She thought of crazy explanations: we were rehearsing for a play; my friend is sick and I was helping her; wish I could stay and talk, but I have to catch a train. She couldn't be flip with him clamped on Angela's arm. She felt a new fire break out in her guts.

Angela cried, "Take your hand off me!"

"I don't think so. Your father should hear about this."

"Hey," Jefferson cried, clawing to get his hands away from Angela, but she could not pry them loose.

"Let me go! He knows," lied Angela.

"Knows his kid's a dirty little queer?"

Angela pul ed back her free arm and slapped him, openhanded.

The man shook her. "d.a.m.n s.l.u.t." He looked at Jefferson then. "I know who you are. I guess it wouldn't do any good to let him know about the chip off his own block."

The man watched her reaction. "Or didn't you know? He's not the only good family man in this town who finds the boys at the railroad station more interesting than his wife."

What was he saying? She had a flash of a scene from the musical Guys and Dolls of the guys playing c.r.a.ps in an al eyway. She pictured Jarvy crouching against a wal , tipping back a bottle. Her straitlaced father? Did this have something to do with why Jarvy and Emmy drank more and more?

"And I don't mean he's out playing poker with them either. Like father, like daughter-or are you real y a son? Maybe he does it to you too."

Jefferson had been feeling helplessly smal compared to the janitor's bulk, but at that moment she understood what the man was saying and her whole world opened up in a way that was bewildering and painful and freeing al at once.

No! she thought. The monster cloud was coming, dropping over her like a hooded cape. She'd never be able to think her way out of this situation if she gave in to it. Her trusty body reacted on its own; she kicked his shin viciously. His grip loosened and they ran.

Normal y it was exhilarating to run, but she was crying, embarra.s.sed to be such a weakling. She should be the strong one, but how could she stand up to that man? He might as wel be the supreme court, the state police, the weight of the whole disapproving world.

They reached the shelter of the band shel and hid behind the wooden enclosure to catch their breath.

"Why did he have to know us?"

"Jefferson," Angela said with gentle sympathy. "Jefferson, who in Dutchess doesn't know me?"

"And I guess my family may be a little bit infamous."

"You mean what he said about your father?"

She nodded.

"Could the janitor be lying?'

She couldn't look at Angela. "You know he wasn't."

"No, I don't think he made that up."

"I don't know whether to be happy or upset."

"It's a shock, Jefferson. You need to get over the shock first."

"Okay. But that's beside the point. Do you think he'l tel your father?" She wanted this ugliness over with so they could graduate and play al of their last summer before col ege.

"Not before I do."

"Oh, G.o.d, Angie, he'l hate me!"

"Face it, Jefferson. What else can we do? I want to go straight to Daddy, tel him like I've always wanted to. He says he wants me to be happy and married. He likes you. Why shouldn't you be the one? We'l get an apartment after we graduate, get jobs. You can go to school with me instead of going away."

"Angie." Her nose was stuffed, but she was no longer crying. "Are you nuts? Parents don't say, 'Sure, fine, my kid's a queer, and that's okey-dokey.'

They think we're dirty."

"Dirty? We're not the dirty ones. Dirty is how that man looked at me. Dirty was what al those boys tried to do to me before I found you. I haven't for a second felt dirty with you. Only delirious with love."

They were hidden from the street on one side by the band shel , on the other by a clump of bushes. Jefferson wanted to hold her, but was scared to now. She felt like a broken little tree after a storm. Angela moved against her, but Jefferson stepped back.

"What are you so afraid of?"

She was stil shaking and didn't want Angela to know it. "They could throw you out."

"I'm their daughter, they would never do that."

"They'l try to change you." She cupped a hand around Angela's breast.

Angela brushed her hand away as she said, "I can't change. I'm yours. I want to spend my life with you!" Angela smiled into her eyes as if to wil an infusion of courage into her.

Something in Jefferson shifted. She'd stopped shaking. It wasn't exposure she feared, was it? She loved this girl, but, no, staying in Dutchess was al wrong. She would go away to school. This incident didn't matter much at al as long as they kept it from getting out. Real y, she'd known al along that the forever Angela talked about was a kid dream. There would be girls she'd like in col ege. She'd seen some playing field hockey.

