The Women of Brewster Place (22 page)

“But the association is for all of us,” Kiswana insisted, “and everyone doesn’t feel the way she did. What you do is your own business, not that you’re doing anything, anyway. I mean, well, two women or two guys can’t live together without people talking. She could be your cousin or sister or something.”

“We’re not related,” Lorraine said quietly.

“Well, good friends then,” Kiswana stammered. “Why can’t good friends just live together and people mind their own business. And even if you’re not friends, even…well, whatever.” She went on miserably, “It was my house and I’m sorry, I…”

Lorraine was kind enough to change the subject for her. “I see you have an armful yourself. You’re heading toward the library?”

“No.” Kiswana gave her a grateful smile. “I’m taking a few
classes on the weekends. My old lady is always on my back about going back to school, so I enrolled at the community college.” She was almost apologetic. “But I’m only studying black history and the science of revolution, and I let her know that. But it’s enough to keep her quiet.”

“I think that’s great. You know, I took quite a few courses in black history when I went to school in Detroit.”

“Yeah, which ones?”

While they were talking, C. C. Baker and his friends loped up the block. These young men always moved in a pack, or never without two or three. They needed the others continually near to verify their existence. When they stood with their black skin, ninth-grade diplomas, and fifty-word vocabularies in front of the mirror that the world had erected and saw nothing, those other pairs of tight jeans, suede sneakers, and tinted sunglasses imaged nearby proved that they were alive. And if there was life, there could be dreams of that miracle that would one day propel them into the heaven populated by their gods—Shaft and Superfly. While they grew old awaiting that transformation they moved through the streets, insuring that they could at least be heard, if not seen, by blasting their portable cassette players and talking loudly. They continually surnamed each other Man and clutched at their crotches, readying the equipment they deemed necessary to be summoned at any moment into Superfly heaven.

The boys recognized Kiswana because her boyfriend, Abshu, was director of the community center, and Lorraine had been pointed out to them by parents or some other adult who had helped to spread the yellow mist. They spotted the two women talking to each other, and on a cue from C. C., they all slowed as they passed the stoop. C. C. Baker was greatly disturbed by the thought of a Lorraine. He knew of only one way to deal with women other than his mother. Before he had learned exactly how women gave birth, he knew how to please or punish or extract favors from them by the execution of what lay curled behind his fly. It was his
lifeline to that part of his being that sheltered his self-respect. And the thought of any woman who lay beyond the length of its power was a threat.

“Hey, Swana, better watch it talkin’ to that dyke—she might try to grab a tit!” C. C. called out.

“Yeah, Butch, why don’t ya join the WACS and really have a field day.”

Lorraine’s arms tightened around her packages, and she tried to push past Kiswana and go into the building. “I’ll see you later.”

“No, wait.” Kiswana blocked her path. “Don’t let them talk to you like that. They’re nothing but a bunch of punks.” She called out to the leader, “C. C., why don’t you just take your little dusty behind and get out of here. No one was talking to you.”

The muscular tan boy spit out his cigarette and squared his shoulders. “I ain’t got to do nothin’! And I’m gonna tell Abshu you need a good spankin’ for taking up with a lesbo.” He looked around at his reflections and preened himself in their approval. “Why don’t ya come over here and I’ll show ya what a real man can do.” He cupped his crotch.

Kiswana’s face reddened with anger. “From what I heard about you, C. C., I wouldn’t even feel it.”

His friends broke up with laughter, and when he turned around to them, all he could see mirrored was respect for the girl who had beat him at the dozens. Lorraine smiled at the absolutely lost look on his face. He curled his lips back into a snarl and tried to regain lost ground by attacking what instinct told him was the weaker of the two.

“Ya laughing at me, huh, freak? I oughta come over there and stick my fist in your cunt-eatin’ mouth!”

“You’ll have to come through me first, so just try it.” Kiswana put her books on the stoop.

“Aw, Man, come on. Don’t waste your time.” His friends pulled at his arm. “She ain’t nothing but a woman.”

“I oughta go over there and slap that bitch in her face and teach her a lesson.”

“Hey, Man, lay light, lay light,” one whispered in his ear. “That’s Abshu’s woman, and that big dude don’t mind kickin’ ass.”

