Sisters of the Road

by Barbara Wilson

  “Oh, a kitty!” said Trish happily as Ernesto lumbered out of the bedroom. “Wow, he’s big, isn’t he?”

  “Big, mean and ugly.”

  “No, he’s not—are you, little kitty cat? You’re sweet!”

  Ernesto was purring madly and running around her spike-heeled boots, rubbing himself against them. Then he rolled over on his back with his huge paws in the air and looked at Trish adoringly. She got down on her hands and knees, still in her coat and hat, and scratched his belly. “Yes, he’s such a good baby, isn’t he?”

  “Do you have any animals?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I had a dog once but they put it to sleep … I’d like a kitty. How long have you had this one?”

  “Two days. I’m cat-sitting for a friend.” I went into the kitchen and started unpacking the groceries. From the living room I heard, Then you’re all alone in the world, aren’t you, kitty cat?”

  “He’s got me,” I called back, slightly miffed. Maybe I hadn’t tried hard enough with Ernesto.

  I put water on to boil for the cannelloni shells and began to mix the stuffing of ricotta and mozzarella together with chopped parsley and olives. I opened the bottle of Rioja and poured myself a glass, then poured some Diet Pepsi for Trish. Horrible stuff, it fizzed like watery brown sewage that had been treated with strong chemicals.

  Trish was tip-toeing around my apartment. I could hear June’s voice—or was it Penny’s?—in my head: “She’s probably casing the joint. And tonight, after you’re asleep, her boyfriend, a criminal with a string of convictions for breaking and entering will come in and steal your…” My what? My 1966 Hermes typewriter? My Sony cassette player with one speaker dead? My Canon camera, made for five dollars in Korea and sold for seventy-five? It was broken now and I had been debating whether or not to get it fixed, because one hour of American labor was forty-five dollars and the shop had suggested I just get a new one. Trish’s criminal friend was welcome to it—and to the stupid car, too. I’d leave the keys out.

  Trish came into the kitchen, still wearing her coat and hat, as if she’d be ready to leave at any point if asked.

  “I know you don’t eat green things,” I said. “But I’m just throwing a little parsley in for color. Parsley’s a good introduction to vegetables. It’s sort of like water—it has almost no taste.”

  She laughed a little and sat down at the kitchen table and sipped at her Diet Pepsi. Whenever she sat she looked smaller and more vulnerable. Her shoulders tended to hunch and in the trench coat her breasts weren’t noticeable. After a moment she took off her black felt hat and laid it on a chair. The frosted ash-blond hair was flattened at the crown and clung to the sides of her triangular face. She looked suddenly tired and much younger. When Ernesto came in, for the first time he didn’t go straight to his food dish, but jumped up on Trish’s lap. She cuddled him lovingly but not with the same kind of attention as before. She seemed absent-minded, thinking of something else.

  I kept up a lively chatter while I prepared the food. I told her about how Penny and I had inherited the print shop after our parents died, and how we struggled to keep it going. I told her about June and Penny and their women’s skydiving club and how June was always after me to try it. Trish listened and laughed from time to time. I interrupted myself once to ask if she’d like to make a phone call or anything, let anyone know she was here, anyone who might be worried… but she shook her head.

  After a little while, when the cannelloni was safely in the oven, and I was cleaning up the sink, she suddenly said,

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  The question caught me by surprise and I started to mumble no, but then I braced myself against the sideboard, turned and said, “I’m a lesbian.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “What tipped you off? My short hair, my overalls?”

  “No, it’s how you walk. How you just are,” she said and added, “Rosalie was a lesbian too. But I’m not.”

  “But surely you don’t think…” I took off my glasses and polished them nervously, aghast at the mere suggestion of being thought an elderly predator.

  “I just like people to know where I stand,” she said. Her wise tone was at such variance with her childish face that I couldn’t help laughing.

  “For such a young person you seem to have some very decided ideas where you stand. Clearly against vegetables and for Diet Pepsi, for instance. Anyway,” I continued lightly, determined to pass it off as a joke, “You’re not my type. And besides, what makes you think I don’t have a girlfriend?”

