Sisters of the Road

by Barbara Wilson

  She smoked badly, as if she had learned the art for an amateur play.

  “I want to do something,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk to the police.”

  “Why not?” asked June.

  “They’d tell my parents where I am. I don’t want them to know. They live in Broadmoor—they’d just put me back in that awful girls’ school I ran away from. In six months I’ll be eighteen. I don’t want them to know where I am until then.”

  “You hooking?” June asked.

  “Not really.”

  “What do you mean, not really?”

  “I have a friend,” said Trish. She attempted to smile, and choked a little on her cigarette smoke.

  “Then what were you doing down around Sea-Tac?” June shot back.

  Trish didn’t answer; she took a long, uncomfortable drag from her cigarette and looked at me.

  “How can we help you?” I asked.

  Her sudden look of panic went straight through me.

  “I’m afraid,” she whispered.

  “Afraid? Afraid of what?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. Her cigarette was burning close to her purple fingernails but she didn’t seem to notice. “It was so dark and snowy. It took me a long time to get there and I was late—I feel like it’s all my fault.”

  “Did you see the man? Would you recognize him again?” I leaned towards her from my perch on the armrest. “Is that who you’re afraid of?”

  “No,” she said, with a thin, quavering vehemence, and stubbed out her cigarette on the floor. “I didn’t see him. But I have this feeling—it makes me so afraid—that he saw me.”

  June and I conferred in the press room while Trish continued to smoke cigarettes out front. June had pointedly provided her with a saucer and told her to pick up the butt from the floor.

  “Don’t get involved in this, Pam. It’s too weird. And you’ll get dragged into it, I know how you are, and you won’t pay attention to your work, and then it will be you and Carole flaking off.”

  “Just because Penny’s gone you don’t need to start acting like her. Christ, she was born two minutes before me and my whole life she’s acted like my older sister. If you want to know something, her leaving was a relief and I don’t need you telling me what to do.”

  “You think this girl is telling the truth? She is not. All that stuff about her parents and that guy supporting her? She’s just a regular street hooker like the rest of them downtown. Before she goes you better take a good look in your wallet and see if all your credit cards are still there.”

  “She’s not going to get far on a Sears card already charged up to its limit. Besides, I think Nordstrom’s is more her style.”

  “Those clothes are all ripped off. Ripped off, I’m telling you. The girl is a con artist if I’ve ever seen one. Broadmoor, fancy girls’ school, that’s a load of shit. She’s got something in mind you don’t know the slightest bit about. I know these types of girls. I knew them in high school, hey, some are even my relatives.”

  There was nothing I could say to that. June had street smarts and I did not. But I trusted my instincts about Trish somehow. And I wasn’t going to send her away without finding out more about her.

  June finally accepted it. She turned to the press and started to load the paper and said, “I’m only promising you one thing—that I won’t say I told you so when you get disappointed.”

  “Promise me one other thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That you won’t say ‘I told Pam so,’ to Penny when she gets back.”

  And with a pitying smile June promised me that too.

  6

  I TOOK TRISH FOR an early lunch at the cafe downstairs from the Elliott Bay Book Company. The sun had appeared like a pale granite stone in the white-gray sky, and Occidental Square looked its old-fashioned, slightly touristy self; bare trees and grill-work, surrounded by solid masonry. Trish walked carefully in her high-heeled boots by my side and was noticed by passersby in ways I’d long forgotten. In my parka and overalls, yellow-striped cap pulled down over my ears, I felt like a woodsman escorting a fairy princess who had gone astray in the forest outside the castle.

  The bookstore was crowded and so was the cafe. “This is like a library down here,” Trish whispered. The cafe was lined with books, not for sale but for show—tired old bestsellers like Forever Amber and Marjorie Morningstar and old reference works and encyclopedias: “A-Pocket Veto”; “Pockmark-Zymurgy.” I had always wondered what zymurgy meant.

  “Do you like to read?” I asked her as we got into line.

