Twilight Girl

2

LUIGI’S Drive-In jumped with cars. The cars jumped with kids and the kids’ radios jumped with the beat of Fabian’s mixed metaphor:

I’m your tiger, you’re my mate!

Hurry up, buttercup, and don’t be late!

Lon turned off the ignition and waited in the old Plymouth, wondering why she had come here alone, where no one came alone. Not knowing what she waited for on the outer edge of the parked cars. Still, a lonely voice inside was telling her she had pulled into Luigi’s because this was one of the restless evenings when the Island was not big enough to hold her, and where else was there to go? So she had come where the music jumped and the cars bulged with kids delirious with the prospect of three undisciplined months spreading out before them.

Jumping, too—with menus for the heap with blinking headlights, and a tray of Luigi-Burgers and malts for the gang in the dago-ed Ford—was a curved and compact doll, all five feet of her crammed into the Air Force blue slacks and vivid red bolero that identified a Luigi car-hop. Her face was buried somewhere beneath layers of pinkish pancake. Yet Lon was certain that under the thick make-up, the girl’s complexion would be genuinely pink and white. Mascara-weighted lashes fluttered provocatively over lavender-blue eyes that, like the rest of her, were round. For her face was round, the breasts that strained against the scarlet monkey jacket were round, and her hips in the tight gabardine slacks were just wonderfully round. Too, she had a round button nose. Her mouth, when she was not smiling to reveal even white teeth, formed a perfect O. And under the round gray-blue cap, her face was a pretty pink moon.

But the hair, Lon thought. The hair out of some technicolor nightmare, untamed by the required hairnet and falling midway between the girl’s chin and shoulders, assaulting the eyes with a shade that hovered between lavender and violet.

And it was, “Hey, you, Vi’let!” that the boys howled from the parked cars. “You with the purple mop!” “Wha’ hoppen’ ta the ketchup fer my fries?” Roaring like the tiger looking for its mate: “Is it purple all over, Vi’let?” “Prove it, honey. I only want the facts, man!”

The girl replied with winks, responded with smiles. And the boys who asked for proof were rewarded with sidelong glances. She gloried in her upstage role and Lon thought, she’s not beautiful. Not actually beautiful. But she acts as if she is and so nobody can be sure she isn’t.”

Not actually beautiful, but seeing the girl through the girl’s round eyes, Lon shivered a little, felt her tongue turn to balls of wool as Vi finally got around to the old tan crate in the back row.

“Hi. Sorry it took so long.” She shoved an oversized menu at Lon.

“It’s okay. No hurry.” Lon pretended to study the glossy card.

“They sure give me a hard time about my hair,” the girl complained proudly. Wrinkling the little round nose, pleased with the hard time. Her voice was coarse and she spoke with a practiced attempt at sexy intonation. Lon felt an unaccountable swell of disappointment.

“I notice.”

“At first Luigi said to let it grow out natcherl or blow. The crust! I said he could take his lousy job an’ shove it. One night, on’y one night I worked with it like this and he’s beggin’ me to leave it alone. Guys come around jest to see me an’ don’t he know it!”

The girl studied Lon while speaking, looking Lon over carefully. Faded red of the cotton T-shirt, mostly. Sizing me up as a weirdo, Lon told herself. And said aloud, “It’s very pretty.”

“I bleach it first an’ then I put on this stuff I mix myself. Jest food coloring, that’s all it is. Red an’ blue. Holy Jeez help me I ever get caught in the rain, huh?” She laughed, catching Lon’s eyes with the lavender-blue discs and holding them uncomfortably long. “It goes with my name. My name’s really Vi’let. You dig?” She was quiet then, waiting for her order, staring in a strange, knowing sort of way.

Muscles tightened under the red shirt, a spasm of remembering for no special reason the agony of undressing in the gym locker with perspired, perfumed bodies crowding her against the steel cabinets, the gagging, hot-faced bewilderment of her own nakedness and theirs. “It’s sharp. I mean, it goes together.”

A horn sounded and the girl spoke again. Under the heavy black lashes, the pastel eyes looked vaguely amused. “Listen, I gotta go. What’ll it be tonight—butch?”

Lon handed back the menu. “Large chocolate Coke.”

Violet didn’t move. “You heard me.”

“I said, large chocolate Coke.”

“Oh, Christ, come t’ the party. You slow on the uptake, butch?”

“My name’s Lon Harris.”

“Lon. Hey, that’s cute. You just cruisin’ or did somebody tell you ‘bout me?”

