She thought she’d seen a light under the door, but the room was dark when she stepped inside. The bed was rumpled, but nobody was in it. A wing chair seemed to hold a thick shape, but, as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw it was only an upended bolster. A distant yard light shone down through a window over her bare feet and picked up the purplish crescent beneath a toenail where she’d dropped the posthole digger on herself the week before. She pressed the spot with her other foot. It didn’t hurt any more. A dry breeze stirred a froth of willow branches. Through the open windows came the gurgle of the river. She was wearing only a T-shirt and underpants and now thought of her robe, though the night was hot. Her mouth was dry and her heart had begun to pound. Something moved in the far corner. She made out the mirror and the reflection of willow branches waving there. A pressure bloomed in her head. Her gorge rose and she swallowed. Homophobia, she thought to herself, a new word in her vocabulary, a word with a rolling sound that would be perfect sung in an operetta, if it weren’t synonymous with hatred and fear. She really had to laugh, having thought herself so free of it. But she couldn’t laugh. She could barely breathe. She’d just steal back to bed. Lila had gone off somewhere. Rose had proved she was no coward; maybe that was enough for one night. She’d go back to bed.
They’d been up before dawn to avoid the heat and lugged full bushels of tomatoes across the bridge to the pump for washing, and then into the house where Noah helped Peggy cut out the bad spots till he got bored and ornery, started pinching people and had to be sent outside. Rose scalded, Wilma pulled off skins, Dinah cored, and Josie packed jars, which Lila sealed and timed, ten minutes per batch in the pressure canner. They were going to fill every one of her grandma’s two hundred canning jars. They chatted and then lapsed into a busy silence. Then someone started a song and the others joined in. Every hour they all switched jobs. They rarely worked in such close quarters all day long, and Lila, just another among them, chatted, laughed, and sang.
She’d even told a joke: “Why does Helen Keller masturbate with just one hand?”
“Lila,” said Josie with mock severity, “not while we’re handling food.”
“What’s ‘masturbate’?” asked Noah through the screen door.
“When you make yourself feel good,” answered Wilma.
“Okay, Lila, why?” asked Rose.
“So she has the other hand to moan with.” There was a burst of surprised laughter. Rose laughed hardest. Had she ever heard Lila tell a joke before?
“I don’t get it,” whined Noah.
“Helen Keller was deaf, so she talked with her hands. I’ll explain later,” said Wilma.
Peggy wasn’t laughing. “That’s a cruelty joke.”
“Oh, no—it’s a pleasure joke,” said Rose.
Peggy took a swig of water, eyed Rose, and shrugged. Lila was very pleased with herself. Arms covered to the elbows in black industrial rubber gloves, she stood fanning herself nonchalantly. Why, she’s happy, Rose thought—my cellist is happy.
Lila threw a smile in Rose’s direction, but her gaze was inward. It occurred to Rose that she’d been thinking of Lila mostly in terms of how Lila felt about her. That, by now, was impossible to miss. And Rose had profited from it. Without responding, she’d allowed herself to be enveloped by Lila’s feeling for her, had wrapped herself in its magnetism. She’d become Rose the beloved. Because Lila was fascinated, Rose had found a new fascination with herself, and it had aroused energies and hopes. But what of Lila? She stood in the glow of her joke, flapping the huge rubber gloves, self-possessed in a way Rose had never seen. This was Lila the almost-beloved, not hidden behind a cello but standing in the open.
“Rose?” said Lila out of the darkness, and what Rose had thought was a robe on a hook turned in her direction.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Rose croaked and cleared her throat noisily. “Can’t you sleep?”
Lila boosted herself up onto the end of the bed and sat with her legs dangling below the hem of a thin cotton nightgown. It was a high bed with spindle posts at each corner topped by oval, pointed finials. From one of the finials, the threaded end of a bolt protruded. Rose stepped for-ward and closed her hand around it.
“There used to be wood all around the top,” remarked Lila. “Like a pic-ture frame—The Long Night of Lila. Lila in the Twisted Sheets. I took it down, but I couldn’t get that bolt out.”
“I could help you,” said Rose, jiggling the bolt back and forth.
