Penny had accepted my becoming a lesbian the way she accepted, albeit a little skeptically, everything I did. At the same time, there was an undercurrent of sadness in our relationship now that hadn’t been there before. Like the sister who loved me, she wanted me to be happy, but also, like many straight people, she wasn’t sure if homosexuals really could be happy. And she couldn’t quite understand, after having known me all these years, how I had come to such a momentous decision about my sexual and emotional life. She couldn’t understand where our paths had diverged.
The truth was, our paths had diverged years ago, but she had never seen it and I had never admitted it. I wondered what my life would have been like if I hadn’t had Penny as a twin. Would I have been happier, more rebellious? Somehow, from early on, Penny had locked me into her pattern, and her pattern was that of a sensible over-achiever, academically and socially. How she’d looked down on bad girls, on loose girls, on stupid girls. Girls who wore too much make-up and tight skirts, who had runs in their pantyhose and reeked of perfume, girls who had hickies on their necks and failed their tests. I wouldn’t have dared to have a friend from that crowd, even though there was always something about them that fascinated and attracted me.
Stella was a girl in my tenth grade drama class. She was Italian, with thick, open-pored skin, dark brown curly hair and a wide, sensual mouth, always laughing. She hung around with the seniors and went out on dates and smoked cigarettes in the parking lot. I had a terrible crush on her until that day Penny remarked, in passing, “There’s something really whorish about Stella, don’t you think?”
Had she really said that?
Yes. And I had agreed. Stella, whom I had admired as a gypsy and a bohemian, would never become my friend.
Maybe Penny was aware of some tendency in me to slip down the same path. She was always lecturing me about combing my hair, not putting on too much mascara, ironing my clothes. Naturally. It reflected on her. She tamed any little wildness I might have had and I acquiesced. Because I loved and admired her, because I was used to her telling me what to do; because not being like her meant being myself. And sometimes that still frightened me.
I still loved and admired her. I missed her terribly down there in Nicaragua, and I couldn’t imagine life, past, present or future, without her.
All the same—for one of the first times in my life, as the train rolled calmly on its way to Portland—I felt I was glad not to have her around.
Janis Glover was waiting in the train station for me. She was a slim, athletic woman in her mid-thirties, dressed in an expensive maroon training suit. Her flyaway dark hair was tucked behind her ears and held in place with an elastic maroon headband, and she had two little no-nonsense gold hoops in her ears. She looked like she’d just put down her squash racket.
“Good trip?” she asked, without waiting for an answer. “My car’s out front.” She hurried me through the marble and wood lobby out to a new MG and tossed my bag in the trunk.
“How’s Beth?” she asked, revving the motor and tearing through the parking lot.
“Fine, she sends her regards.” I couldn’t imagine two more unlike people and wondered how they’d ever gotten together. Beth was a large, compassionate bed of calm compared to this straight-backed chair of efficiency.
“That’s good,” said Janis and dropped the subject. “You know Portland at all?”
“Not very well…”
Before I knew it, she was giving me a rapid tour of the city’s streets, complete with past and present history, a rundown on the city’s politics and all her own opinions on its politicians.
“That’s the new Justice Center and there’s the Portland Building with the statue of Portlandia, no, it’s on the other side, you can’t see it,” and then we were racing over a steel-girded bridge that spanned the Willamette River.
MGs are small and low and I couldn’t see much of anything. I gave up trying to understand or keep up with her, until she suddenly pulled up at a pleasant-looking little house on a quiet side-street. Then she turned to me and with a change of tone, almost a break in her voice, said, “So is Beth really doing okay?”
27
“BUT CAN YOU IMAGINE two people more incompatible? Her incessant smoking and her coffee and her pink bedroom slippers. And her life! She’s available to those kids at the center day and night, and her house is a total shambles, just like her office. Newspapers and cats everywhere, dishes stacked in the sink, grunge in the bathroom. I’ve never met such a slob.”
