Brittle Roses
by: Dorian Gossy
*Content Warning: LGBT+ Discrimination, Depiction of Death or Illness*
It wasn’t ever a mother thing. Let me get that straight. I mean, if you’re a skinny young woman and you love an older woman with big breasts, supposedly you have a fucked-up relationship with your mother. I’ve heard that, but in my case, it’s bullshit. In fact, I have a pretty decent relationship with my mother, as long as I don’t pull dyke attitude when I go visit her. I floof out my short hair and dress in Monet colors—blurred and soft—and we talk about my brother who drives truck for a hauling company around the Southwest, or about my cousins in Florida, who all sell real estate. Mom used to like hearing about where I went with Penna when she was on tour: the glittery cities on the West Coast, England, France, once even to Sarajevo when it was still just rotting and elegant instead of shot up. Mom knew I slept with women, with
Penna, but if I ever mentioned it, she’d say, “Oh, Jane,” as if I was afflicted with a big ugly birthmark or hairy nostrils or a crippled leg.
But I’m not crippled. Besides, I know about being crippled. I’ve been up close to disease and real pain like nobody’s business. I’m an expert on painkillers, which ones are the best and work the fastest. Penna has lupus. I could be a nurse. Even though Penna had a full-time nurse for a while—a stupid former groupie, in my opinion—for a long time I was the only one Penna would tolerate near her when she was having her worst flares, when her face got puffed-up red places along her nose and under her eyes and she couldn’t even put her arm through a sleeve without help for the aching in her joints. She said the lupus made her feel rusty, and I’d joke about oiling her the way they fixed up the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. Sometimes she’d laugh, but sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes she would smile, as though remembering what it was like to laugh. I took the drugs, too, once in a while. Darvocet for pain, and Xanax for the nerves. They make your body feel like some distant relative, or like waking up from a nap when you’re a kid.
I was a cocktail waitress when I met Penna. In a small Indiana college town, where big gigs like the Indigo Girls and Lyle Lovett would blow in during midweek if they had time and felt like it between Chicago and Atlanta or Washington, DC. She was on the rise then, Penna Rae Graysender and Her Willful Wildcats, a sort of loud punk-country band with more ambition than good musical sense. Later they shortened their name—and hers—to just Penna Gray, and started turning her long poems about quirky not-quite romances between Vietnam vets and high school teachers, and things like that, into moody, funky ballads. That’s when they started to make it big. Plus Penna got more interesting. Sometimes she’d dress like a guy, hiding her body, and other times she’d put on low-cut Dolly Parton stuff. And then she’d come on to both women and men in the front-row audience. People liked that. She could be everybody’s or anybody’s. And her voice, well—Penna had the kind of voice that pushed into your other senses, a voice you tasted and felt and saw as well as heard down into your bones.
I was just twenty then, and she was forty-five, and I was finally admitting to myself that I wanted to be with women, and Ronald Reagan was a brand-new president, and being gay was still thought of as a kind of illness by a lot of people. Still, I’d read Rubyfruit Jungle. I’d made out with a few girls, though I was discovering that women could be just as fucked up about relationships as they complain men are.
But one night I served Penna and her band Bud Lites as they rehearsed for the
ir first gig in Bloomington, and at the break between sets. She scarcely looked at me—in fact, I got more attention from her wiry drummer than from her at first—but after the show, about twelve-thirty, she came up to me while I was wiping down tables. “Are those great arms from doing that?” She sat down at the table and watched my sponge go round and round.
“Sorry?” I said, politely, still the waitress. She was bigger up close, fragrant with sweat from her show. It had gone well—dance floor crowded, eager faces turned up to her, cheering, clapping, hips swaying, wet-haired heads flipping back and forth.
She bared one of her own arms and made a Popeye-style bicep. “You lift?”
It took me a minute. “Sure. I lift beers, and scotches, and cheap wine, and-”
She laughed. “I don’t suppose there’s any place in this town where you can get coffee in the middle of the night.”
“Nope.” There was a Denny’s by the state highway. “You could come over to my house,” I said, not quite sure where I was getting the nerve to say it. “I’ve got some good stuff my brother sends me from California. He thinks I’m in a cultural wilderness, where people don’t have running water or drinkable coffee.”
