legs.”
Cassandra instructed Zoe on the particulars of giving blow jobs. She sewed clothes for her, urged her to tame her hair.
“Wild is one thing,” she said. “Medusa is something else. You're scaring men off with that jungle do. Why don't you let me give it a cream rinse and a little trim, just to see if we can get it to move in a windstorm?”
But Zoe didn't want her hair to change. Something resided there, something heavy and tangled she wanted to keep.
She had rented an apartment with Trancas when they graduated from high school but now Trancas was gone and Zoe lived with her friends Ford and Sharon in a fourth-floor walk-up on East Third Street, across from the Hell's Angels' headquarters. Trancas was in Oregon, in love with three women at once. Zoe worked in a secondhand clothing store on MacDougal Street. She smoked joints in the cramped little office at the back of the store, helped strangers decide whether or not to buy old party dresses, silk shawls, Hawaiian shirts. The musk of the used clothes seeped into her skin and she took hot baths at night, dabbed herself with grass oil in an effort to feel new again. At home she smoked more joints and drank wine with Sharon, who worked as a waitress, and Ford, who played guitar on the streets. She hung bad portraits of strangers on the walls of her bedroom, covered the lamp with colored scarves. She lived in New York like Alice, thinking someday she'd go back to the other world. Gardens, schoolbooks, wash on a line. For now there were her sweet-tempered friends and her undemanding job, cash paid off the books. There was sex with men who could turn out to be anybody. There was acid in Central Park; there were syringes full of crystal meth that made her slip through the hours like thread slipping through the eye of a needle. She'd learn what she could. As a young girl she'd lived in her parents' house and watched the daughters and sons of the old era dancing on television, dressed in discarded clothes and pieces of the flag, with flowers twisted into their hair. By the time she was grown a kind of promise had already faded, a lost, light-headed belief that humans could live innocently among the animals. Zoe mourned and did not mourn the passing of the old future. She had too much desire in her, too many electrical circuits snapping, to want a life growing dope and feeding chickens and goats. She wanted the true dangers of the forest; pastures and barnyards were too much like houses.
Cassandra called when she thought about it. Sometimes she came over. She didn't do drag in daylight. She came in her ordinary skinniness, her thin red hair. She wore loose khaki pants, big shirts, sometimes a bracelet or two.
“So, what's the dish, honey?” she said, sipping coffee at the kitchen table. In men's clothes she looked more feminine. In dresses and wigs she looked like a man in a dress and a wig.
“I met somebody new,” Zoe said. She tried always to have a story or two.
“Do tell.” Cassandra sat with her sharp elbows on the tabletop, looking over the rim of her coffee cup like somebody's shrewd wife.
“Well, I met him in Tompkins Square Park,” Zoe said. “I was smoking a little hash by the band shell, and he was throwing a Frisbee to a dog.”
“Men with dogs,” Cassandra said, “are generally trustworthy, but no great shakes in bed.”
“The dog came up to me, she was a nice dog, just a mutt, and I petted her and this guy and I started talking.”
“And what was he like?”
“Sweet. Sort of untouched. He said 'Wow.' ”
“Only that?”
“No. He said things like, 'Wow, are you smoking hash right out here in the open?' and 'Wow, that's a cool necklace you're wearing.' He was like a ten-year-old boy who'd turned twenty-five, you know what I mean?”
“Oh, I recognize the type from a distance. They don't come within fifty yards of nasty old drag queens.”
“We smoked what was in the pipe, and then we both started throwing the Frisbee for the dog.”
“Better go straight to the sex, this is getting boring.”
“We got all sweaty, he took off his shirt.”
“And revealed what?” Cassandra said.
“A nice body. Skinny. Sort of a boy's body, with tiny little nipples. But I liked it. I don't need muscles.”
“You straight girls are a marvel. No wonder you all get