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  halfway there

  My Lesbian Life at Middle Age

  Aubrie Elliot

  Copyright © 2015 by Aubrie Elliot

  All rights reserved.

  2nd. Edition

  Published by Walrus Publishing

  an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group

  Publisher’s Note: This book is a work of the imagination. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. While some of the characters and incidents portrayed here can be found in historical accounts, they have been altered and rearranged by the author to suit the strict purposes of storytelling. The book should be read solely as a work of fiction.

  Produced in the United States of America.

  For information contact Walrus Publishing

  4168 Hartford Street, Saint Louis, MO 63116.

  www.walruspublishing.com

  www.amphoraepublishing.com

  ISBN: 9781940442082

  halfway there

  1

  Friday Night

  Friday night television sucks. Yet I persist, and with optimism born of obstinacy, I turn on the television and flip through the fifty or so channels we actually pay to have the cable company provide. I emphasize the word pay because on Friday nights it is absolutely amazing to me that we pay good money for such bad programming. Still, I try again and again to find anything that will keep me entertained while I lounge on the couch trying to unwind.

  After about an hour or so of sore disappointment, I decided I’d had enough. I clicked off the television and stared at my cat. He stared back. The culmination of our cat-human mind meld was that he wanted to know was whether or not I was going to get him a kitty treat. Michael is a loving little creature, but at heart he’s only out for himself. I stroked his head and scratched his ears to which he responded with a satisfied little purr. The kitty treat could wait as long as active ear-scratching was in progress. It was nice, but not quite what I had in mind for the evening’s entertainment. Spending the night alone in a darkening room petting my cat was not really doing it for me. It had been a long week of meetings, reports, and little progress on my current project. I needed a distraction.

  It wasn’t that I was lonely. No, it certainly couldn’t be that. My girlfriend is often gone over the weekends. She’s a pilot, so I’m used to being alone. In fact, she and I pretty much agree that the success of our relationship is owed in part to her being away three to four nights a week. No matter how well this arrangement works, there are still times when the four walls of our den get on my nerves. When this happens, no amount of bad television, books, drinks, or cigarettes helps. There was only one answer. I needed out of the house.

  I hadn’t had dinner yet, so a vision of a big fat burger beside thick-cut fries loomed large. I knew damned good and well I shouldn’t even be thinking about a burger. It was food like that, as well as my beloved three or four scotches a night, which was responsible for the forty or so pounds I had gained since my twenties. Sometimes, though, rational thinking doesn’t amount to more than “Well, shit, just this one time won’t matter that much. After all, anything in moderation—including moderation—can’t hurt you.”

  With my conscience appeased for the moment, I got up from the couch and dressed. I wasn’t so depressed, thank God, that I thought it was okay to go out in flannel pajama bottoms, a tee shirt, and slippers. Instead, I put on a pair of jeans, a tee shirt, and my Børns, grabbed my wallet and went out the door.

  As I drove down the street, I thought about my little corner of the world. Saint Louis is a great town. Each neighborhood has its own special character. There’s “The Hill,” known for its Italian heritage, not to mention (but I will) food that makes your mouth water just thinking about it. There’s Soulard, known for its nineteenth-century homes, architecture, and the last vestiges of Saint Louis’s French heritage. Then there’s Lafayette Square, the place the Anheuser-Busch clan, the Lemps, and the Lacledes once called home, where the houses are grand testaments to bygone glory. I don’t live in any of those places.

  I live in Tower Grove South, the neighborhood known within some circles as “Dyke Heights.” When Saint Louis was a focal point of intellect and culture a hundred years ago or thereabouts, my neighborhood housed the businessmen and professionals who made the city run. After years of decline, it’s finally seeing a comeback. Gone are the crack houses, abandoned buildings, and roaming gangster kids. Now these blocks of brick and wood homes are filled with people of varied ethnic and social background and sexual preference. We have the two gay boys next door, a mixed-race couple down the street, a few drug dealers at the end of the block, and, so on. No, I don’t know everyone on my block, but the ones I do know are good folks, and I’m glad they’re my neighbors. They, however, were not what I wanted on this Friday night. I wanted the smell of stale beer, the beat of loud music, and the sound of feminine voices. There was only one place to go to get all that and a burger, too. I had to go to another neighborhood that, as in most cities, is in the seedier part of town.