She had the darkest blue eyes I’d ever seen. “Got enough for the whole band?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I do.” And after she went backstage to help the band finish wrapping up, I kept finding myself smiling as I finished my shift, appreciating the strength in my skinny, ropy arms, maybe for the first time, imagining how they might appear to some onlooker. When she and the band came over, my little half-house turned into a happy place for a while. Even the woman renting the other side of the house, who often complained when I got home late and played the stereo however quietly, came over and drank coffee with us. Penna did imitations of country singers, including a version of “Achy-Breaky Heart” complete with curled lip and hip jerking, and her drummer asked my neighbor for a date. When they all got up to leave, the birds were cranking up outside in the gray light, and I didn’t feel even slightly tired.
Penna took my hand at the door and kissed me on the cheek, just a whisper from the corner of my mouth. “What do you want to do with your life?” she said, under the loud, cheerful goodbyes the rest of the band were showering on my neighbor.
“Have adventures,” I said. And then I thought about it. Was that true? There I was, art school dropout, waiting tables and growing old on second-hand cigarette smoke. Some adventurer I was.
Penna nodded, holding back a smile. “They can be arranged,” she said. She unbuckled and slipped off her watch, a green and pink Swatch. “Oops,” she said, handing it to me. “I must have misplaced my watch. Will you keep it safe until I get back?”
I put it on. The thick plastic band was still warm from her arm. “Of course, I said. “I’m sorry you’ll be missing it.”
“See you,” she said, as the bass player, a beefy guy who could have doubled as her bouncer, took her arm and hustled her away. “Miz Graysender needs her beauty rest,” he said to me.
“Thanks for having us in.” And then they were gone.
I slept the morning away, deep in the covers wearing nothing but Penna’s watch. Its patient ticking explained to me at last why people put clocks into the beds of puppies away from their moms and littermates for the first time. Anything that steady, even battery-driven, seems to match what might be perfect love.
*
Lupus is a motherfucker. Hardly anyone knows anything about it, probably because most of the people who get it are women, who seem to be less interesting to the medical world than men.
A big percentage of its victims are black women, but it doesn’t overlook aging white dykes— though you’d think both groups of people would’ve had enough to deal with in their lives.
If you’ve got it, you get red rashes on your face, and you run inexplicable fevers and jointcracking flus for weeks. Your HIV test comes back negative. Every other regular test comes back negative. After about a hundred more tests, they finally figure out you’ve got it, and if you’re lucky the drugs they give you make you go into remission. If you’re not, you can die young of heart problems or lung disease. You can’t catch it from anybody, no one can cure it, and no one really knows what causes it. When you talk to doctors about it, you think you’re in the fucking Middle Ages when medicine amounted to the belief that sinners and witches were responsible for plague.
With lupus, doctors tell you to rest. They tell you not to get excited. They give you barrels of drugs, some of which keep you up all night, requiring you also to take sleeping pills. You’re a walking medicine chest. You can lose hair, shake, and grow moon-faced from the stuff that’s supposed to help you. And you are certainly not yourself.
I didn’t hear from Penna right away after that first time I met her. Which actually was fine with me. I started thinking about the lines around her eyes, the sags in her chin. She was older than me—a lot older. She was probably old enough to be my mother. I didn’t have a thing for older guys when I was still convincing myself to go out with men, nor did I tend toward older women when I started seeing women.
But after meeting Penna, I dreamed about her body, rosy and generous like someone in a
Fragonard painting. I hadn’t even seen it, except through clothes, but there are some people whose bodies speak to you as clearly as any mouth, and your body’s paying attention even if your mind has its own stupid business. I craved her even while I was thinking, Jesus, she’s too old for you, she’s two inches shorter than you, she’s even built like your mother, etc., etc. At night, in bed by myself, though, I thought about touching her, almost chastely, on top of her clothes. I imagined her hands on me. It’s something for two women to touch each other’s breasts.
You know what your lover is feeling, because she’s making you feel it, too.
But during the day I had wars with myself about wanting to see her again. I stopped wearing the watch after about a week. It was just too weird. And when the days passed and I didn’t hear from her, I was relieved—at least my mind was relieved. The rest of me had other ideas. My body ached. I woke up stiff. I took a lot of aspirin.
Even the body’s tenacity has its limits, though. By the time I got the roses from Penna— about three weeks later—I had stopped thinking about her every half hour and just taken to wondering what might have happened with her, as if my life were over and I was reviewing it for loss and error. I’d do this after dinner on my nights off, sitting and having good wine and a cigarette in my half house with the lights dim, looking out over the Bloomington courthouse, which I could see from my living room window. Its cupola was lit up all night long, like a beacon to a night traveler returning home.
