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They met, as so many people did back then, at the Pride parade.
Well, not at the parade exactly, but at one of the bars afterward. Every city had its little neighborhood where “the gays” would congregate, and for National City that was the West 300s, where the canneries had been until they all were bought out and consolidated into one giant processing plant further up the coast. The tiny shotgun houses and empty warehouses were left abandoned until the people on the margins moved in, creating a new community from the ashes of the old.
The bar that Alex went to was called “The West Way.” A tacky little dive with cobwebs on the ceiling, it was packed to the gills with what Alex's mother would have referred to as the “infinite diversity of biology." And infinite diversity was definitely on display, from the group of women with buzz cuts dressed like greasers from the fifties to the men in black leather chaps and vests to the sandy-haired bartender with a handlebar mustache who was wearing a kimono.
Alex had nearly bolted when she walked inside. Before she could, a drag queen named LaDonna Deville — who was dressed like Donna Summer, of course — had taken Alex under her wing. “Sugar, this is a place for family,” LaDonna said as she took Alex’s arm and guided her to the bar. “And whether you know you’re family or only wonder if you might be, you belong here.”
LaDonna had bought Alex a rum and Coke and sat with her for a while, listening patiently while Alex told her how she hadn’t marched in the parade, just watched from the sidelines, because the counselor she had been seeing thought it would be good for her. She hadn’t explained the counselor’s rationale for her attendance — Maybe if you see those people up close, you’ll realize that you don’t belong in their world — but somehow, LaDonna had understood.
“Don’t you let anyone tell you who you are. Not even us,” LaDonna said, and then waved one red-nailed hand around the bar. “You decide who you get to be, little sister.”
Just then, LaDonna’s partner, who was clad in a red wig and corset and looked like Queen Elizabeth I as played by Rita Hayworth, came over and said it was time to leave.
“Just stay for a little while longer,” LaDonna pleaded when Alex quickly polished off her drink. “Maybe even talk to a pretty girl?”
“I already have been,” Alex replied.
LaDonna laughed and kissed her on the cheek. “I like you, Sugar,” she said with a wink. She turned, her sequined dress sparkling, and made for the door, and called over her shoulder, “I sure hope I get to see you again.”
Alex watched LaDonna thread her way through the crowd, depositing kisses and hugs and mock insults with the other drag queens milling around in the tight space. She reached the door just as the bell over it dinged. The late afternoon sun made it hard to see the person walking in, but LaDonna must have known them, because she let out a loud screech and swallowed the much tinier person in her embrace.
“You want a refill?” the bartender asked, and Alex, blinking, turned to look at him.
“One rum and Coke’s enough for me,” she said. “So, um, maybe a whiskey?”
“Irish or Scotch?” the bartender asked.
“Scotch,” said a woman’s voice from over her shoulder. “And make it two, Frankie.”
“Maggie, hey,” the bartender said, his eyes lighting up as he looked past Alex at the short, brown-skinned woman who had just approached the bar. “You want it on your tab?”
“Sure, why not,” Maggie said as she slid into the space that LaDonna had been occupying. She was wearing sandals and bell-bottoms and a tank top tie dyed in every color of the rainbow with a brown, fringed leather jacket over top. Her hair was black and straight and fell almost to her waist. She pulled a pair of round-cut, rose-colored glasses away from her eyes and tucked them on top of her head, and then looked straight at Alex with a beaming, double dimpled smile.
“Hi. I’m Maggie Sawyer,” she said, and thrust out her hand.
“Alex, um…” Alex hesitated, not sure whether she should go by anything beyond her first name in this place. But Maggie was looking at her with a question in her eyes, and so Alex took a deep breath and said, “Alex Danvers,” as she took Maggie's hand.
“Nice to meet you, Alex Danvers,” Maggie said, her grip smooth and firm. Her fingertips brushed the cuff of the worn brown leather bomber jacket Alex was wearing over her jeans and white t-shirt, and she ran her eyes over it appreciatively, saying, “That’s a groovy jacket.”
“Thanks,” Alex said, and then added, without being sure why, “It was my dad’s. He was a fighter pilot, on his way to being an astronaut. He crashed during a training exercise over the Sea of Japan when I was fifteen.”
