Bend

by Nancy Hedin

  “Why’d you move here? What did you do?”

  “Let’s see. What did I do? Do you want my parents’ version or the college’s version?”

  “I just want to know the truth.”

  “It’s all true to somebody, Lorraine.” Charity leaned in and let her shoulder nudge me, but I stayed on the rock as close to Charity as I could manage without getting in the way of her sketching.

  “It didn’t seem like you came home to Bend by your own choice. What happened?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be flippant, but I have lived with so many stories and revisions of stories of what I did that I can’t always remember what’s true. No, that’s not it.” She looked at me. “I will always remember what I did. It’s just that I learned that sometimes what really happened doesn’t matter in the bigger picture.”

  “What happened matters to me.”

  Charity put one sketch aside and began another one in charcoal. I thought for a minute she wasn’t going to tell me, but after a little while, she put her charcoal stick aside and put on her mittens and began her story.

  Charity told how Jolene and her parents had moved to Bend when Charity had started her freshman year of college. She had spent the last two years completing her general education credits at a private school in St. Paul. Her parents had told her that if she kept her grades up and stayed out of trouble, they would foot the bill for her to finish a four-year art education degree.

  “I bet my father thought I’d lose interest in more school, so he wouldn’t have to keep his promise. He probably hoped I’d fall in love with some nice young man and get married and have a dozen babies.” She removed her mittens again. I longed to reach out and hold her hands and warm them myself, but I sat on my own hands so I didn’t do something premature and stupid. Charity sketched in birch trees, their white bark peeling and curling back. Some thorny bushes and sharp-bladed tall grasses poked through the snow cover in the foreground.

  “I fell in love, with a woman. She was older and a part-time instructor named Kelly. I never told my parents. Mom would have cried and asked what she did wrong. She’d have scheduled me with a psychiatrist. It would have been worse if Dad found out. He’d insist on an exorcism.”

  Word had gotten back to the administration at the school that one of the teachers was in a sexual relationship with a student. The woman was only a couple of years older than Charity, but she was technically an adjunct faculty member. Charity’s parents could have raised holy hell even though Charity was a legal adult. Charity told the school administrators that she wouldn’t testify against the woman and said she wouldn’t tell her minister father what had happened as long as the school didn’t either. She’d made a deal that she would tell her dad she was kicked off campus for too much partying. The school administrator, who was probably very relieved, had gone along with the lie and told Charity she was not to contact the instructor again and vice versa.

  Charity took some colored pencils from her tackle box and added shades of orange behind the trees, each value darker than the one before, and in no time what looked like a winter-sky–encompassed sunrise came into focus. Charity had transformed the tranquil winter scene into a raging fire that raced over the ground, through the trees, and poured toward the bushes.

  “I had to leave Kelly, my friends, and everything. Now my parents watch me all the time like they think I’m some sort of alcoholic, and they don’t understand that my heart is broken missing Kelly, not parties.” Her eyes teared up. “I can’t tell them. They’ll think I’m broken. They won’t get that I can’t help that I love women. I didn’t choose it like the way a person chooses which pop to drink or whether to write with a pen or pencil.” Charity continued sketching.

  “When did you know you were, you know?”

  “Queer, odd, homosexual, lesbian? You have to learn to say the words, Lorraine.”

  “Well, when did you know you were lesbian?” I choked a bit on my own words.

  “Looking back, I think my first inkling came when I was really young—maybe five or six. I loved my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Anderson. I loved the way she looked, the way she smelled, the way she moved. I brought her dumb presents, my cookies from snack time. That was just the start. I had crush after crush on female teachers and women at church. I had no interest in boys, but I tried to be interested like my friends.”

  “I tried too,” I said. “I even dated boys from my class. I didn’t hate it exactly, but I didn’t like it.”

  “Tell me about it. My dad brought home boys from whatever church he was leading, or boys he heard about when he was meeting with other pastors. I have been groped by so many so-called Christian boys and minister’s sons that I threatened to run away if he didn’t stop.”

