Testimony

by Paula Martinac

  That was why Fay’s name seemed familiar; Fenton must have mentioned her at some point. Gen avoided looking up from her slice of pumpkin pie. “He’s a friend of mine,” she replied.

  Fay eyed her curiously. “Well, if you see him, would you give him my best? Tell him Fay says, ‘Don’t be strange!’ He’ll get the joke.” Her tone was wistful, and Gen felt a pang of sadness for her.

  After Fay left, Gen lingered behind, nursing her sherry. Juliet’s voice fell to a hush, even though they were alone in the house. “Do you think Fay really doesn’t know about Fenton being—you know, gay?”

  The conversation had careened into private territory. In public, Gen was accustomed to addressing Fenton’s sexuality in coded terms, avoiding the actual words that described him. He was a confirmed bachelor, just as she was a career woman. She proceeded cautiously, surveying Juliet’s face for subtle signs of disapproval or distaste that didn’t appear.

  “Maybe she likes him too much to care,” Gen offered.

  “Like that young secretary . . . I forget her name. The one he brought to election night. I found it so odd, didn’t you? Like he was trying to prove he’s not family.” Juliet fixed her eyes on her plate and proceeded to finish her slice of pie in rapid bites.

  Gen started at family, such a clear signal for gay people. She and Fenton used both that word and church when they referred to people like themselves. Carolyn preferred to say “she bats for our team” because she enjoyed softball.

  Juliet had dropped a broad hint when she admitted wearing an engagement ring to “keep the men at bay.” Although Gen had responded with her own fake fiancé, they hadn’t proceeded any further. In the past, Fenton had kidded Gen about being slow to pounce on obvious clues.

  “You got your head in those history books when it could be somewhere else,” he teased—a dirty joke she dismissed because she was exclusively Carolyn’s at the time and not in the market to date.

  Now Gen felt foolish drawing too much attention to Juliet’s revelation—as if she hadn’t known all along! She picked at the Fenton thread instead. “He told me he’s trying to change himself,” she said.

  Juliet looked up from her plate, now dotted with flakes of crust. “Oh, that’s terrible.”

  “I said the same thing. He’s actually going to a psychiatrist to train himself to prefer women.”

  “What a waste of time and money,” Juliet said. “Why is he doing that to himself? He’s a grown man. He knows it’s impossible.”

  “I think he’s banking on other folks not knowing that. He’s been afraid of losing his job. Or worse, going to jail.”

  Juliet slapped down her plate. “If I were ever in a spot like that, I’d just—”

  Gen swallowed hard, half-expecting the solution “kill myself.” But after a dramatic pause, Juliet continued, “—I’d pick up and move somewhere else. A big city that’s not under the microscope. This town—”

  Juliet didn’t need to finish her thought for Gen to understand. “Is there any more sherry?” Gen asked.

  Juliet hopped out of her seat with a smirk. “There is. But what say we switch to something stronger?”

  ✥ ✥ ✥

  Gen stayed at Cavendish House into the wee hours, reveling in an open chat with “family.” Over shots of Jim Beam, she and Juliet discussed everything from when they first recognized their attraction to women, to women on campus they suspected were gay (“Frances Palmer, for sure!”), to the ghosts of lovers past. Although she was Gen’s junior, Juliet’s list of exes was longer.

  “What can I say? I had a wicked youth,” Juliet said.

  Although she matched Gen in belts of bourbon, Juliet never got drunk. “Hollow leg,” she explained, “inherited from my daddy.” For Gen, after a certain number of shots, the parlor of Cavendish House started to spin, and she feared driving home.

  Juliet suggested she stay the night, and Gen agreed although she wasn’t sure what Juliet had in mind. When Juliet said she’d sleep on the sofa in her first-floor suite, unexpected disappointment flashed in Gen.

  “I’ll take the sofa,” she insisted, embarrassed that she had mistaken Juliet’s invitation for interest.

  “I can’t let you. It’s not that comfortable.”

  “Well, why don’t we share the bed?” Gen suggested.

  “As long as you don’t mind. I don’t think I snore.”

  Gen watched Juliet fumble through her dresser drawers for an extra nightgown.

  “Here, wear this, it’s my nicest one.” The flannel cascaded over her ankles, which made them giggle like girls at a slumber party. “You are just too short, Dr. Rider.”

  Lying within inches of each other in bed, they talked more and kept collapsing into uncontrollable laughter when they attempted to be quiet and sleep. After they caught their breath, Juliet reached out for Gen’s hand, squeezed it, and let it rest there. Gen lifted Juliet’s hand to her lips and gave it a butterfly peck.

  They rolled toward each other. Juliet’s hand brushed Gen’s cheek, cupped her neck. When their lips met, the kiss started soft before catching fire, like they’d become characters in a movie—as if anyone made movies about women doing things like that.

  Their gowns caught on their chins and heads as they hurried to shed them, which made them giggle all over again. When Juliet’s fingers found their way inside her, the only sounds in the room were Gen’s moans and Juliet’s reassuring whispers.

  A different noise, a whining ring, cut through their private moment. Gen hoped it was some distant phone they could ignore, but Juliet bolted upright.

  Gen recognized it, too, then. Cavendish boasted a brass doorbell, the old-fashioned kind you twisted. She had admired it when she came to the door that evening.

  Their breaths came in anxious puffs. They waited for it to stop, but someone kept turning the bell, over and over, demanding Juliet answer the door.

  Juliet threw on her nightgown and robe. When Gen offered to come with her, she waved her off.

  “Probably just campus security,” she said. “They look out for us on holidays especially.”

  Gen flicked on the table lamp and strained to listen. Juliet greeted someone by name, but then she couldn’t make out their low voices. Within minutes, Juliet returned to the bedroom with a look that Gen couldn’t read.

  “What?”

  “Campus guard, like I thought. He saw the parlor lights on at four in the morning and got curious. And then he spotted a car in the driveway, and he thought I was being raped or something.” Juliet sat heavily on Gen’s edge of the bed. “Damn. I should have asked you to pull it around the back.”

  “I’ll leave.” Gen hung her legs out of the covers, then crossed her arms over her bare breasts.

  “No need, I got rid of him. Told him I had family staying over. Not even a lie.” Her tone was light, but Juliet’s hands on the quilt balled into fists. “This is why I couldn’t listen to Ruby and Frances about living here. Jesus, May can’t come soon enough!”

  “Juliet, I’m going to go,” Gen insisted. She found her wool dress where she’d left it, folded across a flowered armchair.

  In the bathroom, Gen splashed water on her face and stared at her disheveled reflection, her face devoid of makeup, her hair sticking out in odd peaks. Thirty minutes earlier she’d felt alive, vibrant, desired. Now she looked like the middle-aged woman she was quickly becoming. She combed her fingers through her hair, but the attempted grooming didn’t help.

  Dawn light peeped through the leaded glass in the Cavendish House front door as Juliet helped Gen into her coat.

  “I’ve dreamt about being with you,” Juliet whispered as they hugged. “I want to try again.”

  Gen slid out of the embrace first, replying that they would see each other soon. On the short drive home, Juliet’s romantic words, so full of longing and hope, echoed in her thoughts.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Gen

  A hangover pulsed behind Gen’s eyes. She forced her lids to open an
d tried to read the time. Ten-something, it looked like. She squinted at the alarm clock until she made out the second hand pointing to the space between five and six. In the medicine cabinet, she located the Bayer aspirin and downed three.

  Somehow the milk had gone sour, and black coffee was her only choice. She drank the bitter brew down anyway, standing at the kitchen table in her bathrobe. If she didn’t wake herself up, she might be tempted to crawl back into bed until Saturday.

  The ring of the phone jolted her, and she wondered if it was Juliet. The night before had been exhilarating, sexy, but in the brassy morning light Gen worried about becoming involved with someone right in town, on campus. Someone who said she’d been dreaming about her, but whom she hadn’t dreamt about in return.

  “Did I wake you?”

  Gen sank onto the telephone bench at Carolyn’s voice.

  “I’ve never known you to sleep past seven, not even on vacation.”

  “Late night,” Gen replied, fussing with a pulled thread on her terry robe.

  “I hope it was fun,” Carolyn said, fishing for information Gen wasn’t going to give her.

  She waited.

  “I got your letter, obviously,” Carolyn said, “or I’d be on my way right now.”

  Gen waited again.

  “I thought I’d check and make sure you hadn’t changed your mind. I could hop in the car and be there right after lunch.”

  Gen had located Towson on a road map and knew it was twice the distance from Springboro as Richmond. Carolyn couldn’t be calling from home.

  “Where are you?”

  “Peggy and Lorna’s. We had a gay old dinner last night with some of the girls.”

  Peggy was one of Carolyn’s exes from years back, a high school gym teacher with an infectious laugh. Lorna, her partner, worked at the state archives and shared a lot of interests with Gen. In the months since the breakup, Gen hadn’t realized she missed the couple and the many “gay old dinners” they’d hosted, but Carolyn’s casual mention of them broke the wound open.

  Gen stifled a yawn. She’d had only a few hours of sleep, her head continued to throb, and the game Carolyn was playing exhausted her.

  “So if you’d like to reconsider,” Carolyn continued, “I might come tomorrow. For the day.”

  Gen rested her chin in her hand. “Why in the world do you think I’d reconsider?” she demanded. “My letter was very clear. I’m done, Carolyn. There’s nothing to say.”

  Carolyn sniffed on the other end of the line. “The girls took a vote last night. They said I should try anyway, that maybe you’d had second thoughts. And I’m so close . . .”

  Gen shivered. The group had discussed her private letter, in which she had poured out her fury at discovering Carolyn’s lies. Worse, they seemed to have passed it around to weigh if Gen’s words sounded serious and final. She imagined one of them dismissing it with, “Ah, we all fly off the handle sometimes,” and another woman calling for a vote. All in favor, say aye.

  “It’s too late, Carolyn,” Gen said. She wanted to cut her as deep as she’d been wounded. “Tell your friends I’ve found someone else, and this was a waste of your dime.”

  She clicked the receiver into place without saying good-bye. Putting Carolyn in her place did not feel as good as she’d hoped. It both satisfied her and brought stinging tears. Gen plodded back to the bedroom and tucked herself under the covers.

  ✥ ✥ ✥

  Gen woke again when the sun was just beginning its slow crawl toward nighttime. Her head was less fuzzy and pounding than it had been in the morning, but now her stomach grumbled its complaint. She’d stayed in bed all day without anything more than a cup of black coffee.

  She had left both of her Thanksgiving dinners without taking any leftovers, and her refrigerator was almost bare. At the back of one shelf, she found a new container of port wine cheese spread that Fenton had given her on one of his visits. An untouched sleeve of Ritz Crackers sat in the cupboard. She ripped it open and mounded cheese onto a cracker and, while she was still chewing, prepared two more just like it. She preferred her cheese and port separate, but at that moment nothing had ever tasted so good. She considered eating the whole tub, possibly with a spoon.

  The doorbell buzz interrupted her snack. She didn’t think it could possibly be Carolyn, not after she’d told her to stay away. Through the window panel in the door, she spotted Juliet, and her heart picked up a beat. With cracker crumbs on her bathrobe, sour breath, and matted hair, Gen didn’t cut an attractive figure. She held a hand over her mouth self-consciously as she waved Juliet in.

  “I haven’t showered or even brushed my teeth,” she said. “My breath smells like port wine cheese. Give me fifteen minutes to be a real person again.”

  Juliet smiled broadly and gave up her coat. “I think I can spare the time.”

  “Make yourself at home,” Gen called out. She didn’t want Juliet to see her stuffing her coat into the chaotic hall closet, where purses were poised to tumble off the top shelf, while an assortment of shoes, slippers, and galoshes littered the closet floor, along with loose garments that had slipped from hangers.

  But Juliet spotted the closet anyway. She clucked her tongue as Gen gave the door an extra push to close it. “Gen Rider! I never knew.”

  “It’s my darkest secret.” Gen motioned to the liquor cabinet. “But my alcohol is in perfect form.”

  “You have your priorities straight.”

  The hot water soothed her, but Gen didn’t dawdle in the shower. Her mind weighed the options of what to say to Juliet. Do you think it’s wise for either of us to date someone in town? was the most direct and accurate, but there was also the cowardly, It’s too soon after Carolyn, which would shut the topic down more quickly. Juliet could offer a competing opinion about dating in Springboro, but how could she dismiss Gen’s feelings for an ex?

  With hair combed but still wet and no time for makeup or lipstick, Gen opened the bedroom door expecting to see Juliet on the sofa, reading or thumbing through a journal.

  Instead, Juliet had made her way to the kitchen table, where she helped herself to the cheese and crackers still lying out. She wore her hair braided again, and it hung neatly between her shoulder blades. The sight of it charmed Gen and sent a ripple through her core, a sharp memory of the things they’d done the night before.

  “Looks like you didn’t eat much today either,” Gen said, standing beside her at the table.

  Juliet stuffed the rest of the Ritz into her mouth sheepishly. “I actually ate like a pig today,” she said after swallowing. “Turkey, pie, you name it. I eat when I’m nervous, and I can’t think of anything else to do.” Her scowl was teasing and not genuine. “And you only have history journals lying around. Not a single Life or National Geographic in the house!”

  Gen’s cheeks warmed. Copies of the Mississippi Valley Historical Review hardly invited casual reading. “You caught me being vain,” she said. “I had a book review published in the fall issue.”

  “Well, then I’ll have to read it.” Juliet smeared another cracker with cheese and piloted it toward Gen’s mouth. Gen’s lips parted to take a bite, and Juliet promptly polished off the other half. They chewed slowly and in silence, watching the shadows outside the window dim as dusk set. Across the backyard, the overhead light in the Carrs’ kitchen, which faced her own, flickered on.

  “Juliet—” Gen said finally, but then she wasn’t sure where to go from there.

  Juliet brushed her hands together, dusting off the crumbs. “Well, that doesn’t sound good,” she said, a tremor in her voice.

  Gen cast a sideways glance at Juliet. Her profile was lovelier than Gen had noticed before, with high cheekbones and delicate ears that her braided hairstyle complemented. Subtle lines accented the corners of her blue eyes, which Gen had made brim with tears by just saying her name. She took Juliet’s hand and started to speak, but Juliet raised their joined hands to cover her lips.

  “I know what you’
re going to say.” A little choking sound escaped her throat. “You’re going to say you’re still in love with Carolyn. Or if not that, you’re going to say you aren’t attracted to me. I’m not sure which is worse.”

  Gen lowered their hands, and her own eyes filled. The emotions welling up confounded her. She could so easily dissect and interpret documents, craft a convincing historical argument, but she was sinking through the sludge of her feelings.

  “Neither of those. It’s—I’m scared to be with someone right here, in town.”

  Gen meant because of the risk of exposure, but Juliet pegged the excuse as something completely different. She dropped Gen’s hand.

  “You’re scared of someone getting too close.”

  Gen shook her head but stopped short of objecting. On spring break the semester of their breakup, Carolyn had accused her of that very thing. Gen had laughed it away as preposterous, given they’d been a couple for six years. But Carolyn objected to playing house on weekends and vacations. She wanted a real relationship, like Peggy and Lorna’s.

  “There’s nothing for me in your neck of the woods, but you could easily get a job here,” Carolyn had suggested. “This crazy Confederate town could use a historian like you.”

  Lorna had told them about an archivist job. And although Gen reluctantly applied for the position, when they called for an interview, she declined—something she didn’t admit to Carolyn.

  “Guess my resume wasn’t good enough,” was what she said.

  “Good enough? How could that be? Gen Rider is so good she’s too good.” When Gen took offense, Carolyn said she was joking, but her words rang with bitterness, not amusement.

  Now Gen’s tears fell harder and faster, until Juliet took pity on her and drew her into an embrace. She wept freely into Juliet’s shoulder. But when her tears beaded up on the angora sweater, soft as a baby’s blanket, she knew she had to stop. It was too embarrassing, crying in her kitchen like a little girl, and she didn’t want Juliet to mistake it for something it wasn’t—desire for Carolyn.