Trash (21 page)

“You haven’t quit yet, huh?” Paula waves her hand as if warding off smoke, though the air conditioner over our heads has already sucked up the thin blue cloud. It’s the reason I got here first and sat in just this seat—now I can just smile and not reply. I’ve known Paula a long time, and no response is always best with her unless you’re prepared to sit still for several hours of exhaustive argument, something I haven’t wanted to do since we left the feminist collective where we both used to live.

“You’ve got such an addictive personality. Can’t you see what those cigarettes are doing to you?”

I smile determinedly and take another drag. About five years ago Paula won an award for her presentation to the therapists’ collective on how fingernail biting was a form of subliminal alcoholic behavior. Since then she’s become the world’s expert on addictive behavior, talking on the radio and writing a pithy little column for the local women’s paper. Margaret jokes that Paula can spot addiction indicators faster than most people can locate a taxi. It gets tiresome for her old friends, but most of us pretend to ignore it. Occasionally Margaret and I even talk about how tolerant we all seem to have become of each other. “It’s getting older,” Margaret thinks. I tell her that all that has happened is that we’ve worn each other down. It’s a conversation we have often, every time Paula or Jackie does something that gets us mad, and Margaret and I have a tacit agreement to head off arguments when we can. This time Margaret fails me.

“Paula’s right,” she says, pausing to lick salt off the rim of her glass. “You really ought to take a close look at yourself, girl.”

“Don’t want to get too introspective.” I pull smoke deep into my lungs and try to look amused rather than brooding.

Margaret’s eyebrows go up quizzically, and I know it’s time to get to the point of this little gathering.

“I thought we were here to talk about Jackie.” That sets Margaret to nodding.

“Oh Lord, don’t tell me.” Paula leans forward in her seat and grips her wineglass more tightly. “What’s she done now?”

“It’s the worst. You won’t believe it.” Margaret’s voice is a little loud and excited. Twin spots of flush pink appear high on her cheekbones. She signals the waiter for another margarita and puts her right hand on Paula’s free wrist. “She’s paying the whole bill for the arbitrator. She’s decided it’s her own fault after all.”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous!”

It is that, I think, but I heard about this last night so I’m not as surprised as Paula. I let my eyes wander to the waiter’s trousers drawn tight across his ass. He looks like he’s put concentrated attention into that ass or else is what Bruce always calls “genetics’ gift to faggots.” Bruce was the first gay man I met who admitted to having grown up and come out in a poor family in a small southern town—the same little crossroads town where I was born. Once every few months we get together to share gossip from our mothers, and talk bitchy trash that makes us both feel cosmopolitan and witty. “No one else talks like you do, honey,” Bruce insists, but the truth is no one talks like either of us. Most of the other expatriate southerners we know pretend to membership in the petty aristocracy, a fact we both find very amusing. One would think southern gentry produced only queer offspring. Somehow the conversation always seems to turn to highly detailed descriptions of our favorite body parts. The only serious conflict Bruce and I have is our divergent fascinations. He’s consumed with lust for narrow ankles and beautiful feet, while I obsess over lush behinds.

“Taste,” Bruce calls it.

“Fetish,” I always tell him.

I don’t seem to care so much what the rest of the body is like. It’s those flexing, bouncing bottoms that always pull my own thigh muscles tight and make me feel slightly gushy all over. Paula tells me I am disgustingly predictable. “A product of modern advertising, that’s all you are.” She’s probably right. I used to be the only woman in the collective that subscribed to
Playboy
. I’d clip the pictures I liked and leave the rest of it in the trash, upsetting Paula and Jackie terribly. But I noticed that the magazine was never there when I checked back later, so one of them was probably taking it out—to verify just how sexist it was, no doubt.

“I’m not as predictable as you think,” I’ve always told Paula, noting that she dates only bodybuilders and competition jocks. I like jocks myself, but since my taste in behinds is significantly larger than the social standard, I’m much more interested in Janet Jackson-type dancers than the tennis players Jackie and Paula go after. I can’t stand skinny butts on men or women—something about them makes me nervous and uncomfortable—while a rounded, high behind, what Bruce calls a “bubble butt,” always brings a flush to my neck. The waiter leans over the table next to us, and I see that he has a faint blush of pink eye shadow under his brows and a tiny gold earring in his left ear. I am immediately entranced, and startled when Margaret grabs my wrist.

“Jackie can’t deal with confrontation, you know. Never could,” Margaret goes on. “It’s easier for her to give in and pretend the whole thing was her fault. I’m surprised she didn’t offer to pay for the spray paint they used.” Margaret nods at the waiter pleasantly as he takes her empty glass, while I lean forward slightly trying to see if his other ear is pierced. Paula sees what I am doing and frowns.

“Christ, you really don’t know how to behave, do you?”

“What?” Margaret has seen nothing and doesn’t understand what Paula is talking about. I pass my glass to the waiter.

“Another beer,” I tell him with a grin, and watch Paula’s mouth tighten with rage. The waiter ignores her and smiles at me, his eyes lingering on the ancient set of figures I pulled off a charm bracelet and hung from the half-dozen rings in my ears.

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” Paula hisses, as he walks away.

“Flirting with a queen.” I smile at her lazily. “Gonna call the Lesbian Thought Police on me? Betcha it’s something Fawn and Pris could handle in an afternoon. They could come ’round with a couple of gallons of paint and a few hours to kill. No sweat.”

