Sisters of the Road

by Barbara Wilson

  I kept looking at the woman at the counter. She was slumped over a cup of coffee, her peroxided hair pulled back into a limp ponytail; her face, from my angle, was sweet, soft and puffy, like a bowl of whipped cream just starting to settle. She had a fresh bruise under one eye.

  I was still thinking about my conversation with Janis. I wondered what she really felt, emotionally, about prostitution. I wondered what I felt.

  Powerful, Carole had said. Nasty. It was both, it was neither. It was all tangled up in my mind with legend and literature. Japanese geishas, Irma la Douce, Colette’s demi-monde, Xaviera Hollander, and Lola Montez. Seductive images that warred with other pictures: diseased, nameless hags standing in doorways, displayed in street windows, greasy, toothless women reeking of gin. History and novels gave you both: the myth of the grand horizontal, sensual, charming, clever, and the myth of the harlot, the scarlet woman, the whore, the most pitiful and despicable creature on earth. Men said you were one or the other; somehow you suspected you might be both. All the same you chose. Good girl, bad girl.

  The waitress came over with my chili.

  “You from around here?”

  “Seattle.”

  “Just traveling?”

  “No. I’m looking for a girl, a friend of mine, a kid really.”

  She nodded, straightening a chair slightly. “We don’t get too many street kids in here. Some, but mainly it’s the Burnside regulars.”

  I felt a sudden urge to confide, but I didn’t know what. Maybe that I was a little lost and lonely, that I didn’t know where Trish was or why Rosalie had to die, or what would happen to Trish if I didn’t find her.

  She stood there waiting, sturdy and gentle.

  “Why Sisters of the Road?” I finally asked.

  “We had a project called Boxcar Berthas for transient women and the cafe came out of that. We wanted to make a safe place for women.” The waitress smiled and the smile was warm and easy and kind. She wasn’t going to press me. “Boxcar Bertha was a hobo who wrote a book, Sister of the Road. She was into helping other women, she knew what it was like. Enjoy your chili.”

  She went back to the counter and started refilling coffee cups, joking a little with the men. The woman with the bruise didn’t talk; she seemed sunk in some private hell. Exhaustion perhaps, or misery.

  “Fucking bitch!”

  The door had swung open and a small Black man in built-up shoes and a suit with wide lapels and padded shoulders stood there. “I been looking all over town for you. Come on.”

  The woman at the counter slumped over more deeply and didn’t turn around.

  “What’s the problem?” the waitress said calmly. She came out from behind the counter, wiping her hands on her apron and stood, solidly planted, between him and the woman.

  “Shut up, bitch! This is between me and Louise. Come on, get up and get over here, before I have to drag you.” His face was mean and angry; his voice seethed.

  The woman at the counter didn’t move. The men at the counter didn’t either. I half got up and said, “You want me to call the police?”

  “No,” said the waitress. She was still standing in the middle of the cafe, large and immovable with her bushy dark hair fanning out over her shoulders. Her voice was mild. “Calm down, mister. Just calm down now. You can go in the kitchen if you want, Louise.”

  Louise turned slightly from the counter. “I’m not going with you, Earl.” She was frightened but aggrieved. “Not after what you did.”

  “You fucking get off that seat and get out here right away. You’ll go where I tell you to go.” The man didn’t come any nearer, though, and the anger in his face retreated a little, leaving a contempt that was uncertain and cajoling. “Come on, Louise, don’t let this bitch tell you what to do. She doesn’t know about you and me.”

  “Earl,” said the waitress, very calm and clear. “Louise is having a cup of coffee. She can stay here as long as she wants.”

  She didn’t tell him to go, she didn’t threaten him. She just stood there.

  “I’m not leaving, Earl, forget it,” muttered Louise. “Not after what you did.”

  All of a sudden his bluster left him. He looked furious, but defeated. “Fucking white bitch,” he said and turned and slammed out the door.

  I sat down again.

  The waitress sighed and went back behind the counter. I expected her to talk to Louise, to ask her what had happened, to tell her where she could go for help. She didn’t. She said, as if to herself, “This cafe is a safe place, it’s always going to be a safe place.”

