Beggar of Love (9 page)

In September 1977, the nineteen-year-old Jefferson stood at the dormitory’s back door, watching her father lift his now-heavy body behind the wheel of his Cadillac. After cramming all summer to finish her first freshman term as a commuter, she was a second-semester freshman moving into a dormitory well after the rest of her class, and her parents had driven her, with all her luggage, past the still-green leaves along the roads, down to school. On their way home, they would stop for dinner and her father would have his first drink, then a second, both doubles. He’d excuse himself, and on the way to the men’s room he’d pass the bar, order another, and quickly down it before returning to the table, where he would order a fourth. That might be enough to get him home to Dutchess.

Emmy came back to the dorm door to hug her one last time, as if to make up for all the missed hugs and misunderstandings between them. Jefferson didn’t expect her mother to understand her. How could a straight parent imagine what went on with a gay kid, how could a mom like hers get it when her daughter’s only interest was sports, when she didn’t date boys or chatter or giggle or indulge in long fashion talks? The poor woman had no idea she’d been living with a husband who fooled with men and a daughter who loved girls.

“What is
wrong
with you?” Emmy had many times demanded to know, as she’d demanded the same of her husband, but much less often and much more timorously, when the evidence of his runaway drinking compelled her to confront it. Jarvy never went to the opera or the theater with Emmy these days; Emmy went with her mother. Jefferson remembered so clearly how her parents had doted on each other until the last few years when Emmy stopped drinking. Their doctor found liver damage in both of them. Jarvy ignored it. Before that they’d had their own world of two, and Jefferson had felt in the way more than she hadn’t. How old were they? Maybe Jarvy was having his midlife crisis, what with his thinning hair and wide waistline and his rendezvous at the railroad station. Today, this last buffer between Emmy and her problems was vanishing.

Jefferson accepted the hug stiffly, although one part of her wanted to cry out in terror, “Don’t leave me here alone!” But evidence of dependence on her part only upset Emmy and, of course, they weren’t going to coddle her more than they ever had.

What
was
wrong with her? Part of her believed in her strength and talent, and was certain of success; the other half cowered, consumed by fear and self-doubt as she listened to Emmy chatter about how hard she’d find college because she was such a poor student and only wanted to play children’s games; how difficult she’d find being away from home after her failed attempt to live on her own with that hair person; how ill-equipped she was for life—hard, hard life—why hadn’t Jefferson listened to her warnings? She felt like the whipping boy for whatever Emmy was going through with Jarvy.

While she’d still lived with them, Emmy’s words had battered her till she was heavy with fear. She’d watched every nuance of every move either made—how he drank, how she feared his drinking. She’d done a lot of cowering that last year of high school, hoping he wouldn’t pound down another drink, and scared, so scared that when he did, Emmy would protest and bring on the blowup, the final confrontation. Prayed, though she didn’t believe in prayer, that Emmy never found out about the men he saw. And cowered finally, in terror of her life, in the dark backseat of the car, knowing that neither she nor her mother could control their fates with Mr. Jefferson at the wheel of the box of steel, weaving his way between the dotted lines as if they were his only guides through life. Would her mother make it to Dutchess tonight?

“If you need to, Amelia, you can come home to us. There are lots of good schools in the area.”

“I’ll remember,” she assured Emmy, thinking, you have lost your ever-loving mind to suggest it, wanting to shout, Stop it! Stop feeding my fears with yours!

If only… All her life she’d treasured the memory of the nurse at her pediatrician’s office holding her against her soft pillow of a bosom while the doctor gave little Amelia one shot or another. She had never felt anything so comforting. If only it was a mother like that nurse—not this woman, leaving her among strangers—she could take on anything.

She treasured her talented body, but her parents were suspicious of women athletes—weren’t they all, or most, homosexual? Jefferson had the normal teenage disdain for the ignorance of parents and despised her father for his hypocrisy. Not only was it wrong in their eyes for her to be an athlete, her error was compounded by being gay. She couldn’t defend the one or ignore the other, and she endured their disapproval as if it were a blow, sometimes longing to obliterate the body that gave her joy yet caused her so much grief with its willful ways.

