Silk-hand Butches

onny and Jeep burst through the door of Natural Woman

Foods like puppies playing. Their clothes and pants were soaked. Donny's fragrant string of fish dripped on the floor as she and Jeep fenced along the aisle with their rods.

Chick, inspecting the ears of corn balanced on her lap, laughed so hard an ear went tumbling to the floor. Donny feinted around Jeep and rushed back to kiss Chick full on the mouth, picking up the corn and depositing it in her lap in one economical swoop as she did.

"You taste like cinnamon roll, Donny Donaldson. Is that why I was two short this morning?"

"Yo, R!" Donny said over her shoulder by way of a greeting, as she clattered after Jeep up the old wooden stairs in the back to the apartment. For a moment there was quiet in the store except for whirring refrigeration units. Then she heard the blast of music upstairs. Donny had fallen in love with the singer Mary J. Blige and had to hear her every minute of the day.

"They bring the spring inside with them," R said softly.

"Butches are outrageous! You can't help but love them."

"Where does Donny get the energy at her age?"

"She'll live to a hundred. Her mother's seventy-six and still working. I plan to be around as long as Donny. I don't want to miss a minute of her."

"I'm glad Abeo slowed down before she got to me."

Chick studied R's pale face and the dark smudges under her eyes. "Do you feel as dragged out as you look?"

"Tired, very tired."

Chick had told Donny as they lay late in bed this last warm summer Sunday morning, "R's not someone I love being around. She reminds me too much of my mom and her tight-lipped don't-let-the-anger-show depressions. I'm drawn to R's spirit. She's like some kind of bird that's not born to fly, yet keeps trying. I think it's why she's such a good teacher. No one knows the mechanics of flying better than a creature without working wings. Even if we didn't connect that way, R's so melancholy, how could I turn my back on the poor woman?"

"You're all soft underbelly right now, Chick. You don't have enough ups in you to be giving any away to that downer. You watch your precious self, okay?" Donny had advised.

She could hear Donny and Jeep scraping chairs and dropping shoes overhead. "I suspect there's plenty of fish for dinner. Can you stay?" Donny would never forgive her if R took her up on it.

"I don't eat flesh," R said, pulling her chin back as if offended. "Abeo's with Dr. Wu getting her shots. Afterwards we'll go back up the mountain."

"Shots?"

"Her hormones. She's difficult to be with when they start taking effect."

Chick laughed. Donny was right. R was draining, but spending time with her made Chick more sure of her own mental health than anything else she did. "It must be like PMS. What a trip for her. In the old days, when I still got PMS and did dope, I'd get stoned and clean house for hours or eat nothing but sweets for days-or both. If I had acid, I'd save it until I started bleeding. Mellowed me right out. I was Sweet Creek, my cramps were the point in the pond where the waterfall hits-heavy water, but it whirlpooled like coming. Did you ever notice how close cramps feel to orgasmic spasms?"

"I had a total hysterectomy at thirty-two after my second caesarian. And a husband who demanded my orgasms in a way that took the pleasure out of them. He wanted to think of himself as a good lover."

"Wow, heavy shit. I can't imagine you under some man's thumb, or believe you did that whole era as a housewife while I tie-dyed American flags. Now you're living the revolution and I'm a capitalist pig! Life is too strange. Don't you love it?"

"All too much," R said without explanation. She had few words during her visits. She always sat at the small scratched maple table by the window, hands locked around a mug of organic coffee, a weary look on her face.

Chick was drawn to her like a healing magnet, offering pastries, putting on the verbal equivalent of a floor show. "I talk too much when you're here, R."

R's laugh was so faint she could barely hear it over a Manhattan Transfer CD. "Your world amuses and comforts me. Somehow, I feel part of the stories you tell."

"I wish you could've been part of that kaleidoscope time." Chick ran a fingernail through a shallow split in the table to clean it out. "From what you've told me, the Jefferson Airplane probably hurt your ears. There I was trying to keep Woodstock alive forever, and you thought Sesame Street was the revolution, right? I was freaking out on magic buttons because Jimi and Janis crash-landed, and you were taking tranqs so you wouldn't fly."

R's smile lingered as she sipped her coffee.

Chick remembered younger photographs of herself. "I lived in two different worlds. During the days I hung out with long-haired bi girls, getting stoned in the sunshine, drinking wine, and watching the fog eat San Francisco block by block. They always left me by nightfall for their male musicians and dealers. I'd drift to a barstool, listen to Anne Murray, and dream that a real lesbian like Donny would lead me to the dance floor." She clapped her hands once and laughed. "Now I'm the real lesbian, can you dig it?"