  I ate my chili. I stayed a little longer than I needed to. Louise was still sitting there when I left.

  29

  TRISH’S FATHER, ART MARGOLIN, didn’t live far from Janis, in a modest frame house with a neatly kept yard. It was almost sunset when I found the address; the front windows glowed like bars of toffee and a wind chime tinkled a little above the door. A large yellow cat sat on a jute mat on the porch.

  My heart lifted as I saw the house. Maybe I’d been worried for nothing. Maybe Trish was here; maybe her father had taken her in and was even now doing something to help and protect her.

  I rang the doorbell expectantly. A small Japanese-American woman in a print dress and cardigan sweater opened up.

  “I’m Pam Nilsen, from Seattle. Are you Mrs. Margolin?”

  She nodded. She wore glasses and a prim, judgmental look.

  “I’m looking for Art Margolin. I’d like to talk to him about his daughter, Trish.”

  She hesitated slightly, then asked me in. “He’s in the kitchen.”

  The house bore unmistakable signs of children. A rocking horse in the living room, toys on the stairs, a baby carriage in the hall. Two kids, a boy of five or six and a girl somewhat younger, were in the kitchen with a tall, heavily built man. He was stirring a pot on the stove and looking at a cookbook while talking to them absentmindedly. A radio was on and the whole scene was exceedingly domestic.

  Better and better, I thought; if Trish weren’t here, maybe she should be. Why hadn’t she ever talked about her father?

  “Art, this is Pam Nilsen from Seattle. She wants to know something about Patricia.”

  Art’s big distracted features focused on me. He had bushy graying eyebrows and a receding hairline; his mouth was slack and unfinished, as if a mason had slapped a smear of mortar between his jowls, and it was still wet and grayish-pink.

  “Why, what’s happened to her?”

  “She’s disappeared from Seattle. I thought she might have come here. I’m a friend of hers.”

  Art and his wife looked at each other. “She wouldn’t have come here,” said the woman matter-of-factly. She shooed the children out into the hall; they stared at me worriedly as they went.

  “She might, Judy,” Art said. “She might have changed. Is she in trouble?” He sounded almost hopeful.

  “I think she might be,” I said. “Has she been to visit before?”

  “Up until about six months ago she used to come down sometimes,” Judy said. “But we haven’t seen her since last September or October.”

  “We always had a good time,” said Art eagerly, putting down his spoon and extending an arm around his small wife’s shoulders. “She helped with the kids and around the house. We went camping once with the Bible study class.”

  “She accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into her heart, but then she repudiated him,” Judy said. “Evil ways overcame her and the Devil entered her soul.”

  As if that were a sign, I suddenly became aware that the voice on the radio was that of an evangelical preacher, and that there was a bright little placard over the kitchen table that read, “Trust in the Lord.”

  “If she’s in trouble she may be ready to take the Lord back into her heart again, Judy,” Art reproved his wife with a gentle smack of his mortared lips. “We would never turn her away.”

  “Did you have a fight last fall?”

  Judy’s face went pinched and hard. �
�Patricia treated us like fools. She showed no respect for her father or me. She refused to go to church.”

  “I know she was having a hard time at home with her mother and stepfather and in the foster homes. She’d been on drugs and arrested and in jail,” Art said. “But the Lord is willing to forgive and forget. We can too, Judy.”

  Judy looked as if forgiving came harder to her than to her husband. “I was afraid for the children,” she said sanctimoniously. “Afraid she’d be a bad influence.” She glanced in the direction of the hall.

  “She’s young, Judy, she’s a troubled soul.” Art went back to stirring his pot. I couldn’t see his face. “Very troubled.”

  “Art is an extremely loving person,” said Judy, with a degree of resentment. “He had a hard time seeing that Patricia was in the power of the Devil.”

  The radio evangelist was building up to a crackling crescendo.

  “What could she be doing in Portland?” Art worried. “Why hasn’t she come to us?”

  “She probably will,” I tried to reassure him, even though I knew now that I couldn’t hope to find Trish with these fundamentalists, one of whom, at least, suspected her of being on the Devil’s payroll.

