Beggar of Love (4 page)

Cousin Ruth arrived to babysit her. As soon as her mother and father left, Ruth put her to bed and went out in the living room to smoke cigarettes and listen to the record player all night. Amelia’s mustache kept away the dark-cloud feeling she usually had on Friday and Saturday nights when Emmy and Jarvy were gone.

All these years later, smoke from Angela’s cigarette stung her nose and she stood to avoid it, as she always tried to avoid her family’s smoke, losing her reverie. Angela lay on the new spring grass in Cannon Park. Bright new dandelions and tiny white daisies with yolk-yellow centers were clustered everywhere, like glowing fallen stars. Bits of streamers had been left behind from someone’s wedding.

“Look at this magnificent carpet, Jefferson! Summer’s here in full swing now that you’re sixteen.”

“Summer never looked so good before, Angie,” she said, bending to finger one of the little white flowers.

“You mean, before you?” They’d come from walking along the river, arms wrapped around each other. Angela tickled Jefferson’s bare toes with tiny pebbles that she emptied from her shoes.

“No, Angie, before us.”

“Before us you were making eyes at your Girl Scouts.”

“Hey! You know I wasn’t.” She leapt to catch a tree branch and pulled it down to tease Angela’s nose with a soft blossom. “I didn’t know a girl could love a girl before you.”

“What about Isadora Dellwood?” Angela teased.

Jefferson dove onto her stomach and hid her face. “I should never have told you about Isadora Dellwood. We were best friends when we were kids, that’s all.”

“And you shared a tent with her on Bear Mountain every summer.”

“We were little girls.”

“If only we could share a tent somewhere.”

Jefferson dared a look up. “You? In a tent? I thought you didn’t like bugs and owls and”—Jefferson half-rose and pretended to pounce—“ferocious night-stalking raccoons.”

“In between visits from the menagerie it might be nice. You could show me what you wanted to do with Isadora Dellwood.”

“Angie! I never knew there was something
to
do with Iz.”

“Aha. You think I corrupted you.”

“And how.” Jefferson flopped on her back and hugged herself, trying to erase the humiliating memory of what she and Isadora did do.

When it happened, they were only eleven. Iz lay on the couch in her mother’s apartment above the hat store and the Chinese laundry. The apartment always smelled like steam from the pressers, and Jefferson could sometimes hear the owners arguing in Chinese, their words quick, incomprehensible bursts that, for all she knew, might not have been hostile, could have been loving, or mundane, maybe about the weather.

That day it was raining. Iz had called for her to come over and play. They’d been friends all through grammar school; play, to Jefferson, meant paper dolls or kickball. She’d loved the few paper-doll books that had boy characters. Iz would dress the girl doll and she would dress the boy to go out on a date, wishing she could wear clothes like theirs, not like the girl’s. Sometimes they talked about growing up and having children. Jefferson always wanted to have little boys so she could dress them in tiny gray flannel slacks, white shirts, red vests, and bow ties.

She sighed, remembering how Iz had lain on the green, textured couch in that rainy-day apartment and beckoned her, crooking one finger like movie stars did. She went over and Iz looked at her with an unfamiliar faraway gaze that scared her.

“I got a brassiere this week,” Iz told her.

Jefferson remembered the exact feeling of confusion, embarrassment, and interest that made her face get hot as an oven.

Iz reached around Jefferson and felt along her back. “You don’t have one yet.”

“I don’t want one.” Her words were fast and firm.

“They’re sexy,” Iz boasted. “Want to see mine?”

The seconds she waited for Iz to unbutton her yellow blouse felt like a lifetime. The brassiere was plain chalky cotton. Iz sat up, filling the tiny cups with her brand-new, tiny—Jefferson knew the word, but couldn’t say it, even to herself.

She looked, then looked away.

“You can touch it,” Iz said in a voice that didn’t sound like hers.

She shook her head and started to quickly hide her hands behind her back, but Iz caught one of them and placed it on her left breast. The fabric was soft and warm. Iz held her hand there. A bump slowly rose under her index finger. “What’s that?” she asked, startled.

Iz laughed at her. “Don’t you know anything? That’s my nipple.”

She’d known it was wrong, that this whole encounter was terribly wrong, but she dared to rub her finger over the bump.

“That felt nice,” said Iz. “Do it again.”

Jefferson shook her head and tried not to, but at the same time, the sensation was good. It excited her the way it first had when she was nine and touched herself between the legs. Every time she’d done it since, the quickening inside her was as scary as it was now.

“Do you want to touch me somewhere else?” Iz asked.

Had Iz found that place too? She backed away, tried sitting on an armchair and talking to Iz about something, anything, but Iz lay there, smiling in that dreamy way, like she knew everything and Jefferson was being silly, but would come around to Iz’s way of thinking.

“My mother said I have to come right home,” she mumbled and grabbed her green plaid raincoat and her red umbrella and her black rubber boots and fled down the long steep wooden stairs, through the glass-windowed door to the cool rain outside. She didn’t go home, but ran at full speed into the woods, outran that blindness that came on her when things went wrong, ran along a path worn by animals and kids, ran to the field where the foundation of an old house lay, nothing left but it and part of the chimney. The rain had stopped. She sat on the edge of the foundation and relived the touches and the way she’d felt, both terrified and jubilant.

She looked up at Angela now. Was she nuts about Angela because she was something like Iz, a girl from the other side of the tracks? How far would Iz have let her go? Would they have been as happy as she was now, with Angela? Of course not. That had been play; this was love. She looked around. No one was close to them. She ran a hand along Angela’s thigh, her hip, the small of her back. How amazing that Angela liked the feel of her fingers and her arms. After a lifetime of touching no one except teammates, she couldn’t keep her hands to herself.

Her first year with Angela, school had hardly been an interruption. They simply moved their idyll with them wherever they went. Jefferson felt as if she lived in one of the Impressionist paintings the art teacher had shown them. She answered her French teacher with lyrical Romance words that fell so easily from her mouth she might have been born knowing them. She read “The Lotus Eaters” in her English class with such spirit she might have been singing the rhymes to Angela. The sciences filled her with wonder.

“Life used to seem so full of traps, Angie,” Jefferson said, still watching the clouds drift overhead. “Ever since you, I know what to do.”

“Except when I get you in trouble.”

“Trouble? Like forgetting the time last night? We were only walking.”

“And two nights before that. God, I love the way you walk. I swear you never touch the ground, Jefferson. You glide, all in one fluid line, like you’re never in a hurry and you’ve got everything handled.”

This was their age of innocence. Young as she was, Jefferson knew that even the bad might be the best it would ever be. That they would recognize real trouble only too well when it came. She didn’t yet know that idylls softened real trouble and that two young women in love might not recognize it.

“We’re going to wear a path through Dutchess, Angie.”

“Then my father won’t have to worry where I am at nine o’clock at night. He can follow our trail.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“We’d hear him before he saw anything.”

She glanced the palm of her hand over the head of a dandelion. “When you’re kissing me, Angie, I don’t know where I am.”

The heat Angela so easily raised in her came. Angela moved closer and said, “Show me, Jefferson.”

“Angie, not here. This place is wide open. My parents could come by, or, worse, my grandparents. You want to get us run out of town?”

“We could go on your bicycle.” Angela settled back on her haunches, making a tent of her skirt for modesty. “Can’t you see it? We’d honk that wheezy old horn you have and wave and—I know! We’d ride out of town without a stitch on, the two Lady Godivas, with, with”—she spotted the rows of not-quite-blooming rose bushes—“with roses in our hair! And we wouldn’t stop until we climbed to the top of Bear Mountain. We’d live on acorns and whatever else Girl Scouts eat and be too busy making whoopee to notice bugs and wild animals.”

Jefferson sat up. “You know you’re nuttier than a fruitcake.”

“You say the nicest things, Miss Jefferson.”