But then there were the roses—ten of them, pale orange—and a United Airlines airfare voucher to anywhere in the contiguous United States. And a note: “To a sweet bar girl with adventure on her mind. Use the travel however you want. I’m playing at the Warfield in San
Francisco June 21. Penna.” My neighbor had kept the roses in her side of the house until I got home around midnight, when she brought them to me, smiling. I guess Penna’s drummer was calling her from the road pretty frequently, keeping her up later. “He must be quite a guy,” she said of my rose-sending admirer.
“I’ve never gotten roses before,” I said. “Orange ones, look. Orange roses.” And before I had to explain anything, to tell her who the roses were really from, I quickly took them inside. I wasn’t sure if my neighbor would believe who they were from, or even if I did.
But over the next several days I cared for them as though they might grow. When they began to droop, I took them from the water and laid them on my back porch window sill, where they dried into pale, delicate crisps. I kept them a long time, tied together with a satin ribbon, their petals papery like old skin. There’s a photo of me and Penna somewhere holding the dried bouquet and each other, kissing. Along with the watch, roses was only the first of the many things she gave me.
*
They call lupus an autoimmune disease, but it’s not like AIDS. Not at all, though that’s what people think when you say “autoimmune.” In fact, what happens is instead of crapping out, your body decides to kill you. Your body fights itself instead of some virus or bacteria.
But about six months into Penna’s symptoms, even as worried as I was, I had to say that usually she looked great. In fact, though I’d heard lupus was one of the nastier diseases, I began to think maybe someone had miscalculated. Or that the contemporary version of the disease wasn’t so bad. Or that Penna, with her magnificent body, was going to fight it off, was going to be just too good for mere illness. In other words, I got hopeful. Right after they finally diagnosed her, we cried and yelled, but at least we had an enemy. Penna wasn’t touring, and she took a month-long break from recording the next album. She’d had three pretty big hits on the most recent one, so we all figured she could take a breather without any career damage.
I squeezed her fresh grapefruit juice, and massaged her every day. And when she began to feel better, we made love every day, too, the way we had when we were first together. You’d think after eight years you might not fuck the same body with so much relish, but Penna’s illness gave me new concentration. There was suddenly an extra barrier between us, and I was determined to reach her through it. Maybe I thought I could cure her by applying my love all over her like salve. Kind of a sappy idea, I know. Not to mention egotistical and unscientific. But you think this stuff when you’re crazy with love and compassion. And fear—for the one you love, and probably most of all, for yourself.
So I took a United flight to San Francisco for Penna’s show. I had a moment of wondering if I should, but it didn’t last long. I didn’t know if I should let her know I was coming, or even how I could if I wanted to. I was a little young, remember. I just went, and bought a ticket like everyone else, and sat way off to one side in the Warfield Theater, jammed to the gills with twenty year olds. I guess she and her band were catching on, at least among the university crowds on the coasts. People were screaming and jumping around like it was the Stones coming on even before the roadies finished setting up.
And then Penna strode out, in these hip-deep yellow-and-black lizard boots, black jeans, and a black V-necked western blouse cut so low you could see her gorgeous breasts crashed together like a baby’s butt. I had a physical shock down to my gut and lower, and then, with the kids screaming around me, I became a fan. I yelled and clapped and stomped just like everyone else, and Penna whipped the mike cord behind her like Tom Jones doing “She’s a Lady,” and belted out song after song in her sometimes aching, sometimes moaning, sometimes shrieking virtuoso voice. She sang some lyrics right at people in the audience, and others over their heads to the dark ceiling, to the heavens outside. I didn’t know if she’d seen me or not, but part of me hoped she hadn’t. I was afraid of seeing her up close, of finding her old again. On stage she was a child of the hour, her past the song she’d just finished and her future the next one. It was easy for me to love her when two thousand-plus people around me were loving her too.
During the break at the end of the first set, when everyone was milling in and out of the lobby, a man in an unreadable brown uniform touched my arm. “Would you mind coming with me?”
Why?” He looked like the most he might be in charge of was a bread truck. “You a cop?”
