She was about to turn back when she heard a low noise somewhere to the left. When she followed it she noticed a red light near the end of the campus. She came just close enough to see the police car, the ambulance, the few people standing by the open door of a large private home. A woman appeared in the doorway. She wore a paramedic’s jacket and pants. Her red hair was short and spiky. In her arms she carried a man in blue silk pajamas and a toad mask. Jaqe turned and headed back to Laurie’s apartment. The next day, in art class, someone told her that President Benson had died of a heart attack during the night.
Two
Snakes and Cakes
At that time in the land of the turtle people did not know what to think of women who had sex with other women. Previous generations knew exactly what to think: that it was physically, morally, and spiritually repugnant. In Jaqe’s time many people stayed with this old-fashioned view; others, however, insisted that the practice did no harm to anyone, while still others considered it a superior approach to life, even commanded by God, whom they pictured as a woman with an axe on a white horse.
Unsure of what to think, some people became unsure of what to say. The first time Jaqe went with Laurie and Louise to an LSU meeting several women debated what to call themselves, insisting that “women-loving women” was a better term than the nationality of a small island thousands of miles away. While Jaqe sympathized with anyone who wanted to discover her real name, she found the discussion tedious, except when Louise suggested that all the women-loving women go to the small island and claim citizenship under the Right of Return.
Jaqe wondered if she really could call herself a woman-loving woman. What would she do, what would she look for, if the universe shifted and Laurie vanished? She had found her name and desire and love all at the same time, so that when Louise talked of coming out, Jaqe knew she had never been in. She tried once to tell Louise that she had not really existed until that night of the Toad Dance, but Louise didn’t seem to understand. “You were just repressed,” she told Jaqe. “The patriarchy buried you so far in the closet you couldn’t even see the door.”
Sometimes Jaqe looked at women in the street to see if she desired them. And sometimes she found herself filled with love, or simply fascinated, like a scientist of femaleness, by breasts and hips and hair. But desire? None of them was Laurie, so how could they excite her?
Laurie had known she desired women since junior high school, when she and a girl named Carol Hamet had cut afternoon classes to imitate the poses found in dirty pictures hidden by Carol’s father in the attic of Carol’s house. Carol had wanted only to create “tableaux”; Laurie, however, had wanted to improvise and experiment, until finally Carol declared her “sick” and kicked her out. For several days Laurie tried to speak to Carol at school and phone her at night, always without an answer. At the end of the week, Carol announced to her friends in the cafeteria that she and a boy named Bryan Forbes were going steady. With a superior effort of will Laurie managed to finish her lunch without crying or even looking up as Carol kissed Bryan and ran her hands up and down his back. Two days later Laurie opened Carol’s locker at school—they had traded combinations—and left a pink rose and a note. “You have found normality,” the note read, “but I have found my life’s work.” She made sure to change her own lock before Carol would have a chance to reply.
In high school Laurie pursued her vocation with ambiguous defiance. She cut her hair short and wore jeans and a leather jacket, but so did many other girls. A classmate took her aside once and warned her that she looked “a little bit like a lesbian,” and maybe she should wear makeup or something. “Maybe I want to look this way,” was all Laurie could say, an equivocation that disgusted her whenever she thought about it. She wore a pinkie ring, a tribal sign, but only to those in the tribe, or those who had read the same books as Laurie. In her senior year she sometimes wore a green scarf to school on Thursdays, for high school a more open declaration, but she usually left the scarf in her locker during classes.
All this changed several months before graduation, with the arrival in Laurie’s school of a girl named Anne Lewison. Anne looked like no one Laurie had ever seen—long straight black skirts, a black blazer, hair pulled back and held with a filigreed clip, pale makeup and red lipstick, eyebrows plucked to a thin arch. Anne’s father was a violinist recently hired by the local orchestra. Anne herself played the cello, though she refused to join the school orchestra, despite a speech by the school principal denouncing “those with God-given talents who isolate themselves in pathetic arrogance.” During this lecture, Anne sat motionless, with a slight smile and single finger extended along her left cheek. Sitting half a row away, Laurie couldn’t take her eyes off her.
