LILY

When Francesca Gold was only sixteen her father whose name was Asha Gold and who was a poet found a poem she had written in the tradition of her father the Yiddish poet. Francesca was the second generation of Yiddish anarchists in New York. She was a Goldman Baby that’s what they called the children of the Yiddish anarchists: a Goldman Baby. The poem read

Fucking girls Oh amerika

Is the greatest freedom yet

Did my people know

Such a freedom we’d beget?

MOTHER RUSSIA she called me

Every time I kissed her

Now I know that girls aren’t just

Your mother or your sister.

Her father brushed his last flop of hair back from his forehead and left his hand there. Oh Francesca, he said. That night Asha went to the bar, his hand still on his forehead. “Oh Saul I have a new burden.” It was Oh everything, Oh America, Oh Saul, Oh Francesca, Oh boy Oh boy it was easy to be a poet when your natural inclination was for everything to start with a great unburdening Oh. It made everything erotic for Francesca from an early age, every exclamation, every newly released round cereal, every doughnut, every other poem, every prayer though she grew up without them and her own voice at a certain point said Oh. “Oh Saul I have a new burden” “What burden Asha? Come, take your hand off your forehead” and Saul reached round to his friend and pulled at his wrist and Asha’s hand fell into his lap, upwards and open as if he held something very heavy. “I have found something other than the oppression of man that I cannot tolerate, that I cannot live with, that I know in my heart, as surely as I know I cannot condone anything but freedom, that I will never accept.” Asha pushed his shirt sleeves further up his arms. The last of his hair flopped in his eyes as he hung his head. He was a good man. He was an anarchist who had known the support of so many people without question or condition and given freely his time, his money, his care in return. They had done it because they were building a new society, one without law and therefore based solely on trust, one where each man was free to act as each man wished to act so long as the actions of no man impinged upon the actions of no other man’s. It was a riddle he loved, one he had devoted his life to solving. He walked home in the dark hoping someone would jump him and he could punch and grab at them. It’d been such a long time since he’d fought. He wanted to kick his legs and twist to feel the resistance he had always spoken of to feel it really pulling at you and you really tugging at it. He was a lean man, a twisty kind of wiggly man. Slippery and soft like an otter. Asha never spoke to Frankie about the poem he found, or about how one Friday night he watched as she kissed Daniel’s daughter Lily goodbye. He had thought it looked like a wonderful kiss, that Francesca had looked exactly like a man and Lily exactly like a woman, though neither of them were either, not to him. They had looked like movie stars, Asha thought, kissing like that.

[A Friday Night in the Past: Yiddish Anarchist Teenagers in Love] At thirteen Jews turn into men but if you do not intend to become a man then you have to choose an age at which to become something else. At sixteen Lily thought she would like to a be a woman. Lily knew that she was living in a man’s world: all of the lightbulbs lemonade letterpresses envelopes lion’s dens hotel lobbies liquor licorice liberty life all of it Lily understood would be forfeited and she dropped it with glee like luggage she didn’t need to carry anymore because she had arrived [Thunk] Lily left it all behind and imagined a future with Frankie. They’d imagined futures, of course, since they were children they had sat in anarchist groups imagining futures, living in the hope that very soon the pot will boil over, as they say, the sun will rise and everything become bright and they will all roll up their sleeves and get to work to turn the world upside down yes! Yes! Yes! Yeah Lily had heard about the future, but she’d chosen her own, the way children do. She had chosen a future with a capital F. Frankie’s Fridays were for Friday meetings. On Fridays Frankie’s family and friends packed into living rooms listening (with Lily) to speakers from Philadelphia to France quoting Fourier on “the four affective passions tending to form the four groups of friendship.” On Fridays Frankie rolled her sleeves up ready and kept her cigarettes in her back pocket and her lighter in her top pocket and her pencil behind her ear like everybody else. But more and more Frankie and Lily left early. In Lily’s bedroom Frankie fidgets on the bed feeling guilty for spending her Friday night with only Lily. Though it never felt so different to Frankie to be alone with Lily than it felt to be waiting with the rest of them in the living room for the pot to overflow. Frankie and Lily had spent their Fridays at meetings forever “Our whole lives” Lily said “don’t you think we could skip one?” Frankie undid her top button and rolled up her sleeves. Lily took the lighter from her top pocket and lit a cigarette. Among other things, Frankie and Lily had fallen in love. “We’re Goldman Babies” Frankie said “You more than me” “Me?” “Yeah you, you’re a real revolutionary” and Lily tweaked the peak of Frankie’s cap and brushed down her collar “not like me. Frankie Gold the Goldman Baby” Lily said, a little jet plane slipping out from between her lips and skywriting in pink steam Frankie Gold the Goldman Baby spelled out in the air, the steam settling over their heads, turning to grey and coming away from itself like meat off a bone. “How dyu get to be such a boy anyway?” Lily ran her finger along Frankie’s jaw and rested it in the dip of her chin “The trick’s to slick your hair back instead of forward” Frankie said “It only makes me look like a ballerina to slick my hair back, it makes you look like Sal Marino” “He’s Italian” Lily shrugged “So” she said “we’re all from somewhere.” Lying with her head in Lily’s lap Frankie opened her mouth and Lily put her fist inside it “You messin with my gal, buster?” she said and through Lily’s fist Frankie sounded “Nuh-uh” “Keep your hands off my Lilian, or I’ll serve you up my finest fist sandwich, Frankie Gold.” When Frankie was with Lily her clothes fit right and her arms swung and slung their jacket over their shoulder and her smart shoes walked about. I have often walked down this street before but the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before all at once am I several stories high knowing I’m on the street where you live. Asha had spent all the rest of his life after the death of his wife still loving her. He spoke about her like a fine dinner he had been eating continuously up until the point of her death. He didn’t lose his spirit, he didn’t stop living because she did, he simply kept loving her as if she were alive, didn’t shift to a dead kind of love it was always an alive sort even though there wasn’t anything there to love and that’s how Frankie had learnt to love, the way a man loves a dead woman, or an anarchist loves anarchism. The way perfect things are perfect. At sixteen Frankie and Lillian were alive for one another. “Let’s not say we’ll die for anything” Lily falls into Frankie’s arms “for the cause or for each other, let’s say we will live for it. For it all and most of all for each other.” But when Frankie left, Lily didn’t go. For Frankie the bars were a natural progression from the living room floors of their childhood among the comrades of their fathers. At the bar Frankie still rolled her sleeves up ready and kept her cigarettes in her back pocket and her lighter in her top pocket and her pencil behind her ear only now she did it how a butch does it, not how an anarchist does. “Some scene” Lily huffed. She didn’t want the same, not the same as Frankie and not the same as before. It was Sammy who went with, Frankie Gold’s own Sammy Silver who’d had her own anarchist father and sat on the carpet with Lily and Frankie on Friday nights. Whose parents had eaten dinners together and left them to play and to write their own childish anarchist papers, that same Sammy who’d tried to kiss Frankie just to try it when they were only kids, younger than ten and who’d grown up to be a similar shape to Frankie, and Sam had idolized Frankie and Frankie loved Sam. And now, ladies and gentlemen: Sammy Silver and Frankie Gold.

