After examining the grime under my fingernails, I broke the silence.
“Do you miss it?”
“What?” Lisa asked.
“Home.”
Lisa looked at me then went back to her charcoal sketch of an unlaced hiking boot. A fresh wave of anxiety doused my stomach as I waited for her answer.
“Hell no,” she finally murmured.
“Not even laying out at the Boulder Reservoir? Or going to Chautauqua?”
“A little sun would be nice,” she smiled.
Chautauqua was the park in Boulder where our neighborhood west of the university, known as The Hill, dead-ended at the foothills. Nestled just below the city’s jagged Flatirons – gentle mountains faced with massive sloping anvils of red rock – the park was a hub of activity for college students heading out for a hike or a Frisbee match, and for idle teenagers. While two-dollar movies played in a cavernous old wooden theater, bands of our friends roamed the foothill trails, having told their parents they were going to the movies.
“Why did you want to get away so bad? Did something happen with your mom and Tim?”
“Well, after he moved in, I could hear them at night.”
“Gross.”
“I know,” Lisa said in a low voice. “But that wasn’t really the reason.”
“Really?”
I wanted more details on her mother and Tim, but I decided not to ask. Teepee life didn’t offer much in the way of luxuries, but it did offer a ton of privacy. I didn’t want to invade hers. I was worried that Lisa rued the day she gave up her sun-drenched summer at ‘the ‘Res’ to isolate in this cold, glorified mud puddle. To distract myself from my imminent abandonment, I scribbled anxious notes in my journal. Suddenly, Lisa looked up from her sketch.
“Remember Mrs. McBride – Trish, who I babysat for up on Mapleton Hill?”
“Yeah…”
I had visited Lisa at Trish’s house several times over the winter. An imposing white brick house with green shutters and colonial columns, you could pick the whole house up and plunk it in one of the east coast’s most stately suburbs and it would fit right in.
“She kind of spilled her guts to me.”
“Really? She seemed stuck up when I met her.”
“Yeah, that went out the window after I’d worked for her for a few months,” Lisa said. “She’s actually really friendly.”
Mapleton Hill was a leafy, tree-lined street that culminated in a narrow but beautiful canyon. Our house was near by, but being Mapleton-adjacent was a far cry from actually living on Boulder’s nicest street. Trish McBride and her professor husband had moved away from their upper crust roots, but her blue blood pedigree permeated the house’s museum-quality oriental rugs, Tiffany candlesticks and strikingly well-painted family portraits hung amidst Trish’s stark black and white photography.
“What did she say?”
“She said she wants to raise her young children in Boulder, so they can have a normal childhood. Then she told me she is horribly lonely.”
“No duh! She’s telling her life story to the babysitter!”
“She hasn’t slept with her husband for two years.”
“Whoa. Weird.”
“That’s nothing compared to what came next. She told me that she was attracted to women, and that over the past few months, she had fallen in love with me.”
“Gross!” I gasped.
Lisa looked up from her sketchbook.
“You think?”
“I don’t know. I just can’t picture her telling you that! Did you freak?” I asked.
“By the time she finally said it, I kind of already knew.”
“Did she make a pass at you?”
I was practically shouting. I mentally vowed to calm down. Lisa was confiding all of this in such a quiet, unperturbed voice.
“No. She never touched me, except for an occasional shoulder rub. We used to give each other shoulder rubs.”
“What did you do?”
“I told her I was flattered but I just want to be friends. But things were never the same after that. I didn’t really want to have any physical contact with her. She’s a nice lady, and I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. But I got creeped out by the shoulder rubs after I knew what she was thinking. I had to tell her to stop.”
“What a trip!”
“I try not to judge her, because she’s really nice. And she wanted to help me out so badly. She asked me to keep working for her, and I did. But often, she wouldn’t even go out. I didn’t really know what to do. It felt strange, like she was paying me to hang out with her.
Outside, the rain swept against our canvas walls in sheets.
“God, she sounds a little desperate,” I suggested.
“Yeah. I know. By the time you invited me to the teepee, I was ready to just get away from the whole thing.”
“Damn. The woman doesn’t look like a lesbian.”
“What does a lesbian look like?”
“Motorcycles and lots of leather,” I said.
Lisa laughed.
“Not always.”
Lisa got up, threw on a poncho and stepped out of the teepee into the rain. It seemed like she considered the matter closed, although I had hundreds of questions about Trish, her bizarre confession and, most of all, Lisa’s reaction to it. How would it feel to let your guard down with a woman and to find out that she was just as hot for you as any guy? For a moment, I honestly felt for Lisa. I wanted to ask if having everyone – even women – want you got to be a nightmare. But I decided not to probe. If I showed too much interest in Lisa’s secret, who was to say she wouldn’t uncover mine?
