Chapter Text
Really, Maggie should have known better than to think that a lesbian bookclub would be any better than a straight one. Sure, this one is slightly better in that she's fairly certain most people have read the book. Or at least they've watched Carol and are pretending it's the same thing as having read The Price of Salt. But it's still just a group of women sitting around and not talking about the fucking book. At least not in any of the ways Maggie cares about.
Maggie wants to talk about the narrative arc, the way temporality gets torqued around Therese, what it means that this queer, queer book's road chase scene inspired Nabokov, how the weight of certain scenes changed from the book to the film (and why didn't Carol get to have a loaded gun in the film, huh?).
Everyone else wants to talk about feelings. Not even the characters's; no, their own.
Maggie tunes back in to hear some other 20-something bitching about Highsmith because the plot "feels unrealistic." Apparently it's not "good writing" to have a character fall in love so quickly because she has never personally felt anything like infatuation at a checkout counter.
Doodling in the corner of her notebook, Maggie finds herself sketching out big block letters: I HATE THIS. Again and again and again.
After a few minutes, she hears a snort of laughter from beside her and looks over to find a rather attractive woman about her age glancing down at her notebook. After an initial surge of annoyance, Maggie scrawls out a brief: "Sorry."
The woman shrugs. Maggie thinks that's the end of it. At least until she hears a quiet shuffling beside her, then finds the woman snatching a pen right out of the hand of the blonde sitting next to her. The blonde looks more than a little affronted.
The woman spins Maggie's notebook toward herself, and Maggie would be royally pissed if she wasn't so intrigued. (As it stands, she's just a regular amount of annoyed.)
"Don't be." The handwriting is a sloppy scrawl, and Maggie's deeply glad to have done enough archival work that she can read anyone's writing at this point. "I didn't really think this would be an hour of hearing people debate whether you can fall in love at a department store."
Maggie snorts loudly enough to draw the attention of everyone around her, and it's a testament to the years she's spent honing her passive listening skills during seminars full of theory bros enjoying an intellectual circle jerk that she's able to pipe up like she'd been intending to contribute to the conversation all along. She gives a vague nod of acknowledgment to the ongoing conversation, then tries to segue from the time element of the infatuation question that is, apparently, so open to debate, to the discussion questions she'd written out before coming about queer temporality. (Other than a conciliatory little, "Interesting!" from one of the attendees, no one engages, and Maggie goes back to doodling.)
A minute later, a freckled left hand drops down in the middle of her notebook again, and a barely legible, "Your point sounded cool," appears down the margins of her page.
"Shame no one else thought so," Maggie writes. She can't quite shake the feeling that she's back in grade school passing notes during the good years before all anyone wanted to talk about was boys.
"Alex," the blonde woman hisses, "give me back my pen!"
"I'm using it," Alex grumbles, clutching more tightly to it, only to have her fingers pried back one at a time in what looks like a familiar ritual, if the way Alex immediately throws her other hand around the top of the pen is any indication.
"Ladies." The tone is sharp, and both Alex and the blonde woman sit back in their seats, looking slightly and thoroughly chastised, respectively.
Maggie drops her own pen in front of Alex a moment later, and Alex shoots her a grin.
"Sorry. Kara didn't bring enough to share with the class," Alex writes.
Maggie snorts and steals the pen back. "Your gf?"
"Ew," Alex says aloud, earning another set of glares from the room that she resolutely ignores. She does shift back to the written word, though, taking the pen from Maggie's outstretched hand and scrawling, "Sister."
They go back and forth for a while, writing notes about the novel and the other book club members until a bookstore employee appears behind them, laying a hand on both of their shoulders and leaning in close. "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you both to leave the book club table."
Maggie can feel her cheeks warm, and Alex swallows heavily.
It's only once they've been led out to the cafe area that the woman--Lucy, according to her name tag--lets out a loud laugh that transforms into a full on cackle. "Sorry," she wheezes between snorts of laughter, shaking her head and looking not at all apologetic. "I've just never seen anyone get kicked out of book club before."
"Yeah, well," Maggie shrugs. "Guess you can't pass notes during book club. Not like we were even talking about the book..."
"Yeah, and if we weren't gonna talk about the book, pop culture led me to believe there would be a lot more wine," Alex chimes in.
Lucy grins. "Hate to break it to you both, but there's a lot of feelings talk and no wine here. Unless you smuggle it in yourself. But I wouldn't encourage it. I think it's probably a two strikes kinda book club. One if you're bad enough," she adds with a wink.
"Oh?" Maggie lifts an eyebrow.
"Turns out it's in really bad form to hit on the organizer's girlfriend."
Alex lets out a bark of shocked laughter.
Lucy holds two hands in the air. "It's not like she was wearing a nametag that said, 'Callie's girlfriend; do not engage.'"
"Some real L Word level shit here," Maggie says.
"We might have some aspiring Jennies in there, too. Who knows? There may just be a sequel to Thus Spoke Sarah Schuster being typed out right in my cafe." Alex glances between them as they laugh, and Lucy raises her eyebrows at Alex. "Never seen it?"
Alex shakes her head. "Kind of, um, new to all this."
"Oh. Well, welcome," Maggie says. "We have Subarus and good coffee and shitty book clubs."
"And some truly terrible television," Lucy adds.
"Yeah, that. It's better to get all your gay friends together to watch with drinks or something. Makes it a little less sad."
Lucy nods sagely.
"I guess I probably just ruined my chances of turning any of them into my new gay Central Perk gang, huh?" Alex asks, gesturing in the vague direction of the book club table.
"Probably," Maggie sighs.
"But hey," Lucy says, "you've got two queer women standing right next to you. Play your cards right, and maybe I'll give you my number when my shift ends in"--she glances up at the clock--"half an hour."
Alex's cheeks pink, and Maggie wonders if she's just managed to become a third wheel to a very attractive relationship in the making.
But then Lucy nudges Maggie. "Offer goes for you, too, you know? Just because you've already seen it doesn't mean you can't help me indoctrinate a new baby gay, am I right?"
Maggie manages a small smile. "Only if I wouldn't be intruding."
"No!" Alex's voice cracks on the word, and she bites her lower lip and wrinkles her nose at the sound. "No, I mean, it'd be fun to have you there, too."
Lucy nods and turns on her heels, pausing only briefly to toss over her shoulder. "You know, I always said that the show coulda solved a lot of its problems by letting Shane be poly. Food for thought..."