R put down her mug and folded her hands.

"They were something in those days," Chick continued, "the bar dykes. Then it was passing butches. Now it's Name That Gender." Her insides fluttered with the grand memory of being a brand-new powerfully feminine lesbian. "The boys on the streets wore granny glasses and love beads and flowing manes, but the butch girls in the bars wouldn't be caught dead in such sissy-wear. They'd curse out the draft dodgers and wolf whistle at the gentle generation. After all, gays have been into free love from day one, and we never got a Broadway musical out of it."

R's laugh was more an exhalation of breath. She covered her mouth as the laughter became a cough.

"I used to close the bars. There was one hole-in-the-wall near the Marina that held Christian services on Sunday afternoons using a drunken minister. The straight owners made up for supplying queers with a place to dance by offering us a way to salvation. Then there was the hotel bar in the Tenderloin where married ladies who dared wandered off from home while their husbands worked late. You would have liked that one."

"I wish I'd known a little more about myself then."

"I was having too much fun for introspection. Were you dancing to "Bennie and the Jets" at straight living-room parties while I did tribal group dancing at gay-lib bashes? Did you even know Elton and Bernie were an item?" she asked, flicking a wrist, pinky first, in the air. "We loved it."

When R smiled at her out of intensely focused eyes, Chick went on. "I was selling classified ads at a newspaper. Practically our whole department was gay. I remember one holiday party when the manager, a tiny sassy butch who wore button-down shirtwaist dresses, got tipsy. We danced in the hallway to an eight-track of Isaac Hayes. The two queens from the mail room screeched with laughter. The few hets looked like they wished they could have a liberation movement and have that much fun too."

She looked away from her memories at R's eyes and thought she'd never seen a sadder face.

"I would have liked to meet one of your fairy-tale butches."

"They're all around you. Sometimes, R, I feel like I got it on with one after another of those dynamite silk-hand butches back in 1969 and lay around stoned to Jethro Tull for ten years until it was time to disco with the gayboys under the light-throwing balls. Then I got up, found a disco-butch, and danced for another decade."

They both looked out the window at the sound of a police car. Joan Sweet sped by, blue roof light strobing. A century ago, she thought, the sheriff would have been a man urging speed from his four-legged mount. And she, Chick-what would she have been? A bar owner with a string of girls upstairs? She'd heard that had been the first use of this building, before it became a feed store.

"Poor R, did you really miss the decadent decade? The Allman Brothers, Taj Mahal, Joy of Cooking. Who cared what was playing as long as it was slow. Or faster than the speed of speed. 'I Will Survive,' 'Voulez Vous Coucher Avec Moi,' the Village People-Goddess! The music never ended, and we ended the seventies with Meg Christian and Holly Near in Berkeley blowing us all away."

Again, she looked out the window. It was early afternoon and Stage Street was deserted. The saloon smelled of sawdust and spilled beer. Her ladies of the night were resting upstairs in preparation for the cowboys on the cattle run coming through later. One of the girls, Cassie Ann, was her bed warmer, though Chick yearned after the widow Hortense, who had pulled on her husband's old pants and taken over the running of the family spread.

She brought herself back to thoroughly twenty-first-century R. "What can I recommend as a pick-me-up?"

"I've tried them all."

"Maybe it's time to see a doctor."

R scowled. "They've done me enough harm."

"Medical doctors?"

"The caesarians I mentioned?"

Chick waited for a caustic criticism.

"Unnecessary. I don't know if the ob-gyns were reimbursed more for them by the insurance companies or if they feared malpractice suits, but I know now the procedure was used more often than circumstances warranted. It infuriates me to have been denied natural childbirth for the convenience of this patriarchal so-called health care system."

"Still, something could be wrong, R."

"Oh, something's wrong all right. But you don't carry anything that can shrink a lump in my breast, do you?" R held her left breast up like she was offering a piece of rotting fruit.

Chick felt the goose bumps rise on her forearms. She'd lost an old Chicago friend to breast cancer not four years ago and, 2000 miles away, hadn't been able to be there for her. What was a bit of depression to this?

She rose from her seat and moved to the other side of the booth to engulf R in her arms and hold her to her chest, all too aware that she needed the hug as badly as R must. "You poor baby. When did you find out? How big is the lump?"