“I just got a taste for a Coke.”

“Sure you did!”

“I did.” Lamely, Lon added, “I hadn’t much else to do.”

“I bet you didn’t know I work here,” the girl teased. “No, not much.”

Helplessly, Lon sensed insinuation. “What difference would that make? I don’t know anybody you know. Anyway, what difference would it make?”

Violet’s eyes widened. “No kiddin’, you don’t know any of the kids?”

“Oh, I know kids, but….”

“Our kind a kids?” Then with something like awe. “Holy Mother, you ain’t that dumb! I’d a swore …! Oh, Jeez, I woulda swore!” She looked over her shoulder as if to check the nearness of others. “I hang out at The 28%. Ever hear of it?”

“What’s the 28%?”

“Gay joint. Private, jest girls. I know all the kids hang out there.” She lowered the hoarse voice. “Wanna go?”

“When, tonight?”

“Crazy. I get off ten-thirty.”

“I don’t know.” Lon’s glance fell to the low-slung jeans. “I’d have to go home and change.” And added sheepishly, “I didn’t bring … money.”

“I get paid tonight. Go on me.”

“What is it, some kind of girls’ club?”

“Yeah, a gay club. Where the kids c’n dance. They have beer an’ Coke—you know.”

“I’d have to change,” Lon said again.

“Nah, what for? Saturday night the butches wear good pants, but Friday night who cares?” She reached through the window to pat Lon’s cheek. “Stick around, hon.”

A blast from a front-row M.G. shook Violet from the window. “Ah, have y’self a hemrich, why dontcha?” And then to Lon, with the soft sound of old intimacy, “I gotta hop, sweetie. Don’t go. I mean after, when you drink your Coke. Stick aroun’!”

Lon stuck around. Stuck after the syrupy drink tasted like melted ice and after three visits from the girl whose brows were a thin black pencil-line. Once she slipped into Luigi’s phone booth to call home and tell her mother she had met some of the girls from school and was going to the show. And the fourth time Violet returned to the car, she had changed into purple toreodor pants, a bulky white sweater and spike-heeled gold slippers. Her mouth wore a fresh coat of orchid-pink lipstick and she smelled of violet cologne.

She bounced into the Plymouth, snuggling deep into the scratchy upholstery before she pulled the door shut. “You’re a doll, waitin’ aroun’. This girlfriend of mine, she moved up t’ Stockton an’ I’m playin’ the field nowadays. I sure am glad t’ get a lift.” Lon chugged the old car out of Luigi’s lot, into the street.

She drove purposefully, following Violet’s instructions, glad of the heavy Friday-night traffic that absorbed her wondering exultation. And Violet rattled on. The girl with the lavender hair seemed compelled to reveal in minute detail the story of her life.

She was nineteen. She lived in a rented house at the wrong end of the Valley. Her mother was out of town, workin’ grab joints on the fair circuit which is what the old lady had been doing since they had left Cicero, Ill. That was after her old man beat the old lady up so bad and her an’ the old lady had grabbed a bus for California, which was sure funny because one time in Chicago, before they moved to Cicero, they had lived in this flat on a street called California. How ‘bout that? Violet was not insensitive to the strange twists of fate.

“I worked grab,” she told Lon. “Jeez, I got so I come near pukin’ if I smelled a hot-dog.” But her old lady didn’t trust her around the carnies or the carnies around her. Which was okay by Violet because she was makin’ good hoppin’ cars, not on’y in the fair season but all year. And which brought up another subject. “We’re Bohunks. What’re you?”

Lon turned from the wheel, guessing at the question’s meaning. “Welsh and English descent.”

“Well, we’re Bohem’an. My real first name is Fialka. That means Vi’let. My last name’s Polivka. You know what that means? Soup. Vi’let Soup. Ain’t that a kill? Vi’let Soup.”

Some of the tension eased away. Lon could laugh at this.

“Guys usta say, ‘How’s about a little hot soup?’ Horka polivka. Jeez, it usta make me so mad.” She remembered another important factor. “We’re Cath’lic. You Cath’lic?”

“My folks go to the Methodist church,” Lon told her. It would have taken too long to explain that God Tikitehatu and Goddess Hiuapopoia had produced life on the Island.

Violet grudgingly said, “I was scared maybe yez were Baptist. Or them Witnesses. Methodist ain’t too bad.”

Lon laughed again. And to sober her, Violet said, “My old man froze t’ death in a car barn. How ‘bout that?”

“Froze?”

