Beauty Queen

thing, working on the noisy high-pressure mail sorter. Mary Ellen was so dizzied by love that she barely passed her exam for sergeant.
    Liv and the police force—they made things almost perfect. Mary Ellen loved her work on the force with a passion that was almost physical. As a rookie she had made her mark— her first arrest was eight white males with a stolen car and drugs. She had handcuffed the boys in pairs and brought them all in. In court, as each perpetrator admitted that he, too, had been arrested by Police Officer Frampton, the judge was unable to suppress a smile. After that, Captain Bader had nicknamed her "Cuffs." She had never yet killed a person in the line of duty. Police Commissioner Benny Manuella had told her that she was one of the main reasons why he had (grudgingly, of course) changed his mind about putting women officers on the New York streets. Mary Ellen liked to remember that moment in the PC's office, and how she had nearly burst with pride. Too bad her dad was no longer alive, to be proud in his own way. It would have made two generations of police sergeants in the Frampton family.
    But now Mary Ellen sat frowning at the New York Times, and some of the pleasure was going out of her day.
    "Law and order," she thought. "Oh, how I believe in that. But law and order doesn't include me and Liv. On me and Liv, it's open season. It's a person-hunt."
    Sitting on the other side of the table, Liv was fluffing her long hair out in the sun, drying it after her morning shower. The hair dryer was going, with the extension cords that led down to an outlet in the apartment—that hair dryer that, often at night, wore ribbons and feathers and became an instrument of love. Liv was a fanatic about cleanliness, and showered and dried her hair two or three times a day.
    "What is it, Mary Ellen?" she asked.
    Liv was so sensitive to Mary Ellen's moods that Mary Ellen often had the sensation that her thoughts were being read. This was usually a nice sensation, not at all scary. But today, somehow, it gave her an eerie feeling. She recognized that someday, she might think a thought that she'd want to hide from Liv.
    Instead of answering, Mary Ellen tossed the paper across the table, making their tabby cat, Kikan, jump down. She pointed at the article.
    Liv studied it briefly, then shrugged.
    "Someday it will pass," she said in her soft, correct, accented voice.
    "I'm not so sure about that," said Mary Ellen.
    Liv picked Kikan up and the cat relaxed in her arms. Kikan, too, had been scavenged off the street as a starving kitten with huge eyes and legs like toothpicks. Now she was a great solemn adult mackerel tabby. Liv loved cats fiercely, and always said that they were aloof because "they know most people believe cats cannot show love, and they don't want to exert themselves."
    "But it is a question of the Bill of Rights, no?" said Liv.
    "Most Americans interpret the Bill of Rights as applying only to themselves personally," said Mary Ellen, just a little bitterly.
    "But so many American cities now have such a bill, no?" said Liv.
    "Sure," said Maiy Ellen. "But now the backlash is starting. We'll have to fight like bastards just to defend those laws. Those laws can always be repealed, you know."
    She sipped at her coffee slowly.
    "It's ironic," she said. "When the force sends me out on the street, they give me a gun, right? If some person tries to blow me away, I can blow him away." She said this reminding herself that, as yet, she had never killed another human being. "But supposing some perpetrator tries to blow me away on the moral plane, right? Not take my life, but take my dignity and my career and my money and maybe my lover, too, right? And I can't do anything. I'm supposed to turn the other cheek. I'm supposed to be like a lamb led to the slaughter."
    Liv's eyes were shadowed with pain. She had absorbed much of the somber steady churchiness of her family, and on coming to New York had gravitated to the Metropolitan Community Church on Seventh Avenue, as there was no gay Lutheran church group in the city yet. Mary Ellen, for her part, had retained much of her family's somber Presbyterian faith, especially that of her father, though she wasn't as churchy and spiritual as Liv. The two women's strong belief in their own dignity had led them, quite naturally, to attend the MCC's gay worship services.
    But Liv's answer was not a theological one, but a practical one.
    "Mary Ellen," she said, "if you think so