Trash_ Stories - Dorothy Allison [60]
“Damn!” I shook my head.
“Uh uh. ’Course you got a few stories yourself. Don’t play pool worth a damn, do you? But you bring ’em home, those sweaty girls?”
“Bar dykes.” I said it flatly. “You know how it is. They got those stringy muscles in their arms, and they all grin like those old pictures of Elvis Presley getting ready to shake his butt where the camera can’t see. Gets to me every time.”
She laughed at me, but then put her hand on my arm in apology. “I don’t know. You’re younger. Maybe it’s different for you. Women my age now, we’ve always been kind of hard on each other for that kind of thing. You’re supposed to do it because you’re in love. You get a reputation for sleeping around and people treat you bad, call you terrible names. I always hated that, but not enough to do anything myself. To tell you the truth, the only time I ever brought anybody home that way, I was drunk and I hated it. Must be different if you’re younger, huh?”
“No, not that I’ve seen, and the trouble is I like them older than me anyway,” I’d shrugged, “older than you. And yeah, they got a word for me, too.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“Neither do I.” I ran my palms up my own stringy arms and looked up at the pictures she had pinned all over her bedroom door. The women up there looked back at me with pinpoint black sleepy eyes—lesbians Anna’s age and older, mysterious, powerful and mean, no doubt, if you didn’t play by their rules. I hugged myself and looked away. “Neither do I.”
At the concert last week, I kept walking back to Cass and the little bottle of Jack Daniel’s she had in her coat pocket. “Have a drink, darling. It’ll open your eyes,” she’d say, her pupils hidden behind half-closed lids. I shook my head no and gave her a quick lick on the neck that made her cheeks flash pink and her eyes open wide. All the women near us, most of them Cass’s friends from work or the pool hall, had their own bottles. I tried to get Cass to keep her little bottle down in the shadows. The crowd kept pushing past, their eyes hooded with too much dope and skin sour with cigarettes—women in party clothes: loose trousers, velvet vests, hats, high-heeled boots, glittering necklaces, and elaborate hoops dangling from their ears. Most of them looked like they belonged to the same gypsy troupe, their tribe indicated by the slogan-bearing buttons pinned to their collars and jackets. I saw Anna go by with her new girlfriend, Gayle, and then three of the women from the house—Judy, Paula, and Lenore. But none of them seemed to have seen us, and they all quickly disappeared into the audience. I felt Cass slip her hands around my waist and turned my face into the shelter of her neck.
“Where do they all come from?” I was only half serious. There were more women in the audience than I’d seen at any demonstration up at the capitol building.
“Oh, these only come out for the music,” Cass laughed. “Just like me.”
“You know, culture, women’s culture.” Cass’s friend Billy leaned over us, her hand sliding past my butt on its way to the bottle in Cass’s pocket. “An’t you heard about women’s culture?” I looked down at the black ink tattoos standing out all over her forearms. Billy was wearing her usual uniform—jeans so old and worn they looked like gray sky over the ocean at dawn, and a denim vest buttoned up tight to flatten her breasts. Her arms were bare, and every time she stretched her hand out, I could see white flash under her armpit from skin that was never exposed to the sun.
“You mean to tell me we an’t here to listen to rock and roll?” Cass slapped Billy’s shoulder and giggled. It had taken two weeks of teasing and arguing before Cass had agreed to come to this event, and she’d insisted on getting Billy and her girlfriend Roxanne to come, too. “Got to have somebody to talk to,” she’d insisted.
Billy had thought the whole notion a hoot. “They don’t know how to dress,” she kept saying, “but some of these chicks an’t bad-looking.”
Roxanne just kept biting the lipstick off her lips and kicking her heels against the wall behind us. “I don’t see nothing here