The Age of Aquarius

ou know why I love loving you?" Donny asked above her.

It was late. She'd thought making love would help her get some rest tonight. She sleepily held on tighter, and Donny gave a last thrust, groin to groin, before moving onto her own pillow.

"Donny, Donny, you're too much. You make it go on and on."

"Do you know?"

Chick was heavy and felt light. Her mouth tasted salty. She lifted herself, straddled Donny, and grazed her mouth with both breasts, watching her little crystal against Donny's darker skin.

"Because I'm a ringer for Ellen Degeneres?" She could hear Donny's grumble of laughter beneath her breasts. "You're not laughing at me, are you? Because it wouldn't take much to smother you with love."

Donny widened her eyes and took the tip of a sizeable breast in her mouth, then turned her head. "Who'd want that skinny youngster?"

"I love that you always say the right thing. So tell me. Why do you like doing it with me? I've been wondering what keeps you around."

"'Cause you're always so wet." Donny dipped her hand between Chick's legs and, Chick could tell, came up dry. "Until recently."

She could feel the circle of sparks in her chest that would ignite a hot flash and moved to lie on her back. Her body had been giving her away for some time now. She'd been surprised that Donny hadn't said anything. She hadn't wanted her to know that sex seemed like another chore except when Donny started it. Even then she sleepwalked her way through, enjoying the sensations while following Donny's lead. Tonight she'd felt livelier for some reason, maybe because the Pensioners' Posse was keeping M.C. away, but she knew that he was no more than a leaf on a noxious weed whose complicated roots wound inside her.

"You think I don't have eyes in my head, woman?" Donny propped herself on one elbow to look at her. "Go to bed," she told Loopy, who'd come to peer at them, chin on the bed, when they'd started talking. "You think I don't see that my laughing, generous, loving Chick is having trouble leaving her bed in the mornings? You used to hate it when I saw you with your hair uncombed, and now you don't get around to brushing it till you get downstairs. You couldn't stand to wear the same clothes two days in a row, and now you wear one outfit all week. You look miserable creeping your way downstairs like the executioner is waiting for you."

Donny was right. She'd get as far as the familiar, comforting motions of flipping on lights, changing the disks in the CD player, making coffee, and setting up the bakery, and then despair would drain her again. Sometimes she'd visit her downstairs sanctuary, breathe deeply from an herb bag, run her fingers over the curves of a goddess figurine, and feel stronger. On other days she knew there was no such thing as a Goddess within and felt such aversion to her store altar she couldn't force herself to go near it.

Bless Jeep. Now that the kid was working at the school she'd come in for breakfast and sing bouncy little tunes as she set up the shop, no questions asked, and handled the first customers while Chick did deep breathing in the walk-in cooler. Slightly buoyed, Chick would move to the bathroom, comb her hair, and draw her trademark smile across her mouth like lipstick.

"I know you, Chick," Donny was saying. "Something's bugging you big-time, and it ain't Shrub's tax cuts."

Although M.C. was the least of it, she wanted to keep the stalking secret. Donny, the street scrapper, would fight him, only to end up keeping Sheriff Sweet company at the lockup. A lot of good that would do. Sweat collected along her hairline and between her breasts.

"It's too mind-bending, sweetheart. I can't explain," she whispered, trying to hold back tears. Crying would alarm Donny more. She wished she hadn't put Neil Young on the CD player. He was too melancholy tonight.

"What can't you explain? Did you fall for somebody else? Don't tell me you're serious about Jeep."

"Oh, my poor baby. No. There's only you."

"Then why can't you tell me?"

There was no stopping the tears or the hysteria in her voice. "Please listen to me! I can't even explain what's happening to myself. It's beyond comprehension."

The stalking was on top, but underneath was the worry that she'd get as sick as her brother, the damned hormones ricocheting around inside her like pinballs ringing her bells, and the despair itself that left her exhausted and hopeless. To make this whole trip worse, M.C.'s appearance had triggered her old self-hatred. She'd been trying to kill her warming, cushioning fat body back in her hippie days, trying to stifle her gay soul with drugs and self-medicate herself out of depression. She'd lived on booze in the girl bars, then battled hepatitis for a year. Now she knew she'd been trying to die. Back then she'd thought she was having fun.

The heat left her body. Her sweat turned cold. And I'm getting old, she silently sang along with Neil Young. How could she begin to put all that into words? She breathed deeply, deeply again. She thought if she could spend her life doing deep breathing, everything would be fine.

"You're fantastic, lover. Just the fact that you're in my life keeps me going. If you weren't I'd be finito. I'm really working on getting more cheerful." She reached into the night table drawer.

"What's this?" asked Donny, examining the prescription bottle Chick handed her.

Chick gave her best chortle, but it caught in her throat and she coughed. "I've joined the designer drug generation. You know, better living through chemistry?"

Donny looked stunned. "You're jiving me. You, the laughing lady, on Prozac? Since when? This shit takes people over the edge."

"You liked me over the edge enough a few minutes ago, lover-woman," Chick said, rolling onto her side, rubbing her hand over the gray curls at the bottom of Donny's belly.

Donny ignored her. "I thought you were seeing Doc Wu about hormone pills for the change."

"They were a big zero, Don." She moved closer, belly to belly with her lover. "I got into a funk. Freaked when I couldn't get out of it."

The surprise in Donny's eyes turned to fear. "Am I treating you bad?"

"No, my egocentric little butch. It's got nothing to do with you. With us."

"Check this woman out. Then why have you been moping around, jumping out of your skin every time I walk through a door?"

"I'm strung out, lover, and down in the dumps."