“You think it don’t get cold back East? Wow!”

“Gee, what a rough thing to have happen.”

Violet laughed now, a tin-pan musical convulsion. “Oh, yeah? Try an’ tell that t’ my old lady.” Then, evidently remembering, reporting dutifully: “Another reason I stay home, this carny got me in trouble. We had to adopt the baby out, this place called St. Vincent’s Foundling. You think I don’t cry about that sometimes? Never again, believe you me, kid. She woulda been two years old. Jeez, I talk like she’s dead. I mean she’s two years now an’ you know how cute you c’n dress kids that age. But Holy Christ on a bicycle, I mean t’ tell you I had a hard time. I bit clean through my hand, if you wanna know. I could show you the scar, even.”

There was another world beside the other people’s world and her own. Maybe there were thousands of worlds, millions of worlds, one of them in purple pants and who knew how many others? Lon gunned the Plymouth to be on the safe side—to be sure she by-passed the new Buick when the light on Vineland Avenue turned green. And listened to the mysteries of a world much stranger than her own.

“So this bookkeeper where I worked—that was in this supermarket before I started at Luigi’s. She was butch, same as you. All she ever did was wanta sit around her place makin’ out. Jesus, I like t’ get out, so that’s why we broke up, but she made sure I got wise. I got more kicks with her than that damn lousy carny, an’ no hospital, no baby. You get wise, you don’t get hurt. You’ll find out, kid.”

Lon nodded vague agreement. “Straight ahead?”

“Yeah, but pull over left. You’re gonna make a turn in a couple blocks.”

“Are you sure this is all right? My going to this place the way I look?”

“That’s the nice thing about the twenny-eight. Anything goes. Rags, she’s this girl that owns the place, her an’ her girlfriend t’gether, she sometimes don’t dress. Other times, wow, she wears these real crazy clothes, like she has this p’ticular beatnik outfit. Black suede pants an’ shirt, kid—talk about crazy! She can afford clothes, the dough she makes. Half a buck fer Coke, same as beer—how ‘about that? But I don’ hold it against her. I seen her wear jeans plenny times. Not stuck-up or anything, kid. An’ hell! It’s about the on’y place around here the girls c’n dance.”

The questions were stacked in layers at the back of Lon’s mind, but now there was time for only one. “Why do they call it that? 28%. That can’t be the address.”

“Jest t’ show you how cute this Rags is. She read this book by some doctor, he took like a survey an’ in this book he claims twenny-eight per cent of women had somethin’ t’ do with some other woman sometime or other. So that’s the whole idea behind why Rags named the club that. Cute?”

The question left Lon as confused as before—repelled by her own raw ignorance yet fascinated by the need for answers. She drove the remaining blocks with the self-assured recklessness peculiar to drivers who can take their car apart and put it back together again. She drove harshly, yet floated on with the promised delights of the club named to honor a statistic. And breathed the delicate air of Parma violets.

3

IT WAS Rags who peered cautiously into the night, opening the drab green door of the lonely cement-block building at the end of the dark, undeveloped street. Lon knew Rags by the sharp black tux, the cerise bow-tie beneath a pallid, acne-scarred face. Rags stood sullen in the doorway, behind her an amateurishly lettered notice: THE 28%—MEMBERS ONLY.

“What the hell’s with the pounding?” Rags was no bigger than Violet, but the tough bass sound was enormous.

“Sweetie, meet this real good friend a mine. Lon Harris.”

Unsmiling, Rags nodded. “Hiya, Lon.”

Lon responded, “Hi!” And apparently being Violet’s “good friend” meant open sesame. Friend and proprietress led Lon into the smoke-blue dimness. Lon blinked at the strangeness of the scene.

Rags hurried ahead, circling behind the long, home-built bar. She had been interrupted apparently, by Violet’s hammering. But now she backed the girl Lon judged to be a barmaid-partner against a chipped and dented bottle cooler. Grimly, she clasped the taller girl in her arms. Kissed her as though it were a life-death matter. Lon watched, something forbidden stirring inside her. “Our kind of kids,” Violet had said. “Our kind of kids!”

Violet led Lon to the far end of the bar. She pounded amiably on the linoleum top. “Hey, quit makin’ out. How’s about some service?”

The girl in Rags’s stranglehold laughed and pushed herself free. “That’s what I’m getting! Break it up, honey. Vi wants a drink.”

She came to their end of the bar, and Lon was introduced to “a real swell kid—Betty.” Betty from out of a black-and-white movie; colorless, pale, like shoots that spring up from under sidewalks.

