by Sacchi Green
“I don’t do that,” I explain. “I’m always on top.”
“Oh,” she says. “I didn’t know.”
I release her arms and let my fingertips slide down her neck, circle one breast and then the other, down to her belly button, and into her nest of pubic hair.
“And while we’re talking about sex, I don’t do oral unless you shave.”
“Oh,” she says again.
I stop.
“I have an idea,” I say.
In the dining room, I open the glass door of her grand-father’s case and remove the Robeson. It’s heavier than I would expect, it feels solid in my hand, unlike the razors today. In Wynonna’s bathroom I find everything I need: manicure scissors, rubbing alcohol; shaving gel; a wash-cloth; and a big, soft towel. I notice an electric shaver in the cabinet, for her legs and underarms. Just in case, I think. I return to Wynonna in bed with the scissors in my hand.
“Oh lordy,” she says.
“You trust me, don’t you?”
“I don’t really know you,” she replies.
“Wrong answer. You trust me, don’t you?”
“I guess.”
“Wrong again! Third time, you know what they say about charm. You trust me, don’t you?”
“Yes, I trust you,” she says.
“Good. Now lift up.”
I slip the towel under her hips and pull it up as high as her waist. She settles back down.
“Good girl,” I say.
“I may regret this,” she says.
“Shush now.”
The manicure scissors are barely adequate to the task, but I manage to trim her pubic hair until it’s short enough for the razor. In the bathroom, I open her grand-father’s straight-edge to a four-inch silver steel blade. The handle is bone, off-white in color, and looks like twisted rope. I sanitize the blade with rubbing alcohol. While the straight-edge is air-drying, I let the washcloth warm under hot running water, then I wring it out and take it to bed, where she lies waiting.
“This will feel good,” I say.
I untwist the washcloth and spread it over her mound.
“Ummm,” she says.
“Told ya. Now you’re going to relax and let that do its work.”
I look around. There’s a CD player on a worn, oak dresser across from the bed.
“Would you like music?”
“Sure,” she says. “You pick.”
I look through her collection and settle on Claire Mann and Aaron Jones.
“Oh,” she says as a Celtic tune begins. “How appropriate.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “Our kinfolk’s music. A fiddle, a flute, and a tin whistle.”
I let an instrumental play all the way through before I remove the washcloth and set it on the nightstand. I press the flat of my hand over her pussy. Her hair feels soft and moist.
“Better,” I say.
I spray a ben-wa-sized ball of shaving gel onto the tips of my fingers and rub it over the remaining pubic hair, into a whipped-cream-like lather. Her breathing quickens. I spread her legs.
“Don’t move.”
I retrieve her grandfather’s straight-edge. Her eyes widen when she sees it. I lay the blade lightly at the top of her pubes. I ease it down slowly, gently, snowplowing a line until I see perfect, clear skin. I stop dangerously close to her hooded clit. She’s holding her breath.
“Breathe,” I say, and she does.
I lift the blade, wipe it clean on a section of the towel beneath her, and begin again. I move the blade over slightly, begin at the top of her pubic hair, and slide down; repeat, then reposition and repeat; reposition and repeat until her skin has been shaved clean. I wipe her with the washcloth. There are no bumps, no cuts, not even a nick. I set the straight-edge aside and pick up the electric razor. It starts with a buzz.
“This is for your vulva,” I say.
When I’m finished with the electric razor, I turn it off and admire my work.
“Pretty,” I say. “That’s the front. Now I need you to turn over for me.”
“Oh my—”
“Over,” I say, more firmly.
She flips over, leaning on her elbows. I slip my hand between her legs and spread her thighs. I use the electric shaver to remove the last of her pubes around her perineum and anus, then wipe her clean with the washcloth.
“Good girl,” I say. “Now come with me.”
She turns her head to look back at me, puzzled.
“You need to shower off.”
I position her to face the shower spray, then rub a washcloth lathered with Dial soap onto her shoulders and down her arms. She’s got tats: a heart in memory of Granddad on one shoulder; a cross and John 3:16 on the other; a red Harley on the left cheek of her ass. I turn her around. Water is falling over her face, beading on her skin, she has closed her eyes, and I know this is the scene in the made-for-TV-movie where I am supposed to lean in and kiss her.
