Juno's Swans

by Tamsen Wolff

  She looked around at us, and then pointed to me and my scene partner, a tall willowy girl named Alicia with a long nose, long dark glossy hair, and a high opinion of herself. “You two,” she said, “again.”

  Before we began, Marg walked over to me, gripped my elbow, and whispered, You’re in love with her, in my ear. I stared at her, startled, and then we played the scene again. Alicia bobbed along in her own self-absorbed world and I was more and more crushed and furious that I couldn’t reach her, although I tried in every way I could. When we finished, the class murmured a little ripple of appreciation.

  “Alright then,” said Marg restrained, but approving. “It’s the strength of the choice going into the scene that makes it play or not. It’s how high the stakes are. Nice.”

  I sat down on a cloud of self-congratulation, feeling understood.

  “What did I suggest to make that happen?” Marg asked at large.

  Ann, in her unpredictable rabbity way, piped up, “That they are in love?” and I looked over at Marg’s pouchy cheek nodding in profile and thought, What did she see in me to ask me to do this. I thought, She sees me, and, overcome with shyness and pleasure in equal parts, I stared so hard at the floor that I saw black spots.

  “Raise the stakes,” Marg was saying to the room. “Always raise the stakes.”

  “Does that mean she can tell?” I asked Sarah afterwards, outside in the parking lot. “How can she tell?”

  Across the street from the library, a delirious chorus of frogs was singing their raucous social hearts out.

  Sarah said, “Well, she’s been around. She’s good at her job. And she’s gay.”

  This didn’t help me. What I meant was, if it was something Marg Hawthorne could see, who else could see it, and what were they seeing? What did it look like?

  Sarah looked across at me. “You’ve never been asked if you want the lesbian discount at any store in Provincetown, have you?”

  I said no.

  “Well, then,” she said, dismissively, opening the truck door and slinging her knapsack behind her seat. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.”

  “Have you?” I asked her through the window as I came around to the passenger’s side, but she was looking straight ahead and didn’t answer.

  “I wasn’t worried,” I said, when I got in, which was not entirely true.

  I knew that if Sarah didn’t answer a question immediately, I was never going to get an answer. This didn’t trouble me in the slightest. I felt we were in complete accord at bottom and her occasional refusals to speak didn’t touch my certainty. Certainty was in her mouth, the slope of her silky bent head, the downy small of her back, the spaces between her ribs, her heartbeat. As long as I had access to these, I had all the information I needed.

  Also it wasn’t only that I couldn’t necessarily get clear answers out of Sarah. I was unfathomable to myself a lot of the time now. For instance: I said I was a biter when I was a child. Well, from the beginning I bit Sarah without even knowing I was biting. I didn’t know why I did it; I hardly knew when I did it. I bit in an unfocused, determined haze, in lovely snatches of ferocity and desire, marking cheeks, sometimes shoulders, arms, calves with purply blue crescents. We would gaze with wonder at these developments in the early light like they were new moons around Jupiter, suddenly two shy amazed girls.

  The same night we worked on audition scenes, we ran right into Marg Hawthorne on the street in Provincetown.

  “You did a nice job today,” she said to me with unexpected warmth. “You could have a future.”

  I squashed the urge to say I sincerely hoped so. Her cheeks looked very pink.

  “Thanks,” I said, instead.

  “Where are you going to school?” she asked, ignoring Sarah.

  “I’m not. I mean I’m still in high school. In New Hampshire.” She nodded at me and then her eyes slid over to Sarah.

  “Sarah, right?” she said and Sarah nodded. Marg started talking to her about a workshop in the city in August—the development of a new television pilot filming in NY—that Sarah should audition for. She said Sarah should call her about it.

  “Are you going to do that?” I asked, when Marg had said goodbye.

  Sarah shrugged.

  “It won’t come to anything,” she said.