C. C. did an excellent job of allowing himself to be reluctantly pulled away from Kiswana, but she wasn’t fooled and had already turned to pick up her books. He made several jerky motions with his fist and forefinger at Lorraine.

“I’m gonna remember this, Butch!”

Theresa had watched the entire scene out of the window and had been ready to run out and help Kiswana if the boy had come up on the stoop. That was just like Lorraine to stand there and let someone else take up for her. Well, maybe she’d finally learned her lesson about these ignorant nothings on Brewster Place. They weren’t ever going to be accepted by these people, and there was no point in trying.

Theresa left the window and sat on the couch, pretending to be solving a crossword puzzle when Lorraine came in.

“You look a little pale. Were the prices that bad at the store today?”

“No, this heat just drains me. It’s hard to believe that we’re in the beginning of October.” She headed straight for the kitchen.

“Yeah,” Theresa said, watching her back intently. “Indian Summer and all that.”

“Mmm.” Lorraine dumped the bags on the table. “I’m too tired to put these away now. There’s nothing perishable in there. I think I’ll take some aspirin and lay down.”

“Do that,” Theresa said, and followed her into the bedroom. “Then you’ll be rested for later. Saddle called—he and Byron are throwing a birthday party at the club, and they want us to come over.”

Lorraine was looking through the top dresser drawer for her aspirin. “I’m not going over there tonight. I hate those parties.”

“You never hated them before.” Theresa crossed her arms in the door and stared at Lorraine. “What’s so different now?”

“I’ve always hated them.” Lorraine closed the drawer and
started searching in the other one. “I just went because you wanted to. They make me sick with all their prancing and phoniness. They’re nothing but a couple of fags.”

“And we’re just a couple of dykes.” She spit the words into the air.

Lorraine started as if she’d been slapped. “That’s a filthy thing to say, Tee. You can call yourself that if you want to, but I’m not like that. Do you hear me? I’m not!” She slammed the drawer shut.

So she can turn on me but she wouldn’t say a word to that scum in the streets, Theresa thought. She narrowed her eyes slowly at Lorraine. “Well, since my friends aren’t good enough for the Duchess from Detroit,” she said aloud, “I guess you’ll go spend another evening with your boyfriend. But I can tell you right now I saw him pass the window just before you came up the block, and he’s already stewed to the gills and just singing away. What do you two do down there in that basement—harmonize? It must get kinda boring for you, he only knows one song.”

“Well, at least he’s not a sarcastic bitch like some people.”

Theresa looked at Lorraine as if she were a stranger.

“And I’ll tell you what we do down there. We talk, Theresa—we really, really talk.”

“So you and I don’t talk?” Theresa’s astonishment was turning into hurt. “After five years, you’re going to stand there and say that you can talk to some dried-up wino better than you can to me?”

“You and I don’t talk, Tee. You talk—Lorraine listens. You lecture—Lorraine takes notes about how to dress and act and have fun. If I don’t see things your way, then you shout—Lorraine cries. You seem to get a kick out of making me feel like a clumsy fool.”

“That’s unfair, Lorraine, and you know it. I can’t count the times I’ve told you to stop running behind people, sniveling to be their friends while they just hurt you. I’ve always wanted you to show some guts and be independent.”

“That’s just it, Tee! You wanted me to be independent of
other people and look to you for the way I should feel about myself, cut myself off from the world, and join you in some crazy idea about being different. When I’m with Ben, I don’t feel any different from anybody else in the world.”

“Then he’s doing you an injustice,” Theresa snapped, “because we are different. And the sooner you learn that, the better off you’ll be.”

“See, there you go again. Tee the teacher and Lorraine the student, who just can’t get the lesson right. Lorraine, who just wants to be a human being—a lousy human being who’s somebody’s daughter or somebody’s friend or even somebody’s enemy. But they make me feel like a freak out there, and you try to make me feel like one in here. That only place I’ve found some peace, Tee, is in that damp ugly basement, where I’m not different.”

“Lorraine.” Theresa shook her head slowly. “You’re a lesbian—do you understand that word?—a butch, a dyke, a lesbo, all those things that kid was shouting. Yes, I heard him! And you can run in all the basements in the world, and it won’t change that, so why don’t you accept it?”

