The Storm (24 page)

But then Jacqueline sat up too and said she liked the way John acted like a man in her relationships with both her women lovers. What did Jacqueline mean? Molly listened even more intently.

“John called herself an invert, a man trapped in a woman's body,” Jacqueline said. “She believed she couldn't change the way she felt about women.”

But Molly was puzzled and wondered why that interested Jacqueline. So she smiled and asked, “You're not an invert, are you? You're one of the most womanly women I've ever seen.” As she lightly said these words, though, the nickname
Jaq
hit her in the head.

Jacqueline eased back down and lay on her side, facing her again. “You haven't seen me dressed in my brothers' clothes and working on our automobiles together. You haven't really seen the way I drive, because the roads around here are too rough to speed on. And you didn't see me in France. I wore men's clothes most of the way up here. They make life easier when you're on the road. The next time you come over, I'll show you what I look like in them.”

She couldn't picture Jacqueline as a tomboy, though she'd hinted that she'd been one. She saw only a beautiful, fashionable woman.

“In France, doing your job mattered most. But dressing like a man doesn't make a woman an invert, and working like one doesn't either. The way I feel about women makes me one. That's why I married Eric.”

“I don't understand.” Suddenly she felt like she was talking to a stranger. “How do you feel about women? And what does that have to do with marrying Eric?”

“I married him because I was a coward. I admired John, but I couldn't face my real self, not like she could. And I couldn't stand to even imagine what my parents, especially Mother, would think if they found out. The books about sex that I read scared me silly. I guess I thought that if I married a man, my deep feelings for women would disappear. Of course that didn't work and wasn't fair to Eric or me because I didn't love him.”

Molly understood. She knew all about being unfair and marrying a man she didn't love.

“Oh, Eric was handsome and charming, an admirable hero. I must have thought everyone would consider his wife womanly. He seemed really independent too. We never lived together. He left for the front just a few days after we married.”

Molly sighed. The only time she ever spent away from Mr. James was when she visited her parents in Dallas. He certainly depended on the two women he lived with, especially his mother. And she was dependent on him.

“After our first night together I realized I'd made a mistake,” Jacqueline said. “We agreed to lead separate lives, but I didn't want to get a divorce or even an annulment because of my religious background, and because of what Mother would say. But now we've agreed to have our marriage annulled when we return to New Orleans. The only problem is, I've met you and I'm even more confused now.”

Why did meeting me confuse Jacqueline?
She lay back again, wrapped part of the quilt over her, and gazed at the pines overhead. Why couldn't people be more like pines—stable, rooted, sure of where they belonged? Poor Jacqueline, caught in a loveless marriage and mixed up because she loved women.

Though she didn't love Mr. James, and Mother Russell drove her to distraction most of the time, she had her music. Most important, though, she had Patrick. He made everything worthwhile, and he always would.

As she lay there, Jacqueline crossed her arms and massaged them repeatedly. She spoke so rapidly Molly had to strain to catch every word.

“In New Orleans I met a woman who convinced me I'll never change. But I'm not as strong as John. Sometimes I wish I could be like other people. Life would be so much simpler.”

Jacqueline's dark eyes flashed like thunderclouds, and the words “I met a woman” ripped through her like lightning, shattered her calm. Thunder deafened her, yet she didn't want to run. She wanted to curl up next to Jacqueline and never leave her. Yet who was this other woman? Would Jacqueline see her again when she returned to New Orleans?

“Molly.” Jacqueline's voice drowned out the thunder. “I don't want to feel this way. Sometimes I want to find a doctor who can cure me of my attraction to women so I can live a normal life. That won't include marrying another man—I've learned my lesson. I'll probably spend my life alone, but at least it'll be
my
life. I want to devote my life to a worthy cause such as helping women gain the right to vote, or like my Aunt Anna has with her work in medicine.”

Slowly Jacqueline edged nearer, as if she needed to be physically as close as possible before she could say what she wanted. And now she whispered, “Women have caused me nothing but heartache. I left France partially because I fell in love with a nurse named Helen. She took care of me when I was exhausted and ill, and for the longest time she never knew I was in love with her.”

The thunder boomed again in Molly's head, and she let it. She didn't want to hear about Jacqueline loving someone else.

“Helen was a true hero. She gave herself for what she believed in—this stupid war that has slaughtered so many young people. She was amazing.”

She couldn't block out Jacqueline's words. She felt like she'd rammed a needle under her fingernail and recognized the stinging pain as jealousy. Mr. James had given her the diamond he bought for someone else. Now Jacqueline considered her second-best too.

“I don't imagine you want to listen to me talk about Helen, but she's dead, and I can't get her out of my mind. Mustard gas killed her. She spent too much time working on gassed men, and I guess the overexposure ruined her liver. But I left France before she died then went to Washington and back home. I met the woman I mentioned earlier, and eventually Eric turned up, so I've had problems for quite a while.”

Jacqueline eased so close her breath felt soft against Molly's cheek. She'd mentioned that woman again. Who was she and what had happened between them?

“I sure didn't need to meet you right now, Molly. Or do you want me to call you Marguerite? I have to resolve my situation with Eric and decide what to do with the rest of my life. I can't stay here and moon over you. I don't get to see you nearly enough, and I have to grit my teeth when I think about you sleeping with your husband.”

Taking a huge breath, Jacqueline looked so serious, as if she were about to plunge underwater. “I love you, Molly, like a man loves a woman. And I'm going crazy because I can't be with you like that.”

Slowly, Jacqueline lowered her lips to Molly's. At first, they felt like a snowflake, a butterfly's wing. Jacqueline's cheek touched hers. Where was the sandpaper, the prickly pear she'd come to associate with a kiss? The suede brush? The pine needles? Jacqueline's cheek felt as soft as a downy chick, newly picked cotton, a fuzzy peach.

