Wedding Bell Blues

by Julia Watts

  “You city girls get softhearted about animals, don’tcha?” Ed asked, pouring gravy over a split biscuit.

  “Sorry,” Lily said, feeling foolish. “It just struck me as sad, is all.”

  “Well, shoot,” Jack said, helping herself to a third fried egg. “If you’re gonna get that upset about it, I reckon Ed and Vina can just bring Lily the pig out to me after she gets weaned. I’ll pay as good a price for her as they will at the meat market, and I reckon I’ve got room on my farm for a pig.”

  “You and your farm,” Vina laughed, emptying the second pan of biscuits into the bread basket.

  “Ed and Vina always make fun of my farm,” Jack began. “Of course, I reckon they’ve got a right to. It’s more of a petting zoo than a farm. I’ve got half a dozen dogs — some I found on the side of the road, some I took away from people that was mistreating ’em; five cats; an old swaybacked horse I saved from getting shot; and a goat with just one horn. You oughta bring your little girl out to see ’em.”

  Lily smiled. “I’ll have to do that.”

  “Anyway,” Jack said as she spooned up another serving of grits, “I reckon I got room for a pig in my collection, if you and Mimi promise to come visit her.”

  “I promise.”

  “It sure takes a lot of money to feed all them animals without you making any profit off ’em,” Ed said, pushing his plate away.

  “Aah, it’s not that expensive,” Jack said. “Besides, I gotta spend my money on somethin’. It’s not like I go out and blow it on new dresses.”

  Ed and Vina laughed. Lily was amazed at how comfortable they were with Jack’s masculinity.

  When they climbed into the truck to go home, Lily said, “Thank you for the pig.”

  “It was no skin off my nose. I’d been thinking about getting me a pig anyhow.” She started the truck. “And I can understand why the thought of slaughtering that pig bothered you. I mean, I’m no vegetarian, but it does seem like a shame that a critter has such a hard time coming into the world, only to get taken out of it so quick.” She watched the road for a minute. “There was somethin’ I wanted to ask you, though.”

  “Yeah?”

  “About that joke you made when you were about to invade that sow’s privacy.”

  “Oh, that. I hardly even knew what I was saying. I’m always make dumb jokes when I’m nervous.”

  “Well, it’s probably none of my business. It just seemed like an odd joke for a married lady to be making ... at least for a married lady who’s married to a man.”

  The biscuits in Lily’s stomach congealed into a heavy clump. How could she be so stupid as to make a joke like that? Apparently waking up before the sun wasn’t conducive to her secret-keeping abilities.

  “It’s okay,” Jack said. “Like I said, it’s none of my business. You don’t have to tell me anything.

  But if you ever decide you wanna talk, your secrets — if you’ve got any — are safe with me.”

  What was it about Dr. Jack that made Lily decide to trust her? Was it because she was the first real lesbian Lily had seen since she hit Faulkner County? Or was it Jack’s obvious kindness — the part of her personality that made her rescue abused dogs and swaybacked horses?

  Whatever it was, it made Lily talk. She talked all the way back to the house and then sat talking with Jack in her truck in the driveway.

  When Lily finished, Jack breathed, “Whoa. That’s quite a story.”

  Lily laughed. “You’re telling me.”

  “So ...” Jack looked her square in the eye. “You lonely?”

  Lily quickly broke eye contact. “Lonely? Of course I’m lonely. I lost my wife, my best friend —

  but if you’re, like, coming on to me, I’m not interested. The only thing that could possibly make my life more complicated than it is now is a relationship. Besides, I’ll never find anyone I can love like I loved Charlotte —”

  “Whoa, Nelly!” Jack hollered. “Let me try again. What I meant to say was you probably had lots of friends back in Atlanta ... other dykes you hung out with. I bet that now that you’re away from them, you’re kinda lonely.”