We sat across from each other in Janis’ combination dining room and work space. The phone had been ringing continually. Janis was as impatient and quick in her phone conversations as in her movements, punctuating her rapid-fire instructions and explanations with finger-snapping and foot-drumming. While she talked I looked around at the obsessive neatness of the room. Her life, like Beth’s, was filled with papers and folders, but they were all labeled and stored away. Two file cabinets rose in the corner; the desk drawers were marked and the desk top was nearly empty save for a handsome leather blotter/calendar and a rosebud in a crystal vase. On a small wicker bed quivered a short-haired terrier, as sleek and wiry as Janis.
Hanging up the phone, Janis returned to her subject. “Social workers! I loathe social workers! I could never have imagined getting involved with a bleeding heart social worker. That’s not my approach to the world at all. Sure, I’m interested in my clients—but most of them are weak, manipulative people who continually screw up their lives and who probably deserve to be locked up, even though I do my best to get them off.”
The phone rang again and while Janis answered it, I thought of Beth’s description of their meeting. “It was at a conference I was helping to organize. We’d asked this hot shot lawyer from Portland to come. We were all a little nervous about it. She’d just gotten a battered woman off for killing her husband, so we figured she’d know what she was talking about, but no one knew whether she was a feminist or just a good lawyer. Janis turned up in a three-piece suit and gave a brilliant talk. I was sort of assigned to take care of her, and I did everything wrong. Took her to a restaurant where she couldn’t eat anything on the menu, things like that.” Beth had groaned at the memory. “And I ran out of gas. I remember standing on the freeway in the pouring rain, trying to get somebody to stop, while Janis just sat in the car, polite and more and more exasperated. I knew she thought I was a nerd, a complete nerd.”
“And this whole prostitution thing,” Janis said, hanging up and bouncing around on the chair. “You can’t just go around feeling sorry for them and thinking they got a raw deal in life. A lot of them make more money than I do and would be perfectly satisfied with life if the cops didn’t harass them.”
A severe expression came into her light hazel eyes with their bristly lashes, and a straight, short furrow appeared between her thin eyebrows. “Who am I—or any feminist—to decide whether prostitution is a good or bad thing for the women who do it? This wave of puritanism—it’s got women doing exactly what they did a hundred years ago, getting all worked up about their fallen sisters, trying to save them. No wonder hookers laugh at us—with our liberal diatribes about how men use women as sex objects. Most prostitutes I’ve met feel like they’re the ones in control, using men to get back what’s owing to them economically. Hell if they care about being poor and pure!”
The phone rang again and Janis leapt to answer it; she poured forth a flood of legalese to someone on the other end. It was starting to exhaust me just to watch her, much less listen to her. I could see how she won her cases—probably everyone left the courtroom on stretchers.
“I always thought Janis would be the one to break it off,” Beth had said. “That she’d decide I was just too flaky. But, in fact, it was me. She’d started on the theme of me moving to Portland and she wouldn’t let up. Maniacal persistence and brilliant arguments—those are what make her such a fine lawyer—but it’s wearing. I felt like a prisoner in the dock. ‘Let’s examine y
our reasons for not wanting to move to Portland.’ I’d give her my reasons—I like my job, I have a lot of friends in Seattle, my son, who lives with his father, is here—and she’d demolish them one by one. It was second nature to her.”
“You know what I should do,” said Janis when she got off the phone. “I should introduce you to a real prostitute, a professional.” She went over and inspected her rose for signs of withering and looked pleased with herself, then suddenly snapped her fingers. “I’ve got to get back to the office. I’m up to my ears in a big case. Back in a minute after I change. Can I drop you anyplace? Here’s a map of Portland.”
She vanished into her bedroom, leaving me wondering what to do now, where I should start. Beth had warned me that Janis wouldn’t have much time for me, that her life was as tightly scheduled as the arrivals and departures board at a major airport. But she’d also said that Janis had a good heart and would be supportive if I told her clearly what I wanted.
