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Serial Fiction from Hanne Blank |
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Episode Two "Funny, you don't look like I thought you would," remarked the older woman as she ushered Kala in, discreetly taking stock of Kala's thick dark hair, her smoked-peach skin, the long shapely legs that disappeared under the hem of a teal-blue skirt almost, but not quite, short enough to be given the name "mini." Vivian wondered, as she always did and had since childhood, what it would be like to be able to run around like that, legs bare and beautiful. In a crisp white blouse, Kala looked very lovely, certainly. She was tall and long-limbed, but not in the pipe-cleaner way Vivian saw so much of amongst her own students. No, Kala looked like she enjoyed a good meal, the slight roundness of her thighs and the high, but not chronic-dieter sharp, cheekbones advertising her as being simply a lovely, healthy girl. Good thing that. Traveling with someone who was neurotic about food, or worse yet, obsessive about calories and working out and whatnot would be a pain, a hassle Vivian had half expected she'd have to just grin and bear. She chose to consider it a good sign. But Kala seemed a little lost, somehow, too. She was quick, and sweet, and blindingly smart, if the conversation they'd had the night before was any indication. But now she seemed a shell-shocked, a little deer-in-the-headlights. Vivian wasn't too sure what to make of that. Whether or not she was as capable as Felice had advertised her to be remained to be seen. She didn't look it right then. But Vivian trusted the pragmatic, earth-motherly Felice, and if Felice said that Kala was as solid a rock as all that, perhaps she was. So she gestured with her cane, letting the younger woman step past her into the foyer. "Go on in. The parlor is on the left." Parlor? Maybe people did still use that word. Hell, maybe some people still had them. Kala arched an eyebrow as she stepped onto the glossy parquet. She was terribly curious about the house, about Vivian, but not yet ready to ask. She did her own inventory, trying not to let it lead her to too many assumptions. The house on Ash Street wasn't at all pretentious, but it didn't have to be. That was something these New Englanders didn't seem to realize, or maybe they did and they just didn't want to admit it. Old New England money wasn't like other money, a characteristic Kala had been noticing for several years. There was nothing flashy about it. It was just there, clearly something that had been around a while, with a soft, shiny patina of regular use about it, just part of the way things were... and terribly obvious just the same. Dr. Salton's house oozed wealth, and it made Kala nervous. She had begun to get nervous as soon as she started down Ash Street, and more nervous when she finally located the right house, with its small hedge and tall windows. It only got worse once she was inside. As much as she liked to think that she was adaptable, a woman of the world who could be comfortable anywhere, it was just like it was when she'd gone to Beacon Hill to visit one of her classmates in the apartment her antiques-broker daddy kept so he'd have a place while he was in town from New York: try as she might, she was still a fish out of water, not really knowing the rules. Like Betsy's place, Dr. Salton's house had high ceilings, the moldings around the doorways old and deeply-grooved. That the floor of the foyer had an inlaid border of Greek keys in wood a few shades darker than the rest only intensified the impression of a house far grander, even in its genteel shabbiness, than any she'd ever thought of people actually living, working, fighting, cooking, fucking, or taking a shit in. The threadbare patch Kala noticed in the Oriental carpet that lay under the imposing black bulk of the grand piano in the room opposite the parlor had did nothing to lessen the impression of great, even casual wealth, nothing to lessen Kala's edgy, nagging sense of inadequacy. It was all about the money, honey, just like some of the women she danced with would say when Kala marveled at the ease with which some of them popped off for a night here, a weekend there, with a particularly promising sugar daddy of a john. And it made Kala tense. It didn't have anything to do with the people in question not being nice, or kind, or likeable. Betsy was fabulous and as down-to-earth as they came, and kind, too. She hadn't laughed when Kala gasped with shock when Betsy leaned back on the leather sofa and propped her cowboy-booted feet up on an inlaid, ornately carved dark wood coffee table. She'd removed her feet from it, in fact, and buffed the slight scuff with the hem of her sleeve. Her father bought and sold such antiques for a living, and Betsy was sheepishly apologetic that she'd grown so used to them that she was sometimes rather cavalier with their treatment. Kala had appreciated that. Betsy's life was luxe, but despite her upbringing, she did her best not to it was supposed to be that way or that it always would. The two of them had made friends over it, in fact, about the horrible presumptions of money and power. A hawk-faced, jewelry-dripping senator's wife, a figurehead for some advocacy organization, had been guest speaker in their Politics and Policy class. She'd gotten there late, ostentatiously