put her hand on the girl’s face and felt the tears. She turned her face and put her lips on the salty moistness. “Come on over to the bed,” she said. “Get up, Mitch, and come on over to the bed.”
Mitch lay down with her face buried in the pillow, and Leda sat on the edge, her hands stroking Mitch’s hair.
“Can you hear me, Mitch? Listen, it doesn’t help to run away. You don’t think it helps, do you? It doesn’t help.”
“No,” Mitch sobbed. “I can’t stay here. I can’t bear to see you every day and know what I’m doing to you.”
“What are you doing to me? What in hell are you doing to me?”
“I’m a Lesbian,” Mitch answered. “That’s how I feel about you, too. I’m not like you—with Jake and everything.”
“Oh, God, Mitch! All right, listen. I love you, you crazy kid. I don’t have to label my love, do I? Do I have to say that it’s Lesbian love? OK, then that’s what it is. It’s Lesbian love, pure and simple. Ye gods, I’ve known about myself for years. I didn’t run away. I didn’t walk out and run away. You gave me plenty of reason to. You were the first one to come along and blow up my little plan for hiding the way I am. You think you’re doing something to me! Oh, Mitch! If anyone’s doing it, I’m doing it. I’m doing it because I love you.”
Mitch brought her head up from the pillow and turned over on her side. “But you said it,” she said. “You said you couldn’t love a Lesbian. You said—”
“I said so damn much, didn’t I? You’ve got to understand, Mitch. I don’t like what I am. If Jan ever knew, I’d take a razor and slash my wrists. I couldn’t live with people knowing, and pointing and saying, ‘Queer’ at me. No one knows but you, and I guess I never would have told you if you hadn’t started to leave. Do you think it’s easy to admit it? It was different when I could say it wasn’t this way, that I was bisexual and all that rot. Bisexual—that’s sort of like succotash, isn’t it? Only this succotash hasn’t got any corn in it. It’s straight beans!”
“What about Jake?” Mitch blew her nose and sat up. “What about all the time you spend with Jake?”
“Maybe I’m trying to prove something to myself. Part of me is trying to say that I’m not what I am. That’s the part of me that everyone knows—the alluring Leda, the queen, Jan’s daughter, an apple never falls far from the tree. Out with Jake every damn day to keep myself away from what I really am. Want to know what sex with him is like? It’s like dry bread, that’s what it’s like. Like dry bread!”
Leda got up from the bed and reached for her cigarettes on the desk. She felt relieved, cleansed, as though her mind had been emptied and she was free. She walked over to the suitcase on Mitch’s bed and picked up the clothing, taking it in her arms to the drawer. “You want this all put back, don’t you?” she said to Mitch. “You won’t leave me?”
“No,” Mitch said. “I’m going. Robin arranged everything, and—oh, Leda!” They stood in the center of the room holding one another, their lips fastened hard, their arms strong around each other. Leda’s hand reached for the buttons on Mitch’s blouse.
“Just stand still,” she said. “Just let me take everything off and look at you. I want to look at you.”
The skirt fell to the floor, and the blouse. Mitch stepped out of her shoes and stood before Leda.
“I want to love you,” Leda said.
Her hands stroked Mitch’s body gently. She leaned over to kiss her lips and her forehead and the closed eyelids. She said her name and held her, feeling the fast beat in her pulse and knowing that she had almost lost her.
The blood beat furiously in Mitch’s throat and she could feel a mounting strength in her legs and arms. With the arrogance of a master, Mitch’s nails dug into Leda’s flesh as she began to pull the sweater and the thin blouse from her shoulders. She let her teeth sink into Leda’s neck.
“No, faster!” Leda cried. “Faster, Mitch!”
Leda’s gasp was one of pleasure and desire and it moved Mitch to more violence, pinning Leda’s wrists behind her back and jerking at her skirt.
Neither of them heard the door open.
They turned in time to see Kitten and Casey framed in the doorway, eyes big, mouths dropped, and they fell apart from one another when the door was slammed, and the sound of feet running down the hall was as loud and fast as the beating of their hearts in that room.
It was a long time before they talked. Mitch lay dumb with horror, never forgetting the look on their faces as they had found her that way with Leda, unclothed and wild like a fierce animal. Sitting with her head hung, her hands pressing at her eyes, Leda was the first one to speak after the minutes passed as they would in a slow nightmare when nothing is real.
She stood up and picked the blouse off the floor. “Look,” she said. “I’ll go and talk to Marsha. That’s where they ran to. I’ll go and straighten it out.”
“How?”
Leda reached in the closet for a fresh blouse, and straightened her skirt so that the zipper was pulled and on the side. She ran a comb through her long hair, and her hands were trembling.
“I’ll explain it somehow. Marsha’s gullible, and I’ll explain it. I have to go now, or they’ll have a chance to talk and spread the story.”
Mitch said, “‘I’ll go too, Leda, I’ll go too. What’ll we say?”
“No!” Leda put her hands over her face and shook her head. “I’m sorry I yelled. We’ve got to handle this just right. You stay here. It’s better for me to go alone.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Look, get into bed. I’ll turn the light out and you stay here. If anyone else comes by, pretend you’re asleep.
She waited while Mitch pulled her pajamas from the suitcase on her bed and threw the suitcase down on the floor, before she stepped into the pants and the coat. After she got in bed, Leda snapped the light out and went back by her own bed before she opened the door to go.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Don’t worry at all. And stay here!”
In her hand, as she walked toward Marsha’s suite, Leda clutched Mitch’s letter, wrinkled and folded on the long sheet of notebook paper. Her eyes were set and determined, and there was a tight line about her lips.
Under the heavy violet and black quilted robe, Mother Nesselbush wore a voluminous peach-colored flannel nightgown. Her hair was rolled on large black pins so that it pulled at her scalp and gave her round face a bizarre expression like that of a mild Jersey cow. Her skin shone with “night cream,” and until everything began, it was with conscious effort that she stifled the great yawns that exposed her pressing lethargy, as well as her gold-studded molars.
Everything began when Marsha shut the door to Nessy’s suite and pressed the lock down to secure it. Beside those two, Casey, Kitten Clark, Jane Bell, and Leda shared the secrecy of the meeting that was about to commence. Marsha stood while the others sat in various positions around the small anteroom.
“I don’t need to tell you that this gathering is an extreme emergency. We must all pledge never to reveal what we hear. Our whole reputation as a national sorority is at stake, to say nothing of the reputation of Tri Epsilon on the Cranston campus. I’ve asked Jane to come because she’s a member of the Grand Council. Fortunately, our other two members were on the scene when this thing happened. And Leda will explain her part in it. Nessy, we’ve inconvenienced you tremendously, but this is too terribly serious.”
Mother Nesselbush