  “Did he stop?”

  “Are you kidding? My dad never gives up. He arranged dates for me right up until I moved into the dorm and he moved to Bend,” she said. “Jolene even tried to get him to lay off.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I tried to ignore him. Other times I made up lurid stories about having sex with every one of the boys he tried to set me up with.”

  “You loved Kelly?” I made myself say the name.

  “Yep, I think I did. Too late now.” Charity stopped drawing and smiled as she handed me her sketchbook and wrapped her arms around herself.

  Orange, cadmium orange, raw sienna, and burnt sienna flames licked and lurched forward over the grasses in the sketch. Charity took the sketchbook back. With her left hand she grabbed vine charcoal sticks and brushed them and broke them onto the paper where the consuming fire released choking ivory and black smoke. Charity made the sky even angrier, and she covered the midsections of the trees with crimson and violet. The roots and trunks came up from the ground, but waded in a lake of fire.

  I wanted to ask if Charity was really over Kelly, and where Kelly was. How could it be over? Were they still in love? But my throat stung and tightened from the sight of the sketch. Charity had made the fires of hell consume every living thing in their path. Was that what it felt like for her being away from Kelly? I took a deep breath and steeled myself. I found the nerve to ask Charity something.

  “Would you go with me to my sister’s wedding? I mean, I have to go because I’m in it, but would you come too?”

  Charity gathered up her art supplies and moved closer to me. She wasn’t teary anymore.

  “Lorraine, are you asking me on a date?”

  I could swear I saw more color coming to Charity’s face, but maybe it was just the reflection of my blushing mug. There was no good reason to expect a college woman to have any interest in a high school senior like me, but something gave me reason to hope. Charity smiled and leaned into my shoulder. It was like a jolt of courage.

  “Have you ever been to a small-town wedding?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Well after the serious stuff at the church, things loosen up. There’s a reception-like dinner at the dance hall. They hold the dinner there for a couple reasons. For one thing, most people get pretty drunk because there’s an open bar the first two hours. People drink fast when the booze is free. With all that drinking the parents don’t want folks driving to a new place for the dance. They all hope that the dancing afterward and drinks no longer being free will sober people up in time to drive home. Another thing, the men would rather drink than dance, so women dance with women.” I looked at Charity to see if she caught my drift. Charity was way ahead of me. She dropped her sketchbook and sprang off the rock.

  “Lorraine, are you saying a gal could hold another gal like this?” Charity grabbed me around my back with her right arm, took my right hand into her left hand, and pulled me into a standing position.

  You couldn’t have slipped frog’s hair in the space between our bodies. I had never been held by another woman except for brief hugs of congratulations by my parents, friends, and church folks. This was not the same. Electricity shot through my body.

  “Could
a gal hold another gal this close?” Charity pressed against me. Our faces were only inches apart.

  “Yes, and maybe a couple of gals could keep dancing even after the other dancers went home,” I said before I twirled Charity.

  “Well, we are two gals who shouldn’t miss that opportunity.” Charity spun me around again and looked at me with narrowed eyes like she was going to say something, or maybe even kiss me. Then she let me go. “Maybe being exiled to Bend isn’t so bad after all.”

  Becky married Kenny Hollister on the second Saturday in January. It was still five months before we would graduate from high school and turn eighteen, and six months before she was due to deliver a baby. She had registered for gifts at the Mills Fleet Farm, the same place Kenny bought supplies for his hogs. It didn’t matter that her grades were the highest in our class, she couldn’t win the scholarship because she was pregnant. I had hoped Becky would just postpone her college enrollment until she had the money, but Becky canceled it entirely, and seemingly without regret.

  I was Becky’s reluctant maid of honor, and flanked her with three other girls in pink dresses that could have been seen from outer space and had no practical purpose beyond that little jaunt down the aisle for Becky. Wearing the long-sleeved, pink frilly dress; the pink-dyed shoes; the panty hose; and having my curls pinned back with bobby pins and plastered with hairspray didn’t chafe me as much as I had imagined. I was preoccupied with love and lust. I was about to have my first real date with Charity.