"Why didn't you say something? I could've brought you flowers. We could've gone on a vacation. We still can!"

"Donny, Donny, the drug may be working. We only now made love for the first time in-"

Donny sulked. Loopy whimpered in her sleep, her paws running in the air. "Yeah, and next time maybe I better invite my pal K-Y over to help." She sat up and stared at Chick. "Or is that it? Abeo's stayed too long? You don't like my weird trans friend and all the ruckus she's stirring up?"

The hot flash sparked again. "Why is this turning into your problem, lover? It's something inside me, okay? I need you to love me, that's all, not beat yourself up."

"You didn't tell me."

"I was too down to talk about it. Haven't you ever felt like that?" Donny was a concrete wall when she wanted to be. "I didn't mean to hurt you or leave you out."

"But you did cut me out. This is some serious shit you're talking, woman. If you can't let me in at a time like this, then I'm thinking you never have."

"How can you say that, Donny? You know you zapped my heart and soul."

"I never asked for your heart and soul. All I asked for is a gorgeous, loving woman to share my life with, and now you tell me you're so damned miserable you have to take drugs to get by?"

"Is that what's flipping you out? That I'm doing a drug? It's not a high, my sweet worrier." Donny's back was to her and she slid her arms around her. She felt so cool and soft and smelled slightly minty. Maybe she'd leaned on a bed of mint while she was out fishing earlier with Hector. He was a twilight fisherman, willing to endure the mosquitoes because the fish loved them. "I'm cool, Donny. Taking chemicals for recreation doesn't do a thing for me anymore."

"I'm not flipped out," Donny protested, squirming from reach. "It's no skin off my nose what you do to yourself."

Chick could hear the fear, though. What a totally stupid thing to confess with Donny's brother in the shape he was in. "I battled Dr. Wu on this, Donny. It was my last choice. I need help shaking this melancholy I'm going through."

"You need help out of that bottle?"

"What could I have asked you for? You can't make me happy."

"You were always saying I did. What changed?"

Donny was right, but wrong. "You do make me happy. Or you make it possible for me to be happy when everything else is going right."

"Then tell me what's going wrong."

"Dr. Wu thinks it's some combination of hormones and missing serotonin. That's the chemical they think controls-"

"I know what it is. I read the paper. Another fancy new-age way the drug companies are making a buck. Way back when, it was Miltowns for your nerves. Now it's all about your nerve synapses or something. The way I see it, either you're content with what you've got or you're not, and no drugs, no alcohol is going to fix you if you're not."

"I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, Donny. Let me brew us a pot of tea and-"

"I don't want no cup of tea, Chick. Stop trying to take care of me. Don't you understand? You need taking care of sometimes too, and you've got to let me instead of shutting me out. They don't sell what I can do in any shape bottle."

That unnerved her. "Sometimes all the love in the world can't fix what's broken. Look at my brother."

"Your brother's got nothing to do with this. He's got his wires crossed. You're having a little down spell. We'll get Jeep and Abeo and a couple of the gals on the land to cover for us, Chick. We'll take a trip. A change of scenery, some moonlight walks, maybe palm trees and a boat ride. How about a cruise? We can borrow the money."

"You're so good to me. When this is over I'd love to take a trip with you, but not now. Leaving home would be the end of me. You and our friends and the store are my glue." She had a vision of M.C. hurting Loopy while they were away. "I'd fall to pieces without our daily routines."

Donny was at the side of the bed, sitting up, pulling on her shirt. "Who will you let help you? Who else knows what's going on with you?"

"Only Dr. Wu. It's too heavy to share with anyone but her- and you."

Donny stepped into her overalls. "It's not right. That's what I'm for."

Donny would for sure think going after M.C. was a help. Chick bit her lip. No matter what she did, whether she lied to Donny to protect her or came clean, M.C. had worsened the big depression. He'd stopped coming in the store to play mind games with her, but she'd heard that he was helping out with Katie's video project, connecting her with the straights, insinuating himself into the women's community, getting closer.

Thinking about it made her feel crazy. She wanted to get under the covers and never come out. She saw herself, naked, at the top of Blackberry Falls, sliding down the worn rocks, one with the water, riding the flow to the dark pool and letting it take her down the mountain, along Sweet Creek to the Elk River, the easiest ride of her life, swift and buoyant and free of herself, to the Pacific Ocean. She could hear the rush of the waters and the osprey crying when they mistook her for a giant fish. She felt the salmon as she slid past them in the blessedly numbing cold.

She needed to talk to Donny and forced herself to surface. Donny was gone. Where? How would it feel if Donny never came back? She told Donny everything else; why was she blowing this so badly? Because this wasn't her scene. She didn't want this ugliness that clung to men like a cloud of furious insects to spread to her life.

She sat upright, felt the chill in the room as the covers fell from her. Donny didn't have to leave-without going anywhere, the Chick Donny loved had split and didn't know her way back. Who would take care of her lost butches-Donny, Jeep, Sheriff Sweet, the very young land women who didn't have a clue about life? Her days of chasing them were over, but they remained a passion. She'd been born Wendy to every lesbian Peter Pan. She had to get it together.

It was too hard. Under the covers again, she stared at the motionless ceiling fan and remembered another night like this long ago. She remembered lying on the shore of Lake Michigan in the fall, chilled, without energy to put on her coat, hungry with no appetite, fatigued to the bone but sleepless, so stoned she wanted a flood of water to bear her away.

The lake was coming at her again, welcomed and feared. She was too confused to know the question, much less the right thing to do. K-Y, Prozac, and lying to her lover-is that what her Age of Aquarius had come to?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN