THE IN-BETWEEN SEX

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

“Oh, 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 fern?”

“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 …

Twilight Girl

Della Martin

www.spice-books.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

The In-Between Sex

Title Page

Part One

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Part Two

8

9

10

Part Three

11

12

13

14

15

Endpages

Copyright

Part One

Kid Stuff

1

IT WAS on the day Lon Harris decided to spare the mutt that she met the girl with the violet hair. In the psychiatrically charted years to come, Lon might occasionally pause to reflect upon this fact, searching the seemingly fortuitous occurences for some suggestion of ironic pattern—speculating, perhaps, on the alternate courses her life might have taken if:

(1) Miss Chamberlin’s dog had eaten the greasy mound of hamburger, liberally loaded with the pulverized remains of a 7-Up bottle, and

(2) If Lon had not made the acquaintance of a shapely car-hop whose name, translated from Czech, meant Violet Soup.

But throughout that day in mid-June—the last day of school—Lon Harris lacked the composure for musing on the vagaries of fate. She did, as she had always done, the things it occurred to her to do.

English III was Lon’s final period. Today it amounted to no more than a tension-charged killing of time for the Wellington High junior class. Books had been turned in on the previous morning and Miss Chamberlin staved off the mounting restlessness by inviting the students to discuss their plans for the summer. Listening to this recital, Lon was tremulous, her eyes chained to the wall clock. She was longing for and yet dreading the electric bell that would eject her, perhaps forever, from the warm presence of Netta Chamberlin. Waiting, Lon listened impatiently to the self-conscious voices.

HELEN LANG: I’m going to Oregon with my folks for three weeks. We’ve got this darling aqua trailer that just matches our car and it’ll be my first time out of California.

And, waiting, Lon wondered. Had Miss Chamberlin read the note? Read the revealing words? Yes, she had read it, she must have read it. But what would she say? When this hour was ended, what would she say?

RALPH ALVAREZ: My uncle got a body shop in San Fernando. I’ll be workin’ there if he don’t can me.

I held it in the palm of my hand all during class yesterday, Lon thought. Held it so tight that maybe the paper soaked up sweat—maybe the ink ran. And I held back to let everyone out of the room before me, so I could drop it unseen on her desk. But, oh, God, what if it was too blurry to read?

MARGIE McCANN: Oh, just horse around, I guess. Go to the beach. I don’t know.

Waiting and remembering, that’s what Lon was doing. Seeing the words as she hoped Netta Chamberlin had seen them: I am putting my innermost thoughts down because I know you feel the same way. (The last six words scratched out for a more impressive phrase.) I am cognizant of the fact that we share the same deep emotions and I have a plan whereby we can be together that I must tell you about. (The tiny slip of paper running out then, with still so much unsaid!) I would die if this was the last time I saw you. With all my love, Lon Harris. (Squeezing the last words uphill into the margin.)

DAN OSTERMAIER: Summer school. No comment!

Scattered applause, laughter. Then the switch-blade shrillness of the bell, the casual goodbyes, the cries of “This is it!” and, “Ye-ay-y!” The world that was not her world stampeded for the door and Lon lingered, paralyzed with the fearful hope.

“Lorraine?”

Eyes magnetized to the asphalt tile floor. “Yes, Miss Chamberlin?”

“I know you’re anxious to go, but you can spare a minute, can’t you?”

“It’s all right. Sure.”

“I’m a bit puzzled, Lorraine.”

“You are?”

“By your note.”

“Oh, that.”

“Of course, they’re quite common. Crushes on teachers. Or can we call it that, Lorraine?”

All the wrong words. Lon had rehearsed the dialogue carefully, ready with impassioned responses to cue lines that failed in this moment to come. Shame and regret bore down from the ecru walls, weighing her with an uncomprehended guilt. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t want to upset you, but as we grow older, Lorraine, we outgrow these impulses. I’ve always thought of you as level-headed and mature for your years. You read a lot, don’t you?”

“Quite a bit.”

“What do you like to read?”

“Oh—poetry. Books about the islands. I read just about anything.”

“Do you spend most of your time this way? Alone? Reading?”