draped her Fendi coat over the back of her chair, and proceeded to talk about the needs of addict and homeless women with a casualness Kala found both stupid and heartless. Betsy had taken the preceding summer, and the winter semester prior, off from graduate school to work in a clinic just off of Times Square, trying to do AIDS-prevention work with runaways, hookers, wetbrained winos, transsexual teenagers, junkies, the crazy, the disaffected, the cavalcade of human flotsam that ended up washing up in the clinic waiting room looking for help, for condoms, for someone to talk to, or just for a place to get out of the cold. Fidgeting with impatience, Kala and Betsy had begun their friendship with eye-rolling silent commiseration across the seminar-room table, and cemented it afterwards with a protracted Indian-restaurant buffet lunch of grad-student bitching and bonding. Unlike the few other grad students Kala had mentioned it to, Betsy actually got it when Kala explained the whole stripping thing. She'd gotten to know a few dancers at the clinic. Kala was relieved that Betsy didn't just pretend to take it all in stride, she actually did. She didn't know the life personally, but she did understand how it worked. It was no big deal, just another way things could be. And Kala was glad about that. In a world often hostile to the world she'd come out of - and where she still spent a lot of time - it was good to have a friend. Watching Kala's graceful stride as she walked down the hall and turned into the parlor, Vivian furrowed her eyebrows. It was hard to imagine her coming from the background Felice had claimed. Vivian wasn't entirely sure what she had expected of her colleague's prize scholarship student, but this indefinably exotic, long-legged, caramel-skinned creature who moved with such ease, who spoke so well, surprised her. She'd expected an her to be maybe round-faced and bookish, a little pasty, one of those slightly fat, intensely eager-to-please girls who would break into nervous giggles a lot when name-dropping authors or films, worried about making the right sort of intellectual impression. Someone who looked like she'd spent a couple of summers coated in poorly-fitting polyester and fryer grease while she worked her way through at some state college and was determined as hell that she'd never go back. For all Vivian knew, maybe that was exactly what Kala had done, but she certainly didn't come off that way. Wherever she'd come from, she'd learned a thing or two between there and here: the dark waves of the girl's hair fell down her back and ended with the precise edge of a recent and competent trim, and her sandals were deep-brown leather, well-worn, but better quality than most grad students sported, in her experience. Vivian wasn't sure whether she was disappointed. Vivian's walking stick preceded her into the room by several inches. Perhaps it was just an affectation. She seemed to walk well enough, Kala thought as her host made her way into the room. Vivian was petite, one of those well-put-together women, trim in a dark-plum long-sleeved T-shirt, tasteful pearls at her earlobes, whose smallness seemed all of a piece with the general aura of competence and efficiency they project, as if they simply didn't need to be any larger, and would never dream of wanting to be. She didn't look old enough for age to be her reason for using the stick. Kala placed her in her late fifties somewhere, if the salt-and-pepper bob that framed her gentle crow's feet was any guide. Slight though she was, more than a head shorter than Kala, Vivian had an air of deliberateness about her that made her seem somehow larger, and definitely not to be trifled with. The voice Kala had heard over the phone and the genteel upper-class neighborhood had suggested that Vivian would be perhaps some big-boned tweed-wrapped ruddy Olde New England horsey type with a great penchant for Labrador retrievers, but the way Vivian actually was made more sense. Kala couldn't imagine the big strapping horsey type having never learned how to drive. "Please, make yourself at home," Vivian said as she sat down in a blue wingback chair. Kala sat down on the couch, surprised to discover that the scroll-armed antique was firm and comfortable, more so than the couch she and Theo fought over at home on the rare occasions when they were both spending the evening in. Kala wondered what Vivian would make of their shabby little nest, their futons, the couch and dining-room table so much nicer than either of them could afford and that Theo had so very nobly volunteered to take off the hands of an acquaintance whose lover was having his South End condo redecorated. Then there was the extensive architecture of bookshelves they'd made one tier at a time, carting a plank and two cinderblocks home on the subway every day for a month. What Vivian might think of her mom's place in Youngstown, Tiffany's room plastered with New Kids On The Block posters, or Sandie's sullen, stringy-haired metalhead boyfriend who showed up every afternoon and sat in his truck listening to Iron Maiden and smoking and waiting for Sandie to be done changing out of the clothes she wore to her job at the DMV, was a little too vivid a notion to entertain. They'd cross that bridge if they came to it. From either side of the room, the two women took a simultaneous deep breath, then burst into giggles