Laurie’s eyes fixed on the ground. “I guess so,” she said. She straightened up. “Let’s take a walk.”
They headed down Church Street to the fountain, a Victorian display of stone flowers and winged nymphs. A few children splashed in the water at the bottom of the statue while their mothers sat on benches ringing the fountain. Laurie said, “Why can’t grown-ups do that? What do you think people would say if you and I ran in the water, shrieking and flapping our hands?”
“Laurie—” Jaqe said. She stared at the edge of the sidewalk, squinting against the splash of sun coming off the water.
Laurie kept walking, even speeding up as if she wanted to get away. Finally she stopped, shook her head, and turned and came back. She said, “Let’s talk about it later, okay?”
“No,” Jaqe said. “It’s not okay at all. I don’t understand how you can, I don’t know, act like we’re on a picnic or something.”
“I’m not acting like we’re on a picnic. I just…I just can’t talk here.”
“What’s wrong with here?”
“It’s where I grew up. Why can’t we wait till we get home?”
“That’s hours, Laurie. I can’t sit on the bus, looking over the scenery and talking about the weather. Your father almost raped me.” She thought of the cut on her leg, the pain, how it had swollen and turned green, and she thought of the candle sputtering out in the meadow.
“Shh,” Laurie said, and actually put up her hands with the fingers spread. When she saw what she was doing, she dropped her hands. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Jaqe said, “I’m not going to shut up. I don’t care if everybody here has known you since you were a baby jumping up and down in that fountain. We can’t just forget about this.”
“I’m not planning to forget about it. I promise we’ll talk about it later.”
“It’ll just get harder. It’s not just the rape. I trusted them. I trusted them like my own parents. I trusted you.”
Laurie said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“How could you let him—” Jaqe stopped, dizzy and out of breath. She had a strange sensation that Laurie was rushing away from her. When Laurie touched her shoulder, Jaqe made a frightened noise.
Laurie said, “It’s all right, honey.”
Jaqe shook her head. “Let me alone.”
“You don’t look good. You’ve got to get out of the sun.” Laurie took Jaqe’s bag and led her to a bench under a tree a few yards from the fountain. Some kids were sitting there, eating ice cream from a small family grocery across the street. Laurie told them, “My friend’s sick. Can we sit down?” One of the kids grimaced and the other rolled her eyes, but they moved. “We must be getting old,” Laurie said to Jaqe. “They think we’re grown-ups.”
Jaqe bent forward, her eyes focused on a small ring of pebbles lying in the grass. They looked very far away, like a prehistoric ruin seen from up in the sky. She took a deep breath, then another. The dizziness was passing.
“Are you okay?” Laurie asked.
Jaqe sat up. “You’ve got to stop pretending,” she said.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You knew, Laurie. That’s why you wanted me to come shopping with you.”
“I just wanted your company.”
“Don’t lie to me. You were scared. You knew what he’d do if you left me alone with him.” Laurie didn’t answer. “God,” Jaqe said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What was I supposed do, tell you you better come along or my dad might attack you? How could I say something like that?”
“So you did know.”
“I didn’t know,” Laurie whispered.
“You just said—”
“I was scared.”
“Why were you scared? What were you scared of?”
“I’m sorry, honey. Really I am. I’m so sorry.”
Jaqe couldn’t look at her. She said, “How did you know?”
“I didn’t. Not really. That’s why I didn’t say anything. I was just scared—”
“Why were you scared?” Laurie didn’t answer. “Did he tell you?” Jaqe asked.
“Tell me?”
“Did he say, ‘Laurie, you go off with your mother, I want to have some fun with Jaqe’?”
“No! Jesus, Jaqe, do you think I’d let him say something like that?”
“He told me you knew. That you approved.”
“Goddamn him,” Laurie said. “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him.”
“He said the two of you had an agreement. ‘Share and share alike’ he called it.”
“That’s insane. You didn’t believe him, did you?”
“He said I was the first one to complain.”
“That fucking bastard,” Laurie said. She jumped up as if she’d run back to the housing development.
