“You don’t mean that.” Paula is as surprised as I am. The waiter slips Margaret’s drink around Paula’s shoulder and passes me my beer with a lazy grin. I’m tempted to grin back, but only nod. Margaret wets a forefinger and takes another taste of salt.
“I do. Arbitration isn’t gonna get Jackie anywhere. Look, she didn’t even get her broken glass paid for, and now she’s been talked into ‘accepting her responsibility’ for what happened. That’s crazy. She didn’t do anything, and I don’t think her paintings are pornographic. She’s always worked on nudes, for Christ’s sake! And besides, she told me she did those paintings for the study of the light and shade and the texture . . .”
“Oh, give me a break!” It’s all I can do to keep from hissing in rage. “You know Jackie as well as I do. She’s got boxes of drawings and paintings like the ones Fawn and Pris decided were so terrible. She’s been doing them forever—women with knives, women with swords, in leather clothing, on motorcycles, wrestling, running naked down city streets, fucking. You’ve seen them. I’ve seen them—the ones she keeps locked up in boxes in her closet or under her bed, the ones she doesn’t burn when she gets all panicky about why she does them in the first place. I just wish she’d pull them all out and plaster them over the walls of the women’s bookstore, not start pretending she didn’t mean to do them in the first place.”
“Jackie’s an artist,” Paula interrupts me. “She has to work her stuff out in her own way.”
“With Fawn and Pris’s help she’ll get it all worked out, destroy all the work she’s ever done, and never do any more. Oh well, maybe they’ll let her do some posters for the Take Back the Night Campaign, maybe some illustrations for the editorial page of that paper you do your column for, huh Paula? Or damn, maybe even a comic strip, if she doesn’t make it too explicit . . .”
“You’re yelling.” Margaret’s voice is very quiet.
I stop and look at her. Her face is pale and her fingers are curled tightly on the table. I sigh and push my beer glass forward until it clicks against Paula’s wineglass. “All right. All right. What do you think we should do?” I ask her. “How do we get Fawn and Pris off her back and put her back together now that she’s decided she’s some kind of erotic criminal?”
“Neither Fawn nor Pris is going to do anything more to Jackie.”
“Nothing justifies what they already did to Jackie’s apartment. She’s gonna be months replacing all her dishes.” Margaret’s features have the pained indignation of a woman who’s had to replace her mama’s glassware too often in the last year. “And to spray-paint that slogan on the walls. That was the worst. ‘Violence against women begins at home!’ That’s outrageous!”
“But think about what they meant by it.” Paula is trying to look patient and understanding, but sweat is starting to show on her upper lip.
I feel nauseous. “It seems to me you could make a political comment short of breaking somebody’s dishes and trashing their apartment.”
“Well, the thing is I’ve agreed to take part in the arbitration.” Paula has the grace to look momentarily uncomfortable. “As an old friend of Jackie’s I didn’t think I should before, but Fawn and Pris have asked me, too, and I think I can get some things worked out between them all.”
Margaret looks stunned. So do I probably, but my voice is calm when I speak. “You gonna get them to work out paying for Jackie’s apartment?”
“That may be a problem. Neither of them has any money. Pris is only working part-time and Fawn is still volunteering at the coffeehouse while she finishes her studies. It’s Jackie who has a full-time job.” Paula sips her wine and looks toward the clock over the bar. She wipes her mouth with her napkin and carefully avoids my eyes. “I’m gonna be late, you know.”
“Oh?” Margaret looks up to the clock on the wall and jumps in her seat. “Oh, yeah. I’ve got to get home, too.” She finishes her margarita in a gulp but doesn’t move. “Look, do you think maybe we could hold a rent party for Jackie, get her some money to fix her place back up?”
Paula looks impatient and starts gathering up her stuff. “Oh, I don’t think we should do that. Not while they’re still in arbitration. And anyway, we have so many important things we have to raise money for this spring—community things.”
“Jackie’s a part of the community,” I hear myself say.
“Well, of course.” Paula stands up. “We all are.” The look she gives me makes me wonder if she really believes that, but she’s gone before I can say anything else.
