It
started slowly, so slowly I don't think either of us even realized what
was happening at first. I remember Annie's face when we first went into
the house. All the delight from her special laugh went into her eyes. I
showed her all over the first two floors; it didn't occur to us to go
upstairs--somehow that seemed private. Annie loved everything: of course
the plants and the gardens outside and the cats most of all, but also
the brickwork, the books, the records, the paintings. The cats took to
her right away, rubbing against her and purring and letting her pick
them up and pat them. She took over the feeding job without our even
discussing it. That first day, I stood in the kitchen leaning against
the counter watching Annie feed the cats, and I knew I wanted to be able
to do that forever: stand in kitchens watching Annie feed cats. Our
kitchens. Our cats. There she was, with her long black hair in one braid
down her back, and her blue shirt hanging out around her jeans, and her
sneakers with the holes in them and a cat at each one, looking up and
mewing. So I went over and put my arms around her and kissed her, and it
became a different kind of kiss from any between us before.
I remember that she still had the cat-food can in her hand and that she
nearly dropped it. After a while, Annie whispered, "Liza, the cats," and
we moved away from each other and she fed them. But when she finished,
we just stood there looking at each other. My heart was pounding so loud
I was sure Annie could hear it, I think it was partly to muffle it that
I put my arms around her again. We went up to the living room ...
I remember so much about that first time with Annie that I am numb with
it, and breathless. I can feel Annie's hands touching me again, gently,
as if she were afraid I might break; I can feel her softness under my
hands--I look down at my hands now and see them slightly curved, feel
them become both strong and gentle as I felt them become for the first
time then. I can close my eyes and feel every motion of Annie's body and
my own--clumsy and hesitant and shy--but that isn't the important part.
The important part is the wonder of the closeness and the unbearable
ultimate realization that we are two people, not one--and also the wonder
of that: that even though we are two people, we can be almost like one,
and at the same time delight in each other's uniqueness. ... We can be
almost like one ...
They were wonderful, those two weeks of spring
vacation; it was as if we finally had not only a place but a whole world
all our own. We even bought instant coffee and food for breakfast and
lunch so we could stay at the house all day every day till we both had
to go home for dinner.
The weather was warm and hopeful, and every morning when I arrived I
would fling open the windows and let the sun and the soft spring air
pour in. I'd put water on for coffee and then settle down to wait for
Annie, sometimes with a newspaper; sometimes I'd just sit there. And
pretty soon I'd hear the door latch turning. We had only one key, so I
always left the door unlocked in the mornings; Annie could just come in,
as if she lived there. One morning during the first week, I sat at the
kitchen counter on one of two tall stools watching the sun give the
black cat's fur highlights like those in Annie's hair. Then I heard
Annie open the door and come down the stairs to me. I smiled, because I
could hear her singing. "Hi." She kissed me and wriggled out of her
lumber jacket, which by then I knew she had gotten secondhand from a
cousin. "I got us some more of that Danish," she said, putting a paper
bag on the counter.
"But you haven't the money!" I got up and began breaking eggs into a bowl.
"It's all right," she said, giving me a quick
hug and then spooning instant coffee into mugs. "Mmm. Coffee smells
good, even raw!" I laughed.
"Have some," I said, beating the eggs.
Annie shook her head and opened the refrigerator. "Juice first. I'm starved.
I woke up at five-thirty and the sun was so pretty I couldn't go back to
sleep. I wanted to come right down here."
"Maybe I should give you the keys," I said, thinking of how wonderful it
would be to arrive in the morning and find Annie there waiting for me.
"Wouldn't be right," Annie said. She poured herself
some juice--juice makes me feel sick on an empty stomach, and Annie
already knew that and never asked me any more if I wanted any. She drank
the juice and then scooped up the black cat. "Good morning, puss,
where's your brother?"
"Chasing his tail under Ms. Widmer's desk when last seen. Butter,
please." Annie handed me the butter with a bow, saying like an
operating-room nurse, "Butter." I caught her mid-bow and kissed her
again, and we stood there forgetting breakfast in the early-morning sun.
We finally did eat, though, and washed the dishes. I remember that
morning we were especially silly; it must have been the sun. We had the
back door open, and it streamed in through the screen, making both cats
restless. "'There was an old woman,'" Annie sang, drying a coffee mug,
"'swallowed a fly ...' Come on, Liza, you sing, too."
"I can't," I said. "I can't carry a tune."
"Everyone can carry a tune."
"I can't carry one right. I change key."
"Demonstrate." I shook my head; I've always been self-conscious about
singing. But Annie went ahead with the song anyway, ignoring me, and by
the time I was scrubbing the frying pan, I couldn't help but join in.