He smiled, patiently as if at the half-witted. “No, ma’am.” People were squeezing around us. He lowered his voice. “Backstage.” He flashed a photo badge. “You’re requested backstage.”
“Oh.” I said. My guts suddenly felt a little watery. “Okay.” I followed him, as meekly as if I had been arrested. I suppose, in a way, I had.
Penna was breathless and grinning when she saw me. “Clear a path!” she said to her crew, hovering over her like mechanics around a race car. The sea of them parted and a chair materialized at her side. “Hi, sweetie,” she said, cradling my chin and kissing me right on the mouth, in front of everyone. I suppose it could have been interpreted as a sisterly kiss, or just a very friendly one. But I didn’t feel it that way. “God, I’m delighted you’re here!” she said, still sounding out of breath. “Are you having fun? Aren’t these college kids a kick in the ass?”
“Say, Penna, this your daughter?” A middle-aged guy whose nubbled skin shouted deep adolescent acne swaggered in front of Penna. I assumed he was her manager, or someone else inyour-face important. It was mutual hate at first sight. Plus it would be one of many attempts by the world to read me and Penna as either a mother and a daughter, or else in some inappropriate mother-daughter derivative arrangement. Which meant that we were not only dykes but potentially incestuous dykes. I gave the guy my fiercest glare, but I also broke out in a prickly blush.
“Fuck you, Elmo,” Penna said. “This here is my friend, Jane E. Katz, flown out at considerable trouble from Bloomington, Indiana.”
Elmo squinted at me, as if putting me in focus might do me some good. Then he shook his head. “Whatever,” he said, striding away.
“Don’t mind him,” Penna ordered. “He’s a prick. But he’s a good manager, mostly.” She toweled her sweaty hair. “Look, tell Sydney to put you in one of the empty rooms set aside for me. Go get some sleep. I’ll see you later.”
“My stuffs at the Motel 6 on Van Ness.” It seemed like the last chance I’d have to turn back from Penna’s irresistible force, from the collision of our lives that I had good reason to suspect would change me forever.
She waved the half-protest away. “Tell Sydney to fix that, too.” Penna flagged down a thin blonde woman with a bouffant Fifties hairdo. “ Yo, Sydney! This is Jane. Take care of her, would you?”
Sydney took my arm as if I were the new girl in class. “Well, now, what can we do for you?”
“I’ll be singing for you, sweetie,” Penna said, her attendants helping her into her second-set attire, much butchier than her first outfit: red jeans, red shirt, black jacket and boots. She was still buttoning as they hustled her down toward the stage.
Sydney’s face was pert, ready for orders. But her skin had the leathery quality of too many years and too many cigarettes. Her orange lipstick was leaking into the wrinkles draining away from her lips. “I need a dose of sense,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“I mean, I need a bath and a drink. And my stuff from the Motel 6.”
Sydney barely heard me finish before whirling away. “Coming right up,” she said. “Follow me.” And when I did, through the labyrinth of backstage people and equipment and smoke and noise, and endless tiny rooms, it seemed that I really had left my life behind, or what life I’d so far been able to make on my own. What lay ahead had the feel of jet take-off, with a grinning daredevil in the cockpit.
*
I never thought I’d live forever. I just thought I’d feel good for a long time, and that there would always be possibilities. I knew Penna would die before me. I used to look at old people, women in their eighties, and think, that’ll be the cheek I’ll kiss when she’s eighty and I’m fiftyfive. But it’ll be Penna’s cheek, the special cheek, its flesh well into its descent away from her bones, but still hers.
What I hadn’t factored in was disease. When her flares got more frequent than the good spells in between, Penna would cough, and speak crazily out of her night fevers, and shove me away when I tried the gentlest embrace. I got out those old orange roses she’d sent me that I’d dried and put them on her nightstand, but she was so feverish and confused that at first she couldn’t remember where they were from. She’d shriek for quiet when I’d play even her favorite music, Patsy Cline and Mahler and early Elvis. The house in upstate New York we had gotten together, within walking distance of a swimming pond, was big enough for me to go elsewhere and play music, and break things and scream if I wanted to, which I did sometimes, just to hear a sound that wasn’t Penna moaning, or me talking to myself. I could see friends, but there was no one I wanted to see as much as Penna.
