Work Text:
*
Memories eventually trickle back in.
Carol remembers her bedroom when she was still in middle school. All of the magazine cutouts of pop stars and boy band leads. She couldn't see the robin's egg blue of her painted walls around them. The closet doors and floor mouldings were white.
White like snow. Freshly fallen. Carol remembers that snow white when she was a little bit older — maybe fourteen or fifteen — and it's cold enough outside to tingle her rosy cheeks. But her lips, wow, Carol's lips felt warm against Laura Smith's mouth.
That was her first kiss. Her very first.
Laura Smith had been shy and puzzled by the other girl's enthusiasm, but utter a little whine against Carol.
Lesbian — was she a lesbian?
Her grandmother opened the front door and shrieked at the top of her lungs as if Carol has been set on fire. Laura Smith never talked to Carol again. Carol's parents tried to explain why they're disapproving, why they wanted her to pray to Jesus and seek therapy, and it was just nonsense.
Carol moved out as soon as she could and never looked back.
Her uncle took her in, not minding when she confessed to liking girls, and told her about serving in the US Air Force. Carol knew that's what she wanted to. She wanted to be just like her uncle — he was stern and had a wild temper, but compassionate.
Carol used to run around on her own, jumping the fence to the next town, hanging around their carnivals.
Her and her bright green and blue hightops.
She flirted with the boys pretending to lose games for her, the boys with leather jackets, the boys with crooked, hungry grins — the ones who snatch her around the waist for a kiss, or lift Carol on their shoulders and walk her around — the ones who held her tight and rubbed against her ass. She flirted with the girls in floral, patterned skirts, the girls with ice cream cones Carol licked slyly, the girls with freckles and dark skin and bright blonde curls — the ones who held Carol's hand fearfully on the rollercoasters and the Ferris wheel, or linked arms while strolling to the arcade — the ones who tasted like peppermint gum when Carol held them in a bathroom stall, grinding hips.
It was the girls she really wanted to make smile.
She gave childish things, eventually, as soon as Carol discussed her plans to a recruiter and started her basic training. But life took pleasure in her misery. Like her parents and her grandmother — other people didn't want Carol to be who she was.
Don't Ask, Don't Tell.
Carol didn't think it was anyone's business that she enjoyed women, and no longer men, but keeping secrets?
Maria. Maria hated the policy too, frowning and complaining out of earshot of their sergeant. Carol doesn't remember how or when she met Maria — not yet — but she does remember Maria smelled like lilacs when they dressed up to go to karaoke.
Nobody sang like Maria. Nobody was even resembled the shadow of Maria.
She was a sword, unbending and gleaming and silver-coated on her tongue, and Carol knew she wanted to spend the rest of her life with her. She knew it before Carol ever kissed her. (On a dirt road, in the morning — Maria tossed a filthy, oil-stained rag in Carol's face, and then she kissed Carol. Soft and sure, and Carol was sure she was gonna pass out from holding her breath for so long. Didn't ask. Didn't tell either.)
Maria ended up pregnant — Carol doesn't remember the father, or if Maria was dating or married or widowed — but Carol helped raise Monica, lived with them, loved them, made their breakfast with shell flecks in the hot scrambled eggs and burned the toast.
She remembers Maria loved her too. Carol can see it now, when they're alone on the porch, fanning themselves in the heat.
Maria whispers about Monica's grades, and her art projects, and all of the memories that Carol is still lacking. She thumbs over Carol's face, laughing quietly, hoarsely, when the other woman presses a tender, moist kiss to Maria's wrist.
Carol wishes she could do this forever.
Hold her hand.
Listen.
Be here.
(Maybe some day.)
*