Something True (11 page)

V
ita and Tate sat on shredded lawn chairs in the vacant lot behind Tate's apartment, eating risotto. The moon was just as bright and watery as it had been a few days earlier when Laura walked into Out Coffee after closing. Then, it had filled Tate with restless potentiality. Tonight it had a melancholy, Bonnie Raitt kind of feeling.

“Where are the old Hungarians?” Vita asked. She had traded her leopard print for zebra stripes, and they glinted in the moonlight. “I'm surprised they're not out here badgering you. Their long-lost daughter.
Oh, Tate, we love. We love you.
” She imitated their lilting accent.

“They're just lonely,” Tate shot back.

“I'm kidding.”

“They don't have any family in Portland. They don't speak enough English. They don't have enough money to go out. It's sad. It shouldn't have to be like that. And it's Pawel and Rose, not the ‘old Hungarians.'”

“Fine. I didn't mean anything,” Vita said.

“Sorry.”

They were silent for a while. Tate stared at her bowl, pushing the risotto from side to side without taking a bite.

“What's wrong?” Vita asked.

“Krystal got another letter from her father.”

Vita snorted. “That girl's always got something. What's up, really?”

“Nothing.” Tate stared into the garden.

The distant city noises formed their own kind of silence.

Vita waited a beat, then said, “You brood better than anyone I know. If I brooded like you did, I'd get all the girls.”

“You do get all the girls,” Tate noted. “Anyway, you said Cairo was the one.”

“It's that profile,” Vita said, ignoring Tate's comment. “The nose.”

“Lay off.”

“I love your nose. It's archetypal.”

“Thanks, because that's what a woman wants to hear: She has an archetypal nose.” Tate rolled her eyes.

“I'm just saying. We're going to talk about your nose until you tell me what's wrong with your heart.”

“Nothing,” Tate said again.

“If you don't tell me, I'll go find that woman you like and tell her every embarrassing thing you've ever done.”

“You'll make half of it up.” Tate threw her head back in mock despair. “I do like her.”

Tate put her bowl down on the ground by her feet.

“I know you do, so why aren't you talking about her?” Vita asked.

“Because she's a Republican senator's daughter.”

“I know. I looked her up online. I am so far ahead of you on this one.” Vita scraped her spoon along her empty bowl and eyed Tate's half-finished dinner.

Tate picked the bowl up and handed it to her. “You're incorrigible.”

“So what's her being a senator's daughter got to do with anything?”

“She's not interested. The only good thing is that she's still considering Out Coffee.”

“No. She's not,” Vita said. “I'm sorry, but this has nothing to do with the coffee shop. She just wants to get in your pants.”

“You say things.” Tate shook her head. “You open your mouth and things come out, but they have no bearing on reality. You can't know that.”

“Yes I can. I'm sorry, Out Coffee is a losing business proposition,” Vita said. “While you've been busy propping up Maggie, I've been managing one of the most successful bars in Portland, owned by one of the shrewdest lesbian entrepreneurs you're going to meet. Out is in a terrible location. It's a difficult business model. The retail space is too big for the business. The market is saturated. And Maggie has the business savvy of Mother Teresa. It's going under. I'm sorry to be blunt, but if you didn't already see that, then you're blind.

“And those sandwich boutiques this Laura Enfield woman wants to move in, they are hot. And they would be great for Portland, especially that neighborhood. They have totally capitalized on the organic, locally grown, free-range market. Everything that enters that store is compostable except for the customers.” Vita paused. “Who are compostable too I guess, but you see what I mean.”

Tate rested her chin on her knuckles.

“Yes.”

“No. You don't,” Vita protested. “That face says you don't.”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I'm saying Laura Enfield is in this for
you
. That's what this little charade is all about whether she is ready to admit it or not, and you like her.”

“I do.”

“So…tell me about her. I'm your best friend. Why is this all such a secret suddenly? What's she like? What does she do? What does she do
to you
?”

