The Swashbuckler

by Lee Lynch

  Lydia beat a tattoo on her thighs and the three formed a line behind her as she began to snake her way through the crowd. They whooped and laughed, sang snatches of songs. A few small children joined the line, several drunken adults. They went snaking back to their blankets where Esther rose and began to sing Oh Happy Day. Soon a whole crowd was singing. Beebo inverted an empty cooler and began to drum loudly, while Doreatha grabbed Lydia and began to dance.

  On the edge of the group stood Frenchy and Mercedes. Both cried now, gently, embracing. What long, impossible years they had lived through. How useless all their fears seemed now.

  Mercedes whispered, under the noise of the crowd,

  “What a wonderful wedding.”

  The singing went on, blended with what seemed like a hundred transistor radios, while Frenchy squeezed her tightly and asked, “Can you come home with me tonight?”

  “Can you stop me?” replied Mercedes.

  * * * * *

  After the packing up, the trek to the dock, after the long ride home, after, finally, their half-asleep bumbling toward the Morton Street apartment, their groaning climb up the stairs, Frenchy and Mercedes reached home. Sore, sunburnt, dry-eyed from the sun and wind, they simply smiled wearily like two old friends, and took separate showers. Frenchy gave Mercedes a pair of pajamas and made coffee hoping it would wake them up. They sat nodding at the kitchen table.

  “Some honeymoon,” Frenchy managed to say.

  Mercedes yawned. “Listen, I don’t mind. Really I don’t.” She yawned again. “We’ve got all our lives ahead of us. To me it’ll be a pleasure just sleeping with you.”

  Frenchy reached across the table. “Yeah. Me too.”

  “What do you think, Frenchy, you think we can work it out?”

  Frenchy could see Mercedes’ need for reassurance under the exhaustion. “I’ll stake my life on it,” she said strongly. “As a matter of fact, I’ll give my life to it.”

  “You don’t know me very well.”

  “I know you have a kid and I know you been in hospitals. So I like crazy dyke mothers. So arrest me.”

  “I’m just saying it won’t be easy.”

  “Like living with me will be? You know how long it took me to be with you this afternoon?”

  They nodded over the last of their coffee. Frenchy was pleased to see Mercedes carry her cup to the sink. She wouldn’t be another Pam — they would have a whole set of their own problems. They walked to the bedroom.

  Lying side by side, they were suddenly wide awake with the coffee and the newness of being together. Mercedes took Frenchy’s hand in hers. Frenchy felt her strengthening desire for Mercedes, its heat like another blanket over her. Mercedes turned on her side, facing Frenchy. She slipped a hand under Frenchy’s pajama top.

  “I just want to feel you,” she whispered. “To make sure you’re real and here with me.” Frenchy’s skin was so smooth, her ribs felt so frail — as Mercedes always thought she would.

  With minimal movement, burrowed into a circle of rising warmth which slowly closed around them, they began. Tentative with each other, they slipped the pajamas off their slight trembling bodies. Then they were overwhelmed by a desire that cared nothing of exhaustion, or of fears, or of endings.

  Soon Mercedes leaned back. Those dark eyes beneath her, that thick black hair, the fine small body under her hands — She felt like an artist drawing a woman. Each part of Frenchy she touched came alive.

  At the same time, Frenchy shivered as the cool night breeze touched her sweat. The smell of Cape Cod was in her nostrils. The sound of the sea in her ears. The motion of the waves moved through her body. Mercedes was as deeply part of her as all this.

  Then Mercedes touched Frenchy very gently with one finger. Frenchy did the same for Mercedes. They brought their lips together barely touching, and kept circling with their fingers. Frenchy thought she couldn’t. Mercedes pulled away a couple of times so she would not. Frenchy’s lips jerked away from Mercedes’. Mercedes felt this and heard the sharp intake of Frenchy’s breath. She brought herself back to that lovely little finger and pressed against it, as it once more began to rotate. She felt her own breath become uneven, her face flush, Frenchy’s breath on her cheek, heard the moan, whose moan? heard the two cries together, felt a breeze come in through the window and lift them away, away, away beyond themselves.

  Then shyly, her voice thick and needy, Frenchy said, “Do it again.”