It did not occur to Laurie that Anne Lewison might have noticed her, or that Anne—who wore makeup and skirts—might be a woman-loving woman. One Friday afternoon, between classes, Laurie saw Anne coming toward her outside the gym. She was concentrating so hard on not staring that she almost didn’t see Anne standing in front of her. “You’re Lauren Cohen,” Anne said. Laurie nodded. Anne said, “There’s a woman’s bar across the river. They have dancing every Friday night. Would you like to go with me?”
Laurie found herself shivering. She was afraid her teeth would chatter. She said, “I don’t have a car.”
Anne smiled. “I do.”
For the rest of that year Anne instructed Laurie in the theory and practice of her life’s work. After they graduated, and Laurie went to college on the East Coast, and Anne to an experimental communal school out West, they promised to send each other copies of their diaries and to long for their school breaks when they could “fulfill the longing of our isolated bodies”—as Anne wrote inside the cover of a book of women’s poetry she gave to Laurie for Valentine’s Day. Despite Anne’s promises, Laurie was terrified the day she saw Anne to the airport. Anne would find some poet or sculptor and forget Laurie had ever existed. Or worse, she would lie in her sculptor’s arms and joke about the small-town girl she’d left behind.
In the end it was Laurie who first stopped writing, telling herself that classes took up all her time, but knowing that if she wrote she would have to leave out what really mattered—the women in the cafés and small theaters, the muscles on a particular woman in a bowling alley, the way a certain woman looked in a sleeveless T-shirt as she held up a banner during a women’s antiviolence march. Just before the spring break of their freshman year, Anne wrote that she was staying at school to rehearse with a string quartet. That night Laurie went to an all-night reading of the works of a lesbian novelist. During the break after a book about pioneer women, Laurie left with an Englishwoman whose skin Laurie would later describe as “legendary.”
With great diligence, Laurie began creating her own legend. With a small group of women she organized theatrical, and successful, protests against heterosexism and the university’s refusal to allow a lesbian student union. She picked up women in bars and brought them to lectures in literary history. She sent roses to women professors. And she seduced a string of students, many of whom had confessed they might be gay, and could she advise them?
Yet in her final year she began to long for graduation as much as she feared it. “Lauren Cohen” had become a performance, with a bored star and no new routines. When Toad Fever took over the school Laurie had no plans to go to the dance, until the LSU pleaded with her that they needed their leader to help them remind the heterosexists that women-loving women would not be driven back into hiding. For several days, Laurie tried to think of a costume, until, the afternoon before the dance, she saw something thin and white lying on the grass outside the library. When she picked it up, it took her a moment to recognize the bleached bone of a bird’s claw.
When Laurie and Jaqe had been together a month, a couple of women at an LSU meeting accused Laurie of neglect. “You’re thinking with your cunt,” one of them told her, and the other said it was a wonder she didn’t stay at home all day baking cooki
es. Laurie told them to go to hell and resigned the presidency.
That night, in bed, Jaqe asked, “Am I bad for you?” Laurie tried to kiss her, but Jaqe turned away. “I’ve got to know,” she said. “I don’t want to ever be bad for you.”
Laurie sat up. With her left hand on her heart and her right arm flung out, she declared, “You saved my life.”
“Be serious. You had a wonderful life. You’re important. Louise just about worships you. Or she did, until I stole you away.”
Laurie kissed her shoulder. “I was dead.”
Jaqe twisted away. “Don’t say that. Not even as a joke.”
“It’s no joke,” Laurie said, but she was grinning. “I was just too stupid to lie down, like the mummy in one of those old black-and-white horror movies. You revived me. You and Mother Night.” Jaqe scrambled up and started to get dressed. Laurie said, “What are you doing?”
“I told you not to say that.” When Laurie tried to grab her arm she jerked loose. She was already putting on her shorts when Laurie said, “I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again. I promise. Do you want me to bake some cookies?”