“God, I’m sorry. All these fucking wars and not-quite wars. I’m sick of it.” Maggie looked down at the bar, her bright spirit clouded by a sudden wave of darkness. “My dad is a vet, though he…” She looked up at Alex, giving her a tight smile. “We don’t talk anymore. My mom either.”
“Because you…” Alex waved her hand around the bar. “This?”
Maggie nodded as she reached for the glass of Scotch that the bartender had just deposited in front of her. She lifted it and said, “To your dad, who must have been pretty good at being one if you still want to wear something to remember him by.”
“To my dad,” Alex said, raising her glass, and then, on impulse, “and to everyone who didn’t have someone like him and deserved better.”
“Nice,” Maggie said as they clinked glasses and drank. She set her glass down and slid off her jacket, revealing a Pride flag painted on her arm. It flexed as she moved, as did a very well-toned bicep, and Alex wondered what it would feel like to have those muscles ripple under her hand.
Then she realized that she was staring, and that Maggie, bemused, had caught her doing so.
“I, um…so what do you do?” Alex asked, and felt a blush creep its way up her neck.
“Besides come over and say hi to a pretty girl at a bar when LaDonna tells me to?” Maggie said with a wink. “I work as a private detective. I wanted to be a cop, but..." She waved her hand around the bar. “My deviant associations got me booted from the academy.”
Alex nodded in understanding. It was 1977, and things were slowly changing, but not fast enough to keep prejudice from ruining people’s dreams and lives. It was hard to be different, even in a big city; harder still, when you were a woman.
“But hey, we managed to get Harvey Milk elected up in San Francisco,” Maggie said with a grin. “And if we can do that, we can do anything, right?” She took another sip of her drink. “So tell me, Alex Danvers with the great jacket who likes Scotch and who was brave enough to give me her last name when she didn’t have to. What do you do when you’re not here?”
Alex spent the next several minutes telling Maggie about her job at LexCorp, though she didn’t mention the corporation by name. She had a feeling Maggie had figured it out, however, by the knowing gleam in her eye when Alex talked about the research scientists and sales guys who were her colleagues. Some of them tried to glad hand and back slap her like she was one of the boys; others would treat her like a secretary, smacking her ass as she walked past or trying to corner her in the break room. It didn’t matter that she had a PhD in Biology from Stanford or that her graduate work had been on the cutting edge of bioengineering. To them she was just someone to fetch coffee and organize lab samples and tell them they were wonderful when they came to a realization that she had reached fifteen minutes before they did.
The bar grew more raucous as they talked, so eventually they migrated to a small café down the street that featured a mishmash of Japanese and Vietnamese dishes. “I know this can be weird if you’re not used to it,” Maggie said as their waitress came over, and then trailed off, her mouth hanging half-open, when Alex proceeded to order in Japanese.
“Or not,” Maggie said, and Alex, grinning, realized that for the first time in the three hours they had been together, she didn’t feel entirely back on her heels.
“We lived in Japan for a few years when my dad was stationed there, before he…” Alex waved her hand, not wanting to break the mood by going deeper into her father’s death. “Anyway, I learned to speak Japanese. And to not be afraid of tofu.”
“A woman after my own heart.” Maggie reached for her sake, and as she did, that Pride flag on her bicep flexed enticingly again. This time Maggie noticed that Alex was staring at it. “You want?”
“Want…um…” Alex felt blood rush not just to her cheeks, but to other, more sensitive places as well. “Want what?”
“A flag, on your arm,” Maggie said, with a grin that made it clear she knew that wasn’t at all what had been on Alex’s mind. “I have my paint kit at my place. It’s just around the corner.”
“Maybe, um…” Alex sensed what she was being offered, and for a moment, she feared her response might ruin the rest of the night. But she knew she wasn’t quite ready for more than drinks and banter, so she said, “Maybe next year?”
Maggie pursed her lips and nodded, a warm glint of approval in her mahogany eyes. “Next year is good, too. In fact, next year would be great.”
“Good.” Alex let out a breath and then, feeling brave, dared an answering smile. “That’s really good.”
They spent the rest of the night eating and talking until they closed the restaurant down. The owner, scolding them in Japanese, ushered them outside, and Maggie turned to look at Alex as the door clanged shut. “You need a ride?”
“I took the trolley,” Alex said. “There’s a station two blocks over.”
“Well, they only run till midnight, so you’d better not dawdle.” Maggie reached into the back pocket of her jeans and drew out a plain white card. “This is my business card. My home number is on the back, in case you want to share our love of scotch and tofu again.”
“I’d like that,” Alex said as she tucked the card in her jacket pocket. She wanted to kiss Maggie — wanted it in ways she had never wanted it before — but she wasn’t sure about the rules about who should kiss whom and when. The one thing she was certain of was that they shouldn't be kissing each other in public, even in this neighborhood on the night of the Pride parade.
But that didn’t make her want to do it any less.
“Groovy,” Maggie said, and reached out to, very lightly, touch Alex’s arm. She looked up at Alex, her features limned in shadows from the nearby streetlight, and smiled that sly, beautiful smile. “See you around, Danvers.”
And Alex fell hopelessly in love.
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“LaDonna’s gone,” Maggie said as she walked through the door.
“Oh, sweetie,” Alex whispered as she guided Maggie over to the threadbare, paiseley-patterned couch that had come with their threadbare, sparsely furnished apartment. They had moved in together just seven months after they first met, and six months after they started sharing a bed. It wasn’t the life Alex had expected to have when she was nearing thirty, but she loved it, even if her mother did not.
“I have no problem with your sexual preferences, Alexandra,” Eliza had said when Alex told her that she had fallen in love and was committing to a life with Maggie. “I just don’t understand why you have to express them in that neighborhood.”
“Because that neighborhood is the only place we can rent a one bedroom apartment without people making snide remarks about old maids sharing a bed,” Alex explained. “And if we save enough money, then maybe in a few years, we can buy a house.”
“If anyone will sell to you,” Eliza sniffed, and then backtracked when she saw the hurt in Alex’s eyes. “Oh, Alexandra, I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to be negative. I just worry about how much harder your life will be because you’ve made this choice.”
“It’s not a choice if it’s biology, Mom,” Alex reminded her, and her mother, the biology teacher, had simply sighed and nodded her understanding. Alex wondered if she dared ask how her mother, who had always wanted to do more with her advanced degrees than teach a bunch of sniveling high school students on a never-ending series of air force bases, felt about what this mystery virus was doing to the people of the West 300s.
“How many of our friends have we lost to this now?” Alex asked as she cradled Maggie against her.
“Three, I think,” Maggie said. “Plus Frankie is in the hospital, and they don’t think he’ll ever leave.”
“Frankie served us our first drink together,” Alex said, and felt, beneath her sorrow, a growing frustration. For months, she had been submitting research proposals at LexCorp to study this disease that was killing so many gay men, but each one was shot down by the higher ups. It was almost like they wanted all these people to die.
“I hate what this is doing to our community,” Maggie said. “People are afraid to touch each other, to even talk to each other. And on the flip side are the people who don’t care and are acting like they don’t have to take any precautions at all.”
“There’s so much we don’t know yet,” Alex replied. “And it’s hard to fight a disease when no one wants to acknowledge it actually exists. Not even the people it’s killing.”
She felt her rage began to simmer and took a breath, willing it down below a boil. Later, she would take a walk along the waterfront and let her fury consume her. For now, Maggie needed her, and she needed Maggie.
Alex ran her hand through Maggie’s hair, feeling it slide like silk over her fingers. Maggie nuzzled deeper into Alex’s neck and then lifted one hand to undo the tight bun that Alex kept her hair in at work. Alex's auburn curls, cut to just past her jawline, tumbled down in a wild tangle.
“Hey, pretty girl,” Maggie whispered. “Kick off those sensible shoes and tell me about your day.”
Alex pushed her tight, low-heeled shoes off her feet, stretching her toes out with a sigh of relief. She wanted to escape her panty hose too, but that would require her to move, and she needed to be close to Maggie more than she needed her skin to breathe. Besides, it was more fun when Maggie rolled them down her legs, leaving kisses on every bare patch of skin.