  “Because you seem lonely,” she said matter-of-factly, and stroked Ernesto.

  “You’re a psychologist already then?”

  “When you’re out on the street and doing dates you get to know a lot about people,” she said. “And you can feel it, feel their loneliness coming off them—like something cold, like cold mist or steam.”

  “You know a lot for being only seventeen going on eighteen,” I said. I didn’t pick up then on the part about the street and dates; I was busy resisting the picture of myself as a block of dry ice, sending up clouds of angst. “Are you sure you’re not forty-five?”

  “Sometimes I feel older than I am,” she said, not looking at me. “Sometimes I don’t even remember how old I am—I’ve lied about it so often. And I can hardly remember when I was little—it seems like such a long time ago.”

  “How old are you really, Trish?”

  “Fifteen,” she said, and added hopefully, “Sixteen next summer.”

  8

  “OH,” I SAID, RATHER LAMELY. “Does your boyfriend know?”

  “Oh, sure,” Trish said and then, flippantly, “He likes it—as long as I act grown-up.”

  “That must be a strain sometimes.”

  “Not really.” She lit another Marlboro as if to prove her point. “See, I really love him. I just—feel different when I’m around him. Like there are just the two of us in the world.” She dragged and blew smoke out, intense but distant. “I’d do anything for him. And he’d do anything for me. He’d do anything for me,” she repeated and seemed to lose her train of thought.

  I took a peek at the cannelloni. It was starting to bubble at the edges.

  “But you see other men, right?” I didn’t know how to put it. “I mean, your ‘dates’?”

  “I don’t take it personally. It’s their problem. Men don’t care about anything else. Why shouldn’t I get paid for it?” She reeled off the reasons flatly, then was silent, petting Ernesto. The dates don’t have anything to do with being in love with Wayne. He and I don’t even have sex!” She said this triumphantly, but there was aversion in her voice as she continued, “I don’t like sex that much. And when I like a person I don’t want sex to have anything to do with it.”

  Trish looked at me. “I slept with Rosalie. But we didn’t do anything. Just hugged and stuff.”

  I was having trouble figuring out how the boyfriend came into all this.

  “How did you meet Wayne?”

  She seemed disconcerted. “Did I tell you his name?”

  “Just his first name, don’t worry.”

  “I don’t care, but it’s so unfair—when a girl has a boyfriend and she does dates, that the police can arrest him…”

  “But I thought he supported you?”

  “He does, he does, he gives me anything I want. I told you he’s an artist. Once he sold a painting and he took me out to eat at the Four Seasons. Oh, it was so fun, getting all dressed up and wearing a fur coat and Wayne wore a tuxedo and rented a limousine. Wayne is so great like that. He likes to do things to surprise me—send me flowers or drive somewhere we’ve never been. And he’s got such a cool studio, did I tell you, with paintings hanging all over the walls. I really like his friends too, they’re so interesting. One guy named Karl has this long beard and no hair on his head and he always wears black. Karl’s really a great painter, Wayne says, but he won’t sell his paintings because he thinks p
eople won’t understand them.”

  I took the cannelloni out of the oven, feeling as if I were listening to a program on the Abstract Expressionists of the fifties. Misunderstood bald artists and impressionable young girls—thirty years later had anything really changed?

  “Sure you won’t try the salad? It’s just lettuce and tomatoes and green peppers.”

  “I could eat the tomatoes, I guess, but not if they have any stuff on them already, that oil and vinegar stuff. I just eat Thousand Island dressing.”

  “Well, you’re out of luck,” I said, not sure whether to be irritated or amused. “I don’t eat Thousand Island dressing and there’s none in my house.”

  “Do you like to live alone?” she asked, as I was dishing out the cannelloni. She had kept Ernesto on her lap, and his squarish, tufty head kept appearing over the top of the table like a tea cozy.

