JULY 20, 1974
It’s Tim she thinks she loves at first—despite the field of acne—but it’s Bird who finds her. They are in the garden weeding the tomatoes. The weeds are voracious, a forest unto themselves, and they are there for hours, pulling, plucking, under Amish straw hats Tim brought back from a shop in western Pennsylvania. They take off their jeans and dresses, wear just their underwear and cotton T-shirts, sleeves and necks cut off to let in the air. Deb’s back and shoulders are pink, raw, but the pain will come later, will be soothed by creek water. For now there are the weeds amid the tomatoes, the rows upon rows ahead of them, brought on by June rain. And there is Bird, before her.
She doesn’t know much about Bird. She’s from Atlanta, met Ginny at Yale. They came north together in Bird’s blue Saab 96, which her father, a banker, bought for her. Bird has all the best records: Ruth Brown, Nina Simone, Billie Holiday. When she dances in the living room, all eyes are on her.
She tells them stories about a grandmother from Mexico City—aristocratic—and another grandmother—a goat farmer from the mountains of Greece. Tips her head back. Laughs. “I didn’t inherit her love of the land.”
Now, in the garden, Bird throws herself back onto the dirt and closes her eyes. “Goddamn manual labor,” she whispers. “I’m parched. Why did we all come here again?”
Deb rubs the sweat out of her eyes, smearing dirt across her face. It’s true. It’s not at all how she thought, the day-in-and-day-out relentlessness of physical labor. Her back aches. Her legs ache. Her neck screams from sunburn. Bird rolls over and turns toward Deb. She puts her thin, dirt-caked hand on Deb’s thigh. “Perhaps we should retire,” she says, smiling.
Deb looks back, surprised. Her leg is cool where Bird’s hand touches it.
“Perhaps,” she says.
They go back to the house—its rooms refreshingly cool—and up the stairs to Bird’s room. Deb feels Ginny’s eyes on them where she stands at the kitchen sink—suspect, or wounded, Deb can’t tell. Deb follows Bird up the back stairway.
Her room is above the kitchen, an attic room with low ceilings and a bed on the floor. “Part of the Underground Railroad, I think, this room,” Bird says. There are candles everywhere, a tapestry hanging as a curtain. She undresses Deb and Deb undresses her. Deb has never kissed a woman, never touched a nipple other than her own, never slipped a finger inside another woman’s body. Never had a woman’s hand draw constellations of the freckles on her sunburnt chest. She spends the evening and the night there, wrapped in Bird’s arms, watching moonlight make its way across the rafters.
When she wakes, Bird is sitting in bed with a cigarette, listening to Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.”
Bird grins at Deb; Deb flings her head back on the pillow, laughs. Lies there in the cotton sheets listening to the song and to the rooster below and to the crickets beyond them. She puts her hand on Bird’s arm. Closes her eyes. The revolution will be no re-run, brothers, Gil Scott-Heron sings. The revolution will be live.