“We’re getting a new CEO now that the boss is going to jail,” Alex said.
Maggie let out a bitter sigh, her breath hot against Alex's neck. “Maybe Lex should have tried the Twinkie defense.”
“Probably would have worked better than blowing up the courthouse,” Alex said, shuddering at the memory of that ugly day. “Anyway, his sister Lena is taking over, and word around the lab is she’s someone who wants results, not ass kissing. I’m hoping that means I might get some of my research proposals backed.”
“That new antibiotic you were talking about?” Maggie asked.
“Yeah,” Alex said, and felt an immense wave of love well up in her. It wasn’t that Maggie understood what she did — hardly anyone did if they hadn’t spent most of their waking hours in a lab from fifteen on. It was that Maggie cared enough to pay attention when Alex would wax rhapsodic about the ideas that would come to her in the middle of the night when their apartment was too hot for their window air conditioner to keep up. Maggie had even taken a basic biology course at the local college so she could understand Alex’s work better.
“If I can get approval, I might be able to get the drug into trials in a few years,” Alex said, and dared, for just a minute, to hope that she might actually get the corporate buy-in she needed to make it happen. “Think about what that could do for our friends who have had so many infections that the usual antibiotics won’t work anymore. It could buy them more time until we find a cure.”
“I’m not sure any of our friends are going to be left by then,” Maggie said, a note of despair in her voice. “But for the ones who follow…”
“It’s hope,” Alex said. “And hope is what we need in the middle of a storm.”
Maggie pressed a hand to Alex’s cheek and drew her head down. “I don’t need hope as long as I have you.”
“Aw, baby,” Alex whispered, and spent the rest of the evening kissing Maggie’s tears away.
--------------
Maggie slammed her hand down on the kitchen table. “That is the biggest load of horseshit I ever heard!”
“Babe, I know you’re mad, it’s just…” Alex nodded toward the window, which was cracked open to let out the cooking smells from the stir-fry Maggie had made for dinner. “You’re going to piss off the neighbors.”
“They should be pissed,” Maggie snapped, her dark eyes blazing with fury. “’Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ What the hell does that even mean, anyway?”
“It means that if people keep their mouths shut, they can stay,” Alex explained, ignoring the glare Maggie shot at her for being overly literal. “Look, I know it’s not what they promised, but it’s something. Which is something, right?”
“It’s asking someone to stay in the closet or risk their career,” Maggie said. “Would you want that?”
Alex froze at the words, and Maggie drew in a breath, her eyes widening. “Oh, Babe. I’m sorry. That was…”
“Yeah,” Alex said, and threw a handful of silverware into the dishwater-filled sink. Her throat tightened at the memory of how close she had come to being fired when someone at L-Corp had somehow obtained and then circulated their application to be foster parents around her department. Alex’s supervisor, a hardline Catholic who used homosexuality as an example when discussing deleterious mutations in genes, had been perilously close to firing her. Ms. Luthor stepped in and saved the day, but even she hadn’t been able to keep Alex in charge of the research project she had been working on for five years. When the work was finally published, it had someone else’s name on it.
The fallout hadn’t ended there, of course. Alex’s younger sister Kara, whose sunny enthusiasm and eternal optimism also made her prone to being terribly naïve, had shared the story of what had happened during her character witness interview with the state’s foster care agency. And soon after, their foster parenting application, which was the first step in their very narrow path to adopting a child outside of a private religious organization, had been rejected.
They had found another way by opening their home to the kids in the neighborhood, many of whom had drifted to National City from other places where being gay was more dangerous. It gave them a way to make use of that second bedroom that, they had hoped, would one day belong to a child of their own. But biology, Alex’s life’s work, had failed in that department, and so too had the state. They were aunts to two beloved nieces, but they would never be parents.
“I know that telling someone they can keep their military career if they keep their personal life private is not enough,” Alex said now, “but it’s better than telling them that they can’t join at all.”
“I’m sick of half steps,” Maggie said. "Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to just have everything without it being parsed out in little pieces like we’re children who might eat too much candy?”