  “Oh. That kind of lonely.” Lily felt like an idiot. Why had she gotten so defensive? “Yeah, I guess I am lonely. Sometimes, it’s nice, you know, just to hang out with other dykes and talk about dyke

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. My friend Honey runs a tattoo shop out on Peacock Alley. She’s got an apartment out back, and Friday nights a bunch of us go out there ... just to hang out and be dykes, like you said. There’s Honey and her girlfriend and a couple of old army dykes from Fort Oglethorpe.

  They’re all older than you are — on the wrong side of forty, like me — but we’d be glad to have you if you think your husband wouldn’t mind you having a girls’ night out.”

  “I bet he wouldn’t. God knows he’s been having boys’ nights out often enough. So where is this Peacock Alley?”

  “That’s not really the name of the road. That’s just what locals call the old highway that runs between here and Chattanooga. It’s called Peacock Alley because years ago, when it was a main road, there used to be all these roadside stands that sold those chenille bedspreads with gaudy-colored peacocks on ’em. Those bedspreads’d be hanging on clotheslines, blowing in the breeze. I guess they were tacky, but when I was a little kid, I thought they were beautiful.”

  Lily pictured Jack as a young tomboy, watching the chenille peacocks fluttering in the breeze.

  “You look like you wanna ask me somethin’,” Jack said. “Go ahead. I’ve already made you tell me your life story.”

  “I was just wondering ... people around here, like Ed and Vina ... do they know about you?”

  Jack grinned. “I guess so. I’m not the type to say much about my personal life, but I’ve never bothered to keep it much of a secret either. I think folks in Faulkner County think I’m the way I am on account that my momma leaving and my daddy not knowing how to raise a girl. So I think they feel sorry for me.” She rolled her eyes. “Not that there’s anything to feel sorry for. Of course, given the choice, I guess I’d rather have them pity me than beat me up.”

  “Have you ever thought of moving away?”

  “I did move away for a while — went to college in Chattanooga, then vet school in Knoxville. But I love my farm, and I always knew I’d wind up taking over Daddy’s practice. Besides, it doesn’t matter if I live in a small town or a big town. Dykes turn any town into a small town.”

  Lily laughed. “I think you’ve got something there.” She looked at her Timex. She had been gone a little over three hours. “Well, I’d better go inside. I want to be there when Mimi wakes up.”

  “Okay, well, nice talking to ya. I’ll call you the next time I go to work on somethin’ other than pigs. I figure you’ve drawn your fill of pigs. And hey, maybe I’ll see you over at Honey’s next week?”

  “Maybe so. Bye.”

  Lily entered the living room to see Ben sitting on the sofa, bleary-eyed, still dressed in his T-shirt and boxers. Mimi was wide awake, playing a game that seemed to involve somersaulting over the reclining Mordecai while giggling a lot.

  “She . . . woke . . . up . . . fifteen minutes . . . after you left,” Ben droned. His usually perfectly coiffed hair was as unruly as Mimi’s. “The first thing she said was, ‘Mama gone, B-Jack. Let’s play.’ And that’s what we’ve done, nonstop, for the past three and a half hours. God, taking care of a baby is, like, really tiring, isn’t it?”

  “There’s a news flash.” Lily ran a hand through his spiky hair. “You go back to bed if you want.

  I’ve got her.”

  He trudged back to his bedroom, as if shell-shocked from the unaccustomed childcare.

  “Mama!” Mimi stretched out her arms and hurried toward Lily at a tippy-toeing toddler run.

  Lily scooped up her daughter and held her on her lap. “Guess what I did this morning, Mimi-saurus. I stuck my hand straight up a pig’s patootie!”

 
; “Piggy tootie!” Mimi repeated, and collapsed in a fit of giggles.

  CHAPTER 13

  Lily had been a good girl all week. On Sunday, she had made the potato salad for yet another of the McGillys’ infernal family barbecues. On Tuesday, she had taken Granny McGilly to the optometrist in Callahan, even though she had gone on a five A.M. farm call with Jack that morning and so had gotten only five hours’ sleep. On Wednesday, she had even gone to aerobics with Sheila and Tracee again. All week, she had been nothing but a dutiful imitation wife, granddaughter-in-law, and sister-in-law. And she, for one, was sick of it.