as they realized it. "Sorry about that," Kala offered. "I'm just a little nervous. Job interview syndrome, you know." The tension broken somewhat, Vivian relaxed a bit against the back of her chair. "Understandable. I'm just this crazy woman you've only just met who's considering asking you to think about driving her across the country all summer, that's all. Nothing out of the ordinary." Kala grinned with relief, and Vivian nodded a tiny, pleased nod as she sensed a bit of the groundedness Felice had told her the girl possessed in spades. Nourished by a bit of humor, smalltalk eventually segued into something more medium-sized. Over glasses of Diet Coke at the professor's cluttered kitchen table (Kala found it endearing that Vivian had to clear away a messy stack of Boston Globes so that Kala would have a place to sit) Vivian described the trip she'd been envisioning. She'd thought originally that she'd do it back in the mid-80's, just take the year as a leave of absence and spend the summer on the road, first, doing research, and then the rest of the year back in Cambridge, working on the novel she'd always wanted to write. Not so much the Great American Novel, she hastened to reassure Kala, but she felt as if she didn't really know the country as well as she might, didn't know the local color, the accents, the characteristics of the light and the lay of the land, and it seemed like she should. The novel was set in several places at once, it seemed, the story of a big old family now scattered to the winds of a changing country, one sister in New Orleans, one sister in Seattle, a brother in Chicago-although Vivian wasn't sure about that any more and thought the location might change-some additional relatives scattered about, and the matriarch and patriarch now divorced and separated by a continent, one each in Boston and Carmel, California. Kala wondered how autobiographical it all might be, but didn't ask. Vivian talked with her hands when she talked about writing, Brahmin reserve evaporating like moth pee on a light bulb under the force of her enthusiasm. Kala wondered if she was like that when she taught, but didn't think she was, somehow. She knew herself that the process of writing was quite a different thing again than the process of dealing with what was left behind when other people did it. She'd always liked losing herself in the rhythm and flow of words, reading, yes, but especially writing. It was glorious to be able to go somewhere else on someone else's thoughts, but even better to be swirled in a world of your own making where the words you put down were the words that made it so. A box of notebooks filled with embarrassingly adolescent scribblings sat on the floor of her closet, a plastic tray, filched from the Youngstown State mailroom where she'd had a work-study job, on top of it, filled with paper-clipped typed sheets, stories, drafts of articles, and more than a couple beginnings of what she'd thought would turn inevitably into best-seller novels. Those had always petered out around page thirty, but when she went back and read them later, she figured that was probably for the best. Still, it was nice to know she wasn't the only one: Vivian's cheeks flushed just slightly pink as she admitted to the six false starts she'd made since she'd first gotten the idea to write the novel that was the object of the planned summer on the road. "But I realize now that makes sense. It couldn't have gone any further. I didn't have… don't have the perspective. I mean, I've been to all those cities. But I've flown there. I've never been between them, if that makes any sense. I don't really know what's there. I don't even really know how far apart everything is, or what it looks like. I've seen pictures. But that's not the same. All I know is that you can get into a big metal tube with bad food and then a few hours later you're in Chicago, or Los Angeles. Does that make any sense?" Kala's glass was nearly empty, Vivian's still nearly full. Kala nodded, leaning back against the chair's high ladderback and crossing her legs as she swirled the ice cubes in the bottom of her glass. "Makes perfect sense. You've been there, but you haven't had the experience of getting there?" Vivian bounced in her chair like a little kid, hair swaying against her jawline like lampshade fringe. "Oh, you do understand. This is excellent." "Well, I don't know if I totally understand, but what you're saying makes sense. If you'll pardon my misquoting, it sounds like you know there's a there, there. But you've never seen it for yourself." "Gertrude would approve, don't you think?" Vivian took a long drink of soda. "Sure. I'm just curious...you've wanted to do this for a long time. What's stopped you from going before now. I mean, if I can ask that?" The older woman's eyes darkened and the exhilaration drained from her face as quickly as if a curtain had been dropped. Sure that she'd just said exactly the wrong thing, Kala leaned forward, an apology about to form on her lips, but Vivian held up her hand. "No. Don't apologize. That's fair game, if we're going to spend two months cooped up in a car with each other." Fiddling with her walking stick, which she'd ignored completely during their previous conversation, Vivian described the accident that had smashed her leg and hip when she was a child of eleven. The 1942 Buick roadster had been her