  Chapter 11

  Home Free

  Summer, 1972

  Frenchy left work a half hour early. She paused outside the doors of the A&P, lit a cigarette with her battered Zippo, and went off toward 8th Street, hands in her pockets. She walked head-down, partly out of habit, partly in fascination of her desert boots. These new boots had the disadvantage of not making her as tall as the old black ones, but she’d been head cashier a few years now, so her authority was recognized. And standing on her feet all day hurt less in these.

  She loved her job now. Her days were not nearly so grueling as when she’d first started, when she’d expected one catastrophe after another. She called the cashiers “my girls,” and she thought, protected, guided and helped them all. Her store had the lowest turnover of cashiers in Manhattan and she was damn proud of that. Some were even gay, now that she did the hiring. One of the gay cashiers, in fact, had suggested the anniversary present. As she walked, she watched the bright flash of her desert boots. She didn’t need the old boots ouside work, either.

  Five years today. Who would have thought it? Frenchy made her way past the shabby little shops, mourning the loss of the old neighborhood. She had joined a community association working to keep the Village as it had been. The Sea Colony and the rest of the old places were gone, but no more of this tawdry 42nd Street facade, this cheapening influence, if she could help it. She puffed up her chest as she inhaled her cigarette. She coughed. Smoking wasn’t the joy it used to be. She was thirty-three, but damn if she didn’t still feel like twenty-one.

  Except, of course, she was calmer, and happy. Much of her old walk remained despite the new boots; she still somewhat resembled a 1950s teenaged punk, a tiny Elvis Presley. But no one on 8th Street laughed or made comments about her anymore. Was this because she was older and had therefore taken on some degree of respectability? Or did she simply come across as less brash, less challenging toward the world, having found her place in it? She dropped her cigarette and checked her hair briefly in a window. Now that she didn’t train it into unnatural heights and dips, it looked pretty good all the time. She had, as of this morning, twenty-eight grey hairs. Loving the way older dykes looked, she’d tried to comb her hair so the grey would be obvious against its black background. She would have to be patient, she’d have a shock of grey soon enough.

  A willowy, long-haired faggot was leafletting. “How beautiful!” he said as she passed. She raised one eyebrow and looked quizzically at him. “Your jacket,” he explained. “I adore it! Did you decorate it?”

  Frenchy chuckled, “No, my ex did,” she said. That jean jacket Pam had embroidered so many years ago still excited comment everywhere she went.

  “You ought to march in it,” he said, pushing one of the leaflets on her.

  “March?”

  “On Christopher Street Day. To show gay strength and solidarity.”

  She glanced at the paper skeptically. She remembered the riots a few years back, and she’d watched the parade a couple of times. But it had nothing to do with her, a bunch of hysterical drag queens getting excited.

  “Watch for the posters. This year we hope every gay in the city will march!”

  She walked on. Weren’t things better without drawing attention to themselves more? Gay people were exposed enough. Maybe it was okay for men who could defend themselves against cops or angry straights; maybe it was okay for gays who didn’t have to worry about losing their jobs if they went to jail; but she would play it safe. If the way she lived and walked and looked wasn’t enough to tell
the world she was proud of who she was, then the hell with it. She’d been marching all her life.

  She reached the store that sold Indian jewelry Mercedes liked. Frenchy wanted something spectacular for their fifth anniversary. They had made reservations at a gay woman’s restaurant — vegetarian dishes. The cutesy little bar they had downstairs, with tiny stools and bright colors, didn’t look like a gay bar as far as she was concerned, but Lydia had recommended it. When she stayed with Frenchy and Mercedes, usually a couple of times a month now that she was a freshman at Queens College, living with Edie, she’d cook vegetarian dishes to tempt them to give up meat. Frenchy insistently called herself a “meat and potatoes man.”

  “Woman!” Lydia would protest, but Frenchy didn’t believe in these women’s lib ideas Lydia was always spouting. But at least it was a lesbian restaurant.

  Frenchy took her glasses from her breast pocket to see the cases and cases of Indian jewelry. Glasses! Mercedes had sent her to the eye doctor, wanting to know why Frenchy was squinting so much. She’d come home to Mercedes sheepishly, but her eyes weren’t too bad. She gotten aviator-style glasses with photogrey lenses, so half the time she fancied she looked like a Florida-bound pilot in sunglasses. There, she said to herself. That piece, a mottled brown stone like an eye, in the middle of a silver sunburst. It looked like Mercedes. Like those warm brown eyes and the light she’d brought into her life.

  She watched the saleslady giftwrap it, thinking of the miracle of Mercedes. Sure, she got kind of weird now and then. Sure, sometimes her moods were erratic. It used to scare Frenchy because she hadn’t understood. Frenchy had grown up gay in a straight world — but Mercedes had been gay and poor, a teenaged mother, and Spanish. All that had made her crazy. Now, like Frenchy, she fit somewhere, and had relaxed more; and she’d started talking to a woman Lydia had heard about in college, a lesbian who counseled lesbians.

  She was passing the vacant lot where the Women’s House of Detention once stood when she remembered to pick up cat food for Chiquita and Banana. How horrified Lydia had been at the names they’d chosen for the two kittens they found in a box in the hallway last year. She’d said they were racist and sexist! Mercedes had laughed and said, “You want us to call them that, instead? Racist and Sexist?” The sheltie was named Ace of Spades. Frenchy’s life wouldn’t have been complete without Sunday mornings with Ace and Mercedes, walking to get the papers and baked goods.

  Drooping under the two bags of canned food she now carried, Frenchy made her way slowly toward W. 12th Street. The apartment had been a find, but Frenchy had missed her shabby little place on Morton Street, had missed Pam and Dorene. But soon afterwards, Pam had moved to California and Dorene had been with her new lover almost as long as Frenchy with Mercedes. Pam had had a couple of shows out in California. She’d wanted Frenchy to fly out there to see her. But five hours of hanging over America? Pam had to be nuts. It was bad enough she had to go trooping down to Florida once a year.

  Frenchy struggled up to the second floor and fumbled for her key. Mercedes opened the door. “I thought you’d never get here!”

  Mercedes was glowing. She wore jeans and a white shirt, with a red corduroy vest. Her ears were pierced and a few attractive lines had grown along her face, crazy lines, she called them, but her face with its high cheekbones had the same taut surface. She took a bag from Frenchy.

  They put groceries away, laughing together, and pulled each other close. “Happy anniversary, babe.”

  “Happy anniversary to you, Mer.”

  Ace gently pushed her nose between them and they patted her as they hugged. A cat jumped to the countertop, landed with one foot on a can, half lost her balance and sent the can spinning to the floor. “Banana!” yelled Frenchy, startled. The cat leapt off the counter and ran to the next room. Ace skittered out of the way. Chiquita sat calmly on the sunny windowsill cleaning a paw.

  As Frenchy dressed, Mercedes stocked the cat food shelf. At this milestone in her life, she reflected, she and Frenchy had been happy for five years, sex was getting even better, she’d had her job even longer than her relationship, she’d lived in the same place almost five years, and Lydia was doing well in college, even if she did have some strange ideas.

  She looked around the kitchen. Frenchy did most of the cooking, even when Jessie came to dinner and teased her about doing a femme’s job. Mercedes felt at home in the unusually large, well-lighted room. Whenever their friends came over, the kitchen was where they settled. She’d put up orange curtains, the tablecloth was yellow, they’d laid their own orange and brown linoleum. That was the great thing about living with Frenchy, who wasn’t afraid to fix things around the house any more than Mercedes. They shared their tasks and kept house together in a way Mercedes never imagined two butches could.

  She relished her happiness. Sometimes she still felt crazy, but now she had the counselor to explain, very simply, without a lot of bullshit about her early childhood, how and why she reacted the way she did. She was beginning to wonder if she shouldn’t take the counselor’s advice and get involved with one of the groups Lydia belonged to, a group of Puerto Rican and black and Asian women who talked about their common experience.

  “How do I look?” asked Frenchy, parading in her jeans and shirt.

  Mercedes tried to figure out what she was supposed to be noticing. “Handsome, as usual,” she finally said.

  “You didn’t notice my new T-shirt!” Frenchy complained.

  “Of course!” said Mercedes. Frenchy had taken to wearing different colored T-shirts under her shirts instead of a bra, like the longhairs. How much more daring new young lesbians were about how they dressed, with their long hair and buttons everywhere. In earlier days, Mercedes and Frenchy had to wear at least three items of apparel of their own sex in New York or risk getting busted for cross-dressing.

  “You look great,” Mercedes said, shepherding Frenchy out the door. They ran down the stairs and walked arm in arm, grinning.

  Later, through the twilight streets of New York, Mercedes and Frenchy walked home. Full of food and wine, they walked slowly. Mercedes kissed Frenchy beside the fountain at Washington Square. “Just look at that lavender sky!” she said, remembering another time, under another lavender sky, with another woman who helped her on her way to health and to Frenchy.

  “What are you thinking about, Mer?”

  “Just remembering before you. How bad it was, how slowly I came back alive.”

  Frenchy, too, had her memories. She was thinking of the day Pam had spotted her on the bench they’d just passed.

  Frenchy opened the apartment door and reached for the light.

  “Happy anniversary!”

  Their shock lasted only a second, but in that second Frenchy had time to fear: had the police come to round up all the queers at last? But then she saw Lydia, their friends, the cake, the gifts. In joyous surprise they turned to one another, eyes wet. Before they were swept up in their friends’ attentions, Frenchy looked meaningfully toward their bedroom with its large soft bed, and Mercedes smiled at her. “Later,” she whispered, squeezing Frenchy’s hand.

  Lydia, a few inches taller, stooped to her mother, and Frenchy saw them as they would look in another thirty or forty years: Mercedes white-haired and wrinkled, her body perhaps slightly bent from lifting heavy patients, even smaller than she was now, again in the embrace of this tall, healthy-looking daughter who had nothing to hide from them as they had nothing to hide from her. She sighed, shrugging off her embroidered jacket. From behind her, someone took it, and she turned.

  “Pam!” she shouted. “How in hell did you get here?”

  “I was coming to New York anyway, so I came early for your celebration!”

  Frenchy laughed, and surprised Pam by taking her arm and leading her to the bedroom. “Look,” she said. “I wanted you to see this.” The framed drawing of the woman in jeans and T-shirt making love to her naked partner hung over the bed.

  Pam gave a joyous little cry a
nd hugged Frenchy.

  “We thought about hanging up work by some famous artist, but yours is still my favorite.”

  “Far out! I’ll send you more.”

  “Hey, Frenchy!” called Jessie from the living room. Frenchy excused herself.

  Lydia was leading her mother into a dance. Mercedes looked sheepishly up at her browner, longer-limbed daughter until the song was over.

  “Happy fifth!” cried Jessie, applauding.

  Frenchy found herself next to Edie. They hugged. “It seems like such a short time since Lydia would use my basement to practice drums,” said Edie. “What a short five years! Happy anniversary.” Edie kissed Frenchy’s cheek.

  “How’s it going with you two?”

  “We still have our ups and downs. I’m finally learning not to be hurt by what Esther needs to do. I know she loves me, but she’s got other fish to fry. Did she tell you she’s starting a lesbian chorus? There are five of them already.”

  “What about that civil rights stuff? Her spending every summer down there just to register voters?”

  “This is what she believes in. Now Lydia has her going to this women’s group at the college. They talk about women and racism. Lydia wants me to start a group of white women who want to do something about racism, but I’m not really a group person.” Edie laughed. “I’d rather have dinner on the table when Esther comes home tired from her groups.”

  Frenchy said, “I sure wouldn’t mind talking to somebody else with the kinds of problems we have — a white girl with a Puerto Rican.”

  Edie shook her head, looking amused. “I’ve lived such a sheltered quiet life. Now, little by little, the world is gathering in my living room. All these women Lydia brings to me, Esther brings home...”

  Lydia was dancing again, with Beebo, leading her carefully. Beebo had finally admitted her failing sight. Several months ago, all of a sudden, Hermine and Beebo had announced they were in love after years of being friends. Beebo had wanted her all along, but hadn’t wished to tie any girl to her blindness. The first thing Herm had done was steer Beebo to an uptown specialist, and new hope through a surgical technique.