  I left them my address and phone number at Janis’ and Judy gave me a couple of tracts from a pile on the kitchen table.

  “If you see her,” said Art, looking at his cookbook again, “Tell her we forgive her and that the Lord will too.”

  It was twilight when I left the Margolins, that eerie time of day that seems darker than real night. A cold mist had moved in from the river like a spray from a can of quick-freeze propellant, and I felt very conscious of being in a neighborhood I didn’t know, in a city I didn’t know.

  When I heard quick, heavy steps behind me I almost ran, but stopped to glance back an instant. It was Art Margolin, out of breath, huge in an orange parka and tennis shoes, coming after me.

  “Wait,” he called. “Please wait.”

  I waited, underneath the nearest streetlight.

  “What is it?” I asked more brusquely than I meant. He’d scared the shit out of me.

  “I…” he stopped and wiped his forehead. “A little out of shape, I guess…” He wet his big, cement-like lips and said, “After you left, I thought, well, I thought there’s something you ought to know. It’s not just like we said in there, I mean that Patti stopped coming to see us because of religion and all.”

  He stared at me mournfully, pathetically, a large dog that’s done something wrong, and hopes desperately to be forgiven. I didn’t know why he’d chosen me.

  “Why did she stop coming?” I prompted him, when he fell silent.

  “It was something that happened a long time ago, when Patti was small…” He wiped his forehead and started again. “You see, when I was married to Melanie, before I found Jesus, I had a problem. Judy knows and Jesus has forgiven me. I’d never do it again. It was the Devil in me, I guess. I don’t really understand it, but you see, when Patti was real young, only four or five…”

  I unconsciously held up a hand to stop him. I could guess the rest.

  “Melanie found out and got a divorce. She didn’t press charges, thank the Lord, and Patti never seemed to remember it. I came to Portland and started over. I found Jesus—and Judy. She believed me when I said I’d never do it again. And I never have. It’s like a bad dream.”

  The cold mist swirled around us, each droplet a mosquito of cold, biting my exposed skin.

  “But Trish did remember,” I said slowly. “That’s why she never talked about you to me.”

  It was only a few times.” He was begging me to understand. “I never would have hurt Patti. I loved her so much. And she started coming to visit when she was ten sometimes. Her mother saw I’d changed. I have changed.”

  I remembered Trish’s diary entry. The girl in her group, Julianne, who’d talked about her incest experience and confronted her father. It hadn’t been Wayne Trish had decided to confront. It had been Art.

  “So she came here last September and told you she remembered, and you told her… what?”

  “The Lord forgive me,” Art whispered. “I told her she was imagining it, that it never happened. I couldn’t face her knowing what I’d done to her. I didn’t tell Judy about our conversation. I let her think Patti left because of the religious conflicts.”

  And Trish had gone back to Seattle, to Wayne, to the only person she thought cared about her.

  Art fumbled in his parka pocket. “After she left, I found this diary. It was only then that I realized what I’d done to her. I went up to Seattle, I’ve been up there many times looking for her. I want to tell her I’m sorry.”

  “It may be too late.”

  “Please, take this,” he pressed the square fat volume into my hands. “And when you see her, give it to her and tell her I’m sorry. I need her forgiveness.”

  30

  JANIS WAS AT HOME when I returned, cooking dinner: Szechuwan Tofu Triangles with Triple Pepper Sauce. Now back in her maroon training suit, her flyaway brown hair tucked firmly behind her ears, she poured us each a glass of nutty Spanish sherry and directed me to sit at her kitchen table and chop salad vegetables. “Not too large, not too small.” The knife she gave me was very sharp, and I attacked the peppers with a will, glad to feel useful for once today.

  “Did you find out anything?” she asked.

  “Not really.” I’d put away the diary to read later, not ready to face it yet, not ready to talk to Janis about what I had learned from Art. Was there any possibility that he had killed Rosalie and abducted Trish? I doubted it strongly; all the same, he was one more man in Trish’s life who had hurt her. “I’ll try some agencies tomorrow,” I said, a little hopelessly.

