It was around the time I quit my job as a typist with Con Edison that I finally worked up the courage to go into the Bracken. The Bracken was a piano bar in the Village that I had heard of, by reputation, from other girls at the boardinghouse; they were making fun of a new arrival from Texas, who had been going down there to cadge drinks and plates of spaghetti from the dykes who worked for the transit authority. Like many things at the boardinghouse, the Bracken was at once a place that everybody knew about and that nobody would admit to having been to. Twice I walked past the narrow door without going in, and once I hesitated for a few minutes at the end of the block, pretending to be waiting for a bus. I saw women go in and out—some with lipstick on, hair curled and pinned, and some who wore big black shoes and kept their cigarettes tucked behind their ears. I saw a few men, too, laughing and joking with their arms around each other.
I had no one to go with me. I couldn’t ask Cathy. I had gone with girls at the Barrington School, but that place was a cloister, where the girls romanced each other out of boredom and loneliness as much as real desire. A running joke in the senior class compared these relationships to the arrangements made by men trapped on ships on long ocean voyages. This was different. I was out in the world and I couldn’t pretend it was a game anymore. I could have a good time with men, but with women it was different: I was lit up, rattled, consumed.
I chose an evening when Cathy was out on a date with a law student and dressed carefully in our room. I chose a shift that I thought was very chic—it was black and it did something clever with the draping on one shoulder but otherwise refused to call attention to itself, and it made me feel a bit like a French girl, or at least a co-ed at the New School. I looked nice, I thought. I was tall, and my legs were all right.
The Bracken was crowded and noisy, a fog of smoke around half-lit chandeliers. Colored Moroccan lanterns hung over the bar; the banquettes were draped in old velvet, and the wood floor showed through in places where the linoleum had been danced away. I pushed my way to the bar, licking dry lips. A woman whose short hair was combed back with oil stared straight into my eyes, her expression blank, and I let my gaze drop to the floor. The barmaid brought me a gimlet and I edged onto a stool. Beside me, a row of girls in cocktail dresses clung close together, laughing, prodding at the ice in their drinks with straws.
Butch women stood in clusters at the back of the room. While I watched, one woman approached the girls to my right and pushed in deftly among them, ordering a round, dropping a white hand onto the shoulders of the smallest blonde. My drink was empty, and it was hard to catch the barmaid’s eye. The blonde girl next to me, lost in her romance, laughed uproariously and elbowed me hard in the ribs, looking round a moment later with bleary eyes, as if not sure she’d made contact with a real person. “Sorry,” she said. She studied me, her eyes narrowing, then turned pointedly away.
At that point I decided to try harder at getting drunk. I caught the arm of the barmaid as she went by, and she looked up, irritated. “Another gimlet, please,” I said. Maybe she could see something in my face; her look softened. She mixed the drink and then stepped aside and said something to a woman with a painted-on beauty mark at the end of the bar.
Now I was drunk. The girls on my right had paired up and were dancing near the piano. The man at the keys played “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” with a twelve-inch ivory cigarette holder clenched between his teeth. I smoked a cigarette and then another. The feeling of being invisible stopped being so awful.
When my drink was empty, I drifted unsteadily out to the sidewalk, trying and failing to button my coat. I felt a heaviness that was a step past tears.
“Are you all right?”
I lurched back and squinted. It was the woman with the beauty mark.
“Am I what?” I said, trying to be dignified.
She smirked. She was holding a thin jacket closed. The night had gotten cold. “It’s because they think you’re a cop,” she said. “That’s why no one would talk to you.”
I must have looked shocked, because she laughed. “I’m not a cop,” I said.
“You’re not femme enough to be a femme and you’re obviously not a butch,” she said. “So they think you’re a cop.”
My coat was hanging open. I looked down at my clothes, my shoes.
“I like your dress,” she said. “It’s not that it’s not a nice dress.” She brushed a hair behind her ear. “Are you hungry? There’s a place around the corner that sells burgers.”