“I want to do something,” Margaret tells me. It looks like there are tears in her eyes. “I’m tired of not doing anything when these things happen, just talking about how horrible it all is and then going on with our lives. I want to call Jackie, or maybe even Fawn and Pris.”
“No, not them.” I get a cold chill down my back, imagining Fawn and Pris walking in on Margaret’s mama some day. “That rent party idea is a good notion. I’ll give Jackie a call, and you and I can set it up. It’ll be like old times.”
Margaret’s face relaxes. She stands up, but then stops and leans across the table to kiss me on the cheek. “Old times,” she laughs. “I’ve had some of my best times with you, you know.”
“I know.”
I watch Margaret walk away and shake my head. Margaret has gotten so skinny, she almost has no ass at all anymore. When I first met her she looked just like a Botticelli virgin, all lush and pink and full. I’d flirted with her for two years until she would go to bed with me, but then we’d spent the night in giggles. “Get serious,” I’d kept insisting, but neither of us could. After a while we’d given up the idea of sex and just relaxed into cuddling and telling stories. Once every few years we try it again, but with the same result.
“Maybe it’s how we smell to each other,” Margaret once suggested. “I read about that somewhere. Or maybe we just know each other too well, huh?” I’d been laughing so hard at the time, I hadn’t been able to reply. I don’t really care anymore what it is that makes us so unsuited as lovers. We’ve become the best of friends. Not like Paula and me: we’ve been snipping at each other ever since we stopped being lovers.
I wonder if Paula still drinks half a glass of vodka to put herself to sleep every night and if she’s still seeing Fawn now and then. For a moment I think about all the things we never say to each other, the things we know that we don’t admit we know. Dirt. Gossip. Simple cruelty and self-righteousness.
I remember the first time Jackie showed me her drawings, the fear and uncertainty in her face, the fierceness on the features of the women she had drawn. I had liked the drawings. I had loved the passion in Jackie when she held them, the way she ground her teeth together as I lifted one after the other. I had wanted to tell her it would be all right, that people would love her warrior women, that I loved the way they threw their heads back and stared out of the drawings. Jackie seemed so fragile with her drawings spread out before her, like those white mountain flowers that come up in the spring on sturdy stalks but lose their blossoms if the wind hits them too suddenly. That’s exactly what she’s like, tough and wiry and sure to stand up to violence, but just as much at risk. I wonder if she has burned the drawings that Fawn and Pris didn’t find.
A Lesbian Appetite
Biscuits. I dream about baking biscuits: sifting flour, baking powder, and salt together; measuring out shortening and buttermilk by eye; and rolling it all out with flour-dusted fingers. Beans. I dream about picking over beans, soaking them overnight, chopping pork fat, slicing onions, putting it all in a great iron pot to bubble for hour after hour until all the world smells of salt and heat and the sweat that used to pool on my mama’s neck. Greens. Mustard greens, collards, turnip greens, and poke—can’t find them anywhere in the shops up North. In the middle of the night I wake up desperate for the taste of greens, get up and find a twenty-four-hour deli that still has a can of spinach and half a pound of bacon. I fry the bacon, dump it in the spinach, bring the whole mess to a
boil, and eat it with tears in my eyes. It doesn’t taste like anything I really wanted to have. When I find frozen collards in the Safeway, I buy five bags and store them away. Then all I have to do is persuade the butcher to let me have a pack of neck bones. Having those wrapped packages in the freezer reassures me almost as much as money in the bank. If I wake up with bad dreams there will at least be something I want to eat.
Red beans and rice, chicken necks and dumplings, pot roast with vinegar and cloves stuck in the onions, salmon patties with white sauce, refried beans on warm tortillas, sweet duck with scallions and pancakes, lamb cooked with olive oil and lemon slices, pan-fried pork chops and red-eye gravy, potato pancakes with applesauce, polenta with spaghetti sauce floating on top—food is more than sustenance: it is history. I remember women by what we ate together, what they dug out of the freezer after we’d made love for hours. I’ve only had one lover who didn’t want to eat at all. We didn’t last long. The sex was good, but I couldn’t think what to do with her when the sex was finished. We drank spring water together and fought a lot.