“Mmm,” said Lila. “Maybe not right now.”
Rose let out a laugh, trying to ease the tightness in her chest. Besides being high, the bed was long, homebuilt by Lila’s grandpa, who had stood six and a half feet tall. Letting go of the finial, Rose picked up a corner of sheet and rubbed it between her fingers. Small blue morning glories twined over the smooth cotton: expensive fabric, inviting sleep. Passing by Lila’s open door, Rose had noticed the sheets, yet she’d never till now been over the threshold. No one came in here except Lila. Lila was not the chatty type. She’d never invited anyone in just to hang around.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” Rose asked. “You’re always up at night.”
“Well, I’m sorry. What do you want me to do—tie myself to the bed? If I’m awake, I’m awake.” Lila’s sulky tone was somehow reassuring. Rose boosted herself up onto the bed.
They sat there side by side at the foot of the high bed.
“It’s like a riverbank,” Rose suggested. “We’re trailing our feet in the water.” Lila’s smell wafted over her. She inhaled it, resisted, and then commanded herself to breathe deeper. A familiar smell, she told herself. She looked over at Lila through the moonlight and smiled.
Lila smiled back and then looked away. “You really want to do this?” she asked Rose.
“I don’t know. To tell the truth, I feel strange.”
“You feel strange?”
“Want me to go?”
“No!” Lila reached out, gripped Rose by the wrist, then opened Rose’s hand and, trembling, stroked her fingers.
“It might be my ignorance,” Rose ventured, “like the way I used to feel about boys when I was, oh, ten or eleven. My mother explained what she called ‘intimate matters’ early. She claimed she didn’t want us to be shocked when we heard. I think she just wanted to be the one to do the shocking. Of course I was shocked. I was dumbfounded. Fitting your private parts together?” This was the wrong tack. Rose let out a jittery laugh. “But I guess you learn by doing. My, don’t I have a lot to say?” she rambled on. “Maybe learning to love someone of your own sex is part of a maturing process most people never even approach. Do you think that might be?”
Lila was quiet, stroking Rose’s hand. “Why do you feel strange?” Rose asked her.
“We could light a candle. People do that, don’t they?”
“Good,” said Rose and hopped down from the bed. There were candles in the kitchen. To get a candle was simple. She felt a springiness in her feet, a longing for the feel of the stairs, though coming back up might be a different matter. As if sensing this, Lila kept hold of her.
“I’ve got one here.” She led Rose to her bedside table, which had a handsome oval top over a little drawer. Lila gestured and Rose opened the drawer to find a new candle wrapped in cellophane, a crystal holder in the shape of a star, and a small, full box of matches. So Lila had prepared for her? She felt a tightness in her head, and her heart pounded in her throat. At least she had something to do. She unwrapped the candle, twisted it into the holder, and lit it. Up on the bed, Lila slipped under the sheet.
The mattress was hard and yielded no hollows, no hint of the craggy old man, nor of Lila’s grandma who had predeceased him, leaving him to sleep alone his final years in that bed. Here he was in Lila’s face, in her heavy brow and square chin, as she lay curled facing Rose, following the contours of Rose’s body with her hand, but not quite touching her. Out-side, a breeze lifted the willow leaves and let them fall, like respiration. Lila closed her eyes.
“It’s hot,” Rose murmured, leaning back against Lila’s bank of pillows. Rose ran her eye down the bearded face, the cheek bisected by its dark swath of hair, the shadowed eye socket, deep and creaturely, the shoulder, the breasts showing through the open neck of the nightgown, the higher breast resting on the lower, heavy and glamorous—breasts a man would like. Rose banished the thought, disgusted with herself. Why think of men? Why study Lila like a specimen? Apparently Rose could not be trusted. This lay heavily on her. Lila lay still. Rose couldn’t justify staying there propped up on the pillows above her, and so she slid down. “Are you asleep?”
“No,” whispered Lila, not opening her eyes.
Rose raised herself on her elbow. She ought to know what to do. She understood her own body and would understand Lila’s. She should just lean over and kiss her. Lila moved her chin down a little and her mouth was obscured in shadow. Alone, Rose could reliably give herself pleasure and knew what it took to come—wetness and, with the fingers, this, and then this. But Lila lay there not moving, not speaking.