Wynonna opens her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” she says.
I press my palm into the shaved place between her legs.
“Not a thing,” I say.
STRAWBERRY SURPRISE
Anna Watson
Mitzi always said fucking would stop us from growing old, and we went at it like it was a religion. When meno-pause almost took me down—I surely did not feel up to much with all that mess going on—Mitzi’s butch diligence got us through. She could walk into the sex store, all silver-fox Daddy, her suit falling just right, shoes shined, and the kids would be lining up to show her the latest products and books for enhancing the mature dyke’s sex life. The dick size went down, the quantity of lube went up, but the motion and the emotion remained the same, and I believed her. I believed her when she said we could keep it up forever.
The social worker—her name is the name of a leaf or a tree or something—is one of those straight-up-and-down girls, built like a pencil with a bowl haircut. You could twirl her between your hands and her hair would reach out from her head like an umbrella popping open. We’re all in her office: me and Mitzi’s kids—the two who like strawberry surprise me—and our eldest grandchild, Linda. The third child, the one married to a Tea Party lawyer, we don’t have much truck with, and of course she’s not here. It’s funny how for us it was the butch who came to the relationship with kids, not the femme. I never had any use for men at all, even when I thought I was straight. Queer was what was really going on, although my dad would storm around and call me stubborn, and I could be; I sure could be. “Not stubborn,” Mitzi would say when I argued or threw a fit. “That’s my determined wife.”
The kids and the social worker are having a big old confab, and I’m just tuning in and out, but I do hear the words “depression brought on by caretaker fatigue” coming out of that pencil-leaf girl’s cavernous mouth. I suppose they’re talking about me. I suppose that’s what happened to me, the fatigue, because of what happened to Mitzi.
I knew it when I saw her butch wax in the refrigerator instead of on the shelf in the bathroom where she always kept it. Didn’t I spend my sixties tending to my own mother when she went gaga? It starts that way, things out of order, because your brain is out of order, and it goes from there. I just knew it, standing there looking at that little jar of hair stuff next to the eggs and half a sandwich from a weekend picnic we’d gone on with the grandkids. I snatched it out and put it back where it belonged. I didn’t say anything to Mitzi.
As things got more random in her brain, I did everything I could to help her. Stuck up notes, reminded, shielded her as best I could from her own brain’s breakdown. I hated to think about it, and most of the time she was still herself, still my Mitzi. And I came to her in bed; I came to her wearing the slinky underthings she liked, with my cocksucking lipstick painted on and my gray curls loose and falling down my back. Slowly, the harness got to be too much for her, but a consummate cocksman like my husbutch didn’t need silicone in order to pleasure her girl.
It got so I couldn’t keep
Mitzi’s condition from her kids anymore, though, and they’re the ones who got her the diagnosis. They’re the ones who moved us into the assisted living, and I guess it’s been okay, even though we’re the only queers. I know that my queer ancestors wouldn’t have had it this good, even if they’d made it to our age. The staff here mostly treat us like we’re married, which we are, and that’s even legal. But my Mitzi has left me. They’ve got her in the “memory neighborhood” now, and I can’t believe I can say those words without gagging, those crazy 1984 words, but they trip right off my tongue. “Mitzi is in the memory neighborhood now,” I say to our friends at the Council on Aging LGBT events. When I make it out. Which hasn’t been lately. I can barely make myself visit my sweet butch who has left me. She left me. She isn’t the dear soul I met at the demonstration in 1987, when we were marching on Washington, so many of us! The people, united! We were already in our forties, and Mitzi said we had no time to waste. She fucked me in a hotel bathroom that day, pulled me out of the march and into one of the downtown hotels, bold as you please, queer as you please, and Up against the wall with you, pretty baby, spread ’em, aren’t you the nasty girl with your lacy little panties, wet, too, take them, take my dick fingers, pretty sweet baby.