“Well, I have a part-time job. Saturdays. This summer I might get to work weekdays, too.”

“Baby-sitting, I suppose?”

A rankling accusation. “No. I work at the pet shop. Washing dogs.”

“Do you have a lot of friends? Close friends?”

“I get along with the kids all right.”

“Boys, too?”

“I get along with them, too.”

“But no special boy?”

“I used to play ball a lot with Bud Schaeffer. Baseball. I used to get along great with him.”

“But you don’t play baseball now?”

Stupid questions, getting more senseless by the minute! “Who with? That was a long time ago.”

“Yes, and I suppose he’s like other boys. Busy working on his car … dating girls …”

“He doesn’t know the first thing about cars. I wouldn’t let him change the oil in my Plymouth. I washed a lot of flea-taxis to pay for that car. Well, the down payment and my dad gave me the rest, I mean. It’s old, but I take good care of it.”

“I don’t know how to put this, Lorraine. I seem to be saying everything badly. But what I’m trying to tell you is that when a girl gets to be … What are you, sixteen? Seventeen?”

“Sixteen.”

“She’s usually thinking about clothes and dates. Working on a jalopy is … uh … writing a sentimental, almost unnatural note such as the one you left for me yesterday …”

“That was just a silly thing. I forgot all about it.”

“I hope you did forget it, Lorraine. A note such as yours might be misinterpreted.” From out of her grab-bag of meaningless phrases, Miss Chamberlin pulled another. “I’m a woman, Lorraine. I’m thirty-two years old and unmarried. People … If someone read what you wrote to me, they might misunderstand.” And in a tone that implied deep significance where Lon sensed only absurdity, “I live alone, you see.”

“I know.”

“You really do know. You actually know?”

“You live in one of Hardesty’s duplexes. The ones with the fenced yard on Orange Grove.”

“You went out of your way to find out personal details about my life?” There was dismay and disapproval in the question. Wasn’t it enough that she hadn’t said the things she was supposed to say? Did she have to make inane statements and then act shocked at the obvious answers? Lon lifted her eyes to the doorway, yearning.

“Lorraine, I appreciate your … I’m glad, that is, that you like me and that you’ve enjoyed this semester in my class. I’m hoping you’ll find outlets that are more—shall we say, normal? You’re a very attractive girl. Your hair’s naturally wavy, isn’t it?”

“That’s from cutting it a lot. I like it short.”

“I’d like to see you walk more gracefully. Why, a girl as slim and tall as you are could be a model. Surely you must have some fondness for pretty clothes?”

Lon tugged at her brown wool sweater-vest. Shut up! Just shut up and let me go! Oh, let me go!

“With dark brown hair, you can get away with wearing lovely colors. Coral pink, for instance. You don’t want to look drab, Lorraine. Boys might find you very attractive if you set out a program for yourself and …”

“Is that all you wanted to tell me?”

“I suppose so. And I think you understand me. Do you, Lorraine?”

“I guess so.”

“Then you don’t think I’m saying these things to be critical? We’re still friends?”

“I have to drive a couple of kids home,” Lon lied. “They’ll think I ditched them.”

“Yes. Well, you run along, Lorraine.” And, strangely confused, Lon thought, for one who had guided the whole conversation, “But you do understand about writing notes to … And about boys. You do understand what I mean?”

“Sure. I’ll be seeing you, Miss Chamberlin.”

And she hurried into the joy-filled corridor where someone yelped, “T.G.T.I.F.!” and a chorus responded, “You know it! Thank God this is Friday—the last Friday!” She hurried along the dark, warm hall, scalding moisture clouding her vison of the marbled walls until she was in the students’ parking lot where the hot salt zigzag tears burned on her face. It began then; the thin trickle of sound that was not a sound within her head. It was deeper inside her body, where so much was compressed that could not be revealed, where the buried questions begged to be released. Not why am I unlike the others, but why are the others unlike me? And I want, I want, but what is it I want?

Some of the others sang now. Packed into cars and filled with the T.G.T.I.F. joy of singing:

Give a cheer, give a cheer,

For the boys who drink the beer,

In the cellars of Wellington High!