  “Oh, I love to!” Her sharp features lit up with genuine pleasure. “I love to read books that are really long and have good stories that keep you guessing. Did you ever read Shōgun?”

  I shook my head.

  “That was a really great book! It was, like, in Japan, only early Japan. You really learned a lot from it. Like history, but it was fun.”

  “Do you read many women authors?”

  “Women authors? You mean, books by women?” She thought a minute. “Oh yeah! I read Mistral’s Daughter. That was really great too. It was about three women, from different generations, and the first two were in love with this man and the third was his daughter. He was a great Parisian artist.” She pronounced it Pareeshun very carefully. “They made a TV movie out of it. Didn’t you see it?”

  “I don’t watch much TV.” I wasn’t going to tell her, or anyone else for that matter, that this winter I’d been tuning into the late movie and the late late movie and had even found myself crying over The King and I.

  “Oh,” said Trish. She turned her attention to the food and appeared slightly alarmed at the choices: mulligatawny soup, spanakopita, plates of Greek salads and Italian antipasto. “I’ll take a roast beef sandwich on white bread,” she told the woman behind the counter. “But don’t put any lettuce or sprouts on it.” She added a slice of mocha-almond torte and a Diet Pepsi to her tray. “Oh no, I just realized I left my wallet at home,” she said nervously, looking into her bag. “How stupid!”

  “My treat,” I assured her. I had soup and blackberry tea.

  “Do you live with your boyfriend?” I asked when we had found a table. “I mean, the guy who supports you?” I had visions of some broker or bank president who’d set her up in a little love nest, complete with red velvet walls, a white shag rug and a heart-shaped bed. Probably a friend of her father’s who was married and had three children.

  Trish had removed her coat but not her hat, and she was gobbling her sandwich as if she hadn’t eaten for weeks. “Oh no,” she said. “We’re both very independent. He’s an artist and photographer and he has the most fantastic studio, you should see it. It’s in Belltown, you know, where all the artists live and it looks right out over the water. He’s built a loft in it—it’s so cool. You go up a little ladder, and there you are, way up high, and you can look out the window and see the ferries at night—they’re so pretty when they’re lit up.”

  “But you don’t usually stay there?”

  “Nooo, well of course, a lot. The thing is, he has to be alone really a lot, to do his work.”

  “So he’s a photographer. What’s his name?”

  Trish ignored the question. “He’s not just a photographer,” she said, starting on the mocha-almond torte. “He does all kinds of art—xerox art and collages and sometimes really big paintings. Like, before I knew him I didn’t know anything about art. I thought art was like,” she thought hard a moment, “like art in my parents’ house, like” she searched for a name, “Picasso or something.”

  “Your parents have a Picasso?”

  “Well, no, but you know, like that. Museum-type stuff.”

  “And he supports you, this artist?”

  She nodded, almost too quickly. “He gives me anything I want—clothes and… And we eat out a lot. And he’s taught me so much. I mean, here I was in school—in this really good girls’ school—and I just hadn’t learned a
thing. I mean, sure, dates and algebra and history and grammar, but nothing important!”

  She seemed intent on convincing me. “And he loves me, he loves me so much, that’s what I can’t get over. Because I never had that at home. It was Dad working all the time at the office and Mom giving parties. Sure we had money! But we didn’t have love!”

  It all sounded as if she’d read it somewhere—more likely, heard it said in an old movie, a very old movie. I almost laughed. But if there was anything I remembered from my adolescence, it was that I had hated being laughed at, especially when I was baring my soul.

  Trish’s sincerity, real or not, hadn’t interfered with her appetite, however. She had polished off the torte and was pressing the moist crumbs to her small rosebud mouth with a purple fingernail.

  “These slices are so small,” I said. “Have another one. On me, of course.” I handed her a couple of dollars.

  She hesitated a moment. “I feel so stupid leaving my wallet at home. My boyfriend gave me two hundred dollars yesterday and it’s just sitting there.” But she took the two bills.