It got so I couldn’t relax in my apartment in the assisted living, where Mitzi wasn’t anymore. I could hear everything in the hall, outside the window. I paced. Linda, our eldest grandchild—queer, too, pied piper, or panpipes or something—she’s the one who noticed. “Tatie, you’re too skinny”; “Tatie, you haven’t been going to meals”; “Tatie, I think something’s wrong and I’m taking you to the doctor.” I did it for my mother, the taking care of, and now for Mitzi, but I want it to stop. The doctor asked did I want to die? Well, no, of course not. But could it stop?
“Just for a little while,” says Linda, when the doctor says she thinks a stay in the geriatric psych ward would be “beneficial.” I think of The Snakepit and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the way Big Nurse terrorized the inmates. I’m going to be an inmate. Those freezing cold-water treatments, lobotomies, chemical castration, electric shocks to your brain.
“Stop it, Tatie,” says Linda. “They don’t do that shit anymore.”
I have lost track of time. I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I don’t know what day it is when I see a butch by the front desk, rolling up in a wheelchair. She’s making choices on the menu for her supper, joshing with Small Nurse. The butch looks like she has her faculties about her. She looks like she has a hearty appetite. I’d been sitting with my roommate, Queen of All She Surveys. I like the way Queen bosses everyone around, since I can barely manage to ask for soap so I can take a shower, but she’s not very good company. Always complaining. Linda had called and said she couldn’t visit that evening, and I know I can’t expect her to leave her busy life all the time and come see me every day, I know that. I miss her. I miss Mitzi, but even if she were right here with me, she wouldn’t be.
She hasn’t quite forgotten how to eat yet, but other things. Most things. Me.
The butch in the wheelchair finishes her order and hands the menu over to Small Nurse with a flourish. She’s heavyset, wearing her own bathrobe, fuzzy fleece with pictures of hunting dogs on it. Her feet are swaddled in the bright yellow non-slip loony-bin socks we all have to wear, but I bet she has leather scuffs at home. Head shaved except for a quiff right at the front, dyed a bright pinky-red.
“Oh, that’s a nice color!” says Pencil-Leaf, galumphing down the corridor on her lanky legs.
“Tell her what it’s called,” says Small Nurse in that voice they all use.
The butch sees me looking and leans back in her wheel-chair. “Strawberry Surprise,” she says, winking at me.
“That’s so cute!” coos Pencil-Leaf, in that voice. I don’t think the butch is listening to her, though. I think the butch is watching me blush instead.
People usually let me sit by myself in the rec room, over at the farthest table, the one looking out on Memorial Drive. The cars just go and go and go. All those people out there, going along.
“Well, they told me to get out of my room and socialize,” someone says, a gravelly voice, the kind of voice I know and love. She bellies up to the table in her wheelchair, maneuvering herself so that her knee is almost touching mine.
I’m not wearing lipstick. I forgot it and then forgot to ask Linda to bring me any.
“Well, I don’t know how social I’m going to be,” I say, trying for flirtatious but ending up with whiney. “Broken down old me.”
“Peas in a pod,” she says, lifting her eyebrows. “My head is murky with all the crap drugs they gave me.”
“It gets me in the stomach,” I say, nodding. She’s looking at me so strong. That gaze. Mitzi had it, and then it dimmed and died. I could be anyone when I go to visit her. I want to ask the butch what’s wrong with her, if it’s serious, if she’s crazy, but we don’t ask each other things like that in here. Instead, I ask her if she has a roommate.
“No, but I live in fear.”
I want to laugh but all I can do is twitch up one side of my mouth. Still, something is happening. Something is tapping on my heart, bubbling in my bloodstream. “You’re lucky. Mine is over there. The Queen of All She Surveys.”
The butch snorts and turns around to see who I’m talking about. The Queen is laughing and talking loudly to two newbies. She is much admired for the luster of her hair and her fashion sense. Suddenly, I don’t want the butch to look at her too hard. I touch her on her knee. That bathrobe is fuzzy and her knee is warm and solid underneath.
“She wears those things, those Depends,” I say, and then I regret my unkindness, and what if the butch has to wear them, too? It happens. But she’s back looking right at me, and she snorts again. “Poor thing,” she says. And “Meow!”
