“Probably.”
Anna grinned wider still and used her elbow to wipe sweat off her eyebrows. The late-afternoon sun was pouring in her big shaded windows, laying a pattern of silhouetted walnut leaves on her bare feet where they were folded up against her thighs. She was naked except for the polished white handkerchief she had spread over her lap to catch any stray grains of grass from the loose bag she was slowly pushing through her flour sifter. Like my mama, Anna believed you never washed a flour sifter; you brushed it clean. When she cleaned her grass there was a slight dusting of flour sprinkled among the pungent leaves in her mixing bowl. I didn’t really smoke anymore myself, but I’d tasted Anna’s blend once or twice and imagined a slight baking-powder aftertaste that reminded me of home. The aura of biscuits and marijuana-induced relaxation that surrounded Anna was one of the things I liked about sharing the apartment with her. She kept it calm, dimly lit, and sweet-smelling.
“I’m just an old dyke hippy,” she’d insisted, when I’d come to ask about the apartment.
I’d laughed, “Well, we should get along just fine then. I’m kind of a young one.”
Anna had pulled her sandal strap up and then looked me up and down, from my long shaggy hair and labrys earrings to the backpack I wore over one shoulder, from the Crazy Ladies T-shirt under my army surplus jacket to my steel-toed hiking boots. She’d pushed back her short-cropped frosty gray hair, pursed her lips, and then given that grin I would learn to love.
“Kind of, maybe,” she’d laughed. “You another one of these Women’s Center lesbians?”
“No, I’m new in town.”
“Look to me like you’re new in the world, but come have a cup of tea and tell me why you’d like to live in this messy old house. I’m warning you, it’s full of really crazy women, all of ’em running through here all the time trying to get me to go to one meeting or another, some demonstration or discussion group. I don’t go to meetings, you understand. Three other apartments in this building, and if you’re planning on holding meetings in your bedroom, you better see if you can’t rent in one of them. This is the depoliticized zone in here. I bake a lot, smoke a lot, and sleep during the day, and I intend to keep it that way.”
She led me in past the screened porch to a spacious living room that had an old brocade couch pushed up under the windows and a rug that was worn through in a path from the kitchen to the open bathroom door. There were lots of plants drooping in the heat, dust and cat fur clinging to the bottom of the pots. An enormous dirty white cat was sleeping in a patch of sunlight on one of the pews. Anna dropped down on a big stuffed cushion and watched me perch awkwardly on the near couch.
“Where you from?” she asked suddenly, and without thinking about it I answered, “South Carolina.”
“Yeah? You got a strange accent.”
“Rhode Island—spent some time there when I was a kid and my mama got sick. My family just about disowned me when I come home talking like a Yankee.”
“I been to Rhode Island once. Weird place, but all North is weird to me. They talk too fast and ask too many questions.” She lit a cigarette. A big black-and-gray tomcat walked over and plopped in her lap. She began to stroke him without looking down.
“Cats OK, huh?”
“Mine are. They’ve driven off everybody else’s in the building. Even old Ghost Dance there wakes up when a strange cat comes around, eats them up, and runs them off.” She looked pleased at the thought. “Us sleepy-looking types are dangerous when threatened, you know.”
“Oh, I know. I been messed with myself a time or two.” I dropped my bag and pulled out the stack of her apartment ads I’d torn off the bulletin board over at the Women’s Center. I handed them to her and gave her my own slow grin. “I got no problem with going next door if I want to talk politics and I don’t cook much anymore, so the kitchen is yours to keep. I don’t smoke. I do karate, and I like to play pool, though I’m not much good at it. I work days up the street at the camera store, and I want this apartment real bad.”
She grinned and shook her head. “You take down all my ads?”
“Think so, all I saw anyway. I asked around about you. Sounds like you and I could get along, and I got to move before the week’s up.”
She shook her head again and laughed out loud. “You picked up more than an accent in Rhode Island, picked up a few Yankee ways, didn’t you?”
“No more than I need to get by.” I dropped my head, looked up at her from under my eyelids, giving her my country-honey drawl. “Shit, Mama, I’m just a good old girl, don’t want no trouble a’tall. Easy to get along with, easy to get for that matter, and peaceable by nature.”