  “It has its ups and downs,” I said. “Your social life needs more organization. If you live in a collective household you can all be sitting around and someone will say, hey, let’s go to the midnight movie, and you’ll all go. But if you live alone you’re always having to call around and if you do find someone who’s home, chances are they’ll look in their appointment book and say, ‘I have a free hour Thursday, three weeks from now.’”

  Trish took this in without laughing, as I’d meant her to, and dug into her cannelloni. “What happened to your last girlfriend?”

  I could have told her about Dandi, Betty, Andrea or Devlin. I could have mentioned my on and off attraction to Carole. Instead I said, “She went away last summer. First from me and then from Seattle. I still think about her.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Hadley.” It was strange that I still felt like smiling when I said it. She treated you bad, girl, I reminded myself firmly.

  “Rosalie had a girlfriend when she came up to Seattle. They came up together. The girlfriend was white; her name was Karen.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, they had a fight and Karen split.”

  “Do you still see her? Maybe she knows something about…”

  “No, she went back to California, I guess. She just disappeared.”

  The words hung a little longer in the air than they were meant to.

  “So Rosalie was living alone?”

  “Yeah—in this hotel downtown. She had a little room she’d fixed up pretty nice with a couple of posters and a lot of plants. She really loved plants, especially cactus, because it reminded her of the desert and California and everything. She was always getting a new little plant and putting it in the window. She called them her babies, she used to talk to them, like, ‘Hi, how ya doing?’ every morning to each of them, she said she’d read some where they liked it, that it made them grow. It wasn’t weird though—it was funny. I liked waking up in the morning and hearing her.”

  “You used to stay with her a lot then?”

  Trish nodded. She finished her first helping of cannelloni and seemed to like it well enough to reach for more. “Yeah, I went back last night. But it was too strange, thinking of Rosalie never coming home again and the little cactuses all sitting there in a row.”

  “Where are you going to stay now? With Wayne?”

  She suddenly seemed to lose interest in her food. She pushed her plate away and resumed stroking Ernesto. “No,” she said slowly.

  “You’re welcome to stay here for a while,” I said. “You can sleep on the sofa bed.”

  “You mean that?” She gave a little jump and Ernesto, surprised, thudded off her lap. “Oh, I knew you were a nice person when you picked me up. I was so glad it was a lady. I couldn’t have stood to be in a car with a guy.”

  “Do you want to talk about it, tell me what happened? Are you still afraid—of being recognized by the person who did it?”

  I saw from her eyes she was. But also that she didn’t trust me enough.

  “You know,” she said, with self-conscious pathos, “I’m really tired, I feel like I could just fall asleep right now.”

  I didn’t press her further, though I wish I had. I cleared the plates from the table. “You’d probably like a bath too.”

  “Would I! I feel filthy.”

  I ran the water and gave her a towel, then made up the couch into a bed and found her a clean flannel nightgown.

  When she came back into the living room after her bath, she finally looked her true age—makeup gone, hair flat and wet, woman’s body hidden in the ballooning flannel gown, barefoot.

  She went over to the sofa bed and then turned hesitantly to face me. “You can sleep with me if you want.”

  “You’re here as my guest. And it doesn’t cost anything. Now good-night. And sleep well.”

  Christ, I thought. What have they done to this kid?

  An hour later I peeked in to check on her. She was fast asleep, one arm thrown up to her forehead in a nocturnal parody of the distressed damsel, the other firmly around Ernesto, who opened up one eye to glare at me and then closed it again.

  9

  “HOW OLD WERE YOU when you quit school?” I asked Trish the next morning. We were back at the table, eating breakfast, a meal which, happily, she seemed to have no reservations about, perhaps because its main colors were cheerful shades of yellow, red and brown.

  “I was in the ninth grade, I must have been fourteen, cause it was last year.” She took a large bite of toast spread with raspberry preserves. “Mmmm, I had one teacher I liked, that was my English teacher, Mrs. Horowitz—she used to tell me books to read and sometimes give them to me, like Hemingway and Steinbeck. I liked him a lot, I read a lot of what he wrote.”