Tate looked out over the moonlit lot with its weeds and its rusting shopping cart overturned beneath a wild cherry tree.

“That first night we played two out of three at 8-ball, she said if I won she'd tell me a secret or at least tell me something true,” Tate said. “I lost. I scratched on the eight. But the thing is, when I'm with her, I feel like she's just on the verge of telling me that true thing. And I want to hear it. And I want to tell her…everything.

“Like tonight. She asked if I was happy. I told her all the crap, and then I told her we'd sit here and talk and it would make me happy. I knew that, but I knew it more when I said it to her.”

For once Vita did not have a glib comeback. When she finally spoke she said, “I haven't seen you like this before.”

“She was pretty clear the other night,” Tate added. “Whether or not she wants something to happen she doesn't think it should. I don't want to get my heart broken again.”

“Too late for that.” Vita steepled her fingers under her chin. “But maybe right now, she's feeling like she messed up. She panicked. Maybe now she's wondering what she can possibly do to make up for it.”

The following day, Tate woke early to ready Out Coffee. Then she rode back home to change in preparation for Laura's arrival at nine a.m. Her conversation with Vita had left her feeling at turns hopeful and guilty. If what Vita said was true, Laura had no intention of saving Out Coffee. But if what Vita said was true, then Laura had intentions for her. She alternated between these two poles a few more times while she washed her face. When she was finished, she ran a hand over her short hair and regarded the face that stared back at her in the bathroom mirror.

Happy. That was where her emotional pendulum finally came to rest. It had been so easy talking to Laura. Even though Tate had good friends who loved her, there was a corner of her heart that had been empty the day before and now was full of sunlight.
Today
, Tate thought as she shrugged into a white T-shirt,
I get to see her again.
She tried not to think about how short the day was or how likely it was that in a few days Laura would leave.

“
Push off, and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset
,” Tate quoted out loud. It was a poem she had memorized for her literature class nine years earlier. Then she thought,
Maybe there's still time.

Everything seemed possible in Portland in the summer.

Unfortunately, Tate was not the only person who had been spurred to action by the beautiful day. When she got to Out Coffee, she saw a string of people standing outside. There was Maggie, a host of stern, craggy women in political T-shirts and leather vests, and several men with long, gray ponytails.

Tate pulled her Harley up short and removed her helmet.

“What's going on here?” she asked.

The women would have looked menacing, except that they looked so much like Maggie. Up close, Tate recognized them from Maggie's women's group. One waved to her. Another flashed a peace symbol. Two of them started singing “Kumbaya.”

“We're all here!” Maggie called.

“Why are you all here?” Tate asked.

Maggie stood beside a woman in a
CLINTON/GORE '96
T-shirt and a man with strings of handmade clay beads strung around his neck. And next to him stood…Abigail. Tate stopped short.

“Why is
she
here?” Tate demanded.

Abigail wore a green sundress. She really did have an exorbitant amount of freckles. They covered her from hairline to the plunging neckline of her dress. She was like a pale person perpetually walking in dappled shade or, perhaps, more like a white T-shirt on which someone had spilled a latte.

“Maggie said you needed me,” Abigail called.

Her eyes were bright. She wore the same sweet, eager smile she had worn when they were first courting, before she decided that Tate could not understand her because Tate had never played the cello.

Third cello
, Tate thought.

“Maggie said Out Coffee was getting bought out by some corporate bitch, and you were the only one who could save it,” Abigail added.

“We're not going to let corporate America oppress us anymore,” one of the leather-vested women yelled.

“No, we're not!” Maggie chimed in. She looked flushed and excited.

Someone yelled, “There she is!”

Tate turned to see Laura a few paces behind her, the Sebring parked on the other side of the street.

