Sisters of the Road (16 page)

Still, I’d done my duty as a citizen, I hadn’t kept anything back … Well, one thing. I hadn’t told him that I also wondered about Rob Hemmings. I didn’t want to come across as a paranoid man-hater. And besides, I had no real reason to suspect him; he’d said he hadn’t seen Trish in months, that he wouldn’t have anything to do with her.

At the train station, just before leaving, I tried to call Melanie, to tell her where I was going, to ask if she’d ever met Rosalie, to ask if there was any possibility Trish might have fled, on her own, to her father’s house in Portland.

Rob answered the phone. “Melanie’s at church,” he informed me gruffly. He sounded like he’d just woken up.

“So sorry to bother you. This is Nancy Todd, the researcher from the other day. I just have a couple more questions about your stepdaughter.” I continued quickly before he could interrupt. “One aspect of particular interest to us in studying adolescent delinquents is the tendency for interracial friendships to develop on the street. Can you tell me if your stepdaughter had any Black friends?”

Maybe it wasn’t the best approach; at any rate Rob roared into the receiver, before I even got a chance to mention Portland, “I don’t know who the hell her friends are. And this is Sunday morning!” Slam went the phone.

Some people weren’t at their best in the morning, I guessed.

The Coast Starlight moved smoothly southwards, through forests of dark green firs and pines, along the Sound. The snow of a week ago was gone now and it was sunny; when I looked down at the pebbles glinting under the clear water, or off at the misty blue islands, I could almost imagine it was an early spring. It was soothing, it was calming; it almost enabled me to forget where I was going, what I was coming from. Not quite. If I was anxious about Trish, I was also bummed out about Carole.

Rejected. Rejected by Carole. How had I let myself get into that position? It brought back all those feelings of last summer when Hadley had walked away, all those feelings I’d tried to erase this winter with my various affairs, affairs where I was in control, where I got the chance to back out.

How had it started with Carole; what had led me to misjudge her? That story about turning a trick maybe, her telling me she was a sexual person. I’d let my fantasies run away with me—as in,
Why would she be telling me all this if she didn’t want to get it on?

But the fantasy had been in my mind only; I’d projected on to her the image of accessibility, when all Carole had been doing was telling me a story. It was pretty embarrassing.

I hoped Penny would never get to hear about it.

It was funny, my relationship with Penny, and I could see it more clearly now she was gone. There were so many things I’d never told her, so many things I’d never wanted her to find out about me. I took it for granted that she’d be there, that she’d go first and make everything easier, that she’d protect me. Just like an older sister. In return I defended and emulated her, rarely noticing, almost never questioning that I had to hide part of myself to do it.

Once we’d been walking home from school and she’d been talking about whether it was a good idea to have babies when we were young and closer to their age, or when we were older, after we’d had a chance to do something on our own. I suddenly said, out of the blue and without having thought about it, “I don’t think I want to get married,” and she said, “Oh, of course you will.” She wasn’t trying to contradict me; she was just stating what to her was obvious. And that was that. Of course I will, I thought. I’ll have to, because Penny will, and she’ll want to raise our children together. And I’ll have to do that to, because she expects it.

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?”

“B
UT 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 your 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.