“I’m sorry!” Now both sides of my mouth have twitched up.
“No, don’t be. Anything to keep sane in here, am I right? And don’t worry—it’s quite clear that your hair is prettier and your outfit is better, too.”
How can that be? I’m wearing nothing, nothing of any consequence, a blouse, some slacks, a far cry from the funky artsy garb I’d affected in my maturity, the pashminas, the flowing skirts. And I’ve gotten so damn skinny!
“Tatiana,” I say, reaching out my hand. “Tatie.”
“A beautiful, old-world name,” she says, taking my hand in both of hers. “I’m Phil.”
The next day and the next we sit together in the rec room after the news group and the singing group and the OT. That bubbling around my heart gets stronger. What am I doing here? I’ve been asking myself that more and more. Linda had to go on a trip for work; the others come for short little visits, obviously wishing they didn’t have to. It’s okay. People come and go on the ward, but so far, Phil is still with us. I look for her every morning. She has cranberry juice for breakfast and an egg over easy. Marble rye toast. Grape jelly. She got a roommate and now she tells me funny stories in a whisper about the things the poor gal says in her sleep.
One afternoon the old loudmouth retired Episcopal priest lets his bathrobe flop open and out flops his wrinkly old dong. Phil makes her snort, but quietly, because the other ladies are so distressed, and Big and Small Nurses get him out of there but quick. No dongs allowed in the rec room, but no one can stop me from looking at Phil’s big hands as she rests them on her lap. There’s a pale strip of skin around her pinky finger—no rings allowed in here, either—and that pale band matches the pale strip of skin around my left ring finger. She shoots the cuffs of her bathrobe and I can see her faded blue star. Mitzi never did, but a lot of the butches used to have them, covered by their watches during the day when they were at work. I haven’t seen one in so long. I shut my eyes on the afterimage of that old star.
It’s evening and we’re waiting for our meds. It just seems to take forever. The headlights of all those cars out on Memorial Drive are so bright. I look away to where Phil is sitting
next to me, closer than she was the last time I looked. Our knees almost touching, the way we like. I can’t help it, the big question pops out of my mouth, “What am I doing here?” and Phil’s eyes light up. She beckons, and I lean in. Her voice is low so no one can hear.
“What are you doing here?” she repeats. “I know what you’re doing here, Tatie. You’re here because here is where we meet. Here is where we find each other. Here is where it all begins.” She takes my hand and turns it over, cradling it. She places her raspy fingertips on the inside of my wrist like she’s feeling for my pulse. “You’ve been keeping yourself sweet for me, haven’t you?”
Does she mean that I got Linda to bring me lipstick and my red-and-black pashmina? My leggings with the shooting stars on them and my black silky blouse? Does she somehow know that for the past two nights I’ve been sucking my fingers until they’re wet and dancing circles on my clit until I come and come again, always quiet, never making any noise, timing it between the nurse’s rounds? “I have been,” I whisper back, nodding. I let a lock of my crazy-curly hair fall across the side of my face; all those gray curls: Mitzi used to tangle her fingers up in them and gently tug. Phil reaches out and brushes the curls away so she can see my eyes. When she strokes the side of my face, I shiver to my core. I feel myself breaking out in goose bumps.
“I knew it,” says Phil, stroking me some more. “I knew you were a feeling girl, an easy girl. Come more than once, don’t you, Tatie? Don’t you? Fast and easy and sweet for me?”
How does she know? One night, Mitzi and I just stopped counting. “You’re going to kill me!” I squealed, panting and laughing and squirming around on the bed, covers all over the room, who knew what time in the wee hours it had gotten to be.
“Going out in a blaze of glory,” she growled before getting back to work with her mouth. Each time a surprise, a gift. “You are a marvel,” said Mitzi, no, it’s Phil saying it. “You are a marvel and you are here with me.”
There’s nowhere for us to go to be alone. She passes me in the hall and she whispers, “You’ll ride my cock.” Big Nurse, walking beside me—does she hear? Her poochy cheeks keep up their rhythmic motion without stopping; she’s always chewing gum.
