Chapter 12 Date Night
There was a low wall surrounding the building, with some modest shrubbery and plants in the space between the wall and the building itself. Perhaps someone thought it would give it class, perhaps back in the day when it was a proper restaurant. Shane sat on the wall down from the entrance, over which the neon light still flashed "Girls Girls Girls," although at 2:30 in the morning traffic on the boulevard was pretty scarce. Shane could hear music still faintly emanating from the strip club, and somewhere down the street a car alarm suddenly went off, and a minute later stopped. Shane smoked a cigarette and thought about nothing more complicated than the night air.
Jenny came out of the club and was pleased to find Shane sitting on the wall down at the corner. "Hey," she said.
"Hey, lady," Shane responded.
"What are you doing here?"
"Came to see you." Shane got up and handed her lit cigarette to Jenny to finish. They walked down the sidewalk toward the bus stop, where there was a concrete bench.
"What did you think?"
"You were good," Shane said, being polite.
"No I wasn't, I sucked." Jenny took a drag and gave the cigarette back to Shane. "Here. It doesn't matter if I'm good. Nobody in there cares."
They stopped at the bus stop sign.
"Why are you doing this?" Shane asked, after a moment.
"Because, when I'm in there, it's my fucking choice when I take off my top and I wanna show my breasts. And it's my fucking choice when I take off my pants and I show my pussy, and then I stop when I wanna stop and it makes me feel good because I'm in charge, and it helps me remember all this childhood shit that happened to me. You know, like, I have to. It's important. Do you remember what happened to you as a child that makes you not wanna -"
"Jenny, what - what - what do you mean --"
"No, seriously, no, no, no, just hear me out," Jenny overrode Shane. "Do you remember the shit that happened to you as a child that makes you not wanna trust people as an adult?"
"Yeah, I probably do," said Shane, whose memory on that score was just fine.
"Well, then, you're fucking lucky."
"I don't know how that makes me so lucky."
"You're lucky because you can get on with your fucking life and you're not dogged down by these horrible, oppressive childhood memories, and you know, you stand a chance of being a normal, productive person," Jenny said.
Shane thought that over for a while. "Well, do you know what happened to you?"
Jenny stared down the empty street, then shook her head, more to herself than Shane.
"I don't know. I remember things, and then, like, I think, 'Is this true? Did this stuff really happen, or am I making it up?' Because, you know, the older I get, things - the memory sort of becomes a little blurry, and then, it's like, I can't ... ." Jenny stopped, and shook her head again, as if to clear it. "I don't know, but ... you just don't know the truth anymore."
"Right. I get that. But you don't have to do it with
that
." Shane gestured toward the strip club.
"I know."
"So what is this?" Shane asked.
"I know I don't have to do this."
"Just know that ... I'm just saying that you don't have to -- you know, you have me, you have other people, you don't have to do this alone. Go through whatever you're going through, alone."
"I know. No, I know, I know. I'm not alone, but I want to ... do this. Work something out."
"Just be careful," Shane said.
Jenny stared at Shane, and after a moment smiled and looked away.
"All right," Shane said, not sure if she'd accomplished anything or not.
And then Jenny put a hand on Shane's shoulder to indicate everything was okay.
"Let's go home," Shane said.
"No, I'm gonna take the bus," she said, pointing at the bus stop sign. It meant she wanted to be alone, and Shane respected that, even if she didn't think it was the best idea. She started to walk away, and turned, walking backwards so she could she Jenny, sitting on the bus stop bench.
"Promise you're gonna be safe? I'm gonna see you at home?"
Jenny nodded, and watched Shane walk reluctantly away.
***
In the morning they learned that Bette and Kit's father had died the night before. It had been expected; Bette and Kit had brought him to Bette's home several weeks earlier. With the help of two hospice workers plus all their friends from
The Planet
they had done what they could to ease Melvin Porter through his final days. Kit and Bette took turns reading to the old man even as he slept and slipped into his last coma. There wasn't much for the Friends to do, but they visited from time to time, bringing food for Kit or Bette, not that they would eat much. Shane and Mark ran a few errands for them from time to time, going to the supermarket or the pharmacy for whatever was needed. One morning when she had no production work, Carmen came over and sat with Bette for several hours, not talking much, just ... being there. Alice and Helena stopped in a couple of times, just to offer a hug and ask if there was anything they could do, but of course there wasn't.
The Friends knew very little about Melvin until these, his final days, since Bette and Kit had never talked about him. From bits and pieces they'd acquired over the past few weeks of his illness and days of his life, they had learned a few things about him: That he had been stubborn, ornery and difficult; that he had disapproved of Bette's lesbianism in general and in very particular of Tina. Almost until the last he had only ever referred to her as "Miss Kinnard," and had never treated her as he should have, as a defacto daughter-in-law. They learned that, in his own highly dysfunctional way, he loved his two daughters, and they, in their own dysfunctional ways, loved him back, no matter what, in that way that fathers and daughters must, no matter how much the relationship had deteriorated.