R didn't struggle at all. She might even have relaxed her stiff neck for a moment to lay her head against Chick's softness, or, Chick thought with a silent chuckle, R might only have been finding a more comfortable position. Poor proud R wouldn't admit to a weakness if- if it killed her. She rocked her a little and then, because an unfamiliar customer was parking outside, let go.

The door opened, letting in the noise of the freeway and reminding Chick that there was a world outside this pod of bad news. The customer was a traveler wanting a cold drink, cookies, and directions. When Chick returned to the booth, R was cleaning her glasses with a napkin.

"I noticed it about three months ago. It was a little smaller than one of the giant marbles my sons had as kids. They called them jumbos."

"And now?"

"I can't tell. It may have grown some or my memory may have shrunk the original."

"Pain?"

"No, it's not painful. The glands under my arms are tender, but they're far from the lump."

Her own breasts ached. Now it was R who was alone and naked on a rocky mountaintop crag. "Has Abeo felt it? Katie?" She could not quell this urge to rescue every hurt creature, but really, whose life could she save other than her own?

R looked out the window toward the sky. "Katie would want to do a documentary on living with breast cancer. Abeo's wonderful." She spoke even more slowly than usual. "I believe she is a woman trapped in a man's body. There's some sort of acculturation that takes place as we are raised as women, however, some nameless intuitiveness, that she lacks. If I told her, she'd turn into a round-the-clock nurse in bed and out. That would be the only way she could express empathy, solidarity, understanding. Whereas you simply threw your arms around me and held me. And then you asked the right questions-because you're also at risk, so you know what to ask. I'm sure Abeo would be perfect for an HIV positive person, but I imagine even your silk-handed butches would understand better than Abeo."

"Oh, especially a butch. She'd feel it right here," she told R, touching her fingertips to her solar plexus. "She'd have the double whammy of being unable to protect a femme against something nasty and knowing it could happen to her too." She wanted R to get off her high horse about butches and femmes and to understand before it was too late. "I don't think anyone on earth is more sensitive to women's pain than a butch lesbian. Except maybe a femme, of course."

R looked blank.

"So you haven't told either of them?" She couldn't imagine not telling something like this to Donny. She would want all the support she could get. When R shook her head, Chick said, "Whatever works for you, sweetheart, is fine, but you're still describing a good-sized lump. Aren't you scared?"

"Not as frightened as I am of the medico-pharmaceutical establishment. I trust the Goddess to bring me healing."

"R, the Goddess expects us to take care of ourselves."

"I don't smoke or drink or expose my breasts to X-rays."

"Do you keep your fat intake low?" She was being a nag. What else could she be when she felt so helpless?

"Of course. Nor do I wear a bra or antiperspirant."

"And your family history?"

Her expression as flat as ever, R said, "Radical mastectomies were all the rage when my mother was diagnosed. They took both her breasts, burned her with radiation, poisoned her with chemotherapy, and she took insufferably long to die."

"You're not bitter."

"I'd rather die sooner with all my sacred parts than have the man's technology chip away at me for years."

Chick kept herself from throwing her hands up in disgust. R was a fool, but she could think of nothing that would change her mind. "Vitamin A is good. How much C do you do?"

"Whatever I get from fruit and greens."

"You need to be taking 5,000 to 10,000 mg. daily."

"Where are you finding your information?"

She rolled her necklace's tiny green crystal between her fingers, wanting to give it to R for healing, but it had been a gift to her from Donny, and she needed its energy. "In between Western novels and lesbian romances, I read nutritional books."

"By women?"

"When I can find them."

"Even the books by women draw their information primarily from male sources. We know who profits from their expensive therapies, herbal or not. No, this is between the Goddess and myself."

"I don't know if you're brave or crazy. I'd be in surgery so fast I'd ask Donny to wheel in my gurney."

"In the wild I would heal myself or die. This," R added with one hand on her breast, "is benign. I practice validations continually."

"I'm getting you to a doctor."

She heard the side door slam. Jeep passed the front window, obviously avoiding R, the snake who'd stolen Katie from her. Chick watched her push into the street on her skateboard, a damp spot on her purple backpack from the wet fish. She waved without looking at them and headed down toward the freeway. Mary J. Blige and her electronic sounds thumped upstairs.

It was a terrifying thought, but Chick wondered if by next spring Jeep would need to avoid R-if R might be gone.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT