Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to have nothing keeping you attached to the ground?

She’s having a hard time right now because you’re not what she expected. But we’re never what our parents expected. They have to learn that lesson.

Here was her mother sitting down across from her, reaching for her hands and chafing them as if she were frozen. She felt the rub of her mother’s wedding ring against her skin, and her mother’s face swam into focus, her brown eyes full of the sharp worry of love, and Lily thought, You will never look at me like this again.

Are you like the girls in the book too? Because I think I am.

She wondered where Kath was. She wondered if Kath could sense her, sitting here on this train as it took her away. Perhaps it was possible, if she closed her eyes and sent out her thoughts along the steel track like a message along a telegraph wire. I love you. I love you. The train swayed gently beneath her, and she leaned against the window to feel the cool glass against her cheek, and she was sure that Kath had heard her, she was sure.

Perhaps that was the most perverse part of this: the inside-outness of everything, as if denial would make it go away, when it only made the pain in her chest tighten, when it only made her emotions clearer.

It wasn’t like chocolate, Lily thought. It was like finding water after a drought. She couldn’t drink enough, and her thirst made her ashamed, and the shame made her angry.

How am I supposed to know?” she asked instead. “What’s it supposed to be like?” Lana and Claire traded tiny smiles, and Claire asked gently, “What’s what supposed to be like?” Lily slumped back against the sofa, feeling boneless and muddled. “Falling in love, I guess.” “You’ll know,” Claire said. “It’s unmistakable.” (How she could recognize Kath at the other end of a crowded Galileo hallway by the way she walked.) “It’s like . . . well, it’s like falling,” Lana said. “Falling, or floating, or sinking.” (Every time they kissed.) “You won’t know which way is up.” “It’s like having a fever.” (The way the world seemed to narrow down to the tips of Kath’s fingers.) “It’s like being drunk—drunk for days.

Now she was confused, as if she’d been reading a book that had several pages removed, but hadn’t realized the pages were gone until this moment.

An unfamiliar emotion swelled inside her at this image. A strangely sharp pang for a place she had never visited. For a people she resembled but did not know.

The word felt dangerous, and also powerful, as if uttering it would summon someone or something

They had hugged each other quickly, and Lily realized then and there that they'd never be able to kiss goodbye in public. (A tightening in her chest as she reluctantly turned away.)

To all the butches and femmes, past, present, and future.

Perhaps one day she’d get used to the way it made her feel: dislocated and dazed, never quite certain if the other half of her would stay offstage as directed. But tonight she felt as if she were constantly on the edge of saying or doing something wrong, and the effort of keeping that unwelcome half silent was making her sick.

The hurt felt real - much more real than the entire afternoon of staying silent. So she lay on the hard wooden floor between her brothers' beds and let that ache fill her.

A few hours at home and the Telegraph Club seemed more like a fantasy than a real thing. This troubled her. It felt as if someone had taken an eraser to her memory - to her very self - and rubbed at it, then blown away the remains.

Did that mean that she had always been destined to come here? To this city and this land so far from her home?

And yet she couldn’t say the word the book had used to describe those kinds of girls: lesbian. The word felt dangerous, and also powerful, as if uttering it would summon someone or something—a policeman to arrest them for saying that word, or even worse, a real-life lesbian herself.

It wasn't Lily who was the figurine in a diorama; it was her mother. Her mother was going round and round on that track, hearing only what she wanted to hear.

She felt a queer giddiness overtaking her, as if her body might float up from the ground because she was so buoyant with this lightness, this love.

She didn't understand the shrinking feeling inside her, as if she shouldn't be caught looking at those girls.

It’s not a mistake,” Lily said miserably. Her mother strode across the kitchen and slapped her. Lily jerked backward, shocked. Her mother hadn’t hit her in years—since she was eight or nine—and she instantly felt like that child again, cowering in fear of another strike. With the terror came a crippling guilt and the belief that she must have done something awful, that she deserved this punishment.

It also revealed the naked expanse of her back, the bones of her spine like a map for someone’s fingers.

At each intersection she cast skittish glances at the women waiting for the light to change, wondering if she was one of them too, or her, or her.

She knew that what she had read in Strange Season was not only scandalous, it was perverse. She should feel dirtied by reading it; she should feel guilty for being thrilled by it. The problem was, she didn’t. She felt as if she had finally cracked the last part of a code she had been puzzling over for so long that she couldn’t remember when she had started deciphering it. She felt exhilarated.

Wake up. You are here.

The sensation of having already met someone, or what the French called deja vu, the feeling of having already seen something. There was probably a scientific explanation for it, but the older she got, the more she was inclined to give ino the the feeling that these moments were glimpses into a world greater than this physical one. It was as if there were cycles that repeated themselves over and over, but most people never saw the repetition; they were too deeply enmeshed in their own path to see.

As if summer had bloomed inside the club and wrapped her in its lazy heat

She could almost see the curve of the earth on the oceans horizon. Or she imagined that she could. And it gave her a physical sense of how far away from home she had traveled. Yes, she truly had come that far. No, she really wasn’t going home anytime soon. There was a strange sense of freedom in those thoughts. They left her free to be here, in this place, right now.