n those days I would wrap myself up in someone else’s personality, a set of clothes that I not only tried on but wore, as if I had none of my own--I did but they didn’t yet fit; I was lost in the folds or I was too bound, or the colors weren’t right: too faded, mismatched--I preferred someone else’s.

I don’t remember how I found her. She had a boy’s name and this in itself was not easily explained. There was an explanation, of course, but it didn’t make sense to me then--a made-up one would have done better--something to do with a whim of her mom’s (she had no father that she knew). She was not Stephanie, but Stevan.

Her breasts and hips were large like a grown woman’s, not those of a nineteen-year-old, which is how old we were. She walked with a limp, as if she had a problem with her hips, as if she were already much older, thirty-five or more. And perhaps that was why I liked her. If you’re trying on someone else’s personality, why choose one that is--like your own--unformed?

We might have met in Spanish class. She would have been there for the credits; she already spoke almost fluently. She had lived for a time in Peru and had come back with stomach pains that were chronic. My own body was light and strong, not the always somewhat overweight self I am now. I had the elasticity of a nineteen-year-old and all the feelings of invincibility that go along with that age too. I didn’t understand Stevan’s pain, except that as a child my older sister had suffered from migraines--a concept I could barely begin to imagine: pain in the head--where did it come from and how did it stay there? Stevan spent what seemed like hours in the bathroom stall, groaning, complaining, while I waited for her patiently outside. I made an effort to constantly remind myself she was in pain, to even imagine what it felt like: I wouldn’t remember it otherwise. Living with physical ailments was a foreign concept. But I had sympathy to spend on my friends.

Stevan was having an affair with our history professor, and this of course added to her allure. Professor Scheip was not physically attractive (pale, skinny with glasses), but he was older, and a Marxist, and he wanted her. More extraordinary even, it seemed to me, was that after two months it was Stevan, not the professor, who ended the affair. There were phone calls and notes (some of which I had to deliver to her) from him still--he wasn’t ready to give it up, but Stevan was; she told me she was bored.

What did she see in me? I was solid where she slipped, could help her up when we walked the icy pavement on the midwestern campus where we went to school. While I had four brothers and sisters, she had none; while I had two parents still very much alive, she had only one: her mother who called her daily to complain about her own aches and pains and to discuss her newest live-in boyfriend. I thought those calls both a burden and an extraordinary thing--I who had to share my mother with four others, rarely got a call from Mom. It should he an emergency to spend such money and time.

For Stevan I was reassuringly normal, and I let myself be that for her. Even then I knew I was not, or I would not have had such a friend at all. I would have spent my time at the library, writing my reports and papers, drinking beer in the Rathskellar, instead of lying on a bed next to Stevan, discussing her love affair with Fidel Castro, helping her to construct it, imagining how they’d spend a day together.

Did I have obsessions of my own? I let them all be hers; I swallowed them gladly with her, like the maté she always drank, bitter and strong; we drank thermos after thermos of maté until were were just as wired, surely more so, than our classmates who lived on coffee.

We would make plans but we never went through with them. We were going to hitchhike into town, have an adventure. I’d be up and ready at 7:00 am, go to her room to meet her, and find her still in bed, moaning about her mysterious stomach ailments.

“Tengo bichos,” she would tell me, those invisible Spanish bugs she’d acquired in Peru that sounded like little bitches, and I guess they were that to her: her little bitches.

Or I’d meet her in her room at night--we were going to spy on Professor Scheip with his new girlfriend, but again she was in bed, “I can’t do it tonight. Let’s go tomorrow, tengo bichos…”

“But we can’t tomorrow--it’s Monday night! They won’t be going out!”
“But I’m sick…I feel awful... .mis bichos…”

Eventually I tired of the lack of adventure: the promised outings, the inevitable let-down. And then quite suddenly Stevan had to take a leave of absence. Her mother was sick; there wasn’t enough money to keep Stevan in school. She was going to have to go back to California... I was sorry she was leaving, but our friendship also seemed to have run its course. The adventures never transpired; I was bored with Fidel Castro. (Besides: hadn’t she heard about how he treated political prisoners? That his island wasn’t the rosy place she thought it was?) Nothing could smear her dear Fidel, dear Fidel, she would be loyal to him forever, they would meet in Habana when she slipped unseen into his mansion... “Querida mia, donde has estado toda mi vida?” Where have you been all my life, my dear?

