and I moved her into Foothills Elder Care.” He puts his hands in his pockets, his shoulders slumped.

  “Who knows what carries up from that bar,” says Anna Lisa sympathetically.

  “I wouldn’t mind having a dancing ghost for a roommate,” Felix sighs.

  PLAYING WITH ROCKS

  Felix: Lilac Mines, 2002–2003

  Christmas comes like a snow globe, shaking them furiously, then setting them back down, the flakes falling into place. Suzy and Martin Ketay, who only saw their eldest daughter every six weeks or so when she lived in L.A., make a big fuss over Felix’s move and supply her with furniture. Her sisters bring vases and lampshades. Then they return to Hermosa Beach and Glendale and Pasadena. Felix settles
into her new home, plugging in her coffeemaker and perusing Want Ads in the chilly mornings.

  Anna Lisa comes over on New Year’s Eve carrying scrapers and bottles of paint thinner. She helps Felix tear out the green linoleum. Flooring, like ice cream, is not an absolute—it too is composed of ingredients, and it can be changed. Felix has barely freed a corner of the gummy linoleum when Anna Lisa lets out a small yelp from the other side of the room.

  “There are hardwood floors under here!” Anna Lisa flings aside a four-square sheet of linoleum. “And they’re nice. Maple, I think.”

  “Are you kidding me? Do you know how much I’d be paying for an apartment with hardwood floors in L.A.?”

  They pull and scrape throughout the drizzling afternoon, sweating in the unheated apartment, clawing to get to their buried treasure. They don’t speak much, and stop only to guzzle water. Ancient black glue takes up residence beneath their fingernails as the tower of linoleum squares grows. The maple floor is grooved near the front door and pockmarked with staples from long-gone carpeting. Islands of glue form a huge map of nowhere. Felix wipes her face with the top of the old scrubs she’s borrowed from Anna Lisa. “This is nice?”

  “C’mon, don’t be a wimp,” Anna Lisa says good-naturedly. “This is nothing a sander and a can of stain can’t fix. It’s the wood itself that’s important. Look, do these look like regular wood floors to you?”

  “Well, they’re a lot more beat-up.”

  Anna Lisa squats down, and Felix mimics her position. “No, look closer,” her aunt instructs. The rectangles of wood have a more speckled appearance than the long stripes of grain she would expect, perhaps.

  “It sort of reminds me of, like,” Felix hesitates, “if you held a bunch of dried spaghetti, and looked at the end of it. All those little circles.”

  “Exactly. This wood was cut on the diagonal. Instead of cutting the trunk of the tree like this—” she gestures with her hands, “—they cut it like this. One long piece and a lot of waste. The timber industry is much more efficient now, you’d never see this.”

  Felix is glad that the timber industry is more efficient. But, as she and her aunt sand and stain through the night, painting themselves out the door on New Year’s Day, she is glad for other things, too. For the evil and beautiful past that she will walk across every day, that she will put her new armchair and her new old coffeetable on. For an aunt who can name that past and who owns a belt sander.

  “Whew, those fumes!” Anna Lisa fans her hand in front of her face as they shut the door. Now they’re standing in the dim stairwell, where the air is cold and fresh.

  “But we did it,” Felix says triumphantly. “I’ve never done such a big project before. It makes me think I could learn to sew, too.”

  “It does look pretty good,” Anna Lisa smiles, almost shyly, “doesn’t it?” She looks down at her palms, reading her mahogany-stained lifeline. “I have to say, it’s… invigorating. All of it. I was thinking that, in the spring, we could build you a windowbox. The bedroom window faces east, so it would get that great morning sun. We could start you off with something easy, maybe daylilies or peonies.”

  “And you thought you weren’t useful.”

  Two weeks into 2003, Felix stops by the Goodwill. The mannequins crouch on skis, wrapped in cozy sweaters. Not bad, Felix thinks. Blanca is working the cash register. Her fingers move quickly now, punching buttons and bagging handfuls of plastic beads for a customer.

  “Felice! Have you reconsidered?” It’s the same question Blanca asked repeatedly during Felix’s agonizing last shifts.

  “It’s Felix. And I’ve reconsidered something else,” she says. “Is Tawn here?”

  “In the back, interviewing,” Blanca sighs.

  Felix waits until a greasy-haired young man lopes out of the office. “Tawn?”

  Tawn pulls her arms across her chest. “My next interview is in 15 minutes.”

  “That’s all I need. Can I come in?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Felix pulls up an old kitchen chair upholstered in naugahyde daisies. “I don’t want to bother you, I just wanted to, well, I wanted to apologize for freaking out about you not being out at work.”

  “I’m not not out. I’m not in. And not that it’s any business of yours anymore, but when Blanca complained about you, I told her that she shouldn’t discriminate and that I was pretty sure the sweater she was wearing used to belong to a drag queen.”

  Felix pauses, suppresses a smile and continues. “In college, we had a kiss-in. You know, like people did in the ’60s and ’70s. But we had it outside of NBC studios. We thought some guy on a sitcom should get to kiss some other guy on a sitcom.”

  Tawn listens, her chin tilted to the side.