Late on the Sunday morning before he died, a stunning revelation had come to Alice as she and some of the the Friends sat in
The Planet
sipping their lattes and picking at brunch. They had been talking about Melvin, and how difficult it had been for Bette and Kit to cope with his terminal cancer, taking care of him in Bette's house-turned-hospice.
"Look at us," Alice said, gesturing around the table as the revelation swept over her. "We're all fatherless. Every one of us. None of us has a relationship with the one and only man who could possibly have a relationship with us. Since we're all lesbians, that can only be our fathers. And we don't even have that."
She gestured at herself. "I haven't seen my dad in fifteen years, and we have no relationship. Helena, you hardly even know who your father is, and you have no relationship with him. Shane, same with you. Carmen, your dad died before you were born, and you had a stepfather for a while when you were growing up, but he died years ago. Shane, Carmen and Helena all grew up fatherless, and I might as well have. Tina, your father's alive and you send him a Christmas card and a birthday card, and that's the sum total of your relationship. Jenny, you aren't close to your birth father, and you basically hate your step-father. Dana, you have a relationship with your dad, still, but you're hardly close buddies, and since you've come out it's gotten a lot cooler. And Bette and Kit weren't close to Melvin, until very recently, and I'm not even sure 'close' describes what it is when a parent is dying right in front of you."
"Metaphorically, we're all orphans, almost, except Carmen and a little bit of Dana," Jenny said. "Maybe that's why we're so close with each other here. In the absence of our birth parents, we've formed our own extended family of sisters out of our friends and lovers. It sounds like a cliché, but it's literally true in our case: All we really have in this world is each other."
"I'm the odd one out," Carmen said. "I still live at home, with my mother and my
Abuela,
that's what we call my grandmother. And I'm still close with my sisters and my cousins and my Aunt Begonia. There's my Uncle Mike, and my brother-in-law Carlos."
Alice nodded.
"I think I'm envious of that," Shane said. "I miss never having had much of a family, and sometimes I think I would like being part of one. Do the rest of you guys feel that way?"
"Well, I have my two children," Helena said, "but I don't have custody, and I miss them terribly sometimes. But I guess I'm just not too maternal, or whatever it is. I'm not a nest-builder, not like ... well, like Bette and Tina had been until they broke up. I suppose out of all of us, except maybe for Carmen, they were the two people most into having a family."
Shane looked around the table. "I suppose, though, that in one way we're all pretty lucky. None of us here has ever lost a parent, had a mother or father who died, at least while we were alive. But Bette and Kit lost their mother years ago, and now they are losing their dad."
"I lost my step-father, when I was thirteen," Carmen said.
"Oh, I'm sorry," Shane said. "I didn't know that."
"So I'm still the odd girl out," Carmen said, but smiling.
"No, Carmen. Shane lost somebody, once, too," Alice said.
Carmen turned to Shane. "Did you? I'm sorry. I didn't know."
Shane blew it off, patting Carmen on the arm, and assuming that no one but Alice knew the story of Harvey, which was a silly assumption given Alice's predilection for story-telling. But everyone at the table except Carmen pretended not to know about Shane's background, and Jenny quickly turned the conversation away to something else.
At the funeral on the Saturday a week later they all learned one last major thing about Melvin Porter: that he had been much more widely known and widely respected and even admired by many more people than they'd ever known or expected. And if Bette or Kit had known that, they'd never given any hint of it over the years.
Hundreds of people came to the funeral and the burial service, politicians local, state and national; civil rights leaders from all over the region, with telegrams of condolence and bouquets of flowers from as far away as Washington, D.C., and New York; a couple of "elder statesmen" in the black Hollywood community, actors and actresses who'd led the forefront of black entertainment and film-making in the 1960s and 1970s; and not all the mourners were black. Among the most prominent people who came to the funeral was Gloria Steinem, who Bette and Kit greeted and hugged and briefly cried with as old, dear friends.
"Did you know they knew Gloria Steinem?" Jenny whispered to Alice, who knew everything.
"No, I had no idea," Alice whispered back. "But anything is possible. Bette's a real big shot in the art world, and Kit used to be a prominent singer once upon a time, so I guess it shouldn't come as a surprise that they know some major movers and shakers."
As it turned out, not only was Gloria Steinem one of the mourners, but she also gave one of the eulogies, during which it became apparent that she had known Melvin well, had worked with him quite a lot over the years, and truly loved and admired him. After the services, Bette and Kit hosted a modest reception back at the house, intended for their closest friends and those closest to Melvin. Not surprisingly, Gloria was one of the latter. Shortly after they had all arrived at Bette's house, some of the Friends found themselves sitting at a table with Gloria and a couple of members of the band
Betty,
whom they all knew by now.
"Look, Gloria, I've been begging you for fifteen years to sleep with me, and it's because I care about you and I love you. I don't want you to miss out, and I know, I know not every feminist is a lesbian," one of the
Betty
members said.
"Yeah, you're right, 'cause I haven't slept with a woman and I am definitely a feminist," Kit said, laughing.
"Ditto for me," another
Betty
member said.
