“You guys go on road trips to hand out magazines, right? Like that trip you took to Woodstock?”
“Yeah,” said Eile. “We go out most weekends. When the concert scene is slow, we sell the street.”
I could tell that “sell the street” meant “sell merchandise on the street.” What threw me was the word “sell.” “So, you don’t just hand the magazines out? You sell them?”
“Yeah, that’s how we support ourselves. We get donations sometimes, and apprentice fees, but they’re not reliable. Selling is our survival.”
Selling for a living sounded intriguing—but I doubted I could do it. Once, I’d spent an afternoon distributing free copies of the New York Observer on a busy corner in SoHo. I’d crumpled under the neutral cruelty of brush-off after brush-off, while my partner, laughing and bantering, had rapidly emptied his satchel.
“Does everybody go selling?” I asked.
“No, not everyone. I mean, almost all the girls do, every other weekend. But some of the guys aren’t that good at it, so they only go out once in a while.”
As Eile spoke, I noticed a bright fringe of scarves, shirts, and sweaters trimming the rail of the loft above the living room. “What’s up there?”
“That’s where a bunch of the girls sleep. We just moved in a couple weeks ago. The guys don’t mind the draft in the barn, but for us it was getting to be too cold at night.”
Uphill from the Farmhouse, at the end of a wide gravel path, stood two barns—one for horses, one for goats. Before dinner, Eile had led me up the hill, pointing out studios for music and dance, a woodshop adjoining a trash shed, a storage yard for building materials salvaged from demolition jobs in nearby towns. Then I’d followed her up a steep, rail-less staircase to the horse-barn loft. A few dozen bunks lined the loft’s long sides. Wind slipped in through gaps between wall slats. These bunks slept most of the Zendik men.
At the back of the loft stood an insulated plywood box, about eight feet tall and twice as wide. Half the ten bunks inside the box belonged to a motley crew of strange males who, like me, were “new people.” These would be my roommates.
Sitting with Eile in the living room, admiring the gaily decked railing, I wished I didn’t have to trek up to the barn in the dark. I wondered what would earn me a bed here, among women.
The next morning, after breakfast, I reported for my first Zendik work assignment: helping dig a trench for running power cables from the Farmhouse to the dance studio. I waited outside the dance-room door, at one end of the Day-Glo-orange line sprayed on the ground as a guide. The rest of the crew—all women—sauntered up a dirt path from the toolshed, shouldering half a dozen shovels and a pickax.
Karma was first to grab the pick. She straddled the line, knees bent, quads taut against tight jeans, and hoisted it above her head. With a fierce downswing, she drove it deep in the earth.
Her hair slipped from a loose knot and tumbled in blond hanks to her shoulders, veiling the iridescent dreamcatchers dangling from her ears. Her low-cut T-shirt, tie-dyed in sea colors, barely hid pert, braless breasts. She’d perfected the macha-yet-feminine look favored by Zendik women.
“Yeah!” she grunted, slipping her hand down the pick’s shaft for a second swing. “Nothin’ like a little pickin’ to get the blood movin’ in the mornin’!” The daughter of a Texas-based diplomat, she’d had ample opportunity to hone her hillbilly act.
When it was my turn to pick, my heartbeat accelerated with excitement. Blood rushed to my cheeks. Euphoria surged through me as dormant muscles roared into use.
“Yeah! Swing it!” yelled Karma. I glanced over my shoulder at her. Heaving a shovelful of clods over the lip of the trench, she flashed me a mischievous grin. I smiled back, then redoubled my attack on the line of glowing orange. Each thwack of the pick swelled a joy I’d rarely taken in my innate strength.
“Hey, Helen!” called Karma, from a few feet farther back. I swiveled to face her and rested the pick against the building, guessing my turn with it had ended. She stood with one foot in the ditch, the blade of her trenching shovel poised to slice into the gray muck beneath the red clay. She knitted her eyebrows and thrust her jaw into geezer jowls, mugging for me and a couple other women who’d paused to listen. “Are you a lez-bean?”
What? I thought. But I could see why she’d asked. My baggy brown overalls hid every curve her jeans exposed. The neckline of my shirt clung to my collarbone. I owned no jewelry. After years of disuse, my ear piercings had almost closed. And my head evoked a shag rug—four and a half months earlier, a couple hours after receiving my college diploma, I’d given myself a buzz cut. Knowing I’d be wandering, I’d wished to spare myself the bother of keeping my hair clean—while showing my disinterest in doing anything to attract a man.
According to the mating story I’d brought to Zendik, the man I was meant to spend my life with would find me. He would see through my butch do and bad clothes. He would know that when I blushed—when I shunned his gaze for a book, the floor, the distance—I was subtly showing interest. He would reach beneath my silence and hunch to stroke my soft animal, curled and panting. He would fold me in his arms, set me at ease, sweep me to ecstasy. He would call, I would respond. Out of his touch would spring a lifelong bond.
I’d already begun wondering if this man would find me at Zendik.
Earlier that morning, through half-closed lids, I’d watched as a Zendik named Estero let himself into the plywood box at the back of the barn loft. Starting with thick, red-faced Rebel, snoring from a bunk opposite me, Estero roused each of my roommates with a touch to the shoulder and a cry of “Seven thirty! Rise and shine!” He ranged through the room with slouching grace, his dark curls pulled carelessly into a tangled ponytail. A tiny smile played at the edges of his eyes and mouth. Maybe it amused him to alarm others while still groggy himself. I snuggled into my mummy bag, eyes shut tight, and feigned the steady breathing of deep sleep.
I felt the air shift as he crouched to reach me. I kept my eyes closed. Then—there it was: the touch on my shoulder, igniting a tingle through layers of nylon, goose down, cotton. I let my eyes open to meet Estero’s eyes, dark and wide, lit by that hint of a smile. “Seven thirty. Time to wake up,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m awake.”
I lay still, transfixed, as he rose like steam from a hot spring and disappeared through the door.
Later, at breakfast, I’d washed down my bowl of honey-drizzled oatmeal with an intoxicating drink from the Farm’s brimming pool of rippling masculinity. Tucked in a corner of the living room, I’d sipped surreptitious glimpses of firm biceps browned by farmer tans, frayed cuffs over muddy work boots, roughened hands resting on comfortably slung tool belts. I’d savored the notes of a new music of male names: Dymion. Prophet. Lyrik. Estero. (Again: Estero.) With their lively eyes and vigorous strides, their ease with the work of survival, the Zendik men seemed like a breed apart from the scholars and artists I’d known at Harvard.
But Karma couldn’t read my insides. And she wasn’t the first to miscast me. A few months earlier, in the ladies’ room of an Applebee’s on Flatbush Avenue, a woman had snarled, “What are you doing here?” before seeing I was female. Her mistake had stunned and hurt me.
“No,” I told Karma, the word “lez-bean” still ringing in my inner ear. “No, I’m really not. I just cut my hair short so it would be easy to take care of.”