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  “What about renting out the upstairs, Gramma Gus?” Maddy had asked. Her face still held a child’s softness, a breathtaking androgynous beauty.

  “Where in the world would I find a congenial, honest soul who’d want to share a kitchen with an old codger like me? Who I could bear to have around watching me suffer the indignities of aging? And who’d be interesting enough to make it worthwhile?” Smiles and mourning flickered across Gussie’s lined face.

  Listening, Annie began to understand that what she had learned from the philosophy courses she’d dabbled in—trying to figure out what life was all about—paled next to these eighty-three years of lesbian life.

  Maddy had introduced Annie as the ex-New York City cab driver who took philosophy courses for fun.

  Gussie had turned to her with a dry laugh, “I don’t know what to say to a philosopher. I had a friend once who’d explain the mysteries of life after a couple of highballs. We used to call her Socrates.”

  It had been as if, poking a respectful hole in Annie’s persona, Gussie had demystified her own—the old widow woman. Annie hadn’t known how to treat her and hadn’t liked being introduced to old age and mourning.

  Now, in the warmth of May, her memories brought a flush of affection for Gussie. “Okay,” she said. “I give up. What do we do?”

  “First,” said Gussie, “you go down there and demand your job back. What are the laws in this state anyway? I was glad when I saw some law passed, but I didn’t think I’d ever need to take advantage of it,” confessed Gussie. She poured the tea. “One of the blessings of getting up there in years, Socrates, is that all old women look alike, even funny old women. The world thinks it’s safe from us now.”

  “Ha! Safe from Gussie Brennan?”

  “Keep it up, kiddo. You’re good for my ego.”

  “Poor Lorelei.”

  “Why?”

  “What are my riders going to think when I don’t take them home this afternoon? Damn it, Gus, maybe I shouldn’t make a career of Special Ed, but do you have any idea how good it feels— felt—not to be hustling eight, ten hours a day? Thinking of the minutes of my life as dollars, and measuring people by how much they tipped me? They weren’t even people anymore, they were fares.

  “The pigs who thought an invitation to their hotel rooms was tip enough. The high-rollers snorting coke in the back seat. The poor families stuffed in together on their way to emergency housing, paying with a welfare chit, some apologetic about having no money for a tip. The thieves who took my whole night’s pay—and the next, by the time I got through at the police station. I liked driving a cab until it meant bullet-proof glass and checking the back seat for dirty needles.” She whirled on Gussie. “I want this job. I want this life.”

  “Annie,” Gussie said gently from the stove, “believe me. We’re not helpless. Just to be sure, we’ll call a great gaggle of people and we’ll put our heads together.”

  “Right now all I want to do is go hide in my room. I came here to get my life together. What a downer.”

  “Do you want to be standing in some kitchen forty years from now knowing the time was right to end the cycle? This town’s just the place to take on your demons. We’re good at crises in Morton River. Have I told you about the flood?”

  “And what about Jo! This’ll blow her right out of the water. She can’t afford to run around with me now.”

  Gussie gestured emphatically for her to sit. This was no time for one of Gussie’s long stories, but Annie sat down anyway.

  “A lot of workers came up from the south to Morton River Valley for the brass factories which ran, I’m told, day and night. Some of the migrants brought the Ku Klux Klan along with them.”

  Annie dunked her tea bag, feeling antsy, and challenged Gussie. “To New England? No.”

  “Oh, but New England introduced that sort of thing to America. Remember the Salem witchcraft trials? Remember forced busing in Boston, Sacco and Vanzetti? New England is where The Scarlet Letter was set, Socrates. In the Valley there were the blacks and the Italian and Polish Catholics trying to learn English—and the Klan kept them all in their places.”

  “The good news is that you don’t have a front yard to burn a cross on.”

  “You don’t hear much about the Klan in Morton River these days,” Gussie went on, ignoring her, “but that old suspicious anger is rooted deep. When Dusty and Elly, bless their souls, bought the diner, unemployment was almost as high as it is now. Word spread that prosperous gays from the city were taking over, even though Dusty’s a native and put together a lot of helicopter parts before she could start her own business.”

