Substitute for Love (14 page)

The cottage was built for one. A breakfast table, sofa and one chair would finish the downstairs, and upstairs there was room for a bed and perhaps a desk. The upper floor smelled strongly of the beige paint that had been recently applied.

“It’s students who most want it, but I’m tired of the bother and the mates who come round at all hours. My last tenant was an older woman. She’s moved to be nearer her daughter.” Flo was perhaps in her mid-forties, with soft features to match her lyrical voice.

Holly was paying attention, or at least she was trying to. “I don’t have a job at the moment, but I’ve saved up quite a lot of money. I don’t even have furniture, so I could get exactly what fits. This is what I’m looking for.”

They came to terms quickly and Tori gave a happy bounce. “I knew it was a good idea. I feel totally less guilty.”

“You picked the last one very nicely,” Flo admitted. “I should pay you a fee.”

“Pay me in scones,” Tori suggested brightly. “With clotted cream and strawberry jam.”

“Bring Geena tomorrow for supper and we’ll be quits. We’ll do chips and eggs, too, just like my mum used to make home in Chester.” Flo had led them inside her back door and was putting the lease papers out on the table. Not to be a complete idiot, Holly read them, found them agreeable, and signed on the dotted line.

There were footsteps overhead, then on the stairs. A woman a few years younger than Holly burst into the kitchen. “Oh, sorry, babe. I thought you were done.”

“Just about. There’s nothing on telly tonight. I just checked.”

The younger woman dropped a careless kiss onto Flo’s lips. “Then we’ll have to think of something else to do.”

“This is Holly,” Flo said, after she had shared a contemplative smile with her lover. “She’s renting the cottage.”

“That’s great. Nancy,” she said, holding out her hand.

Holly had no choice. Nancy had a strong, warm grip. Holly had not known her arms could feel such a range of tingling sensations.

“You have anything against beige?”

Holly shook her head and took her hand back.

“Good. I’ll be finished with the downstairs tomorrow.”

“Will I be able to move in on Monday?”

“Yeah, though it’ll still smell. Cold weather and paint, it takes forever for it to really cure out.” Nancy shrugged. She had broad shoulders. “I do commercial painting by day so I can do artistic painting by night.”

“Oh, so that’s what you do with your nights,” Tori quipped.

“Painting of one kind or another.” They all laughed. Holly joined in though she was thoroughly unsettled by the idea of Nancy’s sharp edges merging with Flo’s soft curves.

It seemed that all she could think about was sex. Sex and Galina’s card. Flo’s mouth. Nancy’s hands. Murphy’s nipples. Tori’s eyes. Galina’s kisses. Was she not straight anymore?

It was easy to settle into a house so small, and a visit to a used furniture store had completed the effort. She gave herself a few days to settle in — there could never be enough bookcases, she quickly concluded — and tried hard not to think about anything but mathematics.

She surrounded herself with library books and rapidly realized she needed a computer. More technology — Clay would not understand. But she could find out about degree programs and requirements for colleges everywhere more quickly on the Internet than through the mail. She could join the Academy of Mathematicians and start reading the journal online. There was so much she could do, and so easily, that when she asked herself if it all somehow robbed her of her essential humanity, the answer was no.

So she took the plunge into technology with a cute little laptop that had a built-in modem. She pored over the guide for beginners, made lots of mistakes, and came close to heaving it out the window at least four times. When she finally began navigating around the World Wide Web she wished for a printer. Technology was addictive. She bought a small color inkjet the next day and stopped to worry if she was damaging her essential humanity. She shrugged it off — even the Amish were selling quilts online. If the Amish could square their consciences with some technology, then who was she to worry?

She found out that she could automatically synch her

Palm Pilot to her laptop, sharing the addresses and appointments on both. It was so, well, cool. Clay was nuts. There was so much to learn that it was easy to not think about other things… Galina, Tori and Geena, Tori and Murphy. She saw Flo coming home from work and Nancy meeting her at the door with an eagerness that surpassed Clay’s at his most passionate. As she walked the narrow driveway to the street one evening she glimpsed Flo unbuttoning Nancy’s shirt while they were in the kitchen. It had been hours before she stopped seeing the image of Nancy’s hungry, trembling expression behind her closed lids.