“Uh huh.”
“Uh huh,” I repeated back to her.
Just like that, we were friends. Anna treated me like an ambassador from a foreign nation. Baby-dyke-politicos, she named us, after I started going to all the meetings at the Women’s Center. I was twenty-four and had been dating women for more than seven years, long enough to resent being labeled a baby dyke, but Anna had been out for almost twenty years and joked that she’d had her first orgasm while wearing her Girl Scout uniform. I liked her better than any other women in the building: liked her slow, stoned drawl; her sharp, witty glances; and her invariably good-natured acid remarks when people started talking about the “women’s revolution.” Most of all I liked her stories. She’d been going to Panama City where there was a real gay bar with a drag show since she’d come to Tallahassee as a freshman in 1963. There wasn’t a dyke in town she didn’t know and no legendary piece of gossip she hadn’t already heard, or been the subject of. Ten years ago, she’d been arrested with two dozen others out in front of the blackened ruins of the town’s short-lived gay bar. All their names had been printed in the paper, and she’d lost her teaching fellowship in the English department.
“That was enough politics for me. I’ve had the longest graduate school career in history as a result. You know this is the first year they’ve let me teach again?” She offered me a brownie with one hand, a joint with the other. “And still, every time somebody opens a gay bar in this town, some local firebombs it. It’s got to where it’s easier around here for a faggot to get a liquor license than fire insurance.”
“There’s that pool hall over on College.”
“Yeah, after one o’clock in the morning, and then only if you’re real discreet, and real careful, and real young. I an’t none of that, and I prefer Panama City myself. ’Course, you probably like those sweaty girls in tank tops that go in there and pose under those sling lamps, sneaking whiskey in their soda bottles when it an’t their turn to play.”
“You have been there.”
“Hell, I’ve been everywhere in this town. I could tell you stories would keep you awake nights. Like the name of the boy who firebombed the last two gay bars, and exactly what year his daddy got appointed sheriff.”
“Damn!” I shook my head.
“Uh uh. ’Course you got a few stories yourself. Don’t play pool worth a damn, do you? But you bring ’em home, those sweaty girls?”
“Bar dykes.” I said it flatly. “You know how it is. They got those stringy muscles in their arms, and they all grin like those old pictures of Elvis Presley getting ready to shake his butt where the camera can’t see. Gets to me every time.”
She laughed at me, but then put her hand on my arm in apology. “I don’t know. You’re younger. Maybe it’s different for you. Women my age now, we’ve always been kind of hard on each other for that kind of thing. You’re supposed to do it because you’re in love. You get a reputation for sleeping around and people treat you bad, call you terrible names. I always hated that, but not enough to do anything myself. To tell you the truth, the only time I ever brought anybody home that way, I was drunk and I hated it. Must be different if you’re younger, huh?”
“No, not that I’ve seen, and the trouble is I like them older than me anyway,” I’d shrugged, “older than you. And yeah, they got a word for me, too.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“Neither do I.” I ran my palms up my own stringy arms and looked up at the pictures she had pinned all over her bedroom door. The women up there looked back at me with pinpoint black sleepy eyes—lesbians Anna’s age and older, mysterious, powerful and mean, no doubt, if you didn’t play by their rules. I hugged myself and looked away. “Neither do I.”
At the concert last week, I kept walking back to Cass and the little bottle of Jack Daniel’s she had in her coat pocket. “Have a drink, darling. It’ll open your eyes,” she’d say, her pupils hidden behind half-closed lids. I shook my head no and gave her a quick lick on the neck that made her cheeks flash pink and her eyes open wide. All the women near us, most of them Cass’s friends from work or the pool hall, had their own bottles. I tried to get Cass to keep her little bottle down in the shadows. The crowd kept pushing past, their eyes hooded with too much dope and skin sour with cigarettes—women in party clothes: loose trousers, velvet vests, hats, high-heeled boots, glittering necklaces, and elaborate hoops dangling from their ears. Most of them looked like they belonged to the same gypsy troupe, their tribe indicated by the slogan-bearing buttons pinned to their collars and jackets. I saw Anna go by with her new girlfriend, Gayle, and then three of the women from the house—Judy, Paula, and Lenore. But none of them seemed to have seen us, and they all quickly disappeared into the audience. I felt Cass slip her hands around my waist and turned my face into the shelter of her neck.