  Ben, Lily knew, was equally tired of playing the respectable small-town family man. This week, when he could have been spending time with Ken, he had been pressured to lunch with Big Ben and his Rotary Club pals, and he halfheartedly had joined in their witticisms about the demands of married life.

  It was out of Lily and Ben’s exhaustion with “the demands of married life” that Lily’s idea for a

  “romantic overnight getaway” was born. Last night, while picking at pasta and complaining about the agonies of compulsory heterosexuality, Lily had thought aloud, “Hmm ... I wonder if your mom would be willing to keep Mimi overnight.”

  “I’d venture to say that nothing would make her happier than having an extended length of time in which to dress her granddaughter in frills and stuff her full of junk food. Why do you ask?”

  “I don’t know...I was just thinking, I’m sure you’d like to spend some time with Ken, and there’s this get-together thing tomorrow night that Jack told me about... all dykes, apparently.”

  “So what are we going to tell my mom? That I’m hoping to finally have sex with this guy I’ve been dating, while you go and familiarize yourself with the Faulkner County, Georgia, chapter of the lesbian nation?”

  “Actually, I was thinking we could put it in the terms of a romantic overnight trip. After all, we’ve been under so much stress lately with the hearing coming up...maybe we want to go away for a night, have some time just for the two of us.”

  “Boy, it’s true what they say about women being devious, isn’t it?” Ben laughed. “Let’s do it.”

  A pinprick of worry stung Lily’s brain. “Of course, it would be the first time I’ve left Mimi overnight.”

  “Hey, don’t worry about that. Mom raised three unruly boys to adulthood; she’s perfectly capable of taking care of one tiny girl.”

  Lily couldn’t push back her anxiety “But what if something goes wrong and we’re not where we’ve said we are?”

  “I’ll tell you what. Ken has a friend who runs a bed-and-breakfast just north of Atlanta. Ken’s been dying to take me there. If he can get us a room for tomorrow night, we could give Mom the bed-and-breakfast’s number. If she calls me there, I’ll call you where you are, and you can go see to Mimi.”

  “Okay, but you have to remember: If the phone rings in your room, you answer it, not Ken.” Lily felt as if she had to resort to the tactics of a double agent just to have a normal evening out. “God, our lives are complicated.”

  “Yup.” Ben flashed one of his uncharacteristically wide smiles. “But I’ll tell you what. I’m willing to resort to all manner of subterfuge to make tomorrow night possible. I’ve been dreaming about a night alone with Ken Woods since I was a freshman in high school!”

  The old road known by the locals as Peacock Alley was a ghost road, marked by crumbling monuments to the tourist trade of the days before the construction of the interstate. Low-slung motor courts with signs announcing AIR CONDITIONING, COLOR TV, and VACANCY dotted the road, and Lily marveled that these little places managed to stay in business. She imagined that the family vacation motels of yesterday became the sites of today’s clandestine trysts.

  A clapboard building with a Confederate flag-bearing sign proclaiming JOHNNY REB’S

  SOUVENIRS made Lily think of the chenille peacock bedspreads that gave this road its nickname. The windows had been painted with yellow block letters reading BEDSPREADS, DISHWARE, and CIVIL

  WAR GIFTS. Lily couldn’t tell if the store was closed for the day or for good.

  As she drove north, toward Fort Oglethorpe, the roadside attractions took on a seedier appeal.

  Concrete block taverns called SHOOTERS and COWBOY’S appeared to be doing a good business, judging from the number of pickup trucks in the parking lot. One bar, the PINK PUSSYCAT, even claimed to have EXOTIC DANCERS. Lily wondered what passed for exotic in rural northern Georgia.

  On her right, exactly where Jack said it would be, was a small brick building with a large sign announcing TATTOOS BY HONEY. Smaller signs on the Store’s windows proclaimed, HEALTH

  BOARD APPROVED and TATTOOS WHILE U WAIT. Lily pulled into the small gravel parking lot and took a deep breath.

