Best of the Best Lesbian Erotica (21 page)

She took her hand from me slowly, let it stay underneath her when she sank into me. And I felt her hand and the weight of her body as indistinguishable things. And I came in this way,

 

 

 

 

 

I dragged the ringing phone, along with my cold brew, out to the front porch. Sometimes I don't answer the phone, I just listen to it ring. A ringing phone is kind of like a vibrator up against the ache in my chest. It's like holding possibility up against hope. And not answering the phone is sort of like masturbating instead of having sex with someone. If you answer the phone, or if you take a real partner in sex, you got to deal with who it is. But if you don't answer the phone, and if your partner is in your head, it could be Marlene Dietrich.

It was one of those long mild Portland evenings and my lilacs were in full bloom. I settled into the porch swing and popped open the beer. The phone continued to ring. Down the street I heard a couple of kids arguing over some dumb game. Across the street a woman was mowing her lawn. I like having folks around. Just not too close. I took the first long swallow of my brew. Then I addressed the ringing phone.

“I'm busy, Marlene,” I said out loud. Then I called my handy boy. “James? Fax a mess of these lilacs to Ms. Dietrich for me. Thanks, doll.”

I took a slug of my beer. Nothing could make me believe there was anyone on the other end of that ringing phone but Ma. Don't get me wrong. I love my mother. But she was getting to the age where I should be calling
her
every night to see how
she
was doing, not the other way around. Ma didn't realize that calling me every night was like sky-writing, “You have no lover, Esther. You're all alone.”

I picked a lilac and stuck it behind my ear so that its fragrance assaulted my nose. Then I answered the phone. “Hi, Ma.”

“Esther.” The sultry voice spoke my name as if it were sweet fruit. “Do you remember me?”

I sat up straight. “Who is this?”

“Big old bulldagger like you, and you don't have no memory?”

A big old bulldagger? Well, I liked that. I waited for the woman to speak again.

“This is Sherry, from ten years ago exactly, this summer.”

“Sherry…?” I was still adjusting to this not being Ma.

“Don't tell me you've forgotten me?”

“No, wait a minute. I got it. Sherry from the trail crew. Where are you?”

“Chowchilla, baby. Doin' time.”

I couldn't believe her voice, so low and seductive. I'd worked that summer as a trail crew supervisor for the county. My crew was made up of juvenile delinquents from girls' and boys' homes. Besides building trails in parks, I was supposed to teach those hoods job skills. Sherry had been a fourteen-year-old kid with a blond pony-tail and crooked teeth. She had those long colt legs of a barely adolescent girl, and her arms were always bruised and scratched as if she spent her days pushing through blackberry brambles. “Oh. I'm sorry to hear that.”

“Me, too, honey!” Her rich smoker's laugh sounded much more mature than the dirty, brash mouth I remembered. “Truth, though, it ain't any different from the girls' homes. It's what I'm used to. Got me a woman to look after me, too. She's cute but she don't have no money.”

So she came out. Or maybe this was just a prison thing. I opened my mouth to speak, but Sherry went right ahead.

“You ever hear from that fag?”

She meant Arthur. “No. I never heard from him after the summer.”

“He's probably inside, too. I don't think you ever realized how deep that kid was. Into all kinds of shit even back then. Don't matter how many books he read.” She laughed. “I know you liked him better than me, the whole summer, but I was a lot more honest with you than him. You know, I'd give anything to go back to that summer.”

There, in that last sentence I heard the voice of the Sherry I remembered, the fourteen-year-old kid. I'd thought of her a lot over the years, convinced that she'd made it. I liked to think of her as a take-no-shit lawyer or doctor somewhere. To be honest, I counted her as one of my few successes. Even if I hadn't done much with my own life, I'd helped that kid back then.

“Do you remember,” she asked, “that time by the river?”

“Sure.” My voice cracked. “I remember.”

“I guess you knew I was jailbait, huh.”

