Stranger On Lesbos

by Valerie Taylor

Bake scowled. "Oh, all right. Dance?"

  It still felt odd to be dancing with another woman. More than any other single thing, the sight of girls dancing together, which had reminded her of a high-school gym class the first time she saw it, made her feel how far she had come from the world of conventional man-woman relationships. She went into Bake's arms feeling that this embrace, rather than the one they shared when they were alone, was unnatural. Yet there were only women in this place, some of them in dresses, some in the Ivy League shirts and tight pedal pushers you saw everywhere, a few in obviously masculine garb. Jane and Kay went by, cheek to cheek, and then little Lissa with a stranger. Bake waved at a girl with startling red hair, cut short and tightly curled.

  "That's Cathleen Archer. She used to go with Barby."

  "It makes me feel funny when you talk like that."

  "Look, baby, nothing's permanent. How many married couples do you know that are still in love after, say, two or three years?"

  Bake's hand was a reassuring warmth against her back. She shut her eyes and let the jukebox music, strongly accented, take over.

  "Wake up," Bake said. "We're going on to someplace more interesting."

  CHAPTER 8

  “How about another drink all around?”

  Frances shook her head. Motion made it ache and she stopped. "Had too much now," she said owlishly.

  "The hell I have."

  "Somebody has to drive."

  Bake thought this over, leaning against the bar. "Okay. You're all wrong, but I'm not going to argue with you. If you want me to drive, I'll drive. Lissa, drink?"

  "I feel so terrible," Lissa whispered. She had started crying again, and her eyes were swollen almost shut. "What difference does it make?"

  "That's the spirit," the girl standing beside her said. She wore the heavy sweater and fly-front jeans that were regulation here; her hair was cut short and slicked down. "You got trouble, baby?"

  "Her girl left her," Jane said sadly.

  "Poor kid. Listen, why don't you come home with me? I got a double bed. You could get a good night's sleep."

  "I bet," Jane said. "Goddam butch."

  Kay said urgently, "What's it to you? That's what makes me so angry, darling. It happens every time. Every time I ask you to be nice to some little tramp, just out of politeness, you go overboard. What do you care where she goes or who she goes with?"

  "She's just a child," Jane said with drunken dignity. She pushed her hair back to give Kay the full benefit of a cold look. "An innocent little child. Somebody has to take care of her."

  "Look, you take care of me. Just concentrate on that. You don't need to worry about anybody else."

  She sounded like Bill. Frances said, "Oh, my God, what time is it?"

  Bake squinted at her watch. "Twenty past two. That can't be right, can it?"

  "I have to go home."

  "But you're supposed to go home with me," Bake said in a hurt voice. "You promised."

  "Just for a little while, then."

  Bill would be sound asleep by this time. Or would he? She had a crazy mental image of him still sitting in the armchair where she had left him, his feet propped on the hassock, watching the door accusingly above yesterday morning's Tribune. Bill Ollenfield, model of domestic virtue and handy man around the houseonce every six months. Why did he have to pick a night when she had a date? Was she supposed to sit around the house night after night, waiting for him to get tired of his drinking and whoring customers and come home to her loving arms?

  Or maybe he was lying tense and wide awake as she had done so often, watching the lights of passing cars sweep across the bedroom wall and waiting for the sound of her step on the stairs. She giggled.

  "Sauce for the gander," she said.

  "Right, right," Jane said, not knowing or caring what she was talking about.

  Bake said, "Who's that girl in the green dress? The one that just came in? I'd swear I know her from someplace."

  Frances followed her gaze to the doorway, where a party of three men and three young girls stood, looking around curiously. "Goddam tourists," the girl beside Lissa said. "Out to get a great big thrill looking at the queers." She tipped her glass.

  "I've seen her too. On campus, I think."

  "That's great," Bake said. "Just great." She laid a shaky hand on Frances arm. "Come on, let's go home. I'm tired."

  The girl in green stared at them as they left, and then laughed. It was a mean laugh. It chilled Frances. She pushed her way out behind Bake. The crowd had thinned. There were half a dozen parties like their own, trying to spin the evening's festivity out to breakfast time, and three or four couples sitting drink-sodden and silent at small tables; also a few single women, mostly middle-aged, cruising. There were five or six butches waiting for their girls to get through work.