“We need a couple beers,” Violet told her. “How ‘bout that, Lon?”

“Right,” Lon said. Using a ruggedly deep voice that came instinctively because she knew it would sound right. Betty took two brown bottles from the cooler, popped them open with a church key and set them on the bar.

“Most of the kids are in the other room,” Violet said, swigging. “I’ll go see if I c’n find us a table.”

She wriggled her way toward the opening in the divided wall, stopping to scream, “Hi, doll!” to a girl in fly-front slacks and white T-shirt, Lon’s size. And Violet hugged another girl, a pug-faced peroxide blonde. Violet shrieked, “Swee-tie-eee!” at another group and made her sensuous way to the rope curtains that divided the barroom from the room in which the shadow-forms of kids danced to a recording of Lonely Street. The kids, the kids … Violet glanced over her shoulder once to wink at Lon, to let her know, it seemed, that she knew the kids and the kids knew her and weren’t they all having the craziest time? Like Eddie, thought Lon. Eddie going to Disneyland with the family after having gone before with the Cubs—anxious to point out the sights and let everyone know in a loud voice that he had been there before. Like a queer lavender Elsa Maxwell, Violet greeted the loved and the unloved, the staked and the cruising, disappearing finally into the packed room where the shadow-shapes clung to each other. Now she was singing in unison with the record: “Perhaps upon that Lonely Street, there’s someone such as I …”

Lon sipped beer. Sipped the new bitter taste and marveled at the way dry palm fronds and a raffia backing on the bar had given an exotic air to a cement-block garage. Someone had painted a Hawaiian hula scene on the wall above the bar. Someone had sketched a likeness of Rags on the opposite wall, and had framed it with bamboo. This is the way the clubhouse will look. This is the way we’ll fix up the recreation hall on the Island! She swigged from the bottle again, mellowing with the sense of a long-gone traveler at last arrived home. For the threesome at the other end of the bar were not unlike the traveler she had seen in mirrors, her own self.

They wore tan peggers, nonchalantly unpressed. Two in plaid flannel shirts, one sharper in an open-throated white job with a turquoise sweater vest. Lon envied them the clipped haircuts, the strong scrubbed faces. And ignored the lazy eyes and droop-cornered mouths.

“I still claim you owe me two-bits,” one argued.

“The hell you say.”

“You remember that girl, right here at this bar?”

“Oh, Jesus, yes.”

“You bet me a quarter I couldn’t make her.”

“You didn’t.”

“Oh, didn’t I?”

“I’ll be damned.”

“I’ve got a witness.” The first of them turned to the silent one. “Did I make her, Chuck?”

“If you don’t know, I’m not gonna tell you.”

They roared at this and then the loser paid her bill. “Here’s your goddam quarter. Just tell me one thing. Was she butch or fem? Christ, I couldn’t tell!”

“Smorgasbord. By the time she went home I wasn’t sure which I was!” Eyebrows wriggled up and down, implying secrets that could not be unveiled. Regular guys, remembering a girl and laughing it up. Regular guys, flicking kitchen matches with their thumbnails for a light, burrowing hands in the front-zipped pants for a crushed cigarette pack and belting each other in the back to punctuate a bellylaugh. Regular guys, and less than twenty years before, unknowing nurses had checked the wrong box on the hospital form that offered only Male and Female. For perhaps the choice was incomplete.

Halfway through the brown bottle, Violet came back. “I got a place at their table. This girl, kid—Jeez, she’s society an’ everything. Boy, would I like to get next to her. She’s here with some crazy dark one. I hate t’ say this, but this girl, wow, is she sharp.” Violet spilled the words breathlessly. “I got a spot at their table. Pray for me, kid.” Leading Lon from the bar toward the curtained room, frenzied with her dim hope of a conquest that escaped Lon. “Make out like I’m your girl. Act real nuts about me.”

They wove their way through the dancers. Pretty girls and crones at sixteen, old hands and neophytes, insatiable and satiated; Lon saw them in the darkened room where dreams were woven, seeing through the untutored, all-sensing eyes of the young, the clip-haired butches who looked as she herself must look, yet knowing the purpose of their maleness, shuffling to the agonized cry—“Where’s this place called Lonely Street?” Big, brawl-sized butches and tiny Napoleons, out to prove to the world: we are not small; we matter, we count! Hands clutching their partners as though someone might doubt their talents to possess, hip grinding hip.

