by Lee Lynch
Jaudon was half reading a textbook, but she guffawed at Berry’s description of Cullie’s antics.
“I asked her, why should we segregate ourselves? We have scant leftover energy to spread around. Can you guess what Lari answered?”
Jaudon knew without thinking. “To meet other lesbians, why else?”
“That person peeves the life out of me, Jaudon, and not only because of the way she tested you, tested our love. Meanwhile, Cullie was there in her pool-boy clothes, stained shorts and a company polo shirt, looking every inch the classic example of a gal who makes the others suspicious. She told Lari and me that those straights are too worried about women like us in their midst and too interested in what we do when we’re alone together.”
“I told them we’d be stronger if all kinds of women bunched up and focused on women’s health, but Lari and Cullie want dances and lesbian land and feel-good groups.” She tilted her head the way she always did when she met an obstacle. “There’s a gap in the women’s movement, don’t you think?”
“Tell me?” Jaudon rested on one elbow, watching her think.
“Women make up over half of this country. That’s millions and millions of people. We should be able to make changes, but we’re too divvied up. Some women are horrified that we want to be able to make our own decisions. They don’t see what’s in front of their noses, how men protect one another at the expense of women. Among feminists, there’s a whole split between women who love men and women who love other women. Between poor women and women doing well. Between women of color and us pale faces. It shouldn’t be so hard to close those gaps, but it is.”
Jaudon could only take so many stories about Berry’s crazy group. She snickered. “Here we are, Berry, in the heart of the gap—Rainbow Gap.”
Smiling despite her agonizing, Berry said, “That’s it, Jaudon. A rainbow of women. I don’t know if the rainbow is a celebration of our bonds or a symbol of our differences.”
“Which color are we, people like us?”
“All the colors, silly.”
Jaudon flopped up beside her. “Then I’m glad to be in the Gap with you.”
“The answer to your question is, I’m proud to be seen with you, angel, not embarrassed,” Berry said, caressing Jaudon’s cheeks again.
“I just can’t see the sense to it, Berry. What difference does it make if one woman has more hair than another?”
Berry held her and stroked her hair. “No difference to me. You’re right as rain.”
“Just when life was starting to seem normal,” said Jaudon.
“Because Cullie’s home? Or because we know Allison stayed out West?”
“Hey,” said Jaudon. “I was thinking it was Lari who tipped off the U.S. Marshals about Allison working in my store.”
Berry nodded as she considered the possibility. “Out of jealousy?”
“Or cussedness?” said Jaudon. “Or because she’s deranged?”
“We always blame Lari.”
“Am I trying to cover up my own craziness? She seems to take up a lot of time and space and skulks in everywhere. I get a bad feeling in my bones when she’s around. If she had a beef with Allison, ratting her out was a perfect way to drive her off.”
“Lari may wish she was as much a mover and shaker as Allison Millar. We’ll hear of Allison again someday. She’ll write a book or lead a big protest or become Secretary of Health in Washington, DC”
“Lari’s jealous of Allison for being gutsy and respected.”
“It’s not nice of me to think it, but I wish Lari was the one run out of town and Allison stayed with us.”
Jaudon laughed. “As long as Allison doesn’t plop down in our yard again and stopped telling me that she loved women who don’t wear bras, even though she wears one.”
“Did she?” Berry smoothed Jaudon’s hair.
“Last time I saw her before she left she ran a hand up my back. I about died. She was checking for a strap. She told me Cullie wears one.”
“Oh, hush up, who cares.” It was true, though. Most people hated to see a woman without a bra. “You are my beautiful Jaudon Vicker and Allison had best keep her hands off you if we ever see her again.”
“I can’t help my hating how we’re supposed to keep our bodies just so, Berry.”
“I know, angel, it’s awful hard.” Berry interlaced her fingers with Jaudon’s and told her how much Cullie missed Allison. “I know a little how she feels. Remember how nice the patients at my part-time job were when I left? I miss them all.”
Jaudon did and remembered how that whole send-off party gave her hope that people got nicer as they aged.
A teacher at one of Berry’s clinicals had recommended her to the ob-gyn clinic in Four Lakes. The clinic wanted her to start work the minute she graduated, so she resigned from the rehabilitation center where she’d worked almost four years in order to concentrate on the last weeks of school. The rehab patients and staff gave her a big good-bye party and insisted she bring Jaudon to meet them.
“The Bible tells me she’s a sinner, Miss Jaudon, but your Berry is one of the nicest human beings I ever met,” said a very old white woman sunk into a wheelchair, fiddling with her hearing aids.
Beside her, a black man who appeared even older banged his cane on the linoleum floor three times and pronounced, “The Lord gives us means to balance out our sins. Miss Berry won’t have trouble getting by St. Peter.”
Whispering behind her hand, the white woman said, “He’s a reverend so he knows what he’s talking about, colored or not.” The woman gave her a firm nod and a wink despite Jaudon’s grimace. There was thunder in her gut at the woman’s comment, but the reverend was pressing the woman’s hand between his own. This was neither time nor place to say anything.
The director of nursing had presented Berry with a sterling silver stethoscope charm engraved with her name. The memory, now, of the little celebration gave Jaudon an idea.
“Let’s arrange for Cullie to have someplace to be for Memorial Day,” she said. “She’s fun, even with her heart broken. I’d like to let her know we want to be her friends.”
“We can have a holiday picnic. I’ll invite the other women too.”
“Not Lari.”
“Jaudon, we can’t exclude any women. The community is too small. She can come, but no one can make me be nice to that home wrecker.”
“She wants girls stacked up like cord wood.”
“Don’t tell me she’s still a temptation.” The thought of Allison’s non-monogamy ideas frightened her. She hesitated to say anything and the impulse passed. Instead she got up and brought Jaudon’s ear medications from the bathroom. She busied herself tending to the ear.
“Lari’s about as tempting as a bucket of bait grubs,” Jaudon told her.
“Then why not invite her?”
“She’s strange. She goes after women who aren’t free. And when she came after me, she pulled me in the way a cat goes to catnip. Is she that desperate for sex? Or is that part of this no monogamy deal? Ouch.”
Berry was so startled by their similar wavelength her hand had slipped. “I’ll go slower. I wonder if Lari’s promiscuous because she smokes marijuana.”
“Ouch.”
“I’m sorry, angel.” She needed to concentrate. “This has got to be done.”
“It’s not your fault.” She wished it was possible to amputate that whole side of her head. “Are feminists inclined to take drugs, Berr?”
“From what I see at the hospital, people our age have a hankering for drugs.”
“Okay, ask Lari over for the picnic and maybe we can study how to protect others from her.”
Chapter Twenty-six
“We can’t leave out the meat at a Memorial Day barbecue,” Gran declared.
“Did you write the rule book for patriotic holidays?”
“Never mind the sass, pet. Not everyone is a vegetarian like you.”
“I agree, Berry,” Jaudon said. “We have to have rib
s and hot dogs and hamburgers. That’s what a barbecue is, for gosh sakes.”
Berry frowned with concern. “You’ll get takers for all of it, but the non-meat-eaters may find the smells offensive.”
“The whole South smells of ribs on the 30th,” said Gran. “There’s no escaping it. You need to think of your kin as much as you do your ladies’ lib friends.” She sighed. “How your pa loved a party, especially a barbecue.”
Berry stood immobile, listening hard, hoping for more. Over the years she saw Gran had been as shattered as she was by Ma and Pa’s departure. She grasped the pain it must cause Gran to share memories of her daughter. Every scrap of information Gran revealed, Berry hoarded. At the public library she’d spent many hours perusing newspapers on microfiche for motorcycle accidents along Ma and Pa’s planned route. They could be anywhere—or nowhere.
“We’ll make a few salads.” Gran patted spots on the table as if to show where the dishes belonged. “Grill the franks and shape the burgers. Your friends can bring their favorite holiday foods.”