She tried not to think about Clay, because thinking about him made her think about Galina’s card and then all the rest. Sometimes at night she would shiver under the sheets and ask herself what it would have hurt to go with Murphy, to learn everything about what she liked. What held her back?

It was her common sense, a quality that neither Clay nor Aunt Zinnia had ever thought she’d possessed in any sufficient quantity. Well, she did have it. She knew she needed to start off in this new life with some semblance of control. But at night she didn’t feel in control and her hands brought only torment.

Two weeks passed in a numbed blur, with mornings that were over before she’d finished one cup of coffee and evenings that dragged endlessly. She joined the mathematicians’ society and read online journals until her eyes felt raw and her brain spun with puzzles and proofs, new and old. Theories and ideas were waiting to be tested in the ever-broadening, free-flowing exchange. The love of a good riddle discussed in the local brewery after classes had made way for Internet message boards devoted to single equations and new ideas added all the time. The humor and joy of it caught her all over again, just as it had when she was a girl. How could she have thought anything could substitute for something she loved?

She spent six hours alone happily absorbing the discussion around a sound-wave proposal. Was it possible for two drums to be sound-wave identical but shaped differently? Yes, was the answer. The suggested equation for building two different/identical drums speculated that nearly infinite arrangements were possible. So far, two eight-sided drums had been designed based on the formula, one sort of L-shaped and the other closer to a Z. Clicking ever forward through the messages, she read that the two drums had been tested and compared by microwave in a sound lab.

Scientists were thrilled. They now had a mathematical formula they could use to predict sound-wave results in any given material — say, steel — regardless of how it was formed. In a solid block or a thin wheel, it no longer mattered. X amount of steel in Y configurations should result in Z kinds of wave forms. If your business was testing train wheels for cracks, you could now use a microwave sound test instead of the less reliable hammer method. A reading outside the predicted result could indicate a crack much earlier than even an experienced railroad worker’s ear could. Forget steel — the manufacturers of silicon chips were euphoric. They now had a method of testing their computer microchips that didn’t damage the delicate silicon components.

God, she loved math.

She read, she slept, she read, she dreamed, she read, and she wondered how she could find her way back into the field. There was so much she had to catch up on. She’d lost so much time. Could she make a career of it? At twenty-six, with a birthday rapidly approaching, she was old to be taking up a master’s and doctorate program. Perhaps she should aim lower, get a teaching credential and employ what she knew. Jo was right — girls needed role models in math. But she didn’t have any coursework in teaching. How could she get a credential?

Self-doubt came easy when you were lonely, she realized, and she went for long walks to vanquish what she called the Echo of Clay. She still felt poised between the past and future.

So. If her work future was stalled by her lack of confidence, she would focus instead on her personal affairs. She had let them slide, refusing to look at Galina’s card, tucked into the edge of the bathroom mirror. She’d buried her head in math to avoid the messy questions that went unanswered. She was not straight anymore, but she wasn’t a lesbian — at least she didn’t feel like one. She didn’t know if it was possible to be a theoretical lesbian, or “all but sex” lesbian. How to go from theory to practice? Sitting in her little cottage day in and night out was not an answer.

And there were darker questions, from her past. Perhaps that was the best place to begin. The past was finite, it could be explored, summarized and redressed. Her future needed a past.

On a Friday night two weeks after her last visit, she pulled up to the curb outside her aunt’s house. She was not expected.

Winter had taken a break, and though there had been a brief rainfall the night before, the twilight sky was illuminated by early stars.

She was nervous about the confrontation, but laughed to herself when she accepted that even with two mirrors, the horizon and a familiar star to navigate by, she still wouldn’t know where she was. She hadn’t known for most of her life.

