For Good

by Karelia Stetz-Waters

  “I’ll, um…” Tate ran her hand through her hair, as if to push it off her face, although the clippers had already done that for her. “I’ll have to warm up the machines. It’ll be a minute.”

  “I’ll just take what’s in the airpot,” the woman said, still surveying the shop.

  Tate filled a paper cup and squeezed a biodegradable corn-plastic lid on it. The woman drew a bill from the pocket of her crisp, white shirt. Tate shook her head.

  “On the house. It’s probably stale.”

  She was about to go back to counting the till when the woman asked, “How long has this been a coffee shop?”

  Tate considered. “It opened as a bookstore in 1979. Then it closed for a few years in the early eighties, opened back up as a coffee shop in 1988, and it’s been running since then. I think. I’ve been here for nine years.”

  Too long.

  “‘Out in Portland Coffee.’” The woman read the side of her cup.

  “Out Coffee,” Tate said. “That’s what everyone calls it.”

  “Any other businesses in the area?”

  “There’s Ron’s Reptiles, the AM/PM, the Oregon Adult Theater.”

  Across the street, the theater’s yellow letter board advertised HD FILM! STRIPPER SPANK-A-THON WEDNESDAYS!

  From the back room, Maggie, the boss, called out, “They’re all perverts.”

  The woman nodded and turned as if to leave. Then she seemed to reconsider.

  “Are there any women’s bars in the area?” She glanced around the shop again, her eyes sliding past Tate’s, resting everywhere but in Tate’s direction.

  “There’s the Mirage.” Tate gave her directions.

  “Is it safe to walk?”

  “As safe as anywhere in the city.”

  As soon as the woman left, twenty-year-old Krystal—Maggie’s surrogate daughter or pet project, depending on who you asked—popped out of the back room, where she had ostensibly been studying.

  “I heard that,” she said. “As safe as anywhere in the city.” She hopped up onto the counter next to Tate.

  “Get off the counter.” Tate ruffled Krystal’s short, pink hair.

  “Is my butt a health code violation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, anyway,” Krystal said, swinging her legs and kicking the cupboard behind her, “I heard that. She practically asked you to walk her. Is it safe?” Krystal imitated a woman’s soprano with an added whine. “Hold me in your big, strong arms, you sexy butch.”

  “Ugh.” Tate rolled her eyes. “Why is she still here?” she called to Maggie in the back room.

  “She’s part of our family, Tate!”

  Kindhearted Maggie; something had happened in utero, and she had been born without the ability to understand sarcasm.

  “Some family,” Tate said, winking at Krystal and pulling her into a hug.

  “Did you like her?” Krystal asked, pulling away from Tate.

  “Who?”

  “The woman who was just here.”

  “No.” Tate turned back to the cash register and rolled a stack of nickels into a paper sleeve.

  “Why didn’t you go after her, like in the movies? She probably thought you were cute.”

  Like in the movies. That was always Krystal’s question: Why isn’t it like the movies?

  “I’m working,” Tate said with feigned annoyance. “She just wanted a coffee. Anyway, I just got dumped, remember?”

  “So?”

  In the quiet minutes between customers, Tate had been reading The Sociology of Lesbian Sexual Experience. Now Krystal pulled the book from behind the counter and flipped it open.

  “‘The Alpha Butch,’” she read. “‘In this paradigm’”—she pronounced it par-i-di-gum—”‘the femme lesbian is looking for a strong, masculine—but not manly—woman who can protect her against the perceived threat of straight society.’ That’s you!” Krystal sounded like a shopper who had just found the perfect accessory. “I bet that’s why she came in here. She saw you through the window and she was like, ‘I’ve got to meet this woman.’” Krystal closed the book and examined the woman on the cover. “You’re way cuter than this girl.”

  It wasn’t hard; the woman on the cover looked like a haggard truck driver from 1950.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be studying for the GED?” Tate asked.

  “My dad taught me most of that stuff already, when I was, like, a little kid.”