  I drove down Grand Avenue to Vandeventer and then past Sarah Street to get to the esteemed establishment called Novak’s. Those who live around here will tell you I took the long way, but it’s the way I know. The houses and buildings surrounding this little place are, to say the least, a bit shabby, and as brave as I think I am, “The Grove” is not an area I feel comfortable in at night, but the burger was calling, and I was willing to risk it.

  Parking was easy to find because any time before nine pm is too damned early for the usual crowd. I slid my little car into a slot by the door and went inside. The air was cool. The room shadowed. Pickup joints should never, ever be well-lighted. I took a seat at the bar and waited for the bartender to look my way. I wasn’t in a hurry. She was at the other end of the long counter talking to a group of girls. God, she was young, I found myself thinking as I admired how her tan arms complemented her orange tank top which itself rested atop well developed, muscular shoulders. She had light brown hair that curled in all the right places. I ran my fingers through my own straight hair and wondered for a brief moment what her curls might feel like between my fingers. I shook my head. Those kinds of thoughts only led to trouble. As if she read my mind, she turned and caught my eye. I raised my hand to indicate I wanted to place an order.

  She sauntered over, as if I even know what a true saunter looks like. “What would you like?” she asked, with practiced ease as she handed me a laminated menu that had seen better days.

  I looked it over. This was pure form of course, because I already knew what I wanted.

  “Let me have a ‘Novak’ burger with a side of steak fries and a beer, please.”

  “Sure,” she said with a nod, handing me a stupid plastic flower so she could remember where to drop off my order. I looked at the flower. It was droopy, as if it too had seen better days. I told myself that the droopy daisy did not reflect her impression of me.

  When she came back with an ice-cold beer in a large frosty mug, I put my thoughts aside and took a long, satisfying mouthful. Drinking gave me something to do besides gawking at her or the other customers, but this pastime was a limited refuge. I knew eventually I would have to set down the beer and simply and awkwardly wait. By myself. Alone.

  It wasn’t so long ago that being in a bar alone was a major social no-no. It simply wasn’t done. Sitting at the bar or even at a table drinking by oneself was a sure sign of an alcoholic or, worse yet, a lecher. Surely those days were far behind me. Hell, I knew who I was. I could sit down anywhere I wanted and have a beer. It didn’t matter if I had an entourage with me or not, damn it. I’m comfortable with who I am, and I’m perfectly comfortable sitting by myself. I picked up my mug again.
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  The music in the bar was low and slow. I didn’t recognize the song. I was glad it wasn’t mind-numbing rap that had become so popular. I listened to the singer’s voice and reminisced. Years ago, in my college days, I lived in Baltimore, just down the street from the “Hippo,” a rather popular hangout. On the weekends, after not studying, my friends and I would go there to play pool or dance or occasionally play the girlfriend switch. Before we graduated, we’d mixed and matched couples so often we figured all of us had slept together at one time or another. Frankly, that seemed to be the reason we were anxious to leave and “get on with our lives”—too much history.

  My order showed up. I opened the bun and, with a silent prayer to the goddess of blood pressure to ignore my indulgence, salted the burger liberally. I wondered what had happened to the girls of my youth. One had gotten married—yes, to a man. We all laughed about that and figured she’d turn him eventually. One is a teacher. Another went back home to Ohio. She and I keep in touch to this day. We even tease each other about who’s been together with whom the longest. She wins, but only on a technicality. The third went her own way after a nasty breakup. I don’t know where she ended up. Fact is, we all did get on with our lives. I bit into my burger and let the juice run down my chin.

  “Want another beer?” the tanned bartender asked.

  “Sure, thanks,” I responded. At least she hadn’t waited for me to ask. That was nice.

  The song changed again. Another tune I didn’t know. Which isn’t surprising. It’s my curse to love folk music and yet to be blissfully unaware of any singers or groups except of course for Mary Chapin Carpenter, but I wasn’t even able to remember her name until I was in my thirties.

  When my second beer came, I realized I’d been watching the girls on the dance floor and the girls at the tables beside it. Laughing, talking, daring each other to do Jell-O shots or something. From what I could see, the libations were bright-colored and most likely deadly. In the old days, back at the Hippo, the shots came in long plastic tubes. They were colored by the same stuff that made chemical lights glow, whatever that was. We would suck at the tubes until the last drop was gone and then waggle our tongues at each other daring someone to “have a lick.”

  God knows what those concoctions did to us. I suppose they weren’t as bad as the poppers that went around with equal frequency. Even if they were, it wouldn’t have mattered. We were going to live forever. For us, it was all about who was sleeping with whom, how good or awful it was, and where the parties were. If we even talked about school, I don’t remember it.

  Denise was my girlfriend through much of that time. She wasn’t part of the crowd, which was okay with me because I preferred “older” dykes. As I recall, she was thirty to my twenty-one, or so. I would love to tell you she was attractive, but I would be lying. She was short, stocky, and a bit rough around the edges. She worked as a waitress at Chi-Chi’s.

  Denise didn’t seem too put off by my youth. Maybe that was the attraction. She loved to tell me stories about her crush on Billie Jean King. Hell, she’d even saved the newspaper articles about Billie’s palimony suit. She had the hots for Billie much like I had the hots for Martina several years later. Those crushes were really all we had in common. Denise came of age in a world of protest, war, and hope. I came of age in a world of money, indulgence, and arrogance. It was never going to last long.

  We didn’t talk much. Mostly we went to parties, drank, and had sex. One of the last times we were together was at a party in D.C. We had gone to a Beach Boys concert and ended up on the roof of a friend’s apartment building. At some point, Denise convinced me it would be a good idea to climb out on the ledge of the building to hear the end of the concert. I must have been drunk because I did just that. Underneath the stars, we sat on this three-foot shelf about ten stories up and listened to aging rockers sing about endless summer days. It was pretty wonderful.

  Later that night, we helped throw a woman into the rooftop swimming pool. God, did she put up a fight. She fought all the way, screaming obscenities no one really heard because we were all laughin so hard. She hit the water and sank. We watched as she clawed her way to the surface, coming up spitting and cursing. She was beyond pissed because she had been carrying a gram of coke. After we heard that, some folks wanted to figure out how to drain the pool and snort the residue. Diehards.

  “You’re pretty quiet down here. Do you want another one?” The hot little bartender broke into my thoughts.

  “Sure, I’ll take another one.”

  “Fuck,” I thought looking at her ass as she walked away, “you probably weren’t even imagining your first zit back then.” That realization hit me pretty hard. I looked back toward the dance floor and took another bite from my burger.

  A woman with purple hair cut short around her ears and pointed in spikes toward the ceiling had just started to dance. Her arms were covered with tattoos. Actually, it was the tattoo craze that announced my entrance into middle age. I didn’t get it. Why in hell would you tattoo a picture on your body that would be there forever? What would it look like in ten years? What if you changed your mind and decided a dragon coming out of your underwear didn’t do it for you anymore? What then? It was easier for me to understand my sister wearing maternity thongs than it was for me to understand “body art.”

  Obviously Purple Hair wasn’t my type. What was I looking for anyway? I was happy, wasn’t I? I had a lover, and we’d been together for more than fifteen years. I’d made it. What did these kids know? She looked over my way and flashed a smile. Her teeth were white and straight. She flipped her head back, completely abandoning herself to the music. I could imagine blue eyes beneath half-closed lids as she bounced the other way in time to the beat.

  It didn’t seem so long ago that I was on the dance floor in a tight pair of painted jeans, flipping my huge perm to Laura Branigan crooning overhead while Denise ground her hips into mine. Sometimes as we danced, I looked at the people sitting at the bar. Once a woman smiled at me through the sparkling disco lights. I remember it so clearly because the lights made her silver hair almost glow like a halo. I laughed and whispered in Denise’s ear, and we spun back around. In that instant I had been so sure I would never have wrinkles, wide hips, or white hair, and I certainly would never be at a bar looking at some young thing on the dance floor. Yet, here I was.

  “You need anything else?” the bartender asked.

  “No,” I said looking down into my empty mug. “I’m done.”

  I paid for my dinner and headed toward the door. Outside, the crowd was gathering for another Friday night of drinking and dancing, flirting, and hookups. I looked at all the hopeful faces and headed for my car. I was going home to my cat.

  2

  The Biological Clock

  “You know, I’m going to be thirty-eight this year,” I said as I nuzzled the back of my lover’s neck. We were lying in bed, turned toward the window of our bedroom, breasts to back, like spoons. I breathed in the smell of her hair. Grecian Formula is an acquired taste, but it has a soothing aroma once you get used to it.

  “Yes, I know you’re going to be thirty-eight,” she yawned. I knew it wouldn’t be long before she’d reach over for her earplugs. She said they helped her sleep better, but I always felt as if she used them to block me out. They were like tiny transporters to her own little world. I hated them.

  “I was just wondering if you, if we, well—I want to have a baby.” This hadn’t come out the way I had hoped. My voice sounded desperate. Ellen rolled over and looked at me.

  “What makes you say that?”

  I didn’t look directly at her. I closed my eyes and turned on my back. “I just thought if we’re going to do this, we should probably do it pretty soon.”

  “You want to do it because your sister just got pregnant, don’t you?”

  “No. We talked about having a baby before that. My sister has nothing to do with it.”

  “Sure. Fine. Let’s pretend I believe yo
u. Why now?”

  “I’m not getting any younger.”

  “Oh, that’s a great reason to have a kid.”

  We had agreed a long time ago that I would be the one to get pregnant. We had joked about it. Having a kid was always something we could do later. There was always time to have one. We had never been in any rush, but now, all of a sudden, time had slipped away from us. All of a sudden, getting pregnant seemed like a “now or never” proposition.

  “Don’t you want to have one?” I changed the subject.

  “I wanted to adopt. You were the one who wanted to have one yourself.” She leaned over to get her earplugs from the nightstand. “Let’s talk about this in the morning. I’m pooped. Okay?”

  I rolled over onto my side and pulled Ellen’s arm over my stomach. She kissed me on my cheek. “I love you,” she said. I pushed my butt up against her and listened as her breathing became deep and even. I lay awake for a long time until, finally, my restless mind relaxed, and I too fell asleep.

  The next morning, I was up early and at the computer. I could hear Ellen downstairs talking to the cats. They were engaged in the usual morning ritual during which Ellen waved the can of cat food in front of them and then slowly opened it as they meowed and purred their approval. Raleigh, the biggest and most obnoxious of the group, was, as always, the loudest. Most likely he was already up on the counter trying to get at the juicy morsels. While Ellen tended to the cats, I searched the Internet for sperm banks. The California Cryobank was at the top of the list.

  Ellen came up with coffee. “What’cha doin’?”

  “I thought I’d see how much getting pregnant is going to cost us.” I took the cup from her hands and showed her the website.

  “Hey, go to the list of donors first. Let’s see what they’ve got.”

  I clicked the link and a form opened up. We’d have to register first. This required names, addresses, and the all-important credit card number to set up an account. That brought about a whole discussion concerning which card to use, how much was on what card, and why in the hell we had so many of them in the first place. Eventually, we decided to use the American Express card as a compromise. At long last we were ready to look at the list of donors.