And Penna was full of something else, that was so possessive of her attention that I couldn’t even contract it from her, nor reach her through it anymore. She took chemo drugs they thought might help, which as you might have guessed made her throw up and drop weight like a political prisoner. On good mornings of her flares, when she had an hour or two of feeling well, she’d say, with her blue eyes wide and starvation-bright, “Teach me to draw,” and I’d try, but in the feverfilled hours following in the afternoon and night, she’d forget everything I’d taught her, and I’d have to start over again. And those were the good days. There were more days when she didn’t ask for me at all, when her nurse, a smarmy know-it-all named Frances who had every single one of Penna’s albums—tapes and CDs—fed her and bathed her, though I’d usually help. But sometimes not.
I was just under thirty. I’d think, in my most selfish moments, about possibilities, and about feeling good, the way I always had. I still had those, didn’t I? I’d cry into drapes, kick furniture.
Didn’t I? God damn the world. And God damn Penna, for getting sick. For ruining our life together. For ruining my life. For being helpless. For being mortal, after all.
The morning after I had let Sydney practically tuck me into bed in one of Penna’s reserved rooms, I was so disoriented that I worked the knock on the door into a dream about trying to get out of the locked jewelry case I used to keep on my dresser as a kid. I lay there thinking, either I had shrunk, Alice-in-Wonderland style, or the case had grown to the size of a condo, when the second knock came.
“Jane?” It was Penna. “You hungry?”
“Yeah,” I said, scrambling for my robe. “Hold on.” I’d imagined myself naked with this woman more times than I could count, but there I was, covering myself up like a fifteen-year-old suburban virgin. It was a good thing I did, after all, because when I opened the door, there was a hotel guy with a room service cart. Penna stood behind him in ordinary jeans and a t-shirt.
“Well,” she said. “You’re hungry, here’s food. Hope you don’t mind if I join you.” She shooed the hotel guy away and poured the coffee herself, her hand shaking just enough to tell me she was feeling the same crash of excitement and terror. “Here,” she said. “I remember you like it black.”
I took it. It was hot and good, but something felt strange in the room between us. Penna was watching me. My hunger for everything evaporated. Here I was, with this older woman I barely knew, who in the flesh was much more vivid and changeable than any of my fantasies, trying to dazzle me with her growing fame and wealth—for what? Did she just want a fuck-doll? And was I looking for a mommy figure?
“This is weird,” I said. The coffee bit my tongue. “I don’t mean the coffee.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “But there’s no way to get to know somebody without going through weird. And I want to know you. It’s not real complicated.”
I was seeing that loose skin on her neck again. Not terribly loose, but not firm. Forty-fiveyear-old woman skin, you know. Manifestations of age that I knew other people would see on her and not on me. “There are always complications,” I said. “I’ve dated some recently.”
She leaned forward, put her coffee down. “Jane, let’s eat breakfast. We don’t have to be lovers, now or ever. Maybe you have a nice breakfast with me and fly home this afternoon. Fine.
Truly—that’s fine. We will both have had our adventure, and that will be that. But let’s just get as far as toast, okay?” She took the silver cover off one of the plates.
“You think I’m some scared little girl, don’t you?”
“I’m a scared little girl, too, you know.”
So we ate our fancy eggs, and talked, and she asked me all about art school and why I had given it up, and about my mother, and about how my father lived in Portland, and how I used to ride horses, and about the LA. punk bands like X that I listened to. Penna told me how she was married for a while, and her ex sometimes came to her shows, and about her son was a teenager with musical ambitions of his own, and how she loved to swim, especially in mountain ponds.
By the time we finished everything on the tray, me even eating the parsley, our stories had eased the space between us, making it seem natural for me to dress and for the two of us to go walking along the San Francisco Marina, marveling at the kite-flyers on the grass and the overpriced souvenirs for sale on the street-vendors tables, feeling the fog-wet bay breeze in our hair, and the intermittent sun on our necks.
And when we got back to the hotel, we shook off our clothes and slid against each other in bed for some hours, trying things we’d tried before, or that others had tried on us, and all of it feeling like creation, or going over waterfalls. It’s mostly a sweet blur now, but what’s still with me is that first mirroring of our bodies, nipple kissing nipple, hip to luscious hip.
