Saxon Bennett - Talk of the Town

by Saxon Bennett

  “Name one that stayed,” Mallory challenged.

  “Eleanor Roosevelt,” Dr. Kohlrabi replied. Ellie was handy. She fit into almost any situation. And she was historical enough to avoid any threats of libel.

  “Her husband had a mistress and he died in her bed. And Eleanor had a woman for a lover,” Mallory replied, undaunted in her belief that being attracted to Del was dangerous.

  “But they all stayed together didn’t they? Man with wife, man with mistress, woman with man, woman with woman.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. I’m supposed to be the crazy one here,” Mallory said.

  “You’re not crazy. You just need some minor adjustments,” Dr. Kohlrabi replied.

  “Am I supposed to take that as an indication of my progress?” Mallory inquired, suddenly alarmed with the thought of outgrowing therapy.

  “No.”

  “Good. I can’t come next week. Gigi is taking me to Yarnell,” Mallory said, getting up.

  “That should be interesting. Why don’t you take Del with you?”

  “You are crazy,” Mallory said.

  Friday night was ticking past with the setting sun and the clock rings as the girls waited for the pizza man. Del, Alex and Kim sat with their feet in the pool, talking about bad women in their lives. Del wasn’t sure being privy to this conversation was a good thing. Young loves should not be subjected to the notion of failure. However, Del had her own failures to relive. She did think it odd or at best spiritually enlightened to be drinking beer with two women who each had partners that were fooling around with each other or at least contemplating it. Was this yet another form of sisterhood?

  “You know, Gigi’s the kind of woman who will forget to get you toilet paper when you ask yet she’ll walk into your backyard and clink every wind chime that you own, a woman who creates her own wind, look you in the eye and tell you that she loves you,” Alex said, thinking she’d been wooed senseless and left wanting.

  Kim nodded, keeping quiet.

  “What do you like best about Ollie?” Del asked.

  “I wish I knew,” Kim said, not revealing what she always knew about her relationship with Ollie. It was tasteless and harmful and letting go wasn’t going to be as difficult as she envisioned.

  What she liked best about Ollie was that she was good looking in a way any woman would like. She was thin, blond, blue eyed. She was a complete contrast to the woman Kim saw in the mirror each morning. To be completely and truly fucked as in Yin fucking Yang, Ollie was her polar opposite. I wanted to fuck the other side. With Ollie I did that, unfortunately I also attached the strings of my heart and like an imprudent spider, I’m reaping the nasty rewards.

  “You don’t know?” Alex asked, suddenly getting the idea that the situation was worse than it was.

  “Ollie is a flirt, like Gigi is a flirt. And we both know this is not the first time either one of them has done this kind of thing,” Kim said.

  “I’m not ready to face this,” Alex said, diplomatically.

  “You shouldn’t have to,” Del said.

  “But we do,” Kim said.

  “I know,” Alex replied, thinking this was not how she envisioned love. She wanted Gigi to love her unconditionally with the understanding that their love would have ebbs and tides but ultimately prevail. She thought about making love with Gigi before she left for Yarnell. Gigi had come to her, tail between her legs, apologetic, cute, funny and successful in seducing her. Alex couldn’t help feeling worked.

  As Alex lay naked and warm in Gigi’s arms, she had to suppress the desire to ask the question that nagged at her love like a street urchin, intent on getting a coin. Why can’t you behave like my lover and my friend, not my truant teenager in constant need of supervision?

  Gigi would be good for a while now but she would fail her again and again. The cost of this love affair was getting too high and Alex began to contemplate the end. Alex hated this part of love, especially now that their love had a past behind them. Letting go of Gigi wasn’t going to be as uncomplicated as her other lovers. Lovers she hadn’t lived with, lovers with whom she hadn’t exchanged more than bodily fluids and a few choice details of her life. Gigi knew everything. Gigi’s clothes, books and music, photographs, half finished projects littered the house. Gigi’s life was intertwined with her own. Letting go would be painful and evident.

  But how do you say goodbye to someone who loves you so hard and so well; who can make you smile and laugh while they break your heart and who tells you things about yourself that you didn’t even know. Kissing Gigi on the front porch before she left for Yarnell, Alex felt the hunger of absence and it wasn’t about a weekend trip, it was about forever.

  Road trips were a new sensation to Mallory who did not stray much past the city limits. Travel seemed like something she had done before but ceased to be part of her life after Caroline left. If Caroline was away, staying within the city limits meant she was safe. She was here, her estranged lover was there and an imaginary line was drawn around the city.

  As they reached the outskirts of the city, Mallory felt like she was putting a tentative toe in the steamy waters of the greater world. She waited for the first disaster but it didn’t come. They were not harassed in the truck stop. They had a good lunch in a small diner, grilled cheese and fries for Mallory and a burger for Gigi.

  Gigi turned up the stereo and drove like one possessed. Mallory plugged in compact discs and neither was concerned with the lack of conversation. They were two exclusive bubbles of reality bumping along together in the cab of a pickup truck. They came over the top of the hill and the small community of Yarnell sprung out of the desert floor. The Airstream trailers looked like great silver beetles assembled in a regiment set for inspection.

  Seeing her last chance to talk, Gigi broke the silence.

  “Alex is pissed at me,” Gigi said.

  “About the other night?” Mallory said, offering Gigi a vine of red licorice.

  “Yes,” Gigi said, turning on Bingham Road and out toward the Horizon Hills Mobile Home Park, domain of the Infamous Lesbian Activists, one of which was her Aunt Lil.

  “That was pretty stupid. Don’t you think?” Mallory said.

  “Very stupid,” Gigi replied, eyes straight ahead on the road.

  “Losing Alex over someone who can’t hope to compare is not prudent and I think you would grow to regret it.”

  “Gotcha,” Gigi said. “And thank you.”

  “Any time, pal,” Mallory said, moving close and swinging her arm around Gigi.

  Gigi kissed her cheek. “You’re the best.”

  Mallory blushed but she didn’t feel the same buzz, the quiver of excitement that she always felt when she got the chance to touch Gigi. One day she was planning their future and the next her infatuation fluttered limply, a forgotten shear hanging in a deserted window. She saw herself as a cowboy, meandering down a dusty dirt road and not looking back at the old shack, her eyes scanning the horizon for something new. The cowboy that was really a girl was new in the Republic, Mallory thought, startled. The Republic did not usually create characters of its own accord. They were in a new part of the Republic with wide-open vistas and a girl with a horse looking for adventure. Mallory smiled. Maybe getting out of town was a good thing.

  They pulled in the driveway of the trailer park and Gigi pointed out the locals, rattling off women’s names like an old-time Rotary or garden club. All was wasted on Mallory who was still pondering the intrinsic nature of love. Mallory was thinking about the question she had asked Dr. Kohlrabi earlier that day.

  “What question would you ask God if you were granted an audience?” Mallory asked.

  “I don’t understand,” Dr. Kohlrabi replied.

  “Let me preface this. You know how everyone wants to have the chance to talk to someone they admire. To some people it’s a politician, you know, meet the president, or a musician, a movie star, someone from the past.”

  “You want to ask God a question?”


  “Yes, I want to ask why.”

  “Why we exist?”

  “No, why we insist on asking why?”

  “What do you mean?” Dr. Kohlrabi asked, thinking sometimes her crazy clients were more lucid than the so-called normal people.

  “Why do we get what we want when we no longer want it? Why do we seek what we already have? What sort of capricious, nasty trick is this?”

  “That’s what you would ask God,” Dr. Kohlrabi replied.

  “Yes, got any ideas?”

  “Only one. There is a master plan or at least a law looming deep in the crevices of the universe that deems struggle and failure as paramount to one’s existence.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “So that we become better people.”

  “We become better people by getting what we want when we no longer want it and lose what we wanted but didn’t realize we had. That is the sign of a bastard universe that seeks only to fuck with the best laid plans. People plan. God laughs.”

  Dr. Kohlrabi did not have a response. The hour was up and now as Mallory sat with Gigi she knew it was a bastard in charge. Gigi had the jewel in her pocket. She didn’t have to search the world over for the one lover she was looking for; she already had it in Alex. But Mallory knew Gigi would lose Alex before she gained this knowledge.

  A gray haired woman with immense shoulders and tight Wranglers stepped out of one of the silver Airstream trailers. She nodded as Gigi pulled up next to the trailer. Aunt Lil handed Fran a towel as she got out of the hot tub. Fran was Lil’s lover of thirty years. She was as broad hipped as Lil was shouldered. Her wrinkled face was a happy mirror of Lil’s more intense lines. Gigi always marveled at the lines on the faces of her aunt and her lover, wondering at the years of sun, wind, emotions, and time that left their traces there.

  She had looked at the old pictures when Lil’s hair was a brilliant black and Fran had been a blonde, when they had dressed up in suits and skirts and gone out on the town, Lil with a swagger and Fran with a swish of the hips and the click of high heels. Gigi wondered about those days when some girls were girls and some girls were boys. It seemed simpler. Lil assured her it wasn’t. She often told Gigi how fortunate lesbians were now, how hard and dangerous life had been in those early days. Now is better, definitely better.

  “They have a hot tub,” Mallory said, admiring the gazebo decorated with old ship artifacts and wooden beads.

  “Fran has really bad arthritis in her hips,” Gigi said, handing Mallory her cane.

  “Well, who have we got here?” Lil asked.

  “This is my friend Mallory,” Gigi replied.

  “What happened to your foot?” Lil asked, taking a good look at Mallory’s newly outfitted walking cast.

  “I got a vending machine dropped on it by a short, fat man who was fighting with his pregnant girlfriend-soon-to-be-miserable bride at the time and not paying attention to what he was doing,” Mallory said, feeling herself get hot just thinking about it.

  She was still angry with Jose although she hadn’t fired him, because the incident had morphed him into some kind of super worker who prostrated himself whenever he was in her presence. Maybe it takes an accident to cure the bad and create the good.

  “You’re obviously one of us,” Lil said, giving Mallory the conspiratorial wink.

  “Gigi doesn’t know anyone but PLUs,” Mallory replied.

  “PLUs?” Fran asked, tying her towel around her waist.

  “People like us,” Mallory replied.

  “I do too!” Gigi said, indignantly.

  “Name one,” Mallory said.

  “Do relatives or grocery store clerks count?”

  “No!” everyone said in unison.

  “And especially people in your family,” Fran said, emphatically.

  As they sat on the screened in porch of the trailer with the misters and fans going full blast drinking a huge ice cold pitcher of lemonade, Fran and Lil filled Mallory in on the family, the one Gigi never talked about.

  Mallory felt like she was sitting in a tropical rain forest with all the hanging, climbing, creeping plants that seemed to be growing out of every niche and corner of the makeshift porch. She was waiting for a snake, monkey, bat or bird to come out of nowhere to complete her illusion.

  “But I hate when you tell little Gigi stories,” Gigi whined.

  “This isn’t about you this time, or rather only indirectly about you,” Fran replied, leaning over to tuck the rainbow colored umbrella she’d opened behind Mallory and just above her head as she had begun to get dripped on.

  “Thank you,” Mallory replied.

  “You’re quite welcome, dear. Now where was I?” Fran said.

  “We were talking about Rose, my sister Rose, the Virgin Mary incarnate,” Lil said.

  “She’s found out that you’ve been coming down here again and she’s not happy. We’re trying to figure out who her spy is,” Fran said.

  “You don’t think it is someone in the park do you?” Gigi asked, always in awe of her mother’s ability to be in every part of the universe simultaneously. Gigi wondered sometimes if her mother could see her having sex. She did have the uncanny ability when Gigi was a child to know almost every move she made and consequently all the trouble she got into.