She straightened and put her arms around Angela, then kissed her. She loved her, but good gravy, she was seventeen. "Do you want me with you when you tel him?"

Angela, such a smal , sweet cuddly girl, laid her head on Jefferson's shoulder. "No. Stay by the phone."

"If my parents answer, don't say anything to them, okay?"

"You're not going to tel them?" Angela said, pul ing back.

"Look, they aren't very interested in me as it is. I don't have as much faith that they'd go along with this as you do."

"What do you have to lose?"

"You. Cripes, they might stop us from seeing each other."

Angela looked at her. "You would let them stop you?"

"Like I'd have a choice?"

When Angela's cal came, Jefferson was watching Gunsmoke with her parents. Earlier, she had gone to the basketbal game at the high school and continued a friendly argument about the restrictions of girls' rules with the coach. She loved watching the game and was looking forward to playing in col ege, since she'd already made her name in field hockey. She'd completely forgotten that Angela was talking to her father tonight until the cal came.

"Jefferson, help me," Angela said on the phone. "He's going to send me to my aunt's in the city until you leave for school."

Gunsmoke was her favorite show. When she went back into the den to watch, she thought about Angela's scheme to run away from home. Angry, of course she'd said no. She'd ride the train down to the city to see her every weekend this summer. Her parents wouldn't think it was strange that Angela was spending the summer with an aunt or that Jefferson wanted to visit her best friend. But no, it turned out that Angela had decided she wasn't going along with her father's scheme and didn't want to leave Dutchess and Jefferson. She begged Jefferson to get an apartment with her.

"No," she'd said, with such firm fury, Angela cried more. Where was this anger coming from? She felt trapped. She needed a way out, but was Angela what she wanted to escape? Was getting stuck in Dutchess forever what she was angry about? She couldn't think. "I'm going to live in the dorm at col ege and concentrate on school, not take any old job and some slummy apartment. That gets us nothing but poor and unhappy."

She watched Marshal Dil on swagger through Dodge, hips heavy with six-shooters. She loved Angela, but she wasn't giving up her entire future to be with her. The marshal ordered a bad guy out of town. Her decision was final. d.a.m.n it.

Chapter Seven.

Margo Kurtz was not as striking to look at as Angela, but having spent her childhood in the cities of Europe, she had a worldly manner Jefferson had never before encountered. She also had an aura of glamour that came from teaching German at Hunter Col ege and reading poetry at the Vil age coffeehouses.

"Rilke," Margo exclaimed over coffee in the cafeteria. "There simply is no greater twentieth-century poet." Margo read some lines about flowers and seasons and how "immemorial sap mounts in our arms when we love." Jefferson wasn't much on poetry, but this guy Rilke got it about making love.

The verse-or Margo-instil ed in Jefferson's chest a heat she thought had cooled forever the day last summer Mr. Tabor met with her father to explain why she and Angela must be separated. She'd been right al along to fear every shadow, every odd look, every innuendo about her tomboy ways: the aftermath of their exposure had been sheer hel . They asked her why she was like this and she said she didn't know. That was true. She just loved loving Angela as much as she loved Angela herself.

In the hot summer weeks before her eighteenth birthday she'd felt incurably cold, an exile in her town and from society itself. She'd been too humiliated to show her face on the streets of Dutchess to look for a job and had spent her days idle, on the maple four-poster bed at Grandma and Grandpa Thorpe's roomy old house, up the hil from her parents' home where she felt constant disappointment sweep through the house like a searchlight.

There was no place to hide. An enormous cherry tree shaded her window. It was fil ed with tril ing birds whose enterprising, energetic, and comical comings and goings kept some deep and silent force within her alive with the hope that life might have some intrinsic value for a kid like her. Every time she began to measure methods of suicide, some little gray bird would crane its neck as if to peer in her window, or would burst into a song worthy of an opera hal , or would disappear deep into the branches, absorbed by its own busy life.