Jaqe sat down on the edge of the bed. “You don’t know how.”
“I could learn. I could make special Goddess cookies. Shaped like a pregnant woman.”
Jaqe let Laurie unzip her shorts. “I just wanted to know if I was good for you.”
Laurie kissed her belly button, then slid her face down to rub against Jaqe’s pubic hair. She said, “You did for me what no one else could ever do. You got me to clean my apartment.” Jaqe laughed and finished taking off her clothes.
Laurie’s apartment was in a once-grand building in the poor neighborhood down the hill from the university. There were three rooms (counting the small kitchen) and very little furniture—a foam mattress on a bed made from a door, a wobbly desk Laurie had made herself, a pair of chairs Laurie and a friend had found on the street. Next door lived a woman, her small daughter whose face was always smeared with chocolate and jam, and sometimes the woman’s boyfriend, who came late at night and played loud music till dawn. On those nights, Laurie tried pounding on the walls until the plaster fell in small piles on the rug she’d bought at the Salvation Army. At other times she played her own music or sang very loudly.
Jaqe got Laurie to paint the walls, throw out the rug, pile the books and papers on the desk or against the wall, and buy new sheets when the old ones revealed stains left by earlier lovers. Together they scraped the grease off the kitchen. For their first month’s anniversary Jaqe gave Laurie a set of kitchen curtains. To Jaqe’s surprise Laurie gave her a pair of plants, tall and leafy like small trees, to stand on either side of the living room window like guardians against the world beyond the freshly cleaned glass.
Jaqe told her parents her new name before she told them about Laurie. “Jake?” her mother said on the phone. “That’s a boy’s name. Look, Jacqueline—”
“Jaqe,” Jaqe corrected her. The discussion lasted five minutes, during which Jaqe corrected her mother, and then her father, a combined total of eight times. “People will think you’re a lesbian,” her father said.
“It’s not a man’s name,” Jaqe said. “It’s my name, and I’m a woman.”
Jaqe knew she’d have to tell them soon about her new life. Summer was coming, and her parents would expect her home. They would expect her to get a summer job, and lie by the lake on weekends, and pull weeds from the garden, and talk about boys. And Laurie was graduating, with an acceptance to a graduate program in women’s studies from a school hundreds of miles away.
Jaqe found out about this last problem by accident, for Laurie had neglected to mention it, saying only that she “wasn’t sure” what she was doing after graduation.
“Shouldn’t we make some kind of plans?” Jaqe would say, and Laurie would kiss her and promise to talk about it. One afternoon while Laurie was in class, Jaqe found the graduate school acceptance letter lying on the floor by Laurie’s desk. Until that moment, Jaqe had thought they would never fight, that nothing Laurie could do could ever make her angry. “What am I supposed to do when you go to your seminars?” she screamed.
“I don’t know that I’m going,” Laurie said.
“What do you mean you don’t know? What did you tell the school? Did you write them you were coming?”
Laurie shrugged her beautiful shoulders, wide and delicate all at once. Her loose rayon shirt rippled over her body. “Well, yeah,” she said. “But I can change it. I can write and tell them I’ve changed my mind.”
“I don’t want you to change your mind. If you want to study women, go and do it.”
Laurie grinned. “I could just study you.”
Jaqe was having trouble breathing. She felt like she would die if she stayed angry a moment longer. She just looked at Laurie but her face must have shown something, because Laurie’s grin vanished and she looked scared as she held out her arms for Jaqe to come home.
Jaqe knew she had to tell her parents before the summer, before Laurie’s graduation. “What am I going to do?” she asked Louise one night. “They can’t even accept my name.”
Louise sat back and crossed her arms. “Now you know what it’s like,” she said.
Three weeks before exams Jaqe called her parents to say she was coming home for a long weekend. “To rest up for the big push,” she said lightly, and then added, “And I’d like to bring a friend with me.”
“A boy?” her mother asked.
“No, a girl—a woman.”