“Sit down,” Jaqe said. Laurie was marching back and forth. “Please sit down, honey. I need you to talk to me.” Not looking at Jaqe, Laurie came back to the bench. Jaqe said, “Why would he say such a thing?”
“Because he’s crazy. Because he deserves to lie in a pit with women throwing rocks at him.”
“He didn’t get the idea from something, maybe something you said?”
“No!”
“Then how could you know what he was going to do?”
“I don’t know. How many times do I have to tell you?”
“But you were scared. That’s not normal, Laurie. People don’t worry about their fathers raping their girlfriends as soon as they leave the house.” Laurie said nothing. “Please,” Jaqe said. “Please, honey. I’ve got to know.”
“You promise you won’t leave me?”
Jaqe hugged her. She said, “I’ll never leave you.”
“And you won’t hate me?”
“I promise I’ll never hate you.” Silently she added, And I always mean what I say.
Jaqe let go of Laurie, except for Laurie’s hand, which she held in both of hers. Laurie lifted her head and stared across the street, as if she wanted to read the specials listed in the grocery window. She said, “He did it before.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“He attacked—he raped one of my friends.”
“Oh my God,” Jaqe said. “When?”
“Three years ago. I was with a girl named Margaret. She was one of the ones who started the LSU. There was me and Margaret and Sharon and Judy.” She stopped for a moment, and Jaqe wondered if she was going to have to keep pushing her. But then Laurie said, “Margaret was really pretty.” She smiled briefly and added, “Not as pretty as you, but you know what I mean. Petite. Cute. The kind of woman no one would ever take for a dyke. Sometimes on marches, like Gay Pride, reporters would come up to her and say, ‘Are you a lesbian?’ Like they wanted to add, ‘How could someone as pretty as you be a lesbian?’ I used to get so pissed off.” She sighed. “Anyway, Margaret and my father got along really great.”
“Like me.”
Laurie laughed, a sound like a bark. “Yeah. We’d go home on weekends, or my folks would come to the city and take us to dinner. And they’d bring Margaret little presents sometimes. I remember once on Valentine’s Day, they sent this silly ornate card, a big velvet heart, with a special message for a daughter-in-law. And wherever it said son, they’d crossed it out and written daughter.”
“Sounds sick.”
“Yeah, well, everyone at the DCC thought it was really great. They were all having trouble with their parents, and my folks just seemed different. Special.”
Jaqe nodded. She remembered everyone telling her stories of how special Laurie’s parents were. Everyone including Laurie.
“Anyway,” Laurie said, “we came home one weekend. To get away from the dorm. I was living in the dorm then.” She stopped, took a deep breath. “My mother wanted to show me something at the temple. Some damn project she was working on in the sisterhood. We took Ellen—no, that’s not right—Ellen had gone to a friend’s house.”
“
And Margaret stayed home with your father?” Jaqe could see the wetness glistening in Laurie’s eyes.
Laurie said, “He offered to cut her hair.”
Jaqe said nothing. Nauseated, she became scared the dizziness would come back. She held on tight to Laurie’s hand.
Laurie said, “I came home and he was watching television. Can you believe it? The fucking sonofabitch was watching some goddamn hockey game. Can you believe it?”
“Where was Margaret?” Jaqe said.
“In the bedroom. My room. She was all wrapped up in a couple of blankets. I mean, she’d put her clothes back on, and then she’d put the blankets all around her. She wouldn’t talk to me, Jaqe. It took me, I don’t know, five minutes or something, to get her to tell me what had happened.”
“What did you do?”
“I ran and screamed at him. I think I even threatened to kill him. Shit. I wish I had.”
“And he denied it.”
“Yeah. Said he had no idea what I was talking about.”
Just like today, Jaqe thought. She said, “And your mother?”
“Backed him up. Said Margaret must be crazy. Fucking bitch.”
Just like today, Jaqe thought. And, Laurie, how could you let him do it again? To me? She said, “You could have called the police.”
“You know how hard that is with lesbians.”