  I was watching Marg Hawthorne’s departing back. It seemed to me there was a walk, an identifiable walk. The robust, no-nonsense march of Jodie Foster, Mary Poppins, Sally Ride, and the thousands of girls whose hips drive straight ahead and not side-to-side. Because in addition to trying to comprehend Sarah-and-me, which was kind of a full-time job, not to mention reciting my Shakespeare and memorizing lines and negotiating the other students and workshop demands and remembering to show up at my weekend job and absorbing the new landscape, I was studying a whole new people. I watched everyone, asking roundabout questions when I thought I stood a chance of gleaning any useful information without looking too stupid.

  Provincetown, with its bare-chested men in leather pants and dog collars, the orange tans, the muscles and chains, the rainbow flags and stickers in shop windows, the drag queens with monstrous high pink wigs and teetering heels and aggressive eyeliner, was terrifying, astonishing, and educational all at once. But it was overwhelmingly about men and their efforts either to see or to pretend not to see one another. It was much harder for me to track and understand what happened between women.

  “Who’s that woman?” I asked, about, for instance, a small wiry brunette sitting with Sarah’s friend Jean, who worked as a bartender. We were out late in a small smoky hole in the wall on a Wednesday night when I should have been home in Truro, curled up with a script and a cat.

  “Her name’s Peggy. She’s not gay,” Sarah said, in her brusque indifferent way. “She’s just trying it on for size. I think she’s married to some poor slob actually.”

  I pressed for more but Sarah insisted there wasn’t much to it.

  “She comes out here and she’s with Jean,” she said, shrugging it off. “But Jean’s deluding herself. She gets a little worked up about this stuff. And she’s always falling for straight girls.”

  This kind of exchange left me in a muddle. I had an insatiable appetite to know more, but Sarah would only ever say as much as interested her. She was full of unexpected, inflexible judgments, often witty, usually caustic. She did half-jokingly subscribe to the idea that a gay woman’s ring finger was likely to be longer than her index finger. I had never heard of such a thing. She took my hand like a fortune-teller, straightened my fingers out toward her, and said, “What have we here,” teasingly before kissing my knuckles. She also claimed there were telltale signs of gayness, like the line of the jaw. But she disliked anything overt, mullet haircuts, pink triangles, rainbow bumper stickers. She passionately hated the use of the word “partner”—”What are they, cops? Lawyers?” she would say derisively, of anyone who referred to a girlfriend or boyfriend this way—although she didn’t offer any alternatives.

  I didn’t tell her I was kind of mesmerized by obvious announcements, all the physical signposts and actions that said this world of women was a world of its own. That included appraising looks from women, or the way some women’s breasts, heavy and unrestrained, pulled at white T-shirts under leather jackets, or the leather jackets themselves, with those incomprehensible mesmerizing silver clips and zippers and buckles hanging off them everywhere. What were they for? I was kind of drawn to the looking, to being on the receiving end of that frank, curious, often amused assessment. I wouldn’t have thought it would be different to be checked out by a woman as opposed to being checked out by a man, but it was and I found it exhilarating. It made me want to skip a little, it put a hiccup of flirtation and pleasure in my day, warmed me slyly from a safe distance. I had never had this experience of being with a woman in the company of other women with women and I found it heady, intoxic
ating.

  When did you know? Titch would ask squinting past my left ear. And later still, But how did you know? Are you gay? (This very quietly, so self-conscious but determined that her face was almost entirely scrunched up, like a ball of crumpled tissue.) I mean is that it? Do you know? When did you know?

  Never. There was no moment that I knew.

  The truth is I never thought of myself as one thing or another, as straight or gay or as anything other than Sarah’s person, as she was mine. That was the only category that made sense to me.

  Sarah didn’t identify herself in any way either; she didn’t like to be aligned with any group as far as I could tell. The question seemed beside the point of us. It’s true that in classes I continued to be careful about how I behaved with and toward her because clearly she did not want to be in a couple while being our section leader and all. She never said she didn’t want to say anything about the two of us, but she didn’t have to. We never touched one another in class, or even put our heads together to whisper. She treated me very much the way she treated everyone else.

  Out of class, away from the other students, we were immediately, emphatically, happily joined at the hip. Also at the hand, the shoulder, the forehead, the cheek, the mouth, the belly, the leg; whatever was handy. I never had any doubt about what I could make Sarah feel when we were alone, if I wanted to (and I wanted to). Publicly, we were entirely in one world or the other depending on the context: with her friends in Wellfleet or in Provincetown, we were physically merged, inseparable, a known commodity, an established pair, as we were in private; in class or anywhere near it, we were physically apart, removed, at a marked, strategic distance from one another.

  Of course these apparently tidy distinctions tripped into uncharted territory before long. One evening after class, when we had nothing in the house for dinner we drove to Orleans to go shopping. On the way, I said I wanted to make cookies and Sarah said she didn’t want cookies around in the house because she didn’t want to eat a lot of them, so I said I would bake them and we would give them away to Luke and Eddy and Dennis. Then the house would smell like cookies—which is my favorite part of baking—and we would make the guys happy. She thought this was very funny for some reason.

  Inside the store, I was in the baking aisle and Sarah had headed in the direction of produce, when I heard someone call my name. I turned around, holding a bag of chocolate chips in one hand. Titch’s stepsister Ruby was standing immediately in front of me, looking tan in jean shorts and carrying a shopping basket over one arm.

  “Hey you!” she said.

  “Hey!” I answered, more enthusiastically than I meant to. I hadn’t seen Ruby except from a distance since the first week after we’d gotten to the Cape.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “Yeah, it’s been really busy,” I said. “The workshop and working and everything.”

  “Where’s Titch?” Ruby asked looking behind me, and at that moment Sarah reappeared around the end of the aisle, brandishing a watermelon.

  “Look what I found!” she called out, and then slowed down when she caught sight of Ruby beside me.

  “Hi Ruby,” she said, pleasantly, holding the watermelon in front of her abdomen lightly, with her fingertips, like a basketball.

  “Hi,” said Ruby, cocking her head on one side, inquisitively. They were smiling at one another like it was a game of chicken and we were waiting to see who would blink first.

  I blinked.

  “We’re just picking up some groceries,” I said, weakly.

  “I see that,” said Ruby, and her smile spread into a smirk, unattractively.

  “You’re not at the restaurant? I mean obviously you’re not at the restaurant, but I thought you worked evening shifts, I thought you would be at work now,” I said, hearing myself digging a deeper hole and starting to blush because of it.

  “No,” she said slowly, thoughtfully. “No, I’m not at work now.

  “How is Titch?” she asked me then. “See much of her, do you?”

  “More than you do,” I said, cross now. I took the watermelon from Sarah and dumped it into our shopping cart.

  “Ruby’s harmless,” Sarah said, as we were carrying our shopping bags out to the truck. It was still twilight, and the mosquitoes were out. The parking lot smelled of heated asphalt and gasoline. “I mean, sure, she can be gossipy and mean-spirited and petty—”

  “But harmless,” I said, waiting for her to open my door.

  “Right. Anyway, so she thinks she knows something. Big deal. It’s not like this is news to Titch, right?”

  “No,” I said slowly, although of course I still hadn’t actually said anything directly to Titch about Sarah. I wasn’t thinking about Titch, though. I was wondering if Ruby’s news—about Sarah and me—would be news to Bess, Sarah’s ex-girlfriend and Ruby’s housemate. Either Sarah wasn’t thinking about this, or it didn’t matter to her. I didn’t know which and I didn’t ask.

  CHAPTER 16

  When I moved out of the Davidsons’ I didn’t call it that. I didn’t say anything at all. Although some of my stuff stayed in Truro, I had pretty much moved into Sarah’s the week after we returned from New York. In the beginning, Sarah came over to the Truro house a couple of times, but I always felt shy and divided, unsure of who or what to protect, or how to be. Titch seemed dark and unforthcoming, suspicious and snarky; Sarah seemed imperious and flip. I didn’t want to be shared ground so I ducked the whole problem. For a while, I’d call the house when I knew Titch wasn’t going to be there and leave a message saying, “Hey I’m staying in Wellfleet tonight,” but before long I stopped even bothering to do that. Titch called me too off and on for the first two weeks after I got home from New York and moved into Sarah’s, but she didn’t like to leave messages—she has a phobia about answering machines—and even when we were there we didn’t always answer the phone.

  I got back to the Davidsons’ in order to feed the cats and tried a handful of times to overlap with the time I knew Titch was home in the late afternoon, but after two weeks she stopped being home then anyway. I didn’t ask if her work schedule had changed or what was up. Mostly I was glad not to have to make the effort.

  For a while she stopped by sometimes at the end of the workshop day, as she had since the beginning of classes. That was easy because Sarah was always occupied with her job at that point, after the rest of us students were released for the day. Sometimes Titch would show up and we might meander into town to eat ice cream with a few of the other actors, or go to the pier and sit by the water. And sometimes she would come with me back to Sarah’s apartment and hang out on the lawn in front of the house. We’d put our feet up on the ironwork café tables that Dennis had soldered, surrounded by strange, slightly menacing metal sculptures, and we’d drink iced tea with Luke after his daily bike ride, or with Dennis, if he wasn’t napping, or with whomever happened to be around.

  After one of these occasions, I had the happy thought that maybe Titch had a crush on Luke. If I was harboring a small hope that her interest in Luke might draw her into the Wellfleet crew and make her part of that world, she nixed that idea right away. She scowled deeply when I raised Luke’s name, although the tops of her ears flushed a light pink and the color spread across her cheeks. She appeared to be sweating slightly.

  “We are not going to talk about it,” she said, perfectly calmly.

  I had stopped by the house in Truro after having not been there for two days, to do a load of laundry and, guiltily, to clean litter boxes and play with the neglected cats, Chester and Jack. Titch joined me in the living room where I was sorting socks. When I made the mistake of mentioning Luke though, she got up almost immediately afterwards and went into the kitchen.

  “Titch?” I called, “hey, I’m sorry. Come back.”

  “I just have to finish something,” she said, distantly. “I’m boilin
g rags.”

  “Oh, okay,” I said, helplessly, rolling my eyes at the cats. “If you’re boiling rags.”

  Where she had been hesitant about actually stopping by Sarah’s apartment to look for me before we had this exchange, now she was much worse. She would walk by the house, eyes averted, staring blindly ahead or twisting her whole body away from the house as though intent on the neighbor’s lilac bushes as she walked down to the pier. If she stopped to see if I wanted to go by Mac’s and eat a fish burrito she would stand at the bottom of the outdoor stairs leading up to the deck and call up quickly. If I didn’t appear immediately she would have darted off again, her sandals crunching over the broken pieces of oyster shells in the driveway. I would see the back of her head, ponytail swinging, disappearing down the drive.

  Once she had come up the steps to the apartment and Sarah had answered the door in boy’s white briefs and a tank top with no bra. She was eating a piece of watermelon and the juice had run down her arms. We were laughing. Titch had blinked into the cool dark apartment and looked panicky when her eyes focused. Then she fled. That was the last time she came up like that.

  We still saw each other, but more and more only by accident. One Saturday night, after I had been staying at the apartment for the better part of three weeks, Sarah talked me into going to the drive-in movie theatre in Wellfleet. We both should have been working on lines for scenes we were in, but it was still and hot inside the apartment and we were restless.

  Full-blown summer had arrived finally, at the start of July. I had gotten used to the cool nights and intermittent sunshine, the short bursts of rain. But then without any warning, everything erupted in green heat, lazy and pulsing. The marsh, which for so long had looked like the back of a sick or preoccupied lioness—tawny but with unwashed tufts sticking up along the spine—transformed. It melted into lush, corn silk loveliness, looking magnificently inviting against the razor blue sky.