  I watched her walk quickly back into line, tall and thin, with those spindly limbs and big breasts. She moved her body not with the unconscious grace girls sometimes have, when they’re experiencing that strange new power to attract, but with an unwilling, almost contemptuous severity, as if she were saying, “Yes, look all you want. Assholes!”

  And look they did. Every male eye in the place was riveted on her as she paraded back with her second dessert. But if she didn’t want them to look, why did she wear those tight jeans and high-heeled boots? Wrong, Nilsen, I told myself. Not everybody wants to look like you do. And I flushed a little as I glanced down at my own worn turtleneck sweater and overalls. Like most feminists I’d probably say I dressed this way to be comfortable and free. In truth I was dressed partly for protection, like a soldier who dons a chemical warfare uniform before venturing into enemy territory.

  But if I were free to wear anything I wanted to… That was stupid. I was free, freer than I acted anyway. I just didn’t like to go shopping.

  Trish polished off her second slice of torte with almost as much relish as she had the first, then lit a Marlboro and blew smoke out her sharp little nose.

  “I’m going to have to get back to work soon,” I told her. “So maybe we could talk a little about how to help you—I mean, what I can do.”

  “Wait,” she said, sounding almost panic-stricken, as if I were forcing her to remember a bad dream she’d almost put out of her mind. “You don’t have to go back so soon, do you? We just got here.”

  “I’m afraid I do. June’s all alone, unless Carole has come. But you can come back with me if you want. If that makes you feel …” I was going to say “safer,” struck by her look of fear, but instead said, “better.”

  It’s just that—I don’t feel like being at home today. I mean, after last night. Rosalie and me, well, we were sort of roommates—when I wasn’t at my boyfriend’s.”

  “She was really a good friend of yours then.”

  “We hung out together almost every day. She was really fun to be around. She was always laughing and cracking jokes. We thought maybe we would go on a trip together—she kept wanting to go back to California where she was from. I’ve never been there. I’ve never been anywhere except to Portland where my dad …” she broke and continued nervously, “Rosalie was always making jokes about the weather here. She used to say she was losing her tan!” Trish giggled. “Isn’t that a riot? She always said things like that.”

  “You say your dad lives in Portland?”

  “No, I mean, he has business there, so we sometimes went down there.” She looked uncomfortable and I let it go. There were a lot of mysteries about Trish and I’d already begun to suspect that there were many things in her life she was lying about. A rip-off artist, a street-wise hooker, that’s what June had said she was. I’d have to be careful. But there was something in Trish I liked and something, too, I felt called upon to protect.

  “Why don’t you just hang out at the shop this afternoon? Well go upstairs and I’ll buy you a book and you can read and do whatever you want and then I’ll take you home to my house for dinner. And we can have a good long talk then.”

  She looked as if she’d been given a present. Or a life raft. “Oh, that would be great!”

  We went upstairs and I bought her Jane Eyre. She might as well start at the beginning.

  7

  CAROLE WAS TALKING ON the phone when we came back and waved while continuing her story.

  “So then he asked me was I an arsonist and where had I gotten that blow torch anyway. I was only trying to help, I said, am I supposed to wait for the weather to warm up so I can wash my dishes? I mean, I don’t feel like doing my dishes every day, so when I do feel like it I can’t stand something like the stupid weather and then the stupid landlord saying I can’t.

  “Getting off in a minute,” she mouthed to me, and pointed vigorously at the receiver, to indicate the other person was talking too much.

  Carole had short straight blond hair that stood up surprised above her forehead with one lock that trailed down in a long curl like a question mark behind her left ear. She had eager, slightly empty blue eyes below startled brows and a gaze with the weak intensity of a flashlight turning here and there in a dark room full of strange furniture.

  “Well, I’m not a firebug, if that’s what he thinks,” she announced when she’d hung up the phone and turned to us with her charming, slightly wacky smile.