  “Aside from English, though, you didn’t like school all that much?”

  “I liked it all right in elementary school,” Trish said, putting another piece of bread in the toaster. “I mean, it was all my friends who went there and we did fun things—and at first I thought it was cool to go to Junior High—have different teachers for different subjects and all that—but then, I don’t know, I just kind of lost interest. I guess when I met Wayne I lost interest. I mean, he was talking about things on a whole different level.”

  As always when she talked about Wayne, her eyes took on a protective, wary cast.

  “What was all that about a private girls’ school?”

  “I thought it sounded better.” She looked uneasy. “I mean, people like you better if they think you’re smart and rich.”

  “And your parents—do they really live in Broadmoor?”

  “Why do you want to know all this stuff about me?” She was suddenly, surprisingly hostile. “What’s any of it to you?”

  I thought of snapping back, You came to me, didn’t you?, but controlled myself. “Okay, you ask me some questions about my life. About school, my work, my parents…”

  “I’m not interested in your stupid life,” she said. Her eyes narrowed and her triangular little face sharpened. She got up to empty the ashtray and didn’t come back to the table, but instead wandered about the kitchen and then out to the living room, restless and angry. “Hey Ernesto, here kitty, kitty…”

  “Adults think they know everything,” she suddenly shouted from where I couldn’t see her. “They think they can just ask you anything about your life and then they can tell you what they think of it and what you should do. Like they don’t have any problems themselves.”

  “You think I don’t have any problems? I have problems, a lot of problems.” I still couldn’t see her and raised my voice.

  “Yeah, but they’re adult problems like work and things,” she called back.

  “They’re not adult problems.” I went to the kitchen door and looked at her. She was back in the sofa bed, curled up with Ernesto. “They’re human problems—like loneliness and losing people or being away from people you care about.”

  “Well, you’ve got your sister anyway, your twin sister,” she muttered, not looking at me. “I don’t have any real brothers and sisters at all.”
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  It was strange how quickly I descended to her level. I almost countered, Well, I don’t have any parents, so there! But I stopped myself in time.

  “You seem kind of jumpy this morning,” I said instead. For the first time it occurred to me that she might have a habit, might be needing a fix. Under the nightgown her broad shoulders seemed to be shaking.

  She said something unintelligible, her face buried in Ernesto’s fur. I went into my bedroom and started to get dressed.

  After a few minutes she asked in a high and cheerful voice if I was leaving for work soon.

  I had misgivings about leaving her in my apartment alone, but I did have to go to work and didn’t want to put her back out on the street without learning more about her and Rosalie. I came back to the living room and started explaining things about the heating and the stove and the faucet leak in the bathroom.

  Her bad humor seemed to have vanished as quickly as it had come and she was eager to appear a responsible guest.

  “There’s not a lot of food here, unless you want to eat the cannelloni, so you may want to go out. I’ll leave you some money. If you wanted, you could come down to the shop and we could eat lunch together. You want to do that?”

  “I’ll think about it,” she said. “Maybe I’ll just stay here and read Jane Eyre. I could call you if I’m coming.”

  “You’re sure there’s nobody you want to contact—like…” I didn’t want to mention her parents and get her angry again, “like a friend or someone? Just to let them know where you are?”

  “Not really. Oh, I might call Wayne just to say hi, but it’s no big deal. We don’t check up on each other.”

  “Okay then. Well, give me a call if you want to come for lunch. Otherwise I’ll be back around five-thirty or six. Here’s the shop’s number.”

  I felt dissatisfied and full of questions, both about her and about my own course of conduct. There’d been a murder after all and Trish might be the only witness. Should I call the police, even if she’d asked me not to? I wanted to treat her as an equal, but I knew she was still a child. What if her parents were looking for her—and if they weren’t they should be—and what was my responsibility to them? Should I try to call them, just to let them know Trish was safe? I didn’t even know Trish’s last name—and I didn’t know how to ask without sounding suspicious.