And Alex knew that Maggie was talking about herself now, and how her dreams for her career had been shattered by a combination of misogyny and homophobia. But her frustration wasn’t just for her own situation; it was for all the people, in any profession, who couldn’t rise on their merits without hiding who they were.
Alex let the dish in her hand fall into the soapy water and walked over to stand beside Maggie, who was cleaning off the kitchen table. Alex put her hand on Maggie’s shoulder and waited for Maggie to put down the spray bottle and paper towels. Maggie looked up at her then, eyes guarded, and Alex saw all the little hurts that were left unsaid; the micro-aggressions from being gay in a straight world that had worn Maggie down, year after year, until some days, only her anger remained.
“It would be so nice,” Alex said, and wrapped her fingers around Maggie’s clenched fist. She felt it loosen after a moment, not by much, but enough that Alex could thread their fingers together. The rings they each wore on their left hand — rings that had no meaning, other than what they had given them — clinked together.
“I wish it didn’t have to be this hard,” Alex said, and saw some of the tension ease from Maggie’s shoulders. “I wish I could whip up some compound that we could drop in the water supply and it would strip away all the fear and the hate. I wish we could just….just…”
“Be,” Maggie said.
Alex nodded. “But all we can do is live in this world and do what we can to make it better while we’re here.” She looked over at Maggie, the woman she had loved and slept with and built a life with for fifteen years, and murmured, “And in the meantime, I hope we can keep loving each other as best we can. Because that’s what makes it worth it to me.”
Maggie looked over at Alex for a long moment, one dimple twitching like she was trying to hold back a smile. Then she burst into laughter.
“What?” Alex asked.
“I’m trying to figure out how you ended up the dewy-eyed romantic in this relationship,” Maggie said as she drew Alex into an impromptu dance across their kitchen floor. “What happened to my nerdy scientist who needed concrete data before she would even believe that she was gay?”
“You got me into your bed and made me believe in miracles,” Alex said, and Maggie laughed again in that way that made her eyes disappear and her dimples deepen into craters. It made Alex fall in love with her all over again.
“I guess,” Maggie said when the laughter faded, “maybe, the point is that we keep going, no matter what shit they throw at us.”
“I don’t think we have any choice but to keep going,” Alex said, trying to suppress a grin. “I mean, have you seen our mortgage balance?”
“Last I checked that puppy was in your name, Babe,” Maggie teased. “I’m just your roommate.”
“Roommates,” Alex said with a soft chuckle, “don’t go in the will.”
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“Are you ready?” Kara asked as she scampered toward Alex, her flowing, flower-patterned dress swirling around her knees. She held out a bouquet of white carnations and pink baby roses. “Oh, Alex, I can’t believe we finally get to have this day!”
“Me either,” Alex said, and resisted the urge to wipe her sweating palms on the skirt of her off-white, tea-length dress. Shopping for a wedding gown at the ripe old age of fifty-eight had felt ridiculous, but Maggie had insisted that if they were going to do this, they were going to do it right. That was before Proposition 8 landed on the ballot, of course, when they still thought they would have time for the big, gay, tequila-soaked wedding of their dreams. Then the attempt to override gay marriage in their state had gained traction, and everything changed.
“Let’s just get it done, Babe,” Maggie had said as they drove past yet another billboard from an outside religious group warning that their marriage would bring about the end of civilization and perhaps a plague of locusts, too. “I want that piece of paper saying we’re married in the eyes of the law, if for no other reason than to make these assholes crazy.”
So they married in a courthouse in front of a judge, with Kara at Alex's side and Maggie's recently retired boss, an ageless gentleman by the name of J’onn Jonnz, at Maggie's. Maggie, whose hair was now threaded with gray, was dressed in black pants, a white shirt, and a multicolored vest, yet all Alex could see was a dark-haired girl in bell-bottoms and a fringe jacket and a pair of ridiculous rose-colored glasses. If she had known then how much harder their lives would be just because they loved each other, would she have accepted when Maggie offered her that scotch? Alex wondered. Or would she have slipped off that barstool and walked away?
“I do,” Maggie said, and Alex saw the answer to her question shining in Maggie's eyes.
“That’s good,” Alex said, and tasted the happy tears streaming down her cheeks. “That’s really good, Maggie. Because I do, too.”
--------------
“I should have known they’d fuck us again,” Maggie said.
Alex reached across Maggie's lap to jerk the remote out of her wife’s grip. Ignoring Maggie’s noise of protest, she hit the button to turn off the TV.
“Enough,” she said, and rolled her eyes at Maggie’s glare. “My love, I can hear your blood pressure spiking from here, and I really don’t want to spend another night in the ER.”
“Fine.” Maggie snatched the remote back from Alex and threw it to the far side of the room. The Golden Retriever at her feet woke as it landed, and he leapt up to retrieve it and bring it back to her again.
“Thanks, Winn,” Maggie said as she patted him on the head. “Why is it so hard, Al? Why can’t they just give us something instead of screwing us over?”
“We got such a big win with marriage that we made ourselves targets,” Alex replied. “And some of the people who were our allies have found new fights to fight, just like they always do. One step forward, two steps back, y’know?”
“I don’t get why, for us, it always seems to be three.” Maggie laid her head on Alex’s shoulder. “I’m just tired, Babe. I don’t know why the fights keep getting harder.”
“Because we’ve been through so many.” Maggie turned to look at Alex, a question in her eyes, and Alex shrugged. “I mean, think about where we started. I was afraid to kiss you after our first date for fear we’d get hassled if a cop drove by, and now, we’re legally married, and that marriage is valid in every single state in the country. That’s progress.”
“But it’s still not enough,” Maggie said, her voice weary with the tired, endless refrain. “No matter what we do, we’re still just diversity. And I’m so tired of us going backwards on a politician or a TV writer’s whim.”
They sat quietly for a moment, and Alex found herself falling into the rhythm of the antique clock that had been handed down from her mom, and from her mom before her. Ever since Alex was a kid, the tick of its pendulum had sounded like a single word repeating over and over:
Time. Time. Time.
“Someday,” Alex said, “there will be another Alex and another Maggie. They’ll meet each other, and they will fall in love, and they will fight fights that we can’t even imagine taking on. And they’ll lose and they’ll lose and they’ll lose, but once in a while, they’ll win. And then someone else will come along, and they’ll pick up the fight again.”
“You’ve just described an endless series of Moseses who can never get to the Promised Land,” Maggie replied. She looked over at Alex and wrinkled her nose. “You suck at this, you know that?”
“That’s what I get for being more interested in figuring out the scientific basis for the burning bush in Sunday school," Alex said as she took Maggie's left hand in hers. She fiddled with the rings on Maggie's finger — the one she had given to her as a promise, sometime back when Jimmy Carter was still president, and the one she had placed on Maggie's finger nearly thirty years later on their actual wedding day.
“People are scared of what they can’t control,” Alex said. “And what’s more uncontrollable than two people who dare to fly in the face of everything society tells them to be for no other reason than love?”
Alex lifted one hand to brush her fingertips down Maggie’s cheek and felt the age-softened dimples crease under her touch. One glimpse of them and she’d been a goner. She didn’t want to know where she would have ended up if they hadn’t come into her life; didn’t know how long she would last, if she ever had to live without them.
“We’ve been through some crazy shit because we dared to love each other,” Alex said. “No matter what box people tried to put us in, we always overcame it because we had hope.”
“So we’ll overcome this one, too?” Maggie asked, and for the first time in a while, Alex saw something more than world-weary cynicism shimmering in those whisky-dark eyes.
“Till the day that overcoming it is someone else’s problem,” Alex said, projecting a confidence that wasn’t rooted in logic or reason. But logic and reason had never been what they’d used to live their lives. They’d always been guided, in their own strange way, by faith — not in God or justice or the law — but in each other. That faith was what they had built their lives on, and it was what future Alex and Maggie would build their lives on, too.
“My pretty girl.” Maggie opened her arms, drawing Alex down until she was curled up with her head tucked against Maggie’s chest. “I’m so sick of fighting battles.”
“Me, too, Mags,” Alex said, and thought about the ashes of the old, and how they always yielded to something new. “But I’m glad I get to fight them with you.”