  Getting through the ceremony and pictures was a trial. I swore I could feel Charity’s eyes on me from where Charity and Jolene sat as spectators. To make matters worse, Kenny’s cousin, Frank Hollister, was my escort. Frank was best man in the wedding sense and he had a body right off the cover of Sports Illustrated, but his brawn and chiseled features were wasted on me. He smelled nice, but it irked me that he didn’t have the sense to keep his hands off me. Finally, after two warnings and one sharp blow to his instep, Frank stopped touching me.

  Becky’s long, layered white gown bulged at the waist, but still created a sparkly universe around her. Her veil gave no clue that behind its lace, and her glowing face, was a mind that had scored the highest marks anybody in Bend had ever gotten in the college-preparation tests. Her high scores didn’t mean anything. She’d buckled under pressure from Momma, the school superintendent, and Pastor Grind to finish her school year at home, like she was somehow contagious. Kenny had quit already.

  For the wedding, Momma wore her new blue dress and had a perm. Dad wore his one and only suit—a black specimen with thin lapels that I had only ever seen in funeral pictures and slouching on a metal hanger in the hall closet. He’d had a haircut and a close shave. He looked Paul Newman handsome. His skin smelled like Old Spice cologne, and his breath was minty at the wedding and smelled like Grain Belt Beer at the reception.

  Becky and Kenny were hitched without a hitch. Pictures didn’t take very long because of a lack of relatives. Kenny’s folks were twenty years older than Momma and Dad, and they hadn’t come to the wedding. Word was that Mr. Hollister was too sick and senile for Mrs. Hollister to leave him at home, and nobody’d volunteered to stay with him. Kenny’s two older sisters came from out of town, but left immediately after the ceremony like they were wanted criminals.

  The reception dragged on and on. Appetite eluded me. I was too nervous in anticipation of dancing with Charity at the wedding dance. I passed up the deviled eggs, potato salad, sliced turkey and ham on white buns, and five shades of Jell-O. The cake, three tiers of white pound cake and lard-based frosting, didn’t tempt me at all. I nibbled dove- and rose-shaped mints to keep my breath fresh.

  Kenny’s buddies clinked their glasses repeatedly so that the newlyweds had to kiss. Considering that Becky was already three months pregnant, I didn’t understand the titillation of making them kiss each other.

  Bend wedding traditions dictated that the dance immediately followed the reception. Becky and Kenny would have rather had a DJ, but Momma and Dad were paying. The band was five white men in their sixties who looked like they would have rather been playing the hundred waltzes and four thousand polkas they knew than the dozen rock songs that were all older than me. They played trumpet, tuba, drums, accordion, keyboard, and occasionally molested an electric guitar.

  I loved it. I sat with Charity and Jolene, where a constant string of blurry-eyed boys paraded over and asked Jolene to dance. Older boys and young men sniffed around Charity and asked her to dance, but she turned them all down. Charity only danced with me.

  I held Charity in my arms and danced the “Beer Barrel Polka,” the “Too Fat Polka,” and “Hoop-Dee-Doo.” I cursed the few rock songs they played because it meant I had to let Charity go. I wasn’t brave enough to insist we dance to the couple of slow songs the band played. I wondered if what I was feeling was what Becky felt as she twirled with Kenny. I couldn’t know for certain, but I doubted my feeling that good hurt anybody else.

  When the dance ended, Charity and I lingered in a booth. I people-watched and narrated the scene for Charity. The band members packed up, the men red-faced and spent. Becky massaged her lower back, tired after a long day of celebration with another person inside her. Kenny high-fived with everybody and hugged his drunken school buddies. Twitch held court at the bar, surrounded by a mixture of married and unmarried women giving audience to his stories and jokes. He ran his own little rodeo in his sport coat, dressy cowboy boots, and hat.

  “Just look at Twitch, Charity. I don’t know what it is about him.” I leaned in to whisper. “Those women look ready to lasso him, tie him up like a calf, but take him home and use him like a bull.”

