Free Twilight Girl by Della Martin

way, you did laugh. I can't explain why it was different, coming from you."
    "That was why you wanted to see me again? That was the big reason?"
    Lon sensed the level, penetrating stare and averted her interrogating eyes. "Only one of the reasons, Mavis."
    "Since then you've found that other island. Right, baby? Lesbos. Now there is an island!"
    Lon confessed ignorance once more, and it seemed incredible to her, as Mavis wove the spell of words, that Lon had not read or heard of the lyric poems written six centuries before Christ nor of the true priestess of their cult who had written them. Sappho. The impassioned verses, Lon learned, had been addressed to lovely virgins whose preparation for high-born marriage included Sappho's tutoring in music, poetry and the dance. Poems Lon had read and loved, but none such as these. And islands... she had read adventure until she could have walked the distant beaches and known where she stood. Yet, Lesbos—and Sappho! They would have made pure and joyful beauty of that night in June when her own schooling began, there where the luminous heart bled from night-glowing thorns. Through the magic of the ancient story to which Lon now listened ran a contrapuntal theme—a surging, violent hatred of the teacher who had defiled this noblest of all loves! As if Violet, by her gross ignorance, had cheated Lon—cheated her cruelly.
    "Crazy Greek island," Mavis concluded. "And Sappho... man, she had it made! Read somewhere that she jumped off a cliff out of love for some male cat named Phaon. But I don't buy this. That's the censor board steppin' in to clean up the story. Either that, or she went all-out to convince the neighbors she was double-gaited. The way Sassy's doing tonight."
    Lon ignored Sassy's name and thus needed no explanation. "Lesbos," she whispered dreamily.
    "Yeah, Lesbos. Named our whole club after that island. But it wasn't all gimmicked up then, baby. Butch, fem, straight, single-gait, double-gait. It's jazzed up now and we call it gay. Back then, it was love and poetry, natural as the night dew." Mavis looked across the room at the dance floor, rocking in frenetic movement. Looked her contempt and said, "We still mess with the poetry and we call this dancing. But something's gone, baby. And we've tried to compensate, making a thing out of being sick."
    "It must have been wonderful in those old days," Lon said. "If you were the way I am, and you loved somebody, it wouldn't seem...." She waited a long while and then whispered the word, "Dirty. Somehow, I never thought about it that way. Until just now, hearing you talk about the way it ought to be." And blurted suddenly, "With Violet, it's dirty!"
    "You're not thinking gay, baby. You're not calling it love."
    Now Mavis approached ridicule again. Lon could never be sure she was not being laughed at—never even be certain that the girl as much as knew her name; saying "baby" impersonally, as Mavis might say it to anyone. And Lon longed to hear the sound of her own name from the girl who drew her with a magnetism removed from the words she spoke. "Do you call it love, Mavis?" Lon asked.
    "Haven't used the word for a long time. Loved my mother. Till mama died of T.B., waiting for my daddy to take off his white collar and earn some doctorin' money. But he was out preaching brotherly love. Getting rocks thrown at him, being so brotherly. Just one more Georgia nigger spoiling Belle Isle for pure-white picnics."
    "I used to wish I could love my mother. I don't know—she's never really hurt me. It's like she was never there. Like she didn't exist."
    "You couldn't breathe and not love mama," Mavis said, not hearing Lon. "And he wasted it all. Wasted all that love. She'd teach piano to kids in the neighborhood, coughing so hard their folks wouldn't let them come back after a while. Loving him, too. But knowing he was wasting his words, wasting her love—and some day mine would be wasted, too. I bawled out my last love words over an