“Well, I…uh, yeah.”

“Or didn't you want none. Too knock-kneed for you? You probably had your pick of the girls. Grown ones, I mean. My, you were handsome. Bet you still are. What do you look like, Esther? Still tall? Still have those deep brown eyes? Still passing?”

I snorted into the receiver. “Come off it, Sherry.”

“Give a girl a break. Tell me. What do you look like?”

“I'm the same. Six foot. Yeah, same eyes. Got some lines around them now. People still take me for a guy all the time, but I can't say I'm intentionally passing anymore. I've gained a little weight.”

“Mm
hmm
.” She said this like she'd just taken a bite out of a thick steak and her mouth was still full. “I bet it looks good on you, too.”

“Why're you calling?” I asked.

I could tell I'd been too brusque because her voice got small. “I don't know. I just thought of you.”

“They let you make phone calls from prison?”

Sherry didn't answer my question for a long time and in that pause, I remembered the real Sherry. She was an accomplished and frequent liar. But when you caught her in a lie, there was this grace period where she'd tell you the full truth. First, she'd be silent for a long time like this. I always figured she was planning her next lie, then she would surprise me. Her voice would open up, her demeanor would loosen, and you could just tell she was telling the truth. Those post-lie grace periods always softened me.

“Actually,” she said slowly. “I just got out.”

“Congratulations.” My voice was taut as I pulled in the reins, tightened my control of the exchange. I guess it was the butch in me getting off on orchestrating that resignation in her.

“Well, my girlfriend's still in. She's doin' a life sentence. Killed a john. So, I'm sort of free.” The tears in her voice shook me. I bet she ran her tongue over those crooked teeth, just like she used to. And probably twisted a clump of that blond hair around her finger.

“You'll do fine,” I said perfunctorily. This thing was going too far. What if she was in a pay phone down the block?

“Do you think so?” she asked in a voice that was more than manipulative. She wanted a real answer. “I guess I called you first because you gave me that second chance.”

“What are you talking about?” Very gruff.

“The first day on the trail crew. You found me in the bushes fucking that kid.”

“Sherry.” She was reaching now.

“Yeah. He was definitely a bad fuck.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“I still remember the look on your face when I told you why I fucked him.”

The sky was thickening with the purple of dusk. Someone passing in the street was smoking a cigarette. Crickets were making a racket. And I felt as if the telephone were a giant suction cup. Like I could be slurped up into the receiver and through the telephone lines to wherever Sherry was. Part of why she felt so immediate was that not much had changed for me since that summer. I do better at holding down jobs. I've managed to buy this little house. But, as I've paid two shrinks small fortunes to tell me, I've got intimacy problems. Like, I can't seem to sleep with the same woman more than two times. Sherry was the opposite. She marketed intimacy like it was stock. Still, loneliness looks the same from either end of the pole. I guess we recognized that in each other, even back then, even with twenty years difference between us.

“Talk to me,” Sherry begged. “Jesus Christ, Esther. I just got out of prison. I'm here on a goddamned street corner in goddamned Chowchilla, California and you're going silent on me. Talk.”

She sounded like somebody's femme, all right.

“What do you want me to talk about?” I could hear the resignation in my own voice.

“Me. Tell me what you thought of me that first day. The truth.” I was silent and she said, “Please.”

I tried to sound indulgent. “I knew you were trouble right away. At lunch that first day you worked all the other kids on the crew. Loud-mouthing, flirting, demanding attention.” I paused, reminded myself that Sherry was a whole state away, then said, “You had more sexual savvy at fourteen than I had at thirty-four.”

Sherry giggled. She liked that.

I went on. “I remember that first lunch real well. Arthur was sitting away from the group, reading. He never ate lunch. It was like the books nourished him.”

“Bullshit,” Sherry interrupted. “He was fat. He probably stuffed his face before and after work.”

