Tales of the City 06 - Sure of You

looked up at him hopefully.
    “Yes, yes,” said the tailor, nodding. The other men nodded with him, reassuring her. He understands, they seemed to be saying. Now let us get back to our gossip.
    She headed out into the high street, glad to be rid of this daughterly duty. An army truck came rattling up the viny tunnel, probably bound for the bakery, so she retreated into a gift shop to let it pass. The island was bristling with soldiers—the dreaded Turks being only six miles away—but the troops were too fuzzy-cheeked and funky to invoke her antimilitarist indignation.
    She had been in the shop only a moment or two when she noticed a pair of English girls—one heavy, one slim—both with the same sculpted black-and-blond haircut. They were bent over a calendar called Aphrodite 89 , obviously ogling the nudes. When the heavy one realized she was being watched, she tittered idiotically and pressed her fingers to her lips.
    Mona reassured them with a worldly smile. “Not bad, eh?”
    The skinny one made a fanning motion, pretending to cool herself off.
    The three of them laughed together, reveling in this shared lechery. Mona couldn’t help but notice how good it felt to be a dyke among dykes again. There weren’t nearly enough of them in Gloucestershire.

    The Mermaid was on the water, down where the esplanade became a sort of cobbled off-ramp to the little harbor. When she arrived, there were already three or four people staking claim to tables along the wall. On the wall itself, almost at eye level with the diners, stood a phalanx of alley cats, oblivious to the sunset, waiting for leftovers.
    She tested a couple of tables and chose the less wobbly, then did the same with chairs. The sky was a ludicrous peach color, so she turned her chair to face it while it did its number. She wondered if the gushy couple next to her would burst into applause when it was over.
    Costa, the proprietor, swept past her table with a bottle of retsina. “Your lovely mother,” he said. “Where is she?”
    “She’s coming,” Mona told him, trying not to sound crabby about answering this question for the fourth time today. “She’s meeting me here.”
    Costa set the retsina down at the next table, then swung past her again on his way to the kitchen. “We have very good swordfish tonight.”
    “Great. You’re onto me.” She watched as he continued his progress into the restaurant, nodding to his customers like a priest dispensing absolution. Then he seized a sheet of fresh plastic and returned to her table, whipping it into place with a flourish. As custom seemed to demand, she helped him tuck the edges under the elastic band.
    “Well,” he said, giving the tablecloth a final whack, “you got some sun today.
    “Did I?” She poked doubtfully at her forearm. “Think I should try for one big freckle?”
    “It looks good,” he insisted.
    “Right.”
    “Would you like wine now?”
    “No, thanks. I’ll wait till she gets here.”
    “Very good,” said Costa, and he was gone.
    Out on the water, a blue-and-green fishing boat was putt-putting back to the harbor. In this orange explosion of evening it looked oddly triumphant, like something about to be hoisted into a mother ship. She wondered if its captain felt heroic, knowing that all eyes were upon him. Or did he just feel tired, ready for his dinner and a good night’s sleep?
    She looked up the esplanade, to see a pair of strollers stopped at the wall: the mousy little straight couple from Manchester who had bored her so thoroughly two nights before at Melinda’s. Next to them, but farther along, stood the sixtyish German dykes she had already dubbed Liz and Iris, after a similar pair she knew at home.
    Two by fucking two. The whole damn town was paired off.
    Where in the name of Sappho did the single girls go?

    The sign in Costa’s window said: TRY MY LESBIAN SAUCE ON FISH/LOBSTER . She had laughed at that on their first night in town, pointing it out to Anna, and they had both been charmed by its naïveté. Naïveté, hell. Costa had served plenty of lowercase lesbians—plenty of city people in general—who must have registered amusement over the years. Certainly he had wised up by now, leaving it there only to get a rise out of tourists on the esplanade.
    Like, for instance, those babes with the two-tone haircuts. They had stopped in front of the restaurant, lured by that absurd sign, to smirk the way they had smirked in the gift shop. The little one tried