Oh no
, she thought as Abigail led the crowd in a chorus of “Hell no, we won't go.” She glanced from Maggie to Abigail, trying to decide whom to throttle first. Then everyone in the crowd lifted their arms in unison. The whole thing had suddenly gotten worse. They were—Tate now saw—handcuffed together. And at either end of the line, the last protestors, Abigail and a woman in a
SAVE THE RAIN FORESTS
T-shirt, were handcuffed to one of the drain spouts that ran from the roof of Out Coffee to the sidewalk.

“Freedom!” Maggie's voice rose over the rest of the crowd, clear and proud as though she was marching behind Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez and Marx and Gloria Steinem and all the rest. “Freedom now!”

“But you're chained together,” Tate pleaded. “You chain yourself to buildings when they are going to be bulldozed, when someone's going to cut down a heritage tree.”

No one was listening.

“You can't demolish this building without demolishing us,” Abigail yelled.

Tate glanced at Laura. She looked perplexed.

“No one is demolishing anything,” Tate said. “Laura Enfield is here to see if her company wants to
rent
business space to Out Coffee. She wants to see if we are reputable business people.”

“If they want to get in, they'll have to bulldoze our living bodies,” the man with the beads said. “They will have to crush our entrails and crack every bone in our bodies and tear out our eyes.”

It all seemed a little too visceral to Tate. The crowd cheered.

“Americans have become too complacent,” Maggie added. “What happened to the union? When did we stop organizing?”

These were, in general, sentiments that Tate agreed with, inasmuch as one could agree with rhetorical questions shouted over a chorus of “Fuck the pigs! Fuck the pigs!”

But there was also the matter of Laura, standing at her elbow, saying, “Should I go?”

Tate was suddenly very aware of her proximity, the smell of her perfume, like the complicated smell of lemon blossoms.

“No. No. This is nothing,” Tate said.

“Nothing?” Laura's eyebrow shot up.

“We do this all the time. It's like a Portland tradition,” Tate said.

Krystal appeared at Laura's elbow.

“I could make you a cup of coffee,” she offered, apparently forgetting that Laura would have to climb over or under the line of protestors chained in front of the door.

Near the end of the line, Maggie was swaying. Her eyes were closed. Tate imagined she was reliving her glory days as an activist in San Francisco. Perhaps she was getting doused by imaginary crowd-control hoses because she went down, pulling several protestors with her.

“It's so hot,” she said, looking up at Tate from her newfound seat on the concrete. Her face went pale. “I can't feel my hands.”

The handcuffs fit tightly, and her hands looked more swollen than usual. Tate was worried that Maggie had hurt herself. Old women fell, broke their hips, and went into nursing homes. She could not imagine Maggie stuck in some facility with “green” and “vale” in the name, far away in Gresham or Oregon City, without her friends and her causes.

“Are you okay?” Tate rushed to her side.

“No,” Maggie said as though it was obvious.

“What's wrong?” Tate asked.

Maggie stared at her. “This isn't how it's supposed to happen. We're supposed to win.” The man next to her tried to fan her, but one of his wrists was cuffed to Maggie and the other to another protestor.

“My dad could get out of these,” Krystal said. “He knows how to open a pair of handcuffs like nothing.”

Tate glanced down the block. A two-toned sedan was moving in their direction, slowing down, pulling to a stop on the opposite side of the street. It was not quite a police car, more like a prop from a 1980s B movie. The black portion of the car was covered with a matte paint that screamed
I did this in my garage and
inhaled the fumes
. There was a white stripe painted up the front of the hood. There was also a logo on the door, something between the Marine Corp's globe and eagle and a barber pole. And there, in the front seat, filling the whole front window with her greasy pompadour, was Duke Bryce.

“Oh!” Abigail exclaimed.

“Laura, I think you'd better go,” Tate said.

“I thought you did this all the time,” Laura said with a slight smirk.

“Yeah…no.”

Duke opened the car door and stepped out, one hand balled in a fist and a menacing look in her eyes.

Abigail yelled, “It's not what you think, Duke.”