  “Then take the test and go to college,” Tate said.

  “I don’t need to, ’cause my dad and I are going to start a club, and I don’t need a degree for that.”

  “Right.”

  “She was pretty,” Krystal said. “Like Hillary Clinton if Hillary Clinton was, like, a million years younger.”

  Tate took the book from Krystal’s hands and pretended to swat her with it.

  “I am not ‘alpha butch.’”

  Nonetheless, Tate did steal a glance at her face in the bathroom mirror before leaving the coffee shop. The woman’s perfect good looks made her aware of her own dark eyebrows and her nose, which jutted out and then took a hook-like dive. She looked older than her thirty-five years. She looked tired after the long shift. And she did not feel alpha anything, even with her steel-toed Red Wings and her leather jacket. She did not even feel beta, or whatever letter came next in Krystal’s alphabet.

  Still, a spring spent rebuilding the network of railroad-tie stair steps in the Mount Tabor Community Garden had defined the muscles beneath her labrys tattoo. She was tanned from the work. Her head was freshly shaved. And it was summer, one of those perfect summer nights that Portlanders live for, so warm, so unambiguously beautiful it made up for ten months of steady rain.

  When Tate sidled up to the bar at the Mirage, her friend Vita, the bartender, leaned over.

  “She’s here,” Vita said.

  For a second, Tate thought of the woman.

  “Who?” she asked.

  Vita shot her a look that said, Don’t pretend not to know when you’ve asked me about her every day for six months.

  Abigail. Tate could see her legs wrapped around the body of the cello, her hips splayed, her black concert skirt riding up, her orange hair falling over the cello’s orange wood.

  Vita plunked a shot in front of Tate.

  “On the house. She’s with someone.”

  Tate knocked the shot back, nearly choking as her brain registered the taste a split second after it hit the back of her throat.

  “What the hell was that?” She wiped her mouth.

  “Frat Boy’s Revenge. Jägermeister and grape vodka. I made one too many for the baby dykes in the corner.”

  Tate grimaced and cleared her mouth with a swig of beer. Then she noticed something: that indefinable feeling of being watched. She turned. At a table by the door, the woman from Out Coffee sat, one hand resting on the base of a martini glass, as though she feared it might fly away. She caught Tate’s eye for a second, smiled, and then looked away with a shake of her head. When she looked up again, Tate raised her beer with a slight smile.

  “God, you have it so easy!” Vita said, punching Tate on the arm.

  Tate turned back to the bar. “She’s not interested in me. Look at her.”

  “You look at her,” Vita said, raising both eyebrows.

  In the mirror behind the bar, Tate saw the woman picking her way through the tables, hesitating, looking from side to side as though puzzling her way through a maze.

  “She’s cute. Don’t blow it,” Vita said in a whisper the whole bar could hear.

  “Hello.” The woman took the stool next to Tate’s. She sat on the very edge, as though ready to flee.

  Vita leaned in. She looked predatory. Her hair was teased into a rocker bouffant, and she had on more leopard print than Tate thought was appropriate work attire, even at a bar.

  “Will you be buying this lady a drink?” Vita asked Tate.

  “I’m fine,” the woman said. “I was just leaving.”
>
  At that moment, Abigail appeared. Tate took in the sight: Abigail on the arm of Duke Bryce, drag king extraordinaire. Duke grinned, a big toothy grin, like an Elvis impersonator on steroids. Abigail clung to Duke’s arm, a romance heroine hanging off the lesbian Fabio.

  “Someone you know?” the woman asked.

  “Knew.”

  A moment later, Abigail released her lover and came over, an apologetic look on her face.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think I’d see you here. I mean, I was going to tell you about me and Duke, you know, earlier.”

  Tate shrugged. The music had dropped a decibel, and a few of the other patrons turned to listen.

  “I mean, I know you’re still really upset about the breakup. About us. Really, I wasn’t looking for anything. I just saw Duke one day and presto!” Abigail’s giggle made it sound like she had suddenly been transported back to seventh grade. “I thought I wanted someone who understood my music.”

  That had been the explanation when Abigail cheated on Tate with the oboist.

  “But then I met Duke, and she’s just so…brava.”

  Duke was an alpha butch, Tate thought. She could take a picture and show Krystal.

  “I just know it all happened for a reason, Tate.”

  Tate was trying to think of a response to this when she was startled by a touch. The woman from the coffee shop had touched the back of her head. She ran her hand across Tate’s cropped hair, then slid her fingertips down the back of Tate’s neck. Then she withdrew her hand quickly.

  “Who is she?” The woman’s voice was much softer than it had been in the coffee shop, almost frightened.

  Tate was still concentrating on the woman’s touch, which seemed to linger on her skin. It had been six months since Abigail officially dumped her, but much longer since she had been touched like that. Abigail had never caressed her. Abigail seduced her cello, everyone in the orchestra agreed, but she had squeezed Tate. Tate had always come away from their lovemaking feeling rather like rising bread dough: kneaded and punched down.

  Now Tate stumbled over her words. “This is…this is Abby. She’s a cellist.”

  The woman leaned closer to Tate, and Tate could smell a sweet perfume, like citrus blossoms, rising from her hair.

  “What seat?” the woman asked Abigail.

  This had been an important distinction that had always been lost on Tate.

  “Third,” Abigail answered defensively.

  “Oh. Only third.” The woman turned and, with a gesture even more fleeting than her fingers on Tate’s neck, she pressed her lips to Tate’s cheek.

  Abigail mumbled something Tate did not catch and walked away, disappearing down the hallway that led from the bar to the dance floor. The woman straightened and crossed her legs.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. She took a large sip of her drink. “I don’t do things like that. I just don’t like all those freckles.”

  “Freckles?”

  Tate had loved the beige-on-white-lace of Abigail’s freckles. Plus, one couldn’t hold someone’s freckles against them. Or maybe, if one looked like this woman, one could.

  “She reminds me of my sister.” The woman spoke quickly. “The freckles and that whole ‘I’m going to be nice to you, but I’m actually sticking the fork in’ thing. ‘You can’t tell me to piss off because that would make you look like a jerk, even though I’m the one who’s ruined your life.’ I know that routine.” The woman finished the rest of her martini in one sip.

  Tate was still trying to figure out what to do with the feeling that suffused her body. The woman’s touch, offered unexpectedly after months of abstinence and then just as quickly withdrawn, left her dizzy. She felt like she had just swallowed a bowl of warm moonlight. But she recovered her manners and held out her hand.

  “My name is…”

  The woman cut her off. “I don’t want to know.”

  Tate withdrew her hand, the moonlight cooling. But as soon as she withdrew her hand, the woman grabbed it, holding on as though she were going to shake hands but lingering much longer than any handshake.

  “I didn’t mean it like that,” she said.

  She leaned forward, her perfect good looks furrowed by worry.

  Behind the woman’s head, Vita flicked her tongue between the V of her two raised fingers.

  Tate widened her eyes, the only nonverbal cue she could flash Vita. Embarrass me, and I will strangle you, her eyes said. But she wasn’t sure Vita was listening.

  “It’s not that I don’t want to know you.” The woman still held Tate’s hand, now stroking the back of Tate’s knuckles with her thumb. “It’s just…I don’t live here. I live a thousand miles away.” The woman raised Tate’s knuckles to her lips and kissed them. “Right now I don’t want to be me.”

  “You’re straight,” Tate said.

  Behind the woman’s head, Vita mouthed, So?!

  The woman said nothing.

  “You’ve got a husband and two kids at home.” Tate extracted her hand. “A husband with a shotgun and two kids who will spend thousands of dollars on therapy when they realize you weren’t going to the PTA meetings at all.”

  The woman bowed her head and laughed. Tate could only see her dimples, suddenly apparent in the smooth face. All right, Tate thought. I’ll take it. It was the first time in months that she had sat at the Mirage and not thought about Abigail. She hadn’t even looked up to see if Abigail had come back in the room.

  “I don’t have any kids,” the woman said. “I can promise you that. I was married once, but we divorced years ago, and I’m not straight. I just wanted one night where I’m not what I do or where I work or who I know, but that’s silly, isn’t it?”

  Tate thought about Out Coffee. About Maggie, Krystal, Vita, and the Mount Tabor Community Garden Association. About her studio apartment off northeast Firline and the old Hungarian couple who lived in the unit below hers. She thought about Portland, with its mossy side streets and its glorious summers.

  “If you’re not who you know, where you work, where you live, who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m this,” the woman said and took Tate’s face in her hands and kissed her.

  At first it was just a soft kiss, lip to lip. Then Tate felt the woman’s hands tremble against her cheeks. Their lips parted. Her tongue found Tate’s. Beneath the bar, their knees touched, and Tate felt the woman’s legs shake as though she had run a great distance.

  A second later, Tate pulled away, but only because she wanted the woman, and she felt herself going down in the annals of barroom legend. She could already hear Vita’s rendition of the story: Tate just reached over and grabbed the girl, practically swallowed her. It was like she unhinged her jaw, and the girl’s head was in her mouth. Bang! Like a boa constrictor. Friends and customers would listen attentively, waving away Tate’s protests. Who wanted a story about a lonely barista longing for summer romance when they could have Vita’s tale about Tate Grafton, Python Lover?

  “Would you like to play a game of pool?” Tate said, to get out from under Vita’s grin and to give herself a moment to think.

  She was not the kind of woman who picked up girls at the bar. Vita picked up girls. Vita had picked up so many women she remembered them by taglines like “The Groaner” or “Wooly Bicycle Legs.” She often told Tate that Tate could do the same, if she would only “put out some effort.” According to Vita, half the girls at the Mirage were in love with Tate. But Tate did not believe her; nor did she want an assortment of half-remembered encounters.

  But she wanted this woman.

  They moved toward the side of the bar where two pool tables stood on a raised platform under low-hanging lights.

  “Are you any good?” she asked.

  “I’m all right,” Tate said.

  The woman rolled her pool cue on the table to see if it was true.

  “None of them are straight,” Tate said.

  “I suppose not.” The woman glanced toward the door. “N
ot here.”

  Tate laughed.

  “You break, then,” the woman said.

  Tate cracked the balls apart, sinking two solids and following with a third.

  “So, if you won’t tell me your name,” Tate began. “Or where you live or what you do, what are we going to talk about?”

  “We could talk about you.”

  The woman sank a high ball but missed her next shot. Her hand was unsteady, and she looked around the bar more than she looked at the table. She looked at Tate more than she looked around the bar—but only out of the corner of her eye.

  “I already know where you work,” she said, casting that glance at Tate and then looking down. “And I know that, prior to right now, you’ve had bad taste in women. So…what’s your name? How long have you worked at the coffee shop?”

  Tate took another shot and sank a ball.

  “No,” she said slowly. “I’ll tell you what you tell me.”

  “Okay.” The woman leaned over the pool table and her hair draped in a curtain over one side of her face. She took her shot but missed. “I learned to play pool in college with three girls who I thought would be my friends for life. We played at a sports bar called the Gator Club. And I don’t know any of them now. They could be dead. They could be professional pool sharks.” She leaned against the wall and surveyed the table. “How about you?”

  “I learned to play here the summer I turned twenty-one,” Tate said. She sank another ball and shot a smile in the woman’s direction. “The table is off. It slopes. It’s not fair, you being from out of town and all. I should give you a handicap.”

  “Tell me how it slopes and give me two out of three.”

  Tate had never been the kind of person who made bets or the kind of person who sidled up to beautiful women, looked down at them lustfully, and said things like, What will you give me when I win?

  But apparently that was the kind of woman she was. Tonight. In the summer.

  “What will you give me if I win?”