She pretended not to notice. After we finished the dishes, we took the
cats out and watched them chase bugs in the sun on the cobblestones. A
heavyset woman in a print housedress and a man's baggy sweater waddled
over, peering at us suspiciously. "Katherine and Isabelle," she said
with an accent, "I thought they were on vacation? You friends of
Benjy's? He usually comes to feed the kitties." We explained, and she
smiled and pulled up her garden chair and sat chatting with us for over
an hour. We kept trying to signal each other to do something that would
make her go away, but neither of us could think of anything, and she was
too nice to be rude to. Finally, though, Annie said, "Well, I'm going
in--I've got to do some homework," and the woman nodded and said, "Good
girl, never neglect your studies. I should get to the GD vacuuming,
myself. If I'd have studied more when I was your age, maybe I'd have
gotten myself a good job instead of just a husband and five kids and a
stack of dirty dishes."
"She didn't sound as if she really minded," Annie said when we were back
inside, up in the living room, Annie with her history reading list and
me with my half-finished solar-house floor plan. We worked, mostly in
silence, till lunch--and that day, because it was so warm, we risked
meeting the woman again and took our tuna-fish sandwiches out into the
back yard. She wasn't there, so Annie went back for the bottle of wine
we'd splurged on. "I'd love to work in that garden," Annie said when
we'd finished our sandwiches and were lazily sipping the end of the one
glass of wine each we'd allowed ourselves--no one else was outside,
still.
"I bet they wouldn't mind."
But Annie shook her head. "I'd mind
if I were them," she said. "A garden's special--more than a house. To a
gardener." She got up and knelt on the cobblestones, examining the few
plants that were beginning to come up
around the fading crocuses. The sun was shining on her hair, making
little blue-gold strands among the black.
"I'm so lucky," I said. She
turned and smiled at me. I hadn't even realized I'd spoken till she
turned, her head tipped inquisitively to one side, her small round face
and her deep eyes intent on me. "So lucky," I said, holding out my hand.
We went inside.
It was new every time we touched each other, looked at each other, held
each other close on the uncomfortable living-room sofa. We were still
very shy, and clumsy, and a little scared--but it was as if we had found
a whole new country, in each other and ourselves and were exploring it
slowly together. Often we had to stop and just hold each other--too much
beauty can be hard to bear. And sometimes, especially after a while,
when the shyness was less but we still didn't know each other or
ourselves or what we were doing very well--once in a while, we'd laugh.
The best thing about that vacation was that we somehow felt we had
forever and no one could disturb us. Of course that was an illusion, but
we were so happy we didn't let that thought touch us. I'm afraid
I
didn't think much about the rally or the fund-raising campaign. I had
gone to both the meetings the "committee of three" had before vacation,
and had reluctantly agreed to write a speech and rehearse it at our last
meeting--the one during vacation--and give it at the rally. Nothing I said
convinced Sally and Walt that I'd be terrible at it. Walt had gotten a
newspaper reporter his older brother knew to say he'd "cover" the
rally, which didn't make me any more relaxed about my speech. "Can't you
see it?" Sally had said at our last meeting, I suppose to entice me with
dreams of glory. "'Student Council President Tells What Foster Means
to Her--Encourages New Students to Apply.'"
"With one of those smaller headlines underneatt," said Walt, "saying
'Our School, Cry Students.' Hey, that'd really get them, I bet! I wonder
if we could get some kids to chant that--spontaneously, of course."
"Don't count your speeches before they're written," I said, trying
feebly to be funny. "Or your chants, either." It's not that I meant to
avoid the speech; once it became clear I'd have to make it, I did try to
work on it. In fact, Annie and I must have spent nearly all afternoon
that first Friday trying to work out what I could say that wouldn't
sound phony. And by the time she got through going over it with me, I
actually found there were quite a few reasons why I thought Foster was a
good school. But then came the second week, and Annie and I became more
comfortable with each other, and the speech and the third meeting slowly
slipped far from my mind.
13
It was nearly the end of vacation--Thursday morning of the second
week--that I couldn't find the orange cat, so when Annie got to the
house, we hunted in all the places we knew he usually hid. Finally
Annie said maybe he'd gone upstairs, and she went up to the third floor
to look for him. It's funny, since we were practically living in the
house by then, but neither of us had yet been up there. I think we still
felt it was private; that it was okay for us to take over the rest of
the house, but not where Ms. Stevenson and Ms. Widmer slept. After Annie
had been upstairs for a few minutes, she called to me in a funny voice.
"Liza," she said, sort of low and tense. "Come here." I went up the
narrow stairs and followed her voice into the larger of the two
bedrooms. She was standing beside a double bed, the cat in her arms,
looking down at the books in a small glass-fronted bookcase. I looked at
them, too.
"Oh, my God," I said then. "They're gay! Ms. Stevenson and
Ms. Widmer. They're--they're like us ..."
"Maybe not," Annie said cautiously.
"But ..." I opened the glass doors
and read off some of the titles: Female Homosexuality, by Frank S.
