I love this scene that shows how women talk when we work together. But it didn’t move the story forward, so it had to go.
Everyone had to work the rest of the week, and spent their time off packing and getting ready for a yard sale Gloria organized for Saturday. Robin spent those days clearing out the bottom floor of the house then got started on the barn.
On Saturday, Nikki avoided working the yard sale by meeting Robin at before dawn. Nikki was tall, strong, and handsome. She kept her hair short, and more than one woman had been carried away on fantasies after hearing her voice.
Nikki arrived in her work truck, “N. Poletti, General Contractor” painted on both doors. Her logo was a crossed T-square and a hammer that looked a little like a labrys.
Nikki inspected the stairway and agreed it was lethal. She pulled a ladder off her truck and measured how high the staircase would be. While she was up there, she pried up the decking and declared the joists and walking surface sound.
Nikki and Robin had never built anything together, but after Robin saw the contents of Nikki’s tool boxes, and Robin agreed to buy the more expensive redwood, they began their lasting construction partnership.
After a euphoric hour in the San Lorenzo lumber yard, before they got to the cashiers, Nikki pulled Robin over to the tool aisle and put a hammer, cat’s paw, gloves, and a leather tool belt into Robin’s hands.
“All this? For me?”
“You won’t believe the effect of a tool belt.”
They set up their shop in the yard behind the kitchen, carrying lumber, extension cords, two ladders, and half-a-dozen toolboxes from the truck. Nikki taught Robin how to deftly drop a hammer into the hook at the back of her new belt.
“You wreck out the old stairs while I start on the new one.” Nikki showed Robin the proper way to remove a nail with the cat’s paw and watched Robin struggle to extract the four long nails from the bottom step. Eventually Robin held the tattered board over her head like a trophy and Nikki cheered.
“Okay, good. Now use this,” Nikki said laughing, and plugged in an electric reciprocating saw. “Just cut the stairs to pieces.”
“Why did you make me use the nail puller?”
“Every carpenter needs to know how to remove a nail before she pounds one in,” Nikki said declaratively. “You finish, and I’ll calculate the cuts for stringers.”
“Stringers?”
“Those gorgeous two-by-twelves we tied to the top of the truck. Stringers are the diagonal boards that hold the treads. What we walk on are treads. We call the vertical board between each tread the riser.”
Robin finished cutting apart the rotten stairway before Nikki was done scribbling her calculations in a notebook. Nikki told Robin to take the remains of the staircase to the dump pile while she muttered over the calculations until they satisfied her.
Nikki marked the stringers and Robin held the ends while Nikki sawed her precisely measured triangular notches. Then they cut boards into treads and risers.
“Do we put it together now?”
“Let’s clean up first.” Nikki produced mauls and splitters from a toolbox and they reduced the scraps to kindling. “That reminds me, we need firewood.”
“I’ll call Locatellis. Do we put together the stairs now?”
“We need a foundation.”
The old stairway was well rotted away from a cracked concrete slab. Nikki and Robin used chisels and pickaxes to break it up. While they worked, their conversation turned to women.
“So were you and Wren lovers?”
“Wren and I were together a long time ago, but we were never serious.”
“Is that true?” Robin remembered Wren describing it differently.
“Well,” Nikki pried up a big chunk of concrete and they carried it to the dump pile. “I wasn’t as serious as she was. She hadn’t been in a relationship with a woman before, and I was also seeing this older woman. That woman was into women’s spirituality, so that’s how I got into it. I met Wren in one of those classes. Ginny, Lupe, and Ginny were in it too, but we knew each other in high school.”
“At the Halloween ritual Lupe and Ginny were the Spider and the…um…harvest?” asked Robin.
“Yes.”
“Why were you a beaver?”
“They’re so hard working,” Nikki said, but Robin knew she was joking. “What was your mask about?”
“A campfire?”
“Whoa, a woman who thinks campfires are scary. Cripes.”
“It’s a long story.”
They finished breaking up the old foundation and started digging a trench for the new one.
“Were you all gay in high school?”
“I was, but not out.” Nikki paused as if realising something. “When did you come out? You were so much older than me.”
“I knew I was gay when I was about 15.”
“I was eight then. You were so cool.”
“Really? No fifteen-year-old feels cool. I remember you, another little tomboy. But I was wrapped up in my own troubles.”
“I wouldn’t be fifteen again for all the tofu in Oakland.” They fetched concrete foundation piers from the truck and set them into the trench.
“Okay, that looks pretty good. Let’s use the level to make sure.” Nikki set the level and liked what she saw. “Yup.” Before she continued, she finished her thought. “Anyway, I knew Lupe and Ginny were girlfriends, and no one can figure out what’s going on with Ginny.
Now they were ready to connect the three stringers to the veranda.
“What breaks my heart about the women I’ve been with is the shame they live with,” Nikki said, drilling a pilot hole, then driving a screw through the stringer and into the upper joist.
“Shame about being lesbian?”
“Most women get over lesbophobia shame in no time, once they figure out how much better the sex is than with men.” Ziiiip, another pilot; drrrript, another screw.
“But they’re ashamed to tell their girlfriend they still masturbate, or if they want to be fucked with fingers, or when they have a fantasy during sex—women always find something to stop themselves from really enjoying sex, even once they are lesbians.” Zip. Dript.
“I think there’s a difference between shame and guilt,” Robin said, who was holding the stringers as Nikki attached them. “Guilt is feeling bad for really doing something wrong, whether or not you knew it was wrong at the time. Shame is the feeling you get when your desire for pleasure is interrupted.”
Zip. Dript. Nikki paused for a moment to let that sink in. “So feeling guilty is a positive emotion, because it keeps us from hurting each other. But feeling shame is an emotion that prevents you from your own pleasure.”
“That’s how it seems to me,” said Robin.
They started in on the last stringer. “So when I was attracted to you when I was a girl, was that shame or guilt?”
“You were attracted to me?”
“Yeah, I felt guilty because we were cousins, but I felt shame because guilt interrupted my pleasure in it.” Nikki grinned. She wasn’t sorry or guilty. Zip. Dript.
“You felt the cousin thing was wrong, but not that we were two women?”
“Nah, being attracted to women always seemed normal to me. It was the rest of the world that seemed wrong.”
“I’m sorry I never noticed. I was way too wrapped up in my own troubles. Maybe I could have helped you, you little baby dyke.”
“Don’t worry about it. If we’re going to be housemates, I thought I should tell you. You’re not really my type, anyway.” Zip. Dript.
“What is your type?”
“Rounder than you.” Zip. Dript.
“I hear ya, sista-woman.”
“So you decided we’re going to be housemates?”
“Yup. I think Lupe and Ginny will move up for sure too.” Nikki started screwing the lower ends of the stringers into the wood embedded in the pier.
“How long have you known them?”
Zip. Dript. “They were a year behind me in high school. Ginny moved with her family to Santa Cruz up from Watsonville, and she and Lupe and I started to hang out. I knew something was going on between them. Zip. Dript. When they told me they were having sex, oh my god that opened my eyes to the possibilities. We did everything we could to learn more about lesbians. There were lesbians at UCSC, but those women were so different from us locals. Then we found Our Bodies, Ourselves and that chapter on lesbians. Zip. Dript.
“I was so happy to read that,” Robin said, moving out of Nikki’s way. “When I came out to myself, I also came into my memories of past lives.”
“So that’s how the past life stuff works?” Zip. Dript.
“That book excited me. This is the first time in history when there are lesbians in public. We have always existed, but now there are lesbian magazines and lesbian dances, and lesbian poetry readings and lesbian car mechanics and lesbian bands. Now I’ve found the lesbian witches!”
“And they happen to need a place to live.” Nikki stood back and admired the completed stringers and reached for a board that would be the first tread. “Watch this,” Nikki said. “Women will be up and down these steps in bare feet. We don’t want a nail to pop up and cut them.”
Nikki carefully lay the first tread across the notches in the stringers and with her pencil marked where the nail would go. She pulled a narrow chisel from her tool belt and tapped her hammer against it, incising a curled sliver of wood across the mark. She dropped the chisel into her tool belt and fetched out a nail in one motion, then drove it into the groove under the curl of wood. Then she dropped the hammer into the hook at her back and pulled out a tube. She drew a thin line of glue, and with her finger pressed the curl of wood back flush with the surface of the board. The nail disappeared, hidden under the sliver.
“Do you think you can do that?” Nikki said, admiring her work.
“That was so beautiful, I think I’d rather watch.”
“Oh, so that’s your thing.”
“I have a lot of things.”
Robin watched while Nikki worked her way up, laying a tread, creating thin slivers, nailing, gluing, and vanishing the nails like magic. Robin handed her each tread as she needed it.
After a while they talked about sex again. “Have you been lovers with any other women in the coven?” Robin asked.
“It happens doesn’t it? We can’t help it.”
“Nope. Put women alone together and they find a way to have sex with each other. Even nuns and their mortal sins.”
“Next please.”
“So? Have you?”
“We don’t have a rule against it, but no. We do stuff in ritual that sort of settles tension.” Nikki nailed the rest of that tread. “Hey, when’s your birthday?”
“In a few weeks, after Thanksgiving.”