Jaudon watched Berry digest the new morsel about her parents, watched her wait for more, patient with her gran, yet tense, expectant. One thing that had changed since she first met Berry, Jaudon found, was that, while Berry would do a thing her way, she went about it nicely, so others weren’t aware their own plans were scrapped along the way. Gran was close-mouthed about her son and daughter-in-law; Berry never pushed her, but stayed alert for the rare times Gran broke her silence.
Throwing a party was a first for Berry and Jaudon. The word picnic made them less nervous, but they were nervous nonetheless. Nervous no one would come, nervous of the guests spending the day arguing, nervous about having enough food and drink. Berry moved her lips in prayer as she flared a cloth over the sun-bleached picnic table in the yard. Jaudon put smaller tables on the porch and imagined Ollie the ancient alligator trundling up from Rainbow Lake at the smell of food.
When Mercie Lewis, the first guest, arrived, Berry spoke into Jaudon’s good ear, “Y’all be sweet, angel.”
Jaudon pulled a face. She’d already put several hours in at the store, which was extra busy on holidays, and was tired. Olive Ponder, whose family celebrated at noon, came in after to relieve Jaudon.
“You watch,” she told Berry. “The women who show up will be more interested in the lesbians than the food. Lari will hold an orgy in Gran’s room by the time they’re through.”
The tables were loaded. No one complained about the smells—there was such a variety of them. The women raved about Berry’s potato salad or Gran’s rice and field peas. The guests brought spring sweet corn on the cob to boil, slicing tomatoes, skillet cornbread, a salad made with candied pecans, biscuits and butter, and baked beans in a hot barbecue sauce. For dessert Jaudon bought key lime pies from the baker who supplied the Beverage Bays and Gran baked a lemon chess pie. Berry made gallon jars of sweet tea flavored with fresh strawberries and the mint she grew on the porch.
“This is our one year anniversary of graduation.” Berry hugged her old classmates until they squealed. All of them had been excited about receiving their nursing caps at the traditional ceremony. Berry’s fit as though it was meant to be there. Although they met throughout the year, this was their first social event just for fun.
Lari was all of a sudden there, in black, floating around the women as if she’d dropped down from the sky. Donna Skaggs carried a watermelon. Perfecta Maldonado had ferried Samantha O’Connell with her baby daughter. Three new women climbed out of a pickup cab where they had been pinched together to the point of uncontrollable giggles. Cullie, sneaking the words out of the corner of her mouth, predicted to Jaudon that at least two of the gigglers hoped to come out by midnight. They were way too excited for a picnic.
Zefer was in a happy tumult. She greeted every woman several times and almost knocked down Perfecta.
The women admired the blue concrete mermaid, stroking her and talking about their affection for mermaids. The peacocks watched from a distance, gobbling wildflowers as they went. By the side porch, Gran showed off her potted geraniums, which won first prize at the county fair, and the camellia, trimmed by Bat’s friend John to an impeccable roundness.
Jaudon, juggling the ribs, franks, burgers, and catfish on the grill, followed Berry’s movement from group to group. The women were awkward with one another as they ate, unused to socializing outside a meeting. Lari kept disappearing to the other side of the house to smoke with one or another of the women.
Cullie plopped boiled peanuts from the farm stand onto the picnic table and started eating them. “This is all I had time for,” she said. “I had two pool emergencies, one over in Clearwater, the other in Apollo. Never fails at the holidays. The boss always sends me because I have no family. Ha! What does he call my sister? What about you all, aren’t you my family too?” she asked, opening her arms to include the whole group.
Jaudon and Berry smiled at each other. “So, Cullie thinks of us as family,” Berry said quietly.
Judy rushed to her with a plate piled high. “Poor Cullie. I’ll bet you never had time for lunch.”
Cullie immediately held a rib in one hand for Kirby to gnaw on and told Judy to set a date for their marriage.
“Are you proposing to me, you gallant? I’m not even gay.”
“Ah, but, Judy, I’m a lesbian lothario, and there is no resisting me.”