She was too ashamed to face meals downstairs and lost eighteen pounds from her spare frame, eating only when she slunk to the kitchen late at night to consume leftovers. The thought of Mr. Tabor's cherry Danishes turned her stomach sour with guilt. Yet on the August day that she reached eighteen and went immediately to the bank to empty her savings account, she didn't gnash her teeth and beat her breast in torment. That final decision she'd made about moving into a dorm at Hunter-wel , she wanted her girl. She'd go into the city and sign up for a couple of cla.s.ses at night to get started. She was defying her parents. She felt like a bird with a beak ful of nesting material doing what came natural y as she rented a rinky-d.i.n.k apartment on the first floor of a big pink house, then waited in an al eyway down the street from the candy store until she saw Angela.

"I wish it could be an engagement ring," she'd whispered, waylaying Angela and taking her into the al ey, "but I hope this wil do." She presented the lease and watched as Angela scanned it. They hadn't seen or spoken with each other since graduation day when, leaving the grounds of the Academy for the last time, she had seen Angela across the street, smiling and applauding her in gown and mortarboard. She'd had to avert her eyes or cry in front of her parents.

Today Angela's face slowly flushed. She looked up at Jefferson, eyes narrow.

"The birds gave me the idea," Jefferson explained. The heat was smoldering inside her. "First they make a nest. Everything fol ows from there."

"Do you have a job?"

"No, Angie." She feasted her eyes on Angie, felt one flame, then another lap at her insides. "Nest first, then job and furniture and family fireworks and gas hookup-and love."

Mischievous delight replaced the apprehension in Angela's eyes as she c.o.c.ked her head like a little bird peering in. "Not necessarily in that order?"

They could not touch, but their eyes locked. Oh, the inferno in her chest. She was sweating. "Definitely not in that order," Jefferson responded. For the first time in weeks she rode her bicycle around town like a triumphant racer, swooping around corners, pedaling uphil without slowing, exploding through empty intersections as if fleeing demons, racing as if rushing into her future.

They moved in the next day.

The family fireworks came next. Appal ed, Jefferson's family refused to pay for night cla.s.ses. She should have made a clean break right then, insisted on leaving Dutchess, but Angela wanted to stay and work things out with her parents.

"It's true I'm not the daughter they planned," Angela had explained, as much to herself, it sounded like, as to Jefferson. "How can I deprive them of the only kid they've got?"

They stayed in town and found whatever work they could: babysitting, waitressing, sel ing magazines. They made love daily, before rising, after work, in the middle of their nights, al sleepy and pa.s.sionate. She was determined to put herself through Hunter if she had to commute for ten years so she could stay with Angela. They began to feel the strength of their wings and determination when Angela got a job she liked, almost ful -time, a.s.sisting a photographer. Jefferson was hired as a layout and paste-up person in the little print shop. She learned to operate the press, bil customers, and drum up business so wel that they offered to train her as a backup manager. Arranging hair, applying makeup, and warming up customers for the photographer convinced Angela that she could succeed as a beautician if she could save up the money for school.

Al through the fal when Jefferson was supposed to have gone away to col ege, Emmy and Jarvy, smel ing of alcohol fumes, hammered at her to live a normal life and demanded her presence, without Angela, at holiday dinners. Giving up Angela was not an option, but their efforts-we'l send you to school, we'l get your grandparents to revoke your trust fund, how about a year in France-kept her in constant turmoil. She couldn't help but compare the difficulties of her life now with the relative ease of surrender.

Without consciously doing so, she schemed constantly and silently for ways to spirit Angela along if she capitulated and moved to the city to enrol ful - time as a PE major at Hunter in the spring. How, she wondered, could she get her hands on the trust money before she was twenty-one? Every other solution involved leaving Dutchess. Angela would not go. The Jeffersons' disdain of Angela and of al things gay was like the Hudson River air, whose damp grew a constant stinking crop of mold in the backs of closets in their apartment. She stil loved Angela, but she had also started to feel trapped again.

Angela gave in first. Her father, resigned to her choice of mate, offered not only to put her through beauty school, but to help finance a shop of her own when she was ready. Angela would have to stay in Dutchess and help out at the store when she wasn't in school. And Jefferson, wel , she could feel-as Margo, the German professor she would soon meet, recited-her dampened heat rekindle, but it had nothing to do with Angela, who was waiting at home for her. Jefferson's father had final y agreed to give her the money he'd be paying for a dorm so she could keep the apartment and continue to commute to Hunter for the winter semester instead. When Jefferson began commuting, only a short train ride separated her from Angela, but in the stark, dead winter, Angela seemed farther and farther away.