[A Friday Night in the Here and Now] Frankie leant forward onto the deli table. “He thought I was anathema, he couldn’t believe it” “Believe it?” Sid asked. “Believe it!” Frankie said. “My father believed it alright” said Roz “in a you better believe it kinda way.” Frankie’s shaking her head. “He just” shake “he couldn’t even conceive of it, a poet! He couldn’t imagine it!” slaps the palm of her hand on the table with the coffee cups “belief? What a worm” slam, her hand with the coffee and the ashtray and the sugar pot together, a group of things. “He’s the unbelievable one Frank” Sid said “you don’t need him” “Need him?” Frankie fell back into her seat, winded “I—I’m—” Need him? she thought of all the other things she needed and tried to put her father in a list with them—a new pair of shoes, a loaf of bread. Frankie could cry. Sammy said something to stop her and Sid liked the sound of it because it sounded like it was drawing something to a close. Sid wanted to get going. Not just now all the time. Sid was hoping they’d be invited back to Sam and Frankie’s and that Frankie would sing. She loved it when Frankie sang. Not because it was Frankie but because it was singing. Sid Stein wasn’t a musician, couldn’t hold a tune but loved music like like like women. Sid Stein had a gentle double chin and very dark hair which was thick and curly and short and greased through slick and shiny. She wore a black t shirt and a black denim jacket and black jeans and her gentle double chin looked like the gentle tits she bundled into her clothes every day like they were feet in her shoes. Sid Stein had come from Jersey from a small enclave of Polish Jews there and she had not grown up an anarchist but a Zionist whose family had missed the boat and so ended up to her mother’s dismay in New Jersey. “At least we’re not dead” her father would say, and her mother would slam about and cling and clang and say “I’d rather a pogrom!” in her thick Polish voice, with the stress on the “grom” saying the word like a sneeze ha-choo or po-grom. Sid Stein had a full lower lip and her mouth hung slightly open from the weight of it. Sid had stuffed her crotch with socks since she could remember. She didn’t remember conceiving of the idea just remembered seeing socks and wanting to stuff them in her pants. She still stuffed her crotch, with all different stuff depending on who she was seeing and where she was going and whether she hoped to take her pants off in front them. And then made sure she balled up expensive or at least clean socks. Sid worked in a hot dog factory between Jersey and the city and lived at home with her mother and father but was hardly there. The factory made two types of franks, kosher franks and regular. Both were just beef and beef parts but at the end of one production line a rabbi came to bless the jars and on the other line the franks just went on their way unblessed. Straight to hell. “We don’t believe in hell, Gloria” her father would say, quietly, as her mother crashed about “Well whaddaya call this?” she’d yell back at him “I’d rather—” “I know, I know” her father would say “the pogrom.” So little Sid Stein with her stuffed socked crotch went out into Jersey from a young age and kissed girls under the boardwalk. “Are we gonna get going?” Sid said. She wished she’d ended up with the meatheads instead of the anarchists who were always thinking and discussing, even when they joined in the bar brawls they’d be discussing it at one end or the other sometimes whilst it was happening yadda yadda yadda Sid’d rather the meat-heads. They hardly spoke but you could tell they had big ideas or why’d they be in the bars? It’s not that Sid didn’t believe in anarchy, Sid did. Sid believed in anarchy. Anarchism was the second greatest thing she’d learnt about in her whole life. Frankie’d taught her about anarchism, she didn’t know she was an anarchist until she met Frankie, she’d thought she was only a Jew. Only it was that Sid wasn’t a thinker she was a doer! And anarchism allowed for that, in anarchism they called it “the deed” which Sid sniggered at because that’s what her mother called sex when she sat her down to talk about it. “Don’t let me catch you doing the deed” she’d said, but Sid hadn’t listened. The deed was what Sid lived for. You needed to find stuff to live for when you were butch. That was something Sid had thought a little about. Because there wasn’t anything. Nothing laid out, really, not like you were a hot dog who was meant for a jar or even a bun, being butch wasn’t like