“He wasn't fat.” I enjoyed Sherry's jealousy. “He was chunky. And he had that mess of brown curls. With his chubby cheeks he looked like a cherub. Sure, I liked him. I liked that he did all that reading. He was a smart kid.”

“He was a kiss-ass. I'm telling you, he's doin' time right now. You bet your ass. Intelligence don't have nothing to do with staying out of trouble.”

“That's probably true.”

“It
is
true. And Arthur
was
a kiss-ass. He always acted like he was your assistant and you fell for it. Oh, he'd pass out the tools or he'd run that little errand. Shit, he was just getting off to smoke a joint. He was selling dope to all the kids.”

“No he wasn't.”

“He was, Esther. But I don't want to talk about that fag. Talk about me.”

“Okay, so I'm telling you about that first lunch. I was dead broke. I remember exactly how my peanut butter sandwich tasted—like sawdust. And it was all I was going to have until my first paycheck. So after I finished it, I lay back in the sun—right there in the forest dirt—and thought about buying a mess of sliced turkey, dill pickles, mayonnaise, mustard, dark
rye bread. I was gonna make my future lunches feasts. Fresh peaches and slices of watermelon.”

“What's this got to do with me?”

“Everything.”

She giggled. “Okay, go on.”

“So when it was time to go back to work, I realized that you weren't around anymore.”

“What did you think?”

“I thought, shit. I've already lost a kid.”

“Yeah, but did you worry extra because it was me?”

“No, Sherry. I'd known you about four hours.”

“Mm,” she said. “Go on.”

“I went back to the van. You weren't there. So I started crashing around in the woods until I came to this pretty little meadow. And there you were.” I remembered seeing her two bare bony knees pointing to the sky. Humping away between them was a thirteen-year-old boy with his jeans bunched around his ankles.

“He was definitely a bad fuck,” Sherry mumbled.

“I can't believe that's the part you remember.”

“I'm incorrigible. But go on.”

“I told you to pull up your pants. There was fear in the boy's eyes, but you were cool. You were even a little scornful as you slowly pulled up your jeans.” I added, “You weren't wearing underwear.”

“You noticed that?” Sherry asked.

“So I fired you both on the spot.”

“But I was there at the bus stop the next day.”

“Yeah, you were.”

“Were you glad?”

“No.”

“But you let me in the van. You let me stay on the crew.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

In the sky to the west the last streaks of light were orange. I felt nauseous, maybe from the motion of the swing. I took the lilac out from behind my ear and tossed it into the bushes. The smell of those lilac blossoms could be overpowering. I wasn't going to tell her that it was her aggressive vulnerability that I liked. Maybe not liked. Just understood. So I said, “I don't know.”

“You made that contract with me.”

“Yes.”

“Did I ever break it?”

“No, you didn't.”

“You took me seriously.”

I remained quiet.

“You're so suspicious of me. Every time I say something nice to you, you clam up. I remember, you wrote out the work you expected of me for the summer, including my attitude requirements.” Sherry laughed and finished it with her smoker's cough. “Then you looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘Read this and sign it only if you intend to honor it.' ” She sighed. “Honey, as if there was any question! I loved the idea of spending the summer adjusting my attitude for you.”

“Cut the shit, Sherry. You were a kid. Fourteen.” I remembered that moment so well, too. I felt frightened by how seriously she took me. She spent a long time reading the contract, then she carefully signed her name at the bottom, a big round adolescent girl scrawl. I signed mine below hers and dated it.

“I still thought you were a guy then.”

I swallowed. “You thought I was a guy most of the summer, up until that time by the river.”

Sherry laughed. “In your dreams, girlfriend. Most of the kids never figured it out, I'll give you that. They didn't even know Esther was a girl's name. They were such ignorant fucks. Anyway, we shook hands over that contract. Then
you asked me why I'd screwed him, though you didn't put it that way, and that's when I figured out you were a girl. Remember what you said?”