Angela was always sneaking Chesterfields out of her father’s pack, and she fished another one from the pocket of her dress. She held up a book of matches she’d swiped from her family’s store. “Want a smoke?”

Jefferson eyed the crumpled paper and the shreds of tobacco that hung from its end. “How do you stomach those?”

“You don’t eat them, Jefferson. Stomachs have nothing to do with it.” Angela lit the cigarette and squinted as the smoke drifted upward. She picked tobacco from her bottom lip, then lay back. “I made a smoke ring yesterday.”

“Do tell.”

“Watch, now that I know how…” She shaped her lips into an “O” and blew a shapeless stream of smoke toward the sky. “Damn.”

Jefferson smoothed her own hair back with her hands. She hated when Angela smoked, and when she cursed. Both felt like links to the rest of the world, outside their circle of safety. Why did Angela want those bonds?

Angela had told her that smoking made her feel older and more worldly. Made her feel like Lauren Bacall in
To Have and Have Not,
although she would have been happier if her hair fell, she’d said, loose and silky on her shoulders. They both loved old movies. It had occurred to Jefferson more than once that she watched old movies to find out who she was and where she fit in the world. It was kind of hard with no gay movies out there. Angela sucked the smoke in, let it drift lazily over her bottom lip, and looked at Jefferson through slitted eyes.

“You are something else, Angie Tabor.”

She felt that flush again as Angela’s chest gently heaved, her eyes radiating desire. Angela watched her: her lips, her chest, her eyes. This was an exquisite new power Jefferson had found, this magical ability to excite another girl. It heightened her excitement in turn. Sometimes she felt exultant, like this was what she had been born to do. Other times she felt a little mean, like she was abusing the gift of love. She could never stop herself, though. The feeling was too delicious, the changes in Angela too pleasant, for both of them. Had that been what Iz had been feeling?

“Jefferson,” Angela said, her voice lower than usual, as if every bit of her was focused on the sensual volcano that she and Jefferson became together. “One kiss.”

Jefferson crawled to her then, propped on her elbows, and ground a kiss on Angela’s mouth. It was short, but the voltage left them panting while Jefferson, going to her knees, slowly surveyed the park.

“That was dangerous,” Jefferson said. It was not the only thing they fought about, but it was their most frequent conflict.

“More dangerous than taking me out in your grandfather’s skiff in that storm?”

“Cripes, Angie, it was a little storm. I know what I’m doing in a boat and I wanted you to feel it. The excitement. How big Mother Nature is and how little we are.”

“I feel that every time I look at you. Mother Nature wrote the book on getting hot, Jefferson. Everything from how I get here,” she indicated her breasts, “to how I get here.” Her hand swept across her nether parts.

“Angie,” Jefferson said, her voice half-swallowed.

“I love how you want me,” answered Angela.

She worried that sixteen was far too young to be speaking this language, but their sticky passions enthralled her. Why was she thinking of that movie,
The Snake Pit,
that they watched in reruns on TV? Its scene of lesbian madness and doom couldn’t be farther from loving this girl than…than Iz’s haughty seductiveness had been.

She sprang to her feet and pulled Angela up, up, up—away from her doubts. She was who she was. They were fine together. Being the way they were was every bit as good as it felt. From now on she wouldn’t think what everyone else thought, and she wouldn’t let herself get slammed by that monster dark cloud that sometimes swallowed her whole. She’d push what she knew was wrong way back in her brain and never let it surface again.

Jefferson was always breathless by the time she reached Angela’s candy store on Cannon Street. She wanted to make the most of their time together so she flew on her three-speed bike, though her parents disapproved, tore through the old streets of Dutchess down the hill, let herself out the gate, and raced across town through the park, rushed under the majestic trees and onto Cannon Street toward the center of town. Main Street had the banks, Town Hall, the library, but Cannon boasted the army-navy store, a laundry, two hairdressers, pharmacy, deli, dentists, the A&P, and Angela’s candy store.