“Are you very tired?”
“No.”
Rose felt a faint annoyance. Was this, she wondered, what a man felt when a woman lay passive? Had she ever been like this? She couldn’t think. Yes, there had been times, but only when she hadn’t really wanted to be there, the times when she’d stayed in bed with someone after she knew she should have been gone.
“It’s okay,” she told Lila. “We don’t have to do this.”
“But I want to.” Lila opened her eyes.
Rose reached tentatively to stroke Lila’s thigh through the thin cloth of the nightgown. Lila shifted and the cloth moved up and Rose put her hand on Lila’s bare skin above her knee, where hair grew thick and soft. The smoothness of the hair on the warm thigh was pleasant. There was nothing wrong with Lila’s body, she told herself sternly. Lila lay there watching her. Come on, Rose told herself, you do know what to do. Reach between her legs. Reach, she told her arm and wrist and hand. But she’d frozen.
A fury had come into her. Quite apparently, Lila expected her to lead. But why on earth? Why Rose, who knew nothing about loving women? Lila was the one who had fallen in love with her, not the other way around. Not the other way around. The truth hit her. She hadn’t come out of desire, but out of gratitude and curiosity and restlessness and resentment against Guy for his self-assurance in bed. She’d come out of com-passion— or was it pity? Lila seemed to want her so badly. She’d come because, finally, she couldn’t see why not. Now she saw why not. She’d thought she might feel her way into love with Lila, might be educated into it. She’d been ready to respond, she told herself with failing conviction. She’d better get out of there.
“You see,” said Lila, “I’ve never done this before.”
“Oh,” said Rose. She did see. She saw Lila bashfully turning her back while stripping off her clothes to swim, saw her shying off down the stream by herself, always keeping her breasts in harness in the bra, always keeping her bit of distance. In the laying bare of her body and in the uses of her body in love, Lila was a child. Rose’s heart sank. She wanted to take her hand away from Lila’s thigh, but it wouldn’t move. Lila gave a luxuriant sigh.
If even then, Rose thought later, Lila had turned and embraced her, she might have been able to get past her dread and discover a new self, a self that loved women, that loved Lila like everything else on earth, a self that loved its own body enough to love another like it. But maybe love of self was nothing like love of another, two separate things, like breathing and eating. Breathing, one did without thinking. To eat, one needed the prompt of appetite.
She turned her head aside to avoid Lila’s odor. It reminded her of insecticide, or burnt plastic, or the emission of a paper pulp factory. She thought of the people living in the neighborhood of such a factory, how they acclimated themselves till they no longer noticed the stench. Lila lay gently beside her. Rose’s head hurt her horribly. She was going to cry.
“You know something,” she said, “I’m awfully tired,” and succeeded in moving her hand from Lila’s thigh.
“Well,” said Lila wistfully, “we did do tomatoes all day.”
Rose pulled herself up to look at the clock on the bedside table. “Just past three.”
“Yeah,” Lila said, her voice flat.
She knows, Rose thought. Hugely relieved, she sagged against the bed-post and closed her eyes.
“Couldn’t you just sleep here beside me?” Lila asked.
Rose opened her eyes and nodded. The least she could do was to stay the night. Lila stretched out beside her, holding herself still, as if to avoid disturbing Rose. Rose accommodated her by pretending to sleep till morning.
When Lila got up to go to the outhouse, Rose escaped to her room, grabbed her overalls, went out and flung herself down in the tall grass by the beehives at the far corner of the orchard. She woke to a dark shape looming between her and the sun—Wilma in a head net.
“Well, well,” she said. “How’s the baby lesbian?”
“What?” said Rose.
“Lila. It’s unbelievable. She’s on air. What’s the matter?”
Noah came trailing along with his smoke equipment, and Rose stag-gered up and fled to the swimming hole, stripped and washed herself, put her clothes back on, smoothed her hair, and marched to the house. As she approached, she heard Lila’s cello, playing Rose’s music, strong, ardent, more than certain, a simple lyric line rising into an anthem.