that. It was the deed Sid did! Sid did a lot of doing as much doing as she could (do). Sid was a good anarchist. Sid’d left the house wearing double layers of socks and then when the coast was clear had slipped off her shoes and one layer of socks and balled them together and slipped them down into her underwear. Sid was a kid then and a kid now. She’d picked up her first girl at thirteen years old which is the perfect time for a girl to pick up a girl if Sid was a girl which she didn’t give two fucks about. Frankie read aloud to her sat in her apartment, “Come round Sid I’ll read you it over dinner.” And Sid’d bring her a jar of hot dogs, the kosher ones just out of habit and the jar’d sit on the side until the next time she was round. “For the revolution” she’d say, as she handed them over. It was a Kropotkin joke, she was very proud of that, and Frankie’d give her a smile. Frankie’d be wearing slippers and her coat with its collar up because it was winter and her apartment was freezing cold and maybe Sammy’d come home. Hi Sidney, Hey Sam. Sammy in a light denim jacket and light denim jeans and a cream-colored shirt and a big flop of her hair in her eyes with her head hung forward so it never wasn’t. Frankie’d stood in front of Sammy a bunch of times acting like a mirror “How’d I look?” she’d asked and Frankie would move her hair a little to the left and tug at her jacket a little to square it just right. And Sammy had done the same “How’d I look?” Frankie’d asked and Sammy would say “Like a slouch.” “For the revolution” Sid said, putting the jar on the counter. “When comes the revolution and how will it announce its coming?” Frankie said, using her arms. “Should have called it ‘The Conquest of the Hot Dog Factory’ then I’m your guy” Frankie clapped her hand on Sid’s shoulder and showed her to a seat. “It can be the conquest of the hot dog factory Sid” “I’m working on it” “Yeah? Yeah how’s it going over there, are the boys listening to you?” “The boys? No” “The bosses?” “Even less” “You have to make your voice heard in that union Sidney” said Frankie. “Yes boss” said Sid. Anyway when she was thirteen she’d been sitting on the edge of the pier one night when it was warm with her shoes off and she’d seen a bunch of girls below her on the beach, the girls must have been older because from there Sid could see right down their shirts and Sid didn’t have tits yet, just a sweet little belly and puppy bulges at her biceps which she could tense and turn into muscles. She was wearing blue jeans and a t shirt her dad had bought her on a trip to Coney Island which said papa loves you on it. Her hair was long and thick and black down to her shoulders and she pushed it back behind her ears and stuck a baseball cap over the top of it, she looked like a wise guy. But a Jewish one, with light skin almost blue even in summer with her big lip hanging down. She let a pebble drop into the group of girls and they looked up. Hey! And she laughed and the girls acted like they were mad, who me? she said standing up pointing at her chest acting all what’s the big idea. She’d caught the eye especially of this Irish looking girl, or something different, she didn’t know what people looked like whatever, she wasn’t a Jew she knew that. Took a swagger down to where the girls were. “Hey you, you always throw stones?” “Only at pretty girls.” And that was it. In the dark on the beach under the pier Sid had pushed her sock-stuffed crotch into the thigh of that Irish girl or whatever and she’d kissed her and kissed her and kissed her. The deed. That was what Sid Stein thought about. Frequently Sid imagined lobbing jars of hot dogs like baseballs across the factory at the foreman’s head and jumping up onto the conveyor belt her hands on her hips and her legs apart grabbing the foreman by the collar and dragging him round slowly but not slowly enough like the pace of the conveyor belt which never let you relax just kept you going shooting past and saying: “Are you kosher Stanley?” And he’d squeal “What! what get the fuck off me” and wriggle but her hand’d be on his collar and he’d be pulled along still as she made her way round and round the factory on the belt “I can’t hear you Stanley but you better be kosher or we can’t can you here, not on this belt so I’ll ask again Stan are you blessable or what? Is the good rabbi here gonna be able to bless the filth off you or are you too filthy for that Stanley? You better not be or we ain’t gonna be able to can you here boss not on this belt” “I am I am!” Stan would cry.