Stolen

By Barbara Strauss

Donna drove a black Buick. She kept a miniature trash can with a bag in it on the floor of the passenger seat. When she picked me up from campus Tuesday and Thursday nights, she waited for me to buckle before leaning over and moving the can to the back. She wore a leather jacket that was worn, soft and cold.

At the gym where she coached me privately for the Bay State Games, I caught her watching my backside tighten as I did arch-ups on the spring floor. She let me choose which event I practiced first. I led us to the opposite end from the adult class so that I wouldn’t see her noticing other women in leotards.

At 8:30 when the gym closed, I was starving, but over food I chose road trips. We saw nothing because the winter sky was black, especially as we headed west. Her headlights did catch the street sign: Great Road. We laughed at that. We listened to Van Morrison’s “Moondance.”

“I should take you out on a weekend during the day,” she said. She was 29 but seemed older to me because she walked with a limp, and a dusting of gray stood on her temples. From her own days in gymnastics she had a damaged rotator cuff, which made it so that she was unable truly to spot me. Luckily, the tricks I performed I’d been doing forever.

On a Saturday in March she pulled up outside the dorm. My roommate asked what I was doing with this woman.

“Training for the Bay State Games.”

Now we drove further than usual. At Tufts Veterinary School we got out and watched the cows on a hill behind a fence. “You’re like a little sister,” she said. A cow lowed. Donna had her hands in her jacket pockets. Her military cut ended behind her neck in a shaven V. I’d found her the year before, when I carpooled with the college’s gymnastics club. I’d stolen her from the recreational class she was teaching by asking if she could critique my giant swings. Our club didn’t hire a coach, we just rented the space, but we’d been told by the owner to grab anyone if we needed anything.

I was a good listener. She told me on our drives about her day job in IT, her ongoing battle with depression, that her mother was also a lesbian, and that her older brother went to prison for awhile for striking a pedestrian while driving drunk. “I don’t share that with people.” She shook her head at me, like she was awed by my magic.

She wanted to know about me, too, but the only thing I thought about was her, so I gave her a printout of a story I’d turned into my writing workshop, about a woman who takes road trips with a desperate girl.

“You should sleep over my condo,” she said.

***

She had a girlfriend. They didn’t live together, but Sherry was there when I arrived. She didn’t glare or size me up, but when Donna went to get me a juice box, I whispered, “Do you hate me?”

She laughed as she gathered her things. She was also 29, tall, thick, red-haired, Jewish like me. She was a graphic designer where Donna worked. “Why would you ask me that?”

“Sorry,” I said, lowering myself to a cream-colored couch. I looked up at her as she knotted her scarf. Her face was flushed.

“You two have fun,” she said when Donna came back.

“Bye, love,” Donna said. They pecked on the lips. I hadn’t heard someone call her significant other “love” before. It didn’t ring true.

***

We put together a jigsaw puzzle. We picked up deli sandwiches and ate them on the screened porch with the sun going down. We rented Girl, Interrupted from the video store and watched with the lights out. When I used the bathroom I pulled back the shower curtain and found Vidal Sassoon, a curly hair, Sherry’s color, on a bar of soap.

Apropos of nothing, Donna came into the living room with a portrait of herself in silhouette, nude. She was posed behind a curtain in low light. The curve of her behind was more feminine than I expected, she was always wearing baggy track pants.

“Sherry shot this,” she said, pressing the edge of the frame into her belly and examining herself.

“Wow.” I felt my heart beating. “That was brave of you.”

“Really? You wouldn’t pose nude? I did it for pay when I was your age. For the art classes at Wellesley. It was kind of freeing.”

I chewed a fingernail. I knew I’d never take my clothes off and stand there. I wanted her attention, but not to be scrutinized, or even really known. When she watched me perform my balance beam routine, I found myself whispering under my breath this mantra: “Look away. Look away.”

“Did I make you uncomfortable?” She lay the photo face down on the carpet. “It’s important to me that you feel safe.”

She saw a therapist named Calliope. I heard about many of her sessions. One of the turning points in her life was realizing how disgusted she was by her mother. She was thirteen, sitting at the breakfast table, when her mom told her to “get that juice down.”

“I feel safe.” I grinned and squirmed on the sofa, drawing my hands into my sleeves. It was the only kind of flirting I knew how to do.

“Good,” she said, coming in for a hug. “Because I feel so protective of you.”

 ***

My need grew ferocious over time. I stayed in town on summer break, and we practiced three times a week in the month leading up to the games. One night I let go early on a bar dismount, flinging myself across the pit and smacking my shins on the edge. She took me to the emergency room for X-rays and held ice against the bones that erupted red, purple, and blue. For a few days I could only stretch and condition, and she’d drift off to talk to the recreational adults, to help with spotting. When I accused her of ditching me to prove her physical strength to others, she conceded that Calliope thought she had a hero complex.

The games came and went. Before lineup I got Donna to follow me into the MIT locker room. Claimed not to be able to find the loop for the closure of my leotard, behind my neck. Asked also if she could French braid my hair.

She pointed at her crew cut with two fingers. “You’re on your own there.”

She was growing bored of me. I had nothing to share. On a drive later in summer she urged me to give her a list of things I liked. I wracked my brain for acceptable answers. “Christmas lights and classic rock?”

“Yes!” She smacked the steering wheel. “Especially the Christmas lights. That’s very endearing.”

***

I went to watch her play on her lesbian softball league in August. There were designated runners who stood behind the older players at home plate. Donna had one because of her limp. The woman was 25. Her name was Alison. A fat braid trailed her spine. As they waited for their turn in the dugout, I saw them holding hands.

“That was gross,” I muttered as we sat in traffic in Jamaica Plain. I kicked the underside of the glove compartment. “What about Sherry?”

“Calliope thinks I have the same susceptibility to addiction as my brother. Mine plays out with people instead of drink. Please don’t tell Sherry what you saw.”

“Self-awareness doesn’t cancel out responsibility.” I was picking a fight so we could make up.

She shook her head. “You’re too insightful for 21.” She wouldn’t match my anger. She was a coward, or I wasn’t worth it.

 ***

One night after practice – which was now a free-for-all, a time to chuck myself into high flying skills and strange positions, like a circus freak – we ended up at a playground near my off-campus house. We climbed a wooden structure with foot- and hand-holds, perched on top like nocturnal birds. A pack of young teenage boys pulled up on bicycles. They called us lesbians.

“You’re exactly right,” Donna said calmly. “I am a lesbian.”

The lead boy softened. “Wait. No you’re not.”

“What about her?” asked another boy. A third pushed off on the tire swing, causing the chain to creak.

“What about her?” Donna squeezed my knee. If I’d looked over, she would’ve winked.

Nobody put the question to me directly. But the night in March when I’d slept at her condo, she’d given me my chance.

“If you get scared out here all alone on the couch, come see me,” she’d said, tucking me in. For the rest of my life, in marriage to a man, I’d wonder what would’ve happened.

“Kiss each other,” the leader commanded, standing astride his bike with his arms crossed.

I kept my head down. I was such a coward. I wanted her to lift my chin and pull me toward her but I couldn’t flash a signal.

Only months later, when I’d quit gymnastics because she could no longer coach me – she and Sherry were now in couples therapy and they needed a lot of time – did I blurt at a railroad crossing on a Saturday drive:

“I want you to jump my bones.”

She sighed as she raked a hand through her hair. Held the wheel in one outstretched hand. “You’re my little sister.” She squinted, following the freight cars with her eyes.

“I’m not,” I whispered. I don’t think she heard me above the chug and rattle.

“I really hate that phrase,” she added, so I said nothing else.

THE END

Author Bio: Barbara Strauss’ work has appeared in OpenDoor Magazine’s “Adoration” issue, The Ilanot Review, Rock & Sling, The Charles Carter Working Anthology at UNC Chapel Hill (forthcoming), and bioStories, among other publications. She lives outside Boston.