A raked Chevy screamed past her and the melody of the Caisson Song filled the dusty yard:

They are brave, they are bold,

And the liquor they can hold

Is the glory of Wellington High!

No one was waiting beside the beat-up Plymouth. No one waited for the gangling odd-ball with the hazel eyes, as no one had ever waited. Only the questions waited, as if in some seldom-dusted cobwebbed corner of her consciousness. And who would answer the questions? Who now? There were answers that some sphynx-like mother creature might know. Yet someone who, unmotherlike, would not advise, saying only, “This is why you ran to the bathroom and were sick when Bud Schaeffer touched your breast and kissed you; this is why you ache inside, running to the refuge of the Island, the secret you would have shared with the woman in English III; and this is why you trembled in tears and a violent gladness the afternoon her hand touched yours and she smiled—smiling, you were certain, for no one else.”

Lon pulled open the car door. Far down the street the bawling voices receded:

And it’s guzzle, guzzle, guzzle,

As it trickles down your muzzle,

And you hear them shout, “More beer!”

MORE BEER!

Lon turned the ignition key unsteadily, rammed an angry thumb against the starter button. Mother-creature, lover-creature, someone, someone! There had been someone, yet now no one was near. Now there was only the raging heat, the stinging pain of humiliation. That, and the thin minor wail, keen-edged. Transparent, quavering like her mother’s edgy voice, yet dimly reminiscent, too, of space movies; the weird humming tone that sets the scene for some remote planet, horribly beautiful, breathlessly strange. No one near, and the only other occupants of the old tan car were familiar traveling companions—grown monstrously huge on this eighteenth day in June—confusion, hunger, and the shameful anger born of their union.

Lon parked the Plymouth, stepped out of it, and walked into the house.

It might be that the elementary school PTA was hosting a farewell tea for the teachers. Or maybe, even, the Brotherhood Week Committee was meeting at the church. Maybe, even, the Civic Betterment unit of the Women’s Club was in session. Whatever the reason, Lon rejoiced. Her mother was not at home!

Wild, way out, crazy. No comments about the jeans Lon pulled on being belted too low. No shaking pronouncements about what people thought of a girl who tugged a red cotton T-shirt over her boyish chest and let it go at that. No queries about why Lon whacked a clod of half-frozen hamburger from a package in the refrigerator.

She took the ground meat to the open garage, laying it on the cement in a square of sunlight. Waiting for it to defrost, she knocked the neck off a 7-Up bottle with a hammer. Enjoying the process, she demolished the painted green bottle completely, pushing a few of the smaller pieces into an old leather glove. Then, breathing the short breaths of perverse excitement, the quick snatches of air that denote elation, she pounded the glove viciously with the hammer. When the glass was reduced to rough powder, she stuffed the hamburger inside the glove. She pounded meat and glass together under the leather binding. When the ingredients were one, she scooped the lethal mixture into a brown manila envelope, tossed the glove carelessly into a trash barrel, and returned, trembling with anticipated revenge, to the car.

It was not a long drive to her destination. She parked inconspicuously, sneaked even more inconspicuously to a point of vantage.

Watching Miss Chamberlin’s dog race the length of the redwood fence, Lon wondered if it were true. That business Mr. Beckwith had told her about Dalmatians. “Most other breeds can’t stand them. Other dogs just have it in ‘em to hate Dalmatians,” Saying it as though owning a stinking pet shop made him an authority. “It’s the color of their eyes,” he had explained sagely. And had added in an awesome voice, as though speaking the Great Hidden Wisdom, “And the spots!”

It was, Lon decided, a crock of the well-known article, hating herself immediately for borrowing her father’s army phrase.

“Here, boy!” she called.

The dog, falling all over his paws, hurling his black-flecked body in a convulsion of joy at being noticed, ran to the corner of the fence.

I’ll bet she’s crazy about this dog. Maybe she hasn’t got a friend in the world except this dog….

Forepaws on the inside wall of the board fence, the dog stretched his head upward for human contact. Lon patted the sleek, sun-warm head. Her other hand dangled the brown envelope against her knee.

It’ll crack her up to lose this beautiful dog. She won’t have anybody …

“Here, boy. Got something for you.”

The Dalmatian ducked his head, twisting it then into position to gnaw cautiously at her hand.

“You’re sure you like dogs?” Mr. Beckwith had asked before hiring her. “No use taking on somebody that don’t like dogs.”

“I love ‘em,” Lon had said.

“What kind you got?”

“Oh. Well, I don’t actually have one.”

“That’s a fine kettle of fish.” Peering at her suspiciously.

“No, y’see, my mother’s president of the Garden Club and we have all these begonias and junk around the yard. That’s the only reason.”

“Begonias!” He had spat the word across the counter. But hired her anyway. And taught her enough about dogs so that now she shuddered, knowing what would come—the twitching of flesh and agonized whine, the stomach walls grinding red and merciless in the cutting green dust, the eyes pleading silently …

Lon muzzled the dog’s face and roughed it back and forth. “Quit slobbering over me, stupid.” His tail whipped the air. “Big overgrown pup!” The Dalmatian shifted paws, scrambling against the fence. “Think you’re a lap dog, I’ll bet. Hey, you lonesome, pooch? All by yourself all day long? How come other dogs don’t like you?” Pushing his face and grinning at the fake growls. “You different? Is that why? That why the other dogs don’t like you?”

She grasped his paws firmly in one hand, then shoved him away from the fence and turned before he could resume the game.

A minute later she was back in the Plymouth.

Circling the neighboring blocks, as she had done so often before in the hope of catching a glimpse of Miss Chamberlin, Lon pondered the problem of what to do with the brown, grease-stained envelope. Throw it out the window and some other dog might get it.

At the corner of San Leandro Drive and Los Altos, she stopped the car. Climbing out, looking up and down the deodar-lined street, she dropped her package into the corner mailbox. When she heard the envelope hit the metal floor with a hollow thud, she leaped back into the Plymouth and drove home.

Lon said no more than was necessary during dinner, having learned that the shrill nasal whine of her mother’s voice would eventually wither from lack of response.

Mrs. Harris held a trembling fork in her hand, recounting the day’s events. “I told the girls, not one more committee! I’m swamped now, I told them. Supervising the Sunday School is a full-time job and don’t you think I’m not going to hold my ground.”

“And stick to your guns,” Lon’s father placated. “They expect too much of you.”

Long ago, Lon had concluded that Edwin Harris had been born for no ostensible purpose except to be agreeable. She had inherited her slim, angular body from him, but had been spared the myopic eyes that blinked at accounting sheets through thick horn-rimmed glasses by day and were the scourge of the Little League in the evenings. It was rare in the years since Eddie Junior had been born that she could bear to look at her father.

“When they find a good organizer, they work her to death,” Mrs. Harris said. “I told them that right to their faces.”

“Good for you,” encouraged the man behind the glasses.

“Verna had the gall to tell me I’ll have more time with the kids out of school. Came right out and asked me if Lon didn’t help around the house. Of course, what could I tell her?” Shaky hands left the table to pat the machine-frizzled hair. And the bright dark eyes turned accusingly toward Lon.

Lon counted frozen peas. And her father poured oil on the troubled waters. “Lon’s not like Evie and Judith. We’re all different, Mother.”

“She carried all the rocks.” This was an unexpected defense from the potato-stuffed mouth of Eddie Junior. “She brang the rocks for the rock garden.”

Lon threw him a wry thank-you with her eyes, sweeping in that moment the thin, simian face, wizened, somehow, far beyond its eight years. Mention of her sisters and the sight of Eddie’s face stirred the buried recollections, the unburied resentments. Evie and Judith, married now, but in those days primping and giggling and bossing her around the house, with no Eddie in view. And Dad tousling her hair, teasing, “Counted on you to play with Brooklyn, y’little monkey!” Never really complaining because she was a girl. Joking about it that way. Playful, controlled punches in the arm, full-swinging pats on the back when she stole third or scooped a playground grounder. And proud of her, with the pride nurturing, growing inside her.