And Lon heard, through the unplugged ears of the young, their spicy, pungent talk, as she tacked her way through the crowd:

“… took ourselves out on the lawn and I mean, almost froze …”

“… told that witch, in the future you keep your hands off my girl. Fun is fun and I’m no prude, but I’ve got my standards, honey …”

“… Okay, okay, we’ll go home. I said we’ll go home. Okay, so you can’t stand to see me have a little fun …”

And the shriek with its aftermath of hilarious commotion; somebody gagging somebody, everyone game for one more laugh.

Lon saw and heard with the inner awareness that transcends callow ignorance, linking phrase and gesture. So that she knew why they danced with such gay desperation, why they gathered here where a green door barred the inquisitors of that other world with a sign that warned and pleaded: MEMBERS ONLY. And Lon sympathized with the unclassified kids who needed a place “to dance.” For she was of them, so must be with them and for them. Of them, and belonging to their secret.

Four perspiring bottles graced the redwood picnic table provided by the limited budget of The 28%. Side by side on one of the benches, Lon and Violet faced a twosome conspicuous not only by their post-nineteen maturity but by the vivid contrast of their coloring. Violet had introduced them as Sassy Gregg and Mavis.

The Amazon’s pale-yellow hair fell in short careless waves over the wide brow of a face once deeply tanned, now faded. It was a face with the unravaged ruggedness of one who has enjoyed the outdoors in solid comfort: playing dedicated tennis, perhaps, or swimming lengths of a country club pool. Her features were carefully spaced, her grey-blue eyes unflinchingly direct. And the simplicity of her tailored shirt and slacks spoke quietly of elegance. Any doubt of her affluence was erased by the wide bracelet clamping the cuff of her long-sleeved shirt and the matching wide belt-buckle of hand-wrought silver and Mexican lava. Her nickname, Lon suspected, was backwash from early childhood; Sassy looked and behaved like anything but her name. A few of her yawns were deliberate; the rest seemed genuine enough.

Violet was tying herself into tortured knots in a pathetic attempt to impress the girl. “Honest to God, I think it’s terrif’ about you went ta collidge. Even if you on’y specialized in gym. Ain’t that what you mean by P. E.?”

Sassy’s gray eyes reflected more boredom than amusement. “Yes. I majored in physical education.”

“Yeah, but along with that you had ta read up on other subjecks. I’m that same way. Books! Jeez, I read ‘em by the carload. Anything that has t’ do with education, or if it’s artistical, it makes me flip.” She reached over to squeeze Lon’s hand in a show of familiarity and Lon flinched.

Sassy Gregg broke her cool reserve to wink subtly and knowingly at Lon. Who smiled a vague response to the compliment, grateful that Sassy was not seeing them as a pair.

Violet chattered on, parading her concept of intellectuality, and the analytical eyes of the older girl veiled with a patronizing contempt. Lon turned her attention to Sassy’s friend. “Did you go to U.C.L.A. with Sassy?”

The colored girl spoke with a joyless calm. “No, we met this place I work. Used to come round, hear me play jazz piano. Come with ‘er fiance.”

Lon had missed the sparkle on Sassy’s powerful hand. “Oh, sure. She’s engaged.”

Mavis smirked. “Reason why escape me jus’ now.”

Lon stared at the girl, silent while Betty brought fresh beers all around and Sassy wrangled with Violet over the two-dollar honors. Lon had never exchanged words with a Negro before—nor gazed at enigma that surpassed mere physical beauty. Mavis was slight, loose-limbed, the cafe-au-lait flesh pulled tightly over bone structure well defined. Yet it was not the effortless grace with which she moved the languid wrists, floated the slender fingers when she talked. And not the uninterrupted sweep of features, from broad, intelligent forehead past high-rising cheekbones, downward below the cherry-tinted mouth to the defiant little chin. It was in the line of blue-black hair drawn rigid to the coiled bun from which black wisps played with the back of her neck. And in the fierce pride of distended nostrils, the negroid nose. There, and in the regal tilt of her head, the impassable curtain of velvet black eyes. Eyes almond-shaped and weary from too much seen. If she rose, Lon knew, she would walk with a haughty bearing; Lon knew this with an unassailable certainty. Born to be a Second High Priestess, born to murmur the rhythmic incantations, weave the lithe body on nights when the sky is moonless and the sea beats the time for our chant. Lon dropped her eyes unconsciously to the heavy, snobbish breasts.

“You takin’ style notes? You analyzin’ my dress?”

Embarrassed, Lon shook her head. “No—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …”