But when JJ lifted his head from my crotch and slid his chest onto mine, cock hard, I shook my head. “I don’t wanna have sex,” I said. I wished to share my sexual initiation with a man who might be my mate—not a rough-spoken ranch hand who reckoned I could stick around, keep house for him, pick up a shift at the Feed Barn.
I pulled back from the brink of sex again in January 1999, under cover of night, at the tip of a dock snaking into the Gulf of Mexico. I was in Key West on winter break from college; my seducer was Jorge, a suave Chilean graduate student who’d come on to me by resting a warm hand on my back and tilting my eyes toward the belt of Orion. I thrilled to his touch—and ignored the e-mail he sent, a month later, saying he’d like to see me on a trip he was planning to Boston.
Had Toba asked, I would have shared details of my flings with JJ and Jorge. But she just nodded, eyes on the block she was setting. Then she looked up. “Did you make it with them?” she asked.
“‘Make it’? What do you mean?” Some of the sixties-isms the Zendiks favored needed translation.
“Have sex,” she said. “Did you have sex with them.”
Blood rushed to my cheeks again. The thrill of being recognized as a sexual being overrode any alarm I might have felt at the trespass in her question.
“No,” I replied. “Both guys were ready, but I stopped them. I didn’t wanna get pregnant. And I didn’t wanna do it for the first time with just anyone.”
As I spoke, I flashed on Karma’s description, in her Woodstock story, of approaching a bare-chested man with the magazine: “I liked the painter even though I had to shield against too strong of a sexual connection… . Sex in the world isn’t friendly yet.” Had I avoided sex “in the world” partly because I’d sensed it wasn’t friendly? Could it be true that sex at Zendik was friendly already? In a scenelet of the selling crew’s drive home from upstate New York to North Carolina, Karma quoted her fellow road warrior Cayta—“who’s in charge, if anyone’s in charge”—as saying, “I always want to have sex on the way home—clean bed, hot food, and sex.” Maybe, at the Farm, sex was something warm and sweet and easy to come by that you enjoyed with the blessing of friends. Maybe choosing the right matrix mattered just as much as meeting the right man.
My task after lunch was to help Zeta—one of the young women from the trenching crew—paint shelving units on the Addition’s upper level, divided into three bedrooms. The one we set up in was a loft at the crest of a spiral staircase, bright with sunshine pouring in through windows and skylights. From the railing I admired the structure’s soaring floor-to-roof sweep, as well as the love glowing through each handcrafted detail. I would not have guessed that every board in the building had been pried from the skeleton of some rotting home or shop. The Zendiks had taken a motley jumble of derelict stuff and found purpose for it in a smooth new whole.
Zeta filled two yogurt containers with thick white paint from a bucket nested in newspaper. As we laid it in sleek glides over rough reclaimed pine, I learned that she, like me, had grown up in New York City. She’d even attended the same high school as my sister, at about the same time. A musical virtuoso, she played violin and sometimes sang backup in the all-improv Zendik band. She met her machisma quotient with high-topped combat boots, and tiny-toothed shells biting into her dreadlocks. At the Farm about a year and a half, she was one of only two Black women in the group, and one of only three Black Zendiks.
Warmed by news of our shared origins, I barely blinked when Zeta switched subjects. “Hey,” she said, with a playful smile, “has anyone told you how dating works?”
“No,” I said. “But last night at dinner I heard one of the girls say she was going on a date. I figured she and her boyfriend were heading into Hendersonville to see a movie or something.”
Watching Zeta’s smile widen, I began to doubt the story I’d supplied. “Was I wrong?”
Zeta laughed and nodded, eliciting a burst of clicks from the tiny teeth. “Yeah, you were wrong,” she said. “Dating here is nothing like dating out there. The way we do it is totally different.” She paused, raised her brush to remove a stray bristle. “Have you met Shure and Loria?”
I hadn’t.
“They’re the dating strators. They’ve been here forever—I think since Boulevard.”
“Strator,” I would discover, was Zendik slang for “administrator.” Boulevard—a town outside San Diego—was one of the Farm’s earlier locations. Other Zendik vintages, from older to newer, included Topanga, Texas, and Florida. In its thirty-year history, the Farm had moved many times.
I nodded. Zeta continued. “If you wanna get together with a guy you like, you ask one of them to hit him up for you. You can hit him up for a date—which means sex—or if you just wanna kiss, hold hands, make out, you can start with a walk instead.”
My brush slowed as I imagined ambling through a meadow at midnight, hand in hand, with Estero. The thought of my fingers twined in his roused a delicious wave of tingles.
“You can say in advance how far you wanna go, and the guy will respect that. No games, no pressure. No dumb pickup lines.”
My vision dissolved into the final scene of a vivid dream I’d had when I was ten. A handsome man, at least thrice my age, was chasing me through a tropical forest. Upon catching me, he said, “Let’s not have sex. Let’s just make love.” I was relieved and enraptured.
Twelve years later, I still thought “making love” and “having sex” were separate things. To me, “making love” meant luxuriating in the holding and kissing, the stroking and petting, the languor and longing, as long as you chose. This, it seemed, was the promise of a “walk.”
Zeta broke in with a question. “You’re a virgin, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, taken aback. “How’d you know?”
“Oh,” she said, dabbing extra paint into a knothole, “Toba told me. At lunch.” She covered the patch around the knothole with short, quick strokes. “So, yeah, you’d wanna take it slow. Here, you can do that. People will help.”
I thought again of Estero—the latest in a string of crushes threading back to first grade. How many boys, then men, had enthralled me with their wit, their salt, their sweat, only to dance out of reach? How many chances had I missed to take a hand, test for a match?
Where had Zendik been all my life?
“Wow,” I breathed, gazing out the bedroom window at a pillow of mist falling on the Blue Ridge. “That sounds like a fairy tale.”
A couple days later, I caught my first glimpse of Arol, the Farm’s matriarch. Glancing up from my lunch bowl of salad and broiled tofu, I saw a silver-haired woman sitting opposite me, in an armchair by the door to the porch. At sixty-one, Arol was a generation or two older than the rest of the Zendik women, who ranged in age from late teens to early forties.
She looked older in person than she did in pictures. On the cover of We the Poet, the Zendik band’s latest album, her hair fell in shining ripples; her skin, smooth and youthful, luminesced behind a wall of rain. In a Zendik magazine photo taken about ten years earlier, she commanded a barn doorway, hip thrust out, slim and sexy in jeans, cowboy boots, and a tailored denim jacket. Her luxuriant hair spilled over her shoulders in dark waves tinged gray; the dime-size blue whale tattooed high on her right cheekbone faced a rocky voyage past the challenge hurled by her stormy gaze: I dare you to say I’m on the fade.
Since she’d posed for the photo, Arol had overseen two moves (from Texas to Florida and then North Carolina), lost Wulf, her mate of forty years, and aged in frame and face. The woman across the living room wore a baggy sweater and loose cotton pants. Gravity tugged at her cheeks, her neck, the dime-size whale; wrinkles webbed her forehead. Her hair, still thick around her shoulders but brittle at the ends, had faded to gray.