  “Who, your landlord?” I asked. I always found myself trying to clarify the direct antecedents of Carole’s pronouns.

  “Really! So who’s this?”

  I introduced Trish.

  “I love your sweatshirt,” Carole said warmly. She herself was dressed in a training suit as usual. Besides taking aerobics and self-defense she had lately started running three miles a day and was forever doing stretches in the front office and bounding from one room to the next, singing snatches of Chuck Berry and Cyndi Lauper.

  I wondered once more what it would be like to go to bed with her. Her attitude towards me was eager and flirtatious, not seductive, but vaguely unsettling. She had a way of standing stock-still when I was talking to her, eyes wide, lips parted, quivering slightly like an ardent, but well-trained retriever longing to put her paws on my shoulders and lick my face.

  I was probably just imagining it.

  “Well, back to the grinding board,” Carole said and sprang away to the darkroom, accompanying herself with “Maybelline” (“Why don’t you be true?”).

  Trish watched her leave. “Is it just women who work here?”

  “Mostly,” I said. “There’s one guy, Ray. He’s in Nicaragua now with my sister. She’s my twin.”

  “Wow, does she look like you?”

  “She used to. We seem to get less alike every year. Age, I guess.”

  “You don’t have so many wrinkles though,” Trish said innocently. “Just around your eyes.”

  “Well, I’m only thirty.” I might as well have said one hundred thirty.

  “Wow,” she said. “I never would have guessed.”

  The afternoon passed quickly. Once people dug out from the snow and their childhood memories, they wanted to get back to work. January might be regarded as a slow month overall in the printing trade, but we always had our regulars. The newsletters and flyers for mailings, here and there a poster or brochure.

  June always left at four-thirty to pick up her kids. Carole was supposed to stay till five-fifteen, but these days she was usually out the door by five at the latest. “It’s something psychological about the darkness,” she’d said, pulling down her eyebrows to show she was serious. “When it gets dark I need to get home and build a fire. It’s the cavewoman instinct, I guess.”

  Like me, Carole lived alone now. She’d moved out of her lesbian household at the beginning of December, to a little house out in the North End.

&
nbsp; “I’ll have a garden and fruit trees in the summer,” she’d exulted. “Space, space, I needed space. And I really needed to get some privacy.”

  That I understood. When I’d moved out of my own collective household last summer I’d been wild with delight at first. I could put up anything on my walls, play any music I liked, any time I wanted, cook anything or nothing—and nobody was going to remark on it or offer their opinion. Nobody was going to complain if there was a hair in the bathroom sink or the garbage was too full when it was my day to clean the kitchen. There was going to be absolutely no discussion when I threw the newspaper on the floor after reading it or left a pan in the sink to soak for a week.

  But such pleasures, while long overdue, had in the end proved strangely trivial and unsatisfying. I’d often found myself staying late at the shop, hoping for an invitation to dinner from June or Penny, postponing the moment when I’d have to face the emptiness of my apartment, and of its secret heart—the refrigerator.

  Tonight, at least, I’d cook something decent. When June left at four thirty and Carole shortly after, humming a little apologetic tune about her frozen pipes, so did Trish and I. We took the Number 7 trolley up to the Broadway QFC and I bought cannelloni shells, ricotta and mozzarella, parsley, black olives and a Rioja wine. I still had some good tomato sauce around; Andrea, the baker, had also outfitted me with a winter’s supply of home-canned jars of preserves and sauces.

  Trish asked if we could get some Diet Pepsi too and have ice cream for dessert, and got me to buy her another pack of Marlboros. She said she liked any food that wasn’t green and that she would probably like cannelloni, since she’d always liked spaghetti.

  The sadness of an early violet twilight had turned festive on Broadway, now that it was truly dark and the street lit up. Most of the snow was gone from the sidewalks, but the taste of it lingered in the air, crisp and biting. Voices of shoppers and people coming home from work rang out, as if sound and air had both become solid objects, creating friction where they met.