“If there was…if there was penetration, you could have proved it.”
“C’mon, Jaqe. They would have just said she went out and screwed some local guy and then accused my father to cover it up.”
“You could have tried.” And they could try now, she knew. Skip the bus, walk into the Thorny Woods police station. But it would just be her word against Bill’s. This time—thank the Goddess—there hadn’t been any penetration. “What did you do?” she said.
“Margaret went back to school. She had a car and she wanted to be alone. So I took the bus. When I got back to the dorm I went to find her. She didn’t want to see me. She didn’t want to speak to me. She didn’t blame me, she said, but she just couldn’t be with me.” She looked at Jaqe. “You won’t leave me, will you?”
Jaqe shook her head. “I told you,” she said, “I’ll never leave you.” Laurie looked like she would start crying again, but instead she just sat there, bent over with her hands clasped. Jaqe flinched at the harshness of her own voice as she said, “What about the others?”
“There weren’t any others,” Laurie said. “Margaret was the only one. I swear it.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean the others at school. What did they say?”
“Oh,” Laurie said. “Yeah.” She sighed. “They didn’t know. Margaret made me promise not to tell anyone. Everybody figured she just dropped out of school.”
“Did you want to tell them?”
“Of course…No, that’s a lie. I’m sorry, Jaqe. I was so ashamed.”
“So you let everyone think Bill and Janet were the great lesbian parents.”
“I didn’t—it just—they kept putting on their act. And everyone loved it. Everyone kept saying how great my parents were.”
“Did you believe it?”
“I guess sometimes. It just seemed so much easier sometimes. To believe what everyone else believed. And…and it never happened again.”
“Until now.”
Laurie said, “I wanted to tell you. Please believe me, Jaqe. Please.”
Jaqe remembered all the stories. Bill defending Laurie, Janet going to a dyke bar. But she also remembered the time Laurie had screamed at her to throw away the graduation-day photo of Bill with his arm around Jaqe’s shoulder. And the way Laurie had fought against visiting her parents. She said, “I believe you.” She put her arms around Laurie and hugged her. For a long time they held each other, twisting sideways on the bench. And then Jaqe pushed her away. She said, “We better get back to the bus.”
Neither of them said very much on the way back to the city. For a while, Laurie held Jaqe’s hand, but she let it go when Jaqe just looked out the window. There wasn’t much to see, just concrete and low hills with trees, and every now and then a gas station or a small shopping center when the bus left the highway to make a stop on the edge of some small town. As the hours passed Jaqe found it harder to breathe, harder to swallow. She couldn’t seem to get comfortable, constantly shifting in her seat, until Laurie asked if she wanted to lie down. “Don’t be stupid,” she said, and when Laurie offered her lap or her shoulder for Jaqe’s head, Jaqe told her to leave her alone.
Jaqe tried to make herself relax. She tried deep breathing but gave it up when she noticed the little girl in the next seat staring at her and then whispering something to her mother. She tried reading—Mark had given her a book of animal stories—but the bus made her nauseous, so she shoved the book back in her bag. She tried going to the chemical toilet next to the backseat; the smell drove her away. Stuck in her seat again, she tried not to look at Laurie and her sickly expression, like some homeless beast hoping someone will take her in off the street. Jaqe told herself that wasn’t fair, Laurie just wanted to take care of her, to make it up to her.
She shifted in her seat to look at the passengers around her. They struck her as distasteful, even frightening. A few seats back, a man slept on the seat, his arms and legs tucked into his body as he lay on a pile of crumpled newspapers. Jaqe imagined him dead, dead for weeks on that seat and no one noticing. When he started to snore, she found herself wanting to shove his paper in his mouth. Across the aisle, the little girl was staring at her again, as if planning some nasty trick the moment Jaqe would pass near her. Jaqe imagined the girl sitting in front of her house and someone coming up in a car to grab the child and throw her into the backseat. Jaqe shook her head, pushing away the image. When she looked again, the girl held some cloth doll and was twisting its arms around its body. The girl’s mother had the kind of perm that looked like every hair had gone into place according to a master blueprint stuck to the mirror of the beauty parlor. Jaqe wondered if Bill had constructed it; she imagined his pudgy fingers touching the woman’s face, stroking her neck.
Jaqe shivered. She thought of the girl in the woods, the way the child had hugged her when they’d buried the bones, and the way she’d run away when Jaqe tried to protect her. Jaqe didn’t know if she could have done something. Mother Night said the girl was okay. The image of the candles came to her, the meadow filled with fire. And the candle on the lawn, burning bright.
Jaqe heard a noise outside. She turned to the window and saw three women on motorcycles passing the bus. The setting sun lit up their red hair, their black leather. They went by too fast for Jaqe to read the gold letters stitched across the back of their jackets. Leave me alone, she thought. Please leave me alone.
The driver took the bus off the highway and into the parking lot of a convenience store where he announced, “Ten minutes, folks, we’ve got about ten minutes,” and hurried off the bus.
Laurie stood up. “Are you getting off?” she asked Jaqe. Jaqe didn’t answer. Laurie said, “Can I get you something?” When Jaqe said nothing, Laurie told her, “I’m going to go get a soda.” She hesitated, then bent down to kiss Jaqe, whose mouth seemed to move away all by itself. Jaqe whispered, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that,” but Laurie was already striding down the aisle, moving in a jerky parody of her normal walk.
I’ve got to do something, Jaqe thought. She got up and left the bus. In the parking lot the humid air stank of spilled gasoline. It clung to her so that when she tried to wipe the sweat from her forehead it felt like she was smearing grease into her skin. Maybe she should have gone to the police. Maybe she should have lugged Laurie to the police station and forced her to tell her story. Maybe she should have sent Laurie ahead and gone to the police alone. But she didn’t want to get rid of Laurie. She just wanted…
Jaqe walked into the store, where the smell changed to pizza and hot dogs from a small keep-hot-all-day display next to the cash register. The bus driver stood
there, biting on a pizza slice and dripping tomato sauce onto his gray uniform. His face gleamed with excitement, his teeth looked long and sharp, as if they only chewed the soft food as a disguise, as if they could bite through anything. Jaqe felt strange looking at him, as if someone had twisted things around inside her head. When she turned away, the fluorescent light in the aisles made everything look overly bright and hard, like a lurid painting of the consumer society. Jaqe walked up and down, looking for Laurie. When she didn’t find her, she became scared, though she couldn’t think of why; she knew Laurie must have gone outside or something. But the fear still rose in her, and the fact that she couldn’t attach it to anything only made it worse.
She knew she’d better get outside, but when she turned around the woman and the little girl from the bus were standing in the aisle. The girl reached up for a bag of candy, and her mother slapped her hand away. The mother said, “You keep whining and you’ll get something all right,” and she jerked her hand up above the girl’s face. Jaqe moved to the next aisle. The driver stood there, leafing through a gun magazine and eating a hot dog.
In the last aisle a door opened in the wall and Laurie came out, rubbing her hands on her shorts. Jaqe ran and threw her arms around her, as if she had to hold her down or Laurie would float up to the ceiling. “Hi,” Laurie said, and looked around nervously as she hugged Jaqe.
“Get me out of here,” Jaqe said. In the parking lot she breathed in the gasoline air.
“Are you all right?” Laurie asked. When Jaqe said nothing, Laurie held her hand and led her back to the bus.
At the door to the bus, Jaqe stood and watched Laurie ascend the steps. The fear had settled down in her, like a dark pool hidden somewhere in her body. She hurried inside when she saw the driver coming up behind her.
Jaqe asked Laurie for the window seat again, and when they rolled onto the highway she stared outside, looking for motorcycles. Most of the way to the city Laurie read her book while Jaqe sat turned away from her. Sometimes Laurie put the book down and looked to her lover as if she wanted to kneel down in the narrow space between the seats and beg Jaqe for forgiveness. Twice she tried putting an arm around Jaqe. Jaqe only looked out the window.
Godmother Night Page 12