 

f course I did miss her when she was gone; there was no one else quite like her. Gone, Stevan went back to her old allure, though stronger; the patina surrounding her grew darker and more mysterious. She became the friend no one else came close to; it was never “Stevan,” but always “My friend Stevan,” as if she occupied a sacred corner no one else could enter.

But gradually our letters, never very frequent, dwindled to nothing. The temporary leave of absence became permanent. I made other friends, even had a boyfriend for a while; graduated, I moved to San Francisco. I got a job in a bookstore in the Mission district, a store with well stocked Latin American and political science sections. It was a homey place, with next-to-no pay but friendly fellow workers and customers.

One day while I was trying to fix the broken coffee pot (we always had a pot of coffee on for customers to help themselves to), a voice interrupted me.

“Is that coffee ready yet?”

I glanced up and knew immediately it was she. She had changed so little; her ribbed sweater and tight jeans showing off her curves, her black hair still loose and long. My own hair was cut short like a boy’s, a lock over my forehead; perhaps that was why she didn’t recognize me.

“Stevan,” I said, and she looked at me, startled. “It’s Callie.”

The look-over she gave me was long and steady, appraising my clothes, taking in my every gesture. And then she hugged me. She was strong and warm; I could feel her wide hips and her full breasts against my smaller ones. “I’m so glad,” she said, “I knew I would find you.”

We caught ourselves up on each other’s doings: Stevan was helping refugees from El Salvador get settled into the Bay area; it was a new program, one she had helped get started. I had roommates while she had none; she’d worked hard since leaving college, had saved her money and could afford her own place, albeit a very small one, downtown.

We made plans. I would meet her Sunday morning (my next day off) at her apartment at 9 a.m., then we’d take the boat to Alcatraz, have a picnic.

 

unday morning was cool, almost cold--I was always surprised that San Francisco wasn’t warmer. Scraps of paper flew against me as a gust of wind suddenly blew through the street, empty of strollers and midweek traffic. I passed a brick building with narrow slits for windows, an old fortress or prison. I scanned numbers for her address. Places were boarded-up, closed; nothing looked even remotely like an apartment. At last I found it: a glass door, 324 above it. Stevan had told me to ring the buzzer, but when I tried the door, it opened. I walked up to the third floor, knocked on #5.

“Who is it?” I heard.

“Me, Callie,” I answered. I waited for her to respond, to open the door. I knocked again. Finally I turned the handle and went in.

She was sitting in bed, a flimsy pink negligee barely covering her. She held a gun in both hands; it was pointing straight at me.

“Stevan! What are you doing?”

“Oh it’s you,” she said, putting the gun down on the pillow beside her. “Well you never know. . .”

“Just who were you expecting?” My eyes were on the gun resting on her pillow; was it cocked and loaded? What if she’d pulled the trigger?

“Oh god knows. . .this place is bugged--I’m followed all the time now.”

“By who?”

She gave a look, one she used to give me when we were in college: don’t be so stupid, don’t you know anything? “Who do you think? The FBI. They’ve got my phone bugged. They follow me everywhere--one of these days...”

I wanted her to put the gun away. I hated that it was so near where she was. At the same time I couldn’t stop staring at her. I could see her breasts through the filmy nightgown; they were pear shaped, large but somehow delicate, full and loose under her ridiculous nightdress.

“Stop staring and sit down,” she said. “Here, sit on the bed.”

She patted a place for me. There was nowhere else to sit. She had no armchair or couch in the room. Only the bed, a standing lamp, an eat-in kitchen in the far corner.

“Sit down,” she said again, “C’mon, sit beside me.”

I did as she said, and again my eyes didn’t know where to rest: on the gun, or her smooth face, her hazel eyes, the way her breasts were elongated while her dark nipples stood out, brushing against the sheer fabric.

“How are you? I’ve thought about you so many times… I’m sorry I stopped writing…”

“Are you still in love with Fidel Castro?” I blurted. Where had that come from? A stupid question, but it was what came to me, as if there were nothing else more urgent.

“Ah Fidel...” she laughed, “Mi Fidel. Of course I am. Soy fiel a Fidel...,” she liked how it rhymed, I’m faithful to Fidel. “But I have a real boyfriend now--Julio. From El Salvador. He’s the best.” She smiled at me. “And you? Any boyfriends?”