  Walking into a roomful of people had never been her favorite thing, and since Jack’s red truck was nowhere to be seen, she’d be walking into a room full of strangers. She considered going home for a dull evening alone with Mordecai, but finally said to herself, “Goddamn it, if I can do aerobics with a bunch of straight Southern Baptist women, surely I can find the courage to walk into a roomful of dykes.”

  She walked around to the rear of the building, as Jack had told her to do, and knocked on the back door. It felt so secretive. She wondered if there was a secret password, like Sappho or something.

  A full-figured, fortyish woman with wavy, naturally golden hair answered the door. Lily noticed right away that the woman’s arms were completely covered by tattoos: a medieval unicorn resting in a garden of vibrantly colored flowers, a fairy with diaphanous wings sprinkling stardust with her magic wand, and a frog in a golden crown squatting philosophically on a lily pad. The designs were more fanciful than what Lily would have chosen for herself, but the artwork was undeniably beautiful.

  “Hey,” the woman said, grinning. Her face was as round, flat, and wide-eyed as a Persian cat’s.

  “You must be Lily.”

  “Urn...yeah. I didn’t know you’d be expecting me.”

  “Jack said you might come by. I kinda recognized you ’cause I didn’t recognize you. We don’t see many new faces round here.” She opened the door wider. “Come on in and meet the gang. I’m Honey, by the way.”

  “Nice to meet you. Love your sleeves.”

  Honey surveyed her tattooed arms with genuine pride. “Thanks. Designed ’em myself. Here, let me introduce you to the usual suspects here. The ingrate hogging the La-Z-Boy over there’s Mick. She’s my old man.”

  “Hey.” Mick raised her Bud tallboy in a half toast. Her hair was cut in a salt-and-pepper dyke spike, and she wore a black Harley-Davidson T-shirt and a black leather jacket — a shocking fashion choice, given that Honey’s apartment was cooled only by two oscillating fans, which were doing nothing more than stirring the hot, soupy air.

  “And over here’s Dale and Sue.”

  On the overstuffed tan sofa sat a couple who were at least as old as Granny McGilly. The butch member of the duo — Dale, Lily presumed — had close-cropped, snow-white hair and wore a Georgia Bulldogs jersey and sweatpants. The femme’s silver hair was shampooed and set, and she wore a lilac shell top with matching slacks. She put a long cigarette to her lips, and Dale dutifully leaned over to light it.

  “Hey, babe,” Sue said to Lily, her voice a husky smoker’s rasp.

  “Lord, girl, how old are you?” Dale asked, her voice having all the subtlety and modulation of Big Ben McGilly’s. “Seventeen?”

  Lily smiled. “Twenty-nine, actually.”

  “What a coincidence!” Dale whooped. “Me, too!”

  “Don’t you pay no attention to her,” Sue said to Lily. “I ain’t heard a word she’s said in thirty years. I just keep her around ’cause she lights my cigarettes.”

  “Now, I’m good for a little more than that,” Dale teased, letting her hand rest on Sue’s knee.

  “Oh, that’s right.” Sue waved her cigarette for emphasis. “You do take the trash out. I
forgot about that.”

  Lily laughed. Butch/femme, it seemed, had never gone out of style in northern Georgia. Lily had always enjoyed the butch/femme dynamic in a postmodern, theatrical, and mainly reserved-for-the bedroom kind of way. But these women played their roles without a trace of irony.

  Settling down in a nest of oversize floral-print cushions on the floor, Lily wondered what the hyper-politically correct women at Athena’s Owl Bookstore in Atlanta would make of these dykes. Would they think these rural women were living their lives according to oppressive patriarchal standards?

  Who cares if they are? Lily thought. The two couples obviously loved each other, and the sexual sparks between them were warming up the room faster than the Georgia summer heat. Lily ached for Charlotte.