Mercie was next to Judy. Judy turned and flung herself into Mercie’s arms, announcing that she and her husband had separated.
Judy cried a bit and explained. “He wants kids and I think it’s a lousy idea. I don’t believe the fertility goddess Astarte expected such a dense population. She needs to turn down her volume because we can’t be procreating as much as the ancients did. We’re using up the whole planet.”
That was enough to start a conversation filled with sympathy and dissension, but not enough to halt the feast. Gran rang a weathered porch bell with gusto and the women stopped what they were doing to assemble for food. Cullie kept them laughing all the way into her third helping.
Perfecta fussed with the plenty on the picnic table, uncovering, arranging the dishes, organizing serving utensils. Lari seemed more interested in Mercie than in food; Cullie was the same with one of the gigglers, despite her proposal to Judy. Donna Skaggs and Samantha O’Connell stood as they ate, and seemed, like nuns in a schoolyard, to scan for misbehavior.
Jaudon expected the whole gathering to devolve into a meeting if she didn’t intervene. She stood. “Let’s have a moment of silence for our fighting soldiers on this Memorial Day.”
Donna said, “My moment of silence is for the young men to come home from Vietnam.”
Berry watched Jaudon strain to hear.
Judy said, “I pray for peace between all countries.”
Jaudon’s eyes were squeezed shut so tight Berry worried she was in pain. When she opened them, Jaudon asked, “Did you hear about Emmett Ponder?”
“Emmett?” said Berry. “Your assistant manager’s son? Olive’s baby boy?”
“Emmett. Missing in action. Olive told me today.”
“He was a kid,” said Berry. “Is a kid. I thought he was going to Florida State.”
“That’s what Olive wanted. Emmett got his girlfriend pregnant and joined the army because no one he worked for here at home paid enough to support him, her, and the baby.”
Berry looked at the sky to hold in her sudden tears. Inside, she was railing at the Great Spirit for allowing such tragedy and waste. Momma Vicker had refused to hire Emmett, citing some rule about not hiring relatives of employees, though she’d always done it for her own family. “I don’t understand why we have to fight. Can you imagine what Olive is going through? I hope the army will take care of his wife and child.”
Jaudon said, “He fought for our country. That’s what matters.”
Judy put a hand on Jaudon’s arm. “I can’t believe you said that.”
“Why not?” Jaudon rememb
ered Judy was newly separated and told herself to give her some slack.
“It’s horse pucky. That’s why. The military-industrial complex profits from war. Kids like your friend’s son don’t give their lives, they lose their lives to feed it.”
“What in hell’s bells is the military-whatever complex?”
“It’s a good old boy scheme where industry makes the guns and the military buys them.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“For the gun manufacturers to make obscene profits, they need to sell obscene amounts of guns. They influence the government to make wars so they have a guaranteed market. It’s so obvious, Jaudon.”
Jaudon’s face was pink. “Is that why the American Revolution happened? The War of Northern Aggression?”
Judy said, “The Civil War had an economic basis, like every other war when you come down to it. The Revolution too—remember taxation without representation? It’s a slippery slope from tea to cotton to guns.”
“Are you one of those Socialists?”
“Are you a throwback to Confederate slavery?”
“No, I am not, but you’re talking like a Russian.”
Berry stayed out of the fray, siding with Judy, but loving Jaudon for her willingness to speak of her convictions.
Judy’s voice rose to the same volume as Jaudon’s. “I am. I’m Russian American. My family came to America at the end of the nineteenth century to escape violence and anti-Semitism. American patriotism is strong in my family. My father lost his right hand to frostbite in the mountains of North Korea because he refused evacuation when his platoon was at half strength. He learned very fast to shoot with his left.” Judy held her thumb and index finger like a pistol.
Jaudon’s deep breath escaped as a sob. She cried and reached out her arms to Judy. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.”
They held on. Judy’s set jaw weakened.
Jaudon leaned away, hands on her hips. “Wasn’t Korea an honorable war? Didn’t we all have to fight to stop Communism, to protect the American way of life?”
