by JJ Partridge
Around one-fifteen, I was in the Range Rover. The huge SUV, powerful and bulky with an attitude, made me feel more in control. At a traffic light, I slid Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits into the CD player. The first track, “You’re No Good,” was playing as I pulled up in front of Nadie’s apartment. She was standing on the sidewalk, in a tannish duffel coat, high black boots, and large-lensed sunglasses, holding the straps of a roomy canvas bag. Her hair was gathered at the nape of her neck by a black ribbon. I reached over to open the passenger door when she appeared at the driver side window. I heard her say, “I decided I should drive. Puts things in their proper perspective.”
Uh-oh. Her last car, which she gave up when its engine succumbed to a hundred thousand miles of zero maintenance, was an ancient and tiny Toyota Tercel, and she wanted the keys to a Range Rover! In snow conditions! I almost resisted, but my shake-of-the-head hesitation as her hand clasped the door handle wasn’t appreciated. Reluctantly, to save the interview, I got out. She brushed by me to step up and get in behind the wheel; I climbed in on the other side, adjusted the leather bucket seat for some leg room, and hadn’t yet snapped in the crossover belt when she had us bouncing forward.
Nadie drove hunched over the wheel, with her elbows akimbo and her hands precisely across its diameter, like a kid on a tricycle. I managed to keep my mouth shut and my eyes straight ahead, only once or twice sucking in breath or wincing as she maneuvered down ill-plowed, puddled, and car-clogged side streets to Wickenden Street and up the ramp to I-195. There, we barreled, without reference to any of the car’s three mirrors and to a cacophony of horns, right to left across four lanes of highway at the junction with I-95. ‘Geezus!’ I said to myself as we turned south and she slowed the SUV to a crawl; she was hapless as a driver and was gripping the wheel like she was throttling a snake! The CD began the track for “That’ll Be the Day When I Die”!
There was more traffic than I would have thought, even a mini-jam as we passed a pest control company’s rooftop giant termite—known to all Rhode Islanders as the Big Blue Bug—and made the long curve at the gas tank farm. We left the highway at the Elmwood Avenue exit just before the Cranston line and made a right turn at the bottom of the ramp into Roger Williams Park. The idea was to cut through the Park, cross Broad Street, and find our way through the maze of streets that constitute the Elmwood neighborhood. It was slow going; with school out and workplaces closed, the Park’s narrow, slushy serpentine roads were congested by throngs of kids dragging sleds to favorite slopes and walkers enjoying the sunshine and dazzling snow, particularly around the ponds and up past the Zoo and the Planetarium. Nadie drove even more cautiously—if that was possible—within the Park, which suited me because of the pedestrians, until she got us behind a sander truck. I urged her to keep her distance from the cascading dirt and earned an evil mutter.
Our conversation, despite my attempts, had been nil. She was mute on purpose; her expression was one of peevishness and that annoyed me. The map I was using contained profiles of the city’s neighborhoods and, more to irritate her than anything, I read aloud from its scraps of local history. Elmwood, I began, had once been all woods, orchards, and rolling farmland, supplying the rapidly growing mercantile and manufacturing city with produce, hay, and other staples ..., not unlike Brooklyn had been for Manhattan Island, I added for her reference. She studiously ignored me and I repaid her with a three minute recitation on the advent of horsecars and trolleys in the area, the division, subdivision, and sub-subdivision of land into smaller and smaller house lots for the families of silversmiths at Gorham, machinists of Brown & Sharpe, and boilermakers at the Corliss Works, and how the neighborhood now belonged to the middle class families of utility workers, hubmakers and moldmakers from jewelry manufacturers, and city employees like teachers, police, and firemen. Her pique became evident by loud breathing as I blithely went on, editorializing, that Elmwood had survived as a stable urban enclave in sharp contrast to the crumbling neighborhoods of South Providence to the north and west. It was a place, I said, offhandedly, “of promise.” At that speculation, Nadie lowered her sunglasses, looked at me, and remarked, “How would you know?”
I had no reply which would have kept the truce.