*
After months of almost constant illness, Penna was suddenly struck with a respite. No fevers, no aches, no coughs, and only faint scars from the rash remained on her face, like skid marks left by a heavy vehicle. But instead of wanting to get back in the studio and get rid of that fawning nurse, Penna decided she was going to cure her lupus. She and Frances the Nurse went to several new doctors, reached the limit of their help, and then went on to Chinese herbalists, chiropractors, and homeopaths. The homeopath gave Penna a slew of little white-pill remedies to take, forbade her from garlic and onions, and recommended she eat macrobiotic. She had chiropractic adjustments. And she got bags of herbal stuff for Frances to brew for her that looked to me like lawn clippings, the pot liquor of which Penna was supposed to drink. She did it all, with studied obedience. She ate burdock root. She went to meditation groups with Frances, and the Chinese herbalist came over every week with Penna’s weedy prescription. She seemed happier than I’d seen her since she and I first got together, or probably I was flattering myself.
Maybe she was happier now. I must have been expecting a medal, for patience, for forbearance.
Some kind of acknowledgement for what I’d done, special, wonderful me, in making Penna better—as if I had. It’s the only way I can explain how hard I criticized all the health regimes she brought home. I even started smoking again. I suppose being good for so long made me crack bad.
“You idiot,” Penna said when she got a whiff of the smoke on my breath. “I don’t even want to get near you when you smell like that.”
“Your loss, lady,” I said. “You are what you eat, right? So I’d rather be burned tobacco than the heap of yard waste you’re turning into.”
She whipped over to me faster than I’d seen her move in months and backhanded me right across the face. “Shut the fuck up.”
I grabbed her wrists, which had grown thin over the months and years now of illness, and fought a terrible urge to throw her against the wall. I don’t know what stopped me. “Bitch,” I said. “You old bitch.”
She jerked her wrists away from me with surprising strength and burst into explosive tears.
“Get away from me,” she said, running away herself, into the room that used to be her practice room but more recently was her sickroom, where Frances the Nurse got Penna through her worst nights. Penna slammed the door behind her and locked it. I followed her and put my face to the door that hid her from me, breathing the faint draft that came through the crack. I could hear the beep-beep-beep of the phone, and Penna’s shaky voice say, “Frances?” At that I kicked the door with all my strength. Later when my foot swelled I drove myself to the doctor for repair to the bones I broke. Penna and Frances were murmuring behind the locked door when I got back, hobbling as quietly as I could with the crutches the hospital gave me. Even I got the irony of Penna whispering like a girl behind doors and me the feeble one, stumping around like an old woman just minutes from the grave.
*
The histories get harder to keep separate. Disease twines itself around life. After my visit to that show in San Francisco, Penna asked me to come with her on tour, and I did. For a while I kept my half house in Bloomington, in case things didn’t work out, but as the months went by the sense of home drained out of that place, and even if I hadn’t stayed with Penna I wouldn’t have gone back. So I moved out of the house, got rid of most of my stuff, saved what was worth saving in storage. Like those brittle roses. And the green-and-pink Swatch, which I secreted away, wanting to confine my memories of it to that magical first night. I didn’t want it to acquire use, to wear down, to scuff.
And Penna and I went everywhere, as she got more famous and commanded bigger crowds.
We hung out with a lot of rock stars you’ve heard of and some you probably haven’t, and went to every major American city and a whole lot of the minor ones. She convinced me to quit smoking and got me drawing and painting again, ordering paper and expensive inks and oils for me without my asking. And yes, she paid for everything, but while she was rehearsing, I’d go off and make art. It got to be my work again, like it used to be, before I lost hope that someone like me would ever be good at anything. I know—that sounds self-pitying, and it is. But when you’re queer in this world you can’t help but visit some of the world’s distaste for you on yourself. Even if you’re a decent queer. A law-abiding, hard-working, faithful queer.
Mostly faithful, anyway. I loved Penna every single second even while I was sleeping with the smart, beautiful roadie with the crew that assembled Penna’s band all over the U.S. and Canada. Her name was Laney, and she was about my age and even looked like me a little, wiry and tall. We’d been sort of flirty friends until after Penna and I had our big fight, after which Penna spent a lot of time with Frances locked up in her room.
Laney helped me get around as my broken foot was healing, and it wasn’t long before we wound up in bed. But she was smart enough to dislike being my sedative for missing Penna, no matter how great the sex. After several weeks she stopped phoning, and made herself hard to reach. After trying for the tenth time to get Laney, it finally dawned on me that she was dumping me in self-preservation, and I sat down in the unused rooms of the house where I had my studio and thought about running away, or killing myself. Or both, in that order.