And all this was B.E.—Before Eddie, the family afterthought who squealed, bleated, kicked and raged his protest vainly, ignored in his protests by Dad, who now had a son to be buddy to. For above all that was sacred, Eddie Harris Senior believed fervently in his mission as Father, the Pal. So that After Eddie, there came to Lon the life-vital need to be more a boy, more a pitcher, more, more—until the gentle swelling under the smudged T-shirt proclaimed the odds insurmountable, the competition too heartlessly stacked against her. So that now Dad had Eddie, and L.A., not Brooklyn, had the Dodgers. And Lon had the Island, discovered in reverie between her twelfth and thirteenth years—the undetermined pin-point in the Pacific to be peopled with a painstakingly selected population. Excluding the Harrises, one and all. Except Lon.

“People are noticing the way she runs around, Dad.” Her mother’s flute-pitched lecture on the state of the beltline of Lorraine Harris’s jeans was usually channeled through a neutral source. “You’d think if she has to dress like a hooligan, she could at least recognize where God put her waistline!”

The voice-sound blended with the whine in Lon’s head. Shut up! Just shut up and let me go.

“It could be worse.” Dad apologizing for her again. “She could be painting her face like a barn and staying out late with boys. Am I right, Lonnie?”

Lon nodded yes to the milk glass. And when it was over once more, she washed and dried the dishes mechanically, then closed the door of her room behind her.

The room, like the rest of the new gingerbread-tract house, was furnished in an abortive maple—rag-rug—pepper-grinder—lampbase attempt to resurrect old New England in new Los Angeles suburbia. But the Polynesian masks Lon had whittled from fallen dried palm fronds were her own. The draped fishnet and cork floats were hers. And the papers she took reverently from the bottom desk drawer belonged to a world that none other traveled, except by invitation of the fertile mind. Carefully she chose them, the residents of this unsurveyed microcosm of her fantasy.

She passed quickly over the world map, the South Pacific circled in red crayon and marked: In This General Area. Nor was there need, this evening, to review the List of Supplies (fish-hooks, canned milk, thread, pencils, paper)—some day to be alphabetically arranged, but scrawled now in green ink. And no time for the Sacred Rites of —— (name of Island to be selected when we arrive). No interest now in the Secret Incantations, lists, charts, schedules, village layouts, codes, rules, menus, constitution, cultural and recreational plans—or the notebook devoted to Ideas on How to Get There, including:

A. Boat (Check costs)

B. Where to Sail From

C. Knowledge of Sailing (Find someone who knows about it)

With none of these details was Lon Harris concerned on this evening of the last day of school in June. From the imposing sheaf of papers she pulled the list of proposed inhabitants. For reasons she had never considered, accepting the fact as casually as she chose a gray sweatshirt over an eyelet embroidered blouse, none of the names recorded was male. Under the heading LON HARRIS, HIGH PRIESTESS was another name she had added to the roll call early in the second Junior-year semester. With a surge of something inside her that had wavered before friendly Dalmatian eyes, she picked up a ballpoint pen and traced a question mark after SECOND HIGH PRIESTESS. Then grimly, her revenge tempered by the solemn responsibility of her ritual, she drew a line through the name of Netta Chamberlin. And in that moment, the sound in her head that was not a sound abruptly stopped.

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 …”

What could be seen of Mavis’s dress was dull black and shapeless. Lon lifted the second bottle, drinking back the chagrin.

“This dress what you call a saque,” Mavis said tonelessly. “Been with me a long time. Man, couple years back the modistes caught up with me. But I pass ‘em up again. Now nobody in style but me!” Flashing a snowflake grin, the whiteness melting into brown repose. “Sassy say I look beat. Them beat cats jus’ catchin’ up with me, too. I beat befo’ they latch on Zen. Long befo’ they pick up on Gide. Baby, I beat from awa-a-y back. An’ don’t need to make some cafe expresso scene provin’ it.”

Now Lon faced the new bewilderment. Mavis fluctuated between a cultured enunciation and what seemed to be deliberate parody of minstrel show dialect. Finding courage in swallows of the tart beer, she said, “You sound like you know a lot. But you don’t talk like—” And stammering in the self-induced confusion, “You perplex me!”