“Where do they all come from?” I was only half serious. There were more women in the audience than I’d seen at any demonstration up at the capitol building.
“Oh, these only come out for the music,” Cass laughed. “Just like me.”
“You know, culture, women’s culture.” Cass’s friend Billy leaned over us, her hand sliding past my butt on its way to the bottle in Cass’s pocket. “An’t you heard about women’s culture?” I looked down at the black ink tattoos standing out all over her forearms. Billy was wearing her usual uniform—jeans so old and worn they looked like gray sky over the ocean at dawn, and a denim vest buttoned up tight to flatten her breasts. Her arms were bare, and every time she stretched her hand out, I could see white flash under her armpit from skin that was never exposed to the sun.
“You mean to tell me we an’t here to listen to rock and roll?” Cass slapped Billy’s shoulder and giggled. It had taken two weeks of teasing and arguing before Cass had agreed to come to this event, and she’d insisted on getting Billy and her girlfriend Roxanne to come, too. “Got to have somebody to talk to,” she’d insisted.
Billy had thought the whole notion a hoot. “They don’t know how to dress,” she kept saying, “but some of these chicks an’t bad-looking.”
Roxanne just kept biting the lipstick off her lips and kicking her heels against the wall behind us. “I don’t see nothing here anybody’d want to take home with ’em.” She lit a cigarette and gave me a look of pure malevolence. I wondered if she had seen Billy’s hand on my ass. I leaned back into Cass’s embrace and tried to look happily innocent of any interest in Roxanne’s woman. That wasn’t too hard. Cass was just about the sexiest woman in the crowd, big and rough-looking in her worn denim jacket with her black hair cut close around her ears, but with soft brown eyes and a quick smile. She was a good-natured woman who liked me more than she was sure she wanted to. More important, she didn’t seem to feel the need to push her girlfriends around that Billy did. I loved having a woman in my life who prowled like a big old tiger, yet cuddled me close like a kitten licking mama’s ears. Billy talked about Roxanne as if the woman was a not quite bright child, and clearly had decided I had to have some special hidden sexual talent if Cass was so ready to put up with my sass. Part of what kept me seeing Cass was her casual acceptance of my temper and habits, and her grinning dismissal of Billy’s half-serious flirting with me. Cass was also nearly as tall as Billy and had told me frankly that they had become friends only after everybody they knew kept pushing them to fight each other.
“We was supposed to do the fight of the week or something, and let everybody know who was butcher than who, you know. But providing that kind of free entertainment just an’t my style. Billy and I put them all through some changes when we took up with each other, I’ll tell you.”
Two women I had met at the Women’s Center wiggled past us. One of them looked me in the eye and then up over my head into Cass’s face. I could feel Cass’s grin in the way her hands wiggled on me. The woman looked away quickly.
“Did you hear about Angie?” her friend asked.
“Yeah, I heard.” The woman pushed away from us hurriedly. “Don’t talk about her here.”
“Did you see her face?” Roxanne spoke with her cigarette held between her teeth. “That woman needs to reconsider going without makeup.”
I felt the heat come up in my face and didn’t know for a moment if I was angry or ashamed. I watched the expressions on the faces of the women who filed past us, then felt the skin at the back of my neck pull tight. We could have been animals in a cage from the way they looked at us. I kept going from indignant anger to shame with no pause between. The anger felt healthy but wouldn’t stay with me, while the shame was continuous and crippling. I wanted to be proud of Cass’s hands on my hips, to glare back coldly at the women who frowned at her. I was proud of her, but my pride wasn’t holding any better than my anger. I wished I didn’t care what anybody thought, but I did. Beside me Roxanne kept getting her mirror out and pulling a few curls forward down over her eyes. Her hands were shaking, her makeup streaking on her neck where sweat was trailing down. For a moment, she looked like my little sister looking up at me, wanting my help but unable to ask. I could have cried. Instead, I took deep breaths trying to calm myself and finally just gave it up and took a couple of pulls from Cass’s bottle.
Cass hugged me again, her eyes watching me closely. “We can always leave.” She didn’t look as if the idea bothered her at all.