  From the middle of the dance floor, Dad jumped up and down while he laughed and pulled streamers loose from the rafters. Momma positioned herself at the dance hall door and thanked each person for coming, telling them to drive home safely in a tone that sounded more like an order than a good wish. She probably eyed people to make certain they hadn’t stolen any glasses or plates.

  Pastor Grind made an appearance, didn’t dance, and stopped at our table twice, I suppose to make certain Charity wasn’t drinking. Little did he know what was really transpiring at our table.

  I flirted mercilessly with Charity—wrote silly love poems for her on bar napkins, told her how much I liked dancing with her, and I was just about to ask Charity to drive me home when Momma appeared and declared that I would need to drive the station wagon home. Dad had drunk his usual couple of beers and Momma wouldn’t let him drive.

  “Can’t you drive him home?”

  “I’m just too tired, dear,” Momma said.

  “Wait, I can’t. I’m not allowed to drive the station wagon until I’m twenty-six.” I thought I had found a loophole that appealed to Momma’s zeal for rules and consequences. “You said so yourself.”

  Nothing worked. Momma suspended my driving suspension for that trip home. I waved a weak good-bye to Charity. I was left to wonder if I would have been kissed on my first real date.

  Winter melted into spring. Lo and behold, in early May it was announced that I had won the McGerber scholarship. It was what I wanted, but I was still mad as hell. I had wanted to beat Becky fair and square over grades, not over somebody else’s morals and idea of what God expects. Becky had the better grades, but she couldn’t have the scholarship because she got pregnant while still in high school. I was enraged on Becky’s behalf and also scared that the same beast with morality claws could be coming for me next.

  It just all felt weird. I had a room to myself because Becky lived with Kenny and completed her schoolwork from there, but I couldn’t sleep in there anymore. I tossed and turned and said things waiting for Becky to yell something at me, but then I remembered she wasn’t in the upper bunk. I visited Becky and listened to the new bride and expectant mother talk about God’s hand fluttering in her womb and Biblical names for the baby. I was kind of excited about being an aunt, but not if I had to call the kid Hezekiah o
r something weird.

  I studied, and worked at the diner and with Twitch. I saw Charity whenever I could, which made me both terribly excited and scared out of my wits. She was older than me, she’d already had a girlfriend before that she’d loved, so why would she ever care about a seventeen-year-old nobody? I met her at the library. We took walks. I dreamed of what it would be like to kiss her, but I didn’t try anything and I didn’t sit still enough for her to kiss me even if she wanted to. I insulated my heart to protect against breakage.

  When graduation day finally arrived, Becky and Kenny came to the ceremony, where classmates clustered around them and made polite conversation even though I’d heard some of the same people make snide remarks behind their backs. Becky didn’t blink. She held her head up above her ripe belly and greeted and God-blessed all those two-faced well-wishers. I wished I could punch each one of them for her, but I was proud that she was a better scholar and a better person than me.

  Both Becky and I finished high school, but only I sang a sappy song with other members of the Bend senior choir. Only I was allowed to wear a cap and gown and be on the stage with the rest of the senior class. I accepted my diploma but refused to shake the superintendent’s hand, because he was part of the stubbornness and shame that left Becky in the bleacher seats.

  After I collected my awards, I was expected to make the type of speech that most valedictorians of small high schools make. I was supposed to talk about new beginnings for graduates and how our parents, teachers, churches, and towns were the foundations upon which we would build our strong characters. I spoke very briefly and choked back tears.

  “I thank my dad and momma for raising me on the most beautiful land in the world. I thank Dr. Benjamin Twitchell for teaching me about animals and showing me the job I want for my whole life. I thank my sister, Becky, for showing me how to study. I wish all my classmates and every person here all the things I wish for myself. I wish you the opportunity to go to college if you want. I wish you the opportunity to have the job that makes you happy. I wish you the opportunity to fall in love and have your parents, church, school, and friends be happy for you. Thank you for your attention and good luck.”