Caprio. Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, by Abbott and Love. Patience and
Sarah--our old friend--by Isabel Miller. The Well of Loneliness, by
Radclyffe Hall. The cat jumped out of Annie's arms and scurried back
downstairs to his brother. "It's funny," Annie said. "I never met them,
but from everything you told me, I--well, I wondered."
"It never even crossed my mind," I said, still so astonished I could
only stare at the double bed and the books. Certainly at school Ms.
Stevenson and Ms. Widnier never gave any hint of being gay--and then it
hit me that the only "hints" I could think of were cliches that didn't
apply to them, like acting masculine, or not getting along with men, or
making teacher's pets of girls. True, once Ms. Stevenson got mad when a
kid made a crummy anti-gay remark. But I'd heard my own father do that,
just as he did when someone said something anti-black or anti-Hispanic.
Annie picked up one of the books and flipped through it. "Imagine buying
all these books," she said. "Remember how scared we were?" I nodded.
"God, some of these are old," Annie said, turning back to the books in
the case. "Ms. Stevenson and Ms. Widmer must go back quite a long time."
Then she closed the bookcase and came over to me, leaning her head on my
shoulder. "It's terrible," she said, "for us to have been so scared to
be seen with books we have every right to read." She looked up and put
her hands on my shoulders; her hands were shaking a little. "Liza, let's
not do that.
Let's not be scared to buy books, or
embarrassed, and when we buy them, let's not hide them in a secret
bookcase. It's not honest, it's not right, it's a denial of--of
everything we feel for each other. They're older, maybe they had to,
but--oh, Liza, I don't want to hide the--the best part of my life, of
myself." I pulled her to me; she was shaking all over. "Annie, Annie." I
said, smoothing her hair, trying to soothe her. "Annie, take it easy,
love; I don't want to hide either, but ..."
"The best part," Annie repeated fiercely, moving out of my arms.
"Liza--this vacation, it's been--" She went back to the bookcase, thumping
her palm against the glass doors. "We can't close ourselves in behind
doors the way these books are closed in. But that's what's going to
happen as soon as school starts--just afternoons, just weekends--we should
be together all the time, we should ..." She turned to me again, her
eyes very dark, but then she smiled, half merry, half bitter. "Liza, I
want to run away with you, to elope, dammit."
"I--I know," I said; the bitterness had quickly taken over. I reached for
her hands. "I know." Annie came into my arms again. "Liza, Liza,
nothing's sure, but--but I'm as sure as a person can be. I want to hold
on to you forever, to be with you forever, I ..."
She smiled wistfully. "I want us to be a couple of passionless old
ladies someday together, too," she said, "sitting in rocking chairs,
laughing over how we couldn't get enough of each other when we were
young, rocking peacefully on somebody's sunny porch ..."
"On our sunny porch," I said. "In Maine."
"Maine?"
"Maine. We were both calmer now, holding hands, smiling. "Okay," Annie
said. "And we'll rock and rock and rock and remember when we were kids
and were taking care of somebody else's house and they turned out to be
gay, and how tense we were because we knew we'd have to spend the next
four years away from each other at different colleges, not to mention
that very summer because I had to go to stupid camp ..."
We pulled ourselves out of that room, we really did. We went into the other
bedroom, because we had to do something and because we were curious, and
it was just as we expected; the other bedroom didn't count. All the
clothes were in the two closets in the big bedroom and in the two
bureaus there, and in the bureau in the other room there were only what
looked like extras--heavy sweaters and ski socks and things like that.
The bed in that room was a single one and the sheets on it looked as if
they'd been there for years. It was just for show. "We won't do that,"
Annie said firmly when we were back downstairs in the kitchen, heating
some mushroom soup. "We won't, we won't. If people are shocked, let them
be."
"Parents," I said, stirring the soup. "My brother."
"Well, they'll just have to know, won't they?"
"You going to go right home and tell Nana you're gay, that we're
lovers?" I asked as gently as I could.
"Oh, Liza."
"Well?"
"No, but ..." I turned down the gas; the soup was beginning to boil.
"Bowls." Annie reached into the cupboard. "Bowls."
"And if you're not going to run home and tell them now, you probably
won't later."
"They won't mind so much when I'm older. When we're older." I poured the
soup into the bowls and opened a box of crackers I had bought the day
before.
"It won't make any difference. It'll be just as hard then."
"Dammit!" Annie shouted suddenly. "Speak for yourself, can't you?"
My soup bowl wavered in my hand; I nearly dropped it. And I wanted to carry
it to the sink and dump the soup down the drain. Instead I poured it back
into the pot, reached for my jacket, and said as calmly as I could, "I'm
going out. Lock up if you leave before I get back, okay?"
"Liza, I'm sorry," Annie said, not moving. "I'm sorry. It--it's the
bed--knowing it's there when the sofa's so awful, and knowing it's going
to be so long till we can be together again, really together, I mean.
Please don't go. Have your soup--here." She took my bowl to the stove and poured my soup back in it. "Here--please. You're probably right about my parents."