Mavis lifted a cigarette from Sassy’s case, lying on the table between them. “Trouble is, you tryin’ put me in some peg-hole. Baby, go ‘head an’ crucify me. Go ‘head an’ vilify me. But don’t go messin’ ‘round tryin’ to classify me! I one thing now. Tomorrow I gonna be something else.”

“Don’t you want anyone to know how sharp you are?”

Sucking in the blue smoke, Mavis said, “That way I get me invited into white-color brain circles. Them folks can go home, tell they neighbors they had tea with a colored gal could quote Spinoza. Big deal! Man, I take a good ole-fashioned down-South nigger-hater over them kind.” Then, staring into the dim haze, “I talk my way. I read about some decadent French cats, that Proust talk. Read about some festerin’, slime-ooze creeps down South, that Faulkner talk. Ain’t for me.” And in a sudden spurt of animation, the heat of white-hot, white-directed resentment burned like the tip of her cigarette. “Mavis talk. That all you ever gonna get from me!”

The juke broke out with Poison Ivy. And Sassy, obviously bored with the pressure of being impressed, lifted her brows at the Violet kid. “Dance?”

“Crazy!” Violet wrinkled the little round nose, laughed her delight.

Sassy was even taller than Lon had suspected. The statuesque and the stubby left the table to jiggle their way into the moving crowd.

An alien excitement fell over Lon. Alone with brown Mavis and too tense to express what had lain dormant in her, Lon tried to force herself. Now, now, when at long last the closed doors had strangely opened to her. Feebly offering, “I’ve never known anyone named Mavis. Mavis what?”

“Jus’ Mavis.”

“Everybody has a last name.”

“Some born without ‘em. Some lose the right to use ‘em.”

Lon sensed that she had treaded on shaky ground. And began again. “You said you play the piano.”

“Yea-ah, Sassy got this Knabe grand. Used to be jus’ furniture in that fancy pad where she live. That big ole piano cryin’ its gut out f’lonesome till I come by.”

“I thought you said she used to go somewhere to hear you play.”

“Ruggio’s. Baby, I play in more pi-ano bars ‘n’ you got years. That the last place I play before I git unemployed. Ruggio, he tie the can to me.”

“Why?” Asking it indignantly, marking the faceless Ruggio a sworn enemy.

“Oh, couple gay gals start hangin’ ‘round. Ruggio don’t want that. I tip these gals, but that don’t stop ‘em comin’ on, comin’ on, requestin’ I play this numbah ‘n’ that numbah. Till one night he blow his stack. I gotta git!”

“But it wasn’t your fault, was it? Just because he didn’t like …” Lon swallowed the hard core taking form in her throat. “Were they girls like these?” Gesturing to indicate the dancers.

“Man, they don’t come no gayer. These gals, they both on the make. They wear a big neon sign keep flashin’ what they is. Same as these cats you seein’ now.” Mavis dragged deeply, exhaled, cooled the smoke with draughts from the brown bottle. “I say one thing ‘bout you. You look the same. But you diff’runt. You don’t wait till Sass leave the table, ‘nen make a pass. Too young? Too chicken?” She laughed shortly. “I perplex you? Well, you perplex me!”

The dark eyes mocked, then softened as Lon looked to the beer-wet redwood. Lon lifted her face at last to drink, thirsty swallows, drowning her lack of understanding. And still knowing. Knowing that you can belong and not belong, knowing how much and how little she knew. Until Mavis, wearying, it seemed, of the jazz-man, end-man jargon, dropped her cigarette to the concrete floor, bent to grind it under her heel and spoke with the precise diction of a speech-department pedant. “Sassy happened to be at Ruggio’s the night he fired me. Strangely enough, she had come alone that night for the first time. And I could have called the agent who booked me. Complained to the union. But I was beat. You know? Sassy’s folks were in Hawaii. Like when people find themselves in Pittsburgh—it’s raining—it’s a drag, so they get married. Later they ask themselves why.” She laughed again, the quick-dying jab of laughter. Amused by her story? More likely getting a laugh from Lon’s stunned reaction to the abrupt change in delivery. “Sassy’s got no imagination. You see, I have this dark skin. Types me with people like her folks. So we meet this housekeeper at the door. Sassy’s got one idea. I’m the new maid. Trite, but that does it! I’m still living there, making with the dustpans. Fractures me, watching Sassy cover up for the way I do a bed. It’s a funny hype.”