We exited the Park through its open, spear-topped gates on to Broad Street. We crossed and I gave directions from the map—“next right, that’s Bacon Street, first left”—until we were on Stanhope Avenue. The plows had been here—after all, this was where city workers lived—and mounds of snow paralleled both sides of the streets in front of neat, vinyl-clad capes and bungalows protected by enough chain-link fence to surround Guantanamo. Each house had a small front yard with a maple or an ash drooping with snow, a garage at the side or rear, and a driveway filled with combinations of cars, pickups, vans, and RVs. Kids played in the snow-banks along the curbs and snowmen were fully dressed in some yards. It wasn’t exactly a Christmas card scene but it was kept up, and it did have promise.
We arrived ten minutes early in front of a fenced-in white bungalow with blue shutters and a jalousied screen porch between the house and garage. “Heat Wave” began and Nadie huffed and turned off the CD player. A minute of silence went by.
“Anne must have grown up here,” I finally offered.
Nadie’s response, after tapping the wheel impatiently for a few moments, was, “I just can’t sit here!” She grabbed her bag and was quickly on the shoveled sidewalk; despite the pain of rolling myself out of the car, I was right behind her as she slipped the latch on the gate in the fence, marched up a snow cleared walk, and climbed a single step to push the doorbell. Almost simultaneously, the inner door opened and a heavyset young woman in a red ski hat, red scarf, and heavy blue-green sweater and obviously startled to see us, appeared behind an aluminum storm door.
“Ms. Sullivan?” Nadie asked loudly, taking off her sunglasses. “I’m Nadie Winokur.”
The young woman used a hand to shade her eyes from the snow’s brilliance. “Sorry. Can’t talk to you now. Sorry,” she repeated and started to close the inner door.
“But we had an appointment ...,” said Nadie plaintively. “I know that I’m early ....”
It must have been Nadie’s evident surprise and disappointment—the moral equivalent of the foot in the doorway—that caused Ms. Sullivan’s hesitation because the door opened fully. She was short, five-two or five-three, and maybe twenty-five. Her headgear did nothing for her round, plain face with its widely spaced, brownish eyes, pug nose, large lips, and wide mouth. If there was even the slightest resemblance to her sister in the ID photograph—except, maybe at the mouth—I didn’t see it. “I called the Women’s Center to cancel. Nobody answered. I’m sorry.” She started to turn away.
Nadie grabbed the storm door’s handle. “Please, Ms. Sullivan, if you could just spare a few minutes ....”
She stared at Nadie, then at me. I gave her what I was sure was a winning smile, forgetting that my bruised face was barely concealed by sunglasses.
“Who’s he?” she said suspiciously.
“My friend Alger Temple. I had to borrow his car and he came in case I got stuck.” Nadie followed her stare to my face and added, “He had a tumble in the snow last night.” I continued to smile. Nadie said, “He could wait in the car.”
The smile evaporated.
A mittened hand went to Ms. Sullivan’s partly open mouth and her expression changed from wariness to resignation. “Look, it will have to be short. My folks are out with my uncle getting the headstone and I don’t want them bothered,” she said, pushing open the storm door. She glanced at me. “He might as well come in, too.”
We wiped our feet on a green plastic mat adorned with a white daisy. Cardboard cartons and stacking bins of various colors and sizes, stuffed with books, shoes, DVDs, CDs, and clothing lined the hallway floor into the kitchen where a Panasonic television and an expensive looking multi-piece audio system shared a table with a computer; more clothes were draped over chairs and hung on a port
able rack. Patricia Sullivan steadied herself against a wall, pulled off her boots, put them next to two blue stacking bins packed with books, and shrugged toward the kitchen. “The place is kind of a mess since we got Annie’s things out of her apartment,” she said evenly. “Haven’t had time to deal with it but we couldn’t just leave her things there,” she said as she passed by me and led Nadie into a parlor. “They’d just disappear.”
I followed them and in the process, my eye caught a book on the top of one bin: a copy of Carl Reinman’s T.R., with its dust jacket looking printer fresh. I took off my sunglasses and couldn’t help but pick it up, and when I did, the book fell open to an autographed flyleaf. “To Annie” was clear, and then “Carl,” followed by a squiggle that could have been “Reinman” ... or just a squiggle. I returned the book to the bin, felt the prickle of an idea being formed, and promptly banged the wound on my scalp into the rounded archway to the parlor.