father's car, an enormous, heavy thing. That it would throw a rod while Vivian's oldest brother was speeding down Route 9 toward their aunt's summer home in the Berkshires with Vivian and two of her sisters crammed in along side him in the front seat, couldn't have been foreseen, of course. Neither could the four months that Vivian spent encased in plaster in Mount Auburn Hospital, looking out the window toward the Charles as doctors coaxed her shattered bones back together. They hadn't had the ability to put people together with pins and wires and whatnot back then the way they did now, and healing from a bad accident like that one was a long, protracted, affair. Comparatively speaking, though, she had been the lucky one: Julia, the youngest of the seven Salton children, had died in the crash. Neither Vivian nor her big brother Jack, who had been driving, had been able to leave their hospital beds to attend the funeral. Vivian's leg had healed, although not well. The combination of adolescent growth revving into gear did not make a happy marriage with the barely-healed fissures in Vivian's pelvis. The surgery three years later to try to help correct things only made them worse, and left her with a scar that wrapped around her hip from the middle of her belly button to the middle of her back and another that stretched from the middle of her side to halfway to her knee. Along with the scars went another long convalescence, and Vivian remembered the summer of 1950 as one of seemingly eternal confinement. The stick gave her stability, though she could manage without it. And she never had learned to drive. "I suppose I was lucky that I never needed to," she said, smiling slightly too brightly as she looked directly into Kala's eyes. "I stayed close to home, Radcliffe, then Harvard. Then I got the job across the river and, well, there's the bus and the T and it just never seemed very important." "Well, here in the Boston area, I guess, it's not so hard to get by without a car. I hardly drive mine. Sometimes I think it worries that I've forgotten it, I leave it parked so long." Kala couldn't actually imagine not being able to drive. Driving meant independence, almost literally. It had been the thing that had allowed her to go beyond the white-trash environs in which she'd grown up, that had let her take her first job, that had let her commute to community college, then to Youngstown State. She'd driven pizza delivery, even driven a cab for a little while, before a fare turned her head with flattery and gave her a business card and told her she could make a lot more money dancing at the club he co-owned. And he'd been right. But she still couldn't imagine being without wheels, without the ability to get up and get out and get gone if she needed to. Or even if she just wanted to. But Kala liked Vivian, and she didn't want to say anything that might make her feel badly about not knowing how to drive. Or, for that matter, anything that might make her decide not to hire her for the summer. At first she'd thought Vivian was too tight, too different for it to work out, but there was something admirable about the tiny professor of literature, something that intrigued her. "I did think I was going to learn to drive, back when I first got the idea to do this trip for my novel, though. I even bought a car. I think it's got a hundred and some miles on it. I was thinking we could use it for the trip, though I'll have to get a mechanic to check it out and make sure everything's shipshape before we go. Want to see it?" Kala's eyebrows felt like they almost shot off the top of her head. "Sure, Vivian. I'd love to." The notion of buying a car and not driving it seemed somehow wrong, almost un-American. The idea of having the money to go out and purchase a vehicle you were just going to leave in a garage seemed ludicrous, impractical. Maybe Vivian really was, on some levels, just another one of those rich loonies. Maybe it was inevitable when you had money, who knew. She suppressed the urge to laugh as Vivian reached for the purse sitting on the windowsill next to the table and rooted through it, coming up with keys. Brushing past the overgrown lilac bushes beside the kitchen door, the two of them made their way down the stone path that crossed the small yard to the gravel driveway. Kala followed Vivian's lead and grabbed the iron pull on one of the big wood doors, the paint and rust flaking against her skin as she leaned back and coaxed it to swing on its cranky hinges. Vivian wrestled gamely with her door, bracing herself with her walking stick. "Oh," called Vivian, pausing to curse under her breath at the reluctant door. "I forgot to mention. It's a Rolls. My father always loved them, so I bought one."
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12.07.06: Scarlet Letters -- in case it isn't glaringly obvious -- is currently
on an extended hiatus. The web has changed, we've changed, and
we're trying to figure out how we both fit together now, which isn't a process we want to rush. If you're looking for more current SL-related content, you can
have check out upcoming books from editor Heather Corinna and previous co-editor Hanne Blank, check out Heather's current sexuality sites, or explore sites through the femmerotic network. We hope to be back with you soon, as fresh, challenging and
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