She needed clarity for this conversation and so she would approach it with the most rational methodology she could. There was a secret, and Clay knew what it was. He’d said her aunt had been right about something, implied that her aunt had known all along that Holly was a lesbian. She remembered, too, her aunt’s furious reaction to Holly’s jibe about homosexuality running in families.

There was a secret and she had already reduced it to two possible answers. Neither of them made sense, but that did not deter her. They didn’t make sense because the equation was incomplete. So she had to ask for more information to fill in the constants and variables that had been hidden from her. If she could stay calm, she might find what she needed.

“It’s you,” Aunt Zinnia said when she opened the door.

“It’s me. I know I didn’t call, but I need to talk to you about something.”

“Come in, then.”

Aunt Zinnia did not make tea. They perched on the sitting room chairs and Holly asked her carefully constructed question. “Why weren’t there any pictures of my mother for me to keep?”

Aunt Zinnia didn’t answer immediately. She studied her hands, then finally said, “You know she and I had disagreements.”

“Yes, but you might have let me have a few. For myself. Since she was my mother.”

“You are probably right. At the time, I thought it was for the best. There weren’t very many in the house, and they were all recent.”

Holly asked her follow-up question. “What did you think I’d see in them?”

Aunt Zinnia shrugged. Her diffidence was feigned, Holly knew. Aunt Zinnia had a reason for everything she did, right or wrong.

Paul Erdos, the beloved mathematician and champion puzzle creator and solver, proposed that a person could answer a question by throwing as many darts as necessary in the general direction of a target. The pattern of hits over properly constructed objects on the target would indicate where the solution lay. She had two possible solutions: The secret Clay had alluded to concerned either Aunt Zinnia or her mother.

Now she had at least one hit within the range — Aunt Zinnia had refused to say what the photographs might have told her. It ought to have been an easy answer. For that one answer, she felt more certain that the secret was about her mother.

All the thinking of the past two weeks had led her to acceptance. She did not know if homosexuality ran in families, but all she needed to know was that Aunt Zinnia thought so.

“Did you think that if I had pictures of her, I’d be like her?”

The shrug was more abrupt. Hit two.

“You went to great pains to tell me she wasn’t a decent woman. Too pushy, too smart, too independent. Was there anything else? That made her not decent?” She could accept the answer. It wasn’t such a shock after all. If her mother had been a lesbian that was just the way it was. Her mother had loved her and nothing changed that. But knowing would help her emerge from the shadow the past cast on her own future.

Aunt Zinnia was just staring at her. “I don’t know why you are asking all these questions.”

“Because I am trying to make sense of it. You were so afraid I’d be like her. You even told Clay something about it. He wouldn’t tell me what it was but said I should ask you. So I’m asking.”

“I have no idea what either of you are talking about.”

“A secret. About me.”

“I don’t have any secrets.”

The lie was monumental and Holly was sure she was right. She had a readable pattern over the target. “My mother was a lesbian, wasn’t she? And you’ve been afraid all along that I would become one, too.”

Aunt Zinnia’s lips thinned as she paled. “I want you to go-"

“You completely cut me off from my friends when I moved here. You wouldn’t let me make friends with girls, no sleepovers, no chances for experimenting — you were scared I would realize I was gay. How did you know I was?”

“I didn’t know —” Aunt Zinnia’s mouth snapped shut.

“But you wondered. Because my mother was.”

Her aunt’s face was working with the effort to hold back, but the words escaped anyway. “She was raising you to be one, too. When she died in such a stupid accident I could only think that God had given me a chance to save you. She was going to tell you. Because she didn’t want you to feel it was wrong if you had the same perverted tendencies —”

“She never thought of it as perverted,” Holly said tightly. “She would never have said that. She loved me and loved herself. I have to reach so far back to find my memories of her, but they’re there, and these past few weeks they’ve been all I have to remind me what it’s like to love who you are. She made me feel that way, while you and Clay worked overtime to make me think I was flawed and needed constant correction and improvement.”

“I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She looked suddenly exhausted.