  Annie listened with horror as Gussie described the harassment of employees and customers, gay and straight, the arson, the intimidating atmosphere.

  “Why didn’t anybody tell me this before I moved here? Morton River was supposed to be safer than the city.”

  Spooning her tea bag onto a flowered saucer, Gussie went on. “The rains came. The river rose. Dusty and Elly turned the diner into flood headquarters, gave away food to the sandbagging crews, helped the Red Cross—how could people hate them after that?”

  Gussie blew on her hot tea, sipped. “But the economy’s gotten worse again. The Valley never recovered from the closing of Rafferty Brass. The houses being prettied up by yuppies who work in New Haven are pushing prices beyond what the locals can afford. That old Klan way of thinking is looking for an enemy to punish.”

  “And yours truly moved to town in the nick of time,” Annie said. “Just what I always wanted, to take on the Klan.”

  Nodding, Gussie agreed. “The time is right—the Valley Sentinel is blowing our horn for us with headlines about gays in the army or adopting kids, scaring the squares half to death.”

  “Incredible. This woman who saw Lorelei kiss me, she’s just defending her turf?”

  Gussie set her cup hard against the saucer, her expression a mixture of amazement and anger.

  “That’s who she is! Mrs. Norwood is the wife of that popular fundamentalist preacher. When I was stuck at the old people’s home with my banged-up hip, Mrs. Norwood made the rounds doing bible readings. I practiced every rusty cuss word I know to get her to leave me alone. A royal pain in the derriere, though I know she was trying to do good.”

  “Worst case scenario,” Annie said with disgust. She crumpled up a piece of junk mail and tossed it savagely toward the trashcan where it bounced and fell into Toothpick’s water dish. “I wasn’t only in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I was there with the wrong person. Norwood must have a darling daughter on the other team.”

  “Her little darling. Mama keeps her hair long, femmes up the child’s uniform—but that little tomboy has great promise—and I don’t just mean in sports!”

  “Serves them right.”

  “Have some more of this soda bread while it’s still hot, Socrates. If I’m going to get my share, I’d better put my teeth in.” She went toward the bathroom with a lively step.

  Annie laid her head on her arms at the table. Toothpick pushed onto her lap. “You ready for this, tiger? Let’s get ’em,” she whispered to the little tabby. “Just like Vicky did.”

  When she’d visited her ex, Vicky, last fall, they’d driven from Eugene, where Vicky had her law practice, to the Oregon coast. They’d stayed for the gold and lavender October sunset—but not for the romance of it—they’d gracefully relinquished that part of their bond long ago.

  The air had been damp and Indian-summer soft, smelling faintly but pleasantly of rotting sea vegetation. Pelicans had skimmed the waves, flanked by reeling gulls. She’d pulled the brim of her tweed cap tighter over her shaggy blond hair and squinted at the glorious molten ball slowly immersing itself in the Pacific Ocean.

  “I’d love to have you move here, Annie,” said Vicky, stray silver obvious in the soft sweep of her short hair, sunglasses shading her eyes from the fiery sun that sat blinding and vaporous on the horizon. They were both past forty now, but Vicky
had entered adulthood with more finality than Annie, who had flown out both to recover from her break up with Marie-Christine and to decide whether to leave New York.

  Vicky went on, “You could stay with us until you got a job and a place. The way you attract women, you’d make the home you want within a year. The East Coast is in its death throes from crowds, dirt and pollution. It’s making you so morose.”

  “Vicky,” Annie had said, exasperated, “it suits me. I thrive on adrenaline highs. I’m not a laid back West Coast person.”

  Victoria Locke had lifted her sunglasses and Annie had searched those eyes, so troubled and fatigued-looking this year. But the law agreed with Vicky, gave her a framework for the world, a careful way of speaking that still seemed more about caring than caution.

  Eugene had been tempting—until this year’s visit. She’d argued, “These loony-tune right-wingers are trying to stuff you back in the closet. It doesn’t much matter if you beat them at the polls; I don’t think I could live in a place where the election signs and the newspaper headlines make it so clear how much I’m hated for wanting to puke at the thought of sex with men. I can see what a toll it’s taken on you.”