I grew an ulcer in my belly once I was out in the world on my own. I think of it as an always-angry place inside me, a tyranny that takes good food and turns it like a blade scraping at the hard place where I try to hide my temper. Some days I think it is the rightful reward for my childhood. If I had eaten right, Lee used to tell me, there would never have been any trouble.
“Rickets, poor eyesight, appendicitis, warts, and bad skin,” she insisted, “they’re all caused by bad eating habits, poor diet.”
It’s true. The diet of poor southerners is among the worst in the world, though it’s tasty, very tasty. There’s pork fat or chicken grease in every dish; white sugar in the cobblers, pralines, and fudge; and flour, fat, and salt in the gravies—lots of salt in everything. The vegetables get cooked to limp strands with no fiber left at all. Mothers give sidemeat to their toddlers as pacifiers and slip them whiskey with honey at the first sign of teething, a cold, or a fever. Most of my cousins lost their teeth in their twenties and took up drinking as easily as they put sugar in their iced tea. I try not to eat so much sugar, try not to drink, try to limit pork and salt and white flour, but the truth is I am always hungry for it—the smell and taste of the food my mama fed me.
Poor white trash I am for sure. I eat shit food and am not worthy. My family starts with good teeth but loses them early. Five of my cousins bled to death before thirty-five, their stomachs finally surrendering to sugar and whiskey and fat and salt. I’ve given it up. If I cannot eat what I want, then I’ll eat what I must, but my dreams will always be flooded with salt and grease, crisp fried stuff that sweetens my mouth and feeds my soul. I would rather starve death than myself.
In college it was seven cups of coffee a day after a breakfast of dry-roasted nuts and Coca-Cola. Too much gray meat and reheated potatoes led me to develop a taste for peanut butter with honey, coleslaw with raisins, and pale, sad vegetables that never disturbed anything at all. When I started throwing up before classes, my roommate fed me fat pink pills her doctor had given her. My stomach shrank to a stone in my belly. I lived on pink pills, coffee, and Dexedrine until I could go home and use hot biscuits to scoop up cold tomato soup at my mama’s table. The biscuits dripped memories as well as butter: Uncle Lucius rolling in at dawn, eating a big breakfast with us all, and stealing mama’s tools when he left: or Aunt Panama at the door with her six daughters, screaming, That bastard’s made me pregnant again just to get a son, and wanting butter beans with sliced tomatoes before she would calm down. Cold chicken in a towel meant Aunt Alma was staying over, cooking her usual six birds at a time raising eleven kids I never learned how to cook for less than fifteen. Red dye stains on the sink were a sure sign Reese was dating some new boy, baking him a Red Velvet Cake my stepfather would want for himself.
“It’s good to watch you eat,” my mama smiled at me, around her loose teeth. “It’s just so good to watch you eat.” She packed up a batch of her biscuits when I got ready to leave, stuffed them with cheese and fatback. On the bus going back to school I’d hug them to my belly, using their bulk to remind me who I was.
When the government hired me to be a clerk for the Social Security Administration, I was sent to Miami Beach, where they put me up in a crumbling old hotel right on the water while teaching me all the regulations. The instructors took turns taking us out to dinner. Mr. McCollum took an interest in me, told me Miami Beach had the best food in the world, bought me an order of Oysters Rockefeller one night, and medallions of veal with wine sauce the next. If he was gonna pay for it, I would eat it, but it was all like food seen on a movie screen. It had the shape and shine of luxury but tasted like nothing at all. But I fell in love with Wolfe’s Cafeteria and got up early every morning to walk there and eat their Danish stuffed with cream cheese and raisins.
“The best sweet biscuit in Miami,” I told the counterman.
“Nu? Was zags die?” He grinned at the woman beside me, her face wrinkling up as she blushed and smiled at me.
“Mneh,” she laughed. I didn’t understand a word but I nodded anyway. They were probably talking about food.
When I couldn’t sleep I read Franz Kafka in my hotel room, thinking about him working for the social security administration in Prague. Kafka would work late and eat Polish sausage for dinner, sitting over a notebook in which he would write all night. I wrote letters like novels that I never mailed. When the chairman of the local office promised us all a real treat, I finally rebelled and refused to eat the raw clams Mr. McCollum said were “the best in the world.” While everyone around me sliced lemons and slurped up pink-and-gray morsels, I filled myself up with little white oyster crackers and tried not to look at the lobsters waiting to die, thrashing around in their plastic tanks.
“It’s good to watch you eat,” Mona told me, serving me dill bread, sour cream, and fresh tomatoes. “You do it with such obvious enjoyment.” She drove us up to visit her family in Georgia, talking about what a great cook her mama was. My mouth watered, and we stopped three times for boiled peanuts. I wanted to make love in the backseat of her old DeSoto but she was saving it up to do it in her own bed at home. When we arrived her mama came out to the car and said, “You girls must be hungry,” and took us in to the lunch table.
There was three-bean salad from cans packed with vinaigrette, pickle loaf on thin sliced white bread, American and Swiss cheese in slices, and antipasto from a jar sent directly from an uncle still living in New York City. “Deli food,” her mama kept saying, “is the best food in the world.” I nodded, chewing white bread and a slice of American cheese, the peanuts in my belly weighing me down like a mess of little stones. Mona picked at the pickle loaf and pushed her ankle up into my lap where her mother couldn’t see. I choked on the white bread and broke out in a sweat.
Lee wore her hair pushed up like the whorls on scallop shells. She toasted mushrooms instead of marshmallows, and tried to persuade me of the value of cabbage and eggplant, but she cooked with no fat; everything tasted of safflower oil. I loved Lee but hated the cabbage—it seemed an anemic cousin of real greens—and I only got into the eggplant after Lee brought home a basketful insisting I help her to cook it up for freezing.
“You got to get it to sweat out the poisons.” She sliced the big purple fruits as she talked. “Salt it up so the bitter stuff will come off.” She layered the salted slices between paper towels, changing the towels on the ones she’d cut up earlier. Some of her hair came loose and hung down past one ear. She looked like a mother in a Mary Cassatt painting, standing in her sunlit kitchen, sprinkling raw sea salt with one hand and pushing her hair back with the other.
I picked up an unsalted wedge of eggplant and sniffed it, rubbing the spongy mass between my thumbs. “Makes me think of what breadfruit must be like.” I squeezed it down, and the flesh slowly shaped up again. “Smells like bread and feels like it’s been baked. But after you salt it down, it’s more like fried okra, all soft
and sharp-smelling.”
“Well, you like okra, don’t you?” Lee wiped her grill with peanut oil and started dusting the drained eggplant slices with flour. Sweat shone on her neck under the scarf that tied up her hair in back.
“Oh yeah. You put enough cornmeal on it and fry it in bacon fat and I’ll probably like most anything.” I took the wedge of eggplant and rubbed it on the back of her neck.
“What are you doing?”
“Salting the eggplant.” I followed the eggplant with my tongue, pulled up her T-shirt, and slowly ran the tough purple rind up to her small bare breasts. Lee started giggling, wiggling her ass, but not taking her hands out of the flour to stop me. I pulled down her shorts, picked up another dry slice and planted it against her navel, pressed with my fingers and slipped it down toward her pubic mound.
“Oh! Don’t do that. Don’t do that.” She was breathing through her open mouth and her right hand was a knotted fist in the flour bowl. I laughed softly into her ear, and rocked her back so that she was leaning against me, her ass pressing into my cunt.
“Oh. Oh!” Lee shuddered and reached with her right hand to turn off the grill. With her left she reached behind her and pulled up on my shirt. Flour smeared over my sweaty midriff and sifted down on the floor. “You. You!” She was tugging at my jeans, a couple of slices of eggplant in one hand.
“I’ll show you. Oh you!” We wrestled, eggplant breaking up between our navels. I got her shorts off. She got my jeans down. I dumped a whole plate of eggplant on her belly.
“You are just running salt, girl,” I teased, and pushed slices up between her legs, while I licked one of her nipples and pinched the other between a folded slice of eggplant. She was laughing, her belly bouncing under me.