“I have accepted it!” Lorraine shouted. “I’ve accepted it all my life, and it’s nothing I’m ashamed of. I lost a father because I refused to be ashamed of it—but it doesn’t make me any
different
from anyone else in the world.”

“It makes you damned different!”

“No!” She jerked open the bottom drawer of her dresser and took out a handful of her underwear. “Do you see this? There are two things that have been a constant in my life since I was sixteen years old—beige bras and oatmeal. The day before I first fell in love with a woman, I got up, had oatmeal for breakfast, put on a beige bra, and went to school. The day after I fell in love with that woman, I got up, had oatmeal for breakfast, and put on a beige bra. I was no different the day before or after that happened, Tee.”

“And what did you do when you went to school that next day, Lorraine? Did you stand around the gym locker and swap stories with the other girls about this new love in your
life, huh? While they were bragging about their boyfriends and the fifty dozen ways they had lost their virginity, did you jump in and say, ‘Oh, but you should have seen the one I gave it up to last night?’ Huh? Did you? Did you?”

Theresa was standing in front of her and shouting. She saw Lorraine’s face crumple, but she still kept pushing her.

“You with your beige bras and oatmeal!” She grabbed the clothes from Lorraine’s hand and shook them at her. “Why didn’t you stand in that locker room and pass around a picture of this great love in your life? Why didn’t you take her to the senior prom? Huh? Why? Answer me!”

“Because they wouldn’t have understood,” Lorraine whispered, and her shoulders hunched over.

“That’s right! There go your precious ‘theys’ again. They wouldn’t understand—not in Detroit, not on Brewster Place, not anywhere! And as long as they own the whole damn world, it’s them and us, Sister—them and us. And that spells different!”

Lorraine sat down on the bed with her head in her hands, and heavy spasms shook her shoulders and slender back. Theresa stood over her and clenched her hands to keep herself from reaching out and comforting her. Let her cry. She had to smarten up. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life in basements, talking to winos and building cardboard worlds that were just going to come crashing down around her ears.

Theresa left the bedroom and sat in the chair by the living room window. She watched the autumn sky darken and evening crystallize over the tops of the buildings while she sat there with the smugness of those who could amply justify their methods by the proof of their victorious ends. But even after seven cigarettes, she couldn’t expel the sour taste in her mouth. She heard Lorraine move around in the bedroom and then go into the shower. She finally joined her in the living room, freshly clothed. She had been almost successful in covering the puffiness around her eyes with makeup.

“I’m ready to go to the party. Shouldn’t you start getting dressed?”

Theresa looked at the black pumps and the green dress with black print. Something about the way it hung off of Lorraine’s body made her feel guilty.

“I’ve changed my mind. I don’t feel up to it tonight.” She turned her head back toward the evening sky, as if the answer to their tangled lives lay in its dark face.

“Then I’m going without you.” The tone of Lorraine’s voice pulled her face unwillingly from the window.

“You won’t last ten minutes there alone, so why don’t you just sit down and stop it.”

“I have to go, Tee.” The urgency in her words startled Theresa, and she made a poor attempt of hiding it.

“If I can’t walk out of this house without you tonight, there’ll be nothing left in me to love you. And I’m trying, Theresa; I’m trying so hard to hold on to that.”

Theresa would live to be a very old woman and would replay those words in her mind a thousand times and then invent a thousand different things she could have said or done to keep the tall yellow woman in the green and black dress from walking out of that door for the last time in her life. But tonight she was a young woman and still in search of answers, and she made the fatal mistake that many young women do of believing that what never existed was just cleverly hidden beyond her reach. So Theresa said nothing to Lorraine that night, because she had already sadly turned her face back to the evening sky in a mute appeal for guidance.

Lorraine left the smoky and noisy club and decided to walk home to stretch the time. She had been ready to leave from the moment she had arrived, especially after she saw the disappointment on everyone’s face when she came in without Theresa. Theresa was the one who loved to dance
and joke and banter with them and could keep a party going. Lorraine sat in a corner, holding one drink all night and looking so intimidated by the people who approached her that she killed even the most persistent attempts at conversation. She sensed a mood of quiet hysteria and self-mockery in that club, and she fled from it, refusing to see any possible connection with her own existence.