“Are you drunk?” Paula has that righteous expression that always provoked me to rage when we were living together.

“Oh shit.” I give Margaret a tired smile hoping she’ll rescue me.

“Of course she’s not,” Margaret throws in immediately. That’s Margaret’s third margarita the waiter is bringing back. Lately she and I have discussed how tiresome it is that the women’s community has suddenly discovered alcoholism after all these years. There are letters to the editor in the women’s papers and well-meaning workshops at every possible feminist gathering, most of which smack of self-congratulatory evangelism. Like Paula, everybody begins first by talking about how healthy they are and how pitiful the poor alcoholic is. It reminds me too much of the prayer meetings I hated so as a child. How could you ever know if you were in a state of grace or not, and why did the people who were so sure of themselves always seem to be hiding something? What I love about Margaret is that she’s never sure of much of anything.

“What do you think? Do you think I’m an alcoholic?” Margaret asked me the last time we went out to dinner together. “Lee wants me to talk to my therapist about how much I drink.”

I’d shrugged. “Is it getting in the way of anything you want to do?” That was a silly question, since obviously drinking is getting in the way of her and Lee living happily ever after, which is the one thing Margaret is absolutely sure she wants to do.

“Well . . .” She’d hesitated, then shrugged. “No more than working for a living and taking care of my mother.” Margaret works as the head teller at a midtown bank, a job that’s a little like living on the firing line in a small-arms tournament. She spends her weekends picking up after her mother, a beautiful but prematurely senile woman whose four married children have left her to Margaret to nurse and protect.

“Mama shit on that blue chintz couch again last week, and you know how embarrassing that is for her. Took me three hours to get it even half clean. I’m thinking I may have to re-cover it, but then I suppose she’ll just have another accident. The doctor said I should have the furniture covered in plastic, that it’s just gonna get worse, but damn, I can’t do that to her. It took her so long to get some nice things, and she loves them so.”

I didn’t tell her what I thought, that mostly Mama didn’t notice much of what she sat on anymore. It’s taken Margaret years to be able to afford to buy her mother the things they both always wanted, and it would break Margaret’s heart to give any of it up. Instead I’d changed the subject with a story about my mama’s attempts to get flowers to grow in her swampy yard. Margaret and I both know that some time in the next year she’s gonna have to give up and put her mama in a hospital of some kind. It’s one of the things neither of us discusses with Paula. If Paula were to make one of her righteous comments about Margaret’s mother and the wisdom of nursing homes, Margaret might do something sudden and terrible.

“I only hope you know what you’re doing.” Paula slaps her glass down and glares at Margaret and me.

For a moment I’ve lost the thread of the conversation, something I’ve been doing a lot lately. The fact is I have been drinking too much, and not sleeping and not eating, and half the time I can’t quite keep up with what’s going on around me. It’s as if I wander away in my mind. Everything someone says reminds me of something someone else said, and I never get around to paying attention to the here and now. I’ve even gotten lost on the way to work, missed my subway stop, and took the whole day off as a result. This time I decide to pull myself together. Paula is looking angry, and Margaret is looking confused. I shrug in Paula’s direction and fish a piece of ice out of my water glass to rub across the back of my neck.

“Come on, Paula.” I drop the half-melted ice back into my glass and wipe my hands on a napkin. “You lecture your friends, Margaret works too hard, Jackie lets herself be pushed around, and I flirt. It’s our natures. In all the time we’ve known each other, none of us has changed a bit.”

Paula’s face freezes for a moment, then loosens, and her lips pull up slightly as if she would smile but can’t quite. Instead she reaches across the table and puts her hand on mine. “We’ve changed. We’ve all changed. I can remember when you would never talk back to anybody, when Margaret was on unemployment more than she worked, and Jackie would have bounced Fawn’s head off Pris’s backside before she would have let them fuck with her.”

She’s right, but it’s a shock to hear her say it. It’s a shock to remember her as she used to be, the blunt and perceptive Paula who used to make me laugh all night with her caustic dissections of our neighbors. I loved her for it once, and stopped loving her when she got too careful to say those things anymore. It’s amazing what we have put up with from each other over the years, what we have seen each other go through, and what we have put each other through. Whenever I wonder why people hang on to old friends so desperately, I remember Jackie telling me she felt like her friends were the only record she had of what had happened in her life. “You still keep a journal?” she asked me. “I’ve always imagined that someday I might sit down and read all those journals you kept, see what happened that I wasn’t keeping track of.”

“It’s Jackie we ought to be talking about. She needs our help.” Margaret puts both hands back on the table and looks at Paula and me expectantly.

“What about Fawn and Pris?” I ask her. “I’ve got a few things to say about them.”

“I think they need someone to really confront them with what they did.” Paula’s voice has gone flat again, her face become impassive. “That kind of thing doesn’t come out of nowhere.”

“Confront,” I mouth back to her, wondering if all the women who use that word so easily know what they mean by it. I know what Paula’s gonna say now before she says it. She’s never seemed to notice how predictably her judgments peel off when she’s acting like the feminist therapist, like so many layers of toasted onion, each clinging delicately to the lower layers.

“Jackie should have taken them to court,” Margaret announces.

I stare at Margaret in surprise. I’ve been thinking the same thing for weeks. Certainly if two women had broken into my apartment and trashed it, I’d have had them in court before they’d known what was happening, but Margaret is the last one of us I’d ever expect to advocate using what she has always called “the patriarchal legal system.”

“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.”