Treasured Memories
When the protagonist, Lily, makes her first trip to the Telegraph Club it only changes everything for her. It is like Dorothy traveling from Kansas to Oz with one exception. Lily brings home a part of her own private Idaho with her with plans to keep it intact as it forever as a treasured sense memory:
“That morning when Lily got dressed she had come across the blouse she had worn to the Telegraph Club, folded in her bottom dresser drawer. When she started to move it out of the way she caught the faint odor of cigarette smoke, and then something else. She pulled it out and pressed her nose to the cloth, where she smelled the bar itself—a stale, boozy scent. (Standing against the wall of the club, plucking the fabric of her blouse away from the sweat on her back, the air thick with the exhalations of all those women.) She should wash the blouse before her mother discovered it, but she couldn’t bring herself to put it in the laundry basket. She wanted to preserve it like a piece of evidence.”
Caught in the Act
Her mother eventually does discover the truth, but not through sniffing dirty laundry. Well, not literally, anyway. Dirty laundry almost always is eventually sniffed out when there is someone with a big enough nose and the desire to stick it into the business of other people. Lily’s secret comes to light and imagery tells the tale:
“Lily felt as if she were stuck on a broken track in a diorama, as if she were not herself but merely the figurine of a Chinese girl that kept jerking back to the beginning rather than continuing through her miniature world. It was clear that if she agreed with her mother—and Shirley—if she would only tell them what they wanted to hear, then she could move forward on her prescribed path. But that would mean erasing all her trips to the Telegraph Club; it would mean denying her desire to go at all. It meant suppressing her feelings for Kath, and at that moment, her feelings seemed to swell inside her so painfully that she was terrified she might burst. Was this what it felt like to love someone? She wished she could ask Shirley how she had known.”
Inside the Devil’s Playground
So, this Telegraph Club is a secret lesbian bar. Meaning, of course, since this story takes place in the 1950’s, that it is nothing less than a Satanic hellmouth where Lucifer—inventor of communism—exploits the unnatural sexuality of woman-on-women lust for the benefits of his minions in Moscow and Peking. From the inside, however, things seem a little different:
“The black door opened into a narrow, dimly lit space. Lily didn’t know where to look at first; she wanted to see everything, but she was afraid to stare. There was a mirrored bar on the left where patrons sat on stools. There was barely enough space on the right for Lily and Kath to pass in single file. Lily was struck most forcefully by the smell of the place: a mixture of booze, perfume, sweat, and cigarette smoke. As she followed Kath down the side of the room, she noticed some of the women turning their heads to look at her, their eyes reflecting the globe lights hanging above.”
Pilots, Always with Pilots
Ever sit down and have a one-one-one conversation with a pilot? Not a commercial one sitting in the cockpit of a giant airliner that could probably make it from NY to LA with no one there looking at the computer doing all the heavy lifting, but a pilot of a prop aircraft. Inevitably, no matter the circumstances, it is always the exact same conversation and the imagery here pretty much replicates every one of those conversations almost verbatim:
“The wheels lift off the ground, and you don’t feel it anymore. There are no more bumps. Everything is miraculously smooth. You feel like—well, like a bird! Nothing’s holding you down. You’re floating. You’re flying. And the ground just falls away below you, and you look out the window and everything becomes more and more distant, and none of it matters anymore. You’re up in the air. You leave everything else on the ground. It’s just you and the wind.”