As if Margo had dropped a gauntlet in the middle of the cafeteria table, Jefferson touched her hand-she had become quite a toucher since Angela -and said, "I real y like this piece we're reading in lit cla.s.s." She found it in her text and read about the sal ey gardens and the poet's love with little snow- white feet. The woman told him he ought to take love easy, but Yeats said he was young and foolish, just like she knew herself to be. He cal ed the poem "An Old Song Resung" so she figured she was in good company.

"Yeats. I would never have taken you for a Yeats lover."

She felt herself flush with this dishonesty; she wasn't a poetry lover at al .

Margo's laugh, despite her frail-looking form, seemed to carry her whole life force up the column of her long pale throat and past her pouty-looking lips. Jefferson would have sat in the cafeteria for hours talking about books and poets, but she had the train home to Dutchess to catch. There was an irony in having persuaded her father to pay her tuition at Hunter Col ege. She hadn't left Angela, or cloistered herself in Dutchess, but sending her to the city every day was a bril iant move on her parents' part. It had taken her back into the larger world, exposed her to promises of urban adventure she found harder and harder to leave as train time neared.

"Immemorial sap." Later, on the train, while pa.s.sing through the sleety February darkness of Dutchess County, she tasted the words like a delicacy.

"Mounts in our arms when we love." Had it been Margo's rendering that made those the s.e.xiest words Jefferson had ever heard? Margo Kurtz was a lesbian, she could feel it in her bones. No, that wasn't where she felt it at al . Given the chance, she wanted the experience of Margo. But she should avoid her if she was to stay with Angela.

Angela was lying on the couch smoking and watching Happy Days on the TV that Jefferson's parents had given her last Christmas. Jefferson laid her books on the dining room table, shook herself out of her wet trench coat, and went eagerly to Angela.

"Wait," Angela said, hand up, laughing. Jefferson waited, trying to make sense of the figures on the screen, but her mind was on the sal ey gardens of Yeats, which had immediately evoked her early days with Angela. Perhaps, by defending Yeats, she was admitting to being a novice. The less accessible Rilke brought to mind Margo's pouty lips. What color was her lipstick? Kind of a crushed raspberry, so that her lips looked stained rather than painted.

She ignored Angela's proscription and sat beside her on the couch, craning her neck to kiss her laughing girl.

"Holy smoke," Angela said when Jefferson sat up. "What brought that on?"

Angela opened her arms and Jefferson wrapped hers around her, squeezing tight. Cold and wet after her walk from the station, she felt like she was being blown away and needed to hold on tight. The apartment wasn't very warm in winter. "I haven't seen you since seven this morning. I missed you." She wasn't altogether convinced this was true, but certainly wanted it to be and kissed Angela again, touching tongues, unb.u.t.toning the top b.u.t.ton of her blouse.

"Do you want your dinner?" Angela asked, stepping away. "I've got soup on the stove and Bisquick biscuits waiting to go in the oven."

"Too many dishes to resist," she said, pointedly fondling a breast.

"Not real y. I got my period and I don't feel very romantic."

"Oh." The deflation was compounded by a recent history of Angela's rejections. It was no wonder Margo got to her; she was plain frustrated.

"If you real y want to-"

"No, no." Jefferson felt like a half-dressed nymphomaniac on the cover of a dime-store novel. "I'l bring you a bowl of soup."

Angela's attention was caught by the television. "If you'l put the biscuits in the oven? Three-seventy-five for twenty minutes."

Later, while washing the dishes, Jefferson struggled with the sap that rose in her soapy arms. What did Margo do when she got home at night?

Probably she went back out to a coffeehouse where she talked with poets about the mysteries of life-and love. Was there someone Margo loved? Or else she wandered the streets of the city, fil ed with the kinds of longings Jefferson had. Did she ever think of Jefferson?

Angela got ready for bed as Jefferson began her homework.

"What are you studying?" Angela offered her cheek for a good-night kiss.