“Oh-h-h,” I complained and rubbing my wound, entered the parlor where Nadie, appearing chagrined at my clumsiness, asked without any real concern if I was all right. I nodded.
The parlor, small and immaculate, lacked touches of welcoming domesticity: no plants, books, knickknacks, or pictures on the walls. Sunlight streamed in through an open venetian blind; the lacy, white curtains framed a large bow window facing the street. The furniture consisted of a recliner and soft chair, both slipcovered in reddish plum, a console television in the far corner, a low mahogany coffee table with an ashtray in front of a beige sofa, and end tables holding lamps with plain white shades. A reproduction of a Virgin by Raphael and an antiqued frame mirror were on the walls. The two sepia-toned photographs on top of the television seemed out of place.
Patricia Sullivan had removed her ski hat, revealing mousy-brown hair, cut short; her tight jeans didn’t flatter her heaviness. She took Nadie’s coat—my jacket apparently didn’t rate—and laid it on one of the chairs, then motioned us to the sofa behind the coffee table as she slumped in the chair opposite. We almost sank out of sight in the sofa’s too-soft cushions; my corset hitched up and stabbed my back. Nadie started right in, explaining her work as a volunteer at the Women’s Center as she removed a spiral steno pad from her bag and rummaged inside its vastness until she came up with a ballpoint pen.
“I still don’t get it why you people are still interested in my sister. She wasn’t a student anymore ....”
As her eyes strayed to me, I gave her a concerned, trustworthy look and was about to respond when Nadie, with the coffee table giving her visual cover, dug a boot heel into my ankle. Not missing a beat, she said: “Ms. Sullivan—”
“Patricia.”
“... Patricia. When your sister became a client of the Women’s Center last February, she listed you as the person to call in the event of any issues that might require family information or counsel. She specifically did not want your parents to be called. She apparently was under a lot of stress and apparently had some problems because ....”
“That’s when she thought she was pregnant,” Patricia sniffed. “The first time is what you mean. I don’t think so!”
Nadie’s face didn’t give away surprise and her silence invited further comment.
Patricia cleared her throat and raised her voice half a tone. “She ... we both have had menstrual problems, irregularity, and I think she was taking Cartocean, a hormone, and it kind of screws up that time of the month. At least, it did for me. And she wasn’t on the pill, or she wasn’t supposed to be on it, because of the hormones. But, maybe she was. With Annie, who knows?” She glanced at me with lowered eyes, maybe a little embarrassed at the abrupt intimacy, and covered by fumbling in her jeans for a handkerchief.
Nadie sensed her hesitation. “If Mr. Temple’s presence makes you uncomfortable ....?”
It was my turn to find an ankle under the table.
Patricia wiped at her nose, tucked the handkerchief into her sleeve, and exhaled. “No, it’s okay. I don’t mind talking about Annie, not to someone like you, someone not in the family or neighborhood. Who knows, it might do me some good. Anyway,” she continued, ignoring me, “if she wasn’t pregnant in February, it didn’t take her much time afterward.”
“Is that why she didn’t register this fall?”
“You care if I smoke?”
“It won’t bother me,” said Nadie, and I shook my head “no” even though her question hadn’t been directed at me. Patricia left the room briefly and returned clutching a pack of Marlboro Lights, with a lit cigarette between her lips.
“So-o-o-o ...,” she said as she lowered herself into the recliner before she took a deep drag, exhaled, and waved away the smoke in front of her face. Her eyes had hardened and settled into a stare at a spot behind Nadie; her face told me not to expect a peachy-sweet remembrance. “My little sister Annie. What can I say?” she began with calm emphasis, a hand cupped around the elbow of the arm which held the cigarette near her mouth. “My only sister. I had an older brother ... Steve ... but he died in a car crash a few years ago. She is ... was ... five years younger than me and I was five years younger than my brother.” Her moon-face tightened. “Annie was always the darlin’ one .... Could charm a nun out of her habit, and got all the good looks in the family. My folks doted on her, at least until ....” She shook her head as though trying to get the story straight in her mind, to start in the right time frame, as though the memory, or how she would reflect it to us, was uncertain. “Annie was always difficult to handle, worse after Stevie was buried. As far back as junior high at St. Catherine’s, then at St. X’s. She got so difficult even the nuns complained, and yet my parents would do anything for her, ’cause she was so pretty and smart and that was enough. Sometime, they’d act like they would crack down but they never did. Annie always got her way. She’d turn the charm on and off …”—she snapped her fingers—“… quicker than that. She’d give them crumbs of attention ....” She stopped to pull on the cigarette and appraised Nadie’s reaction to her description as the smoke left her mouth. “So, what else?”
Nadie’s pen, I noticed, hadn’t touched her notebook. She said, “The pregnancy. What happened?”
Patricia put her cigarette in the ashtray; when she spoke again, she was choosing her words more carefully. “All I know, she was in City Hospital for a couple of days back in early July. Told me it was an ‘operation’. Wasn’t that just too cute? An ‘operation’. Always played with words ..., almost told the truth, just to show how smart she was, just to show off. Even when she told the truth, it could be just to mislead you. Always playin’ around. Didn’t tell me until it was over. She never told the folks and I didn’t either.” At that, her face registered her exasperation. “With what she had put them through, it would have been too much.”
Nadie shifted in the soft cushions of the couch, made some notes and said, with consummate gentleness, “Her counselor saw her last in early June, and the file isn’t particularly clear but it looks as though Annie might have been thinking about keeping the baby. It seems she thought she had enough money to—”
Her hands slapped her knees as though she was about ready to get up. “What’s money got to do with anything?”
Oops, I thought, a sensitive topic.
“Well,” Nadie’s voice oozed concern, “most of the Center’s clients are understandably concerned about the cost of a pregnancy, especially if they are going to full term, and availability of funds. Anne was on scholarships and loans ...?”
As her question hung in the air, I thought “Nadie, you are into this now!”
Patricia Sullivan reached for the cigarette and held it, watching the smoke curl upward. Slowly, an unpleasant smile framed her mouth. “I don’t know about that. Sounds like Annie was puttin’ her on. She’d do that kinda thing for no good reason but show. Anyway, she wasn’t pregnant long.” After another drag on the cigarette, she put it in the ashtray. “Okay,” she said, “this will relieve you of any fault. When spring semester was almost over, she pho
ned Dad that she wasn’t going back to school. Didn’t say she was pregnant, of course. I got two years at Community College and she’s in the Ivy League ... and leaving for no reason, just leaving. There was nothing for my folks to do. When Annie made up her mind, that was it. Dad went nuts, threw things around, cursing, knocking things over, scared my mom half to death. That’s about when I decided to get out of here, ’cause I knew it was goin’ to be bad, and I got an apartment over in Cranston.” She leaned forward to run her fingers back and forth around the little carved spirals on the edge of the coffee table. “He couldn’t believe it,” she remembered, irony dripping from her voice, “... his favorite! The one we all sacrificed for, and she was shitting in our bed! Dad wouldn’t let her come home, or even talk about her. She’d call Mom, and she’d call me, but I didn’t see her over the summer, not until September. She lived in a dump near Carter but she had money, more than enough, some kind of job on the internet, she said. I didn’t understand it, but she was making a ton of dough, saving up for a move to New York. Bought piles of clothes at the best stores in Garden City and the Mall, even went up to Boston and Chestnut Hill, sometimes New York. And stuff like her computer and the plasma television and the CD player, for when she made the move, she said ....” She coughed and didn’t bother to cover her mouth. “Of course, there were always guys, and by then, she was hanging around with this nigg ....” She looked up quickly. “This black guy.”
The “N” word was narrowly avoided and we all knew it.
“When I found out, I had to tell Dad. Despite everything, she’s my sister and this guy was dangerous for Annie, the drugs and stuff like that. I thought maybe Dad could get to him. Dad went nuts ... again ... but before he could really do anythin’, Annie told me that she had kicked him out.” The eyes trained on us were now full of resentment. At whom? “You can see how she was all screwed up, leaving school, gettin’ knocked up, and then she musta let this guy come back! But she was always doin’ stuff like that! She wouldn’t listen to me or anybody!”