  That night, in Vicky and Jade’s guest room, she had wavered, hating as always to be parted from her best friend, but in the morning, as Vicky drove her to the airport through the darkness, she saw again that the lawns were a battleground of pro-and anti-gay signs. The heater had roared hot air, but Annie couldn’t stop shivering. “Crap, Vicky, this is like seeing swastikas along the streets. It should be illegal.” No, she’d decided. She’d take east coast boogeymen over this any day.

  So here she was, in Morton River Valley. She lifted her head from her arms. Toothpick was nosing around the soda bread. She gave her a scrap. “I wonder,” she asked the kitten, “if it would be better to live where you could name your enemies?”

  Toothpick licked and nibbled through half the slice. Annie shredded her napkin and decided to move back to New York and be a cabbie again, go out to Vicky in Eugene, to some anonymous Midwestern city to start her own cab company, to the southwest where she would sell her little car and take the Amtrak anywhere it went. Was there a safe place for her on earth?

  Satisfied, Toothpick circled on her lap and nested. Silently, Annie argued with Judy, then agreed with her decision to protect the Farm, then took her to court, then rescued Lorelei and Errol with her own agency, then begged for her job, or found a way to go back to school full time and decided that getting in trouble was a sign that she should move back to Chelsea and care for her ailing parents. She couldn’t help but laugh at the thought that Chelsea, home sweet home to her parents’ bitter marriage, might turn out to be safer than anyplace else.

  Toothpick purred. Normally Annie would go upstairs and put on a jazz piano tape to soothe herself, but she wasn’t up for diversion. Vicky had accused her of having turned into a sad sack.

  “When,” Vicky had asked, “was the last time you howled at the moon?”

  “You remember that?” Annie had asked with delight.

  “Could I forget? When we lived in our little toothpick house I’d watch you race over to the beach barefoot in all kinds of weather and streak along the sand baying your heart out into the night.”

  She was right, it had been a long time and it looked like it would be a long time again.

  Gussie had wet down her cowlicks and came back patting them into place.

  “Working with people at the Farm,” she told Gussie with an incredulous smile, “forced me to be playful again, to laugh at how serious I’d gotten during that long struggle to keep MarieChristine—to keep my head together in that whacked-out cabbie job.”

  The newspaper arrived with a thwack at the front door. Annie brought it in and slouched over the want ads. “Hairstylist, Mold Maker, Motel Housekeeper. Maybe I could do that. No, it’s in Upton. The commute would eat my wages. Nurse’s aide, cafeteria help—even they want experience. I should advertise in the Work Wanted column—middle-aged dyke, recently canned for decent behavior, entire work history driving cabs—looking for meaningful job where she won’t be a threat to heterosexuality.”

  “Nonsense,” Gussie said, calmly buttering her soda bread. “Right after lunch I’ll round up our troops. You’ve already told me you’ve got what it takes to slug this out. You’re not going to be an ostrich like I was all my life.”

  She groaned. “Gus, I came here to turn down the volume. You don’t know what a horror show this is.”

  Across the table, snowy eyebrows furrowed over round glasses, Gussie looked, not like a timid ostrich, but like some ancient owl. “Oh, yes I do.”

  Chapter Three

  “I don’t think this is such great idea, Gus,” she protested as they pulled into a parking space near the diner.

  “My timing may be off at that,” Gussie said, heaving herself up out of the old Saab and into the first fat drops of rain. Within seconds, the sky that had glowed so brightly all day opened like an upended bucket.

  Inside, they shook rain off themselves and dripped the length of the tile floor to the round table at the far end of the diner. “A-mazing! Look at all these people!” Annie said, stepping back. Gussie grabbed her arm.

  America Velasquez, the high school teacher Maddy had tapped for advisor to a stillborn gay student group, called out with a wide lipsticked smile, “Maddy twisted her mom’s arm to baby sit my grandkid for me. Here I am!” America taught Spanish and, Maddy reported, made her lessons lively with Puerto Rican culture.

  “You’re fantastic,” Annie said.