When Jaqe and Laurie arrived in the train station late Thursday evening, Jaqe’s mother wrapped her arms around her while her father shook hands with Laurie. In the car, Jaqe’s mother talked all the way home, telling Jaqe about scandals in the neighborhood, problems at work, and pregnancies in the family. At home she continued her report while setting out cheese and bread and filling the coffeepot. She finally paused after they’d eaten. “Well,” she said after a moment, “I guess you’re tired. Come on, Laurie, I’ll show you your room.”
“She’s staying with me,” Jaqe said. All three of them stared at her, Laurie as surprised as Jaqe’s parents. On the train Jaqe had asked Laurie not to make a fuss about the bedrooms. The spare was upstairs, Jaqe explained, next to hers, and Laurie could just slip next door after Jaqe’s parents had gone to sleep. Laurie had said, “We’d better not forget to rumple the sheets in the guest room.”
“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Lang said. “There’s plenty of room. It’s no trouble really. I’ve already put fresh sheets on the bed.”
“That’s not what she means,” Mr. Lang said. He took a step toward Laurie, who crossed her arms and shifted her weight onto one foot. “Who the hell do you think you are?” he said.
Laurie said, “Your daughter’s lover.”
“Jesus Mary,” Mr. Lang said.
“Please, Allan,” Mrs. Lang said. “Do we have to fight?”
“You know what she’s saying, don’t you?”
“Can’t we all talk about it in the morning?”
“In the morning it’ll be too late!”
Laurie said, “It’s already too late.”
“I want you out of here,” Mr. Lang told her.
Jaqe said, “If she goes, I’m going with her.” Horrified as she was, she still wanted to giggle at hearing those words coming out of her.
“This is ridiculous,” Mrs. Lang said. She asked her husband, “Where do you want them to go? A motel?” She turned to Laurie. “You’re sure you won’t use the guest room? It really is very nice.” Her face quivered with suppressed tears. Jaqe half expected her to say, “Pretty please.”
Laurie glanced at Jaqe, who stared at the rug. “Sure,” she told Jaqe’s mother. “I’d be delighted.”
The next day, with Jaqe’s father at work, Jaqe’s mother took Jaqe and Laurie to two supermarkets, a wholesale beer and soda outlet, three malls, a diner for lunch, and a chain ice cream parlor for an afternoon snack. The moment they got home she sa
id, “Look at the time. Your father will be home and we haven’t even started dinner.”
Laurie whispered to Jaqe, “Glory be.”
During dinner, Jaqe’s parents filled the air with questions about life as a college girl, more stories about neighbors and descriptions of local politics, and the outrageous plans for a garbage processing plant only a half mile from the Langs’ housing development. Laurie expressed great interest in anything Jaqe’s parents said, asking questions and sympathizing with family problems, expressing shock and outrage at the corruption of the town council. After dinner, Jaqe’s mother promised ice cream if everyone would gather in the family room to watch television.
Jaqe said, “I’m going for a walk.” When Laurie followed her toward the door Jaqe whispered that she wanted a few minutes alone.
“I have to stay and watch TV with your parents?” Laurie asked. Jaqe suggested she go upstairs. “Say you have to study. You do, don’t you?”
Outside, Jaqe told herself she should think, make some decision, though she wasn’t sure about what. Instead, she just walked up and down the gentle hills of the development, her head down, her hands in the pockets of her father’s golf jacket.
On the way back, she found a stone. It was flat, elliptical, and crossed on both sides with scores of lines. Jaqe squinted at it. If she looked at the lines a certain way they formed pictures—on one side a kind of tree with a wavy central trunk, branches like arms out to either side, and a tangle of lines at the bottom like packed roots. The roots themselves seemed to form an image, though Jaqe could not decide what they reminded her of. At the top, an oval shape made Jaqe think of an egg in the uppermost branches. The other side was even clearer. A white column up the middle with a line underneath it looked like a ghostly ferryman standing in a boat. The ferryman even held a pole, a diagonal line that ran from one corner of the stone to the other. Jaqe put the stone in her jeans and headed home.
Godmother Night Page 3