  “Don’t give up yet,” Janis said, attacking the soft white cake of tofu, slicing it expertly into triangles. “I talked to Dawn Jacobs, a prostitute I know, and she’s coming over this evening. She’ll be more interesting than the social workers.” She threw the tofu in the sizzling oil of the wok. “Social work doesn’t change anything, you know. The only way to change anything is through the law.”

  Janis’ mind clearly was still running on her conflicts with Beth.

  “So that’s how you help people—through the law?”

  “Who said anything about helping! Most people deserve the stupid messes they get into. I don’t want to help them—I want to win my cases!” She removed the tofu from the wok with a slotted spoon and put it to drain in a paper towel. “Don’t think I’m an awful person. I have ended up helping a lot of people, especially women. But it’s not always because I think they’re right—it’s because I need to prove to myself and the rest of the world that women have a right to win. And the only way I see for establishing that is through legal means, through case after case of precedents.”

  “That sounds pretty idealistic.”

  “No way. I’m hard-headed realism itself.” She sprang lithely over to check my chopping technique, criticized it, and then whipped together a salad dressing in the space of a few minutes.

  It seemed to be my fate in life always to be surrounded by hard-headed realists. She and Penny and June would get along just fine.

  “What’d you get your degree in anyway?” she asked me suddenly.

  “Political science. But I don’t use it. I’m in business—when I’m not being an amateur detective.”

  “So you’ve never thought of becoming a helping professional?”

  “I don’t think professional helping would suit me. Too many forms.”

  “Then what’s your motive for looking for this girl? I don’t get it. Even Beth, the great bleeding heart herself, wouldn’t leave her job to go wandering around Portland searching for someone.”

  I didn’t think Janis was the kind of person who’d understand a moral imperative or a concept of help that didn’t include a solution. I wasn’t sure I understood it myself.

  I took a sip of sherry and shook my head. “Maybe I’m trying t
o establish a precedent too.”

  At eight o’clock, Dawn Jacobs, Janis’ “real” prostitute, came over for tea and cake. Janis had once defended her on a blackmail charge (“Don’t worry, she didn’t do it.”) and they had kept in touch.

  I was nervous and didn’t know what to expect. Which version of the myth would she be? A slinky, sexy call girl or a hard-faced bitter streetwalker with a ruthless habit? And how was meeting her going to help me find Trish?

  I never imagined that Dawn would be in her mid-thirties, a little overweight, with frosted curly hair and an open, lively expression, or that she would be wearing running shoes and a sweatshirt decorated with lines of cows grazing back and forth. She could have been the loquacious lady at my dry cleaner’s, or my mother’s best friend when I was growing up.

  “Janis, you sweetheart! Look at this cake! You can’t tell me nobody wants you for their permanent girlfriend. Rich, cute, and she can cook.” Dawn settled herself on the couch with a sigh of satisfaction and crossed her plump legs. “Cut me a big slice, forget the diet. How does she do it?” Dawn turned to me with a broad smile. “I saw her—she worked twelve hours a day on my case and still she had time to bake me cookies. She doesn’t sleep, I know it. That’s her secret.”

  Janis looked pleased, though she tried to be offhand. “Oh, I’m just organized.”

  “You’re organized like the Pentagon,” Dawn laughed, lolling comfortably back on the couch with a huge slice of carrot cake. “Only you’re the generals and the staff all rolled into one. So, Pam,” she said, without a pause, “I hear you’re looking into prostitution in Portland?”

  “I’m actually looking for a girl who’s a prostitute….” What had Janis told her anyway? That I was writing a book?

  “Well, I’m here to tell you everything you want to know,” she said, exactly like the lady at the dry cleaner’s before she launched into the story of her son’s asthma and her daughter’s allergies and how she had refused to accept what the first doctor said, but gone looking for the best specialist in town. “Don’t be shy. I love to puncture people’s preconceptions. We’re not monsters, we’re not all on heroin and we do lead happy, fulfilled lives, at least about as often as so-called regular people do. You want to know how I started?” she asked, with her mouth full. “I was twenty-eight, divorced, had two kids and was trying to put myself through college. I’d never had a job before, couldn’t type, couldn’t do diddly-shit. And I was studying English! I wanted to be an English teacher, if you can believe it. What a lucrative profession!