“But you can work in some other night club. Why do you want to—to lower yourself that way?”

Almond eyes explored the table with a soft melancholy. And Mavis echoed again her cotton-patch talk. “Sass an’ me, sometimes we dig each othah. Got a fine piano there. Got books. Don’ know, baby. That butch needs me bad. Jus’ don’ know.”

“You mean you’re going to stay there?”

“Toss-up. Do I leave Sassy, or do she tell me leave? Don’t look now like Sassy’s evah goin’ let up, but hard tellin’.” Mavis shrugged an indifferent shoulder. “Don’ nuthin’ last.”

“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Lon said. The cold beer warming her inside, the words coming easily now. “I’ve thought about a place where people weren’t always—spoiling things for each other.”

“Keep tellin’, baby.”

“A place where—people leave you alone. I mean, where they aren’t always stopping you from doing what you want to do.”

“Fine place,” Mavis encouraged. Picking up her rhythm from the juke.

“I decided it would have to be—well, an island.”

“Now yo’ makin’ sense!”

“Somewhere in the Pacific.” And bursting like a bag of popcorn at the dusky girl’s approval, “I’ve never told anyone, but I have it all planned.”

“Swingin’!”

“Everybody could do whatever they enjoy doing.”

“Take me at once to yo’ leadah!”

“I’d … temporarily, at least, I’d be in charge. Because I know all the plans. I’m doing all the preliminary work.”

“It figures, baby.”

Then, with the beer and the beat drowning out, hammering down the earlier timidity, “Mavis, how would you like to be the Second High Priestess? If this thing really goes through, there has to be somebody … I mean, I have all these chants written down. Really weird and … exotic. Do you think you’d …?”

“Secon’ high priestess. Hot damn!”

A chill suspicion trickled down the length of Lon’s spine. Was Mavis making fun of her? Fighting boredom, the way Sassy was killing time on the dance floor with Violet? They had danced by a moment before and the tall blonde had been yawning. With dampened enthusiasm, Lon said, “I still have a lot of details to work out. Transportation’s my main problem. I have to figure out how to get a boat and where to find somebody that’ll know how to sail it.”

“Man, you talk to Sass. Her daddy, he got him a yatch. She know mo’ ‘bout yatches anybody you evah meet!”

And spurred again, Lon said, “Really? Does she really?”

“That cat’s made the Catalina scene all by her lonesome.” Mavis dropping her pose once more, like a seagull letting go of a fish. Then adding significantly, “Don’t count on her, though, baby. The way Sassy’s goin’, don’t anybody count on her for Thing One.”

Lon would have asked for an explanation. But the girls returned to their table. Violet ecstatic, Sassy apparently disgusted. “God, what an obvious crowd of neurotics!”

“They neurotic,” Mavis agreed.

“That’s one a the kinds a persons I can’t stand,” Violet echoed.

And Sassy winked at Mavis, snickering behind her beer.

“They psychotic,” Mavis added. “Pore chillun!”

Then Sassy, in sudden irritation, “God, will you cut that plantation bit? Talk about sounding neurotic! Where’s your goddamn pride?”

Mavis sighed, shrugging once more. “Can’t be queer, effen you ain’t neurotic.”

Lon watched Sassy’s anger flare. “I detest that word, Mavis. Literally detest that word.”

“Okay, baby. Yo’ bi-sexual. Ain’t queer nohow. Yo’ bi-sexual.”

Sassy leaped up from the bench, seething. “You make me so damned—” Her sudden motion upset a tray with which Betty was trying to wriggle through the narrow aisle between tables. A beer bottle toppled, rolled down Sassy’s back, crashing to the concrete floor in a burst of glass and foam.

“You clumsy bitch!” Sassy whirled on the waitress in a scarlet-faced rage. “Goddamn clumsy—you did that on purpose!”

