Banana Rose (12 page)

“Where’ve you been?” I asked.

“I got your note when I got back. Sorry I missed you. Steve Cordon gave me his cabin near Truchas for ten days. He went east and I thought I’d take advantage of it. I needed to get down on the novel. I ran into Jake at the co-op and he offered to drive me over.” She again brushed some hair out of her eyes. “It’s getting real hard. I’m not sure anymore who Louise is. She’s running away from me.”

I curled the corner of my white paper napkin. “Like you’re running away from me?” I bit my lip. It just came out. I couldn’t help it. I’d felt perfectly happy since my solo journey in the woods and here I was starting trouble.

Anna turned and looked at me. “Nell, did I hurt your feelings? I’m sorry. It was a last-minute thing.”

I continued to curl the napkin. I pressed my lips together. “It’s okay.” I felt completely foolish. That wasn’t what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to tell her I was painting.

The waitress placed two glasses in front of us. Then she brought over two silver containers from the lime green malt machine. With one in each hand, she poured half of the frothy liquid into each glass and left the other half in the containers. Anna got vanilla. I had chocolate. The waitress, who was smacking gum and wore a hair net, gave us each other’s flavors accidentally. Anna and I switched them, tapped our glasses together, and drank. The malt was thick and I asked for a spoon.

“I just remembered! Didn’t you and Gauguin say you weren’t going to eat sugar this summer?” Anna exclaimed as though she had discovered something.

“Yeah. I cheat. He probably doesn’t. He’s very honorable.” I smiled with true satisfaction. The malt was good. “This is a special occasion. He’ll understand.”

We sipped and spooned and didn’t say much. There was a long mirror on the back wall behind the counter. Anna’s and my images were blocked by utensils and milk cartons that were on the cutting board, but we could see a bit of each other. Anna sure looked pretty. When she looked into her malt, you could see her lashes against her cheeks in the mirror’s reflection. I wore a coffee-colored tank top. At one point our eyes caught in the mirror, and we smiled at each other.

I poured the second half of my malt into my glass. It had melted, but I still ate it with the long soda spoon. Anna only finished half of hers and then pushed it away.

“How come you’re not finishing?” I asked, eagerly bent over mine.

“I don’t know. I lost my appetite,” she said.

“I would too if I ordered vanilla.” I shook my head.

She waited for me to finish and then paid for both of us. “Want to walk over to Kit Carson?” Anna asked.

We strolled through a green playing field, past a baseball diamond, and under huge cottonwoods that must have been planted when Kit Carson was alive. We walked over to the small park cemetery where Carson was buried. The grass grew high around the gravestones. It was too much trouble to hand-clip that close, so if the mower didn’t get it, the grass just grew. We sat on the ground, leaning against a tombstone. Neither of us talked. I thought, Uh-oh, we’ve run out of things to say. Then I said, “Anna, I went backpacking by myself while you were gone.”

“Yeah?” She was twirling the end of a long weed in her mouth. The golden tassels hung down.

“I meditated up at Heart Lake—ever been there?” She shook her head. I continued. “It’s a good place. During the meditation at one point it came to me that you suffered. You know, over your book and all.” I was nervous. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought this up. Why wasn’t I telling her about painting instead, and how I learned to fly? I felt stupid. I decided not to say anymore, better to wait and see her response.

She was quiet for what seemed a long time, but in truth, I think it might only have been a moment.

“Nell, I’m into women.” She broke the silence abruptly.

I was confused. I thought we were going to discuss my backpacking trip. “So? So am I. I love women.”

“Nell, you don’t get it. I love them instead of men.” Anna relaxed.

“Oh.” I tried to understand what she was saying. I turned to her, my eyebrows knit together. “Does that mean we can’t be friends?” There was still something I wasn’t getting.

“No. It’s just that there is a whole part of me I was keeping from you. That’s why I might have seemed so distant.” She paused. “Nell, I’m a lesbian.” She said that word. Nothing was blurred now. I wanted to say something, but she had more she wanted to share. “And another thing—I went crazy a while back. Before I moved to Taos.”

I was still digesting the word
lesbian
and the fact that Anna was one, but instead I asked, “You went crazy? What happened?”

“I was living in a small town in Nebraska. Elgin, Nebraska.” Her voice got higher when she said the name of the town. “After I graduated college in Colorado, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I knew I wanted to write, but what else? I stayed in Fort Collins for a year and worked as a pizza cook. Then my uncle offered to teach me bookkeeping so that I could take over as the bookkeeper for his company. They manufactured fire engines in Elgin, Nebraska. It’s flat there and cold in the winter—I mean real cold. There’s a one-room library, open from 1 to 4
P.M.,
Tuesdays and Thursdays. A housewife ran the library and filled the place with Betty Crocker cookbooks. So there I was, the only queer in town, trying to write and learning to fill numbers into squares in black books, while my uncle drank Wild Turkey and had an affair with his secretary.”

“God, how long did you stay?” I asked.

“Well, I’m slow. I stayed for three and a half years. I practically ended up running the business. I know more about engines and public sales than the whole Taos Council did last year when they voted to buy three trucks,” Anna said.

“Didn’t you get lonesome?” I asked.

“You bet.” She paused, twisted her mouth to the left. “Even me, a loner who likes her solitude, I couldn’t take it. There was no one to talk to. I drove down to Omaha on the weekends. There was a dyke bar there. I didn’t know anyone and I’m shy.” Anna brushed hair again from her eyes. “I finally met someone, Clarion.” Anna smiled. “She had red hair and lived on a farm. We went together for six months. She had a husband who beat her, but he got so drunk on weekends, he didn’t realize she was gone.”

“Did you like her? Did you have much in common?” I felt dumb.

“Yeah, we were both lonely, and we wanted each other. Anyway, her husband caught us one night. He shoved her aside—she just cowered and he beat me up. I had a broken nose, a black eye, and couldn’t raise my arm all the way for weeks. I think some ribs were busted.” Anna was animated telling this story. I could tell she was glad to get it all out. “When I got back to Elgin, I told everyone I’d been in a car wreck. When they said, ‘But your car’s okay,’ I told them it was my boyfriend’s car that got wrecked. I told ’em he had a Cadillac.” She shook her head and laughed. “What a coward I was!”

She turned to me. “Are you with me?” she asked. I nodded. “Well, to make short of it, I couldn’t take it anymore. About a month later, I quit my job, but I didn’t have the courage to leave town. I didn’t know where I’d go, and I’d bought the house I was living in. Two stories. White clapboard. I even fixed the roof myself one summer.”

“Yeah, so?” I wanted to know what happened.

“I just hung on. I kept saying I was going to write, but I didn’t, and I started doing speed. Can you imagine? Speed, in that slow town? I got prescriptions from the doc. It was supposed to be for my period cramps. Then I got downers from the pharmacist in the next town. There was no drugstore in Elgin, only a grocery that sold liquor, hardware, and some canned and frozen foods. We all had big gardens. It saved you from constipation.” She laughed.

“After a while I didn’t leave the house. My eye went totally in. I stopped doing the eye exercises, and I used to hang my head out of the attic window. I think I was even drooling at the mouth when my mom came to get me.”

“Wow.” I looked at my hands. I picked two blades of grass and tore them into tiny pieces. “You don’t seem crazy now.”

“I’m not. It was the circumstances. Plus in Taos you can be anyone, and it’s okay. Eventually I cooled out. Of course, my folks helped. They liked having me around. Out of the blue a while back, Daniel had enlisted in the army and was sent to Vietnam. My parents were worried about him all the time. He returned soon after I left for Taos.

“I stayed with my mom and dad for a few months. I started writing again, and it kept me sane. Maybe that’s why I’m so uptight. I don’t want writing to get away from me—it’s all I have.” She looked at the back of her hands.

I put my hand on her arm. “Did you think I was coming on to you, because I wanted so much of your attention?”

“I wasn’t sure, but I also realized you were real tight with Gauguin.” She had her legs stretched out in front of her. She picked up a stick and hit the toes of her high-top black sneakers with it.

I looked at her sneakers. “You know, Anna, you have big feet.” We both laughed. I loved the way Anna laughed. It sounded like Russian olive leaves rustling in a summer breeze. “We’re still friends?”

“Sure. Better now, because I told you everything,” she said.

“Tell me more about your novel. How’s it really going?”

“Oh, okay. Not so good. I don’t know.” She shrugged and frowned.

“You know, Anna, I told Gauguin that you should write a novel about me. I was only kidding, but now that I think of it—” I smiled and put my index finger on my chin. Anna rolled her eyes. “But seriously,” I said, “it must be hard to have Louise in the eighteenth century. Why not write a novel about yourself or about Taos or what it’s like to be a lesbian?”

“Aw, no one’s interested in that. What’s interesting about my life?” she scoffed.

“Hey, Willa Cather became famous writing about Nebraska—you should read her some more. Forget about those Southern writers—just be yourself. Besides, I think you’re wonderful. I’d love to read about your life,” I said.

She was embarrassed. “There you go again about Cather. We’d better get up,” she said.

It was almost seven o’clock, and when the sun goes down in Taos, even if it’s summer, it starts to get chilly. We walked back across the park to the gate. The trees were dark green now, with long shadows. I knew the sun was setting off on the mesa somewhere, the place Anna loved best, where she had lived when she first came here. I reached over and took her hand. She was at least a head taller than me. She was the tallest person I’d ever met.

E
VENTUALLY WE CLEANED
out the chicken house by the garden and used it for a place to meditate. We’d sit in there like hens waiting for something to hatch. Mostly what hatched were thoughts.

“Hey, Gauguin, I was thinking we should go backpacking,” I said.

Gauguin turned his head slowly. “Is that what you come up with after a half-hour of meditating?”

“Yes, and let’s go for a whole week,” I said.

We went to the back country of Bandelier, a national monument of ancient pueblo ruins. The dirt road leading to the unexcavated ruins in the back country was rocky, the muffler on Betsy Boop fell off, and we spent a lot of time trying to wire it back. Neither Gauguin nor I was a mechanical genius. We finally threw it in the back seat and chugged loudly to the trail head, arriving in the late afternoon. We hiked in three miles until it became too dark to see, then laid out our sleeping bags, crawled in them, and skipped dinner. I must have been asleep for about an hour when I woke to the heavy breathing of an animal. I jerked up and saw two eyes staring at me in the moonlight. I could tell it was huge.

“Gauguin,” I whispered urgently. He was deep in sleep. “Gauguin.” I reached out my arm and shook him.

“What?” he said, his breath smoky with dreams.

“Gauguin, there’s an animal out there!”

His body jerked in his sleeping bag. “Where?” He squinted and felt the ground next to him for his glasses.

“Right there.” I pointed.

The animal shifted its weight. Yeah, I just heard him. You’re right. I think he’s watching us,” Gauguin said in a hoarse whisper. “And I think he’s big.”

“What should we do?” I asked.

“What can we do?” he answered. “Let’s just lie here awhile.”

I was sure it was a dinosaur or the ghost of a medicine man. We should never have come to a place full of ancient ruins, I thought. Gauguin fell back asleep. I stayed up alone, guardian of the great animal, mostly hoping to guard myself. The animal didn’t leave, but it stayed where it was and didn’t come closer.

The sky finally turned blue gray. I dared to look in the animal’s direction. I lifted my head off the rolled-up towel I used as a pillow and squinted to see better. Staring back at me was a red cow! Not the kind you milk, the kind you eventually eat. It must have gotten lost and, lonesome, wanted to stay near us for company.

With my feet still in the bag, I kicked Gauguin to wake him. “Let’s go. The sun is coming up.” When I spoke aloud, the cow wandered off.

We hiked through fields of wild flowers, dark boulders, and forest, finally moving into more desert land. We turned toward a stream.

“Let’s rest,” I said, flinging off my pack and sitting down by the stream, taking off my shoes and socks. I cracked open a chocolate bar.

“Rose, now remember,” Gauguin cautioned. “We each have one chocolate bar and it has to last the full week we’re here. It’s our only sugar treat this summer.”

Uh-huh, I nodded.

The sun settled on my bare knees and I warmed my hands in patches of light that fell between leaves. Then I turned to Gauguin. “You know, I don’t care, Gauguin. I’m gonna eat the whole thing,” I said. I tore off the wrapper and bit off a chunk. It was good. The bite had a whole almond in it. “Want some?” I asked, offering it up in a magnanimous gesture.

“No. Now remember, I’m not sharing mine with you on the fifth night out here. We each have our own,” he repeated.

I laid back on the edge of the stream and looked up through the oak leaves. “Gauguin, you couldn’t be so cruel. What if I promise to make love to you eight hundred times this week?”