  “I don’t regret it,” Felix continues. “Will should get a boyfriend. But… maybe there’s more. Maybe it’s not just about pop culture. I know there’s this whole other world—”

  “And you’re just visiting it,” Tawn interrupts. “You’ll bring your friends a T-shirt that says, ’My friend went to Lilac Mines and both of us would rather have this stupid T-shirt than actually—’ ”

  “I’m not just visiting.” Felix hadn’t decided if she would tell Tawn this part or not. “I rented an apartment on Calla… on North Main. For the record.”

  Tawn’s mouth is a small O. “Seriously?”

  “I figured, what can I learn at F.I.T. that I can’t learn at East Calaveras Adult School?”

  “Um, probably a lot.”

  Felix smiles. “At least I’ll learn to sew.”

  “Well… congratulations. I want to say that. Since I’m sure everyone congratulated you on F.I.T. and I’m not sure that anyone will congratulate you on moving to Lilac Mines. So I want to.”

  “Thanks.”

  They sit there awkwardly. The distrust has dropped from Tawn’s voice, but she doesn’t seem to know what to make of Felix now. Felix would like to suggest coffee, at least, but she’s not about to grovel. She’s not about to relive her last moments with Eva. There is a soft knock at the door. Felix reaches over and lets in a teenage girl, shy behind a curtain of dark bangs.

  “I guess I should go,” Felix says.

  “If any old sewing machines come in, I’ll let you know,” Tawn says.

  Felix dreams of church bells and Sunday dresses, white and lacy. She wakes up early, unsure what woke her until the doorbell rings a second time. It is Tawn, and she is holding a pair of scissors, handles toward Felix the way they were taught in school. Felix is suddenly conscious of her torn T-shirt and in-need-of-a-wash pajama bottoms. “Are you okay?” she asks. The morning is still blue-gray behind Tawn.

  “Remember when you said you wanted to cut my hair?”

  “Like a million times. You said you didn’t like the feeling of it on your shoulders, it made you think of dead people.”

  “Well, I changed my mind. I want you to do it. But you need to do it now, before I change my mind again.” She’s dressed in fleece jacket and jeans, her twist of wet hair dripping on her forehead.

  “Come in, you’re going to get a cold,” Felix scolds. “Oh my God, I sound like such a mom.” She rubs her eyes. “Um, yeah, okay. Let me just make some coffee and brush my teeth.” That sounds like she’s planning on kissing Tawn, but she doesn’t know how to take it back.

  Tawn drops her arms to her sides, retreating into herself. “I could come back later.”

  “No, no. I think it’s awesome. Come in. Sorry about the boxes. I haven’t finished unpacking.”

  “I could help you,” Tawn says.

  “Don’t try to back out of your haircut, lady,” Felix grins. “I’ll take a raincheck, though.” She drags one of her new old kitchen chairs into the bathroom and spreads yesterday’s Lilac Mines Chronicle on the white oyster-cracker tile. Tawn cringes when Felix picks up the shears. “Didn’t you ever cut your dolls’ hair as a kid?” Felix asks.

  “I hated dolls,” Tawn admits. “Especially their hair. I p
layed with rocks.”

  Felix turns the chair away from the mirror. She gives Tawn’s shoulders a squeeze. They are wiry, familiar, and strange. Then she sets to work. She braids Tawn’s hair, noticing the threads of brown, copper, and even silver woven into the near-black. Then she chops it off. Except it’s not possible to chop, really. The scissors gnaw at the top of the braid, releasing it little by little. She rubber-bands the base of the braid and hands it to Tawn to inspect. Tawn shudders.

  “But doesn’t your head feel lighter?” Felix asks.

  “I guess so,” She says weakly.

  From the bedroom comes the metallic ring of an old-fashioned phone. “Oh, that’s my cell, I better get it,” Felix says on her way out of the room. “Don’t move. And don’t freak out. You’re going to look amazing.”

  Felix picks up the phone before the fifth ring. “Felix? It’s Robbie.”

  “I know, dude. I can recognize your voice.” A month has passed since they last talked. “What’s up?”

  “Happy New Year. We had a party, you know. Genevieve made something called Hopping John. It tastes, um, well, not so great, even though she’s a great cook. But it’s supposed to bring good luck.”

  “I hope it works,” Felix says quickly. “Hey, can I call you back later this afternoon?”

  “Actually…” He takes a deep breath. His voice is a packed box. “Actually, we’re going out soon. Crane and Sandy and I. That’s what I wanted to call you about. Um. We’re going out to dinner with Eva and Kate. They’re back in town.”

  He says it Eva-and-Kate. An institution. Something that always was. Felix sits down on the edge of her mattress.

  “How did the tour go?” she says, keeping her voice even.

  “They’re both pretty exhausted. But the Manly Cupcakes played some great clubs, and some British producer is interested in them, that’s what Eva said when I talked to her.”

  “Have you seen them yet? Since they got back?”

  “Once,” Robbie says guiltily. “At Taffeta Bar. We just ran into them. I’d never even met Kate before. It was so weird seeing Eva with someone besides you. I was surprised how punk-rock Kate was. She’s got a mohawk, and a tattoo of a cupcake on her neck.”