Beauty Queen

bridges, as well as a closeup of the gloomy crowded Wall Street skyline just to the south. As Mary Ellen stirred her instant coffee and added a little more raw sugar, she sadly studied the neighboring rooftops with their crumbling brick chimneys and flues, and their similar efforts at little gardens.
    Mary Ellen and Liv had lived on Bedford Street for a year now. The whole building was gay, as were many buildings in this part of Manhattan. All the tenants, both men and women, had worked at fixing up the garden. With the New Yorker's thrift and skill at scavenging, the tenants had found some old unmatching ironwork chairs and a low table, which had been left at various curbs to be carted away. Mary Ellen and Liv had painted the furniture in blue, red and yellow. Barry and Phil, on the fourth floor, had found some old wooden milk-delivery boxes, which now spilled geraniums and petunias brought from the garden shop where Phil worked. Magda, on the second floor, worked in a decorator fabric shop, and had contributed the rainbow-striped canvas, which was now stretched on tall frames around the garden's edge. The frames cut off the depressing view of the nearby tarpaper roofs, with their dust, pigeon shit and broken glass. Even Jerry, on the ground floor— though he was a little richer than the other tenants and had his own tiny back-court garden—had contributed an extra garden hose, and everybody used it to water the flowers and keep the dust sprayed off of them.
    Barry and Phil had just left for work, clattering off down the stairs, so Mary Ellen and Liv were left to enjoy the rooftop morning by themselves.
    Mary Ellen had been enjoying it, till she picked up her Times and saw the article about the gay rights bill.
    It was an exercise in futility, she thought—the bill would get voted down again.
    She slumped back into the blue ironwork chair and stretched out her long lean legs in their ripped-off denim shorts and blue sneakers. She was off duty today, so she wouldn't have to pull the hot blue uniform pants up over them. She and Liv had picked this apartment because it was close to the Twelfth Street post office where Liv worked as a mail sorter. It was also comfortably far from the boundaries of her police precinct on the East Side, where Mary Ellen was known as Sergeant Mary Ellen Frampton, AKA "Sarge" and "Cuffs." Her .38 Smith and Wesson service revolver and her smaller off-duty handgun were downstairs in the bedroom drawer.
    The two of them had lived together for over two years now, and Mary Ellen was always amazed at how loving someone got better and better. Right now, the only thing wrong with her life was that she couldn't be open with her superiors about being a lesbian, and that she was not officially welcome in the American society whose law and order she had formally sworn to help uphold. That was a large thing to be wrong in her life.
    She had met Liv while still a rookie. She was on a weekend upstate with three other women, visiting a woman who had a lovely old house in Rhinebeck overlooking the Hudson. That morning, Maiy Ellen had gone out to get a gallon of milk, and Liv had come striding up the shady street, carrying her heavy mailbag like it was nothing. Her uniform was crisply pressed. Her mailperson's visored hat set off her baby-blue eyes and her white-blonde hair in its strict little bun. Her sweet Scandinavian face with its china-white skin was trying hard to tan.
    The mailperson swiftly looked Mary Ellen up and down with a look there was no mistaking.
    By the time Mary Ellen was able to get her breath back, Liv had gone striding on up the street.
    But the next morning, Mary Ellen waylaid the smiling young mailperson and struck up a conversation. This led to her contriving to be invited to Rhinebeck another time.
    She learned that Liv had come to the United States as an exchange student in psychology, decided to stay, and become a citizen, but had been unable to get a job because of overcrowding in her field. She was staying in Rhinebeck with an aunt and uncle, also Swedish-born, who were good somber churchgoing Lutherans. She was neither butch nor femme— but a kiki, in her naturalness and dislike of role-playing. And Mary Ellen, under her own uniform, was also a kiki.
    One thing led to another, and Liv left her quiet upstate town and moved to New York with Mary Ellen. There, she found the U.S. Post Office unwilling to put her on the street as a mailcarrier again. So she took the next best