I shook my head. I could feel my face reddening. “I had a boyfriend,” I said, “but...”

“But what?”

“Nothing, it wasn’t serious.” My face was burning. Why didn’t she put some clothes on?

“Stevan...” I said, and she looked at me, waiting. I saw the slope of her shoulder, her slightly tanned skin. Her breasts hung and quivered. “Can you put that gun away? It’s making me nervous.”

“Oh this,” she said, picking it up off the pillow. “I’d forgotten all about it. Here,” she said, handing it to me, “You want to see how it feels?”

“Not especially,” I said, my voice suddenly back with me.

“Here, feel it. It’s not as heavy as you’d think. Take it,” and she thrust it toward me. I’d never held a real gun. It had a solid feel, smoothly polished. I stood up with it. I was afraid to touch anything on it, to press something into action. I carried it into the kitchen.

“Hey, where are you taking my baby?”

I opened a drawer below the sink, placed it in there.

“Hey, Callie... Come back here.”

Stevan had gotten out of bed. Her nightgown had a pink ruffle that fell just below her bottom. Where had she ever bought such a thing? “Come on back here,” she said and she led me to her bed.

“Stevan, aren’t we going to Alcatraz? Aren’t you going to get dressed?”

“Oh sure. Why not? I just move slow in the morning. You were always faster,” and she laughed, as if she’d made a joke, a double-entendre I was missing.

It occurred to me she was drunk, that she’d been drinking. Why else was she moving so slowly, languorously, acting so absurdly?

“You forgot, Callie. You forgot about mis bichos…” and she laughed again and then sighed. “Let’s just lie down a little, I’m not feeling so wonderfully. You never did realize, did you? About my illness?”

I didn’t know anymore what she was talking about, what she was saying to me. She lay down on the bed and told me to lie beside her. A strand of her dark hair fell against my face and it smelled sweet to me, lightly perfumed. She kept talking to me, slipping in and out of Spanish, while at the same time, pulling me closer, her arm around my shoulder. She let my head rest between her breasts, soft and fleshy, undoing the tie on her nightdress, so that the halves parted and I saw how close her nipple was, and wondered how it might taste and felt my tongue licking a path along her tanned skin toward it. I moved so slowly and quietly I was barely aware myself of my movements.

And from this gentle slowness, I emerged, fevered and hungry, so deeply hungry that the voice inside me: But I’m making love with a woman--what am I doing? was easily squashed, had no life of its own, no life at all. She undid my buttons and zippers, helped to pull all my cumbersome clothing off me, and soon I felt the full warmth of her body against mine, and wanted to leave none of it untouched or untasted.

 

ell Callie,” she said, having stood up and dressed finally, in a blouse and pants that were billowy-feminine, “I always knew you were gay.” She looked at me and laughed, and her laughter may have been warm, but to me it felt harsh, judgmental.

“What do you mean? What are you talking about?”

“What I said: I always knew, that’s all.”

She was standing in the middle of her room now, combing her hair out from her head in that peculiar way she had, bending from the waist down and brushing it out from the roots.

“How did you know? And what about you?”

“Me?” she said. She was applying lipstick now, twisting her lips as she stared at her reflection in the mirror against the wall. I had started to grab my clothes and put them back on; I suddenly felt cold, self-conscious. “Oh, I could never be gay. I love dicks too much for that,” and she turned to me and gave me a fully-rouged lipstick smile.

“But what about what just happened? What about that?”

“It was very nice,” she said, and she came over and kissed me lightly on my forehead, leaving a red smudge, I knew. “It was really nice, but it just happened, that’s all. It happened once... I’m not gay.”

“And you think I am?”

She smiled again. “Don’t you know it,” she said softly.

I suddenly hated her. I hated her for her rouged lips, her wide hips, for her stomach pains and her condescension. I saw that I’d hated her all along, had hated her in college and when she went away, hated her when I saw her in the bookstore--I had always hated Stevan--why couldn’t I have seen that? I went to the sink and washed my hands and face, combed my hair back into place.