Gradually the kiss grew harder, warmer, and she tasted the sweetness of chocolate pie, whipped cream, strawberries.

Breathless wonder shot through her. The kiss swept her up like the melody of her favorite piece of music. Rising from one octave to another, she soared on the beauty of the tune, lost in its sweep until her senses became one and she couldn't distinguish hearing from touch or taste or smell or sight. Beneath it all, the bass remained steady, like the beating of their hearts.

Jaq became her world, and the other life seemed far away, as mundane as a milk stool. Molly had become Marguerite, and Jacqueline was Jaq, and whoever she was now wished this moment would never end.

Strength blazed through her. She was a woman. But how could another woman, not a man, make her feel like this for the first time in her life?

She needed to think, wanted to respond—

“Miss Molly, it's time for the singing!”

Mrs. Russell wasn't the least bit surprised when the preacher hollered, “Miss Molly, it's time for the singing! Miss Molly!”

Now where had she got herself off to? Patrick said she'd walked down to the spring with Jacqueline
.
What were those two cooking up?

They talked every day on the telephone and as long as they could after Sunday school. Then they visited practically all day during her Wednesday meetings. They thought she didn't know, but she knew everything around here. Looked like they'd have talked themselves out a long time ago. How much could a body say to another one? They'd be a lot better off if they did something useful instead of moving their mouths all the time.

“Ma, have you seen Miss Molly?”

James looked a mite embarrassed that he'd let his wife stray and now everybody recognized it. He'd wasted his time standing over there under the shade trees cussing and discussing with the politicians about the Lord knows what, and speaking real secretive-like with a greasy-looking city slicker.

Probably had another get-rich-quick scheme up his sleeve. He was so gullible a six-year-old could fool him, but he never learned.
If Molly doesn't sweet-talk him into leaving me and the farm, he'll hang on my coattails until the day I die, and then heaven help him. He'll be lost as a goose.

Never mind, here came Molly, huffing and puffing. Musta been down at the spring. “Everybody's waiting for you. They're ready to start the singing.”

She looked like she was about to have a sunstroke, the silly thing, running so fast in July.

*

Molly was breathing hard, and not only because of the steep climb up the hill. Jaq had talked about things she could barely imagine—someone having an affair with a real king, going to a séance. None of the women she knew or the ones in her family she'd heard stories about had done anything nearly as interesting as the ones Jaq described. Maybe women
could
do something besides marry and have children. Perhaps she wasn't so strange after all, with her dream of putting music before raising a family.

But Jaq said she'd loved a woman during the War. She also knew a woman in New Orleans but intended to be alone the rest of her life. All the same, Jaq said she couldn't stand to think of her sleeping with Mr. James.

She wasn't thinking just about them sleeping in the same bed, but about the times they felt of each other in the private way. That word again—
sex
. She could barely say it and didn't think about it very often. Respectable people didn't mention it, but perhaps the word somehow applied to her strange feelings about Jaq. Like when she'd replaced her bandage, or made pie crust or bread. She'd never throbbed that way before, as if something was tickling the bottom of her stomach, not in bed with Mr. James or even the summer before they married. Jaq certainly didn't need to worry about that.

Most of the time, she fell asleep as soon as her head sank into the feather pillow. Mr. James got an itch occasionally, but she hardly had time to respond. In and out. She supposed some people might call that sex, but she referred to it as having relations and thought it was overrated.

When Mr. James had courted her, she'd felt a little tingle once or twice when he took her hand in his large freckled one and rubbed it gently against his jowl. And the times he kissed her before they married, she'd flushed all over, excited that she might soon finally solve one of life's great mysteries—what it was like to be with a man physically—and her heart had raced.

But their bedroom was right next to Mother Russell's, which probably accounted for Mr. James not being as demonstrative after they married as he had been before.

Now she usually lay awake after he started snoring and wondered if this was all there was to it. If so, the girls who whispered about it back in college certainly didn't know what they were talking about. She guessed it could be so much more, but she would never know what that more consisted of. When she had relations with Mr. James, she never had the same feelings she had for Jaq. But her body had betrayed her by making her think she should marry him, and look where that got her. Sex was okay, but not nearly enough reason to live on a farm. She couldn't afford to let herself get carried away with Jaq.

Exactly what did Jaq mean about being an invert? Molly sat down at the piano and played the first hymn automatically. In college, the two women teachers she respected so much seemed to be the happiest couple imaginable. No one ever mentioned the word
invert
that upset Jaq so much. They all simply envied their teachers and accepted them as two loving women who seemed to fulfill each other's every need.

Everyone knew they loved each other, and even that they slept in the same bed. Some people whispered they might have done something similar to what married couples did, though they didn't know any more about such things than she did. What their teachers did in private didn't concern them much, probably because they were just two women.

Looking back, she had to admit that her feelings for the series of girls before she met Esther weren't as innocent as she'd thought at the time. But back then everyone had a crush on one of the other girls. Smashes, they'd called them, and she had some powerful ones before she and Esther found each other. But her feelings for Jaq far overshadowed any she'd ever had for Esther.

When she married Mr. James, she'd believed those feelings for women would vanish: she would love her husband and her children, period. And that's probably what Jaq meant about why she married Eric. Maybe she was simply more honest than Molly.

Evidently for some women those longings for other women never disappeared, and maybe they expressed them physically, which made their love for each other even richer and deeper.

Did Jaq think
she
might be one of those women too? With the way she'd been feeling around Jaq, she might be, but surely not. What would she do? Where would she go? How would she ever find anyplace to fit in?

Suddenly her lips prickled, and when she missed a note she glanced around to see if anyone had noticed.