I had tried to be clear on the phone last night; I had tried to sound focused and practical. But I hadn’t been sure that she believed me. The search for Trish had sounded to me like a wild goose chase even as I described it.
“Sure you can come,” she’d said. “But it’s not going to be easy. Portland’s a big city and I don’t know how much help I can give you.”
I heard her running water in the bathroom, and hastily dialed the number of Art Margolin from Trish’s diary. There was no answer. I could try again later or go to the house, but other than that what else was there to do but to start walking around, hoping I ran into Trish? Beth had given me the phone numbers of social workers, of juvenile agencies, but it was Sunday. If only I knew who had brought Trish to Portland and what she might be doing here. Would she be tricking, out making money for Wayne? Or hiding? And would whoever brought her to Portland get to her before I could?
The terrier looked at me and wagged her tail; I looked at the terrier and realized that I’d gone off and forgotten Ernesto.
I called June at home. “Hiya.”
“Is this long-distance, Pam?” she asked suspiciously. “I want to know where you are, right now!”
“Managua,” I said. “Can you hear me? It’s incredibly warm down here. Sure beats Seattle.”
“Come off it, Pam,” she said impatiently, but there was an undertone of worry. It pleased me to realize how unpredictable she thought me.
“I’m in Portland actually. I think Trish is here. I’m looking for her… so dinner’s off tonight, tell Carole, and… I need someone to feed Ernesto while I’m gone.”
“I’m sure as hell not going to feed Ernesto… what do you think, a business runs itself? You come back here right away!”
“I can’t, June, I’ve got to find her. I think someone may have brought her down here. I’ve got to ask her some questions, help her.”
There was a pause. “Well, at least you didn’t die from an overdose. I guess I can be thankful for that. But you be back by Wednesday, hear? Cause we got a big job coming up and I need some help too.”
“Then you’ll feed Ernesto? Thanks a million, June, you’re great.”
“I’m great till Wednesday,” she warned. Then I’m mad.”
Janis returned, in a three-piece suit, a crisp white shirt and blue tie. She carefully placed some papers in her briefcase.
“Decided what you want to do?”
“Just walk around, I guess. Try to see Trish’s father…”
“Good,” she said. “I’ll drop you downtown. Tonight I’ll show you where the prostitutes hang out.”
“Thanks,” I started to say, but she interrupted me.
“We’ll eat dinner at home, if that’s all right with you. I hope you can handle vegetarian food.” She added severely, “Beth couldn’t.”
28
PORTLANDIA BENT DOWN FROM her ledge two stories up, golden bronze, leaning forward on one knee, grasping a trident in one hand and stretching the other out to me on the ground, as if she wanted to give me a boost up. Her shoulders were massive and powerful, her long hair was flung back and she gleamed like molten lava in the light of the afternoon sun. Behind her the windows reflected and deepened the color of the bright blue sky. You didn’t often see statues that showed a woman’s strength, not her fragility, that showed a woman who looked like she could really do something for you.
The day was cold and the wind bit my neck. In my haste to get out of Seattle I’d forgotten my muffler and hat, though thankfully not my blue mittens.
I stood there looking at Portlandia, thinking over what Janis had said about feminists and prostitution.
In the car I’d told her, “You make it sound like prostitutes, the ones you’ve met, have a choice. But it doesn’t feel like that to me. A lot of them are young girls who’ve been victims of sexual abuse and they go on being victimized.” I was remembering the despair and corrupted sensibility of Trish’s diary, and how the girls in the group had talked about not feeling anything.
“Even victims have a choice,” said Janis, driving very fast. “Survival is a choice and prostitution is a means of economic survival. Don’t get me wrong. There’s a psychological price to be paid. But you pay a price when you work at McDonald’s for minimum wage and have to wear those ridiculous uniforms. Society punishes prostitutes and so of course they suffer. But it doesn’t have to be that way.”
“You think prostitution should be legalized then?”
“Not legalized!” The MG shot over the bridge like a bullet fired low to the ground. “That would mean the state would intervene and control it. It’s legal in Germany, for instance, and what you get are Eros Hotels, legalized brothels that make huge profits for the men who own them. The women are practically prisoners—they see dozens of men a day, they can’t set their own hours, some of them can’t even leave their rooms.” Janis impatiently tucked a wisp of brown hair behind her ears and raced through a yellow light. “No, I’m talking about just leaving prostitutes alone, about decriminalization. Just stop arresting them. Do you know that thirty percent of all women in the prison system are in for prostitution? Do you know how much it costs to arrest and try each woman? The city of Portland spent over three-quarters of a million dollars last year arresting and rearresting prostitutes. It’s just a waste of money.”
She stopped at a red light, stopped on a dime.
“What’s the crime if a woman sleeps with a man for money? He gets what he wants sexually, she gets what she needs economically. Why should the state in the guise of public morality intervene? It’s all hypocrisy anyway. Everyone knows that prostitution will continue no matter how many laws you make or unmake. The politicians are some of the prostitutes’ best customers.”
“But that’s just it,” I said, trying to grab hold of an argument and feeling almost defeated before I began by her energy. “Why is the institution of prostitution always seen as something that’s always been there and always will be? It just feeds into the myth that men are these insatiable sexual creatures whose needs have got to be met. Legally or illegally, that’s not really the question. As long as we accept the idea that men need prostitutes, we accept the idea that women are responsible for men’s sexuality. Women are responsible for their own sexuality—why aren’t men? Why is men’s sexuality something that has to be catered to and supplied on demand as a ‘service’?”
Janis screeched to a stop in front of the new Justice Center. “You’re bucking thousands of years of history with that little question.”
“Well, so is feminism,” I said as I squeezed out.
“Don’t forget, it’s vegetarian food tonight. So stock up on your hamburgers this afternoon.”
She roared away with a wave, leaving me standing on the sidewalk muttering, “But you didn’t tell me where to find the goddamn McDonald’s.”
I wandered around the river city, up one street and down the next, not sure if I was looking for Trish or just looking, and finally ended up in Burnside. This was Portland’s skid road, now in
the process of being renovated. Expensive restaurants and boutiques nestled next to abandoned storefronts and corner grocers; in front of them small crowds of street people hung out, or stood in line for a hot meal at one of the missions. It reminded me of photos I’d seen of the Depression: long lines of men, beaten down and patient, waiting for the soup kitchen to open. There weren’t many women and only a few teenage girls, most of them Black or Indian. It was odd; when I thought of Depression photographs I mainly remembered images of men. Where had the women been? Where were they now? At home with the kids, in shelters or cheap rooming houses. Just as needy, but invisible.
Some of Burnside’s streets hadn’t been touched by gentrification and were a lonely series of boarded-up shops and miserable taverns. But on Sixth I saw a small storefront with a frosting of old Christmas decorations in the window and a sign: Sisters of the Road Cafe.
I walked across the street and went inside, a little hesitantly. It wasn’t much: a counter and tables for about twenty customers. At the counter was a woman and a few men. The men were dressed in layers of torn clothing, in shoes with worn heels and flapping soles; unbrushed, unwashed, with scraggly beards. The woman was better looking, but she had a rundown air. It was hard to know how old she was—twenty-five, thirty-five. She was wearing a skirt and thin sweater, high patent leather boots that were cracked at the toe.
“The special’s chili for eighty-five cents,” the waitress who came over to my table said. “We’ve also got rice, beans and cheese.” She was stocky in a faded chef’s apron over jeans and a plaid shirt, one of those people who seem firmly rooted to the ground, like a small tree. Her dark hair was long and bushy and she had heavy eyebrows and a generous mouth.
“I’ll take a bowl of the chili, I guess. And some coffee.”
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