I stripped the pictures from the walls, on which I squeezed out all my expensive paints, smearing them into muddy streaks that looked like real shit. I took off my clothes and painted myself, smudging the walls with my tits, with my butt, and wrists and elbows and face. I mixed glue and paint and broken glass with a big palette knife and spread it over the windows. I sneaked into Penna’s empty room and got those dried-up roses, which I crushed and stuck onto the wall with the glue and glass. Dimly I wondered if this crazed pleasure was what axemurderers felt when they went to work with their axes.
When it was done I took a careful shower, packed a couple of my decent outfits, and put the suitcase in my car, the car Penna had bought for me. I’d pay her back for it sometime. In the hallway mirror I was ten years older than the bar girl I used to be, but I could still wait tables, probably. Somewhere. New York City. Philadelphia. I looked around for paper to write a note.
The sound of Penna’s thick, frightening cough told me she was just around the corner in the living room. And then she came into the hallway, and stood there facing me. She looked terrible.
Her whole face was puffy, as if she’d gotten a bee sting in the middle of it. The red patches across her nose and under her eyes were shiny and raised, like burn scars. I hadn’t seen her up close in almost a month. I drew back from her without thinking like she was some leprous stranger.
I’m leaving, was all I could think to say, but I did not say it. Instead I stood there and stared at her. She stared back, and from the clench of her jaw I could tell she was aching all over, that it even hurt to stand.
“I hate myself,” she said. “God, how I hate myself.”
Something inside my chest fell off its shelf. I’d hated myself, too. It’s what her love fixed, for a time. When I made the promises and gave my body, I’d gotten myself back, beloved in return, rejuvenated. But I couldn’t fix her. Period. Maybe that’s why I most wanted to get away: to spare myself from my own helplessness.
Later I would see her even weaker, and more frail. I would understand that progression in a progressive illness means change, not good change, and no going back. But right then she froze for me, this beautiful, withered person I loved so much that the surfeit of it made my stomach cramp. Whether I stayed or left, I would lose her, and all that I’d have then would be the mountain of her absence to fit inside me. The only way in the world I figured I could get big enough for it was to keep loving her, to love us and the brokenness that was coming for us.
“I can’t leave,” I said.
“You probably should,” she said. But she didn’t move when I went to her and put my arms around her, and felt how feverish she was, and how tender and familiar. We stood there a while, weeping and swaying softly, until I could feel her weakening, and I held her up as we made our way back to her bed. But at the door to the master bedroom she stopped and said, “Let’s go in there,” where we hadn’t been in so long, and we did. I undressed her and then myself, we got into bed and lay there, and held each other, and slept.
So I stayed, and Penna fired Frances the Nurse. When Penna saw what I had done to my studio, she declared it genius and forbade me from cleaning it up. I’m not so sure about the genius part, but I look at it sometimes, and its naked chaos comforts me. Funny—what I most like about it is that I still have those roses, even though now they’re practically unrecognizable.
Lately Penna’s been in and out of the hospital, fighting a lung illness they’re calling acute lupus pneumonitis. She might go into remission again, but if she doesn’t, she’ll probably die.
We’ve talked about that, as best we can talk about anything, with Penna’s breath so short. She wants me to keep drawing, and plans to leave me some money so I can go back to art school. I agreed just to get her to stop talking about it. Her son’s around a lot now, helping out, and he’s great. My mother, amazingly enough, came for a visit. She was great, too, even if funny and awkward. My brother sent Penna coffee when he heard how she liked it those years ago. Everything contracts a little, for a death, as if we all have to huddle and connect before we can let go of the sick one in our midst. And after she’s gone I’ll do something, and keep living. I can’t even imagine how, at this point, but maybe it’ll be like painting. You get an idea, sketch it out a little, and hope something takes shape.
About the Author
Dorian Gossy, author of Household Lies (2005) was the recipient of the 2004 First Book Award in Fiction from Winnow Press. Her fiction has appeared in over a dozen literary magazines & journals, including Daedalus, North American Review, Other Voices, Denver Quarterly, & The Sun. She has received fellowships from The Ragdale Foundation, the Indiana Arts Commission, & The Mary Anderson Center for the Arts. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in fiction & a Master of Social Work degree from Indiana University. She lives & works in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State with a poet & a rowdy dog.