Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [58]
“It’s your circadian rhythm,” Anna told me. “I read about it someplace—all about crickets singing at twilight even if you try to fool them into thinking it’s still daytime. You—you’re always gonna know when it’s dawn—a useful thing when you think about it.”
“Uh huh.” I rubbed tired swollen eyes. “Well, tell me, do crickets ever sing at noon or nap when they feel like it?”
“Don’t know.” Anna gave me one of her lopsided grins. “Don’t know shit about crickets, really. It’s twilight I know about—that’s when I wake up. Just about the time you need a little nap or something, right?”
“Something.”
“Well, we an’t never gonna get in phase, are we? I’m always gonna be pissed at you stumbling around making noise early in the morning, and you an’t never gonna forgive me for banging pots when I get the urge to bake ’long about three in the morning. Right?”
“Probably.”
Anna grinned wider still and used her elbow to wipe sweat off her eyebrows. The late-afternoon sun was pouring in her big shaded windows, laying a pattern of silhouetted walnut leaves on her bare feet where they were folded up against her thighs. She was naked except for the polished white handkerchief she had spread over her lap to catch any stray grains of grass from the loose bag she was slowly pushing through her flour sifter. Like my mama, Anna believed you never washed a flour sifter; you brushed it clean. When she cleaned her grass there was a slight dusting of flour sprinkled among the pungent leaves in her mixing bowl. I didn’t really smoke anymore myself, but I’d tasted Anna’s blend once or twice and imagined a slight baking-powder aftertaste that reminded me of home. The aura of biscuits and marijuana-induced relaxation that surrounded Anna was one of the things I liked about sharing the apartment with her. She kept it calm, dimly lit, and sweet-smelling.
“I’m just an old dyke hippy,” she’d insisted, when I’d come to ask about the apartment.
I’d laughed, “Well, we should get along just fine then. I’m kind of a young one.”
Anna had pulled her sandal strap up and then looked me up and down, from my long shaggy hair and labrys earrings to the backpack I wore over one shoulder, from the Crazy Ladies T-shirt under my army surplus jacket to my steel-toed hiking boots. She’d pushed back her short-cropped frosty gray hair, pursed her lips, and then given that grin I would learn to love.
“Kind of, maybe,” she’d laughed. “You another one of these Women’s Center lesbians?”
“No, I’m new in town.”
“Look to me like you’re new in the world, but come have a cup of tea and tell me why you’d like to live in this messy old house. I’m warning you, it’s full of really crazy women, all of ’em running through here all the time trying to get me to go to one meeting or another, some demonstration or discussion group. I don’t go to meetings, you understand. Three other apartments in this building, and if you’re planning on holding meetings in your bedroom, you better see if you can’t rent in one of them. This is the depoliticized zone in here. I bake a lot, smoke a lot, and sleep during the day, and I intend to keep it that way.”
She led me in past the screened porch to a spacious living room that had an old brocade couch pushed up under the windows and a rug that was worn through in a path from the kitchen to the open bathroom door. There were lots of plants drooping in the heat, dust and cat fur clinging to the bottom of the pots. An enormous dirty white cat was sleeping in a patch of sunlight on one of the pews. Anna dropped down on a big stuffed cushion and watched me perch awkwardly on the near couch.
“Where you from?” she asked suddenly, and without thinking about it I answered, “South Carolina.”
“Yeah? You got a strange accent.”
“Rhode Island—spent some