She tried to stand tall against their disapproval, against Emmy’s dire predictions. Still screaming inside—I’m not afraid! Why would I want to return to you?—she stared at the ground until her mother reached the car. Like Jarvy, Jefferson would not show her fear. She would not cry. She would not breathe. Fear could eat you alive. Look at Mrs. Jefferson, too scared to admit something was wrong in her marriage, scared she would lose her husband every minute she was in it, no idea of what had happened to destroy the bubble of love that had sustained her. The heritage of her mother’s, and father’s, fears could eat Jefferson alive too.

The car pulled away and Jefferson waved. In a minute she would breathe. In a minute she would cry. Soon she wouldn’t feel the fear. It would leave with those who’d taught it to her, who’d depended on it to keep her in line, keep her from disrupting their lives. As the car turned the corner her father honked, twice, cheerfully free to head toward a drink. He must, she thought, drink to blot out the knowledge that he was gay and the guilt of his betrayals. Her mother, she knew, was smothering tears, riding back toward life alone with her alcoholic, leaving behind Jefferson, their strange failure, afraid that if she cried Mr. Jefferson would only stop sooner for dinner to shut her up.

Jefferson felt as if the scream she’d muffled before was slipping from her body. A scream of protest at the life they’d go on living and that, in growing up with them, had become part of her. A scream of abandonment. They had taught her to live in the world only as they had. How could they leave her with so little? She hadn’t been able to keep things together for Angela, who was rooted in Dutchess, while Jefferson had discovered that Dutchess and Angela were too small for her.

But she didn’t scream. Or cry or breathe much differently or lose the fear. She felt a flash of excitement, sheer triumph that she was free of them at last. She tried to give herself to it. She stood tall and moved to shrug off the fear and silence, but both had been with her much too long, and once more her shoulders sagged. The city roared around her like a lion after her blood. The only sounds here were of dogs barking, mothers calling. It didn’t smell like fall here; there weren’t enough trees. It smelled like busses and perfumes and the nearby trash basket. Angela wasn’t home waiting for her like a devoted puppy. That life was gone and she needed to learn the new rules. She was glad to be away from the moldy riverside apartment where one thing or another was always on the fritz. She’d yearned for the adventures she imagined the city would supply. Here it was okay to be herself, to be gay. She knew she’d be good at both. She lunged up the stairs to her room.

The dorm was two blocks from what would become her favorite coffee shop, the Lunchbox. She got in the habit of having lunch there, sometimes crunching along the packed-snow sidewalks, partly to avoid dining-hall food, but more because she could soak up the affectionate informality of the crew.

“Another adopted daughter,” Sam the cook and owner said one day not long after she moved into the dorm. He was smiling down at Gladys. At six-foot-six, he had all the appliances in the Lunchbox kitchen built to accommodate him. “What would you do, Glad, without your educated orphans?”

“Get a job someplace decent.”

Jefferson felt special, privileged to be Glad’s new orphan and a part of this cheerful semi-family. Gladys was lavish with praise and admiration. Her banter with Sam would have made a good comedy routine at one of the local night spots.

College began to acquire the comfort of routine. Sports brightened her days. She had found the bars where, instead of fighting off her monster depression alone at the dorm, or calling Angela up and apologizing for hours for not being what she wanted to be for her, she could drink with gays at night. The morning after, Glad was usually there with that smile.

One of those mornings, Jefferson stumbled in with a very black eye.

Glad raised an eyebrow. Her youngest, Gus, in a Yankees cap, was hanging around the restaurant shooting at customers with a toy rifle. “Out,” she told him when he’d worked himself into a noisy frenzy. “Go shoot the tourists.” He seemed to like that idea and rushed through the door. Jefferson had stayed at school for the break, to play ball, and carouse, and to avoid Angie and her parents’ world. “Well?” Glad asked.

“Would you believe I got mugged?”

“No,” Gladys said, sweeping away to another customer.

Jefferson had dreaded this moment for months. She could not truthfully explain her eye without talking about her gayness, but what good was this connection with Glad if she couldn’t? She watched her clear a booth, noticed the wrinkles going deeper and deeper into Glad’s skin. Glad’s age touched her. She couldn’t think about losing her some day. At the thought, fear, magnified by last night’s liquor, grabbed hold of her.

“Glad, I didn’t mean to and I’m not really like that, but unfortunately I got in a fight,” she said on impulse. She’d learned to blot out her fear, sometimes with liquor, sometimes with recklessness. If she pushed Glad away now by coming out to her, she wouldn’t have to fear losing her later. Like when she drank, she couldn’t turn back. Her hands reached to Glad, but she pulled them back. No touching, she told herself. She was coming out to Gladys—she couldn’t choose a worse time for her lesbian hands to touch a straight woman. Was this why her father drank, to ease the tension of continual self-control, to keep the monster of his gay self in a cage? She wouldn’t live like that. She clenched her fists and plunged on. “I was drinking in a gay bar.”

Glad didn’t bat an eye.

Jefferson’s smile felt like melted wax hardened across her face. She rubbed her tight knuckles against the pale blue coffee mug. “I’ve been hanging out with this girl. Her high-school girlfriend showed up drunk. They’re from Staten Island. The little slimeball started shouting and shoving. I told her to calm down. Before I knew it she popped me one.”

“I hope you popped her back,” Glad said, eyes twinkling. She massaged one of Jefferson’s hands and opened it, finger by finger, till it relaxed.

Jefferson licked her dry lips, let herself breathe. “You don’t care?”

“Who, me? Why should I care who you’re screwing?”

Jefferson felt herself blush to hear it put that way, with Glad’s usual bluntness. Her acceptance was so simple, like a gift; so natural, like a mother’s love. Not for the first time in this coffee shop tears came to her eyes.

“Jef, poor Sam’s going to go broke supplying you with napkins.”

“Hey,” she said, gulping. “I never cry.”

“You could have fooled me, kid.”

“Except here,” she corrected herself, giving Gladys an embarrassed little smile.

Margo was unlike anyone Jefferson had ever known. A year after they met she was exciting, an exotic foreigner, intellectually challenging in a way that had never before interested Jefferson, sexually demanding—and knew more than she had imagined could be done with a body. She felt like she could do a master’s thesis on lesbian sex after the first few months of stolen nights she spent with Margo. The woman liked everything and anything and then some. She had porno pictures and a deck of dirty tarot cards and books.

Yet more and more Jefferson felt sick to her stomach after leaving Margo’s infrequently washed bed linens to attend a class. She was nostalgic for Angela’s loving and considerate desire, while Margo was all about exciting herself to orgasm as often as possible. Margo made her feel like a fantastic lover, and it was true that she was learning a lot, but, geeze, Margo, she wanted to say, could you call me by name now and then so I don’t feel interchangeable with every other dyke in New York? Once in a while she had to go out with girls her own age, if only to show off what she now knew and to enjoy their relative innocence.

It was a relief to spend time with her new friend Lily Ann Lee. They could talk for hours about anything in their still-young universes. Lily Ann was the one she went to when she felt too down to function. Lily Ann showed her a nearby playground. She taught her real handball, not the kid stuff she was used to in the Dutchess parking lot against the wall of a furniture store.

The two of them were so different: Lily Ann in dresses and makeup when she wasn’t playing ball, Jefferson in slacks, tailored shirts, and snazzy vests; Jefferson well-off, Lily Ann poor; Jefferson from Dutchess County, Lily Ann from Harlem; Jefferson Caucasian, Lily Ann African American; Jefferson gay, Lily Ann straight, or so Lily Ann thought. Lily Ann hadn’t figured herself out yet. Jefferson teased Lily Ann about it, but the woman was steadfast in her attraction to guys. Something in Jefferson made her want to save Lily Ann from a het life. The very thought of her with a man seemed so wrong that she was tempted to bring Lily Ann out herself, but she feared losing her friendship by making a move.