  “Well, not everyone in the park is one of us. The Lesbian Activists is an exclusive group,” Fran said, lowering her voice and leaning toward Mallory.

  “Why isn’t everyone?” Mallory asked.

  “We need the others as cover; if we were out here exclusively, people would start to wonder what we were up to,” Fran said.

  Mallory refrained from asking what they were up to because Gigi had warned her that her aunts were lesbian activists. She had had no real idea what this meant, only that they were engaged in something subversive that they were extremely serious about and that somehow or another it involved Gigi.

  “Do you think she knows someone in the trailer park and they’re giving her reports?” Gigi asked.

  “I’d bet my social security check on it,” Fran said, taking a big swig of lemonade.

  “I’ll be damned if that righteous, overbearing, meddling busybody is going to foil our plans,” Lil said.

  “It would be unfortunate if something nasty happened to her spy just to get the message across that we know she has penetrated our borders,” Fran said.

  Gigi could see Fran’s brain begin to click on possible tortures for the enemy and she inwardly flinched. Both her aunt and Fran were capable of horrid things. It was Aunt Lil after all that taught Gigi to desecrate shrines of the Virgin Mary when she was a child. They used to go out on late night missions of mercy as Lil referred to them.

  Lil would park down the street and wait for Gigi to sneak out her bedroom window. They would drive around town and upset the shrines and free the virgin. Bathtubs and stucco shrines would be overturned and the virgin stolen and buried out in Lil’s backyard. They always finished the mission by stealing her mother’s precious virgin last.

  The next morning her mother would wake up and lament the heathen that would do such a thing. And then she would take Gigi with her to the Lord’s Shepherd store and buy another ceramic artifact to replace the one that was stolen.

  Gigi had decided that standing in a store full of relics was where she learned to lie. She would pretend to lament her mother’s loss while secretly reveling in her nightly deeds. She felt like a double agent and she knew repercussions only came if you got caught. Maybe this kind of an upbringing had something to do with her amoral grown-up behavior. She would ask Aunt Lil later what she thought. Lil knew everything.

  Lil and Fran got the girls settled and then the four of them went to the Saturday night barbecue. Every Saturday night the trailer park members got together to share food and family anecdotes and plan future activities under the guise of harmless women having a social evening like women had done for centuries. As the women sat around long tables in the recreation room looking
perfectly harmless, Mallory wondered if they had secret rituals, handshakes, and moonlight meetings around a fire, dressed in black and doing strange things to chickens.

  It was hard to picture this while these older women sat in lawn chairs and exchanged gossip looking like any other retired people filling in the suddenly long days that no longer contained work. They had the same worries about losing Social Security benefits, the laments for days gone by, and certain animosities for long-lost aspirations. The women looked like other women but every now and again Mallory would see the machinations of the political organization at work.

  Fran watched as Mallory observed the group. She knew she had questions but thought it impertinent to ask. Fran took the leap that Mallory could not.

  “Trade a question?” Fran asked, snapping a carrot between her perfect white teeth.

  “Excuse me?” Mallory asked, holding a spoonful of potato salad and suddenly remembering the last time she had potato salad she fainted. Was she allergic to potato salad or Del’s attentions?

  “I’ll ask you a question, one of those kind that are highly personal and decorum dictates we shouldn’t ask and you get to do the same with no repercussions or fear of reprisal,” Fran said.

  “All right,” Mallory said, putting the potato salad down.

  “Shall I go first?”

  “Please,” Mallory said.

  “What’s with the pajamas?”

  Mallory smiled, her mind letting out a giant sigh. This would be easy.

  She told Fran the story. Fran thought it was a poetic gesture and liked the idea that it caused most people some concern.

  “Kind of like how lesbians cause people concern especially when the bull dykes wore suits because in those days women didn’t wear trousers, ride a bike or sit properly in a saddle,” Fran said. “The only time a woman could spread her legs was to fuck and birth,” Fran said.