  Gussie told her, “America’s furious.”

  Whispering, Annie asked, “Did you tell these people that I wanted them here?”

  “Why not, Socrates? You can’t fight this alone.”

  “Watch me.”

  Elly, skinny Elly with her permed and tinted hair, her green eye shadow and decorated nails, her old friend Elly from the bar days, hugged Annie very hard. She was southern femme to her very soul, gracious and demonstrative, with a hard edge born of growing up in a world that labeled her white trash. “You poor honey-pie. Dusty’s mad at me, but I made her promise to join us if the kitchen slows down. I skipped Verne’s art class for the first time ever. I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  “Just like old times, El, except Turkey’s still in New York. It’s you, Peg, and me against the world.”

  “And the world hasn’t won yet! Come see my new drawing!” Elly demanded, preceding her to the wall behind the cash register. Annie smiled at the striking likeness to her earlier view of the diner roosting above the Morton River and the railroad tracks.

  “I can’t believe you were this talented all along and nobody ever knew it.”

  “It was my little dream, like yours, remember? You wanted to start a free cab company to help disabled people go places and to keep women off the streets after dark?”

  “Then Peg and Turkey went to grad school and you moved out here with Dusty. And Rosemary, remember her and Claudia?”

  “Whatever happened to that weird Rosemary?”

  Annie had to laugh. She assumed a painfully erect posture, pulled her hair back from her face as tightly as she could and made a thin-lipped sour face. In Rosemary’s clipped tones she said, “I’ve begun a wymmin’s bank in Oakland. With my husband’s backing. He’s more of a feminist than Gloria, Betty and Andrea combined!”

  “Just like her!” Elly cried in glee. “But poor Claudia.”

  “No, she’s still thriving on that lesbian farm out in the Midwest. See, you’re all doing something with your lives. It wasn’t till I started the job at the Herb Farm that I felt like I was finally helping somebody.”

  Dusty emerged from the kitchen, just out of Elly’s sight, as Elly asked in a manner both coquettish and pleading, “Will you come to our opening? Verne set up a show for all her students. You’ll like Verne, she’s—”

  “A home wrecker,” came Dusty’s low commanding voice behind them. She p
ushed her white overseas-style cook’s hat to the back of her head. Her short hair, grown over her brow and collar, was still a rich auburn though she must, Annie calculated, be in her early fifties.

  “Oh, now Dusty. She’s not wrecking any homes. You’re just jealous—” Elly inserted her little finger under Dusty’s collar, “because I’m not spending every livelong second here with you.”

  Dusty backed away from Elly’s finger. “You used to want to be here with me,” Dusty grumbled. “Now it’s Verne this and Verne that.”

  Elly’s blush went pinker against her wan face. She glanced at Annie from the corner of her eye and gave a nervous chirp of laughter. “Dusty, honey, us wives of workaholics can’t just sit home and wait. And I can’t work all the hours you do. I fall apart.”

  “The diner’s falling apart. You’ve had an order up here for five minutes,” Dusty barked, slapping the plate she’d been holding onto the counter. She marched back to the kitchen. Normally the most affable of women, she hadn’t even greeted Annie.

  “Giulia’s covering for me,” Elly said snippily to Dusty’s back, but delivered the sandwich, then pulled Annie back to the group. “You will come?” she whispered.

  “Sure, El,” she replied quickly, further shaken by this discord in the institution that Elly and Dusty had become. She tipped her softball cap down over one eye and went into the old Bogie routine they used to do at the bar. “Hey, sweetheart, come over to my place if you want to talk sometime.”

  Elly tossed make-believe locks off her face. “Talk is cheap, stranger. Make me a better offer.”

  “That’s more like it,” she told Elly with a laugh.

  Maddy arrived and gave her an affectionate bump with a hip. A high school senior now, Maddy had lived as a gay street kid in New York for some months before a network of dykes found her. Annie had given her a ride back to Morton River, then returned to the Valley to visit again and again.

  As the group gathered, Annie felt overwhelmed. She escaped into a quick reminiscence of the day she first went to Dusty’s Diner with Maddy.