She had gone into the bathroom, closed the door shut. I suddenly remembered the gun. I had an image of Stevan emerging from the bathroom and me pointing the gun straight at her--just as she’d done earlier to me, only I’d pull the trigger... I opened the drawer; it was sitting just as I’d left it. My heart was beating loudly, and I saw as I reached for it that my hand was shaking. I closed my hand around it, shut the drawer very carefully, then carried the gun to where my knapsack was resting. I took out the extra sweater I’d brought and wrapped the gun inside it. I stuffed the whole thing back in.

I felt odd, jittery, yet strangely sure of myself. I who’d always hated guns, who as a child was never allowed to play with them, who couldn’t be more weapons-ignorant--I didn’t even know what kind it was. A pistol surely.

“Stevan,” I knocked on the bathroom door, “I’m going.”

“What? You can’t go… why are you leaving? You can’t go now,” she repeated.

“I’m going,” I said again, “Good-bye.”

“But Callie...” she protested.

I didn’t stay to hear the rest. I knew it would feel like hours before she emerged from the bathroom. I wasn’t going to wait for her.

My heart was loose in my chest as I walked, then ran from her apartment. Cars drove by, too slowly it seemed, and I nearly bumped into the woman and her dog who walked past me.

I wasn’t myself. Surely anyone could see that--there was something different about me. They must all know that: that I’d stolen a gun, that I was part criminal. All I had to do now was complete the picture.

 

didn’t know where I was headed; I only knew I wasn’t going to my apartment. Images came intermittently, stayed too long: climbing to the roof of a building, pointing the gun at anyone who walked under me. Or I’d hide behind the corner of the next building, shoot the first unlucky person to step in front of me. Most often I saw myself hiding out across the street from Stevan’s building, waiting for her to emerge, then holding the gun in two hands, feet planted... Always my aim was deadly.

I walked city streets, headed uphill, eventually getting to where you had a view of Twin Peaks. I covered all the streets in the neighborhood below. Too tired to walk further, I got on a bus and took it to the last stop. A light drizzle had started to fall, and I was shivering, but still I wouldn’t open my knapsack, take out my sweater.

I couldn’t go back to my apartment. I told myself I couldn’t risk my roommates finding it, but it was really myself I was afraid of. I carried it on my back, wondering what I was going to do with it.

I got on another bus, one that went out past the park, then through the fogged-in neighborhood of Richmond. I got out and walked past houses, each with its requisite lawn patch; in the mist everything looked the same to me. I crossed the highway, letting cars speed past me.

It wasn’t like a deep rushing river--what had I been thinking? Why wasn’t anything presenting itself as the neatest, cleanest solution? But my mind felt numb, incapable of its usual workings; I was cold and shivering. I walked along the beach, away from the sound of traffic, closer to the ocean. I waited until I felt sure no one was watching (but who could see anything in the thick fog?), then unwrapped it from its sweater-nest. I hurled it as far as I could into the ocean.

My pitch had never been terrific. I knew it would sink to the bottom though, and from there it might get covered in tide-shifting sands, become encrusted with salt--in time, even barnacles.

I went back to my apartment and spent the next day, the last before I had to go back to work, in bed.

I sometimes wondered: if I hadn’t stolen the gun, would Stevan and I still be friends? Lovers even? She knew I had taken it, called me in my apartment to demand where it was, to convince and cajole me, and when that didn’t work, to threaten me. Didn’t I realize what I’d done? What it was I’d taken from her? She was being followed, her phone was bugged, even now they were listening in... She needed it--couldn’t I get that through my thick head? I had better return it, I had to, she had to have it, surely even an idiot could understand that. She was going to search my apartment, she was sending her boyfriend after me.

For a while the phone calls were a constant. I even got used to them. In a strange way, I almost looked forward to them. I always denied that I had taken the gun: I didn’t take it. I have no idea where it is. Maybe your boyfriend stole it. You’re wasting your time. I never touched it.

That was all I ever said: I didn’t take it, and she must have grown bored with the response, because finally the phone calls stopped, and even though I sometimes tried--straying too close to her neighborhood, once even walking by her apartment--I didn’t run into her again. Years later in a distant city, I would again--but by then she’d forgotten. Her inability to remember, her insistence that no such thing had ever transpired was so confident, so complete, that for a long time I had to wonder if it wasn’t I who’d been half-crazy.

 

[END]

© 2004 Jessica Treat - Contributor's Bio