“Got her monkey wet,” Mavis murmured senselessly. “That monkey gonna ketch pneumonia.”

Sassy caught the muttered phrases. They meant something to her, Lon decided, for the fury turned on Mavis now. “Keep your nasty little mouth shut!”

Betty stared open-mouthed, shocked by the force of Sassy’s outburst. A small, curious group gathered around the table, watching with detached interest.

And Sassy reached back to assess the damage, shrieking, “My back is soaked. Literally soaked, you goddam, stupid …”

“One more word, debutante, and you’ll go home in a basket.” The grim figure in the black tuxedo had materialized from nowhere. Rags, with menace written all over that pale, pitted face. Sassy towered over her. Like a eucalyptus tree in a poppy field, Lon thought. But evidently Sassy caught the threat in that throaty masculine voice. She stopped in the middle of her sentence, violence suspended in mid-air. And then Lon saw why Goliath curdled in the face of this tiny David. The something that Rags turned slowly in her hand was a breadknife. And Sassy stood still, pulsating with the hateful silence, eyes helplessly drawn to the saw-toothed blade.

No one moved. They stood around, sat around, immobile in a tableau of motionless waiting, breath suspended. And Lon caught up in a tremulous excitement of heroic battle, siding with the underdog in a T.V. writer’s struggle for truth, honor and justice. Still, it was Sassy who owned a boat—Sassy who knew how to sail. And Sassy who would bring Mavis if Mavis was to come again. Apart from the other spectators, Lon waited for the next move.

“I suppose one should expect this sort of thing in a place like this,” Sassy said, breaking the impasse with lame defiance.

One of the observers hooted, “Hey, Rags—whyn’t you pick on somebody your size?” Jeering laughter routed what was left of the drama. Slowly, Rags lowered the breadknife. But her eyes had preserved the glint of its blade. “Beat it, debutante. Go do your slumming somewhere else!”

Sassy threw back her head in a gesture of contempt. “Scum. Literal, uncouth, uncivilized, neurotic scum.” She edged her way past the onlookers, pushing disdainfully against the rigid wall of unfriendly shoulders. Lon sensed the blood churning invisibly inside, the gray-blue eyes deliberately unseeing, as though by her unawareness Sassy had dismissed them all. “If I thought it was worth the bother, I’d have my dad pull the right strings.”

“Before you start shutting us up,” Rags said, her voice deadly level, “figure out a good excuse for your daddy-O.”

And picking up the cue, another voice cried, “Yeah, tell him what you were doing here, rich-bitch!”

“Are you coming, Mave?” Sassy, halfway across the dance floor. Not bothering to turn her head.

Mavis sighed. “Don’ make no never-minds to me, baby.”

Rags wedged herself between Mavis and the narrow aisle. “We don’t hold anything against you. We don’t want you to think we aren’t—well, democratic.” Still wearing the unsmiling mask: “Don’t think you aren’t welcome here because you’re colored.”

Lon nodded approval. The T.V. drama was going according to all the principles. Truth, honor and justice. These were great kids. Really great kids, and Violet had not been wrong. Lon found time to drain the second bottle.

“Hot damn, you sho ‘nuff democratic! You so democratic, man, I overwhelmed!” Mavis having herself a ball. “Heah I thought you Republican.”

“If you haven’t got a way home, I’ll drive you myself,” the poker-faced owner promised, the dusky sarcasm escaping her.

And timidly, Betty piped, “Don’t mix in between them, Rags. If you were that other girl, I’d stick by you. Even if you were wrong, I’d walk out of here with you.”

Rags considered the protocol of loyalty and stepped aside. “I just wanted her to know how I feel.”

Lon missed the next few bits of by-play. Violet clutching her arm and whispering desperately, “Jesus, kid, what’ll I do? If I go out now, Rags won’t ever leave me in again. But I gotta see that Sassy again. Kid, I jest went ape over her!” The lavender-blue eyes following Sassy Gregg out of the room, miserable. “If you was me, would you make up some excuse that she fergot somethin’ an’ follow her to the parking lot? Or what, kid?”

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