  Jane said, "Crummy bunch, huh?"

  Kay shrugged.

  "There aren't any sunrises in this town," Frances complained. She found the car keys in Bake's pocket, since Bake seemed unable to locate them, and handed them to her. "We had sunrises at home. Here the sky just keeps getting lighter, and pretty soon it's time to get up." The eastern sky was changing from lead gray to smoke gray. She felt very sad.

  "Why do I do these things? Why do you let me?" Bake backed out expertly. The street was deserted except for a cruising taxi and a prowl car. "God, that's a grim place. I don't know why we went there."

  "It seemed like a good idea at the time."

  "A good expensive idea. I was going to buy that South American pottery this week."

  "We spend too much on booze."

  "You're telling me."

  The dawn air was cold. Frances shivered. She put her hand in the other girl's jacket pocket. "I don't want to go home, Bake."

  "I thought you were coming home with me. That was the idea in the first place."

  Frances considered. If she went home now it would mean another fight. If Bill was asleep when she got in, her arrival would almost certainly wake him, and he would raise hell. (Not without reason, she admitted, feeling herself crumpled and dim-eyed.) On the other hand, if she waited until he had left for the office it would postpone the fight until evening, and by that time it would have lost vitality.

  Neither anger nor anxiety would keep young Mr. Ollenfield, sales manager for Plastic Playthings, from being at his desk by nine o'clock, teeth brushed, suit pressed, shoes shined, hair combed. Because young Mr. Ollenfield was' going to get ahead in the world or know the reason why; and after all, what's a wife compared to a bigger expense account and money in the bank?

  She was too tired and confused to explain all this to Bake. She said, "Oh. let him sleep with his sales reports."

  "But baby, why do you keep worrying about the man? He's old enough to cook his own breakfast. I hope it gives him ulcers."

  I'm turning into the kind of woman who stays out all night, Frances thought. A tramp. The perpetual feeling of guilt that lived in the back of her mind uncoiled and stirred, ready to sting. She summoned up all her resentment against Billafter all, hadn't he stayed out plenty of nights, doing God knows what? Doing plenty, I'll bet, she thought defensively. She put her hand on Bake's knee, anxious to feel the solidity, the reality of her.

  "Okay. Do we have any coffee?"

  The apartment was a mess. Bake drifted around, still a little fuzzy, emptying ash trays, opening windows, carrying glasses into the kitchen. "God, I'm tired."

  "Come to bed. I'll let you sleepif that's what you want."

  "Is it what you want?"

  Frances' mouth curled into an unwilling smile. "Not exactly."

  Bake yawned widely, unzipping her pedal pushers and letting them fall to the floor. "It wouldn't have to be like this," she said, her voice muffled by the shirt she was pulling over her head. "You wouldn't have to be so rushed, you know. You could move in here."

  "But how?" The obligations of her life loomed up solid and implacableBill, Bob, the house. She stared at Bake.

  "Easy.
Pack up your stuff and move out."

  "I couldn't do that."

  "All right, don't. It's up to you."

  "But how could I?"

  "It's been done before. Kay was married, you know. She divorced her husband to live with Jane. She was married to Carlton Schofield, the atomic scientist."

  Frances felt a surge of sympathy for Kay, and some envy. "What would I live on?"

  "Oh hell, you can always get a job. I can get you a job, if that's all that's worrying you." Bake stood naked in the half-light from the shuttered window, her head bent thoughtfully. "There are plenty of jobs. You could work in an office."

  "I'd like to go to work anyway. It would be nice to have some money of my own, not have to ask Bill for every penny. Not that he minds, only"

  "Only you feel like a whore."

  "Well, yes, I do." She shook her head. "I can't do it, though."

  Bake shrugged. "It's up to you. Are you coming to bed or not?"

  This is silly, Frances thought. Their argument was taking on the familiar pattern of a married quarrel, in the familiar setting of getting ready for bed. She and Bill had bickered like this, tired and edgy after an evening out; had tried and failed to make up for it by physical closeness. It occurred to her suddenly that she would like to skip the next part of the night and simply go to sleep in Bake's arms. But this is the way I used to feel with Bill, she thought, aghast. She stripped off her clothes and got into bed, sighing a little.

  Later Frances lay in a relaxed half-doze, watching the oblong of window lighten. It would be wonderful to have a job, to be one of the fast-walking girls she saw downtown, going to a desk job every morning. Most wonderful of all to live in this apartment with Bake, sharing their breakfast over two propped-up books and having plenty of time to talk. Lately their scattered hours together had been invaded by too many other people, their companionship diluted by too much drinking. They were wasting time and spending too much moneyBake's money, since Frances had none of her own.

  "I'm tired of being a freeloader," she said.

  Bake rolled over. "Huh?"

  Frances moved closer to her, seeking comfort in contact.

  There was Bob. For fifteen years her days had been shaped to his needs. She might leave Billbut her son, no. Not even now, when he was outgrowing her.

  "Matter, baby?"

  "Ssh, go to sleep."

  Perhaps she could get a job, though. That would give her some money of her own, and make it easier to stay downtown on the evenings she spent with Bake. As things stood, every move she made laid her open to suspicion.

  She was getting warm and drowsy. She could feel her arms and legs relax. I'll decide tomorrow, she thought, shutting her eyes and falling asleep with her hand against Bake's breast.

  CHAPTER 9

  It seemed to Frances, all that winter, that she was warm for the first time in her life. Warm and at home, solidly and actually when she was with Bake, in retrospect or anticipation when they were apart. The company house near the mine tipple, the dormitory room at college, the various apartments and houses where she and Bill had lived during the seventeen years of their married lifethese were nothing but sojourning places, temporary shelters without meaning or comfort.

  And without warmth. It was foolish, it was fantastic, because the house on the South Side, for example, had a perfectly good gas furnaceindeed, the first thing Bill did when he came in after work was to throw the windows open and "get some fresh air in here," while she shivered. But she felt that some residue of chill, lingering in the center of her bones, was melted now for the first time. I've thawed out, she decided solemnly, curled up on Bake's sofa, listening to the rattling of dishes as Bake cooked dinner, while she (presumably) took a nap because she had a sniffly cold.

  She had known real, physical cold, of course. The winter she was thirteen, when they chopped up the doors for firewood because the mine was on strike and there was no money for food, much less fuel. Even reading didn't help. Your fingers got stiff holding the book, and the chill crept down between your scrunched-together shoulders and up your stockinged legs. Frankie had been hungry before, plenty of times, when the miners were out or Pa spent all his pay on drink. But this was worse than being hungry.

  "I should have married one of the neighbor boys at home," Ma once said. "A farmer can always raise something to eat."

  Pa gave her a sour look. "For Christ's sake shut up and quit bawling. You ain't never starved yet."

  "Darrell did."

  Frankie, hanging around the kitchen door, began to whimper. She had heard all she wanted to hear about Darrell, who just sort of dwindled away because Ma didn't have any milk for him and there was no money to buy groceries. The other kids were too little to understand what Ma's bulging apron meant. Frankie was a little vague on the details herself, but she knew there was going to be another baby soonand there was no money this time, either, and the house was nightmare cold.

  "I'll go out after dark and rob a vein," Pa said, surly.

  "With company guards all over the place?" The MacAllister boy, shot down by the company police, lay in his mother's frigid front room with the cheekbones cutting through the wasting flesh, and the stink of his gangrened wound filling the house. The company doctor didn't bother with strikers, especially if they were known to carry union cards.

  "Dirty sonsabitches," Pa said. "Shoot down their own mothers, company police would. A decent man wouldn't give them the time of day. A decent man would kill the bastards."

  Frances said nothing. She had seen Bob MacAllister's own cousin Loren at the pit mouth, a boy who had gone fishing with the neighborhood kids a couple of summers before, beefy now with good food and armed with a police revolver. Had wondered if he was the one who fired the shot that pitched Bob on his face in the dirt.

  Ma shook the last of the flour into a pan and turned the sack inside out. "Seems like I could stand it if I could get warmed up," she said. "Just for a minute, even."

  Pa stood up. He was stooped from years of hard work and his dark thick hair was going gray, but he was still a big man, with iron muscles in his arms and shoulders. "I'll warm you up. Lorena, fetch me the ax."

  So the doors came down, not neatly but with ragged blows of the old ax, and were hacked into kindling. Pa stuffed the cookstove and shook the coal-oil can hopefully, although they hadn't lit the lamp for more than a week. Then he ripped pages out of Frankie's geography book, and her heart tore across like paper.

  But she stood up close to the stove with the others when the orange flames began to lick up and the first warmth stole out into the cold room. She held Delano up to see the red light flicker around the stovelids, and he forgot his sore chapped bottom and the hunger sores at the corners of his mouth and held his hands out to the light. Wonderful warmtheven Ma smiled, feeling her stiffness melt away and her long-carried dread lighten.

  Frances, lying on Bake's sofa, sighed. And then tensed again, remembering that night when she lay awake and heard from behind the gaping doorway of her parents' bedroom the rise and fall of creaking springs, the muffled masculine whisper and the other, higher-pitched protest that she had been hearing from behind the closed door all her life. Only now there was no door to close. Lying on the front-room cot that had been all hers since Wanda married, she could see as well as hear. Moonlight came in the uncurtained window and lay across the patchwork quilt. Pretty soon the quilt slipped off, and the moonlight showed her the confused shape of two people merged into one. She was afraid and ashamed to look and unable to stop looking.

  This was marriage, then. She had guessed at it last summer, when she came upon her sister Wanda and Chris Hollister in the woods, before they were married. But they were dressed, or partly so, and when they saw her standing there, Wanda smoothed down her skirt and Chris ran to hide behind a tree. So she hadn't been sure, had tried to fill in the gaps and empty places from her imagination.

  "Oh God, Joe, you're killing me. It's too near my time."

  A bass growl. T
he springs creaked faster and faster.

  Frances squeezed her eyes shut. Hurry up, she begged silently. Hurry up and get it over with.

  The sight of Wanda, the next day, sickened her even more. Married at fifteen and already pregnant with her first baby, Wanda had taken on the look of the older women, at once resentful and smug. Chris' widowed mother, lucky to be on home relief, had sent over a little brown-paper sack of wheat flour and one of dried prunes, and Wanda dropped them on the table and sat down heavily.

  "God, my back aches."

  Frankie stood beside the oilcloth-covered table, turning the little sack of prunes over and over in her hand. "Sis, do you like itbeing married?"

  "It's all right, I guess. Sure isn't much like you think it'll be." Wanda looked at her curiously. "What are you so interested for, all of a sudden?"

  "I was thinking about Ma. Seems like she's never had anything but kids and hard work."

  Wanda said, "Men's all alike, near about."

  Frankie bent her head to read the fine printing on the prune bag. "I don't ever aim to get married."

  "I used to say that too." Wanda laughed harshly. "Wait till the love bug bites you."

  The gray of Frankie's eyes deepened, under the fine brows that were her only beauty. "I'm going to be a schoolteacher like Ma was, only I'm going to stay one."

  "An old-maid schoolteacher?"

  "Sooner be an old maid than have a baby every year."

  Wanda sighed, cradling her bulge against the edge of the table. "Stay away from the men, then. Frankie, it's like an icebox in here."

  Frances, remembering the skinny scab-kneed little girl she had been, shivered. She opened her eyes and looked at the embers in Bake's fireplace, glowing softly through a fine coating of ashes. "It's nice and warm in here," she said softly.

  "It better be. I've got the gas bills to prove it." Bake appeared in the doorway, a smudge of flour on her cheek. "You're supposed to be asleep."

  Frances blinked. "I hate to waste the time. We hardly ever get a whole day."

  Bake grinned. "So rest. You'll be glad later."

  Frances sighed. It was no use. She could never make anybody understand how wonderful it was to be warm clear through. Nobody else could possibly know.