“Oh good, then we can give you your birthday massage.”
“Uh oh.” Nikki put her hand out and Robin placed the next tread in it.
“We do a ritual on each woman’s birthday, a group massage. I wasn’t sure about it at first, but now I like it. You get touched—lovingly not sexually touched—by everyone in the coven. You need to learn how to let it happen and not give back, you know? Doing that in ritual without a give and take. Gloria says that eros is part of all friendships, even when you’re not lovers.”
“Don’t other people’s girlfriends have a problem with a group massage they aren’t invited to?”
“Sometimes we invite them. But girlfriends always have a problem with us. Girlfriends don’t always understand our coven sister thing. That’s why most of us are non-monogamous.”
“How does that work out?”
“Works great for me.”
“I should have known.”
“Only Ginny doesn’t have girlfriends. She seems to be happy with herself and loves animals. She’s looking forward to getting goats. She’ll probably need me to help her with a chicken coop.”
“Speaking of animals, she and I saw a snake the other day.”
“Really? It’s late in the year to see snakes.”
“But it hasn’t rained for a while. I think it was just sitting in the sun.”
“I don’t blame it. Anyway, back before the coven started, the witchcraft class tried to do a group sex ritual.”
“How was it?”
“Magnificent.” Nikki was halfway up. “But the couple who wanted to do it the most, of course they broke up after. And then there was all the processing of the childhood sexual abuse that comes up when any group has sex.”
“Probably for the best?”
“Yes, in the long run. But we could have done better by each other.”
“I think I know what you mean. You’re still so young.”
“I don’t feel young.”
“Well, you are, and it’s so much to deal with. You don’t have the tools.”
“I got the tools right here,” said Nikki, grasping the buckle of her tool belt with both hands, and giving Robin a salacious look.
They were quiet for a while, enjoying the rhythm of work. They were near the top when Nikki continued her last thought.
“For lots of women, non-monogamy is exciting because it’s radical. Women have political reasons why non-monogamy is better. Did you hear about that women’s collective back east that forced everyone to sleep with everyone else?”
“Why force them? Just wait.”
“I know,” said Nikki laughing. “God, isn’t it great when a woman wants you?”
“Even if she’s not supposed to.”
“Especially. It shocks me when they come to bed.”
“A new lover gives you a sense of self-worth.”
“Yeah.” Nikki reached for the last tread. “Shit, that’s lame.”
“Don’t be hard on yourself.”
“I try not to be.” Nikki hammered in the last nail. She climbed down. “Let’s do the risers later. You should try them out.”
“There’s no rail.”
“The stairs are three feet wide. You won’t fall off.”
“Did you know I’m afraid of heights?”
“You go first, I promise I’ll catch you.”
“Har har.”
Robin nearly ran up the new stairs and stepped off onto the veranda. The surface was spongy with a thick layer of leaves and needles, but felt firm underneath. Nikki followed and walked around the entire house opening each door. “The construction here is weird,” she said. “Every room has its own door? No interior hallway?”
“No, there isn’t. I think that’s how people did it back then. It was easier for multiple families to live together.”
“All in one room?”
“That’s how most human beings still live.”
“I forget about that.”
Robin opened the middle room. “I want to show you the attic,” Robin said. “I haven’t been up there since I was a kid.”
This bedroom contained a rusted iron bed covered in a decayed mattress and empty wine bottles. A roughly constructed ladder of two-by-fours leaned across one wall and disappeared through the ceiling.
“Age before beauty,” said Nikki, with a gesture. Robin took a breath before climbing the ladder and gingerly stepped off the ladder at the top. “Yuck, spider webs,” she said, crouching next to the ladder. Nikki only stuck her head through and looked around. She pulled a flashlight from her tool belt.
Unlike the rest of the house, the attic was empty. Four dormer windows overlooked the plaza, four faced the forest.
“Can you imagine this room in the summer? Light coming in on both sides?”
“Yes, I can,” Nikki said. “But it would be cold. No fireplace. I suppose we’ll have to get a furnace, eventually. And a better stairway up here.”
“I like the way you think,” said Robin.
Later that evening Robin and Nikki drank beers on the porch, and the phone rang.
“Our first phone call,” Robin said, getting up to answer it. It was Lupe and Ginny asking for directions.
“Bring beer,” Nikki shouted before Robin hung up, and they arrived forty minutes later with a case of Henry Weinhard’s and Pizza My Heart boxes.
Lupe and Ginny admired the house and the new stairs. They got very enthusiastic about the cabins in the back. Nikki agreed they could be rehabilitated. Lupe and Ginny then explored behind the house because Lupe had read in a book where to locate and build an outhouse. They were disgusted to find the old one.